My definition of consciousness - non recursive

[apeiron]

Apeiron, care to elaborate on why my approach is "doomed to fail"? I'm not even sure what part of my approach you so casually dismiss.

I had years of dealing with Hameroff, Chalmers and all the quantum mysterians/panpsychics. So I am both very familiar with all its variants and very bored. It is like debating with creationists.

As you say, the argument rests on the implausibility of bottom-up emergence of consciousness from physical processes.

The solution then is to shift to a systems causality, not to jump to a-causal beliefs about stuff magically popping out as the "interior aspect to being".

Even Plato was actually a systems guy (perhaps only due to late influence of Aristotle). He said the forms must be matched by the chora. Dualism is where you end up only if you are unwilling to embrace the power of systems causality.

 

[SDetection]

Here is the definition after some refinement:
consciousness is the state in which an entity is able to recall any aspect of its prior states.

 

[apeiron]

Hi,
here is my thoughts about consciousness:
An entity that can recall any aspect of its state at any certain moment, is conscious in regard to this aspect.

If you study the psychology of memory you will find that recognition is natural, recollection a learned trick of humans based on the scaffolding power of language.

So animals are conscious without recollection as we know it. They can be reminded, but are not free to roam the past and future in the way we call remembering and imagining.

Recollection would be part of being self-conscious, the learned human skill based on language and socialisation, but not of consciousness, plain awareness.

 

[Tam Hunt]

Apeiron, what you suggest is not addressing the hard problem - what you suggest is addressing the soft problem(s), which are interesting, to be sure, but not as interesting to me as the hard problem. What IS experience/consciousness and what is its relationship to matter? Dual aspect theory is not dualism in the traditional sense and I generally use the term panexperientialism to refer to what is really a type of monism (depending on how deep you go on the ontological chain of being). This is the case because under Griffin's panexperientialism (which I find pretty compelling), all matter has experience as a fundamental property, like spin or mass.

Where I'm going a bit deeper is looking into the nature of matter itself, where it comes from, what sustains it and what is its role vis a vis "information." This is what has led me to contemplate the oft-criticized ether because the ether concept helps explain many physical concepts re space, time and matter (see my posts in other parts of physicsforums.com) as well as mental concepts. Whitehead has, of course, delved deeply here and I highly recommend his works.

I admire Chalmers greatly, and Hameroff and Penrose. But none of these guys have thought as deeply as Whitehead or Griffin - so please do check out their work before you condemn panexperientialism.

 

[apeiron]

I argue that from the point of the outside observer, then yes, there is no difference.
Here we agree.
/Fredrik

On zombies, it might be worth making the distinction here between modelling and simulation.

The zombie argument is based on the requirement that we simulate a conscious system. But a theory of consciousness would be a model of the thing in question.

Which means we have to take the step back and define the rightful scope of models.

The clearest writing on this I find in Robert Rosen (modelling relations and anticipatory systems) and Howard Pattee (the epistemic cut), two theoretical biologists. Tor Norretranders also touched on some key aspects in his pop sci book on mind, The User Illusion.

In brief, a simulation is a copy of some particular thing. A model is a generalisation of particular things that can be used to generate predictions. You can take the general model, plug in a few critical values, and spit out a predicted outcome.

So in terms of observers - a simulation would be a particular located observing system. A model would be a general and unlocated observer, or rather, a globally pervasive observer, one acting over all a system's phase space, all its "space and time".

There is of course a spectrum in science between models and simulations. Neural networks occupy this kind of middle ground.

 

[apeiron]

I admire Chalmers greatly, and Hameroff and Penrose. But none of these guys have thought as deeply as Whitehead or Griffin - so please do check out their work before you condemn panexperientialism.

There is a lot to like about Whitehead's process approach. Though Peirce did it much better. Griffin however is just another theology academic grasping at straws.

Positing consciousness as a property of matter does nothing to explain it. And people who think it might always turn out not to have a very good knowledge of the basics of neurology or psychophysics. Consciousness does not even look the way they describe it.

The hard problem can only exist if you believe that consciousness "exists" - rather than indeed being a (complex) process.

 

[Tam Hunt]

Apeiron, I think it's important to establish what exactly we're talking about. "Consciousness" is, in my usage, reflecting Griffin's distinction, a high level type of "experience." Experience consists of qualia: experience the now proverbial color red, an A note, the taste of eggs in the morning. Experience is pure subjectivity: what it is LIKE to be something, to use another well-used phrase.

Accordingly, positing experience as a fundamental property of matter does indeed explain it: it puts it right there at the very beginning, in everything, and inextricably linked with what we call matter. There is no deeper way to explain the hard problem. You simply disagree that this is a good explanation, but you can't dismiss it is as a full explanation. And it's a bit strange that you would dismiss people like Hameroff as not understanding neurology or psychophysics. Hameroff is an anesthesiologist so he knows a thing or two about these topics.

A process approach to consciousness is exactly what Whitehead, Griffin and others like me are pursuing, but it requires acknowledging that we have exactly zero instances of radical emergence in our universe.

And I suspect you haven't read Griffin's works if you so casually write him off. He's a tremendous intellect with an oeuvre that extends far beyond process theology (and for him, as with me, there is no distinction between philosophy and theology: both endeavors seek to make sense of the world from first principles so are naturally viewed as the same process).

 

[apeiron]

Here is the definition after some refinement:
consciousness is the state in which an entity is able to recall any aspect of its prior states.

A soundbite definition of consciousness would home in on the idea of a location with a particular point of view - a semiotic or observer distinction. The world is information. Observers then construct meanings.

And an observer oriented in time is even better. So an anticipatory system. It is the forward view, not the rear-ward view, that is the actual goal of a conscious system. Prediction rather than rememberance.

So to ordinary things, the future just happens (it is fairly deterministic). But for increasingly mindful things, the future is being anticipated from a local point of view. So the future becomes increasingly un-determined, to the degree that the system has gained control over its circumstances.

This anticipatory system approach is general enough to do some concrete modelling. This is why I repeatedly draw attention to neural networkers like Grossberg, and modelling theorists like Rosen, who found their work on the notion of located anticipation.

Global contexts constrain the future for simple physical systems. Retrocausality, quantum erasers and all that. So intelligence is about gaining local constructive freedoms which widen the space of the future possible.

You can see how we are moving away from woo-woo panexperential type "explanations" of consciousness to concrete, almost geometric, models of observerhood and semiotics.

Relating to the earlier post about cogent moments, simple physical systems are trapped in plank scale (de)coherence scale of existence. They are free only for a very short distance into their futures. Conscious systems are creating that greater half second scale plasticity moment which is quantitatively how many orders greater? I think it was about 30. I'll have to dig out my notes.

 

[apeiron]

Apeiron, I think it's important to establish what exactly we're talking about. "Consciousness" is, in my usage, reflecting Griffin's distinction, a high level type of "experience." Experience consists of qualia: experience the now proverbial color red, an A note, the taste of eggs in the morning. Experience is pure subjectivity: what it is LIKE to be something, to use another well-used phrase.

Accordingly, positing experience as a fundamental property of matter does indeed explain it: it puts it right there at the very beginning, in everything, and inextricably linked with what we call matter. There is no deeper way to explain the hard problem. You simply disagree that this is a good explanation, but you can't dismiss it is as a full explanation. And it's a bit strange that you would dismiss people like Hameroff as not understanding neurology or psychophysics. Hameroff is an anesthesiologist so he knows a thing or two about these topics.

A process approach to consciousness is exactly what Whitehead, Griffin and others like me are pursuing, but it requires acknowledging that we have exactly zero instances of radical emergence in our universe.

And I suspect you haven't read Griffin's works if you so casually write him off. He's a tremendous intellect with an oeuvre that extends far beyond process theology (and for him, as with me, there is no distinction between philosophy and theology: both endeavors seek to make sense of the world from first principles so are naturally viewed as the same process).

Ya ya. I know there is no hope of changing your mind and I really shouldn't bother. Just the fact you waffle about qualia is so 1990s.

Conflation is not explanation. And it is nowhere near modelling, the business of science.

I got to the point with Hameroff where I felt he was stalking me. I wouldn't be surprised to find him pop up here at any moment. I have enjoyed the full benefit of his deep knowledge of neuroscience. Let us just leave it that he has a very selective view of the facts. He is just good at constructing edifices that appeal to the amateur.

If these 15 implausible steps are arranged hierarchically, then we might have a theory. Do a bayseian addition of all the probabilities and we can see why serious people think him a pseud. And of course, it would still be a bunch of easy problem mechanism in your parlance that requires the magic of radical emergence to light up the orch collapse with the interior glow of awareness.

Whether you put your magic at the beginning or the end of the "explanatory" trail makes no difference. You can say it is a property in matter or a property that pops out of matter. Both are dualistic and so beyond causality. A form of religion rather than the basis of science.

 

[SDetection]

If you study the psychology of memory you will find that recognition is natural, recollection a learned trick of humans based on the scaffolding power of language.

So animals are conscious without recollection as we know it. They can be reminded, but are not free to roam the past and future in the way we call remembering and imagining.

Recollection would be part of being self-conscious, the learned human skill based on language and socialisation, but not of consciousness, plain awareness.

Hi, no, I didn't mean recalling using human language.
The definition is :

consciousness is the state in which an entity is able to recall any aspect of its prior states.

"recall" here means fetching a prior state from memory, and this applies to animals too.
for example:
A dog was in a house in which a fire broke out , when the dog saw the fire, it unconsciously recorded the sight in its memory, and then decided to get out of the house. At door the dog is still able to recall its state confronting the fire, it's conscious and will not stand still or go back.
This is what I meant, are there better English words which are closer to this meaning ?.
How about this way:
consciousness is the state in which an entity is able to fetch any aspect of its prior state from its memory.
Is this better ?.

 

[apeiron]

No, its got to be about anticipation. A system that is constantly updating its "memory" if you have to call it that to have a view of what is just about to happen.

All this fetching and recording of memory traces is due to trying to force the jargon of computer technology on mind modelling. You can make a rough fit, but it is very rough.

A dog responds to what it anticipates, not what it remembers. Of course, circumstances can jog it into certain anticipatory states that rely on past discrete moments of experience. Specific understandings that lead to specific current reactions.

So if you want to use computational language, adopt that of anticipatory neural network approaches.

An entity had a running generalised state of expectation (dog not expecting fire) which became updated through a focal act of attention and led to a changed state of orientation in regard of its immediate future.

The fetching of memories just does not happen. We may reignite establish neural pathways (and suppress other competing ones), but there is no movement of memory traces from one bit of the brain to another. So the choice of language is very bad here.

Think about it carefully. Remember what you ate for breakfast. What you will actually do is attempt to anticipate what it would be like to be in that position. Mental imagery is the anticipatory part of the cycle of perceptual processing - anticipation which is not actually matched by a sensory confirmation.

This was understood by Wundt and other Victorian psychophysicists. Another reason why I want to bang my head over the nonsense that constantly get passed off as mind science.

The good science is all there. You got to just wade past all the popular guff.

 

[SDetection]

No, its got to be about anticipation.

But note that there is a dependency problem here, no one can anticipate , predict or make a decision without knowing its previous state.
For example:
You will not be able to say "tomorrow will be Sunday" if you don't recall yesterday as being Friday.
Even more than that, the sentence "tomorrow will be Sunday" itself, you must be able to recall the state of saying every word before saying the next one.
Even further than that , the letters themselves, you can't say any letter without recalling the state of saying the previous one.
You can go even more extreme in regard to the muscles of speech.

All the memorizing and recalling happen unconsciously, and if at any certain moment you are unable to recall any aspect of your prior state, you'll just fall to the ground, because this is by my definition the state of being unconscious.

 

[SDetection]

All this fetching and recording of memory traces is due to trying to force the jargon of computer technology on mind modelling. You can make a rough fit, but it is very rough.

Actually it's the other way around, computers are just more powerful simulation of some aspects of our mental abilities.

 

[Tam Hunt]

Apeiron, your tone and manner indicates your own lack of seriousness. By all means, have fun with this, but I prefer discussion that maintains a level of respect and civility - and doesn't simply diss others for the sake of displaying your worldweariness and the fact that you've been thinking about these things since way back in the late 1990s.

There is a huge difference between positing experience at the beginning or the end of the chain of being. If it's at the beginning, it's an organic naturalistic process that comes into being at the same time as all matter (and in each moment, as each component of the universe is re-created in Whitehead's "creative advance"). If it's at the end, it's a "miracle occurs" logical lacuna that gets us nowhere.

It sounds like you're flirting with eliminativism. If so, more power to you. But I prefer to believe that I exist - or at least that my experience exists. It's a bit more empowering.

 

[Dmitry67]

"recall" here means fetching a prior state from memory, and this applies to animals too.
for example:
A dog was in a house

SDetection, it appears that for some reason you believe that animals are NOT conscious?
Definitely, they are not so smart as we do, but I bet they have qualia, so the hard problem applies to them too.

Regarding

consciousness is the state in which an entity is able to recall any aspect of its prior states

you can not recall ANY of its preious state.
Based on your definition, human with some period of amnesia is unconscious.
Especially with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korsakoff's_syndrome - but these people are consious!

Tam - I will read what you suggested.

 

[apeiron]

But note that there is a dependency problem here, no one can anticipate , predict or make a decision without knowing its previous state.
For example:
You will not be able to say "tomorrow will be Sunday" if you don't recall yesterday as being Friday.
.

But the language scaffolded human mind has already been agreed as having this capacity to break with the present tense observer status to "remember" and "imagine". That is to generate anticipations of what it would be like to be elsewhere in the past, elsewhere in the future, and not locked into located responses to immediate circumstance.

A monkey is conscious but indeed cannot talk about yesterdays and tomorrows - words which by learned habit rouse states of perceptual expectation.

Actually it's the other way around, computers are just more powerful simulation of some aspects of our mental abilities.

How is it the other way round if the way computers (von Neuman machines being the kind you are talking about) do it is nothing like how brains do it?

Perhaps if you want to strain the analogies, computers do do it the way symbolic and grammatical language does it. So computers simulate the software. But they don't simulate the hardware.

If you check out the anticipatory neural network approaches of Grossberg (or Hinton's Helmholtz nets, Rao's dietic coding, Kalman filters, McKay's antique stuff, a ton of other allied approaches) then you may see more realistic models of hardware.

 

[Dmitry67]

But note that there is a dependency problem here, no one can anticipate , predict or make a decision without knowing its previous state.
For example:
You will not be able to say "tomorrow will be Sunday" if you don't recall yesterday as being Friday.

I think that medically speaking "being oriented in time and space" is not required for being conscious. Mentally ill people can lose both abilities but they are still conscious. Also, when you wake up from a deep coma asking yourself "who am i? where am i?" you are conscious, right?

Qualia (and the hard problem is talking about it) is not a result of our intellectual work: you can lose all your memory and still being conscious, you can be conscious on the last stage of Alzgeimer...

An interesting experiment: (don't do it at home :) ) stand up quickly from the very hot bath and your vision becomes blurry and you can't even stand. So, brain hardware starts to malfunction - even the low level hardware like vision or orientation in space, but still you can think "I need to sit otherwise I can fall!" So qualia is something very very ancient in our brain (or not in a brain at all)

 

[apeiron]

Apeiron, your tone and manner indicates your own lack of seriousness. By all means, have fun with this, but I prefer discussion that maintains a level of respect and civility - and doesn't simply diss others for the sake of displaying your worldweariness and the fact that you've been thinking about these things since way back in the late 1990s.

There is a huge difference between positing experience at the beginning or the end of the chain of being. If it's at the beginning, it's an organic naturalistic process that comes into being at the same time as all matter (and in each moment, as each component of the universe is re-created in Whitehead's "creative advance"). If it's at the end, it's a "miracle occurs" logical lacuna that gets us nowhere.

It sounds like you're flirting with eliminativism. If so, more power to you. But I prefer to believe that I exist - or at least that my experience exists. It's a bit more empowering.

Sorry if your feelings are hurt. But there is too much claptrap talked by those who are unwilling to get serious in the way I think of seriousness.

And it makes no difference to insert your magic at the beginning of the trail. Not unless you are saying you can at least sketch a TOE that produces worlds plus consciousness out of the same hat. And you can give convincing reasons why systems science approaches to modelling consciousness are barking up the wrong tree (apart from the shopworn "hard problem" which is not a problem for systems science because it does not suggest radical emergence).

 

[apeiron]

I think that medically speaking "being oriented in time and space" is not required for being conscious. Mentally ill people can lose both abilities but they are still conscious. Also, when you wake up from a deep coma asking yourself "who am i? where am i?" you are conscious, right?

Qualia (and the hard problem is talking about it) is not a result of our intellectual work: you can lose all your memory and still being conscious, you can be conscious on the last stage of Alzgeimer...

An interesting experiment: (don't do it at home :) ) stand up quickly from the very hot bath and your vision becomes blurry and you can't even stand. So, brain hardware starts to malfunction - even the low level hardware like vision or orientation in space, but still you can think "I need to sit otherwise I can fall!" So qualia is something very very ancient in our brain (or not in a brain at all)

Confused consciousness is still consciousness.

Mentally ill people? What condition are you thinking of where there is a lack of awareness of time and space (even if disorientated)?

If you wake up from a coma, you would be arguing that you were unconscious and then you regained consciousness.

As an aside, even in slow wave sleep, we are conscious. But it is precisely a consciousness in which short term memory is blocked - disengaged. And so the thought processes are a baffled rumination. This is an unmysterious fact. The lack of brain synchrony and loss of LTP, etc, gives a good neuromechanistic explanation.

So here is another reason to dismiss the idea that consciousness is about recallable prior states. We do have some level of qualia even in deep sleep when memory forming mechanisms are switched off (and only ill-focused long term memories and habits of thought remain).

Standing up suddenly, your blood pressure drops. Primary visual cortex is most sensitive to fall in blood flow.

So after this random string of comments loosely to do with confused awareness, how do you then jump to the conclusion that qualia are something very ancient in the brain? Or not in the brain at all?

Confusion is still a mental state with a qualitative aspect to it.

 

[SDetection]

consciousness is the state in which an entity is able to recall any aspect of its prior states.

SDetection, it appears that for some reason you believe that animals are NOT conscious?

Hi,
no, animals are conscious. Why are you saying that ?, by my definition for example, ants are conscious entities.

Definitely, they are not so smart as we do, but I bet they have qualia, so the hard problem applies to them too.

I don't believe in qualia in regard to the state of consciousness.

you can not recall ANY of its preious state.
Based on your definition, human with some period of amnesia is unconscious.
Especially with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korsakoff's_syndrome - but these people are consious!

No, I said "consciousness is the state in which an entity is able to recall any aspect of its prior states".So If people who have Korsakoff's syndrome are able to recall anything about themselves, then by my definition ,they are conscious. But of course there is also a degree of consciousness.

 

[SDetection]

But the language scaffolded human mind has already been agreed as having this capacity to break with the present tense observer status to "remember" and "imagine". That is to generate anticipations of what it would be like to be elsewhere in the past, elsewhere in the future, and not locked into located responses to immediate circumstance.

Remember I'm referring to "recalling" and "memorizing" as happening unconsciously.
So if you are generating imaginations of what it would be like to be elsewhere in the past, at the same moment you are also unconsciously memorizing them, and in the next state of your mind, you will be able to recall these imaginations. So based on those prior states of mind, you will be able to generate anticipations of what it would be like to be in the future. And hence my definition applies to this too.

A monkey is conscious but indeed cannot talk about yesterdays and tomorrows - words which by learned habit rouse states of perceptual expectation.

yes, the example of "yesterdays and tomorrows" was just for humans, it was for the sake of clarification, here is one that applies to monkeys:
When a monkey sees a banana at a distance, at the same moment, he is also unconsciously memorizing the banana position, then at the next state of his mind ,he will be able to recall that, and as he doesn't need to find out the position of the banana anymore, he will make a decision to move in the direction of that banana, he is now anticipating that he will get it at the end. So the monkey is using prior states of his mind to behave accordingly, and hence by my definition the monkey is conscious.

Actually it's the other way around, computers are just more powerful simulation of some aspects of our mental abilities.

How is it the other way round if the way computers (von Neuman machines being the kind you are talking about) do it is nothing like how brains do it?

Notice that, we simulate some functions of our brains, we are not trying to create similar brains, so we don't need to do it like the actual brain does it.

Perhaps if you want to strain the analogies, computers do do it the way symbolic and grammatical language does it

But using languages are also functions of our brains.

. So computers simulate the software. But they don't simulate the hardware.

I think by the definition of simulation, we are also simulating parts of the hardware.

 

[SDetection]

But note that there is a dependency problem here, no one can anticipate , predict or make a decision without knowing its previous state.
For example:
You will not be able to say "tomorrow will be Sunday" if you don't recall yesterday as being Friday.
Even more than that, the sentence "tomorrow will be Sunday" itself, you must be able to recall the state of saying every word before saying the next one.
Even further than that , the letters themselves, you can't say any letter without recalling the state of saying the previous one.
You can go even more extreme in regard to the muscles of speech.

All the memorizing and recalling happen unconsciously, and if at any certain moment you are unable to recall any aspect of your prior state, you'll just fall to the ground, because this is by my definition the state of being unconscious.

I think that medically speaking "being oriented in time and space" is not required for being conscious. Mentally ill people can lose both abilities but they are still conscious.

Hi, Being able to tell the time was just an example, it's not my actual definition of consciousness.

Also, when you wake up from a deep coma asking yourself "who am i? where am i?" you are conscious, right?

Yes, if you ask yourself "who am i? where am i?", that indicates that you are recalling the state of seeing yourself and the surroundings. So you are using prior states of your mind, and hence by my definition ,you are conscious.

Qualia (and the hard problem is talking about it) is not a result of our intellectual work: you can lose all your memory and still being conscious, you can be conscious on the last stage of Alzgeimer...

I don't think Qualia exist here.
And I think ,if anyone loses all of its conscious memory , he/she could be still able to use his/her unconscious memory to become conscious again and then generate new conscious memory.
But if an entity lost its unconscious memory forever, it will never become conscious again as it was. This entity will just have to start from the beginning as unconscious matter :).

An interesting experiment: (don't do it at home :) ) stand up quickly from the very hot bath and your vision becomes blurry and you can't even stand. So, brain hardware starts to malfunction - even the low level hardware like vision or orientation in space, but still you can think "I need to sit otherwise I can fall!" So qualia is something very very ancient in our brain (or not in a brain at all)

No, qualia doesn't explain anything in this situation:
What is happening here is, because you stood up too quickly, you didn't give your brain a chance to memorize all the aspects of your previous positions . And hence, when you are at the final position, you will not be able to recall all aspects of the states of your prior positions, and so you are losing consciousness in regard to your position, and as you can't recall all of your prior positions information, you don't know how to instruct your muscles so you can stay balanced. At the same moment there is other thought thread in your brain which is recording all of the action, and at the next state of your mind, you will know that you are unbalanced, and accordingly you will decide to sit down to protect yourself from falling.

Whuu whuu that sounds interesting, how about letting me see it instead ?Millions of words.

of course, here it is :

 

[ConradDJ]

2) We have no examples of "radical emergence" in the universe - radical emergence being the emergence of a new category of being from a different category of being.

3) Ergo: experience must be present in some form from the very beginning of the ontological chain of being.

Hi Tam -- I'm puzzled about this. I would have thought that the emergence of life on Earth surely qualifies as "radical"... and though we don't know exactly how it happened, there's nothing really mysterious about it. To the extent that self-replication gets going somehow, by accident, if you're very lucky, you have systems that can evolve. At no point do you suddenly go from one type of entity to another... what's radical / unprecedented is the new evolutionary dynamic.

These ideas are maybe a matter of intellectual taste, until there's a breakthrough that can really illuminate things in a new way. But to my taste, it's much more interesting to use the well-understood example of biological emergence as a starting-point for understanding how really new and unprecedented things can come into being in this world -- human subjectivity, for example, or atoms.

I can't imagine getting very far by taking human subjective consciousness as the model for a universal "inner experience"... since we know human consciousness requires both the most complex biological system in the known universe (brain) and a unique communications system (language) to function the way it does. I realize that human brains are not that dissimilar from ape brains, and there are animal precursors for language. But again, what's "radically emergent" here are not brains or languages per se, but the new evolutionary dynamic that develops them.

 

[Tam Hunt]

Apeiron, my feelings aren't hurt - what I find objectionable is your casual dismissal of others and their thoughts, those who I think deserve at least a modicum of respect, just as all matter enjoys a modicum of experience.

As far as systems science approaches to consciousness, can you post some links to relevant works? If you disagree that the hard problem is a problem then we'll simply have to agree to disagree and that's fine. But as far as systems/physical approaches to consciousness and a TOE approach, I'd suggest reviewing Reg Cahill's work on "process physics." He's a maverick physicist from Flinders University in Australia and he's developed a new physics based explicitly on Whitehead's process philosophy - similar in some ways, at least philosophically, to Bohm's approach. Both Cahill and Bohm take a big think approach to a unified theory of reality that includes consciousness. They both arrive at - as Freeman Dyson also did - an explicitly panexperientialist view of consciousness.

For Cahill, here's a link to a long paper, but I also recommend his 2005 book Process Physics:

http://www.scieng.flinders.edu.au/cpes/people/cahill_r/HPS13.pdf

I'm curious what you think of his approach.

For Bohm, his best works are 1980's Wholeness and the Implicate Order and 1993's The Undivided Universe.

 

[Tam Hunt]

Hi Tam -- I'm puzzled about this. I would have thought that the emergence of life on Earth surely qualifies as "radical"... and though we don't know exactly how it happened, there's nothing really mysterious about it. To the extent that self-replication gets going somehow, by accident, if you're very lucky, you have systems that can evolve. At no point do you suddenly go from one type of entity to another... what's radical / unprecedented is the new evolutionary dynamic.

Conrad, life is not radically emergent in my view. First, life is very difficult to define. I define it like this: life is first and foremost a continuum - not an either/or feature. Life is matter that acts against the statistical laws of nature. As such, life is present in some degree in all matter. This view is known as hylozoism and is an idea that is flirted with by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan in their 1997 book What Is Life? I suspect you will find this view hard to swallow - most do - but if that's the case I challenge you to define life in such a way that you arrive at a bright line between what is life and what is not life. With self-replicating RNA, prions, viruses, etc., we are now seeing vivid examples of the fuzzy border of what is traditionally viewed as "alive." We can avoid such parsing and intellectual timidity by simply accepting that life is not a special "all or nothing" feature that appeals to the vitalist impulse in all of us. Rather, we accept that life is present in some degree in all matter and we, as humans, are lucky enough to represent the pinnacle of life in the known universe.

[/QUOTE]These ideas are maybe a matter of intellectual taste, until there's a breakthrough that can really illuminate things in a new way. But to my taste, it's much more interesting to use the well-understood example of biological emergence as a starting-point for understanding how really new and unprecedented things can come into being in this world -- human subjectivity, for example, or atoms.[/QUOTE]

I certainly agree that intellectual taste is a big factor. But I think if we are attempting to create a comprehensive and rational approach to the universe and all its phenomena, we are practically forced to accept panexperientialism and hylozoism (and pantemporalism and panentheism, but those are topics for a different post). I'm not questioning emergence as a useful concept - we have myriad examples of emergence. But these are all examples of weak emergence, not radical emergence. How do we explain subjectivity - the inside of things - without putting it there at the beginning or somewhere else in the chain of being? If we choose not to put it there in the beginning, we need very good reasons to posit its emergence at some later point. We know that the universe generally operates as a continuum (with quantum mechanics the marked exception, which is a necessary feature of the universe as we get down to the very very small realm). As such, we need to avoid what I call the fallacy of qualitative distinction - this is the fallacy we often indulge in by positing a sharp break in nature when a continuum approach is usually better. The two examples I've given, re life and consciousness, are good examples.

[/QUOTE]I can't imagine getting very far by taking human subjective consciousness as the model for a universal "inner experience"... since we know human consciousness requires both the most complex biological system in the known universe (brain) and a unique communications system (language) to function the way it does. I realize that human brains are not that dissimilar from ape brains, and there are animal precursors for language. But again, what's "radically emergent" here are not brains or languages per se, but the new evolutionary dynamic that develops them.[/QUOTE]

This goes to the distinction between consciousness and experience. I'm not suggesting (and no other serious thinker has to my knowledge) that rocks or bacteria have anything approaching the richness of human consciousness. Rather, what I'm suggesting, basing my views on Whitehead and Griffin's panexperientialism, is that all matter has at least some tiny iota of pure experience - what it is like to be that little piece of matter from the inside. When we think through the implications of this view we arrive at some very satisfying conclusions re the nature of human consciousness, matter, energy, time, space, and an accompanying spirituality that is life-affirming and compassionate. These are all topics in my in-progress book.

 

[SDetection]

To Dmitry67:
Hi, do you have more examples of experiences that don't have explanations ?, if you do, post as many as you can.
thanks.

 

[Dmitry67]

SDetection, so you don't believe in qualia?
Can I put a hot iron on your stomach? You will cry from pain, but as qualia does not exist it is just a reaction of your brain to stimulus which help humans to avoid damage to your body and thus gave benefits for the natural selection, right? You don't FEEL pain, well, you REGISTER it as a computer, but it is not PAINFUL?

But seriously, how can we talk about something non falsifiable like qualia? Why if I tell you about non falsiable pink dancing elephants filling the whole space, elephants which do not interact by all 4 fundamental interactions including gravit and thus can not be detected in principle, everyone (including me) would laugh?

Why qualia can not be denied even it is unfalsiable? An answer is obvious. Do you still deny that qualia exists?

 

[Dmitry67]

To Dmitry67:
Hi, do you have more examples of experiences that don't have explanations ?, if you do, post as many as you can.
thanks.

Yes, a tricky question.
You know, there are some patients which can not tolerate some anesthetics or even all of them. So the only solutions is to hypnotize them during surgery. My question is: do then feel pain when they are hypnotized not to feel pain? An obvious answer is NO, but could you analyze this from the position "Hard problem does not exist"?

 

[SDetection]

SDetection, so you don't believe in qualia?
Can I put a hot iron on your stomach? You will cry from pain, but as qualia does not exist it is just a reaction of your brain to stimulus which help humans to avoid damage to your body and thus gave benefits for the natural selection, right? You don't FEEL pain, well, you REGISTER it as a computer, but it is not PAINFUL?

Hi,
Although I think we can virtually simulate any function of our brains (including feeling pain), let me think about the definition of pain for a while.

I don't think qualia exist.

But seriously, how can we talk about something non falsifiable like qualia? Why if I tell you about non falsiable pink dancing elephants filling the whole space, elephants which do not interact by all 4 fundamental interactions including gravit and thus can not be detected in principle, everyone (including me) would laugh?

Why qualia can not be denied even it is unfalsiable? An answer is obvious. Do you still deny that qualia exists?

I didn't read about all aspects of qualia. I meant that, it doesn't exist as an explanation of any of our conscious experiences.
I'm not denying qualia itself, and I hope you explain more about why you think Qualia involves in the state of consciousness.

Yes, a tricky question.
You know, there are some patients which can not tolerate some anesthetics or even all of them. So the only solutions is to hypnotize them during surgery. My question is: do then feel pain when they are hypnotized not to feel pain? An obvious answer is NO, but could you analyze this from the position "Hard problem does not exist"?

Well, if this could actually happen, I think hypnotizing could be also considered as a special type of anesthetics.
Anesthetics temporarily suppress the unconscious function that makes us memorize aspects of our state at any certain moment, and hence, because we cannot recall any prior state of sensing the knife, we won't feel any pain, we are actually unconscious in regard to our sense of touch.

 

[apeiron]

life is first and foremost a continuum - not an either/or feature. Life is matter that acts against the statistical laws of nature. As such, life is present in some degree in all matter.

Successful modelling of the hierarchy of reality must both "see" the causal continuity, and the important discontinuities.

It is indeed very logical to say all must be connected all the way down. Hence mind and life (bios) must in some sense be present all the way down. But then you also have to be able to say why there are also the major "phase transitions" we also see as being obviously there.

Ice is not water, yet it is also water. We do not expect to go all the way down to H2O molecules and see icyness or even liquidity and gassiness at that level of modelling. Yet the potential must exist in some way in certain properties of the molecule.

So I actually agree that we must have a pan- something point of view. Any pan- philosophy based on the vitalism or mentalism is obviously wrong as it treats life and awareness as substances - the entification fallacy. But many would be comfortable treating life and mind as complex forms, processes, global types of organisation.

So let's take the real process view, the systems science approach. The best pan- I've come across would be the pansemiosis story rooted in the metaphysics of CS Peirce. If you read Peirce, you will see how he does indeed start with human mental processes and then moves to a general view of the universe coming into being through a "self-knowing".

Then moving forward into modern era, we have more concrete models of fundamental semiotic form.

You could say that what connects all forms of organised matter in the universe - every level from atoms to minds - is the notion of dissipative structure. This is the theory of self-organising systems, based on thermodynamics, information theory, far from equilbrium systems, all that stuff.

So take a dust devil or tornado spinning across a landscape. These are in some sense alive and mindful. Alive because they are self-sustaining (for a while). Aware (admittedly at a stretch) because they negotiate a path and respond to obstacles.

As if happens, Sagan co-wrote Into the Cool with one of the key dissipative structure theorists.

Anyway, there are bodies of thought that seem to do a good job of modelling the continuum. But they are pan-form or pan-process, not pan-substance or pan-entity.

The hard problem is only a problem for pan-substance approaches. The reason is that substance (chora) is the local formless stuff. The discrete atoms. The H20 molecules. If you have your mind focused on this kind of vision - the atoms of reality - then any kind of higher organisation must catch you out as an emergent surprise.

Next, having agreed there is a pan- story of some kind all the way down, we must then have theories about the major discontinuities. We must be able to see why life and mind were phase transitions.

The simple answer here is genes, neurons, words.

Several times dissipative structures struck on new memory mechanisms, coding devices that could carry local information which could be used to act as systems boundary constraints.

Genes have this power because they discovererd the mechanical trick of sequencing. A complex 3D protein (a continuous form) could be created from a chain of atoms (amino acid sequences). This digitisation of boundary conditions - the constraints under which a protein would self-organise - allowed for recombination and so natural selection. Statistics could tinker with one little link in the chain at a time and see what happened to the global protein forms.

Neurons were also a digitisation move, but not quite as dimension-reducing as genes. Before neurons, cells communicated through diffusion of neuro-transmitters. Locality ruled. With neurons, there was a sudden removal of real life space and time issues - the need to diffuse. The processing of information could suddenly step outside these local constraints. The whole body was connected up "instantly", creating new possibilities for co-ordination and response.

So genes and neurons give you animal minds. We have a similar deal each time to mark a phase transition. The localisation of control over global boundaries. A digitisation move that creates control over dissipative structure.

The human mind was another phase transition due to words. Again like genes, a digital sequential code that allowed for a system's memory, a place to store information about global boundary constraints.

So intelligent theory can see both the fundamental continuity and the reasons for the major phase changes.

If I am impatient with Tam, it is because he talks up process yet thinks as an entifier. That is just such a boring mistake in the 21st century.