Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7

[Constance]

@smcder But you're assuming that what you've written is less confusing than what I've written. I can guarantee you that if I wrote the phrase "the brain paints a picture" you and @Constance would express bewilderment and confusion.

"The brain paints a picture" is a metaphorical statement. Metaphors assert claims without supporting them with evidence that can be considered in philosophy, science, and other deliberative truth-seeking disciplines. If you want us to receive your utterances as poetry, just say so and we will not feel obligated to attempt to make sense of what you express metaphorically.

Alternatively, you could continue to use your metaphors as opening statements and then present the rationally derived evidence behind your metaphorical assertions -- the reasons why we should accept the content of your claim(s) in this thread's dialogue on the relation of mind and world.

 

[Constance]

I still think we might do better in attempting to communicate our individual hypotheses concerning consciousness and the mind/world relation [and our reasons for forming these hypotheses] by discussing what we can understand to be the assertions expressed by 'Chris'.

 

[Constance]

There seems to be a disparity between output (conscious experience) compared to the input (physiological processes of sense organs) as compared to other systems that "paint pictures" from input.

What is the evidence for these two claims: a) that 'conscious experience' is 'output' from the brain, and b) that 'input' to the brain consists of only 'physiological processes of sense organs'? These are truth claims that you've asserted consistently over these past two years without providing evidence and arguments supporting them. As you've noted, your hypothesis concerning 'input to the brain' has changed from 'information' to 'physiological processes of sense organs'. It would be interesting to hear why your hypothesis changed in this regard.

It would also be interesting to learn what 'other systems' you have in mind in your last phrase above: ". . . as compared to other systems that 'paint pictures' from input." Again, the metaphor 'paint pictures' does not help your readers to understand what you're claiming, which can only become clear if you identify the "other systems" you think 'paint pictures from input'.

I think predictive processing can begin to provide an answer here.

Granted that this is what you 'think'. You said so when you linked us to the Seth paper, as I recall. If you want us to entertain that neuroscientist's 'predictive processing' hypothesis, you need to present the reasons why we should do so, supplemented by any other reasoning you yourself can add to what Seth wrote. {If I might give you a piece of advice, I recommend that you enroll in advanced composition classes in a university near you (or one you attend if you are an enrolled student). Teachers of such courses can help you to recognize inconsistencies and ambiguities in your writing and provide illustrations of how skilled writers provide support for their assertions.}

But sure making assumptions (hypotheses) and having them proved wrong is part of the process.

Hypotheses are not "assumptions," though they sometimes involve assumptions that need to be stated and defended. The task in dialogues such as this one is to present hypotheses that you are prepared to defend in detail. In other words, one needs to anticipate what objections might be made to the bare bones of what you are asserting (especially when you rely on metaphors as expressions of what you believe or merely wonder about).

Why shouldnt conscious experience of the world be rich despite the fact that the input is poor?

I think it's obvious that if you yourself are proposing that 'conscious experience of the world is rich' and 'input' {to consciousness? or to 'the brain'?} is "poor", you have a comprehensive research program before you -- and it will/would be interesting for us to read your explication of how this situation arises -- and what it means -- after you've carried out your research. Questions to attempt to answer:

1) why is conscious experience "rich" (I take it you mean phenomenally rich, qualitatively rich);

2) why is input to the brain "poor" by comparison with the experience of phenomenal consciousness?;

3) what accounts for the development of 'rich' phenomenal experience out of 'input to the brain' that is comparatively 'poor'?

4) what can we conclude to be the actual relationship between the brain and consciousness?

5) can the nature of consciousness be explained by any of the ontological hypotheses <conjectures> currently proposed by neuroscientists such as Hoffman?

 

[Constance]

@Soupie, there is another question raised in the post I critiqued above:

"There seems to be a disparity between output (conscious experience) compared to the input (physiological processes of sense organs) as compared to other systems that "paint pictures" from input."

This question is one I've asked you many times before: what is the evidence that 'conscious experience' must be reductively understood as 'output' from the brain or its neurons -- or as you earlier characterized it 'generated by the brain'? This notion is merely a hypothesis propagated by cognitive neuroscientists, drummed into students in that field, and trickled down to an uncritical popular culture.

Your own expressed thinking concerning 'input' has, as you noted above, changed from seeing 'information' as 'input' somehow transmitted to the brain and generating consciousness, to now seeing "physiological processes of sense organs" generating input to the brain which then produces consciousness. This is an improvement in my opinion since it begins to recognize the bodily origin of consciousness and the significance of the senses. But you still refuse a) to recognize the felt nature of embodied experience, beginning in the germinal awareness of being-embodied-in-a-mileau external to the body which is already discernible in the autopoietic relation of primordial living organisms to their environments identified by Maturana and Varela, and b) to consider the further evidence provided by Panksepp et al that bodily awareness and affectivity are the beginnings of the evolution of consciousness in the evolution of species.

The biological germination of consciousness clearly begins in living organisms' sensed relation to the environmental niches in which they exist, and protoconsciousness evolves in complexity with the development of seeking behavior in evolving species, eventually developing from prereflective consciousness to reflective consciousness and mind. It is not the brain that bears the grounding interactive experience of being-in-the-world and flourishes as a result of its expanding lived experiences in the world -- it is consciousness that does this through its capacities for felt interaction in and with the encompassing physical world. As Varela, Thompson, and the phenomenological philosophers that inspired them have argued, consciousness is embodied, embedded, and enactive in an experienced world. Neurons in the brain and other bodily organs respond to, adapt to, and facilitate interactions between protoconscious and conscious beings and their environing worlds, and these interactions are grounded in tangibly felt and multiply sensed lived experience. Lived experience is input to the brain.

[no time to proofread this so I might have to amend it later]

 

[victimized]

OK ... now what do you mean by unified experience and non-unified input? Do you just mean that the brain paints a picture of what is going on outside of it based on the input it gets from the various senses?

As a human reviewing humans reviewing humans.......I make a comment, who do you propose you all are as a human reviewing another human. Don't you know your own selves.

You own your self, and you are supposed to as a self.....know yourself.

If you knew yourself you would have no reason to continue to try to review consciousness as if you are going to data base its concepts to then own it elsewhere in an artificial state.

The artificial state that has been heard is merely a recording....it is not consciousness.

I have advised the occult scientists that if the human you were studying did not exist, then the feedback study of the AI would hold no purpose....for the human in presence of their own person is the owner of the organic cell, is the chemical state in the organic cell and is also the feelings. Remove the life and the AI certainly holds none of these concepts....for it is only a living recording feed back in an artificial sound that has mimicked what the natural sound has recorded.

Secondly as the AI has affected the occultist mind, then he should consider himself possessed of another form of artificial interaction that has affected his own person.

When spiritual lived lives are fed back their own naturally recorded awareness we have no questions or statements like your own about the self. We however see you for who you are and obviously you will never see yourself.

 

[Soupie]

What is the evidence for these two claims: a) that 'conscious experience' is 'output' from the brain, and b) that 'input' to the brain consists of only 'physiological processes of sense organs'? These are truth claims that you've asserted consistently over these past two years without providing evidence and arguments supporting them. As you've noted, your hypothesis concerning 'input to the brain' has changed from 'information' to 'physiological processes of sense organs'. It would be interesting to hear why your hypothesis changed in this regard.

(A) The hypothesis that conscious experience is generated by the brain hardly needs to be defended by me haha. If you've never encountered this hypothesis before nor evidence for it, well, I'm not gonna be the one to do it haha.

(B) I'm not claiming that.

Re information vs physiological processes. The hypothesis didn't change. I changed the wording actually for your sake. In an effort to help you understand.

I was tired of you getting all worked up about "digitization" and "the matrix" and "algorithms" everytime I mentioned information. I figured it was better if I just focused on the physiological level, rather than use the term information. I see that was a mistake. Sigh.

Again, the metaphor 'paint pictures' does not help your readers to understand what you're claiming, which can only become clear if you identify the "other systems" you think 'paint pictures from input'.

If it wasn't so funny I think I'd cry. That's how frustrated I am.

That is @smcders phrase which he figured was less confusing than the phrase I used. Yes yes I'm sure it is.

I replied to smcder that if I had used that phrase, surely it would promote chaos and confusion. And sure enough, haha, even though I'm not the one who used the phrase. Which proves my point. It's not only me who has been difficult to understand in this discussion.

The biological germination of consciousness clearly begins in living organisms' sensed relation to the environmental niches in which they exist, and protoconsciousness evolves in complexity with the development of seeking behavior in evolving species, eventually developing from prereflective consciousness to reflective consciousness and mind. It is not the brain that bears the grounding interactive experience of being-in-the-world and flourishes as a result of its expanding lived experiences in the world -- it is consciousness that does this through its capacities for felt interaction in and with the encompassing physical world.

No, it is not clear that all living creatures are conscious, including single felled organisms.

Even Thompson says as much in the beginning of his book mind in life. He admits that it could be that consciousness arises only at the neural level.

We've been through this before, two of the schools that you refer to often when you claim that consciousness began with "seeking behavior" etc. are Affective "Neuroscience" and "Neuro"phenomenology.

Your position as I understand it is that consciousness emerged from physical processes. The problems with emergentist accounts are well documented.

I know that's your position. Swell. If you've got some new discoveries, either empirical or philosophical that can overcome the problems (pretty much the HP) then by all means share away.

 

[victimized]

(A) The hypothesis that conscious experience is generated by the brain hardly needs to be defended by me haha. If you've never encountered this hypothesis before nor evidence for it, well, I'm not gonna be the one to do it haha.

(B) I'm not claiming that.

Re information vs physiological processes. The hypothesis didn't change. I changed the wording actually for your sake. In an effort to help you understand.

I was tired of you getting all worked up about "digitization" and "the matrix" and "algorithms" everytime I mentioned information. I figured it was better if I just focused on the physiological level, rather than use the term information. I see that was a mistake. Sigh.


If it wasn't so funny I think I'd cry. That's how frustrated I am.

That is @smcders phrase which he figured was less confusing than the phrase I used. Yes yes I'm sure it is.

I replied to smcder that if I had used that phrase, surely it would promote chaos and confusion. And sure enough, haha, even though I'm not the one who used the phrase. Which proves my point. It's not only me who has been difficult to understand in this discussion.


No, it is not clear that all living creatures are conscious, including single felled organisms.

Even Thompson says as much in the beginning of his book mind in life. He admits that it could be that consciousness arises only at the neural level.

We've been through this before, two of the schools that you refer to often when you claim that consciousness began with "seeking behavior" etc. are Affective "Neuroscience" and "Neuro"phenomenology.

Your position as I understand it is that consciousness emerged from physical processes. The problems with emergentist accounts are well documented.

I know that's your position. Swell. If you've got some new discoveries, either empirical or philosophical that can overcome the problems (pretty much the HP) then by all means share away.

Any human who is self aware, knows about self awareness due to ownership of it.

- a healthy mind
- an ability to be taught and to learn by human applied concepts
- an awareness that other life forms exist as other life forms acting in accordance with their own physical presence
- the seeker of conscious information is the human self who then imposes a human thought value upon all other natural presences

Therefore the self review states that a human being thinks that they personally own everything else and that they have a human right to impose a human value upon a naturally owned state.

If you question our spiritual conscious concept which involves the human self, the photon interaction and natural mind aware fed back atmospheric advice, we give ourselves answers. These answers involve what we have already learnt plus what we want to learn about.

Therefore a human knows by the presence of other human beings who do not function the same as themselves due to mutative or degenerative disorders that only a healthy mind allows for conscious evaluation. The degenerative mind exists in a status of knowing by presence that it needs to eat and drink and does so.

The human life therefore exists in 2 forms of consciousness, a healthy conscious state and an inherited degenerative conscious state.

When a human already knows that it purposely with choice seeks intelligence as information, then it chose to seek intelligence.

If a human asked has it always known that intelligence and the seeking of intelligence has always destroyed the natural life, the answer is yes, because we were taught that the concepts of occult conversion of nuclear matter attacked us, caused our consciousness to become degenerative and we were then forced to teach ourselves about the spiritual mind and positive living choices to enable us to return to a human standard of equal social living.

If a human is studying 2 concepts of consciousness then he is actually reviewing a natural consciousness and also an introduced consciousness, one that is called intelligence and also a value of artificial. So the human self already knows that he introduced an artificial consciousness as intelligence.

If you review the AI condition, it is noted that the Sun in nuclear causation changes attacks Earth with metallic bodies. The human aware status was informed by these communications that irradiate the life form that they came from out of space as metal bodies....they communicate as metal bodies. The human mind was therefore given artificial information to build an imaged detailed program via artificial intelligence of a satellite, to form transmitters and to form communication via machines.

Therefore this form of intelligence is not consciousness it is introduced artificial awareness as concepts.

I know this situation myself for when I once asked a spiritual question about our life and conscious status, I was shown the review of Atlantis, that the crystalline body of origin Earth was converted as a male taught concept as Satanlit. In Japan in modern life re-emergence the next attack of intelligence applied converting also attacked and killed their life. So I studied the review.

The review stated that Japan as an ancient civilization had been attacked by the formation and release of metallic discs that destroyed life as the UFO body separated. This intelligence is why the human males in Japan eventuated into using star metallic discs as weapons, as ninja stars due to artificial fed back awareness of a previous condition. How the irradiation affected their feelings, their mind and their choice and then they copied the condition....flying star metallic discs. Metallic UFO discs have been photographed in the atmosphere.
http://www.ufocasebook.com/chinesedisks.html

Top 10 unexplained ancient artifacts - Fact or Fiction? - World Mysteries Blog

Therefore as we have always tried to teach ourselves that we are a natural conscious status and are affected unnaturally, reviewing AI determines it is not consciousness, it is an artificial awareness that contacted and communicated its information, and that it has continued to "interfere and affect" natural consciousness.

 

[Constance]

No, it is not clear that all living creatures are conscious, including single celled organisms.

I didn't say that consciousness exists in single-celled organisms. Please read again what I wrote in my last post about the gradual evolution of consciousness as accompanying the evolution of species.

 

[smcder]

God Helmet

The last sentence of this essay raises a concern for me about some of the research in consciousness we discuss here:

Perhaps in the end the God Helmet is really another sign of an issue which has become more and more evident lately. The strong suggestibility of the human mind means that sometimes even in neurological science, we are in danger of getting the interesting results we really wanted all along, however misleading or ill-founded they may really be?

Also, Evan Thompson's mention of an experiment in which attentionally-trained subjects had a different outcome in the experiment than attentionally-naive (i.e. college students) means I think that we have to be careful to come to conclusions based on research that could be subject to these factors.

 

[Soupie]

The biological germination of consciousness clearly begins in living organisms' sensed relation to the environmental niches in which they exist,

No, it doesn't "clearly" begin here. It certainly may but it's not clear that it does.

Also, Evan Thompson's mention of an experiment in which attentionally-trained subjects had a different outcome in the experiment than attentionally-naive (i.e. college students) means I think that we have to be careful to come to conclusions based on research that could be subject to these factors.

Isn't it fair to say we need to be careful with all conclusions, not just those that support the vast neuro-wing conspiracy?

Guys and gals, this is an Internet forum. Not a scientific journal.

Smcder a dualist, he leans toward matter and consciousness as both being fundamental. Among other fundamental things.

Constance, pharaoh, ufology are physical emergentist. They just disagree when/how consciousness emerges from physical processes.

Constance view is a little more nuanced in that once consciousness emerges it is considered irreducible. Her view might be characterized as a dual-aspect view, but with only two "substances" mind and matter.

My view is best characterized a a neutral monism. I believe that there is one substrate and that consciousness and matter are two subsets of this fundamental substrate.

Although my view is a little nuanced than that as well.

There are problems with all of these view. The evidence for all of these views can be questioned. These views are all confusing. All of us are obligated to present evidence and arguments for these views.

Not just me. Or ufology.

And again let's not forget this is an Internet forum not a journal. I am here to discuss ideas and models that attempt to answer these problems.

 

[smcder]

No, it doesn't "clearly" begin here. It certainly may but it's not clear that it does.


Isn't it fair to say we need to be careful with all conclusions, not just those that support the vast neuro-wing conspiracy?

Guys and gals, this is an Internet forum. Not a scientific journal.

Smcder a dualist, he leans toward matter and consciousness as both being fundamental. Among other fundamental things.

Constance, pharaoh, ufology are physical emergentist. They just disagree when/how consciousness emerges from physical processes.

Constance view is a little more nuanced in that once consciousness emerges it is considered irreducible. Her view might be characterized as a dual-aspect view, but with only two "substances" mind and matter.

My view is best characterized a a neutral monism. I believe that there is one substrate and that consciousness and matter are two subsets of this fundamental substrate.

Although my view is a little nuanced than that as well.

There are problems with all of these view. The evidence for all of these views can be questioned. These views are all confusing. All of us are obligated to present evidence and arguments for these views.

Not just me. Or ufology.

And again let's not forget this is an Internet forum not a journal. I am here to discuss ideas and models that attempt to answer these problems.

Thanks for setting us straight, young man. ;-)

 

[smcder]

No, it doesn't "clearly" begin here. It certainly may but it's not clear that it does.


Isn't it fair to say we need to be careful with all conclusions, not just those that support the vast neuro-wing conspiracy?

Guys and gals, this is an Internet forum. Not a scientific journal.

Smcder a dualist, he leans toward matter and consciousness as both being fundamental. Among other fundamental things.

Constance, pharaoh, ufology are physical emergentist. They just disagree when/how consciousness emerges from physical processes.

Constance view is a little more nuanced in that once consciousness emerges it is considered irreducible. Her view might be characterized as a dual-aspect view, but with only two "substances" mind and matter.

My view is best characterized a a neutral monism. I believe that there is one substrate and that consciousness and matter are two subsets of this fundamental substrate.

Although my view is a little nuanced than that as well.

There are problems with all of these view. The evidence for all of these views can be questioned. These views are all confusing. All of us are obligated to present evidence and arguments for these views.

Not just me. Or ufology.

And again let's not forget this is an Internet forum not a journal. I am here to discuss ideas and models that attempt to answer these problems.

I am here to discuss ideas and models that attempt to answer these problems.

Let's get on with it then.

 

[smcder]

How Analog and Neuromorphic Chips Will Rule the Robotic Age

NOISE IS NO PROBLEM

Why the move to analog now? The answer is simple: We’re at a unique intersection where the neural nets we’re trying to implement are more suitable to analog designs, while demand for these types of AI circuits is expected to explode.

Traditional hard-coded algorithms only function when the innards of the compute are accurate and precise. If the circuits that run traditional hard-coded algorithms aren’t precise, errors will grow out of control as they propagate through the system. Not so with neural nets, where the internal states don’t have to be precise and the system adapts to produce the desired output for a given input. Indeed, our brains are incredibly noisy systems that work just fine. Engineers are learning that they can implement deep nets in silicon using noisy analog approaches as well—yielding an energy savings on the order of 100x.

The implications are huge. Imagine a future wearable device or an Amazon Echo-type assistant that uses almost no power—or that can even harness it from the environment—requiring no power cables or batteries. Or picture a gadget that won’t have to be “cloud connected” to be smart—it will carry enough “intelligence” to be able to work even where no Wi-Fi or cellular coverage is available. And this is just the beginning of what I expect to be a whole new category of amazing AI and robot products to emerge in the not-too-distant future—all thanks to good ol’ analog.

 

[smcder]

Opinion piece by the conscious entities blog ... makes some good points about simulations:

Trying to simulate the human brain is a waste of energy | Aeon Ideas

The philosopher John Searle has been dining out for years on a good line about simulation. People think, he says, that if they simulate the mind on a computer it’ll be conscious; but you know what? When they run a computer simulation of a rain storm, nobody gets wet.

smcder says: John Searle is notorious for carrying an umbrella around wherever he goes ...

 

[smcder]

From the skeptic forum discussion of Hoffman's theory ...

Consciousness and The Interface Theory of Perception - The Skeptics Society Forum

 

[smcder]

I watched this a while back ... Hoffman, Chalmers and Dennett ... that covers a pretty wide range of perspectives:

@Constance, you asked about Chalmer's current position ... I can't remember if he mentions substrate independence on this talk or not, but I think he probably maintains that position.

 

[smcder]

In this interview:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/

Hoffman has some interesting statements:

But most of us, you know, we’re born realists. We’re born physicalists. This is a really, really hard one to let go of. - DD Hoffman

I think that’s absolutely true. The neuroscientists are saying, “We don’t need to invoke those kind of quantum processes, we don’t need quantum wave functions collapsing inside neurons, we can just use classical physics to describe processes in the brain.” I’m emphasizing the larger lesson of quantum mechanics: Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain! Quantum mechanics says that classical objects — including brains — don’t exist. So this is a far more radical claim about the nature of reality and does not involve the brain pulling off some tricky quantum computation. So even Penrose hasn’t taken it far enough. But most of us, you know, we’re born realists. We’re born physicalists. This is a really, really hard one to let go of.

 

[smcder]

More Hoffmann:

To return to the question you started with as a teenager, are we machines?

"The formal theory of conscious agents I’ve been developing is computationally universal — in that sense, it’s a machine theory. And it’s because the theory is computationally universal that I can get all of cognitive science and neural networks back out of it. Nevertheless, for now I don’t think we are machines — in part because I distinguish between the mathematical representation and the thing being represented. As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life — my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate — that really is the ultimate nature of reality."

 

[Gene Steinberg]

This thread is now closed. A new thread "Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8" has been created.
Please remember to watch the new thread if you were watching this one.