Is Consciousness Solely a Product of the Brain?

[nismaratwork]

Ok let's focus on the absence of signals in rocks. My position is that you won't be able to point out any emergent physical property in the signal or rock, because anything you point at will consist of, and be describable in terms of, the basic physical ingredients (such as elementary particles, the four forces).

What you really mean with "emergence" here is better illustrated with the protein example. A protein may fold in many different ways, just like a molecule may move up, down, left, right, follow a circular or figure 8 pattern, etc. However, no matter how complex the motion gets, there is a simpler version. Motion has been around at least since the big bang.

You will find that the same is true for the "signal" and anything else physical you can find in the universe.

It is arbitrary(subjective) how we define "bright", "stupid", and even "brain". Look at sorites paradox, where we have a pile of sand and keep taking grains away from it. It is arbitrary when we stop calling it "pile". The same goes for the brain. Imagine the simplest brain there is, then take one molecule away from it. Is it still a brain? The answer is arbitrary. "brains" are arbitrary labels and as such have only an arbitrary starting point.

If we drop all those arbitrary (higher level)descriptions, we end up with the lower level descriptions of the basic physical ingredients (as identified by physics). We may arbitrarily feel that "stupid" is not a suitable description for a rock, but we can indeed say (at least if one is a physicalist) that a rock really just consists of a collection of basic physical ingredients, as do humans.

My response is that there is nothing arbitrary about it, rather it's a matter of a limited set of possible thermodynamic processes that can be supported. We can only assign appellation like "pile" based on conventions borne of our experiences, but that changes nothing about reality. Of course, your sand example is telling in a world of silicon... it's just clear that silicon alone isn't enough, anymore than we're JUST carbon, or hydrogen.

Whether or not we can call it as humans, there is a threshold of complexity AND the action of those complex ingredients that forms the line between living and inert, never mind conscious. A simple way to look at this would be that unlike your pile of sand, you can pick out neurons from a brain one by one, and whether you like it or not, it will cease to be a brain. When exactly you reduce it to the point of being dead or inert is something you'll discover, but it doesn't depend on how we view it, or define it.

You can't look at a rock and call it stupid, because stupidity is a function of non-inert, thinking matter. A rock isn't even a definition that means much... a rock of what exactly?... granite? Sandstone? Cocaine?! In the same way, I'm not touching "conscious", because we only have ourselves at the "top" example, and can only compare ourselves to other animals, fungi, rocks... etc.

You can get a rock we call a planet, which is incredibly complex and dynamic, but it's still not thinking; two neurons do more thinking than Jupiter ever will. There is plenty of physical "noise" in a rock, but no signal, and I'd say it's the capacity to produce signals that is the big difference, the yardstick we can use.

 

[ConradDJ]

I see the task as generalising. So we have a very particular and subjective POV. And to move out of that, we seek the most general and hence objective POV - the god's eye view in some sense...

Reductionism has been about the search for the fundamental substance - the atoms, the matter, the general physical stuff of which a material world is made.

But you are talking about generalising something else - the notion of relationships. And that is really the systems approach...

So all understanding remains subjective. But generalisation is a way of structuring our subjective experience so it seems more universal, more objective.

And that would not change if our ideas are based on notions of atoms or notions of relationships.

Thanks for putting this so clearly. There’s a fundamental issue here that’s difficult even to state, because we have such excellent conceptual tools for dealing with the world of things (including “systems” of all kinds), and few attempts have even been made to deal with the relationships between things.

So for example, we refer to “consciousness” as a characteristic of certain kinds of things, as maybe “emerging” in certain types of complex systems. I think it would be better to think of consciousness (in the human sense) as an aspect of the talking-relationships people learn to have with each other (and then later with themselves), as they grow up.

The issue is that the modeling / generalizing mode of thought that we’re so good at is inherently “objectifying”. To think this way is to step out of our connections with things and imagine them “in themselves” – even if when we’re imagining is a “system of relationships” or a “web of real-time interaction”.

This is why I don’t identify with “systems thinking” or the kind of “internalism” that you refer to above... even though I recognize that they’re genuine attempts to find language for the “relational” aspect of existence. Even when what they’re trying to model is the “observer / observed relationship” itself, to my mind this kind of thinking remains within the traditional paradigm, of the disengaged thinker building models of reality in his head and checking if they correspond to the appearances.

This paradigm is excellent, but limited. It does not work for clarifying what’s at the basis of the physical world, or for clarifying what we mean by “consciousness”.

There’s another paradigm – I’m thinking of Phenomenology – that tries to describe the world of subjective consciousness itself. But to my mind this doesn’t get at what’s fundamental either, because the self-enclosed world of the self-observing consciousness also tends to miss the deeper dimension of communicative connection with other people. We don’t yet have a paradigm adequate to “the between” out of which I think our conscious selves emerge.

Heidegger is one of the few philosophers who understood this. You can’t “generalize” about existence, because there is never more than one’s own existence to deal with. Nor are relationships like things, that have properties and can be described “from outside”. Relationships (in the sense I think is fundamental) only exist for the two who are in the relationship – and even they have opposite viewpoints on it.

Heidegger saw that we need a different kind of category-system to deal with the aspect of the world that we “see from inside”, only from this unique perspective each of us has, and that goes deeper than our own self-hood. Instead of “generalizing” – which abstracts from the uniqueness of existence rooted in real-time connection. In Being and Time he called this kind of category “existentials” – attempts to articulate the structure of “being-in-the-world” from one’s own point of view.

It’s relatively easy to explain why the traditional model-building paradigm is limited, and Heidegger was good at that. It’s not easy at all to see what a different paradigm would look like. Being and Time made a remarkable start at this, but Heidegger was unable even to complete that work as he’d originally projected it. And neither his later writing nor that of his “followers” got much further, in my view. So while I’m sure many philosophers see this as a closed chapter in our story... for me, it’s still the basic unresolved issue, if we're trying to understand the basis of our own existence.

 

[Ken G]

I think pftest is making a basic point about language, which is actually very important to recognize because language is all we have here. Langauge involves hanging labels on things, but what are these "things"? They are the only things we are in any position to hang labels on: shared experiences. Period, that's what language is, hanging labels on experiences that we (assume we) share. So we cannot actually label the object "table", all we can label are the shared experiences we have around that object. This is quite important when we come to physicalism, and the OP question of whether or not a brain "creates" consciousness.

Both brain, consciousness, and create, are words, so can be nothing but hanging labels on shared experiences. We are looking for connections between these shared experiences, to make sense of them. Just like with cause and effect, we are looking for basic relationships, and also just like with cause and effect, we cannot actually demonstrate that the cause "creates" the effect, all we can say is the former gives us a way to make sense of the appearance of the latter, given that we experience things in temporal order. Using precise language like that saves us from making wrong terms based on assumptions we have made that we cannot actually demonstrate are true, and the same holds for claims that brains create consciousness, or are the "source" of consciousness, whatever we imagine a "source" is.

 

[Ken G]

Consciousness is a term that has been used to refer to a variety of aspects of the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts

Yes, this seems like a much safer statement than the claim that brains create consciousness.

 

[apeiron]

The issue is that the modeling / generalizing mode of thought that we’re so good at is inherently “objectifying”. To think this way is to step out of our connections with things and imagine them “in themselves” – even if when we’re imagining is a “system of relationships” or a “web of real-time interaction”.

I see it differently because generalisation should produce two things - two halves of a dichotomy, two poles of a spectrum, two levels of a hierarchy. And so we can remain "within" what we produce. If we only imagine monistic options, then we are putting ourselves "outside" looking on.

Subjectively, for instance, the world seems patchily both broken and smooth. We then generalise from this experience to create the metaphysical dichotomy of discrete~continuous to represent the two limiting extremes of what could be the case. Just imagining all reality to be fundamentally discrete would be monistic and leaving us standing outside. But imagining reality instead to be bounded in these two opposed directions means that we can remain inside, living in a reality that is still just a patchy mix and suspended between two limiting cases.

It should be no surprise this is our actual situation when it comes to physical theory. We have to one side (the local scale) a theory of reality as a discrete grain of events (QM), and to the other side (the global scale), a theory of reality as a continuous dynamical fabric (GR). And attempts to collapse one extreme into the other (QG) is a project that keeps floundering in paradox.

So the internalist approach says the apparent dualism of QM~GR is what we should expect to find - reality crisply differentiated in the most general way possible, and then ourselves inside it. To collapse the crisply differentiated into a single monistic generalisation (QG) would put us outside reality, and it doesn't really work.

Now I believe that you can collapse QM~GR back into some prior "monistic" state, but it would be a vague state, a perfect symmetry. Not a crisp monistic generalisation. You would have to collapse, in effect, both the local and the global, both the notions of the discrete and the continuous. So the primal QG state is neither discrete nor continuous, merely the potential to become divided towards these opposing crisp limits.

Sorry, getting a little off track here. But the point is that internalism in systems science/hierarchy theory/Peircean semiotics is motivated by this idea that limits always come in complementary pairs and so we always have something definite to either side when we generalise and objectify our ideas.

Now your goal is to have a relational view of reality. So you say instead of focusing on the point like actors, you will build a model around their point-to-point interactions.

But this is monistic as you are still outside looking down at these individual events or histories. You stand in the (undefined) larger space or void in which there is a play of atomistic relating. Because you want to deal with events isolated at an instant, you don't account for the generally passing time within which all these events are located.

A more complete Peircean approach would be properly hierarchical. First you have the something that can happen (the local fluctation). Then you have the interactions that fluctuations make possible (the dyadic interaction you want to focus on). But then you have over time the generalised organisation that results from a free play of localised relating. You have a global system that has developed definite habits that constrain the relating.

So internalism is not imagining the view of actors interacting with each other - that is still an atomistic or local scale of analysis. It is about local actors interacting with global constraints - the systems view in which you are generalising the opposing extremes of scale and so placing yourself, as the observer, in the middle of things.

This paradigm is excellent, but limited. It does not work for clarifying what’s at the basis of the physical world, or for clarifying what we mean by “consciousness”.

I think it definitely clarifies physics - it makes more sense of QM~GR and QG for a start. It is a more suitable ontology than monistic atomism.

Hierarchy theory is also the best model for making sense of brains and minds that I have come across. It really works in my experience.

Heidegger is one of the few philosophers who understood this. You can’t “generalize” about existence, because there is never more than one’s own existence to deal with. Nor are relationships like things, that have properties and can be described “from outside”. Relationships (in the sense I think is fundamental) only exist for the two who are in the relationship – and even they have opposite viewpoints on it.

Systems thinking grew out of Naturphilosophie, Schelling and Hegel.

 

[pftest]

Whether or not we can call it as humans, there is a threshold of complexity AND the action of those complex ingredients that forms the line between living and inert, never mind conscious. A simple way to look at this would be that unlike your pile of sand, you can pick out neurons from a brain one by one, and whether you like it or not, it will cease to be a brain. When exactly you reduce it to the point of being dead or inert is something you'll discover, but it doesn't depend on how we view it, or define it.

The only types of thresholds you will find are those where process undergoes a 'dramatic' increase. For example, a single drop of water might cause a filled bucket to tip over. It may seem dramatic, but its still just water in motion, just like the single drop that caused it.

There isn't really a boundary between life and inanimate matter either, its just that when we compare an organism with a rock, we place them on opposite extremes of the spectrum and label them as such. But a spectrum it is, just like with the pile of sand. "Pileness" isn't a physical property that pops into existence at some point, its just label we attach to some configuration of physical ingredients. Labelling things is very useful socially (to communicate), but it isn't an indicator of the emergence of new physical properties. If it were, then a rock would get all kinds of new properties when a japanese person observes it.

This is why many people say that life is just chemistry, that it doesn't contain any extra properties, while others say that the whole universe is alive. In the OP paper Strawson also mentions that life is reducible.

You can't look at a rock and call it stupid, because stupidity is a function of non-inert, thinking matter. A rock isn't even a definition that means much... a rock of what exactly?... granite? Sandstone? Cocaine?! In the same way, I'm not touching "conscious", because we only have ourselves at the "top" example, and can only compare ourselves to other animals, fungi, rocks... etc.

You can get a rock we call a planet, which is incredibly complex and dynamic, but it's still not thinking; two neurons do more thinking than Jupiter ever will. There is plenty of physical "noise" in a rock, but no signal, and I'd say it's the capacity to produce signals that is the big difference, the yardstick we can use.

A signal is only a signal when it means something to an observer. Someone might flash a light at you with certain intervals and you may receive a message this way, but otherwise it is just a bunch of photons. Talking about rocks and signals, have a look at this article:

Take that rock over there. It doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything, at least to our gross perception. But at the microlevel it consists of an unimaginable number of atoms connected by springy chemical bonds, all jiggling around at a rate that even our fastest supercomputer might envy. And they are not jiggling at random. The rock’s innards “see” the entire universe by means of the gravitational and electromagnetic signals it is continuously receiving. Such a system can be viewed as an all-purpose information processor, one whose inner dynamics mirror any sequence of mental states that our brains might run through. And where there is information, says panpsychism, there is consciousness. In David Chalmers’s slogan, “Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/m...r=rssuserland&emc=rss&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

 

[nismaratwork]

Panpsychic Solipsism? Ow, my head.

Again, who is saying that the universe is alive? If you want the boundary that straddles what is living and what is inert, see Virus. In my view, you're overcomplicating this for the sake of your pre-existing beliefs. Then again, maybe I'm just tired of the pure philosophy interpretations of QM Interpretations... to say that much is lost in the translation is a grotesque understatement.

 

[pftest]

Panpsychic Solipsism? Ow, my head.

Again, who is saying that the universe is alive? If you want the boundary that straddles what is living and what is inert, see Virus. In my view, you're overcomplicating this for the sake of your pre-existing beliefs. Then again, maybe I'm just tired of the pure philosophy interpretations of QM Interpretations... to say that much is lost in the translation is a grotesque understatement.

I don't see any counterarguments in your post, so i think my point has been made.

 

[nismaratwork]

I don't see any counterarguments in your post, so i think my point has been made.

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.

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

 

[apeiron]

And where there is information, says panpsychism, there is consciousness. In David Chalmers’s slogan, “Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.

But this can't be the case if information has been defined in a way that removes all internal structure and leaves only an externalist perspective. There is no room inside a physicalist definition of information for meaning, and hence any kind of experience.

Hence a natty slogan, but also a vacuous statement.

Information theory was all about removing particular observers so as to be able describe signals in a general way. It was in fact about making a sharp distinction between meaning and marks, symbols and the ideas they might refer to.

So the "objective view" became the generalised idea that any mark could potentially be meaningful (to someone or something). But a mark needs to be made on a surface to be actually distinctive. A bit must have a context.

So this now also gives us a new objective definition of meaningfulness as the amount of information discarded or actively suppressed. It is the work done to make that flat surface which can be marked, that global context in which a distinctive event can be detected. Noise is not noise but actually a measure of the entropy dissipated in order to manufacture a bit of information.

You can see this pretty easily with consciousness. A meaningful state of awareness is about all the potential experience that has been actively suppressed. If you are thinking of a rabbit, it is a distinctive mental state because of all the other things you know and could have been thinking about, but aren't. The more constrained your mental state - now think about a pet rabbit you had as a kid - the more alternative experiences you have discarded and so the more intensely-felt is your current state of consciousness.

So information has no inside. It is atomistic. It is a limit, a boundary state. It is the smallest detectable mark - which in turn requires that there be the globally flattest surface possible. A mark can only exist to the extent that there is a global state that is removing, discarding, all other potential marks surrounding it.

The slogan should thus be that physics (ie: information theory) is imagining a world of marks without contexts, while experience involves the manufacturing of meaningfully marked states of organisation.

Or more succinctly, physics is information without context, experience is information with context.

So panpsychism fails as experience demands rich contexts and active entropification.

A rock has few internal degrees of freedom and is a poor entropifier. It can absorb radiation at a high wavelength and re-radiate it at a lower one. So it does some dissipation. But very limited.

Something living however is continually manufacturing meaning by disposing of negentropy. The throughput is high. And the internal states (of the system) are accordingly rich. There is a high degree of informational order because of the large amount of waste heat, or disordering, being exported.

This dissipative organisation in fact gives a subjective POV. A rock re-radiating sunlight creates only a shallow entropy gradient. But it does still have a distinctive orientation to the world. There is information in the fact it exists at that location and is dissipating the sun's photons. So stretching definitions, the rock is conscious or experiencing in this sense - it has a POV.

But the rock is a holonomic device. Its global organisation is fixed - the electrostatic bonds that holds in atoms in a crystaline lattice were long locked into place by the cooling of magma. So the dissipation achieved by a heated jiggling of the atoms is not a complex story. There is no internal organisation that is thinking rabbits instead of cats, dogs and geese. Or even its hot, time to get into the shade before I crack.

But living things have non-holonomic constraints. They can organise their internal states to have internal meaning. There are alternative paths that can be taken. A lizard can choose to go sit in the sun to warm up, then retreat to the shade to cool down.

The POV is clearly far more meaningful - there is now "something that it is like to be" a hot lizard, because there is also something it is like to be as a cold lizard. Whereas a rock just be whatever it is with no choice. It's dissipative actions are entirely outside itself - a matter of whether the sun shines - and not something that it can meaningfully regulate by changing its relationship with the world.

So the sun's heat means something to a lizard, it means nothing to a rock. Physics can say the hot photons are just information. Their entropification is just rearranged information. And the dissipation - the shift from ordered to disordered states - is meaningful only in the god's eye view enjoyed by the second law. It sees what's going on. Indeed what must happen as a global constraint on reality.

But a systems view, one that can account for non-holonomic constraints and complexity in general, can distinguish meaning from information. The systems view also counts the information discarded, not just the information present. It sees the whole, rather than the parts, the creation of the surface as well as the making of the marks.

 

[nismaratwork]

A natty slogan, possibly why it's in the Times and not in a peer reviewed journal where laughter would resound.

 

[ConradDJ]

I see it differently because generalisation should produce two things - two halves of a dichotomy, two poles of a spectrum, two levels of a hierarchy. And so we can remain "within" what we produce. If we only imagine monistic options, then we are putting ourselves "outside" looking on.

I'm sorry, it's the end of my workday and I'm too worn down to respond intelligently to your post -- I'll try in the morning. But I just want to say, this is a very cool idea. For a moment, I felt like I could see your metaphysics from inside, and the dualities became palpable... "being here" as being pulled in opposite directions. Except that the "pull" in each direction is quite different, not at all symmetrical...

Really, whatever this existence-environment is that we're each seeing from inside, from our own viewpoints, I think that it's made of more different kinds of structure than these dualities. But I love the image of "producing a dichotomy that we remain inside..."

Conrad

 

[nismaratwork]

I'm sorry, it's the end of my workday and I'm too worn down to respond intelligently to your post -- I'll try in the morning. But I just want to say, this is a very cool idea. For a moment, I felt like I could see your metaphysics from inside, and the dualities became palpable... "being here" as being pulled in opposite directions. Except that the "pull" in each direction is quite different, not at all symmetrical...

Really, whatever this existence-environment is that we're each seeing from inside, from our own viewpoints, I think that it's made of more different kinds of structure than these dualities. But I love the image of "producing a dichotomy that we remain inside..."

Conrad

Apeiron: he's not a little eloquent.

 

[apeiron]

For a moment, I felt like I could see your metaphysics from inside, and the dualities became palpable... "being here" as being pulled in opposite directions. Except that the "pull" in each direction is quite different, not at all symmetrical...

Ahh, the next key idea now is equilibrium. You are being pulled from two directions (or pushed and prodded). But a system is developed when these contrasting forces or causalities are in balance over all scales (so isotopic and homogeneous for all possible scales of observation by observers within the system).

So the dualities are asymmetric (pulling from opposite ends of scale), but then locally symmetric because they are in a constant dynamic balance.

It is the old edge of chaos story. The criticality story. A fractal situation. If reality is being pulled on by two limits like the discrete and the continuous, then at any scale of observation, there is a fruitful mix of both things going on.

Thus you get classical mechanics arising as the balance between QM and GR. From inside the system, you cannot see that spacetime is locally grainy, or that it is globally curved. Everything within a decohered inertial frame looks differentiable and flat. There is no sense of being pulled in a direction if the "forces" acting on you are balanced.

[Edit]: Note a concrete example of how this works in the very maths of fractals.

The fractal dimension of a Koch curve (the equilibrium balance of the interative symmetry breaking) is log4/log3, or 1.26...

So you have a basic ratio of a line 3 units long becoming broken out into a curve 4 units long. Then taking the log breaks the symmetry over all possible scales.

The "local" here is the 1D line as an element. The "global" is the 2D plane that is an extra dimension where the symmetry can break towards. And the "pull" of both limits is then seen over all physical scale.

 

[Pythagorean]

So I'm sitting here thinking about something and trying to make a decision. A cosmic particle flies in from a distant star and gets absorbed by a neuron in my brain, causing it to fire... and this results in my deciding a certain way. That’s the objective viewpoint. My subjective experience is that I made the decision. I don’t understand why these two descriptions of the situation are in any way contradictory.

They're not contradictory at all! That's my point. Not that you can't do what you want, but that what you want is already determined by your genetic and sitmuli history. The act of you "subjectively" making a decision is the deterministic process playing itself out.

The alternative, that things are non-deterministic (random) wouldn't look very good for free will. either. There's really no room for free will anywhere without inventing something new! But there's room for willpower of course, as you said. We still subjectively feel the decision-making process as an integral part of our lives (whether it's inhibiting our own behavior or fighting the odds of our environment).

 

[ConradDJ]

They're not contradictory at all! That's my point. Not that you can't do what you want, but that what you want is already determined by your genetic and sitmuli history. The act of you "subjectively" making a decision is the deterministic process playing itself out.

The alternative, that things are non-deterministic (random) wouldn't look very good for free will. either. There's really no room for free will anywhere without inventing something new!

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.

That pretty much corresponds to my experience of the world, too. What I do and what happens around me is not random, and not independent of past history. If complex past situations didn't carry over into the present, if physical interaction weren't very precisely reliable, lawful, predictable, there would only be chaos here -- no atoms, no molecules, no chemistry, no life, and certainly no sort of "free will" worth talking about.

It seems to me that in order for there to be anything at all resembling "free will", we need a world that's both very highly "deterministic" and also open to new possibilities. And that seems to be exactly the sort of world we live in. The evidence is that chance rather than lawfulness is at the bottom of things. But there are so many levels of structure in the world, each characterized by a different way of combining randomness with order. So I'm wondering... what kind of world could better provide for something like "free will"?

 

[Pythagorean]

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.

That pretty much corresponds to my experience of the world, too. What I do and what happens around me is not random, and not independent of past history. If complex past situations didn't carry over into the present, if physical interaction weren't very precisely reliable, lawful, predictable, there would only be chaos here -- no atoms, no molecules, no chemistry, no life, and certainly no sort of "free will" worth talking about.

It seems to me that in order for there to be anything at all resembling "free will", we need a world that's both very highly "deterministic" and also open to new possibilities. And that seems to be exactly the sort of world we live in. The evidence is that chance rather than lawfulness is at the bottom of things. But there are so many levels of structure in the world, each characterized by a different way of combining randomness with order. So I'm wondering... what kind of world could better provide for something like "free will"?

Ok, let's start this way. Define what you mean by free will.

 

[ConradDJ]

Ok, let's start this way. Define what you mean by free will.

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?

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.

 

[Ken G]

They're not contradictory at all! That's my point. Not that you can't do what you want, but that what you want is already determined by your genetic and sitmuli history. The act of you "subjectively" making a decision is the deterministic process playing itself out.

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.

The alternative, that things are non-deterministic (random) wouldn't look very good for free will. either.

That is hardly the alternative! That false dichotomy exposes the fundamentally incorrect assumptions that lie at the very foundation of your argument.

 

[nismaratwork]

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.

Well said, and I'd add... preference has little to do with forming reality... unless solipsists are correct and then it's all a moot point anyway.

 

[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.