This webpage title poses the question: Can Mind Arise from Plain Matter?

[Ferris_bg]

Hi Q_Goest,

I don't see why this paradox troubles you:

This is an important distinction if one wishes to address the issues around mental causation since folks such as Dennett would suggest there is no causal efficacy for mental events and as I've pointed out, this leads to a very serious paradox.

You either accept the dualistic view that mental can interact with physical or you remove the qualia and welcome the materialism. As you stated in post 39, you can't escape the paradox, "mental states enter the causal chain" when qualia exists. But why this should be any problem at all?

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi apeiron,
Thanks for your comments, I tried to respond in parentheses {}.

I would say it is better to think of x as the basic process of awareness - the brain~mind activity that animals have too. So really the story is y~x.
{I'd say that x is the physically measurable state and is objectively measurable.}

Then the extra x* issue is self-awareness. The ability to introspect "objectively" on conscious states.
{yes, x* includes self-awareness, but it also includes all the mental phenomena that we associate with consciousness that some call qualia, some call experience or phenomenal experience, and some call feeling}

Introspection is of course a learned socialised habit, not an innate "hardware" feature.
{Partly true, but introspection could equally arise without socialization as it would seem to follow from consciousness, so I wouldn't say that introspection is strictly something learned. I suspect someone growing up on an island with no one around would discover introspection independently and very quickly}

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert_Mead
{not sure why you referenced these. when providing references, it would be nice to provide your thoughts about a topic, and if those thoughts would benefit from further reading, then providing references would be wonderful, and well accepted.}

And also x* would not be epiphenomenal. Except in a certain sense.

The socialisation of the human brain through the self-regulatory mechanism of language is in fact a good example of downward causation - constraint exerted from a cultural level to the individual level.
{I think this is an excellent example of how we differ in our views and why I've said earlier that we are in 'different camps'. I don't see this example as being one of causation, except in a very loose sense. It's similar to the statement in economics that says, "The cost of goods and services increases with increasing demand." This confuses physical causes (such as the conservation of energy, mass and momentum laws) with very generalized causes that have meaning to us as humans. Human meaning provides us with a wonderful, meaningful and comprehensive understanding of the world around us, but we must resist the temptation of thinking of these concepts as physical causes. They are not physical causes. This is actually nicely explored in Bedau's paper where he talks about "gliders" and the game of life. These things we see as gliders are weakly emergent, but it helps us as humans to understand their behavior. There is no downward causation in the behavior of a glider.}

Society teaches you to mind your manners, pursue certain goals, think in particular ways. The causality is from the global scale to the local so that you in your own head are negotating your needs vs the social needs.

See http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_JCS%20freewill%20article.html

That is of course why Sautoy was reacting with such feigned horror to the notion he had no freewill and his brain was deciding up to 10 seconds ahead of time. Society demands we be in control of our bodies. That is society's need - even if it is a fiction and leads to naive statements about the nature of consciousness.
{let's leave free will and the Leibniz delay out of this thread.}

Thanks,
Q.

 

[apeiron]

If psychology has an operationally definition of something, we should be able to find the neuronal counterpart. Does psychology have an operational definition of "consciousness perception" as opposed to "unconscious perception"?

Traditionally, the literature relies on self-report. The subject tells you what they saw. Or if you are a lab animal, you press a response key or make some other overt action.

In consciousness studies, there has been the call to identify the neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC). Crick and Koch promoted this effort in a series of Nature papers. The effort was generally a bust. Though thalamo-cortical synchrony does correlate well with attentive awareness. There are some reasonable global neuronal measures.

 

[Q_Goest]

Hi Pythagorean, I tried to respond in paren's {}

I must admit, I only remember the experiments itself, not the introductory or commentary of the videos. I don't agree with the statement that consciousness IS brain activity. I'll go more into that later.

I wouldn't say x* = x. I would say, instead that x* is a different frame of reference of x (which means there would be a transform operation involved: x* = T(x). This fits the analogy of the shadow in that way. One may argue that a shadow is somehow causal, but we generally put the blame on the owner of the shadow as being the cause and the shadow itself being the effect (the owner is blocking the sun's photons from hitting the concrete sidewalk, what we call a shadow isn't a substance, it's a lack of 'substance': namely, photons.)
{as I'd mentioned to apeiron, x* represents mental states and x represents physical states. The concept of a transform operation is interesting, but I'd urge you to read more on the topic if it interests you. I haven't seen such an analogy in the literature, but there's probably good reasons for that. Here's my unofficial argument: If there is a transform, then it would very likely violate any kind of multiple realizability argument, at least from the perspective of computationalism. That is, computationalism requires and multiple realization suggests that the mental state x*, can be had by not just any human, such that there are essentially an infinite number of physical states that could correspond to the experience of pain for example, but also by any animal or other life form whatsoever. So if there is a mathematical transform, it needs to be flexible enough to show how every potential experience of a given quale, of which there are essentially an infinite number, equates to that quale. (quale being the singular of qualia) Further, we can't say what limits there are for different quale, it could be infinite. So now you have to have a transform that takes an infinite number of quale and converts them in an infinite number of different ways. }

in 1), did you mean to include "what is spoken" as x? You had elsewhere defined it as y, which I would have agreed more with.
{x and y are physical states. I didn't mean to be that specific as to which state had the physical report and which one led up to that report, but generally the physical state that has the report is labeled as y}

Subjective experience may by far be the most difficult thing to figure out how to measure , but is it truly impossible? I can't find the paper right now (I will look harder after this post, or maybe somebody else knows the study that I'm referring to) that showed how dogs stored smells was very similar to how we stored notes. In the way we can detect octaves, the dog can detect an extra enzyme on an aroma.
{remember that how dogs store smells requires a physical explanation. don't conflate physical and mental phenomena. our experience of the smell is the mental phenomena. what physically happens in creating that smell requires physical states.

Between humans, we can share the experience of red, and neurologists can measure brain activity in several test subjects imagining or observing red.

The more qualia we begin to map out in terms of neurological activity, the more chances we have of discovering emergent properties, and explaining (which we already can in terms of core physics) why some members of our species don't experience red like we do.

If you were a neuroscientist and a musician, wouldn't it be enriching for you to play different kinds of music on many different types of subjects while using something like an fMRI? Or even to do experiments in the qualia, red (given that you're not colorblind).

If we get a firm physical grasp of how we can experience the color red, and then we can physically altar someone who is colorblind to be able to experience red (using what we've discovered) have we not made the case?
{not sure what you mean by this. I disagree we can figure out how a given experience emerges given the computational paradigm. It will require something different, but that explanation is outside the scope of this tread.}

What if we observed physically similar phenomena. Could we make a particular kind of weather pattern experience the color red? No probably not, but that's not suprising because it's not the same physical phenomena, it's just similar (hypothetically of course). It can never be the same physical phenomena without actually having the components of the brain.
{The concept of 'physically similar phenomena' experiencing something the same as a person has been done to death in the literature. Hinckfuss pail for example. That's a whole other thread}


I find no reason to believe the transform x* = T(x) has a 1 to 1 correlation with x. The transform could map n-dimensional space to m-dimensional space for all we know. You'd also have to define "reliable". We can report emotions to each other in a way that's vaguely consistent using language. In the same we, most of us agree on what the color red is (and the failure of a colorblind person to do so can be explained physically). There's always some confidence less than 100% in our report, but that goes with any observation. Of course, when reporting emotions, our confidence is considerably lower than when reporting something like length.
{are you suggesting that the transform requires an additional dimension? I don't disagree, but this violates the causal closure of the physical domain.}

I personally don't agree that consciousness is brain activity. I only demand that consciousness results from brain activity. If you can stop all brain activity, you stop consciousness. I don't mean to say that consciousness exists in all brain activity; just that if you shut the whole thing down, you'll be sure to nail it.
{that's fine, and i agree. in philosophical terms, consciousness doesn't just result from brain activity, it is supervenient on it. Everyone should agree with such statements, and also that stopping brain activity thus stops the mental states.}

In physics, we have lots of things that aren't the physical movements themselves. They are a summation or a statistical abstract of the system. We chose such parameters, not because they're inherent to the system (though they may be) but because they're relevant to the way in which we view the system and our process of understanding it in a categorical way (because stereotyping makes learning faster, if flawed).
{yes, good point. we discussed this briefly in pftest's thread regarding supervenience. pressure of a gas is supervenient on the movement of the molecules, so there are an infinite number of physical microstates that can lead to a physical macrostate. Problem is that mental states (macrostates) aren't objectively measurable.}

What if qualia are classification schemes that our brain uses to integrate and store sensory data? The definition of mind is vague, of course. If you would include all of the brain's activities and function as mind, then I'd think you'd be taking it too far. I was always under the impression that "mind" was only the part that you're aware of.

For instance, we don't notice that the floor is pushing up on our feet as we sit here reading posts. That stimulus isn't being directed the the higher functions of the brain that we associate with mind. It's being handled by lower function until the point where you begin to ponder "hey... the floor is pushing up on my feet".

In the same way, short of us pondering it, the color red isn't brought to our mind's attention when we observe it. One of our memory functions classifies light (with a particular range of frequencies) and files it away and compares it to similar observations in the future. We can view the resulting discussion, later some day, on physics forums, as a result of many different brain functions all fulfilling their "duties" in exactly the way the neurons allow them to.

That is, there may be no single decision-making process in the brain that we can wrap together in a tidy bow and call "mind". And there's no reason for me to believe our experience as an individual encompasses a significant fraction of all the things our brain is doing at once.
{I don't disagree that many things our bodies do, never enter our conscious world. The issue we have to wrestle with regards the mind-body problem - Why should ANY (or why should only SOME) of the physical processes that occur result in mental states? That's the problem in a nutshell.}

Thanks,
Q.

 

[apeiron]

I suspect someone growing up on an island with no one around would discover introspection independently and very quickly

Well you suspect wrong. This is why the conversations here are so half-arsed. Everyone talks off the top of their heads without doing their basic research.

http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_feral%20children.html

 

[Math Is Hard]

Well you suspect wrong. This is why the conversations here are so half-arsed. Everyone talks off the top of their heads without doing their basic research.

http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_feral%20children.html

How do we know that these feral children were developmentally normal? That seems to be a confound in the case of a more recent feral child http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)" , who was possibly mildly mentally retarded, and received this diagnosis before her imprisonment. She had a strange walk and never learned to speak normally, despite intense efforts at rehabilitation after her rescue. In that case there doesn't seem to be a way to tease apart the effects of the abuse and retardation from the effects of social isolation.

Genie's diagnosis of a mental disability seems to have led to her cruel circumstances. It is just speculation on my part, but it seems that there's the possibility that these wild children may have been abandoned because of their developmental abnormalities. In other words, the abnormalities could have caused the isolation rather than the isolation causing the abnormalities.

 

[apeiron]

Genie's diagnosis of a mental disability seems to have led to her cruel circumstances. It is just speculation on my part, but it seems that there's the possibility that these wild children may have been abandoned because of their developmental abnormalities. In other words, the abnormalities could have caused the isolation rather than the isolation causing the abnormalities.

Correct. That is an alternative explanation. That was my reading of Genie's case (of which there is quite a literature). And it is of course possible that two separate indian babies were abandoned near birth because their developmental abnormalities were already apparent. Then picked up by wolves.

But having read the source materials in full, it seems more probable they were normal babies stolen rather than defective babies abandoned.

Did you also read?
http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_helen%20keller.html

 

[Math Is Hard]

Did you also read?
http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_helen%20keller.html

I haven't, but I will. Thanks!

 

[apeiron]

How can we know what a computer experiences since everything a computer does can be FULLY explained in physical terms? This argument can be extended to the mind given the present computational paradigm.

I realize some folks feel a system approach and some form of downward causation are instructive. The paper "Physicalism, Emergence and Downward causation" by Campbell and Bickhard for example, is right up your ally. They discuss mental causation and reference Kim. To me, it's all mere handwaving.
I'm on the other side of the fence. Craver and Bechtel2 I think do a nice job of getting in between the two camps and provide an argument that you might find interesting.

Getting back to the OP, which is an interesting issue, I do take a radical position on downward causation in believing it really exists as a fundamental variety of causation.

I would call it constraint and I would call it global. In dichotomistic contrast (ie: asymetric but mutual) to local causality, which is constructive or additive and, of course, local.

This sounds dualistic to some, perhaps, but it is not as both causalities develop out of a prior shared state of vagueness and they interact to form an equilibrium hierarchy state. So it is a systems view. Again, a dichotomistic story, not dualistic.

It is a hard story to get your head around for sure as it is completely dynamic. Everything is moving and developing. Nothing is securely nailed down as the prime mover that moves everything else. But who said deep truths had to be easy .

Now let's pick the eyes out of that Craver and Bechtel paper, if that is the view you synch with.

Many philosophers (e.g., Alexander 1927; and several authors in Andersen
et al. 2000) and scientists (e.g., Morgan 1927; Campbell 1974; Sperry 1976)
appeal to top-down causes in their explanations. Such appeals evoke concerns
that the notion of top-down causation is incoherent or that it involves spooky
forces exerted by wholes upon their components.

So there is a history of people thinking this way. And a history of (largely anglo-saxon) resistance.

In our view, the phrase ‘topdown
causation’ is often used to describe a perfectly coherent and familiar
relationship between the activities of wholes and the behaviors of their components,
but the relationship is not a causal relationship.

Likewise, the phrase
‘bottom-up causation’ does not, properly speaking, pick out a causal relationship.
Rather, in unobjectionable cases both phrases describe mechanistically
mediated effects.

Mechanistically mediated effects are hybrids of
constitutive and causal relations in a mechanism, where the constitutive relations
are interlevel, and the causal relations are exclusively intralevel. Appeal to
top-down causation seems spooky or incoherent when it cannot be explicated
in terms of mechanistically mediated effects.

So far this could work for me. They are identifying a basic dichotomy - interlevel constitutive relations and intralevel causal relations. That looks like what I would mean by constraint and construction.

And whereas they are taking a mechanical hierarchy approach - where scale is not dichotomised into the local and global - I would take the dichotomistic approach where scale in fact has only two fundamental levels...the local and the global. But I also say that in a system at equilibrium, the local and global are completely mixed over all scales (renormalised you might say).

So in effect, we would both look at some chosen scale of an equilibrium structure and find a "local" mix of local construction and global constraint. Or intralevel causal relations and interlevel constitutive relations as they prefer to describe it.

(Think of the self-similarity of fractals here. Same mix over all scales)

http://www.dichotomistic.com/hierarchies_fractals.html

To say that a causal relation is bottom-up or top-down is to say that things at
one level are causally related to things at another level.3 The term ‘level’ plays
many roles in science. There are levels of abstraction, being, causation,
description, explanation, function, and generality, to name a few, and these are
not the same. For each, there is a different sense in which a cause can be said to
be at the top (or bottom) and a different sense in which its influence is propagated
downward (or upward). In this discussion, we focus on levels of
mechanisms.

Fair enough. But you can see how the assumptions are now being wired into the argument. My approach sees mechanism as a subset of a wider world. Here I would refer you back to Robert Rosen and Howard Pattee especially. And of course the Peircean notion of vagueness.

So I stand for an "organic" approach in which mechanicalism is emergent. Something else (self-organising development) is fundamental.

Finally, higher levels of mechanisms are, by definition, mechanistically
explicable. One might object that we thereby exclude ‘emergent’ causes by fiat.
A defining mark of ‘strongly emergent properties’ is that they have no mechanistic
explanation. The organization of components in a mechanism may
allow the novel property to ‘emerge,’ but the property has no explanation in
terms of the operation of that mechanism. We acknowledge that there can be
no levels of mechanisms when decomposition is impossible in principle. We
draw two conclusions from this observation. First, the notion of ‘level’
involved in considering cases of emergence is not the same as the notion of level
that is so ubiquitous in biology. Levels of mechanisms are constitutive levels;
levels of strong emergence are not.

For this reason, the notion of strong
emergence can borrow no legitimacy from its loose association with the levels
of mechanisms so ubiquitous in biology and elsewhere. Second, our account
places a burden on the defender of strongly emergent properties to explain why
top-down causation from emergent to nonemergent properties is different from
mundane causation between two distinct properties.

So now we get down to it.

The global scale is just more mechanism. Mechanism is intralevel causality. Intralevel means local constructive action. So the global scale is only a construction which can exert unchallenging downward effects. Nothing spooky going on as it all reduces to the smallest scale ultimately.

And if you have emergent properties that just pop-out at the global level, then by definition they are not mechanistic. If you claim this, then you either have not really modeled the situation correctly (there are hidden local variables, you just haven't figured them out) or you are a fruit loop baby.

Sorry, I mean it is of course you who owe us an explanation of that negative finding. We know there must be hidden local variables out there in the darkness, so just keep looking and report back to reductionism central when you've found them.

[I've got to go for a bike ride so I continue this later...]

 

[pftest]

In physics, we have lots of things that aren't the physical movements themselves. They are a summation or a statistical abstract of the system. We chose such parameters, not because they're inherent to the system (though they may be) but because they're relevant to the way in which we view the system and our process of understanding it in a categorical way (because stereotyping makes learning faster, if flawed).
{yes, good point. we discussed this briefly in pftest's thread regarding supervenience. pressure of a gas is supervenient on the movement of the molecules, so there are an infinite number of physical microstates that can lead to a physical macrostate. Problem is that mental states (macrostates) aren't objectively measurable.}

Ive argued against this in my topic and will briefly do so again since its relevant here (see the argument at the bottom of my post). As is mentioned here, the supervenient phenomenon is a "summation", or an "abstract" (and atyy calls it "a useful concept"). The reason why this cannot be the case for mind, is simple: we did not invent mind. Each of the terms summation/abstract/concept are already mental activities. So to claim that mind is a summation/abstract/concept is to claim that mind = mind, or worse, that mind brought itself into existence by summarising/abstracting/conceptualising itself. Mind cannot have originated as a concept because concepts require a mind in the first place. It cannot have been invented because inventions require a mind in the first place.

So it follows that experiences or qualia cannot be to the brain like what pressure is to moving atoms. Supervenience can't be relevant to the causal powers of mind.

Then there is (from what I've read so far) the issue that only weak emergence occurs. Something simple may become very complex and appear radically different, but don't let appearances fool you: it is still just a complex version of the simple thing.

So let's take this argument:
--------------------------------------
p1. causation is upwards and happens at a fundamental (smallest) level
p2. mind causes
c: mind causes at a fundamental level and is not limited to brains
--------------------------------------

p1 could be argued against with:
- examples of non-mental supervenience
- examples of strong emergence
- examples of non-fundamental downward causation
p2 can (as far as i know) only be argued against by adopting dualism and results in an eternal realm of mind disconnected from the physical world.

 

[atyy]

that mind brought itself into existence by summarising/abstracting/conceptualising itself

That feels good to me - why do you think it's problematic?

 

[pftest]

That feels good to me - why do you think it's problematic?

For materialism this a problem, it holds that brains brought mind into existence.

 

[Pythagorean]

Ive argued against this in my topic and will briefly do so again since its relevant here (see the argument at the bottom of my post). As is mentioned here, the supervenient phenomenon is a "summation", or an "abstract" (and atyy calls it "a useful concept"). The reason why this cannot be the case for mind, is simple: we did not invent mind. Each of the terms summation/abstract/concept are already mental activities. So to claim that mind is a summation/abstract/concept is to claim that mind = mind, or worse, that mind brought itself into existence by summarising/abstracting/conceptualising itself. Mind cannot have originated as a concept because concepts require a mind in the first place. It cannot have been invented because inventions require a mind in the first place.

So it follows that experiences or qualia cannot be to the brain like what pressure is to moving atoms. Supervenience can't be relevant to the causal powers of mind.

But we did "invent" the concept of mind in the same way we "invented" the concept of pressure! We weren't somehow born knowing what a mind was and had to struggle with inventing pressure. In both cases, a lot of research and observation went into studying and labeling emergent properties of the systems.

My argument is that we really never leave the mind and safely make 100% objective observations/measurements. We're on a sliding scale where some things are more objective while others are more subjective. In this way, we can't separate the physical states from the mental states like the OP suggests. We never really leave the mental state, we only use repeatability to eliminate what's not the physical state from within our mental state.

Even the idea of qualia is fuzzy. We have to qualitatively define the values we're measuring in physics. We can't just cast rattle off numbers, they have to have qualifications attached to them. This is where subjectivity enters. The atom is a great example. The atom went through many models. None of them are completely objective, but they become more objective the more we can understand and isolate the phenomena we're interested in.

 

[pftest]

But we did "invent" the concept of mind in the same way we "invented" the concept of pressure! We weren't somehow born knowing what a mind was and had to struggle with inventing pressure. In both cases, a lot of research and observation went into studying and labeling emergent properties of the systems.

You can't invent anything without a mind in the first place. The first egg can't have been laid by an egg (unless eggs are fundamental). Sure we may have ideas about what mind is and does, and such beliefs may be an invention and may be true or false, but the invention itself is still based on our previous experiences. We were born conscious and to be conscious is to have a mind.

My argument is that we really never leave the mind and safely make 100% objective observations/measurements. We're on a sliding scale where some things are more objective while others are more subjective. In this way, we can't separate the physical states from the mental states like the OP suggests. We never really leave the mental state, we only use repeatability to eliminate what's not the physical state from within our mental state.

Even the idea of qualia is fuzzy. We have to qualitatively define the values we're measuring in physics. We can't just cast rattle off numbers, they have to have qualifications attached to them. This is where subjectivity enters. The atom is a great example. The atom went through many models. None of them are completely objective, but they become more objective the more we can understand and isolate the phenomena we're interested in.

I agree. However this is a methodological issue isn't it?

 

[Pythagorean]

You can't invent anything without a mind in the first place. An egg can't have laid itself either. Sure we may have ideas about what mind is and does, and such beliefs may be an invention and may be true or false, but the invention itself is still based on our previous experiences.

But you're basing your argument off of your conclusion. You're assuming that the mind you and I think of are exactly the mind that we possess. If it's something else happening (that we greatly simplified and come to call the mind) then we have very little idea of about.

Also, I'm not saying we completely invented pressure. There's some phenomena their that we interpret as pressure. My argument is that in the same way, there's some phenomena going on that we interpret as mind. We don't even know that the mind really exists as objectively as something like pressure does. This is why we must reserve discussions of mind for philosophy, while pressure is a scientific quantity.

We were born conscious and to be conscious is to have a mind.

Depending on your definition of consciousness, are you sure about this? Could we not argue that a newborn baby is completely a system of wired reflexes (for instance, if you stick your tongue out a newborn baby, she'll stuck her tong out back. They're hardwired to mimic, it's not something they learn. This a well known experiment, and I've done it myself with my newborn. Paul Bloom talks about it a little bit
http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/introduction-to-psychology/content/class-sessions
(see session 5)

Then, through long-term stimulation, certain mimicked behaviors are "rewarded" and "punished" (by neurotransmitters) and from this system emerges something we eventually call consciousness because the stimuli history has been completely unique to that organism.

 

[Pythagorean]

I agree. However this is a methodological issue isn't it?

You can argue that, but there's no method that escapes it yet. We can never prove a negative (like that there's not an invisible God) but we don't have any evidence that it's methodological.

I don't believe in God or that any method will come about that can allow us to make 100% objective measurements of the physical world despite the fact that I can never disprove either of these statements.

addendum:

by the way, pftest, thank you for making an argument with premises and conclusions. I will review it and respond soon.

 

[Pythagorean]

I think we should all agree on a definition of mind, or at least make clear our definitions of mind. This is a definition provided for conscious awareness:

Conscious awareness: "The conscious aspect of the mind involving our awareness of the world and self in relation to it"

http://wps.pearsoned.co.uk/wps/media/objects/2784/2851009/glossary/glossary.html#C

From the same reference, mind is defined:

mind: A term unlikely to generate consensus of definition. As used here, it refers to the software aspect of human information process-ing systems of the brain, some of which are open to conscious introspection but most of which are unconscious (Chapter 22).

The first sentence I would agree with, which is why I think it's important that everyone submit a definition of mind, or at least agree with this one.

In my responses, I've considered mental causation to be events associated with the sensation of individuality, intent, and choice that we consciously feel. I realize now why it was brought up that willpower is irrelevant.

My argument from this definition:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
p1. All events exist as signals (even the idea of "signal" itself) in biological neural networks as a representation (or response) of something from the physical world (this holds for the concept of "velocity" as much as it does for the concept of "red"; even "software" and "mind" themselves are representations of something we experience in the physical world. The actual events, of course, don't happen in our brain signals, but our brain's signal model is the only access we have to those events, and of course, "events" is itself is an abstract of what's "really going on".
p2. These signals necessarily enter the cause/effect chain, as they are (to the best of our knowledge) physical electric signals.

conclusion: mind causes
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Though, I don't see exactly how upward or downward causation come into it. Building a hierarchy seems like it has some significant subjectivity to it.

From Wiki:

Physicalist solutions

The other major option is to deny that mental events are non-physical. Views that fall under this general heading are called physicalism or materialism. But, such views require a particular theory of how mental events are physical in nature. One such theory is behaviorism. Behaviorists, in general, argue that mental events are merely dispositions to behave in certain ways. Another theory is the identity theory, according to which mental events are (either type- or token-) identical to physical events. A more recent view, known as functionalism, claims that mental events are individuated (or constituted by) the causal role they play. As such, mental events would fit directly into the causal realm, as they are simply certain causal (or functional) roles. Finally, there is eliminative materialism, which simply denies that there are any such mental events; thus, there is really no problem of mental causation at all.

(emphasis added)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_mental_causation

Here is an example of the bolded. I am referring to his talk about synesthesia (his third subject) but I think all of it is relevant. The behavioral view would appreciate how a particular behavior like creativity is linked to the way neurons are connected.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html

On his second subject, note that the man intellectually knew that he wasn't looking at his phantom limb, yet he was still able to fool his brain. This supports the behaviorlism view, as the man (as an "individual") had no control over his brain function as much as outside stimuli with respect to a particular brain behavior did.

Personally, I believe a lot of people's personal definitions and perceptions of mind in a dualist sense arise from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_gyrus" of the brain, which has been shown to be associated with out-of-body experiences. VR Ramachandran discusses the angular gyrus a bit in his presentation above.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/health/psychology/03shad.html?_r=1

 

[pftest]

First, here are my definitions:

* My definition of consciousness is "having experiences". Examples of experiences are for example pain, what it feels like to see a car, etc. This is my theoretically neutral definition of C. It doesn't state C is material or non-material, it just refers to our experiences, and we all understand what we mean when talking about them.

* I am less clear on the definition of mind, but i do hold that anything that is conscious, has a mind.

But you're basing your argument off of your conclusion. You're assuming that the mind you and I think of are exactly the mind that we possess. If it's something else happening (that we greatly simplified and come to call the mind) then we have very little idea of about.

Also, I'm not saying we completely invented pressure. There's some phenomena their that we interpret as pressure. My argument is that in the same way, there's some phenomena going on that we interpret as mind. We don't even know that the mind really exists as objectively as something like pressure does. This is why we must reserve discussions of mind for philosophy, while pressure is a scientific quantity.

When you say "there is some phenomena that we interpret as mind", you are putting the act of interpretation as the origin of mind. You are essentially saying that mind is different than it appears. It may seem like you could get rid of mind that way, but where does that "appearing" or "interpreting" come from? What I am saying is that all such acts (interpreting, appearing, summarising, abstracting, conceptualising, etc) already are mental activities (since they involve consciousness - see my definitions). Note that I am not saying mind is immaterial. It makes no difference to the argument either way.

Depending on your definition of consciousness, are you sure about this? Could we not argue that a newborn baby is completely a system of wired reflexes (for instance, if you stick your tongue out a newborn baby, she'll stuck her tong out back. They're hardwired to mimic, it's not something they learn. This a well known experiment, and I've done it myself with my newborn. Paul Bloom talks about it a little bit
http://oyc.yale.edu/psychology/introduction-to-psychology/content/class-sessions
(see session 5)

Then, through long-term stimulation, certain mimicked behaviors are "rewarded" and "punished" (by neurotransmitters) and from this system emerges something we eventually call consciousness because the stimuli history has been completely unique to that organism.

Im not sure if newborns are conscious. I do think a baby needs to be conscious (have vision) in order to see someone else stick out his tongue and mimic it. Blind ones probably don't do it. But this is not important to my point, which was that the statement "mind is caused by interpretation/conceptualisation", is principally the same as the statement "mind is caused by a dream", and it boils down to "mind is caused by mind". So by this logic there must be mind before any babies or even before any life existed.

---------------------------------------------------
Btw i see we are drifting away from mental causation, so this line of discussion might be better suited for this topics of mine:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=358210
or maybe https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=346426

If you reply in any of those then i will do the same there.

 

[Pythagorean]

When you say "there is some phenomena that we interpret as mind", you are putting the act of interpretation as the origin of mind. You are essentially saying that mind is different than it appears. It may seem like you could get rid of mind that way, but where does that "appearing" or "interpreting" come from? What I am saying is that all such acts (interpreting, appearing, summarising, abstracting, conceptualising, etc) already are mental activities (since they involve consciousness - see my definitions). Note that I am not saying mind is immaterial. It makes no difference to the argument either way.

The behaviorist view (which is a stance on the 'problem of mental causation') takes the viewpoint that all those actions (interpreting, abstracting, etc.) come from the neural networks. From what I can tell, it's a combination of 1) the way neurons make connections with each other and 2) the way signals arrive from sensory input.

But advanced concepts like these are built over the long-term in the neural network, they don't appear overnight.

Im not sure if newborns are conscious. I do think a baby needs to be conscious (have vision) in order to see someone else stick out his tongue and mimic it. Blind ones probably don't do it. But this is not important to my point, which was that the statement "mind is caused by interpretation/conceptualisation", is principally the same as the statement "mind is caused by a dream", and it boils down to "mind is caused by mind". So by this logic there must be mind before any babies or even before any life existed.

I don't mean to say mind is caused by mind. The real mind is caused by neurons, quite simply. Our concept of mind is represented abstractly by signals in those neurons (i.e. our concept of mind is caused by the real mind.) In fact, from a behaviorist view, one could even argue that there is no mind, there is only behaviors that we sum up to "mind" for our own simplicity.

In the newborn example, we could argue that the babies brain simply receives inputs and sends outputs in the way the neurons were shaped to do so. The baby doesn't need to "know" it's mimicing; it's just a mechanism (output response to an input) that the neurons (which are connected to muscles) are experiencing.

http://www.fpnotebook.com/Nicu/Exam/NwbrnRflxs.htm" a list of newborn reflexes. My argument would be that these built-in reflexes allow the baby to survive and interact enough to develop an abstraction layer (a "map" of how they can interact with the world) through trial and error. As the abstraction layer becomes more complex and abstract, it becomes more like something we would call consciousness (though I wouldn't deny that the baby itself had consciousness... just a very limited form of it).

My point is ultimately that the baby does not know what it is doing. It's neurons are just responding to stimuli and adjusting for it. By the time we're adults, we may not know what we're doing either, our neurons have just become adapt at getting the dopamine and serotonin through the right combination of responses to particular inputs.

Btw i see we are drifting away from mental causation, so this line of discussion might be better suited for this topics of mine:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=358210
or maybe https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=346426

If you reply in any of those then i will do the same there.

I will take a look at those threads later, but when we use statements to support our conclusion, I think the statements are still relevant to the conclusion. (I.e. we are actually still on the topic of mental causation; we're analyzing one of your supporting arguments pertaining to your argument about mental causation).

Also note that post 107 was my response to your formal argument. It's not a rebuttal, just an inspired response.

 

[pftest]

My argument is that a causal mind is a mind that is not limited to brains. I am not sure if we disagree on this (because of what you mentioned about Koch), but my reply below is with that argument as the main point.

I don't mean to say mind is caused by mind. The real mind is caused by neurons, quite simply. Our concept of mind is represented abstractly by signals in those neurons (i.e. our concept of mind is caused by the real mind.) In fact, from a behaviorist view, one could even argue that there is no mind, there is only behaviors that we sum up to "mind" for our own simplicity.

I understand that you didnt mean to say mind is caused by mind, but that's just what the comparison "mind is to brain, like what pressure is to atoms" boils down to. In my view materialists (which I am not sure you are) should never mention the pressure example to support their ideas because it supports exactly the opposite.

Now the behaviorist view: everything has behaviour, so by equating mind with behaviour, we end up with a causal mind that is omnipresent. Suppose we state that "we have no mind at all, just behaviour", we are then left with the consequence that other things that have no mind at all (for example rocks), can have experiences as vivid as humans do. That we do not call it "mind" is only a semantic issue, not a qualitative difference between the human state we call mind and rocks. After all there is no qualitative difference in behaviour between the two either, only a quantitative difference in complexity.

In the newborn example, we could argue that the babies brain simply receives inputs and sends outputs in the way the neurons were shaped to do so. The baby doesn't need to "know" it's mimicing; it's just a mechanism (output response to an input) that the neurons (which are connected to muscles) are experiencing.

http://www.fpnotebook.com/Nicu/Exam/NwbrnRflxs.htm" a list of newborn reflexes. My argument would be that these built-in reflexes allow the baby to survive and interact enough to develop an abstraction layer (a "map" of how they can interact with the world) through trial and error. As the abstraction layer becomes more complex and abstract, it becomes more like something we would call consciousness (though I wouldn't deny that the baby itself had consciousness... just a very limited form of it).

My point is ultimately that the baby does not know what it is doing. It's neurons are just responding to stimuli and adjusting for it. By the time we're adults, we may not know what we're doing either, our neurons have just become adapt at getting the dopamine and serotonin through the right combination of responses to particular inputs.

Yes i think this also illustrates what i just said: by taking this route, one says that the adult brain is qualitatively no different from the baby brain: both have no mind (though there is a quantitative difference of complexity). What if we take this a step further: the adult brain is qualitatively no different from a thermostat. You end up with thermostats that, while semantically having no mind, can have as vivid experiences as adult brains do. And it doesn't stop with thermostats.

 

[Pythagorean]

My argument is that a causal mind is a mind that is not limited to brains. I am not sure if we disagree on this (because of what you mentioned about Koch), but my reply below is with that argument as the main point.

This is a very alluring idea. I've considered it a lot. On the one hand, why should something like consciousness be limited to living organisms if consciousness can be explained as a physical process?

On the other hand, what we define as the causal mind is a very complex physical process that we're still trying to understand. It may be that the brain is the only place the causal minds arrive in nature.

"mind is to brain, like what pressure is to atoms" boils down to. In my view materialists (which I am not sure you are) should never mention the pressure example to support their ideas because it supports exactly the opposite.

It supports the opposite only if you assume that pressure and mind are real, natural things, and not man-made concepts.

Now the behaviorist view: everything has behaviour, so by equating mind with behaviour, we end up with a causal mind that is omnipresent. Suppose we state that "we have no mind at all, just behaviour", we are then left with the consequence that other things that have no mind at all (for example rocks), can have experiences as vivid as humans do. That we do not call it "mind" is only a semantic issue, not a qualitative difference between the human state we call mind and rocks. After all there is no qualitative difference in behaviour between the two either, only a quantitative difference in complexity.

I disagree that a rock's experiences would be that complex if a rock experienced anything at all. I don't think the idea of vividness or even a "vividness" detector would exist in a rock. There could be many processes going on in a rock (phonons, thermodynamics) but the circuity that we use to study neurons and cognitive processes doesn't appear to exist in the rock.

The rock may not even have the concept of individuality. It may not separate itself from the world like we do. We see a boundary between rock and world, between us and world. But the boundary is not solid. Nor could we even survive as this individual life-form we believe we are. We depend on bacteria every day that have formed a symbiotic relationship with us. Bacteria that we would die with out.

Yes i think this also illustrates what i just said: by taking this route, one says that the adult brain is qualitatively no different from the baby brain: both have no mind (though there is a quantitative difference of complexity). What if we take this a step further: the adult brain is qualitatively no different from a thermostat. You end up with thermostats that, while semantically having no mind, can have as vivid experiences as adult brains do. And it doesn't stop with thermostats.

But notice, you've said "qualitatively" no different, but then went on to say that they're quantitatively different by saying "as vivid"

But we have no reason to believe that experience takes place in a thermostat or rock; at least, not whatsoever in the way we experience it. We're getting a feel for how we experience it through complex neural circuitry.

 

[pftest]

On the other hand, what we define as the causal mind is a very complex physical process that we're still trying to understand. It may be that the brain is the only place the causal minds arrive in nature.

Yes its complex, that's why i said the difference between a rock and a brain are a difference in complexity (which i call a quantitative difference). So if a behaviorist said that complex behaviour equals complex mind, then the consequence is that simple behaviour equals simple mind. Since the difference between the two is only in their complexity (of the way the physical ingredients behave and are arranged), there is no justification for any other type of difference, such as a qualitative difference like the arisal of mind out of complete non-mind.

Example: suppose we have a universe that fundamentally consists of balls in motion in space. The balls can interact with each other (bump into each other and cause a change in their movements), but the space has no causal powers (its not curved, has no gravity and such). These are the fundamental ingredients of this imaginary universe.

The motion and the number of balls in a specific area may vary. So there may be an area with just 2 balls bouncing against each other, and there may be an area with 10.000 balls doing figure 8 movements and moving in all kinds of unpredictable ways. The difference between these two situations is a difference in quantity/complexity. But you can see that no matter how complex the balls start moving, its still just moving balls in space and there is no justification for supposing that little square objects start appearing and that space suddenly gets curved and causes the motion of balls to change. That would be a qualitative difference.

You are right that the rock may not have a sense of individuality and even if it did it will not have the same experiences as a human brain does because of the difference in complexity (i talked about vividness because even simple experiences may be very vivid). The difference in their physical complexities allows a difference in their mental complexities, since the behaviorist thinks one = the other.

It supports the opposite only if you assume that pressure and mind are real, natural things, and not man-made concepts.

Concepts are mental activities so the statement "mind is a man-made concept" boils down to "mind is a mind". So that is still not materialist and the pressure example just doesn't support it. I don't think there is any other example of "supervenience" that supports it either.

 

[Pythagorean]

<snip>
That would be a qualitative difference.
<snip>

But we can show quite easily how quantitative differences do bring about qualitative differences. We can know how one particle behaves alone, but if we throw another particle in there, we can't just change all the 1's to 2's. We have completely different behavior.

We can know the properties of atoms and are still not able to predict how the same atoms would behave as a molecule.

This is the whole concept of emergent systems. You can understand your fundamental bits great, but it doesn't mean you're going to understand how a system of fundamental bits is going to work. Look at the computer experience that comes out of a system of 1's and 0's. We're able to communicate whole ideas and convey sound and audio over machine code without ever knowing machine code.

Also, the line between qualitative and quantitative is not a fine one. It is fine for scientific work, but in philosophy we have to accept that quantity is meaningless without quality. You may call geometry a qualitative description, but we can easily describe geometry quantitatively, as long as we label our quantities with qualities (length, angle, dimension, etc)

So a purely quantitative description would be meaningless, and a purely qualitative one is filled with so much meaning that ambiguities arise.

Concepts are mental activities so the statement "mind is a man-made concept" boils down to "mind is a mind". So that is still not materialist and the pressure example just doesn't support it. I don't think there is any other example of "supervenience" that supports it either.

I'll restate my point. You're forgetting that there's two different minds here. One is our subjective concept of mind that we tend to associate with our experience more (the mysterious mind), the other is the actual physical processes that manifest in the physical material (the brain). The software mind.

The software mind "boils down" to a bunch of random processes in a system of neurons that happened to find a stable state that allowed survivability are a mind. Not all of the processes are for survivability (but in fact, none of them were ever for stability as nature doesn't have intention and it doesn't willfully design).

Out of this comes a sense of individuality and separateness from the rest of the world (we could indicate the angular gyrus here, which was recently associated with out-of-body experiences.) Out of this comes lots of mental processes (which are a specific class of physical process).

One of those processes categorizes and labels the types of interactions the system is exposed to and another process manages the memorization of it (perhaps the hippocampus is involved here).

You would agree that all of these processes can be explained by physical events in the brain?

The mysterious and subjective mind is a definition that arises from these processes of categorizing. It is not the same as the real mind (the software running on the brain) it is a representation of it, just we have a representation of our environment, and the representation of a border between us and our environment. The representation may be misleading to the actual nature of the things they are representing, but that's ok. The only thing that's important to the mind's existence is survivability.

So, the actual statement is "mind is brain"

 

[pftest]

But we can show quite easily how quantitative differences do bring about qualitative differences. We can know how one particle behaves alone, but if we throw another particle in there, we can't just change all the 1's to 2's. We have completely different behavior.

We can know the properties of atoms and are still not able to predict how the same atoms would behave as a molecule.

I mentioned this "unpredictability" in my previous post (see the bit about the "universe that fundamentally consists of balls in motion in space"). We may not be able to predict how all the balls are going to move. The motion may be very complex and billions of balls may bounce against each other. But we can predict that no matter how many balls there are and no matter how complex they move, you will not get anything beyond balls in motion in space. There will be no sudden appearance of square objects or curved space.

Also, the line between qualitative and quantitative is not a fine one. It is fine for scientific work, but in philosophy we have to accept that quantity is meaningless without quality. You may call geometry a qualitative description, but we can easily describe geometry quantitatively, as long as we label our quantities with qualities (length, angle, dimension, etc)

So a purely quantitative description would be meaningless, and a purely qualitative one is filled with so much meaning that ambiguities arise.

Yes we are forced to describe the world in terms of our mental faculties. We have no choice. But it is different when you say that the universe in general can summarise/conceptualise/make abstractions/etc. and treat those terms as if they are material, non-mental actions. If i said that rocks can dream, then it follows that they have mind no? Similarly if one says that the universe in general (or particles) can summarise/conceptualise/make abstractions/etc., then it follows that it has mind.

The mysterious and subjective mind is a definition that arises from these processes of categorizing. It is not the same as the real mind (the software running on the brain) it is a representation of it, just we have a representation of our environment, and the representation of a border between us and our environment. The representation may be misleading to the actual nature of the things they are representing, but that's ok. The only thing that's important to the mind's existence is survivability.

So, the actual statement is "mind is brain"

Defining, categorising, representing and misleading are all mental activities (they do not happen without consciousness), so the mysterious mind cannot have arisen from those or it would have brought itself into existence. If plain matter (such as rocks and particles) can mislead itself (or have delusions, representations, etc), then i agree that such plain matter contains the ingredients that mind can consist of. However that is no longer materialism. But if on the other hand plain matter is completely devoid of consciousness (and therefore cannot mislead itself either) then your description of how "mysterious mind is a misleading representation" becomes insufficient. Which of the two is it?