Neuroscience and free will

Perhaps the "spirit world" is deterministic and composed of mechanisms that can be studied quasi-scientifically, but through these arguments we find that its spirit inhabitants must have an inner nature that is not limited to either randomness or causal determinism, and is therefore not analyzable by the methods of science.

I agree and I wasn't saying anything is fully deterministic. I'm just saying that if something has the quality of being regular and dependably repeatable then it acquires expressions of "solidity" and "material" and so materialism can be redefined to incorporate it. It could be that the "spirit world" is just one layer of reality removed from this one and is subject to laws and regularities as this one is and there's no telling how many layers deep reality really is. Regardless... at any level of reality there will be interplay between regularity and irregularity and on this border between order and chaos is where consciousness will always lie.

I don't see how this does away with the Hard Problem. This argument seems to just beg the question by at the beginning assuming something called a subjective viewpoint which is what can assign meaning to patterns.

The hard problem only exists when we assume that everything is composed of tiny dead rocks. Assuming that everything is what we are obviously not is a bad way to start out an ontology. Yes I consider a "subjective viewpoint" to be a primitive notion. Subjective viewpoint is not merely necessary to assign meaning to patterns... patterns don't exist without it. The universe is pattern (not tiny dead rocks) so subjective experience is built into it. We do not merely discover patterns. We also create them when we discover them. So mind and matter are fundamentally intertwined. If this is not a satisfying answer to the hard problem then I don't know what else could be... I think all respectable ontologies must be both circular and somewhat poetic. ...because everything that is real is a metaphor.

Patterns are still formed by material things...

...material is what we call things that reliably fit the patterns we create/discover. Without the subjective viewpoint to arbitrarily assign similarity thresholds to create the pattern... there would be no material.

...and patterns are still in a different existential category from mental phenomena such as subjective awareness and perception and agency.

How so? What is awareness and perception if not a constant comparison of similarity and difference and a feedback loop to nest comparisons through time?

To go a little Old Testament here... agency is what assigns the boundaries that form the pattern. Knowledge is experience abstracted into patterns. There is no knowledge without agency or free will. To have free will or agency is to be a God - to be a prime cause. Acquiring knowledge is "rebellion" because agency is required to transgress old boundaries and create new ones. The story of Adam and Eve is a good way to communicate that: knowledge, free will, being a God (prime cause, self-existent conscious being), and ambiguity of arbitrarily assigned boundaries are all linked together.

So ambiguity of boundaries in pattern is crucial to any discussion of free will.

I like your notion that there is an indefinable "prime cause" underlying reality, which I interpret to be the real essence of consciousness and mental phenomena.

Thanks but not really my idea... I find it in the Genesis creation story, and the Matrix, hermeticism, and other discussions about Magic and alchemy... The "prime cause" having no other causes is completely unpredictable, so...
the prime cause or the will is the "anomaly that is systemic creating fluctuations in even the most simplistic equations". Rebellion leads to new (neO) things and through the creation of new things one becomes the One.

This is reminiscent of the Penrose/Hameroff microtubule theory. It has two basic problems - the "Hard Problem", and the fact that telepathy and other "anomalous psi perceptions" have been shown not to be subject to either the inverse square law of attenuation by distance or metal shielding, and are therefore apparently not field effects, certainly not of any fields known to physics.

The dipole bonds in water or in the microtubules could be a kind of qubit which acts as a receiver antenna for a field that operates across some other dimension than the local temporal dimension. The soul of your great great great grandma could exist as a set of non-local patterns stored on an unknown substrate that can be picked up by the psychic's microtubules.

Regarding the soul...
An individual life can be thought of as the building of patterns. For these patterns to exist "objectively" somewhere or somewhen else doesn't seem like a stretch. Every moment we've ever lived is probably still "now" somewhere else in the universe. How long does the memory go on? If it is eternal then we seem to be back to the block universe. But if the universe eventually forgets and creates something new, maybe not...

Perhaps the universe itself is created with a neural network... maybe it's neural networks all the way down.

Do you see this in ancient wisdom as similar to:

 The metaphor of Indra's Jeweled Net is attributed to an ancient Buddhist named Tu-Shun (557-640 B.C.E.) who asks us to envision a vast net that:

• at each juncture there lies a jewel;
  
• each jewel reflects all the other jewels in this cosmic matrix.
  
• Every jewel represents an individual life form, atom, cell or unit of consciousness.
  
• Each jewel, in turn, is intrinsically and intimately connected to all the others;
  
• thus, a change in one gem is reflected in all the others.
  

This last aspect of the jeweled net is explored in a question/answer dialog of teacher and student in the Avatamsaka Sutra. In answer to the question: "how can all these jewels be considered one jewel?" it is replied: "If you don't believe that one jewel...is all the jewels...just put a dot on the jewel [in question]. When one jewel is dotted, there are dots on all the jewels...Since there are dots on all the jewels...We know that all the jewels are one jewel"

For me; this ties to holographic distribution (maybe not the right word) of information.  Further, it suggests that propagation of information through interference patterns.

Do you see this in ancient wisdom as similar to:

For me; this ties to holographic distribution (maybe not the right word) of information.  Further, it suggests that propagation of information through interference patterns.

Yes very much so. I just heard Indra’s net described recently... I’ll have to read the original story.

The holographic fractal model makes a lot of sense to me.

Only recently watching some demos of NVIDIA’s AI programs that generate realistic detailed environments did I start to play with the idea that this reality could be generated by something like a neural net... that would fit nicely with the circular as above so below holographic model.

.................................
The dipole bonds in water or in the microtubules could be a kind of qubit which acts as a receiver antenna for a field that operates across some other dimension than the local temporal dimension. The soul of your great great great grandma could exist as a set of non-local patterns stored on an unknown substrate that can be picked up by the psychic's microtubules.

As I mentioned before, this still invokes the Hard Problem, since this soul is described as persisting as patterns stored in a substrate. Patterns in a substrate don't have subjective awareness: if this is correct what the psychic medium picks up is an information recording of sorts.

I could object to this interpretation of psychic mediums' spirit communications, because it would require the medium's subconscious mind to have the wonderful dramatizing and acting abilities to analyze the recorded information, using that analysis act out the dead person's characteristic personality to the satisfaction of the sitter, and also to fool the medium herself, who has the clear impression of the difference between picking up information psychically and actually communicating with the discarnate personality.         

Anyway, this doesn't describe any form of survival of the consciousness and personality of the great great great grandma - just the persistence of a recording pattern - maybe the Akashic Records?

The hard problem only exists when we assume that everything is composed of tiny dead rocks. Assuming that everything is what we are obviously not is a bad way to start out an ontology. Yes I consider a "subjective viewpoint" to be a primitive notion. Subjective viewpoint is not merely necessary to assign meaning to patterns... patterns don't exist without it. The universe is pattern (not tiny dead rocks) so subjective experience is built into it. We do not merely discover patterns. We also create them when we discover them. So mind and matter are fundamentally intertwined. If this is not a satisfying answer to the hard problem then I don't know what else could be... I think all respectable ontologies must be both circular and somewhat poetic. ...because everything that is real is a metaphor.

Pattern is at base Shannon information, which may or may not have any subjective meaning. The Universe is a pattern only in the sense that it is simply an arrangement of some kind meaningful or not, mostly not. Shannon defined an event’s information content as the negative logarithm of its probability.

What if a lecturer announces a charged presentation at which he will offer a large amount of information. At the lecture he spent most of the time flipping a coin and calling out the result. The lecturer insists that he has produced an extremely large amount of Shannon information for the money he charged, so he didn't cheat the attendees. I don't think anybody would be convinced. 

A quantity that better matches our intuitive notion of information is mutual information. "Mutual information is one of many quantities that measures how much one random variable tells us about another. It is a dimensionless quantity with (generally) units of bits, and can be thought of as the reduction in uncertainty about one random variable given knowledge of another." (Scholarpedia)

Mutual information measures how much event A reduces our uncertainty about event B. Consider encountering a sign at a fork in the road. Before event A (reading the sign), we are unsure which branch of the fork will take us home. That is to say, we are uncertain about event B, the outcome of choosing one of the branches. Once event A occurs (we read the sign), we are certain about event B (the outcome of choosing one of the branches) and we can find our way home. A series of coin flips would not have told you where you were going if you entered one of the signed lanes. 

A defining aspect of the human mind or sentient intelligence is its ability to create mutual information. For example, the traffic sign designer in the example above created mutual information. You understood what the sign was meant to convey. (This discussion of mutual information derived from this article .)  

Another definition: meaningful information that can only be produced by sentient intelligence is information that is both complex and specified (CSI). 

This also relates to the free will debate. 

Only sentient intelligence can create Complex Specified Information beyond a certain small lower bound, and this appears to also apply to mutual information.  According to the same source cited previously, an abstruse finding by mathematician Leonid Levin is that no combination of randomness and determinism can create mutual information. That seems intuitively correct since the essence of mutual information is "aboutness", meaning, and intentionality, which seem to be properties only of sentient intelligence and not of random or deterministic processes (the Hard Problem again).
 
The implication of this is that human sentient intelligence operates by something in addition to a combination of randomness and determination. This reasoning of course doesn't define what that something is, but it at least establishes its existence. That something could be whatever creates free will.

The hard problem really falls apart when one considers the hopelessness of a system trying to objectively examine itself... and then trying to put it into words.

That is even before the category error of claiming a lack of a “satisfactory” explanation for awareness, allows us to jump to conclusions about the nature of awareness.

.....What is awareness and perception if not a constant comparison of similarity and difference and a feedback loop to nest comparisons through time?

To go a little Old Testament here... agency is what assigns the boundaries that form the pattern. Knowledge is experience abstracted into patterns. There is no knowledge without agency or free will. To have free will or agency is to be a God - to be a prime cause. Acquiring knowledge is "rebellion" because agency is required to transgress old boundaries and create new ones. The story of Adam and Eve is a good way to communicate that: knowledge, free will, being a God (prime cause, self-existent conscious being), and ambiguity of arbitrarily assigned boundaries are all linked together.

This seems to be a category error. The "constant comparisons" you mention are at base merely logic operations that could be carried out by a complicated data processing machine. There is nothing inherent to this logical processing that would make it conscious or capable of perception. I could write a computer program to make comparisons of different input variables with other variables or constants, measure and record the differences, store the comparison results in a wrap-around top-down table, then compare the current results with past results and finally with a formula compute the error value and using it modify the previous used algorithm for the next iteration (feedback). This program would not be conscious or self-aware or capable of perception - it could not be. 

Concerning knowledge: the term assumes a conscious agent, where knowledge is what it is that a conscious agent knows, while patterns are simply information.

This seems to be a category error. The "constant comparisons" you mention are at base merely logic operations that could be carried out by a complicated data processing machine. There is nothing inherent to this logical processing that would make it conscious or capable of perception. I could write a computer program to make comparisons of different input variables with other variables or constants, measure and record the differences, store the comparison results in a wrap-around top-down table, then compare the current results with past results and finally with a formula compute the error value and using it modify the previous used algorithm for the next iteration (feedback). This program would not be conscious or self-aware or capable of perception - it could not be. 

I'm not convinced. This sounds reasonable, but I don't think we understand consciousness well enough to know that it just has to be in a different category from computation. Consider that we could also have meta-procedures that received inputs from those computations and used them to revisit stored information.

I hesitate to become convinced that it's a category error without more understanding.

~~ Paul

I'm not convinced. This sounds reasonable, but I don't think we understand consciousness well enough to know that it just has to be in a different category from computation. Consider that we could also have meta-procedures that received inputs from those computations and used them to revisit stored information.

I hesitate to become convinced that it's a category error without more understanding.

~~ Paul

It seems to me, if there is a fundamental difference in the properties of two different sorts of things, these different sorts of things are in different existential categories. An analogy: solids have the property of having a fixed stable shape, whereas liquids have the property of liquidity. If a substance flows like a liquid then it is in the liquids category not the solids category. If a substance has a fixed shape then it is in the solids category. Having fundamentally different properties means belonging to fundamentally different categories of existence. 

One of the fundamental properties of consciousness: the qualia of perception. As far as we can tell observationally and experimentally, a salt crystal or a watch don't subjectively perceive the color red, or anything for that matter. There is no reason to imagine that indefinitely complexifying the watch or salt crystal will somehow suddenly imbue them with the qualia of perception. And consciousness doesn't have mass or complicated observable material structure, or even length, width and depth, like watches and salt crystals. 

So these two sorts of things, consciousness, and watches and salt crystals, are in different fundamental existential categories.