Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?

I know you have spent time on writing and collating material for a long thread on super-psi. Thank you for that.

Since it isn't my favourite topic, I'm not sure on this - is super-psi raised as a possibility only in relation to (not-)survival or is it applied in any other circumstances?

There seems to be some argument for something like Super Psi in Ufology, that at least some of what is witnessed is just generated by conscious minds.

Though I'd have to go back [&] take a second look at those arguments I do recall parallels...and similar criticisms made...

The brain doesn't create consciousness: The reducing valve theory of consciousness

Paul Marshall

Do you agree with Marshall's views? He writes:

Filter theorists maintain that everyday consciousness is supported by a hidden field or ‘reservoir’ of consciousness...

He refers to this as subliminal consciousness. Is this what you are speaking of?

If consciousness is subliminal in a hidden field, that sure seems like the thing I described earlier, where the neurons of the brain are all working in a massive parallel effort, with some patterns building strength and emerging to attention in a steam we call consciousness. I was told all this subliminal work building our thoughts for us sounded like "an epileptic fit" (https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-i...5#pid52355). Now we find here a link describing much the same process, but instead of happening in the brain, it is said to be happening in some hidden field, whatever that is.  Marshall continues:

While it may be supposed that subliminal consciousness is confined to individual minds, there is reason to think that it extends further afield, as psychical phenomena such as telepathy and clairvoyance suggest, and perhaps much further too, if cosmic mystical experiences are indicative.

Which makes this even more weird. For instead of referring to an individual soul that is my literal self, we now find these conscious thoughts bubbling up from some kind of universal consciousness that is not confined to individual minds. Is that where your thoughts come from? Is this  universal non-individual hidden field generating thoughts for you and feeding them to your brain? Are your brain and my brain each getting our thoughts from the same field, but somehow my brain selects one set of thoughts, and your brain selects a different set from the same field? How is the brain making this selection? Marshall continues:

According to filter theory, ordinary or ‘supraliminal’ consciousness derives from the subliminal sea of consciousness through the limiting activity of matter—or more specifically the brain and nervous system, and associated psychological processes. These act as a filter or selector, taking some subliminal contents for inclusion in supraliminal consciousness while excluding a great deal. In Huxley’s words, the brain and nervous system act as a ‘reducing valve’ through which Mind at Large is ‘funnelled’. The selection and exclusion of subliminal contents are driven by utilitarian and survival needs: in many circumstances, only that which is immediately useful to an organism or necessary for its survival will be provided.

So does my brain act as a filter to select thoughts form this collective "subliminal sea of consciousness" such that it picks those thoughts out of that sea that are beneficial to my survival? The concept is bizarre. Do chimps and toads also draw their thoughts from this "subliminal sea of consciousness," or is their brain function much different from ours? If their brains are just physically processing physical signals, but ours are selecting from a sea of consciousness, why does the chimpanzee brain appear to be so much like ours?

I find the "self" strangely absent from your link. Instead we find a brain selecting the thoughts it wants from this universal sea. If anything in this picture can be described as the conscious self, it would be the brain.

I was thinking about this and would succinctly state my position as:

1. Is there some reason for a priori dismissal of all Survival & Psi research, whether in the lab/hospital setting or through the long history of witnesses? Such dismissal, before looking at any of it, could only be justified if there was a compelling reason to assume Materialism/Physicalism can account for consciousness.

I agree that one should not dismiss claimed research without looking at it. However, survival and PSI research appears to me to be mostly anecdotal, which is notably unreliable. Do you have reliable research supporting PSI?

2. It's not very clear what Physicalism is, and if it depends on the investigation of physics it seems this possibly leads to alternative metaphysical positions that have Consciousness as a fundamental aspect...perhaps, as per certain physicists, even all that is Matter is derived from the Ground of Consciousness...

That's an impressive list, and worthy of a longer reply if I get time. Let's just say for now that this looks like an argument from authority. Many of the claims look like religious claims about the fundamental ground behind everything being mind, which is simply a religious faith claim. Many scientists treat religion and science as nonoverlapping nuomena. They make faith claims in areas that they think are beyond science. Are the claims here based on science? If so, what is their reasoning?  

3. If Materialism/Physicalism defines the "physical" as, whatever other characteristics it possesses, lacking any mental character...then it leads to a variety of bizarre ad hoc positions like Emergentism and Illusionism to get around the Something from Nothing miracles needed to account for how the "physical" produces the "mental".

And how do you think the mental gets produced? Is it magic? What is the difference between saying souls make consciousness and saying magic makes consciousness?

4. Since Materialism/Physicalism cannot account for consciousness - and additionally runs into other issues like the location/existence of the Laws of Nature if there is no God, the role of the Observer in physics, Cosmic Fine Tuning - there is no reason to dismiss all Survival and Psi research.

"Physical laws" are somewhat of a misnomer. They are not rules that declare what things must do. Rather, they are descriptions of how things work. 

Our universe appears to be based on a short set of principles on how things work, and everything else builds from there. One can easily visualize a multiverse where different sets of principles of how things work come into existence in different realms. Those realms that have sets of principles that make complex reactions that can build universes sometimes build universes.

Well a lot of biology proceeds by simply collecting facts.

Sure, but those observed facts are then analyzed to develop understandings of how those facts relate and how things work. Scientists use methodological naturalism to do this. That is, regardless of whether one thinks gods, gremlins, ghosts, or demons exist, if one wants to understand what is going on in the world, then, when doing science, one can expect the best results by putting those entities aside and looking for natural, physical causes of events. When doing this, we make scientific progress. When we resort to, "God does it," although this could be true, we find nothing useful that enhances our scientific knowledge.

I am strongly of the opinion that our everyday world is embedded in and loosely coupled to a larger reality that science tends to ignore. That is the only way that certain observed phenomena can be explained. These are generally called psi phenomena, and there are just too many of them to explain them all as bad science or fraud.

When I say something is non-physical, what I mean is that it uses that larger realm to do what it does.

This is in response to my question, "What do you even mean when you say something is 'non-physical'?"

You refer to a "larger reality that science tends to ignore" and say that something that is non-physical "uses that realm". By this definition, "non-physical" means anything pertaining to things science tends to ignore. Why not just call them "physical things that science has tended to ignore? " The fact that scientists have ignored something so far doesn't seem to justify calling it "non-physical".

When scientists stop ignoring it, does it suddenly become physical?

Want to try again? What do you mean when you say something is non-physical? Does that word even mean anything?

The trouble is, I think you don't read any of the large literature that would inform you as to why this site exists.

I have been reading posts and links here, and am having a hard time even fitting all that into my day, let alone whole books.

We are not all somehow inadequately educated, or deluded in some way!

I never said you were inadequately educated or deluded. I asked you how you learned about quantum mechanics. You answered that, among other things, you learned it while studying for your PHD 50 years ago. I'll assume you are telling the truth. That certainly makes you an educated person.

That is, regardless of whether one thinks gods, gremlins, ghosts, or demons exist, if one wants to understand what is going on in the world, then, when doing science, one can expect the best results by putting those entities aside and looking for natural, physical causes of events.

The problem comes if we are looking a phenomenon in which gods, gremlins, ghosts, or demons did in fact have some part to play in what went on. In that case science just doesn't work.

Doing science predicated on the assumption that X is false, and then using that to 'prove' that X is false, is just lousy science however eminent the research team might be.

If you read "Entangled Minds" - written by a scientist - you will discover how to properly explore some of the phenomena of consciousness.

David

I agree that one should not dismiss claimed research without looking at it. However, survival and PSI research appears to me to be mostly anecdotal, which is notably unreliable. Do you have reliable research supporting PSI?

That's an impressive list, and worthy of a longer reply if I get time. Let's just say for now that this looks like an argument from authority. Many of the claims look like religious claims about the fundamental ground behind everything being mind, which is simply a religious faith claim. Many scientists treat religion and science as nonoverlapping nuomena. They make faith claims in areas that they think are beyond science. Are the claims here based on science? If so, what is their reasoning?  

And how do you think the mental gets produced? Is it magic? What is the difference between saying souls make consciousness and saying magic makes consciousness?

"Physical laws" are somewhat of a misnomer. They are not rules that declare what things must do. Rather, they are descriptions of how things work. 

Our universe appears to be based on a short set of principles on how things work, and everything else builds from there. One can easily visualize a multiverse where different sets of principles of how things work come into existence in different realms. Those realms that have sets of principles that make complex reactions that can build universes sometimes build universes.

This seems like a bunch of desperate talking points drawn from a pamphlet advocating the Materialist-Atheist faith...

As I've said a few times over, nobody has to believe in Survival. You seem so afraid that maybe atheism is wrong and by choosing it you've damned your self, so I don't expect you to read and genuinely assess the quality. The bias among those who've chosen the Materialist-Physicalist religion is so strong I generally don't take their assessments of Survival evidence seriously.

As for consciousness, I don't see why you keep referencing magic. As per Sam Harris, who recall is the New Atheist Horseman with a PhD in Neuroscience, Materialism-Physicalism needs a Something from Nothing "miracle" to get off the ground. So if Materialism was the religion I picked I wouldn't be so quick to accuse others of believing in magic.

Also amusing that everyone - even physicists some of whom are the "quantum fathers" - who disagrees with you must be asserting a religious faith, whereas people who agree with you I guess are super rational and just doing good science?

Do you agree with Marshall's views? He writes:

He refers to this as subliminal consciousness. Is this what you are speaking of?

If consciousness is subliminal in a hidden field, that sure seems like the thing I described earlier, where the neurons of the brain are all working in a massive parallel effort, with some patterns building strength and emerging to attention in a steam we call consciousness. I was told all this subliminal work building our thoughts for us sounded like "an epileptic fit" (https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-i...5#pid52355). Now we find here a link describing much the same process, but instead of happening in the brain, it is said to be happening in some hidden field, whatever that is.  Marshall continues:


Which makes this even more weird. For instead of referring to an individual soul that is my literal self, we now find these conscious thoughts bubbling up from some kind of universal consciousness that is not confined to individual minds. Is that where your thoughts come from? Is this  universal non-individual hidden field generating thoughts for you and feeding them to your brain? Are your brain and my brain each getting our thoughts from the same field, but somehow my brain selects one set of thoughts, and your brain selects a different set from the same field? How is the brain making this selection? Marshall continues:


So does my brain act as a filter to select thoughts form this collective "subliminal sea of consciousness" such that it picks those thoughts out of that sea that are beneficial to my survival? The concept is bizarre. Do chimps and toads also draw their thoughts from this "subliminal sea of consciousness," or is their brain function much different from ours? If their brains are just physically processing physical signals, but ours are selecting from a sea of consciousness, why does the chimpanzee brain appear to be so much like ours?

I find the "self" strangely absent from your link. Instead we find a brain selecting the thoughts it wants from this universal sea. If anything in this picture can be described as the conscious self, it would be the brain.

I've already said I'm not convinced the Filter Theory is true. But this seems like a manipulatively bad reading of what Marshall said, whereas you can just read the Materialist Alex Rosenberg straight off the page and see him saying we can't have thoughts, and that when you think you have thoughts it's just an illusion.

We also have Sam Harris and Raymond Tallis, two atheists with neuroscience education, telling us Materialism is nonsensical because what it demands is nothing short of a Something from Nothing miracle that would violate our very basic logic. Harris throws the Materialist faithful a bone and says maybe it could be true in some unknown way, but I suspect this is probably just pity for people like Dennet who've wasted their whole lives evangelizing the Materialist faith.

So, again, for who knows how many times anymore - it doesn't matter if there are no souls, or if Filter Theory is false. Materialism is just nonsense, and can never be true.

Rosenberg even uses computers and animals for his point, that we don't really have thoughts about Paris or anything else ->

None of these sets of circuits are about anything. And the combination of them can’t be either. The small sets of specialized input/output circuits that respond to your mom’s face, as well as the large set that responds to your mom, are no different from millions of other such sets in your brain, except in one way: they respond to a distinct electrical input with a distinct electrical output. That’s all packages of neural circuits do in the rat and the sea slug. That’s why they are not about anything. Piling up a lot of neural circuits that are not about anything at all can’t turn them into a thought about stuff out there in the world. That was one lesson already learned by working through the Paris neurons: piling up more neurons, in the form of neural interpreters, for example, won’t turn any number of neurons already wired together into a circuit that is about anything else at all.

Rosenberg, Alex. The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (pp. 184-185). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Physics and neuroscience both tell us, for different reasons, that one clump of matter can’t be about another clump of matter. Computer science combines both to show that human brain states can’t really be about stuff for exactly the same reason that the internal workings of your laptop can’t really be about anything at all.

Rosenberg, Alex. The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions (p. 186). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

So we have you telling us Materialism is true and the Materialist conception of the brain can produce Cogito Ergo sum. We have Rosenberg telling us Materialism is true and Cogito Ergo Sum is false, that we never actually have thoughts about anything.

One of you has to be wrong, and Rosenberg's argument about what Materialism would mean is clearer than your weird asides about animal souls and passing references to computer programs.

Yet to me it seems pretty clear, as it does to atheist philosopher & (retired) neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, that if Materialism-Physicalism means we cannot have thoughts about things we should conclude that Materialism-Physicalism is false. And of course if the Materialist conception of the brain cannot have thoughts about things, then again as per Tallis we cannot expect it to store memories.

What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves: Debunking the tropes of Neuromythology

Raymond Tallis

...As a clinical neuroscientist, I could easily expatiate on the wonders of a discipline that I believe has a better claim than mathematics to being Queen of the Sciences. For a start, it is a science in which many other sciences converge: physics, biology, chemistry, biophysics, biochemistry, pharmacology, and psychology, among others. In addition, its object of study is the one material object that, of all the material objects in the universe, bears most closely on our lives: the brain, and more generally, the nervous system. So let us begin by giving all proper respect to what neuroscience can tell us about ourselves: it reveals some of the most important conditions that are necessary for behavior and awareness.

What neuroscience does not do, however, is provide a satisfactory account of the conditions that are sufficient for behavior and awareness. Its descriptions of what these phenomena are and of how they arise are incomplete in several crucial respects, as we will see. The pervasive yet mistaken idea that neuroscience does fully account for awareness and behavior is neuroscientism, an exercise in science-based faith. While to live a human life requires having a brain in some kind of working order, it does not follow from this fact that to live a human life is to be a brain in some kind of working order. This confusion between necessary and sufficient conditions lies behind the encroachment of “neuroscientistic” discourse on academic work in the humanities, and the present epidemic of such neuro-prefixed pseudo-disciplines as neuroaesthetics, neuroeconomics, neurosociology, neuropolitics, neurotheology, neurophilosophy, and so on...

You seem so afraid that maybe atheism is wrong and by choosing it you've damned your self, so I don't expect you to read and genuinely assess the quality.

The bias among those who've chosen the Materialist-Physicalist religion is so strong I generally don't take their assessments of Survival evidence seriously.

That does not address my arguments. Rather it addresses my person. This is known as an ad-hominem argument. It is regarded as a fallacy.

By the way, my writings are not motivated by fear, but by the desire to discuss these ideas and share what I have learned. And no, I do not support a materialist religion, but rather, I support the scientific search for truth.

But even if I was desperately afraid and unable to address the truth, that would not mean my arguments are wrong. So please address the arguments, not the person.

As per Sam Harris, who recall is the New Atheist Horseman with a PhD in Neuroscience, Materialism-Physicalism needs a Something from Nothing "miracle" to get off the ground.

I don't think Sam Harris believes in miracles.

Rather, he is saying that we don't yet understand what makes consciousness. "We don't yet understand" does not imply "therefore, miracle". It is OK to say, "I don't know."

So if Materialism was the religion I picked I wouldn't be so quick to accuse others of believing in magic.

I didn't accuse you of believing in magic. Instead, I had asked you these questions: "And how do you think the mental gets produced? Is it magic? What is the difference between saying souls make consciousness and saying magic makes consciousness?"

Do you have any answers to those questions?

That does not address my arguments. Rather it addresses my person. This is known as an ad-hominem argument. It is regarded as a fallacy.

By the way, my writings are not motivated by fear, but by the desire to discuss these ideas and share what I have learned. And no, I do not support a materialist religion, but rather, I support the scientific search for truth.

But even if I was desperately afraid and unable to address the truth, that would not mean my arguments are wrong. So please address the arguments, not the person.


I don't think Sam Harris believes in miracles.

Rather, he is saying that we don't yet understand what makes consciousness. "We don't yet understand" does not imply "therefore, miracle". It is OK to say, "I don't know."


I didn't accuse you of believing in magic. Instead, I had asked you these questions: "And how do you think the mental gets produced? Is it magic? What is the difference between saying souls make consciousness and saying magic makes consciousness?"

Do you have any answers to those questions?

The point is you don't have any serious arguments, it's just talking points that as E.Flowers noted have been discussed for years by this group.

Additionally your biases don't convince me it's worth the time to pick over Survival evidence. As I've already said, I think it's fine if people don't believe in Survival. That you seem to care so much that I do believe in Survival, and are putting in so much effort to evangelize for the Materialist faith, also makes me question your ability to look at the evidence in an unbiased way. It's just not worth my time, but feel free to count this as a victory that I didn't have the courage to debate you or whatever...

And you can just read what Sam Harris says, specifically his mentions of Something from Nothing. Trying to pretend he didn't say what he said also isn't a serious argument. But leaving Harris out we'd still have a retired clinical neuroscientist in Tallis and Atheist's Guide to Reality author Alex Rosenberg. Both atheists, the former rejecting the Materialist doctrine and the latter evangelizing for it...yet [we see] that both agree that *if* Materialism is true it means we cannot have thoughts about Paris or anything else.

Just for the record, if anyone actually wants to read the discussions between the "quantum fathers" and the serious intellectual effort they put into understanding the place of consciousness in the universe, this is a great book ->

Quantum Theory and Measurement

• Edited by John Archibald Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek
  

Sadly a lot of stuff also gets divided up into varied papers and collections that are not easy or cheap to get if one doesn't have university access.

Henry Stapp - previously mentioned by @David001 - and F. David Peat, however, are both guys who studied under some of the "quantum fathers" (Von Neuman & Bohm respectively IIRC) and their papers/interviews/etc are much easier to find on the 'Net.