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Consciousness and the Paranormal

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Shouldn't the "environment" be said to include the organism itself as experiences can be had without or in opposition to interaction with the external environment, such as provided by dreams, and hallucinatory experiences?
Absolutely!

Furthermore, once a mind (a stream of experience) attains self-awareness (however that happens) then a mind can be influenced/changed by its awareness of its sentience!

I think this is the key to self-regulation and perhaps even free will!

Can't consciousness be seen as essentially the organism experiencing itself, modulated if you will, by transformations in the environment to which it belongs?
"the organism experiencing itself"

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that phrase, but here's what I would say:

Differentiated primal substance in the form of a system able to process information (i.e., a physical body) exchanges information with the environment (i.e., physical reality, including its own differentiated body) which emits a stream of non-physical, mental units (i.e., a stream of experiences). [Think of a stream of musical notes creating a song.]

This mental, non-physical stream of experience is the mind. If one wishes to say that "the brain experiences" that's fine, so long as they're clear that the brain is physical and the stream of experiences is non-physical.

Imho, it's more accurate to say that the mind emerges as a discrete thing from the interaction of the brain with the environment. Just as a song emerges as a discrete thing from the interaction of the instruments with the instrumentalists.

We wouldn't say the instruments/mechanical instrumentalists experience the song, we say they produce the song.
 
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I would put to you that the mind is the physical molecular operation of the brain itself. The personality and other characteristics of the mind are inexorably tied to the physical configuration of the brain. Therefore the mind isn't analogous to software, but rather firmware or more properly a "hard-wired" circuit.

To use your analogy the note produced by the musical instrument is in fact a physical component of the instrument itself, being the modulated air emitting from it.

Also, the brain and the mind are inseparable. A properly functioning brain is in essence a mind.
 
The issue with this approach is that if the mind was indeed physical, then it would follow that we could objectively observe it. However, objectively observing subjective experience has so far eluded us.

Thus the mind appears to consist of a non-physical material or property. (See property dualism.)
 
The personality and other characteristics of the mind are inexorably tied to the physical configuration of the brain. Therefore the mind isn't analogous to software, but rather firmware or more properly a "hard-wired" circuit.
In my analogy, the mind wouldn't be software but rather output.

Also, in my analogy, personality etc. would be analogous to the instruments and the arrengment of instruments producing the musical notes.

Some minds are made with trombones, some without. Some with flutes, some without.
 
The issue with this approach is that if the mind was indeed physical, then it would follow that we could objectively observe it. However, objectively observing subjective experience has so far eluded us.

Thus the mind appears to consist of a non-physical material or property. (See property dualism.)

The mind (the molecular activity of the brain) is a material thing that can be seen.
 
First of all, I'm skeptical about the veracity of that experiment. It's amazing. I'd like to see it reproduced.

Second, that's not a mind, it's pictures of faces.

It is highly representational brain activity. The activity of the brain can be seen in various ways. What spectrum do you want to look in, what method do you want to employ? Blood flow? Electromagnetic activity? These things indicate activity, some of which is as with the faces, is highly representational of experiences. There is an excellent TED talk somewhere showing recognizable images within the optic nerve itself. That is the organism "experiencing itself" transforming itself into a representation of the world and themselves in it.

I'm not a medical professional, just an arm-chair philosopher who would rather read an old Fantastic Four comic book (read issue 72 from the 60s at lunch) than a white paper on consciousness studies. So admittedly, I may not be the best source.
 
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I'd like to know how the experimenters moved from fMRI images of active sets of neurons in given parts of the subjects' brains to the represented 'faces'. Additionally even this popularized report of these experiments provides reasons to doubt the claims being made:

One challenge is that different brains show different activity for the same image. The blurry images pictured here are actually averages of the thoughts of six lab volunteers. If one were to look at any individual’s reading, the image would be less consistent.

“There’s a wide variation in how people’s brains work under a scanner – some people have better brains for fMRI – and so if you were to pick a participant at random it might be that their reconstructions are really good, or it might be that their reconstructions are really poor, which is why we averaged across all the participants,” Cowen said.

For now, he added, you shouldn’t worry about others snooping on your memories or forcibly extracting information.

This sort of technology can only read active parts of the brain. So you couldn’t read passive memories – you would have to get the person to imagine the memory to read it,” Cowen said.

“It’s a matter of time, and eventually – maybe 200 years from now – we’ll have some way of reading inactive parts of the brain. But that’s a much harder problem, as it involves measuring very fine details of brain structure that we don’t even really understand.
It's a gross overstatement to refer to this experimentation as 'reading what goes on in a mind'. Popular science reporting is filled with such empty claims and exaggerations made by the institutional publicists who issue press releases about current neuroscience experiments. It's part of the competition for funding by university science departments.
 
It is highly representational brain activity. The activity of the brain can be seen in various ways. What spectrum do you want to look in, what method do you want to employ? Blood flow? Electromagnetic activity? These things indicate activity, some of which is as with the faces, is highly representational of experiences. There is an excellent TED talk somewhere showing recognizable images within the optic nerve itself. That is the organism "experiencing itself" transforming itself into a representation of the world and themselves in it.
Those are all examples of the physical exchange of information which can be objectively observed. However, subjective experience (mind) cannot be objectively observed.
 
It is highly representational brain activity. The activity of the brain can be seen in various ways. . . . These things indicate activity, some of which is as with the faces, is highly representational of experiences.

I don't deny that this experiment is interesting, but I think you're overstating its significance. It would be good to have a link to the actual paper produced by the experimenters.

There is an excellent TED talk somewhere showing recognizable images within the optic nerve itself. That is the organism "experiencing itself" transforming itself into a representation of the world and themselves in it.

Can you find that TED demonstration and link to it? Your description of it is quite mind-blowing.
 
Absolutely!

Furthermore, once a mind (a stream of experience) attains self-awareness (however that happens) then a mind can be influenced/changed by its awareness of its sentience!

then_a_miracle_occurs.jpg
 
Soupie wrote:

Regarding the idea of meta-sentience: I’m not suggesting consciousness does not exist. It does of course.

What I am suggesting is that consciousness is distinct from sentience.

You're trying to dispose of qualia experienced by numberless species of life, living creatures including humans, in order to disjoin experience and mind at the human level, but where in the evolutionary tree are you going to mark the place where qualia entered awareness sufficiently to be called consciousness? [see the first paragraphs of the wikipedia definition of sentience] I don't think such a place can be distinguished in the evolution of species. As the wiki entry notes, we recognize by now (finally) the level of suffering endured by animals in this world, and we can no longer doubt that animals are aware of -- conscious of -- their suffering as we are.

For example, Helen Keller had sentience before she had consciousness. That is, she had a stream of experience before she had an awareness of that stream of experience.

This doesn't work either. Helen Keller was certainly conscious before Ann Sullivan showed her how symbols connect to meaningful contexts of things in the humanly lived world. Her emotions and her expression of them demonstrate that she was conscious of the world in which she lived before that breakthrough and deeply frustrated by her inability to understand and participate in it more fully because she lacked ordinary abilities to see and hear the things in it and their relationships with one another and with her. She had been by all means “an unhappy consciousness” in her inability to understand the meaning of the dolls placed in her hands by her family members and the symbol(s) written on her palm to denote what the doll was and meant. In Sullivan's demonstrating to HK at the gushing water pump that water could be signified by a symbol too – and that other things she had felt and experienced could be signified by other symbols – HK gained not consciousness or sentience {which she had possessed before} but access to a structure of meaning available to her in the world she existed in, meaning she could participate in and increasingly put together through the core semiosis by which human beings have always ‘made sense’ of the world.
 
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Wallace Stevens wondered about the nature of consciousness in animals as well as humans:

The Dove in Spring

Brooder, brooder, deep beneath its walls--
A small howling of the dove
Makes something of the little there,

The little and the dark, and that
In which it is and that in which
It is established. There the dove

Makes this small howling, like a thought
That howls in the mind or like a man
Who keeps seeking out his identity

In that which is and is established...It howls
Of the great sizes of an outer bush
And the great misery of the doubt of it,

Of stripes of silver that are strips
Like slits across a space, a place
And state of being large and light.

There is this bubbling before the sun,
This howling at one's ear, too far
For daylight and too near for sleep.


********

The Dove in the Belly

The whole of appearance is a toy. For this,
The dove in the belly builds his nest and coos,

Selah, tempestuous bird. How is it that
The rivers shine and hold their mirrors up,

Like excellence collecting excellence?
How is it that the wooden trees stand up

And live and heap their panniers of green
And hold them round the sultry day? Why should

These mountains being high be, also, bright,
Fetched up with snow that never falls to earth?

And this great esplanade of corn, miles wide,
Is something wished for made effectual

And something more. And the people in costumes,
Though poor, though raggeder than ruin, have that

Within them right for terraces—oh, brave salut!
Deep dove, placate you in your hiddenness.
 
Phenomenology is not simply about understanding consciousness and mind, but about understanding the nature of the reality in which these capacities have evolved. These last paragraphs of MP’s Preface to Phenomenology of Perception provide a sense of the scope of the inquiry that is involved in this radical turn in 20th-century philosophy.


Probably the chief gain from phenomenology is to have united

extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism in its notion of the

world or of rationality. Rationality is precisely proportioned to the

experiences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rationality is

to say that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning

emerges. But it should not be set in a realm apart, transposed into

absolute Spirit, or into a world in the realist sense. The phenomenological

world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where

the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own

and other people’s intersect and engage each other like gears. It is thus

inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which find their

unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of the present,

or other people’s in my own. For the first time the philosopher’s thinking

is sufficiently conscious not to anticipate itself and endow its own

results with reified form in the world. The philosopher tries to conceive

the world, others and himself and their interrelations. But the meditating

Ego, the ‘impartial spectator’ (uninteressierter Zuschauer)12 do not

rediscover an already given rationality, they ‘establish themselves’,13

and establish it, by an act of initiative which has no guarantee in being,

its justification resting entirely on the effective power which it confers

on us of taking our own history upon ourselves.


The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression

of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not

the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of

bringing truth into being. One may well ask how this creation is

possible, and if it does not recapture in things a pre-existing Reason. The

answer is that the only pre-existent Logos is the world itself, and that

the philosophy which brings it into visible existence does not begin by

being possible; it is actual or real like the world of which it is a part, and

no explanatory hypothesis is clearer than the act whereby we take up

this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it. Rationality

is not a problem. There is behind it no unknown quantity which has

to be determined by deduction, or, beginning with it, demonstrated

inductively. We witness every minute the miracle of related experience,

and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked,

for we are ourselves this network of relationships. The world and reason

are not problematical. We may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious,

but their mystery defines them: there can be no question of

dispelling it by some ‘solution’, it is on the hither side of all solutions.

True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world, and in this

sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as

‘deeply’ as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate in our hands, we

become responsible for our history through reflection, but equally by a

decision on which we stake our life, and in both cases what is involved

is a violent act which is validated by being performed.


Phenomenology, as a disclosure of the world, rests on itself, or

rather provides its own foundation.14 All cognitions are sustained by a

‘ground’ of postulates and finally by our communication with the

world as primary embodiment of rationality. Philosophy, as radical

reflection, dispenses in principle with this resource. As, however, it too

is in history, it too exploits the world and constituted reason. It must

therefore put to itself the question which it puts to all branches of

knowledge, and so duplicate itself infinitely, being, as Husserl says, a

dialogue or infinite meditation, and, in so far as it remains faithful to its

intention, never knowing where it is going. The unfinished nature of

phenomenology and the inchoative atmosphere which has surrounded it

are not to be taken as a sign of failure, they were inevitable because

phenomenology’s task was to reveal the mystery of the world and

of reason.15 If phenomenology was a movement before becoming a

doctrine or a philosophical system, this was attributable neither to

accident, nor to fraudulent intent. It is as painstaking as the works of

Balzac, Proust, Valéry or Cézanne—by reason of the same kind of

attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same

will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning

comes into being. In this way it merges into the general effort of

modern thought.
 
@Constance You're trying to dispose of qualia experienced by numberless species of life, living creatures including humans, in order to disjoin experience and mind at the human level, but where in the evolutionary tree are you going to mark the place where qualia entered awareness sufficiently to be called consciousness?

No, I'm not trying to dispose of qualia. On the contrary, what I am saying is that all organisms - not just humans - are sentient; that is, all organisms - not just humans - have experiences (qualia). What I am saying is that mind and qualia are one and the same. Thus, all organisms - not just humans - have minds.

Also, I'm certainly not trying to disjoin experience and mind as I'm claiming that experience is mind, haha.

Which animals are self-aware (conscious), I don't know. Humans, chimpanzees, dolphins, whales, and elephants most likely. Likely many others. Which animals are sentient (that is, have qualia)? All of them, even individual cells.

How does any of this, sentience or consciousness, technically happen? I don't know.

@Constance Helen Keller was certainly conscious before Ann Sullivan showed her how symbols connect to meaningful contexts of things in the humanly lived world.

Because Helen was human and did gain self-awareness, she obviously had the capacity for self-awareness (what I consider true consciousness). However, prior to this, Helen, in her own words says:

"[Sullivan] brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure."

“When I learned the meaning of ‘I’ and ‘me’ and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me”.

Helen is not a neuroscientist nor a philosopher, but she was obviously an incredibly intelligent woman. What she seems to describe is having once had a stream of experience, which later became a stream of consciousness when she began to think about her experience.
 
So you think she was incapable of thinking about her experiences {indeed struggling to make sense of them and of her own feelings} before that?
 
I wouldn't expect that she'd be lying, but it's not actually known what her definition of consciousness was. Do you know the date and nature of the text in which she wrote this statement?

She might have been using consciousness as a synonym for mind, since her 'dictionary' of symbols began to be assembled at that point, enabling her to think in ways she had not been able to think earlier, perhaps to begin categorizing types of things, types of feelings, types of behavior, and so forth.
 
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