Is Consciousness Solely a Product of the Brain?

[Ken G]

Because when I say "I" decide something, I'm not pretending to be independent of any prior history or conditions, whether inside my brain or out there in the world. "I" means, whatever decides what I'm deciding right now. If you want to claim that it's a "causal chain of determinism" that's bringing about the decision, I think you're exaggerating... though not entirely wrong. But I don't see why it makes any difference in this context.

I think another way to express this key issue is the question of whether we should subordinate the "self" to the "environment" (or the mental to the physical is another way to slice it), or subordinate the environment to the self, or simply say that both the concept of self and the concept of the environment stem from the interaction between the two. To me, the first choice is clearly wrong and the second choice is better but has problems (largely that the self appears to be made of the same basic "stuff" as the environment, there's no clear delimiter), but the third makes a lot of sense.

 

[nismaratwork]

I think another way to express this key issue is the question of whether we should subordinate the "self" to the "environment" (or the mental to the physical is another way to slice it), or subordinate the environment to the self, or simply say that both the concept of self and the concept of the environment stem from the interaction between the two. To me, the first choice is clearly wrong and the second choice is better but has problems (largely that the self appears to be made of the same basic "stuff" as the environment, there's no clear delimiter), but the third makes a lot of sense.

The third also has real-world examples to support your view, such as genetics being more than 1, or 2, but rather the complex interaction of both, without which 1 and 2 would be BLaaaaah.

 

[pftest]

You didn't observe it so it doesn't exist? There is this as well... https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3206751&postcount=32

Not that it really needs to be repeated.

See https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3207578&postcount=36

I will ask again, who is saying that the universe is alive?

Just google "universe alive". It doesn't really matter if one believes that life is just chemistry or that the universe is alive, it implies the same thing: there is no physical boundary between life and non-life. There is only an imaginary boundary. So the "life" example, like the other examples you mentioned, conflicts with the idea that C emerged in brains. In fact, the idea that C emerged in brains conflicts with all we know about nature. Strawson calls it magic for a good reason.

 

[nismaratwork]

See https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3207578&postcount=36

Just google "universe alive". It doesn't really matter if one believes that life is just chemistry or that the universe is alive, it implies the same thing: there is no physical boundary between life and non-life. There is only an imaginary boundary. So the "life" example, like the other examples you mentioned, conflicts with the idea that C emerged in brains. In fact, the idea that C emerged in brains conflicts with all we know about nature. Strawson calls it magic for a good reason.

Um... no, how about you provide the evidence asked for, as per guidelines.

 

[apeiron]

I'm just not grasping what you mean by "free will", I guess. What exactly is it that "there's no room for", whether the universe is deterministic or not?

The evidence strongly suggests that at the quantum level, when systems interact, new information gets created. Decisions get made that are dependent on a context of prior conditions, but not uniquely "determined" by them.

One point still missing in these discussions is Pattee's epistemic cut which distinguishes between rate dependent dynamics (all the deterministic/probablistic action down at the physical level) and rate independent information (a "something else", that is not physically determined, and whose actual status is a little hard to speak about).

Now physical determinism claims that the world is composed of atomistic events following fixed rules (holonomic boundary conditions). At the Newtonian level, there is no choice. Mass and energy fix the course of every particle in block universe style.

So this is why we get so many arguing that even brains are deterministic devices. It is physics all the way up with no room for anything different than rate dependent dynamics.

But Pattee's point is about computational devices. About symbolic processing.

Something changes when you have a set of switches that can change state "at no cost". Or rather, all at exactly the same cost. Suddenly mass and energy and even spacetime drop out of the picture as physically, the cost of coding any bit of information becomes the same. So the only causes determining the action become symbolic one, computational ones.

We are completely out of the Newtonian paradigm where you can look at the physics and say this caused that to happen. If every event is zeroed to have the same energetic cost, then there are no Newtonian causes visible to explain what is happening.

This is what we have with a computer, a Turing machine. There is a complete divorce of hardware and software. The hardware don't know what the software is doing. The state of the machine may change, but this is not determined by the physics of the machine, purely by the patterns conjured up by the software. The symbols and their rules are determining the action. The physical machine becomes so irrelevant that a Turing machine can be implemented on any suitable "tape and gate" handling structure.

Now life and mind use this "computational" trick in a variety of grades to create the complexity that gives them autonomy, choice, memory, identity, a "subjective POV". They do literally remove a part of themselves from the brute deterministic flow of Newtonian physics by creating this computational back-story - a private realm of memory and habits and intentions. The non-holonomic constraints that Pattee talks about.

And obvious rate independent device is DNA. Energetically, it cost the same to code for any combination of codons, and hence for DNA to represent any kind of protein. Remembering a protein becomes a free choice for the genes. They can chose this one, or that one, and it is all the same in the end so far as Newtonian mechanics goes. The choice becomes purely a private or subjective one. If it suits the organism, it will remember that protein instead of the millions of alternative choices it could have made with equal ease.

Of course, having made a choice, that does have deterministic consequences of a kind. The genes are pretty computational and will manufacture that protein under the right combination of external circumstances. So when the Newtonian world of rate dependent dynamics is sensed to have reached some critical point, the genes will pump out some enzyme to control that reaction, shut it down, speed it up. Change the boundary conditions that prevail so that the metabolic activity self-organises into a new state.

Yet the genes can make new choices. There is also a further informational machinery to evolve their state. Sexual reproduction makes use of randomness - gaussian or constrained to a single scale randomness, so still quite constrained - to mix the protein recipes about. A computational shuffling of the deck that is cost-free in terms of energetics (and so why it can be properly "random"). Then the shuffled deck is thrown back into the Newtonian fray - the organism goes through life and there is differential breeding success that updates the information represented by the gene pool.

So with genes, and sex, we can see the dance between the two realms - the Newtonian fray which is "completely determined" according to Kim, Q Goest, and others, a closed causal tale, and then the private realm of symbols and rules that is, in principle, absolutely free to play its own games.

The same with words. It costs us as much to say peanut as universe. Each is just a puff of air, a quick effort by our throat muscles. The symbolic weight of the words may be hugely different, but there are no Newtonian constraints acting on the words we chose to utter. The ideas they represent can be as small or large, general or particular, vague or crisp, as we like.

As a Vygotskean aside, it should thus be obvious why the human invention of speech created a rapid mental revolution. The thinking of animals is still energetically constrained. They can easily think about whatever is present (the way their brains are organised, they have no choice), but they have no free machinery for thinking about things that are not present. Without symbols to shuffle ideas about "at no cost", the thoughts of animals are reality-constrained. Every idea is having to pay for itself in terms of how it is serving the immediate demands of the moment - brains existing to balance energy needs against energy opportunities in terms of current behaviours.

So when it comes to talking about Newtonian determinism, the whole point about life is that it arose by finding a way to beat the game. It discovered computational mechanism - a symbolic determinism that could stand apart from the physical determinism. That is a new level that was itself undetermined, but could invent/evolve its own world of rule-based action.

So forget QM or even non-linear dynamics. Newtonian determinism just cannot touch a computational realm of action. Once the Newtonian cost of representing symbols and executing rules has been zeroed, then Newtonian determinism can no longer choose between states of representation. That choice becomes a purely internal one.

Of course in practice, the two levels of action are in interaction. There is no point having a symbolic capacity except to serve the purpose of controlling the Newtonian fray. Well, that is how it works for life and mind. Actual computers could not care because there really is no interaction between their software realm and their hardware realm. But for life and mind - complex adaptive systems - there is an active interaction that makes all the activity meaningful. The system has a memory, a history, goals, intentions, plans.

This does not tell you what freewill is (freewill is a human social construct, wrapped around a brain's ability to make intelligent choices based on general goals) but it should convince that Newtonian determinism cannot determine the patterns playing out at the level of software. The symbols and their rules are literally out of sight so far as that level of physical description goes.

 

[pftest]

Um... no, how about you provide the evidence asked for, as per guidelines.

Evidence for what? The emergence of consciousness in brains? You are the one claiming it happens, and I am the one saying it is not a rational position to hold.

 

[JDStupi]

Just as a comment, I don't think that nismar is claiming that there is some discrete jump from no-consciousness to consciousness at the human level. You may say that it is irrelevant at which scale the jump occurs. I don't know that we are ready to say that, looking at things apeiron says it would suggest a much more gradual process of "emerging" consciousness. One that would gradually gain in complexity.

Yes, you are right that as we take one grain of sand away at a time from a "pile" there is no defining line that says "300=pile, 299=conglomeration" or what have you. However, there does come a time when the word "pile" ceases to hold meaning. The only thing that, in my opinion, has been shown is that "consciousness" is a word much like "pile" that is lacking in precise defintion, a qualitative concept. But we shouldn't make ontological conclusions from a demonstration of the limitations of our language.

 

[nismaratwork]

Evidence for what? The emergence of consciousness in brains? You are the one claiming it happens, and I am the one saying it is not a rational position to hold.

Evidence that "people believe the universe is alive" in accordance with PF standards for the statement you've made; "just google it" isn't in it, and you know better. The last time you took this kind of position, remember how well that ended? Let's please avoid that, and just follow the guidelines which exist for a reason.

I can't just say, "Snails love garlic butter and cook themselves, I hear people say." Then tell you to google it...

...and if you mean that some people believe ANYTHING, what was "some believe the universe is alive" doing in your posts here? You know I don't play these games.

 

[nismaratwork]

Just as a comment, I don't think that nismar is claiming that there is some discrete jump from no-consciousness to consciousness at the human level. You may say that it is irrelevant at which scale the jump occurs. I don't know that we are ready to say that, looking at things apeiron says it would suggest a much more gradual process of "emerging" consciousness. One that would gradually gain in complexity.

Bingo, in fact, I think what we see as conciousness would be put in its place if something more complex, alive, an sentient came along. We're limited by being the best we can find, and then concluding that we're special; even if we're unique, that may not argue for us being terribly special. That special status gets narrower the more we learn about life in general...

Yes, you are right that as we take one grain of sand away at a time from a "pile" there is no defining line that says "300=pile, 299=conglomeration" or what have you. However, there does come a time when the word "pile" ceases to hold meaning. The only thing that, in my opinion, has been shown is that "consciousness" is a word much like "pile" that is lacking in precise defintion, a qualitative concept. But we shouldn't make ontological conclusions from a demonstration of the limitations of our language.

Yep... semantics and word-games are just a pleasant (or not) diversion here, and really are the refuge of a failed position.

 

[Pythagorean]

It almost sounds like you still believe that determinism is a self-consistent ontology for the process of perception and reason. Are you aware that it is not consistent with physics? Determinism in physics is not an ontology, it is a tool, like a hammer. Nothing more, that is quite demonstrably true about physics. Those who elevate determinism to an ontology are choosing a belief system, which is their prerogative, but it ain't physics.
That is hardly the alternative! That false dichotomy exposes the fundamentally incorrect assumptions that lie at the very foundation of your argument.

I don't believe in any ontology. You and I both were the ones telling Q_Goest not to confuse the model with the reality in a previous thread. We should be past philosophy 100 concepts here and discuss things from the operational assumption point-of-view. The point is, that humans are more predictable with these tools than you seem to be giving credit for (and with repeated precision). To the point where when people have thought they've decided on something, their decision was already set in motion by unconscious events (from the internal molecular systems to the external stimuli system). To the point where... well, can you find a human behavior that can't be described and predicted mechanistically?

Biological systems are, after all, classical systems. And classical systems are deterministic (we predict a big bang because our universe is expanding, so it must have been confined to a point in the past). To me, it sounds like you want to argue that one day, we may drop the ball in a gravitational field and it won't go down. Again, 100% true, 100% useless. This is the nature of deterministic systems: we assume that yes, the ball will fall in the gravitational field under Newtonian laws of physics. We move forward from our assumptions until we find a conflict. Living organisms are such a classical system that we have found no conflicts with. We just keep finding more and more functional mechanisms for behavior as time progresses.

The one known exception, a plant, uses quantum superposition. But again, in a deterministic way: it uses quantum superposition to ensure that it makes the most efficient use of the sun's energy.

You saw the video I posted, which is fun and neat and thought-provoking, but to really get into the core of it, you have to see all the evidence that shows how well humans can be modeled as deterministic systems. To really gain the appreciation of it, you have to have the knowledge of how humans work from the objective "molecular machinery" point of view. We don't have to deny the existence of the subjective experience, but the experiments demonstrate that the behavior of organisms can be determined by their internal and external physical states without considering their subjective state.

Here's an excellent lecture on ethology that will demonstrate a small portion of deterministic human behavior:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISVaoLlW104&p=848F2368C90DDC3D

Though I think if you really want to have an honest discussion about the science of behavior, you'd have to watch them all.

 

[Pythagorean]

Now here's a real problem... can we usefully define something that neither you nor I seem to care about?

I have the impression, from discussions in this forum, that some people strongly feel that they have the power to make decisions, but they also believe that this is somehow in contradiction to what physics tells us about the world. I think we've agreed there is no such contradiction?

yes, we have. When our prefrontal cortex is able to inhibit primitive behavior, based on social conditioning, we might say we have demonstrated willpower, which I don't argue against. Or when an organism is able to persists through threatening environmental odds, it may refer to it's will. I don't argue against this either (though we know this kind of will is limited, we can't defy the break the laws of physics no matter how bad we may want).

Rather, what is inconsistent with determinism (i.e. incombatibilism) is the notion of "free will". That some kind of soul makes a decision independent of the physical mechanisms of the brain.

 

[pftest]

Just as a comment, I don't think that nismar is claiming that there is some discrete jump from no-consciousness to consciousness at the human level. You may say that it is irrelevant at which scale the jump occurs. I don't know that we are ready to say that, looking at things apeiron says it would suggest a much more gradual process of "emerging" consciousness. One that would gradually gain in complexity.

Yes it is irrelevant at which scale the jump occurs. If something is non-existent, then it can't get gradually more complex either. So instead of the emergence of consciousness in brains (which implies that consciousness suddenly "flipped on" at some point, no matter how small the scale), it makes more sense that we have a very complex form of consciousness in brains, but that as we go back on the evolutionary timeline (and before), consciousness becomes gradually less complex. Most of us accept this is true when we go back to our apelike-ancestors, and that many other simpler organisms are conscious (cats, snakes, perhaps even insects). But as the organisms get really simple (or when we reach inanimate matter), many will think consciousness is no longer present. I understand the intuition behind this but it conflicts with the idea of a gradual increase in complexity.

Yes, you are right that as we take one grain of sand away at a time from a "pile" there is no defining line that says "300=pile, 299=conglomeration" or what have you. However, there does come a time when the word "pile" ceases to hold meaning. The only thing that, in my opinion, has been shown is that "consciousness" is a word much like "pile" that is lacking in precise defintion, a qualitative concept. But we shouldn't make ontological conclusions from a demonstration of the limitations of our language.

Now you are getting to the important point: language itself and the act of labelling things. Physically, the pile is just a collection of basic physical ingredients (elementary particles, etc.). But our senses think it is an entirely new/different phenomenon so we give it a new label (this is useful to communicate with other people). However, the pile is reducible, meaning that it can in principle be described fully in terms of basic physical ingredients. So the new label "pile" is actually redundant. "pileness" is not a physical property, it is merely a higher level description. The important part here is that labeling things and mistaking them to be new phenomena is a conscious activity. Consciousness is required to do it in the first place. That is why one says that consciousness is like "pileness", one in fact says that consciousness is a higher level description, and higher level descriptions require consciousness in the first place.

 

[pftest]

Evidence that "people believe the universe is alive" in accordance with PF standards for the statement you've made; "just google it" isn't in it, and you know better. The last time you took this kind of position, remember how well that ended? Let's please avoid that, and just follow the guidelines which exist for a reason.

I can't just say, "Snails love garlic butter and cook themselves, I hear people say." Then tell you to google it...

...and if you mean that some people believe ANYTHING, what was "some believe the universe is alive" doing in your posts here? You know I don't play these games.

The last few times i posted a handful of peer reviewed papers that supported my points (of course, they supported my points precisely because i often get my points from science). You didnt, and so it was pointed out to you by a mentor that the forum isn't an opinions column. Enough said.

Now I am afraid I am going to be a bit more brief with you because i see this isn't fruitful for discussions on PF. If you provide counterarguments then i will happily respond to them. Otherwise no.

 

[Pythagorean]

Evidence that "people believe the universe is alive"...

At what point does a bunch of little organisms become one organism? Where's the line between the consciousness of individuals and the collective conscious of a subculture (such as physicsforums)?

Where's the boundary between living things and the universe?

How do you bake a pie from scratch?

 

[JDStupi]

Now you are getting to the important point: language itself and the act of labelling things. Physically, the pile is just a collection of basic physical ingredients (elementary particles, etc.). But our senses think it is an entirely new/different phenomenon so we give it a new label (this is useful to communicate with other people). However, the pile is reducible, meaning that it can in principle be described fully in terms of basic physical ingredients. So the new label "pile" is actually redundant. "pileness" is not a physical property, it is merely a higher level description. The important part here is that labeling things and mistaking them to be new phenomena is a conscious activity. Consciousness is required to do it in the first place. That is why one says that consciousness is like "pileness", one in fact says that consciousness is a higher level description, and higher level descriptions require consciousness in the first place

While it is true that we can label things (and be mistaken) only if we are conscious, I still stick to my previous statement. "Consciousness" is not a term quite so easily given a definition. While the Being of consciousness (if you will allow me to speak in such vague terms) is given in experience, the concepts we form of consciousness are not. Exactly how we define consciousness is of the nature of a hypothesis. So, for all factual things that we label, we can be mistaken about the nature of the description applied. "Consciousness" is a concept we have labelled within experience, and as such the concept is capable of being mistaken.

That much I am sure you will agree with. Where we differ, is in re-defining the concept "consciousness". You hold that consciousness can be defined properly only if it is defined as being an intrinsic aspect of the "atoms" of this world (taken in the sense of elementary phenomena) because the opposite involves a contradiction.

The contradiction lies on the law of the excluded middle, and you are saying that something cannot by definition emerge from its opposite, for that would be a logical contradiction. Now we have a number of important tangent questions. Among them are "Can we use logical conclusions to make ontological conclusions?" and the related question "Is it not we who define the terms and use the logic?". So you see, my skepticism lies deeper in the application of the style of argumentation itself. While the law of contradiction may logically (or ontologically) hold true, it is we who create the distincition between opposites and so the choice of what is opposite is, to some degreee, arbitrary.

An example, so you may see where I am coming from, is the "Abstract-Concrete" dichotomy. Consider the genetic code, is it abstract or concrete? How do abstract operations arise from concrete interactions? It is concrete insofar as it requires specific complementary base pairs and molecules in order to be physically instantiated. It is abstract insofar as the "instructions" are by no means contained within the physics and the code is nearly "universal". We have a code that is transcribed and as long as the physics are equiprobable. (As you can see Thymine and Uracil are poth pyramidines and have similar molecular structure and these are typically interchangeable wrt Adenine) the information can be transmitted to different molecules, and yet is not identical or deriveable from any of them, as such it is abstract.
My reason for pointing that out was, the dichotomy itself may be ill-founded, it is we who given information, apply distinctions. So the distinctions cannot necessarily be used to proclaim ontological statements. That we believe p to be the case, does not entail p's being the case. That we believe the dichotomy to hold in this situation, doesn't imply that it must hold. Unless you are to demonstrate how we know the dichotomy holds, which I would say would be a difficult case and would most likely fall victim to Hume's problem of induction, considering we are applying a "truth of reason" to a "truth of fact".

Logic is a human endeavor, just like any other. We are applying a Boolean algebra to nature. Just like when we apply mathematical models to natural phenomena in Science, we cannot be sure that it is absolutley "true", the same goes for logically dichotomizing nature.

Given that, my problem simply lies with how I don't see how it clarifies anything as to the nature of "consciousness". It is kind of akin to when somebody says "The world is truth-functional of elementary propositions" or something, to which I say (maybe it is a limitation of my intelligence) "What does it mean for an "elementary proposition" to be true?".

Of course, always keep in mind that I may not convince you, nor you I, for we both have our non-rational inclinations and temperments. I am inclined towards not supposing that nature knows laws, wheras you may be inclined to the contrary.

 

[pftest]

While it is true that we can label things (and be mistaken) only if we are conscious, I still stick to my previous statement. "Consciousness" is not a term quite so easily given a definition. While the Being of consciousness (if you will allow me to speak in such vague terms) is given in experience, the concepts we form of consciousness are not. Exactly how we define consciousness is of the nature of a hypothesis. So, for all factual things that we label, we can be mistaken about the nature of the description applied. "Consciousness" is a concept we have labelled within experience, and as such the concept is capable of being mistaken.

Yes i agree, and also that being mistaken about something (or to have delusions, illusions, misconceptions) requires one to be conscious. Btw consciousness i always define as "having experiences". This leaves open who or what is having the experiences, what the experiences are like and whether they are material or not. It is therefor theoretically and metaphysically neutral. It just refers to experiences, of which everyone here knows what they are like.

That much I am sure you will agree with. Where we differ, is in re-defining the concept "consciousness". You hold that consciousness can be defined properly only if it is defined as being an intrinsic aspect of the "atoms" of this world (taken in the sense of elementary phenomena) because the opposite involves a contradiction.

The contradiction lies on the law of the excluded middle, and you are saying that something cannot by definition emerge from its opposite, for that would be a logical contradiction. Now we have a number of important tangent questions. Among them are "Can we use logical conclusions to make ontological conclusions?" and the related question "Is it not we who define the terms and use the logic?". So you see, my skepticism lies deeper in the application of the style of argumentation itself. While the law of contradiction may logically (or ontologically) hold true, it is we who create the distincition between opposites and so the choice of what is opposite is, to some degreee, arbitrary.

An example, so you may see where I am coming from, is the "Abstract-Concrete" dichotomy. Consider the genetic code, is it abstract or concrete? How do abstract operations arise from concrete interactions? It is concrete insofar as it requires specific complementary base pairs and molecules in order to be physically instantiated. It is abstract insofar as the "instructions" are by no means contained within the physics and the code is nearly "universal". We have a code that is transcribed and as long as the physics are equiprobable. (As you can see Thymine and Uracil are poth pyramidines and have similar molecular structure and these are typically interchangeable wrt Adenine) the information can be transmitted to different molecules, and yet is not identical or deriveable from any of them, as such it is abstract.
My reason for pointing that out was, the dichotomy itself may be ill-founded, it is we who given information, apply distinctions. So the distinctions cannot necessarily be used to proclaim ontological statements. That we believe p to be the case, does not entail p's being the case. That we believe the dichotomy to hold in this situation, doesn't imply that it must hold. Unless you are to demonstrate how we know the dichotomy holds, which I would say would be a difficult case and would most likely fall victim to Hume's problem of induction, considering we are applying a "truth of reason" to a "truth of fact".

Logic is a human endeavor, just like any other. We are applying a Boolean algebra to nature. Just like when we apply mathematical models to natural phenomena in Science, we cannot be sure that it is absolutley "true", the same goes for logically dichotomizing nature.

Given that, my problem simply lies with how I don't see how it clarifies anything as to the nature of "consciousness". It is kind of akin to when somebody says "The world is truth-functional of elementary propositions" or something, to which I say (maybe it is a limitation of my intelligence) "What does it mean for an "elementary proposition" to be true?".

Of course, always keep in mind that I may not convince you, nor you I, for we both have our non-rational inclinations and temperments. I am inclined towards not supposing that nature knows laws, wheras you may be inclined to the contrary.

Well i must start by saying that I am not declaring consciousness to be an opposite of, or distinct from the material. I am not saying there is a dichotomy. It is the physicalists/materialists who hold that consciousness is unlike rocks, atoms, etc. In their view only brains possesses consciousness, and whatever consciousness is, it is completely absent in non-brains.

While i do not understand all of apeirons arguments (and i have not read them all either), i do think his ideas are compabtible with the view that there is a degree of consciousness in everything. This is based on a brief conversation (see here) i had with him maybe a year ago.

 

[JDStupi]

Yes i agree, and also that being mistaken about something (or to have delusions, illusions, misconceptions) requires one to be conscious. Btw consciousness i always define as "having experiences".

Yes, I would agree with this definition. That is, how could we define the "Being of consciousness" without "having an experience" for the Being of consciousness just is the ground of all experience. It seems you could be seeing the Being of consciousness is the ground of all Being.

This leaves open who or what is having the experiences, what the experiences are like and whether they are material or not. It is therefor theoretically and metaphysically neutral. It just refers to experiences, of which everyone here knows what they are like

I agree with the first part and the second, so long as we are speaking about people. Once we extend the concept of "experience" beyond people, we don't know what it is like.

While i do not understand all of apeirons arguments (and i have not read them all either), i do think his ideas imply or are compabtible with the view that there is a degree of consciousness in everything. I remember i have had a brief conversation with him about this maybe half a year ago. I shall try to find it.

And this may be the case, because then you would say that the descriptions of the behaviors of the systems or what have you at various levels are extensionally equivalent to the word "consciousness". My problem is, as we know, extensional equivalence doesn't imply intensional equivalence, and the "connotations" of saying "Everything is conscious" is quite different from what most people would think that means. Simply saying "Everything is conscious" solves nothing.

Under your definition, it may be less problematic, but then it may simply be trivially true, insofar as everything must have its own POV on the universe, and if that is all that is said, then I agree. It's just the concept of "internal experience" being tied to how you or I experience, seems to lose its clarity the further from humanity we go. The only way we could extend the concept is with an abstract structure for inferencing similarities of what happens in conscious beings. This could be provided by apeiron's structures or other scientific models and then we would be able to speak about everything being "conscious", or not and in what way, but until then it doesn't seem very illuminating to say "everything is conscious". But who knows, maybe you weren't saying it was illuminating just that it was or could be and it took all of this to come to some understanding.

Funny, how we can argue so much and be not all that far off. We are just not seeing quite eye-to-eye insofar as the significance of the argument is concerned, but it doesn't seem our views are entirely incompatible or opposed. It seems we had to "show the fly the way out of the jar" and untie the "meanings" behind our speech. Even then we may not see quite eye-to-eye, but diversity is beautiful. So long as your thinking and I'm thinking and nobody is completely dogmatic (for we all have our unseen dogmas) then whatever, "Different Strokes".

 

[Math Is Hard]

Note: I've done a little pruning to back us away from the mystical angle. Carry on!

 

[nismaratwork]

The last few times i posted a handful of peer reviewed papers that supported my points (of course, they supported my points precisely because i often get my points from science). You didnt, and so it was pointed out to you by a mentor that the forum isn't an opinions column. Enough said.

Now I am afraid I am going to be a bit more brief with you because i see this isn't fruitful for discussions on PF. If you provide counterarguments then i will happily respond to them. Otherwise no.

OK, so provide them for someone else, and remember which of your posts were removed as well...

Still, here's the google you asked for!
#2 result is a locked thread... here: https://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-143833.html
#1 was Yahoo Answers asking if it is "alive or dead", which sets the intellectual bar nicely there.

The third is a reguritation of Smolin, in brief, and is just hand-waving about universal evolution.

The rest are either wrong search returns, Facebook, or utter crackpot sites (and I mean CRACKED).

Your turn.


@Pythagorean: Bigger and More, even more complexity doesn't mean alive. Life does certain things, one of which is to reproduce... I'm eagerly awaiting a baby universe. In fact, the notion of complexity as the basis for life is absurd in the view of complex inorganics, when some of those same inorganics COULD be the basis of life. Ask more, I'll offer more, offer more, I'll ask more. In the end, "the bigger it gets, the smarter it is" just doesn't hold water; only by invoking pure mystery, magic, or religion (magical mythology) does one land in a living universe.

 

[nismaratwork]

Yes i agree, and also that being mistaken about something (or to have delusions, illusions, misconceptions) requires one to be conscious. Btw consciousness i always define as "having experiences". This leaves open who or what is having the experiences, what the experiences are like and whether they are material or not. It is therefor theoretically and metaphysically neutral. It just refers to experiences, of which everyone here knows what they are like.
.

So, when a dog mistakes its reflection for another dog, it's proof of consciousness? When you clip the antennae of an insect, thus causing it confusion, it's conscious? Are you sure about that?

 

[Pythagorean]

Nismar,

I think you missed the point, which was that the line between us and the universe is not defined.

 

[nismaratwork]

Nismar,

I think you missed the point, which was that the line between us and the universe is not defined.

That isn't an argument for it being alive, any more than it is for us being inert, nor either being conscious. A lack of ability to draw precise definitions is wiggle room for mysticism, not a basis for serious thought in my view.

 

[pftest]

So, when a dog mistakes its reflection for another dog, it's proof of consciousness? When you clip the antennae of an insect, thus causing it confusion, it's conscious? Are you sure about that?

I don't think i understand your point here. You are asking me if dogs and insects that can see and have misconceptions would qualify as conscious beings according to my definition? They would. Anything that has an experience would qualify.

 

[nismaratwork]

I don't think i understand your point here. You are asking me if dogs and insects that can see and have misconceptions would qualify as conscious beings according to my definition? They would. Anything that has an experience would qualify.

To be fair, I ignored your definition in favor of what the word actually means. By your definition Watson is as conscious as an ant, just not in a way we recognize.

And the support to take the place of the miserable results google provided?

 

[Pythagorean]

That isn't an argument for it being alive, any more than it is for us being inert, nor either being conscious. A lack of ability to draw precise definitions is wiggle room for mysticism, not a basis for serious thought in my view.

And that's exactly my point about the idea of "self". Have you watched the TED video I posted in the other thread?

The point is that we can "turn off" the part of our brain that gives us the feeling that we're individuals separate from the universe. This is one of the many finding of neuroethology that implies a role for the brain in consciousness.

There's much neuropsychology research in this (the spatial aspect: finding parts of the brain that give us a reference frame) as associated with dissociative disorders. Once you lose the reference frame, you experience what Jill Bolte Taylor did. The semantic concept of "I" begins to evaporate.

So the idea of "self" is just as mystic as the idea of being "one with the universe". Where do we go from there (not implying panpsychism must be true, but that it's only as faulty as the alternative, still-lingering idea of a "soul" that is required to justify the "self" as independent from the universe).

 

[nismaratwork]

And that's exactly my point about the idea of "self". Have you watched the TED video I posted in the other thread?

The point is that we can "turn off" the part of our brain that gives us the feeling that we're individuals separate from the universe. This is one of the many finding of neuroethology that implies a role for the brain in consciousness.

There's much neuropsychology research in this (the spatial aspect: finding parts of the brain that give us a reference frame) as associated with dissociative disorders. Once you lose the reference frame, you experience what Jill Bolte Taylor did. The semantic concept of "I" begins to evaporate.

This is all very interesting fromt he POV of neurology, but others can still identify even the most dissociated individual as a discrete individual. The sense of being unique, or having a discrete self, or not, these are variable without the extremes of hemispherectomy. In my view, it's a side-show without any material insight except that taking chunks out of people's brains when they're not very young tends to end poorly.

People can lose the discrete sense of self through other means, but at no time to they experience a universal phenomenon of not BEING a self-contained "I", only their perception changes. For it to be something valid as more than the personal experience, I would expect others to be similarly aware of this loss of personhood. We're only aware of the changes in perception, and processing.

So the idea of "self" is just as mystic as the idea of being "one with the universe". Where do we go from there (not implying panpsychism must be true, but that it's only as faulty as the alternative, still-lingering idea of a "soul" that is required to justify the "self" as independent from the universe).

I disagree; the sense of self appears to be an adaptation for a social animal of our type, period. It implies nothing greater, anymore than a pile of sand ceasing to be pile-like implies anything more than a limit to our descritive abilities.

 

[apeiron]

Nismar,

I think you missed the point, which was that the line between us and the universe is not defined.

No, but as per #55, the point is that it gets defined. Life is defined by its ability to make that strong epistemic cut. That separation between nucleic code and protein, for example. The separation that creates that aspect of a complex system which is not subject to Newtonian determinism.

 

[baxishta]

dear Pythagorean and other participants,

i wonder if it would be useful to make a distinction between the property of existence and the property of reality. i don't mean actual existence and actual truth, but just the ideas of each.

it seems to me that we use the idea of a property of existence to refer to an either/or situation, a digital situation, such that we may say that a given thing either possesses this property or it doesn't, it either exists or it doesn't.

on the other hand, we may refer to various stages of reality. for example, most people would say that an hallucination is less real than a memory of something which really happened, which in turn is less real than, say, a car or a building.

so 'existence' is a digital property and 'reality' is an analog property. does this seem right so far?

bax

 

[JDStupi]

So, when a dog mistakes its reflection for another dog, it's proof of consciousness? When you clip the antennae of an insect, thus causing it confusion, it's conscious? Are you sure about that?

You see this is kind of what I was getting at in that the term "consciousness" is just not well-defined. I would say an animal is most likely conscious. Though, I would agree and say that most likely is not a sufficient condition for concluding consciousness. But again, the word is so fuzzy it may very well be true if we believe bios and mind are identical to some extent. Again, though this seems to require a more concrete inferencing structure (i.e. scientific model) and more information.

That isn't an argument for it being alive, any more than it is for us being inert, nor either being conscious. A lack of ability to draw precise definitions is wiggle room for mysticism, not a basis for serious thought in my view.

Yet another aspect of its loosness, I don't know if he was arguing the universe is alive, but then what is consciousness without life? Again, it seems to not mean anything, or atleast nowhere near whatever it means now. If it doesn't simply mean "Everything has it's own POV" which could be quite quantum, then I don't see what it means. I don't see how we could apply the concept of "internal experience" to atoms. Unless, as said before we argue on the basis of it having to logically be the case because the emergence of life from non-life involves a contradiction, but I already voiced my concerns about making ontological conclusions from logical concerns.

Essentially, it could or could not be true, depending on how it is meant as such it is tautologous and not useful. We simply do not know enough to delineate at the present the lines between conscious and non-conscious. We don't know enough about our own brains, we don't know enough about the origins of life and cells. It may turn out the definition of "consciousness" or "life" could require some degree of internal complexity and some mix of control processes and, being that inorganic matter doesn't have this it can't be classified as alive. Until then arguing that the whole world could be conscious seems like sophistry...I mean how do you actually "believe" not just entertain the notion of, but believe that the keyboard you are using right now is "conscious" in the sense that we now mean it. The monitor, everything.

Then imprecision is contagious. Now we have a situation where electromagnetic fields are conscious. Space is conscious. It starts to seem like conscious either means something completely different, or it means nothing.

Quantum fields, where particles "live" on the order of microseconds or whatever the number is, yep they're conscious too. ... I don't know, I can't make sense of it.

 

[nismaratwork]

dear Pythagorean and other participants,

i wonder if it would be useful to make a distinction between the property of existence and the property of reality. i don't mean actual existence and actual truth, but just the ideas of each.

it seems to me that we use the idea of a property of existence to refer to an either/or situation, a digital situation, such that we may say that a given thing either possesses this property or it doesn't, it either exists or it doesn't.

on the other hand, we may refer to various stages of reality. for example, most people would say that an hallucination is less real than a memory of something which really happened, which in turn is less real than, say, a car or a building.

so 'existence' is a digital property and 'reality' is an analog property. does this seem right so far?

bax

You mean: There is the internal experience, the internal disturbed experience, internal experience that is verified by external consensus (the car)?

@JDStupi: No doubt, it's not exactly a clear bright line, but science demands we don't leap to far ahead, or see ourselves as too unique or the epitome of conscious complexity. Still, for the universe to be alive, we would have to be a living part of the total system, along with every vacuum fluctation as you mentioned. If that IS the case, I doubt that we have the capacity to deteremine it, not to mention that recession velocities mean that the universe couldn't have thoughts that would ever fully permeate its... itself. There's a lot wrong with a "live fields/universe" concept... it's a leap too far in my view.

That however, does not clarify what it means to be conscious as a human, or a dog, or an ant. It SEEMS that we're sentient, dog's have their moments, and ants are basically genetic computers. I doubt that's the whole story in any of those cases, but it's certainly closer to convention.

 

[Pythagorean]

No, but as per #55, the point is that it gets defined. Life is defined by its ability to make that strong epistemic cut. That separation between nucleic code and protein, for example. The separation that creates that aspect of a complex system which is not subject to Newtonian determinism.

So then by this view, where is the self in a slime mold? In the individual cells? Or in the slug they become? Do each of my individual cells have a sense of self, then?

I disagree; the sense of self appears to be an adaptation for a social animal of our type, period. It implies nothing greater, anymore than a pile of sand ceasing to be pile-like implies anything more than a limit to our descritive abilities.

You say you disagree... but it seems to me that you exactly agree by the rest of your paragraph! To me, it seems that you previously wanted to give it a higher position than what you just said now.

 

[pftest]

I agree with the first part and the second, so long as we are speaking about people. Once we extend the concept of "experience" beyond people, we don't know what it is like.

And this may be the case, because then you would say that the descriptions of the behaviors of the systems or what have you at various levels are extensionally equivalent to the word "consciousness". My problem is, as we know, extensional equivalence doesn't imply intensional equivalence, and the "connotations" of saying "Everything is conscious" is quite different from what most people would think that means. Simply saying "Everything is conscious" solves nothing.

Under your definition, it may be less problematic, but then it may simply be trivially true, insofar as everything must have its own POV on the universe, and if that is all that is said, then I agree. It's just the concept of "internal experience" being tied to how you or I experience, seems to lose its clarity the further from humanity we go. The only way we could extend the concept is with an abstract structure for inferencing similarities of what happens in conscious beings. This could be provided by apeiron's structures or other scientific models and then we would be able to speak about everything being "conscious", or not and in what way, but until then it doesn't seem very illuminating to say "everything is conscious". But who knows, maybe you weren't saying it was illuminating just that it was or could be and it took all of this to come to some understanding.

Funny, how we can argue so much and be not all that far off. We are just not seeing quite eye-to-eye insofar as the significance of the argument is concerned, but it doesn't seem our views are entirely incompatible or opposed. It seems we had to "show the fly the way out of the jar" and untie the "meanings" behind our speech. Even then we may not see quite eye-to-eye, but diversity is beautiful. So long as your thinking and I'm thinking and nobody is completely dogmatic (for we all have our unseen dogmas) then whatever, "Different Strokes".

Yes i certainly did not mean that simpler things than humans brains still have humanlike experiences. The human brain is very complex so maybe i should call it complex C, while the simplest form of consciousness should be called simple C.

My argument currently is merely about whether C exists beyond brains, and not the practical value of such an idea.

 

[baxishta]

nismaratwork,

i'm sorry but i don't really understand how you're using those terms.

i'm just asking if it's reasonable to say that, when we wonder if something exists, we're usually picking between a 'yes' and a 'no'.

and that, when we wonder if something is real, we feel free to choose from more than two options.

bax

 

[nismaratwork]

So then by this view, where is the self in a slime mold? In the individual cells? Or in the slug they become? Do each of my individual cells have a sense of self, then?

They don't become a slug, they are just acting in concert at great proximity. At no point does an individual cell contribute to a greater awareness, only greater physical abilities in response to environmental cues.

You say you disagree... but it seems to me that you exactly agree by the rest of your paragraph! To me, it seems that you previously wanted to give it a higher position than what you just said now.

I'm sorry, I don't understand, truly I'm not being coy here. What do you mean?

 

[Pythagorean]

nismaratwork,

i'm sorry but i don't really understand how you're using those terms.

i'm just asking if it's reasonable to say that, when we wonder if something exists, we're usually picking between a 'yes' and a 'no'.

and that, when we wonder if something is real, we feel free to choose from more than two options.

bax

This is something dynamicists do with digital models: turn them into discrete models. This his been especially productive in neuroethology and even genomics: now gene expression is no longer "on" or "off"; we now have a molecular network based on the interactions between mRNA and transcription factors. There is a fuzzily defined "on state" and "off state" but it's recognized as a qualitative, human classification system of the many infinite states from "on" to "off" in that dynamic network.

 

[nismaratwork]

nismaratwork,

i'm sorry but i don't really understand how you're using those terms.

i'm just asking if it's reasonable to say that, when we wonder if something exists, we're usually picking between a 'yes' and a 'no'.

and that, when we wonder if something is real, we feel free to choose from more than two options.

bax

Think of it this way: all we know is what we experience within our brains, and our conclusions can be:

-Everything is in our heads (Solipsism)
-Everything we experience is in our heads, based on environmental stimuli, and internal actions.
-We experience distorted views of an external reality or figments of our minds, but they are not the norm, and are unique to the individual (hallucinations, paranoia, delusion, dreams etc). Often these are related to external stimuli, but they don't have to be.
-Our experience is personal and internal, but we believe what we see, and when others agree that we're looking at the same thing, we are confident that it has objective reality.
-Our experience is somehow diffuse, a shared experience, and we're each points in that field of consciousness (I do NOT believe this)

 

[Pythagorean]

Second option is "Ethology".

They don't become a slug, they are just acting in concert at great proximity. At no point does an individual cell contribute to a greater awareness, only greater physical abilities in response to environmental cues.

That's fair, but the transition from a unicellular community of organisms to a single multicellular organism did still happen, no? The question is still relevant.

I'm sorry, I don't understand, truly I'm not being coy here. What do you mean?

You said:

People can lose the discrete sense of self through other means, but at no time to they experience a universal phenomenon of not BEING a self-contained "I", only their perception changes. For it to be something valid as more than the personal experience, I would expect others to be similarly aware of this loss of personhood. We're only aware of the changes in perception, and processing.

You seem to starting with the assumption that self is fundamental.

And others do experience the loss of personhood. Dissociative symptoms are the third most common symptoms among general public that do not have mental disorders, after anxiety and depression.

And of course, as you may have gathered by now, I have had several dissociative experiences myself.

People can lose the discrete sense of self through other means, but at no time to they experience a universal phenomenon of not BEING a self-contained "I"

By the way, two things here. To your first point above, I didn't mean to say hemispheric rivalry was the only source of dissociation; just wanted to provide a concrete example.

To the second point, how can you know what others experience. Do you not believe the people who claim to have this experience, to lose their sense of self? How can you have a definitive answer about what other people experience while not trusting their reporting? Do you base it only on your experience? How do you know you're not one of the people that is say, right brain dominant, and that your personal feelings about "self" are more integrated into your world model than other people and so your more reluctant to let go of it?

 

[Pythagorean]

-Everything we experience is in our heads, based on environmental stimuli, and internal actions.
-We experience distorted views of an external reality or figments of our minds, but they are not the norm, and are unique to the individual (hallucinations, paranoia, delusion, dreams etc). Often these are related to external stimuli, but they don't have to be.
-Our experience is personal and internal, but we believe what we see, and when others agree that we're looking at the same thing, we are confident that it has objective reality.

actually, all three of these seem congruent with ethology.

 

[apeiron]

Well i must start by saying that I am not declaring consciousness to be an opposite of, or distinct from the material. I am not saying there is a dichotomy. It is the physicalists/materialists who hold that consciousness is unlike rocks, atoms, etc. In their view only brains possesses consciousness, and whatever consciousness is, it is completely absent in non-brains.

While i do not understand all of apeirons arguments (and i have not read them all either), i do think his ideas are compabtible with the view that there is a degree of consciousness in everything. This is based on a brief conversation (see here) i had with him maybe a year ago.

The problem with "consciousness" as has been so often said is that it conflates a whole lot of ideas. Like saying universe, it is a label so general that its meaning becomes vague in practice.

All terms, to be clear, must be dichotomously defined. The simplest way to achieve a dichotomy is as a negation. So if we have conscious, then its complementary condition must be...un-conscious. Or non-conscious. But very plainly, a simple negation does not actually say anything new. You are still left none the wiser about the meaning of the orginal term. You have created no context. You have suppressed no other meanings.

It is like saying a cat is a cat and anything that is not a cat is not a cat because it possesses the property of non-catness. Both true and trivial.

So you cannot use a term like consciousness in serious scientific or metaphysical conversation unless you have a formally complementary term that creates the matching context which can give your utterances meaning.

I can for example state "discrete" as a word with clear and unambiguous meaning because I have the complementary term "continuous". The same with atom~void, local~global, vague~crisp, and many other metaphysically valid terms.

But unless you (or anyone else) can spell out the formally complementary notion to conscious, then there just isn't a philosophical or scientific conversation going on.

There are many complementary pairings that do have enough validity to get useful conversations going.

We can distinguish between attention and habit. Or between ideas and impressions. Or anticipations and surprises. Or self and other. All quite straightforward and uncontroversial psychological dichotomies where we know what we are talking about because we have the neuroscientific models and the experimental evidence. "Consciousness" is no mystery when framed in those kinds of discussions.

Again, stepping back to a general systems perspective on complex systems, we have good dichotomies like Pattee's epistemic cut - the crisp divide into rate dependent dynamics and rate independent information. Or the global constraints and local construction of hierarchy theory.

Even mind and matter is a dichotomy. Or subjective and objective. They are of course not great as dichotomies because the notion of matter turns out to be poorly defined. And so does the notion of objective. If one end of a dichotomy is weak or vague, then so is the other.

But consciousness is a spectacularly ill-defined term as people use it without any kind of partner concept at all. This is why pan-psychism is so easily believed, why souls or spirits seem so plausible. With no crisp boundaries to prevent us, we can spread a word like consciousness as far as we like. A bad term covers all cases because it carries no proper sense of what it is not.

Metaphysics depends on robust dichotomies, ones that carve up the terrain of possibility into precisely complementary alternatives.

Consciousness is a word defined by "what it is like to be", which is what makes it so useless (except for perpetuating mysteries). To be any use, it would have to be clearly defined in terms of what it is not.

 

[JDStupi]

Yea, I agree. The concept only is meaningful if it is completely re-defined, but if it is then we need a word for what we now call consciousness. So why engage? Yea, haha what are the conclusions of special and general relativity and for the universe's thoughts?...And Bell's inequalities, haha..God is the Absolute Idea which is the Universal Consciousness pervading all of space and time, haha and you bet your bottom dollar that'll find it's way on some crazy website or New Age publication. And you can also bet that they'll all be Bohmians too, in order to avoid God not being able to determine himself, since he can do everything. That solves Free will too, since we are actually God we are determined by God...Black Holes are where god craps out universes...Woohooo, we have officially solved many philosophical problems

...It's entertaining . Haha, excuse me for my poor Cosmic Joke. But yea, I think that we shouldn't take huge leaps in the hopes of solving the problem. Conceptual clarification is a good thing, conceptual abuse is not.

 

[nismaratwork]

Second option is "Ethology".



That's fair, but the transition from a unicellular community of organisms to a single multicellular organism did still happen, no? The question is still relevant.

That's very much a matter of perspective, and I'd say you simply have a close colony acting in concert; to say that it becomes a multicellular organism is to equate a school of fish with a giant fish because of proximity and synchronized behavior.



You said:



You seem to starting with the assumption that self is fundamental.[/quote]

No, it's not fundamental, it clearly develops over time and is subject to alteration or loss without destruction of sentience and consciousness. It is however, fundamentally COMMON among humans, and even dissociative events due to drugs, trauma, or mental illness are not uncommon. Note that none of the change in internal perception of self would confuse another human from identifying you as a distinct and separate (if odd in terms of behavior) consciousness. No melding or sharing occurs, despite perceptions to the contrary, do you see what I mean?

And others do experience the loss of personhood. Dissociative symptoms are the third most common symptoms among general public that do not have mental disorders, after anxiety and depression.

Anxiety, Trauma (anxiety in spades), depression (with co-morbid anxiety), and of course powerful psychedelics can cause dissociative experiences, or "ego death". This is to the conscious sense of self as epilepsy is to the conscious control of the body.

And of course, as you may have gathered by now, I have had several dissociative experiences myself.

I hadn't, but it really has no bearing on the discussion. I don't think more or less of you for it, and I wouldn't pry for details in a public forum of course. Still, it does give you insight into the internal experience that relatively few share, and are still able to communicate.

By the way, two things here. To your first point above, I didn't mean to say hemispheric rivalry was the only source of dissociation; just wanted to provide a concrete example.

Gotcha, agreed.

To the second point, how can you know what others experience. Do you not believe the people who claim to have this experience, to lose their sense of self? How can you have a definitive answer about what other people experience while not trusting their reporting? Do you base it only on your experience? How do you know you're not one of the people that is say, right brain dominant, and that your personal feelings about "self" are more integrated into your world model than other people and so your more reluctant to let go of it?

I believe that the loss of self, and joining with something MORE including others around them is not believable except as a valid internal experience. The event seems to provide no information that would not be present, merely a new perspective that COULD be found through other means. In short, if you feel at one with the universe, and the universe (including the people around you) don't experience you as being one with anything, I stick with the empirical angle.

If you (to quote a friend of mine who ate 'shrooms) are on a journey, but nobody else is involved and you come back with no more than when you left, it was an inwardly directed event, not an expansive one; it only felt like becoming diffuse and a part of something larger.

To your last point, I do indeed have a strong sense of self, but I've had the misfortune of being in a traumatic experience or two, and experienced brief if profound dissociation. I can't say that I found it to be anything meaningful except as a coping mechanism during a period of acute danger. By brief, I mean a few seconds by the way, I've never taken a hallucinogen.

Still, I'm not relying on personal experience or anecdote, so my own brain is really not much of an issue here (thankfully) and a good thing too, just ask some here how meager it is.

 

[nismaratwork]

actually, all three of these seem congruent with ethology.

I'm only familiar with Ethology in passing, via Darwin, so I'll take your word for it.

 

[apeiron]

That's very much a matter of perspective, and I'd say you simply have a close colony acting in concert; to say that it becomes a multicellular organism is to equate a school of fish with a giant fish because of proximity and synchronized behavior.

The idea of group minds and swarm intelligence is pretty respectable in science. Bodies are built on communication (apoptosis, etc).

So I have no problem seeing an ant colony as a form of "consciousness" - once that word is properly defined as a global state of intentionality that shapes the local actions of its parts.

 

[nismaratwork]

The idea of group minds and swarm intelligence is pretty respectable in science. Bodies are built on communication (apoptosis, etc).

So I have no problem seeing an ant colony as a form of "consciousness" - once that word is properly defined as a global state of intentionality that shapes the local actions of its parts.

I agree, but then I'd have to constrain my example to Bulldog or Bullet Ants, instead of social ants. It's not that I'm against the notion of emergent systems behaviour, but any definition of "conscious" is unlikely to include a group-entity that cannot reflect on its totality.

A human can ponder the process of apoptosis (programmed cell death for the non-bio people) as it happens, as a part of us. An ant colony's behavior is a sum of its parts, but without any reflective or experiential capacity.

 

[JDStupi]

To your last point, I do indeed have a strong sense of self, but I've had the misfortune of being in a traumatic experience or two, and experienced brief if profound dissociation. I can't say that I found it to be anything meaningful except as a coping mechanism during a period of acute danger. By brief, I mean a few seconds by the way, I've never taken a hallucinogen.

I haven't followed yours and Pythagorean's discussion enough to make any comments on it really. However I noticed this and I do wish to point out that not all Dissociative experiences are created equal. It also may not be a proper analogy to say "ego death" is to conscious experience what epilepsy is to bodily control. That is a highly negative connotation, and I'm quite certain it is not good. Many who report the experience of ego death can report it to be extremely peaceful and eye-opening and, though evidently mystical/spiritual experiences are still viewed skeptically in our society 100 years after William James, it wouldn't be wise to discount a whole type of experience because our Western minds don't like it. Dismissing different states of consciousness on the basis of it " just screwing up your brain" is to me philosophically naive. (Provided of course it is not like "Robo-tripping" or Dramamine which are used as deliriants and are actually doing no more than screwing up your brain, in the sense of damaging it.) A different state of consciousness can be valuable insofar as any different way of viewing things and gaining perspective is useful.


*edit* but in any case, I don't want this side-tracking your interesting discussions on group/individual consciousness and ethology

 

[nismaratwork]

I haven't followed yours and Pythagorean's discussion enough to make any comments on it really. However I noticed this and I do wish to point out that not all Dissociative experiences are created equal. It also may not be a proper analogy to say "ego death" is to conscious experience what epilepsy is to bodily control. That is a highly negative connotation, and I'm quite certain it is not good. Many who report the experience of ego death can report it to be extremely peaceful and eye-opening and, though evidently mystical/spiritual experiences are still viewed skeptically in our society 100 years after William James, it wouldn't be wise to discount a whole type of experience because our Western minds don't like it. Dismissing different states of consciousness on the basis of it " just screwing up your brain" is to me philosophically naive. (Provided of course it is not like "Robo-tripping" or Dramamine which are used as deliriants and are actually doing no more than screwing up your brain, in the sense of damaging it.) A different state of consciousness can be valuable insofar as any different way of viewing things and gaining perspective is useful.

I'm not in any way judging individual experiences, and I'm well aware of cholinergic toxidrome. To assign any value, positive or negative is only useful in asessing the lasting effects. If they're positive, it was a positive experience, if not, then not. That's a pretty lousy criteria by any scientific standard, East, West, North, South, or Fleem. (Fleem is JUST between North and Gorp, the eighth direction)

 

[Pythagorean]

That's very much a matter of perspective, and I'd say you simply have a close colony acting in concert; to say that it becomes a multicellular organism is to equate a school of fish with a giant fish because of proximity and synchronized behavior.

Yes, but I moved past the slug to something like, say, a human, prior to it becoming a "multi-cellular" organism. Do you think there was a discrete jump from from the single organisms to the collective organism or do you think there was a smooth transition?

Let's talk your way about your brain: it's a multicellulalr organ equatable to a school of fish because of proximity and synchronized behavior. This neuron triggers that neuron, some vesicle release, this neuron goes, saying to fire up this endocrine system, which sets off this population of cells. It's just a bunch of single-cells transfering matter and energy (with information embedded in it) just like the slime mold is. To inject your own personal feelings into the brain isn't scientific.

No, it's not fundamental, it clearly develops over time and is subject to alteration or loss without destruction of sentience and consciousness. It is however, fundamentally COMMON among humans, and even dissociative events due to drugs, trauma, or mental illness are not uncommon. Note that none of the change in internal perception of self would confuse another human from identifying you as a distinct and separate (if odd in terms of behavior) consciousness. No melding or sharing occurs, despite perceptions to the contrary, do you see what I mean?

I agree with you by that specific way you state it, yes. Sharing of experiences occurs from having the same (i.e. very similar) external and internal forces. More likely with kin, more likely to lead to cooperation.

Collective consciousness means all the knowledge you learn in school that you practice and enforce and live by but that you really have no personal experience with. Society has transmitted information to you so that you can indirectly experience something that your ancestors already experienced. So information gets carried with you that could be completely false and have nothing to do with your experiences or the real world at all. So a big part of you and who you are, your self, your consciousness, is determined by the information imparted on you by society. You're head has been filled up before you got a chance to fill it up yourself with a lot of the same information that is filling up other people's heads of your generation and nation.

Inside of you, there's another associate network that saves you the trouble of your ancestor's experiences on a less conscious level: the genetic network.

Still, I'm not relying on personal experience or anecdote...

But you are from my perspective... you're relying on your sense of self: your whole collection of personal experiences and anecdotes. Just like the panpsychists, the libertarians are relying on unfalsifiable assumptions.

Would you agree that your views are libertarian?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature#Free_will_and_determinism

 

[nismaratwork]

Yes, but I moved past the slug to something like, say, a human, prior to it becoming a "multi-cellular" organism. Do you think there was a discrete jump from from the single organisms to the collective organism or do you think there was a smooth transition?

Let's talk your way about your brain: it's a multicellulalr organ equatable to a school of fish because of proximity and synchronized behavior. This neuron triggers that neuron, some vesicle release, this neuron goes, saying to fire up this endocrine system, which sets off this population of cells. It's just a bunch of single-cells transfering matter and energy (with information embedded in it) just like the slime mold is. To inject your own personal feelings into the brain isn't scientific.

At no point can my brain operate as a "mini-brain" through separation of neurons, but rather it acts always as a cohesive system. Dysfunction in one area leads to global dysfunction, whereas in a school of fish that's just a dead fish. As we grow our brains increase in terms of complexity, but their nature is unchanging in the sense that it is operable only in the context of the whole organism.

Slime-molds join, then seperate, unchanged and still functioning; this is more to do with people giving one another a boost by hand over an obstacle than a melding of selves.

I agree with you by that specific way you state it, yes. Sharing of experiences occurs from having the same (i.e. very similar) external and internal forces. More likely with kin, more likely to lead to cooperation.

Collective consciousness means all the knowledge you learn in school that you practice and enforce and live by but that you really have no personal experience with. Society has transmitted information to you so that you can indirectly experience something that your ancestors already experienced. So information gets carried with you that could be completely false and have nothing to do with your experiences or the real world at all. So a big part of you and who you are, your self, your consciousness, is determined by the information imparted on you by society. You're head has been filled up before you got a chance to fill it up yourself with a lot of the same information that is filling up other people's heads of your generation and nation.

Inside of you, there's another associate network that saves you the trouble of your ancestor's experiences on a less conscious level: the genetic network.

True, but there is ample proof that such knowledge is highly conditional, subject to enormous change and interpretation including alteration upon successive recall and retelling. Even in a vacuum there should be an evolution of self, even if it's a terribly warped (by societal norms) sense of self. The genetic network imparts no knowledge without context, only instinct and reaction; hormones and neurotransmitter goads in other words.

But you are from my perspective... you're relying on your sense of self: your whole collection of personal experiences and anecdotes. Just like the panpsychists, the libertarians are relying on unfalsifiable assumptions.

Would you agree that your views are libertarian?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature#Free_will_and_determinism

[/quote]

No, I'm most certainly not any version of Libertarian; generally I'm a pragmatic authoritarian hypocrite with a Genghis Khan-ish bent.

Still, I'm not accepting my own personal experience as the norm, or even the collective as truth; I do recognize that in a world of all theories being wrong, our reality is largely verified by group experience. Beyond that we have tools to probe reality beyond the capacity of naked humanity.

 

[apeiron]

I agree, but then I'd have to constrain my example to Bulldog or Bullet Ants, instead of social ants. It's not that I'm against the notion of emergent systems behaviour, but any definition of "conscious" is unlikely to include a group-entity that cannot reflect on its totality.

A human can ponder the process of apoptosis (programmed cell death for the non-bio people) as it happens, as a part of us. An ant colony's behavior is a sum of its parts, but without any reflective or experiential capacity.

But in fact by breaking things apart in proper fashion, they become measurable. This is why good metaphysics underpins good science.

So if we are modelling "consciousness" as the degree of top down constraint - the ability of the ant colony mind to control the ant colony's parts - then we can now measure that degree of "mindfulness".

And as you say, already you can see different degrees at work in different ant species. This proves the case rather than undermines it.

Biofeedback experiments for instance measure the degree of mindful control humans can exert over their own bodies. If the right feedback (local~global) interation is set up, then the answer is surprisingly great.

But to accept this and then lapse back to a reductionist "the whole is the sum of its parts" rhetoric is unacceptable. It has just been demonstrated that it isn't.

Which is where a proper theory of the epistemic cut between local and global scales of causality in complex adaptive systems becomes essential. Again, it is framing your understanding in operational constructs - crisp dichotomies that in turn can be crisply measured.

Reductionism isn't the way to banish unclear thinking here. Forcing people to adhere to terms with exact meanings (because those meaning have been formed as limits of a dichotomy) is the way to move forward scientifically. It creates a clear picture of what must be measured out in the world.

 

[Pythagorean]

At no point can my brain operate as a "mini-brain" through separation of neurons, but rather it acts always as a cohesive system. Dysfunction in one area leads to global dysfunction, whereas in a school of fish that's just a dead fish. As we grow our brains increase in terms of complexity, but their nature is unchanging in the sense that it is operable only in the context of the whole organism.

Are you aware of cell differentiation in such cell colonies? A school of fish don't really exhibit differentiation, so yeah... a fish dying in the school wouldn't do much globally. But when there's a more intricate coupling between the members (as is the case in cell colonies) and differentiation occurs, then the functional role of the differentiated cells can become significant enough to where removal of those cells WILL lead to global dysfunction.

Even in a vacuum there should be an evolution of self, even if it's a terribly warped (by societal norms) sense of self.

I would challenge that! This is a falsifiable question. From the implications of experiments that deprive sensory organs at birth, it seems intuitive to me that if you completely cut off all perception (yet somehow keep the organism nutritionally supplemented) it will not develop much of a consciousness at all.

It is through primitive reflexes as a newborn and perceptive feedback through development that self-consciousness seems to come about. Take away the perceptive feedback and you have a purely instinctual animal. So far, their sense of self is yet to be detected (as opposed to higher mammals... and particularly social animals)

But this, I think, would be a good question to see if anyone has tried to answer experimentally. We should wager a non-monetary bet on it ;)