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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9


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"The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us or for other creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific image—ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology."

And this is where Danny and Donny disagree. And where i think naive realism rears its ugly head. As strawson says:

"Many make the same mistake today — the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can’t be physical. We don’t."

I would put a twist on that, however, by saying: conscious stuff looks like physical stuff in our user-illusion.
 
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20170301_193923.jpg

this is a view from just outside my front door ... we are out far enough that we can still see some milkiness to the Milky Way ... (I understand light pollution is all but ubiquitous now) ... growing up we could see the stars I think even more brilliantly (or perhaps my eyes were better then) in the town I grew up in ... Now we are about 25 miles north of there in a remote area.

This is where philosophy began ... and (maybe) where it will end.
 
I think we're still operating in multiple directions at once, as we've been doing during most of the two+ years of this conversation, and as indeed our subject seems to require. I received in my email today a link to the fifth part of a series of conversations concerning consciousness in the New York Review of Books and tracked back to find the first in the series. I'll link both the fifth and the first of these below (and then a page providing further links) which might be useful for us as an overview of where we've been so far (and maybe some places we haven't yet gone).

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/02/22/consciousness-am-i-the-apple/

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/21/challenge-of-defining-consciousness/

http://www.nybooks.com/topics/on-consciousness/

Well, then ...

laissez rouler les bon temps!
 
Hopefully Danny gives Donny some credit haha. Wow.

'Nor do we have to understand the mechanisms that underlie those competencies. In an illuminating metaphor, Dennett asserts that the manifest image that depicts the world in which we live our everyday lives is composed of a set of user-illusions,

like the ingenious user-illusion of click-and-drag icons, little tan folders into which files may be dropped, and the rest of the ever more familiar items on your computer’s desktop. What is actually going on behind the desktop is mind-numbingly complicated, but users don’t need to know about it, so intelligent interface designers have simplified the affordances, making them particularly salient for human eyes, and adding sound effects to help direct attention. Nothing compact and salient inside the computer corresponds to that little tan file-folder on the desktop screen.

He says that the manifest image of each species is “a user-illusion brilliantly designed by evolution to fit the needs of its users.”'

He'll not credit him ... I think he considers Chalmers on the fringe ... maybe he can have coffee with the Churchlands, but who else?

 
Boy, Dennet is so smart that he manages to avoid having consciousness emerge from physical processes. Brilliant. How does he manage this!? By (still) denying that consciousness exists haha.

"This brings us to the question of consciousness, on which Dennett holds a distinctive and openly paradoxical position. Our manifest image of the world and ourselves includes as a prominent part not only the physical body and central nervous system but our own consciousness with its elaborate features—sensory, emotional, and cognitive—as well as the consciousness of other humans and many nonhuman species. In keeping with his general view of the manifest image, Dennett holds that consciousness is not part of reality in the way the brain is. Rather, it is a particularly salient and convincing user-illusion, an illusion that is indispensable in our dealings with one another and in monitoring and managing ourselves, but an illusion nonetheless.

You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion, since every illusion is itself a conscious experience—an appearance that doesn’t correspond to reality. So it cannot appear to me that I am conscious though I am not: as Descartes famously observed, the reality of my own consciousness is the one thing I cannot be deluded about. The way Dennett avoids this apparent contradiction takes us to the heart of his position, which is to deny the authority of the first-person perspective with regard to consciousness and the mind generally.

The view is so unnatural that it is hard to convey, but it has something in common with the behaviorism that was prevalent in psychology at the middle of the last century. Dennett believes that our conception of conscious creatures with subjective inner lives—which are not describable merely in physical terms—is a useful fiction that allows us to predict how those creatures will behave and to interact with them. He has coined the term “heterophenomenology” to describe the (strictly false) attribution each of us makes to others of an inner mental theater—full of sensory experiences of colors, shapes, tastes, sounds, images of furniture, landscapes, and so forth—that contains their representation of the world.

According to Dennett, however, the reality is that the representations that underlie human behavior are found in neural structures of which we know very little. And the same is true of the similar conception we have of our own minds. That conception does not capture an inner reality, but has arisen as a consequence of our need to communicate to others in rough and graspable fashion our various competencies and dispositions (and also, sometimes, to conceal them):

Curiously, then, our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our second-person point of view of others’ minds: we don’t see, or hear, or feel, the complicated neural machinery churning away in our brains but have to settle for an interpreted, digested version, a user-illusion that is so familiar to us that we take it not just for reality but also for the most indubitable and intimately known reality of all.

The trouble is that Dennett concludes not only that there is much more behind our behavioral competencies than is revealed to the first-person point of view—which is certainly true—but that nothing whatever is revealed to the first-person point of view but a “version” of the neural machinery. In other words, when I look at the American flag, it may seem to me that there are red stripes in my subjective visual field, but that is an illusion: the only reality, of which this is “an interpreted, digested version,” is that a physical process I can’t describe is going on in my visual cortex.

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”"
 
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Boy, Dennet is so smart that he manages to avoid having consciousness emerge from physical processes. Brilliant. How does he manage this!? By (still) denying that consciousness exists haha.

"This brings us to the question of consciousness, on which Dennett holds a distinctive and openly paradoxical position. Our manifest image of the world and ourselves includes as a prominent part not only the physical body and central nervous system but our own consciousness with its elaborate features—sensory, emotional, and cognitive—as well as the consciousness of other humans and many nonhuman species. In keeping with his general view of the manifest image, Dennett holds that consciousness is not part of reality in the way the brain is. Rather, it is a particularly salient and convincing user-illusion, an illusion that is indispensable in our dealings with one another and in monitoring and managing ourselves, but an illusion nonetheless.

You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion, since every illusion is itself a conscious experience—an appearance that doesn’t correspond to reality. So it cannot appear to me that I am conscious though I am not: as Descartes famously observed, the reality of my own consciousness is the one thing I cannot be deluded about. The way Dennett avoids this apparent contradiction takes us to the heart of his position, which is to deny the authority of the first-person perspective with regard to consciousness and the mind generally.

The view is so unnatural that it is hard to convey, but it has something in common with the behaviorism that was prevalent in psychology at the middle of the last century. Dennett believes that our conception of conscious creatures with subjective inner lives—which are not describable merely in physical terms—is a useful fiction that allows us to predict how those creatures will behave and to interact with them. He has coined the term “heterophenomenology” to describe the (strictly false) attribution each of us makes to others of an inner mental theater—full of sensory experiences of colors, shapes, tastes, sounds, images of furniture, landscapes, and so forth—that contains their representation of the world.

According to Dennett, however, the reality is that the representations that underlie human behavior are found in neural structures of which we know very little. And the same is true of the similar conception we have of our own minds. That conception does not capture an inner reality, but has arisen as a consequence of our need to communicate to others in rough and graspable fashion our various competencies and dispositions (and also, sometimes, to conceal them):

Curiously, then, our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our second-person point of view of others’ minds: we don’t see, or hear, or feel, the complicated neural machinery churning away in our brains but have to settle for an interpreted, digested version, a user-illusion that is so familiar to us that we take it not just for reality but also for the most indubitable and intimately known reality of all.

The trouble is that Dennett concludes not only that there is much more behind our behavioral competencies than is revealed to the first-person point of view—which is certainly true—but that nothing whatever is revealed to the first-person point of view but a “version” of the neural machinery. In other words, when I look at the American flag, it may seem to me that there are red stripes in my subjective visual field, but that is an illusion: the only reality, of which this is “an interpreted, digested version,” is that a physical process I can’t describe is going on in my visual cortex.

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc. that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”"

Faust.jpg

Dennett here bears an uncanny resemblance to Faust ... with Dawkins in a scenery-chewing turn as Mephistopheles ...
 
"A man cannot easily be deficient in natural Logic, but he may very easily be deficient in natural Dialectic, which is a gift apportioned in unequal measure. In so far natural Dialectic resembles the faculty of judgment, which differs in degree with every man; while reason, strictly speaking, is the same. For it often happens that in a matter in which a man is really in the right, he is confounded or refuted by merely superficial arguments; and if he emerges victorious from a contest, he owes it very often not so much to the correctness of his judgment in stating his proposition, as to the cunning and address with which he defended it.

Here, as in all other cases, the best gifts are born with a man; nevertheless, much may be done to make him a master of this art by practice, and also by a consideration of the tactics which may be used to defeat an opponent, or which he uses himself for a similar purpose. Therefore, even though Logic may be of no very real, practical use, Dialectic may certainly be so; and Aristotle, too, seems to me to have drawn up his Logic proper, or Analytic, as a foundation and preparation for his Dialectic, and to have made this his chief business. Logic is concerned with the mere form of propositions; Dialectic, with their contents or matter — in a word, with their substance. It was proper, therefore, to consider the general form of all propositions before proceeding to particulars." - Schopenhauer The Art of Controversy
 
@Pharoah, your paper at FQXi is excellent. It's clear, informative. and persuasive. I finally now understand HCT, and I find it a very persuasive theory indeed.

ps, I had no idea you were a concert violinist and have interacted with Prigogine. :)

pps, if you send a copy to Chalmers, let us know how he responds.
@Constance thanks for that... do give the essay a score on the website, as I am trailing with only two low ones atm! v disheartening as usual.
I am a little surprised that you find it so persuasive.
I will put a link up to one of my violin performances for you to immerse yourself in. :)
Chalmers would not be interested yet.
and @smcder, note Rovelli's essay (on the essay list he is second from bottom) - he thinks he makes a connection between mathematics and purpose/intentionality. You might also find my response in his essay feed of interest. There is a flaw in Rovelli here, imo, but the fundamentals are good. I hope he responds to my comment.
 
ahe hem!!
I do need 10 or more ratings from FQXI members to qualify for the final propper... FQXI membership is sooo cool... I'd recommend it ;)
I made an account and I'm logged in. Every time I try to "rate it" it tells me to login. When I login then, it says I'm already logged in. ...

I will try again from a PC when I get a moment. Cheers.
 
4.4 The Mind-Body Problem | University of Oxford Podcasts - Audio and Video Lectures

Millican on the Mind/Body problem ... he downplays the causation problem of Cartesian dualism by way of Hume's causation (a neat move) and also downplays causal closure ... on the basis of we are not yet justified in asserting causal closure ... I have not finished the lecture yet, but at this point he finds stronger objections in evolutionary theory.

S
 
ahe hem!!
I do need 10 or more ratings from FQXI members to qualify for the final propper... FQXI membership is sooo cool... I'd recommend it ;)
I have an account and I'm logged in but I can't seem to figure how to give the essay a rating. Sorry!
 
"Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas
(published in WS's third volume of poetry, Parts of a World, 1942)

i
A crinkled paper makes a brilliant sound.
The wrinkled roses tinkle, the paper ones,
And the ear is glass, in which the noises pelt,
The false roses – compare the silent rose of the sun
And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell,
With this paper, this dust. That states the point.

Messieurs,
It is an artificial world. The rose
Of paper is of the nature of its world.
The sea is so many written words; the sky
Is blue, clear, cloudy, high, dark, wide and round;
The mountains inscribe themselves upon the walls.
And, otherwise, the rainy rose belongs
To naked men, to women naked as rain.

Where is that summer warm enough to walk
Among the lascivious poisons, clean of them,
And in what covert may we, naked, be
Beyond the knowledge of nakedness, as part
Of reality, beyond the knowledge of what
Is real, part of a land beyond the mind?

Rain is an unbearable tyranny. Sun is
A monster-maker, an eye, only an eye,
A sharpener of shapes for only the eye,
Of things no better than paper things, of days
That are paper days. The false and true are one.

ii
The eye believes and its communion takes.
The spirit laughs to see the eye believe
And its communion take. And now of that.
Let the Secretary for Porcelain observe
That evil made magic, as in catastrophe,
If neatly glazed, becomes the same as the fruit
Of an emperor, the egg-plant of a prince.
The good is evil’s last invention. Thus
The maker of catastrophe invents the eye
And through the eye equates ten thousand deaths
With a single well-tempered apricot, or, say,
An egg-plant of good air.

My beards, attend
To the laughter of evil; the fierce chicanery
With the ferocious chu-chot-chu between, the sobs
For breath to laugh the louder, the deeper gasps
Uplifting the completest rhetoric
Of sneers, the fugues commencing at the toes
And ending at the finger-tips…it is death
That is ten thousand deaths and evil death.
Be tranquil in your wounds. It is good death
That puts an end to evil death and dies.
Be tranquil in your wounds. The placating star
Shall be the gentler for the death you die
And the helpless philosophers say still helpful things.
Plato, the reddened flower, the erotic bird.

iii
The lean cats of the arches of the churches,
That’s the old world. In the new, all men are priests.

They preach and they are preaching in a land
To be described. They are preaching in a time
To be described. Evangelists of what?
If they could gather their theses into one,
Collect their thoughts together into one,
Into a single thought, thus: into a queen,
An intercessor by innate rapport,
Or into a dark-blue king, un roi tonnerre,
Whose merely being was his valiance,
Panjandrum and central heart and mind of minds –
If they could! Or is it the multitude of thoughts,
Like insects in the depths of the mind, that kill
The single thought? The multitudes of men
That kill the single man, starvation’s head,
One man, their bread and their remembered wine?

The lean cats of the arches of the churches
Bask in the sun in which they feel transparent,
As if designed by X, the per-noble master.
They have a sense of their design and savor
The sunlight. They bear brightly the little beyond
Themselves, the slightly unjust drawing that is
Their genius: the exquisite errors of time.

iv
On an early Sunday in April, a feeble day,
He felt curious about the winter hills
And wondered about the water in the lake.
It had been cold since December. Snow fell, first,
At new year and, from then until April, lay
On everything. Now it had melted, leaving
The gray grass like a pallet, closely pressed;
And dirt. The wind blew in the empty place.
The winter wind blew in an empty place –
There was that difference between the and an,
The difference between himself and no man,
No man that heard a wind in an empty place.
It was time to be himself again, to see
If the place, in spite of its witheredness, was still
Within the difference. He felt curious
Whether the water was black and lashed about
Or whether the ice still covered the lake. There was still
Snow under the trees and on the northern rocks,
The dead rocks not the green rocks, the live rocks. If,
When he looked, the water ran up the air or grew white
Against the edge of the ice, the abstraction would
Be broken and winter would be broken and done,
And being would be being himself again,
Being, becoming seeing and feeling and self,
Black water breaking into reality.

v
The law of chaos is the law of ideas,
Of improvisations and seasons of belief.

Ideas are men. The mass of meaning and
The mass of men are one. Chaos is not

The mass of meaning. It is three or four
Ideas or, say, five men or, possibly six.

In the end, these philosophic assassins pull
Revolvers and shoot each other. One remains.

The mass of meaning becomes composed again.
He that remains plays on an instrument

A good agreement between himself and night,
A chord between the mass of men and himself,

Far, far beyond the putative canzones
Of love and summer. The assassin sings

In chaos and his song is a consolation.
It is the music of the mass of meaning.

And yet it is a singular romance,
This warmth in the blood-world for the pure idea,

This inability to find a sound,
That clings to the minds like that right sound, that song

Of the assassin that remains and sings
In the high imagination, triumphantly.

vi
Of systematic thinking…Ercole,
O, skin and spine and hair of you, Ercole,
Of what do you lie thinking in your cavern?
To think it is to think the way to death…

That other one wanted to think his way to life,
Sure that the ultimate poem was the mind,
Or of the mind, or of the mind in these

Elysia, these days, half earth, half mind;
Half-sun, half thinking of the sun; half sky,
Half desire for indifference about the sky.

He, that one, wanted to think his way to life,
To be happy because people were thinking to be.
They had to think it to be. He wanted that,
To face the weather and be unable to tell
How much of it was light and how much thought,
In these Elysia, these origins,
This single place in which we are and stay,
Except for the images we make of it,
And for it, and by which we think the way,
And, being unhappy, talk of happiness
And, talking of happiness, know that it means
That the mind is the end and must be satisfied.

It cannot be half earth, half mind; half sun,
Half thinking; until the mind has been satisfied,
Until, for him, his mind is satisfied.
Time troubles to produce the redeeming thought.
Sometimes at sleepy mid-days it succeeds,
Too vaguely that it be written in character.

vii
To have satisfied the mind and turn to see,
(That being as much belief as we may have,)
And then to look and say there is no more
Than this, in this alone I may believe,
Whatever it may be; then one’s belief
Resists each past apocalypse, rejects
Ceylon, wants nothing from the sea, la belle
Aux crinolines, smears out mad mountains.

What
One believes is what matters. Ecstatic identities
Between one’s self and the weather and the things
Of the weather are the belief in one’s element,
The casual reunions, the long-pondered
Surrenders, the repeated sayings that
There is nothing more and that it is enough
To believe in the weather and in the things and men
Of the weather and in one’s self, as part of that
And nothing more. So that if one went to the moon,
Or anywhere beyond, to a different element,
One would be drowned in the air of difference,
Incapable of belief, in the difference.
And then returning from the moon, if one breathed
The cold evening, without any scent or the shade
Of any woman, watched the thinnest light
And the most distant, single color, about to change,
And naked of any illusion, in poverty,
In the exactest poverty, if then
One breathed the cold evening, the deepest inhalation
Would come from that return to the subtle center.

viii
We live in a camp….Stanzas of final peace
Lie in the heart’s residuum….Amen.
But would it be amen, in choirs, if once
In total war we died and after death
Returned, unable to die again, fated
To endure therafter every mortal wound,
Beyond a second death, as evil’s end?
It is only that we are able to die, to escape
The wounds. Yet to lie buried in evil earth,
If evil never ends, is to return
To evil after death, unable to die
Again and fated to endure beyond
Any mortal end. The chants of final peace
Lie in the heart’s residuum.

How can
We chant if we live in evil and afterward
Lie harshly buried there?

If earth dissolves
Its evil after death, it dissolves it while
We live. Thence come the final chants, the chants
Of the brooder seeking the acutest end
Of speech: to pierce the heart’s residuum
And there to find music for a single line,
Equal to memory, one line in which
The vital music formulates the words.

Behold the men in helmets borne on steel,
Discolored, how they are going to defeat.”

~~Wallace Stevens
 
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''What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.''

-- Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), U.S. poet. "Three Academic Pieces," no. 1, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
 
"The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us or for other creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific image—ultimately in the language of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology."

And this is where Danny and Donny disagree. And where i think naive realism rears its ugly head. As strawson says:

"Many make the same mistake today — the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can’t be physical. We don’t."

I would put a twist on that, however, by saying: conscious stuff looks like physical stuff in our user-illusion.

I'm still not clear about this: does Hoffman believe, then, that we are incorrect in thinking that the physical properties and aspects of the world are real and that we encounter them in our lived experience in our local world?


From WS's propositions about lived experience:

"The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair."

"Words are not forms of a single word. In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts. The world must be measured by eye."




 

Lecture 11 from this series - discussing the (lack of evidence) that social processing is largely automatic, in fact the evidence says there is a balance of conscious and unconscious processing depending on the circumstances, with consciousness often predominating ... and that the "iceberg" metaphor is very misleading ... nonetheless there is a "juggernaut of automaticity" which he attributes to "conscious shyness" as coined by Owen Flanagan.
 
I'm still not clear about this: does Hoffman believe, then, that we are incorrect in thinking that the physical properties and aspects of the world are real and that we encounter them in our lived experience in our local world?
Yes. Hoffman believes/argues that the physical/material world just is a phenomenal facade.

He believes/argues that what is real, what is absolute or noumenal, is consciousness, particularly "conscious agents." ("Conscious agents" is a concept that I don't fully grok.)

By this logic, the phenomenal is constituted of the noumenal. So even though our phenomenal worlds don't give us absolute knowledge of the absolute, they just are the absolute.

A drawing of an atom isn't an atom but it is made of atoms.
 
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