Essentia Science of Consciousness Panel

The word - realm is great - such as observing where the fairies sing with the activity of the woodland stream and glen.  The problem is trying to quantify and rationalize the inner communication of nature.  I surely appreciate nature, in the terms of the feelings of belonging and its deep transcendent poetry.  But that is not the work at hand, which is reporting about the progress of science discovering Psi.

Disambiguation is needed between "realms" with cultural feelings and integrated relationships, from the cold hard abstract models of action and substance that characterize the communication and integration of living things.

You seem to keep struggling back to the ground of doubt, about whether nature can be decoded and a simple model emerge.  Mind is not active at the physical level, there are no SI units measuring decisions and cunning.  If you want to measure the dynamics involved with mind actively changing real-world probabilities you need the tools of information science, such as the MTC, linguistics, thermodynamics, sociology, psychology and logic.

Each of these sciences explore the biological "realm" (environments) as to features not address by physics and chemistry.

Each living thing is communicating, gaining knowledge, working in the presence of others, has limited personal experience and must face the objective outcomes from behavior.

Stephen, without hopefully sounding arrogant, I don't think I am struggling with this at all.

I think there is a second realm (which may indeed contain fairies along with many other things). It is probably a mental world and we return there as we die, or possibly we are in both realms while we are alive, and revert to the mental realm as we die.

The normal scientific laws apply to earthly phenomena, and simply do not handle events in the other realm, so you can't model them at all.

Science is (or should be) about collecting data and trying to understand it with the minimum of reinterpretation.

David001, without hopefully sounding arrogant, I don't think I am struggling with this at all.

I think there is a second realm (which may indeed contain fairies along with many other things). It is probably a mental world and we return there as we die, or possibly we are in both realms while we are alive, and revert to the mental realm as we die.

David001, without hopefully sounding arrogant:

I think there is a second realm that only God and His angels inhabit. It is a spiritual world and will reunite with the physical world after judgement and the separation of Christ's people from everybody else, and entropy will no longer take effect because God will keep everything replenished.

Maybe such comments belong in the spirituality section and we should stick here to what the scientific evidence directly suggests, which is what stephenw is trying to do and what psience quest is really all about.

Stephen, without hopefully sounding arrogant, I don't think I am struggling with this at all.

I think there is a second realm (which may indeed contain fairies along with many other things). It is probably a mental world and we return there as we die, or possibly we are in both realms while we are alive, and revert to the mental realm as we die.

The normal scientific laws apply to earthly phenomena, and simply do not handle events in the other realm, so you can't model them at all.

Science is (or should be) about collecting data and trying to understand it with the minimum of reinterpretation.

Well, I was poking you, in good natured manner and smiling at you pushing back.  But, I do think you haven't "grokked" the push I am making toward a larger goal of the "naturalization of information".  It is no different in the abstract than chemicals or forces.  Simulations that model animal and human behavior prove this.

It would go something like this:  If mind is apparent in terms of being a source of causation, why not model how it works?  The working model must be definite, but use the variables we have now.  Physical science can  not speak to "wanting to eat" directly, just like mind is not observed to create material.  But wanting to eat, or have sex or to flee are critical variables in survival.  The variables in wanting to eat can be dealt with as defined tokens in computation.  

Is mind an "earthly" phenomenon?  It happens here.   (of course it was Frank Zappa who said "It can't happen here")
 I think it likely happens in all the universe.  It surely exists in the visions of the "gods".  Jainism, Buddhist, Hindu, Hebrew, Christian and Muslin - other worlds all have mentality in the observations.  So does the natural religions of native American and all mystic views, I have ever read.

Mind as an active variable IS science and is being better defined all the time.  And again, the definition is that minds act on and change real-world probabilities.  I know we all grew up thinking that probabilities are only real when they come true.  

But, that is not what physics and information theory have discovered about a 100 years ago.

Well, I was poking you, in good natured manner and smiling at you pushing back.  But, I do think you haven't "grokked" the push I am making toward a larger goal of the "naturalization of information".  It is no different in the abstract than chemicals or forces.  Simulations that model animal and human behavior prove this.

Information (of the non-Shannon kind) is only meaningful when interpreted by minds - you cannot invoke it as part of natural law.

David

David001, without hopefully sounding arrogant:

I think there is a second realm that only God and His angels inhabit. It is a spiritual world and will reunite with the physical world after judgement and the separation of Christ's people from everybody else, and entropy will no longer take effect because God will keep everything replenished.

Maybe such comments belong in the spirituality section and we should stick here to what the scientific evidence directly suggests, which is what stephenw is trying to do and what psience quest is really all about.

Well I would argue that you and I have both put forward (not unrelated) hypotheses to explain the phenomena of NDEs and deathbed visions, plus much else besides.

StephenW presumably thinks he is also putting forward an hypothesis but I would say his hypotheses is impossibly flawed because it relies on non-Shannon information (which is closer to what the term 'information' traditionally meant) featuring as an explanation for consciousness, when it itself can only be created or appreciated by conscious entities or artefacts created by them. What good, for example, would a computer program - possibly in its machine code form - be in the days before computers had been invented?

I am sure you would agree that the science establishment can't go on ignoring spiritual questions without resorting to tricks of various sorts to ignore inconvenient facts. Unfortunately by doing so, it no is longer adhering to the principles of science.

David

Information (of the non-Shannon kind) is only meaningful when interpreted by minds - you cannot invoke it as part of natural law.

David

So, represented and semantic information that is encoded is not meaningful unless actively "in thought"; like how a physical observation decoheres and makes "real" a quantum phenomenon?  I surely think that is incorrect.

More likely, your point may have been more tautological, implying that meaning is only in brains.  Such as, there was no subjective meaning until humans evolved.  sigh

But your point makes no sense as a constraint to natural law, at all, in the face of objective meaning.  The meaning of danger of a train coming down the tracks is physics and logic.  It doesn't matter if there was mental interpretation, the train squashes the unaware.

Is the meaning of a piece of art gone, to one person who doesn't get it, while someone else does?

So, represented and semantic information that is encoded is not meaningful unless actively "in thought"; like how a physical observation decoheres and makes "real" a quantum phenomenon?  I surely think that is incorrect.

That is not what I am saying at all!

More likely, your point may have been more tautological, implying that meaning is only in brains.  Such as, there was no subjective meaning until humans evolved.  sigh

But your point makes no sense as a constraint to natural law, at all, in the face of objective meaning.  The meaning of danger of a train coming down the tracks is physics and logic.  It doesn't matter if there was mental interpretation, the train squashes the unaware.

Is the meaning of a piece of art gone, to one person who doesn't get it, while someone else does?

My point is that ... let's call it conventional information ... is indistinguishable from pure gibberish unless you know the code. The easiest example for most people is a string of Chinese characters. We know these have meaning, but without a Chinese translator (or GOOGLE translate) they mean nothing. We also cannot obtain fresh samples of such information.

This means that you must have a conscious entity to separate such information from pure gibberish!

That is fine, but unfortunately it means that you can't use information as an ingredient of a fundamental theory of consciousness, because these objects are already based on consciousness.

David

My point is that ... let's call it conventional information ... is indistinguishable from pure gibberish unless you know the code. The easiest example for most people is a string of Chinese characters. We know these have meaning, but without a Chinese translator (or GOOGLE translate) they mean nothing. We also cannot obtain fresh samples of such information.

This means that you must have a conscious entity to separate such information from pure gibberish!

That is fine, but unfortunately it means that you can't use information as an ingredient of a fundamental theory of consciousness, because these objects are already based on consciousness.

David

"Conventional" or representative information gets parsed in Searle's Chinese Room.  I'm not smart enough to address it in depth, but it was aimed at showing that decoding/translating could be done by computation of symbols, but not generate an understanding of meanings.

Our perceptual systems are trained subconsciously to see material objects and recognize them as foreground figures.  Just like the matter and energy of physical objects, encoded physical information and meaning are connected in an objective fashion.  Categories of all sorts flora and fauna of "mental" objects can be classified as information objects.  And they can be brought under scientific scrutiny.

Again, objective and natural information and structured objects made from it are part of our environments.  The informational meanings are "out there".  We can detect, import and assimilate these information objects into our subjective use.

Yes a theory of consciousness that make primary the subjective concepts and objects may have a difficultly.

The objective meanings of reality flow imperfectly into the subjective mental world of human culture.  As do and their past and future probabilities as new ideas.  Information science is developing the tools to track all of it, back and forth.