What or where is our real sense of self?

So I hooked up the student volunteers to a GSR device while they stared at the table. I then stroked the hidden hand and the table surface simultaneously for several seconds until the student started experiencing the table as his own hand. Next I bashed the table surface with a hammer as the student watched. Instantly, there was a huge change in GSR as if I had smashed the student's own fingers.

They could (a) deny the causal status of mental types; that is, they could reject Mental Realism and deny that mental types are genuine properties. Alternatively, they could (b) reject Physicalism; that is, they could endorse the causal status of mental types, but deny their causal status derives from the causal status of their physical realizers. Or finally, they could (c) endorse Mental Realism and Physicalism, and reject Antireductionism.

Can you cite a reference to support this claim.

This is of course a topic with a large literature as organ harvesting depends on an acceptable criteria for brain death (...) the systems approach (rather than QM or panpsychism or whatever) was the best scientific answer.

Also, before continuing this long diatribe: what are the best phenomenal characteristics we may attribute to consciousness? I believe unity, recursive processing style and egocentric perspective are the best phenomenal target properties attributed to the ‘self’.

Yeah, I adopt the stance of identity theory:

the theory simply states that when we experience something - e.g. pain - this is exactly reflected by a corresponding neurological state in the brain (such as the interaction of certain neurons, axons, etc.). From this point of view, your mind is your brain - they are identical" http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/po...ntity_what.htm

A neural representation is a mental representation.

No, he is claiming it is with the manipulation of metarepresentations ('representations of representations') that we engage in consciousness. Many other other species have representational capacities, but not to the extent of humans.

It seems as though some are speaking about a specifically human sense of self, the one we are aquainted with and experience, and are speaking about the necessary conditions for the existence of our sense of self, not neccessarily any sense of self.

.... On one hand, when we introspect or look at our sense of self we find that our I is built upon a vast network of memories, associative connections, generalized concepts, a re-flective (to bend back upon) ability, and embedding within a specific socio-cultural milieu. On the other hand we see that animals possess subjective states such as pain, pleasure etc etc, which leads us to believe that animals too have an I The problem then is in what sense is the animal I and the human I the same in meaning or reference?

So the question: is the hard problem hard because of what is making our sense of self specific to humans, or because of the part shared with many animals?

... The problem with any approach putting to much emphasized on langage is that all what make the consciousness a hard problem is already present when we're looking at this 'just' conscious phenomena...

The hard problem being based around the divide between "what it feels like" and what its "objective" manifestations are, the animal most likely does have qualia and as such there is a hard problem for it as there is for us.

Here, I do not claim to have more knowledge of what constitutes "awareness", and the relationships between "awareness" and "subjectivity", but it does seem that we must trace it biologically much further down than humans in order to properly understand it.

So the gist of my position is not that only humans have some sort of “internal life” going on in their brains. It’s that we tend to use terms like “consciousness” and “subjectivity” and “representation” to cover a vast range of very different things. If we want to understand these issues better, it’s the differences we should be focusing on.

The problem with treating this as a problem of “consciousness” – as even some reputable physicists do, sadly

So as to the “hard problem” – when we humans look around and “perceive” things around us, we’re just as completely unconscious of the vast amount of linguistic software-processing involved, as we are of the vast amount of neural hardware-processing that’s going on. It’s very easy to imagine we’re doing something like what a cat does when it looks around, “just seeing.” And if we start thinking about it reflectively, we may very easily convince ourselves that the cat “must have an internal subjective world of sensation” or even “a self.”

Can I?.

First news the current practices are based on a philosophical system approach! I'd have say it is based on common sense and that no one give 'the system approach ' a **** when it comes to medical practices. Always happy to learn something.

So the gist of my position is not that only humans have some sort of “internal life” going on in their brains. It’s that we tend to use terms like “consciousness” and “subjectivity” and “representation” to cover a vast range of very different things. If we want to understand these issues better, it’s the differences we should be focusing on.

My comments were certainly aimed at what’s specifically human in “consciousness” and “sense of self.”

These abilities are quite amazing in themselves, but if you talk to biologists or ethologists I doubt you’ll find many who believe there is a “hard problem” here. (...) It’s clear why these capacities evolved, it’s clear how evolution works, and there’s no mystery any more about the relationship of evolving self-reproducing organisms to the physical world.

Before anyone begins to ask questions about the relation of our conscious experience to that of an animal, I would recommend that they spend some time thinking about the very great differences that exist between the conscious experience of humans, say, in oral cultures and in literate culture. (Look up Walter Ong’s work or Eric Havelock’s, for example.) That helps give a sense of how radically different one’s “consciousness” and “sense of self” can be, even when the underlying language has hardly changed.

identify the paper you believe supplies the argument.

Again you supply your personal and unsupported reaction against an actual referenced case

My personal reaction is the reaction of a scientitist who has worked specifically on this issue. So, to be perfectly clear, I know that at least regarding coma, your statement is bull.

In principal, I agree that there exists a "hard problem of consciousness" for both humans and animals, because I do believe that animals have qualia and internal states...

Drastically different cultures which focus on drastically different aspects of human life will almost certainly have a completely different structuring of their internal perceptual manifold. This is relevant because, how could we hope to understand the nature of "what it is like to be a bat" from an internal perspective if we can barely understand what it is like to be in a completely different culture, or even what it is like to be the guy next door.

This is precisely what people who want to debate consciousness should demonstrate a grasp of - the rich structure of the mind...

Philosophy based on qualia-fication does the same thing. If you atomise, you no longer have a chance of seeing the complex organisation.

By the very same logic, you don't know that I or any one but you is conscious. You're making an analogy with yourself, and you may well be wrong to.

Of course I don't believe this solipsism, but it's exactly the same logic for chimps. So where do we stop? At this point, you would probably say: hey but humans are humans: we know that's the same kind of brain so for our species it's correct to reject solipsism.

Yes. I do think the status of “qualia” is an interesting topic – but again, this is a highly relative term. As you well understand, it’s not as though there is something like a simple, “primitive” experience of “red” we can go back to and take as a pristine starting point for assembling a conscious mind.

On this new view of the origins of color vision, color is far from an arbitrary permutable labeling system. Our three-dimensional color space is steeped with links to emotions, moods, and physiological states, as well as potentially to behaviors. For example, purple regions within color space are not merely a perceptual mix of blue and red, but are also steeped in physiological, emotional and behavioral implications – in this case perhaps of a livid male ready to punch you.

http://changizi.wordpress.com/2010/1...-red-the-same/

Building on these insights, this project defines qualia to be salient chunks of human experience, which are experienced as unified wholes, having a definite, individual feeling tone. Hence the study of qualia is the study of the "chunking," or meaningful structuring, of human experience. An important, and seemingly new, finding is that qualia can have complex internal structure, and in fact, are hierarchically organized, i.e., they not only can have parts, but the parts can have parts, etc. The transitive law does not hold for this "part-of" relation. For example, a note is part of a phrase, and a phrase is part of a melody, and segments at each of these three levels are perceived as salient, unified wholes, and thus as qualia in the sense of the above definition - but a single note is not (usually) perceived as a salient part of the melody.

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/projs/qualia.html

Boroditsky compared the ability of English speakers and Russian speakers to distinguish between shades of blue. She picked those languages because Russian does not have a single word for blue that covers all shades of what English speakers would call blue; rather, it has classifications for lighter blues and darker blues as different as the English words yellow and orange. Her hypothesis was that Russians thus pay closer attention to shades of blue than English speakers, who lump many more shades under one name and use more vague distinctions. The experiment confirmed her hypothesis. Russian speakers could distinguish between hues of blue faster if they were called by different names in Russian. English speakers showed no increased sensitivity for the same colors. This suggests, says Boroditsky, that Russian speakers have a "psychologically active perceptual boundary where English speakers do not."

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/m...oroditsky.html

Musical Platonism, score nominalism, cognitivism, and modernist approaches in general, allassume the primacy of representation, and hence all ounder for similar reasons. Context is crucial to interpretation, but it is determined as part of the process of interpretation, not independently or in advance of it. Certain elements are recognized as the context of what is being interpreted,while others become part of the emergent musical \object" itself, and still others are deemed irrelevant. Moreover, the elements involved and their status can change very rapidly. Thus, every performance is uniquely situated, for both performers and listeners, in what may be very differentways.

In particular, every performance is embodied, in the sense that very particular aspectsof each participant are deeply implicated in the processes of interpretation, potentially including their auditory capabilities, clothing, companions, musical skills, prior musical experiences, implicit social beliefs (e.g., that opera is high status, or that punk challenges mainstream values), spatiallocation, etc., and certainly not excluding their reasons for being there at all (this is consistent with the cultural historical approach of Lev Vygotsky.

Most scientific studies of art are problematic for similar reasons. In particular, the third person,objective perspective of science requires a stable collection of "objects" to be used as "data,"which therefore become decontextualized, with their situatedness, embodiment, and interactive social nature ignored.

This paper draws on data from both science and phenomenology, in a spirit similar to the "neurophenomenology" of Francisco Varela, as a way to reconcile first and third person perspectives,by allowing each to impose constraints upon the other. Such approaches acknowledge that the first and third person perspectives reveal two very different domains, neither of which can be reduced to the other, but they also deny that these domains are incompatible.

Whatever approach is taken, qualia are often considered to be atomic, i.e., non-reducible, or without constituent parts, in harmony with doctrines of logical positivism, e.g., as often attributed to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Though I have never seen it stated quite so baldly, the theory(but perhaps "belief" is a better term, since it is so often implicit) seems to be that qualia atoms are completely independent from elements of perception and cognition, but somehow combine with them to give molecules of experience.

Peirce was an American logician concerned with problems of meaning and reference, who concluded that these are relational rather than denotational, and whoalso made an in uential distinction among modes of reference, as symbolic, indexical, or iconic....A semiotic system or semiotic theory consists of: a signature, which gives names for sorts, subsorts, and operations; some axioms; a level ordering on sorts having a maximum element called the top sort; and a priority ordering on the constructors at each level....
Axioms are constraints on the possible signs of a system. Levels express the whole-part hierarchy of complex signs, whereas priorities express the relative importance of constructors and their arguments; social issues play an important role in determining these orderings. This approach has a rich mathematical foundation....

The Anticipatory Model captures aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology of time. For example,it has versions of both retention and protention, and the right kind of relationship between them. It also implies Husserl’s pithy observation that temporal objects (i.e., salient events or qualia) arecharacterized by both duration and unity. Since it is not useful to anticipate details very far into the future, because the number of choices grows very quickly, an implementation of protention, whether natural or artificial, needs a structure to accommodate multiple, relatively short projections, basedon what is now being heard, with weights that increase with elapsed time; this is a good candidatefor implementation by a neural net of competing Hebbian cell assemblies, in both the human and algorithmic instantiations, as well as robots (as in [71]), and it also avoids reliance on old style AI representation and planning.

This paper has attempted to explore the qualitative aspects of experience using music as data, and to place this exploration in the context of some relevant philosophical, cognitive scientific, and mathematical theories. Our observations have supported certain theories and challenged others. Among those supported are Husserl’s phenomenology of time, Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach, and Meyer’s anticipatory approach, while Chalmers’ dualism, Brentano’s thesis on intentionality, qualia realism, qualia atomism, Hume’s pointilist time, and classical cognitivism have been disconfirrmed at least in part.

In particular, embodiment, emotion, and society are certainly important parts of how real humans can be living solutions to the symbol grounding problem. The pervasive influence of cognitivism is presumably one reason why qualia in general, and emotion in particular, have been so neglected by traditional philosophy of mind, AI, linguistics, and so on. We may hope that this is now beginning to change.

This suggests that all consciousness arises through sense-making processes involving anticipation, which produce qualia as sufficiently salient chunks. Let us call this the C Hypothesis; it provides a theory for the origin and structure of consciousness. If correct, it would help to ex-plain why consciousness continues to seem so mysterious: it is because we have been looking at it through inappropriate, distorting lenses; for example, attempting to view qualia as objective facts, or to assign them some new ontological status, instead of seeing segmentation by saliency as an inevitable feature of our processes of enacted perception.

I’m just as little interested in proving that chimps are like humans, or unlike humans, both being obviously true in various ways. How can there be a “correct” answer to the question, “Do chimps have an internal mental life like ours?”

My point is that we interpret the mentality of others by projecting, and that this is a primary human capacity.

For example – before Descartes, I think it’s reasonable to suppose that no one in the history of human thought had ever experienced the world as divided between an “external objective reality” and a “subjective inner consciousness”... because that difference had never before been conceptualized, never brought into human language.

Ideas on mind/body dualism are presented in Hebrew Scripture (as early as Genesis 2:7) where the Creator is said to have formed the first human a living, psycho-physical fusion of mind and body--a holisitic dualism. Mind/body dualism is also seen in the writings of Zarathushtra. Plato and Aristotle deal with speculations as to the existence of an incorporeal soul that bore the faculties of intelligence and wisdom. They maintained, for different reasons, that people's "intelligence" (a faculty of the mind or soul) could not be identified with, or explained in terms of, their physical body.[2][3]