Psience Quest

(2023-06-07, 12:28 AM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]By my definition, consciousness is simply something that the brain, perhaps in cooperation with something nonmaterial, does. It creates an awareness.

Here, again, is what I am trying to draw your attention to.  The above statement has a myriad of non-evidential dependencies, leaps of faith, etc that you seem comfortable with and yet you levy criticisms against competing theories for lack of evidence and 'woo'.

You have taken a non-scientific position since, as you admit above, it can not be tested/falsified relying on 'faith' that science will ultimately fill in the gaps (reminiscent of the one free miracle criticism).  That's fine, but recognize it as a subjective position influence by your personal bias/experience and not an objective one.

(2023-06-07, 11:26 AM)David001 Wrote: [ -> ]I suspect that Libet's results indicate that the mind interacts with matter (its brain) over a finite period of time, so that the observation that the brain seems to initiate action before the person is aware of making a decision, is analogous to the contradictions you can get out of QM, where for example a particle can be in two places at the same time.

I think this is the third time you have brought quantum mechanics into this thread, and the arguments don't seem to apply. QM deals with things that happen over very small distances on the order of the Planck length [the atom] [edited 7/4/2-23]. The world we are familiar with, such as the world in which Libet experimented in, is very different. So no, one can not simply negate an experiment by saying that quantum experiments yield unexpected results.

There is a lot of healthy scientific discussion on Libet's experiment, but I know of no scientist using a QM analogy to refute it.

Since you keep bringing up quantum mechanics, can I ask you where you learned about quantum mechanics? There is a lot of Creationist nonsense out there about quantum mechanics that misunderstands what it is all about. Is that where you are getting your information? If not, where are you getting this information about quantum mechanics you mention? Are you an expert on QM?

Quote:Do think through for a moment, how this issue applies to you. Do you really believe that your brain makes decisions without you being aware, and then fools you into believing you made them?

Yes, of course, the brain does things subconsciously. And yes, we do fool ourselves regarding our motivation when the brain makes decisions.  See, for instance, this spilt brain experiment.

How did you form the sentences in the post you wrote? Did you search through a mental dictionary of all the words you knew, selecting those words that gave you the correct sentence? Or did the sentence somehow come to you as you sat at your computer? It seems to me that the sentences just come to us, and we type out what appears in our mind. We have no idea how our minds selected those sentences. The process is largely subconscious.

Yes, when a sentence comes to mind, we may decide to change it, but how did the original sentence get there? And how did the modified sentence suddenly pop into your mind?

Quote:The materialist approach to life may make sense to you (as I admitted above, it did to me) until you start to think about the many contradictions and puzzles it throws up.

So far I haven't seen anybody mention a serious contradiction or puzzle about materialism, other than a question about how material things can make consciousness. That is a well known problem, sometimes referred to as The Hard Problem of Consciousness. I don't know the answer to it. It may be there is something we might call non-material that is part of the cause of consciousness. Or it may be something akin to dark energy or dark matter. (I'm not even sure if those should be called material or non-material, but that is just an argument of definitions.) Or it might be just the brain and associated forces. That is an issue we all know about. What other "contradictions and puzzles" do you refer to?

Quote:Now let's just dwell on that, and ask what the hell it means. If the mind consists of actions done by the brain (or a bit more abstractly, by a bunch of electrochemical reactions) you seem to be envisioning a world in which all sorts of processes might have a mind - there are electrochemical reactions going on in plants, or on bits on iron as they go rusty

I know of no scientists that thinks that nails have consciousness. (If one thinks nails have consciousness, some might argue that this person is as dumb as a nail.  ). Those that insist consciousness is strictly material will tell you it occurs only when there is enough material arranged in a complex way that creates consciousness. 

Similarly, a single water molecules is not wet, but many together make a substance that is wet.

I'm still confused about the argument. Is it:

1. There are no souls. All mental faculties/awareness/memories can be explained by reference to the body & brain [and possibly outside world for External Mind arguments] which are all "physical" which, whatever else that means, lacks any mental character/aspect at the fundamental level.

or

2. There may be a soul but if it exists it must be dependent on the brain which is a "physical" structure as defined above.

Because the latter means taking the idea souls exist as a premise, if not accepting that some aspect of a "filter" theory has to be true.

I think there are so many things being discussed in addition to the two that maybe new threads are warranted, but the above seem most relevant to the thread.

Personally I think the materalist/physicalist explanations are childishly ad hoc attempts to get around the inability for matter to generate mind - see "Consciousness is Illusion" - but I don't know if that is directly relevant to this thread. As I've said a few times, the falsity of Materialism/Physicalism is not a direct argument *for* Survival but in terms of "likelihood" reasoning it helps.

Finally, I am also unsure what relevance free will has to the thread's topic - plenty of religious traditions don't believe in it, heck William Lane Craig's compatibilism is pretty much on par with Dennet's in how it works and why determinism is true. Craig just adds something about God's Perfect Foreknowledge. Eastern traditions that are what we would call "Idealist" also argue that the subconscious is the source of all conscious decisions save perhaps the decision to seek Liberation*. Yet there are expressed belief in Survival in both cases.

*One could argue that Buddha sees this seeking of Liberation as an inevitable response to "swelling the cemeteries" with so many past lives that one becomes "disenchanted with all fabrications". So this would then also not be "free" in the "Libertarian" sense. Yet nevertheless if you have past lives and are becoming tired of living new lives there is Survival and memory of some sort.

(2023-06-06, 11:33 AM)Brian Wrote: [ -> ]I am fond of the idea of x and not-x being one and the same and it seems to pan out in so many subjects.  My issue philosophically is consciousness itself and how it is possible for matter to experience "want" at all.  We have, however, discussed that in so many other threads already.  I am not in the least scientifically literate but at the end of the day, the results of these experiments seem highly interpretable and although I have no PHDs, I might have enough intelligence to be able to give my own interpretation, or to choose not to on the grounds that this is a big grey area, unsolvable by physical observation.

As per my just above post I'm not convinced free will has any real relevance to this thread but you might like philosopher & retired neuroscientist Tallis' Freedom: An Impossible Reality.

He discusses these types of studies.

(2023-06-07, 06:19 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]I'm still confused about the argument. Is it:

1. There are no souls. All mental faculties/awareness/memories can be explained by reference to the body & brain [and possibly outside world for External Mind arguments] which are all "physical" which, whatever else that means, lacks any mental character/aspect at the fundamental level.

or

2. There may be a soul but if it exists it must be dependent on the brain which is a "physical" structure as defined above.

As I understand it Merle's argument involves how reliant cognitive functions are on the physical state of the brain, meaning that either there are no souls or they exist but the brain being responsible for all mental functions means death is the equivalent of a lobotomy.

(2023-06-07, 04:46 PM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]I think this is the third time you have brought quantum mechanics into this thread, and the arguments don't seem to apply. QM deals with things that happen over very small distances on the order of the Planck length. The world we are familiar with, such as the world in which Libet experimented in, is very different. So no, one can not simply negate an experiment by saying that quantum experiments yield unexpected results.

There is a lot of healthy scientific discussion on Libet's experiment, but I know of no scientist using a QM analogy to refute it.

Since you keep bringing up quantum mechanics, can I ask you where you learned about quantum mechanics? There is a lot of Creationist nonsense out there about quantum mechanics that misunderstands what it is all about. Is that where you are getting your information? If not, where are you getting this information about quantum mechanics you mention? Are you an expert on QM?

No, I am not an expert, but I did a PhD that involved some QM calculations, but that was about 50 years ago!

BTW you are horribly wrong about the scale at which QM effects are important, the Plank length is 1.616255)×10^(−35) m, whereas for example the radius of the hydrogen atom - one of the best studied examples of QM is the hydrogen atom, where the Bohr radius is  5.2917721×10^(−11) m - so you are about 20 orders of magnitude wrong!

Quote:Yes, of course, the brain does things subconsciously. And yes, we do fool ourselves regarding our motivation when the brain makes decisions.  See, for instance, this spilt brain experiment.

How did you form the sentences in the post you wrote? Did you search through a mental dictionary of all the words you knew, selecting those words that gave you the correct sentence? Or did the sentence somehow come to you as you sat at your computer? It seems to me that the sentences just come to us, and we type out what appears in our mind. We have no idea how our minds selected those sentences. The process is largely subconscious.

Yes, when a sentence comes to mind, we may decide to change it, but how did the original sentence get there? And how did the modified sentence suddenly pop into your mind?


So far I haven't seen anybody mention a serious contradiction or puzzle about materialism, other than a question about how material things can make consciousness. That is a well known problem, sometimes referred to as The Hard Problem of Consciousness. I don't know the answer to it. It may be there is something we might call non-material that is part of the cause of consciousness. Or it may be something akin to dark energy or dark matter. (I'm not even sure if those should be called material or non-material, but that is just an argument of definitions.) Or it might be just the brain and associated forces. That is an issue we all know about. What other "contradictions and puzzles" do you refer to?



I know of no scientists that thinks that nails have consciousness. (If one thinks nails have consciousness, some might argue that this person is as dumb as a nail.  ). Those that insist consciousness is strictly material will tell you it occurs only when there is enough material arranged in a complex way that creates consciousness. 

Similarly, a single water molecules is not wet, but many together make a substance that is wet.

So do we simply conclude that given a lot of molecules, they could do anything?

To be honest Merle, all your knowledge of this subject seems to be third hand and all you want to do is argue - not learn - so I am disinclined to continue to debate with you.

David

(2023-06-07, 06:39 PM)quirkybrainmeat Wrote: [ -> ]As I understand it Merle's argument involves how reliant cognitive functions are on the physical state of the brain, meaning that either there are no souls or they exist but the brain being responsible for all mental functions means death is the equivalent of a lobotomy.

This bolded bit assumes the existence of souls for the purposes of debate, so it's rather different than someone arguing that souls don't exist. So I don't see how the accusation of ad hoc fallacy can be thrown around in the second case if for no other reason than *if* there are souls to find out what their post-mortem existence is like one logically looks at purported Survival cases. And in those cases souls retain memories.

(Really I'm not convinced the accusation holds much weight at all even in the first case, especially coming Materialists with all their odd religious beliefs hidden by ad hoc terms like "Emergence" or "Illusion of Consciousness".)

I mean IIRC there were (are?) Christians who rejected the idea of a Heavenly afterlife as pagan and believed Paradise will be in this world after some apocalyptic events. These people did think the soul is still there as a lobotomized entity, as a sort of Aristotelian Form without its usual pairing with the "Prime Matter".

So I guess that's a case where souls need brains and have to wait for God to provide new bodies after...Judgement Day or whatever...

(2023-06-07, 07:47 PM)David001 Wrote: [ -> ]No, I am not an expert, but I did a PhD that involved some QM calculations, but that was about 50 years ago!

BTW you are horribly wrong about the scale at which QM effects are important, the Plank length is 1.616255)×10^(−35) m, whereas for example the radius of the hydrogen atom - one of the best studied examples of QM is the hydrogen atom, where the Bohr radius is  5.2917721×10^(−11) m - so you are about 20 orders of magnitude wrong!

So do we simply conclude that given a lot of molecules, they could do anything?

To be honest Merle, all your knowledge of this subject seems to be third hand and all you want to do is argue - not learn - so I am disinclined to continue to debate with you.

David

To be fair I think he conceded some ground in his reply to you:

(2023-06-07, 04:46 PM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]I know of no scientists that thinks that nails have consciousness. (If one thinks nails have consciousness, some might argue that this person is as dumb as a nail.  ). Those that insist consciousness is strictly material will tell you it occurs only when there is enough material arranged in a complex way that creates consciousness.

It seems he agrees with us that *some* arrangements of matter being able to produce consciousness by way of their amount and structure is laughable, he just hasn't included *all* arrangements of matter.

Or to put it another way, to go back to Sam Harris's critique of materialism:

Quote:To say “Everything came out of nothing” is to assert a brute fact that defies our most basic intuitions of cause and effect—a miracle, in other words.

Likewise, the idea that consciousness is identical to (or emerged from) unconscious physical events is, I would argue, impossible to properly conceive—which is to say that we can think we are thinking it, but we are mistaken. We can say the right words, of course—“consciousness emerges from unconscious information processing.” We can also say “Some squares are as round as circles” and “2 plus 2 equals 7.” But are we really thinking these things all the way through? I don’t think so.

Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness.

Merle gives the Materialist faith their religious Something from Nothing miracle, whereas you and I maintain logical consistency from nails to brains.

=-=-=

On a side note:

Even Amnesics Dream of Tetris: Memory study shows that video game images persist despite brain damage

(2023-06-07, 04:46 PM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]So far I haven't seen anybody mention a serious contradiction or puzzle about materialism

In the thread Analytical argument against physicalism, friend of the forum and sometime participant Titus Rivas shared a link to his paper Exit Epiphenomenalism which elaborates on a knock-down argument against physicalism.

Some years later when it came up again (recently) in a different thread, I summarised it as follows:

(2023-05-02, 07:56 AM)Laird Wrote: [ -> ]

1. If consciousness is epiphenomenal, then we do not (because we cannot) know we are conscious.
   
2. We know we are conscious.
   
3. Therefore, consciousness is not epiphenomenal.
   

It might not be clear to you how the first premise in particular is justified, so I encourage you to read Titus's paper to get clear on that.

Ian Wardell put it in his own words in a comment on one of the articles of yours that was posted to this thread:

Ian Wardell Wrote:Consider that one knows in the most immediate manner possible that oneself is conscious. This awareness, moreover, is not an instantaneous thing, it must be smudged out in time. Hence, one might entertain the thought, ‘yes, I know for certain I myself am conscious’, even if not expressed explicitly in words. Could this thought, this realisation, be purely due to chains of physical causes and effects without one’s actual consciousness playing any role in the fruition of this thought? No, because this certainty, this thought, is clearly due to one’s immediate and direct apprehension of one’s own consciousness. In other words, it is simply incoherent to suppose one could be certain of one’s own consciousness through physical chains of causes and effects *alone*. At least in this instance, consciousness is an indispensable ingredient and cannot be causally irrelevant.

You seemed to misunderstand the argument or at least Ian's framing/phrasing of it in your own response:

Merle Wrote:Ian, you say that you know that the soul is needed for consciousness. How do you know that? Do you know it in the same sense that one might “know” that the Sun is orbiting a stationary Earth or that a steel plate is not predominantly empty space at the molecular level? We may think it is obvious that the sun orbits the earth, a steel plate is completely solid, or that a non-material soul is driving our thoughts. That is what we feel! But sometimes science shows our feelings to be wrong.

Ian quite rightly pointed that out in his final comment in reply to you on that article:

Ian Wardell Wrote:You have simply not understood nor assimilated anything I have said.

Note that all the above quotes from comments on your blog are selected extracts, not the full comments.

There are plenty of other serious problems for physicalism, as has been pointed out by others in this thread, but this argument seems to me to be decisive.

(2023-06-05, 11:13 PM)Merle Wrote: [ -> ]I disagree. Foggy memories work just fine. In fact, most of our memories are foggy and change with time.

Perfect Isomorphism has nothing to do with whether a memory is foggy or "photographic". [It means the structure can only have one thing it points to, or to put it another way the material signifier has to signify one - and only one - event from the past. As Braude notes, this is an impossible object.]

If you don't understand a term feel free to ask, will make the conversation run smoother.