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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 24, 2011 - 01:43pm PT
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MikeL, you are too brief in your quibbles...
your statement "you can't have science without its philosophical underpinnings. Without them, all you have is method, no truth." explains our major difference, you are looking for truth, I am looking for understanding. People should stop using the term "truth" when they don't mean it, and if they do mean it, they should go looking elsewhere, science won't help them find it.
As for the philosophical underpinnings, perhaps there are, but most generally "Every observable effect has a physical cause." And really it is a hypothesis, but one tested time and again and found to be consistent with observation. You can debate it all you want, but science will keep on going until it finds a place where its method breaks down.
If you are debating what the priority of science should be among ways of seeking knowledge, I would use as a criteria the ability to create knowledge, which philosophy seems to lack entirely. Science has expanded knowledge greatly, and has explained things that were once only the realm of religion, such as cosmology, the genesis of humans, the source of disease, an all that stuff, philosophy couldn't touch it.
If my language gave the impression that the scientific method "verified" or "proved" something I apologize, I am usually very careful to point out the falsification.
As far as the use of numbers, or language, I think you have an overly simplistic view, or you are being disingenuous. The use of language in science is a difficult matter, as words in common use may be appropriated to mean something more precise, and confusion can result when a non-scientist looks at what a scientist writes. This has been evident in the interpretation of the "Climategate" emails by non-scientists, who may not be familiar with the science.
Numbers are, of course, more precisely defined and related by mathematical logic which is the whole point. What your quibble should be with is associating the abstract quantities with physical phenomena, which, is a part of the provisional nature of science, that is, the validity of that association.
When we define temperature as the average kinetic energy of a group of atoms, say, we have to discuss issues like how many atoms do we need for the average to behave like temperature, or how are the atoms in the domain of our average interacting with the stuff outside that domain, etc. But it is because we have a precise definition of the word "temperature" in a thermodynamic sense that we are aware of the limitations of the meaning of "temperature. " Many non-scientists of course become exasperated with all this minutae, why can't we just enjoy the warmth! revel in the qualia!! and forget about all that stuff that is irrelevant.
I have no idea what you are talking about "if everyone were to say the same thing..." you're going to have to expand on that if it is something important.
Am I really that doubtful about my own subjective experiences? Yes, it is a part of my training as a scientist... does it effect me as a human? I don't think so.
My statement that we are not all that special in the universe is based on the fact that we are one of a very large number of living organisms on this planet, and a small fraction of all living organisms who have occupied this planet. That the "lifetime" of our species is finite and within the next few hundred-thousand to few million years, there will be no human species on this planet. But everything we know about the universe would indicate that it will go on without us as it had before us.
In our "part" of the universe, which is a tiny part about 4% of what we infer to be there, we are not special as proposed above, and our role in the 96% of the rest of the universe is certainly insignificant, not even noticeable. The possibility that the entirety of our universe, the whole 100% might be just one of a huge number of universes with diverse properties displaces us even farther from the center of the universe.
The path of our demotion starting with a "revolution" a wonderful word coined from that initiating point, when Copernicus published his amazing work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium with the seemingly unremarkable analysis that the Sun is the center of the solar system and that the planets revolved around it. The first step, we are no longer the center of the universe, not only that, but our universe is only a small bit of what could exist out there. And all this based on "observable effects" explained by "physical cause."
If we are special, it is us who are responsible for that specialness, for an individual the degree to which they can effect a legacy lasts only a lifetime, then whatever specialness you have created is carried on by others. We remember and honor Copernicus, who took a first step along an endless path, he is special, but the universe didn't notice, at least not far from the loving hug of our own Sun.
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MH2
climber
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Nov 24, 2011 - 02:00pm PT
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JL wrote:
I have nothing inherently against a model that posits matter as being a component to experience - even a leading component. My problem is that there is no empirical evidence that matter and experience are the very same things, or that one emerges or is "produced" strictly from the other, and that by measuring one, you measure the other.
That's a good statement of your position. Reasonably clear and succinct. There is empirical evidence that experience is a product of brain activity, and the brain is a part of the physical world. However, you seem to want to push to a level of proof that either there is more to it than physical matter, or that physics can explain everything.
It's too early to cast the question as an either/or proposition.
As a student of neuroscience I gained a feeling that there are enough wonderful circuits, juices, and plasticity in the brain to account for every nuance of every sensation you might have. Careful measurements have been made in many small parts of the whole. I see no need for what Chalmers calls an "extra ingredient." I prefer to be parsimonious. Experience is activity in your nervous system. Your nervous system is also capable of communicating its experience. It may or may not be capable of fully understanding its experience, but that doesn't mean that there is more going on than neurons talking to other neurons.
There was a TV show back in the late 50s on woman's intuition. The host asked a scientist, "But isn't it possible that there are forces we are not aware of?" His answer was, "Yes, it is possible, but if so we are not aware of them."
You aren't getting anywhere by asking science to answer your question and then, upon not hearing a satisfactory answer, declaring that science cannot ever answer the question.
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Nov 25, 2011 - 07:20pm PT
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Ed, yes, thanks for the detailed answers. Great. I read them and understand.
I get the feeling that this thread has reached its end.
Happy Holidays to All.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Nov 25, 2011 - 07:29pm PT
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I get the feeling that this thread has reached its end
LOL !
Seems like the nature of mind is coexistent with the nature of reality, whatever that may be.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 25, 2011 - 07:44pm PT
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MikeL might feel exasperated with my answers, which he may find to be extreme and closed minded...
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Nov 25, 2011 - 08:28pm PT
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I get the feeling that this thread has reached its end.
there seems to be considerable difficulty performing scientific research on after-death experiences; without which, a lot of these discussions are forced to be speculative
escape artist Houdini took this very seriously; but his results were highly inconclusive for various technical reasons
observations of near-death experiences can be very interesting according to my personal experiences; but scientists and skeptics tend to discount such as delusional
a personal story related to me as recently as last week occurred when a member of my family was declared clinically dead in a San Diego hospital; and then surprisingly returned to life against all expectations...
she said that she comfortably got to 'the tunnel of light'; and suddenly realized she had neglected to sign the trust documents
she is now back; but not expected to live very long with a failed heart
meanwhile i am sitting here chatting with my 91 year-old nuclear engineer uncle, who still beats everyone at Scrabble and Monopoly and can relate many details about WWII in the South Pacific
on this note i am sort of interested in observing that this discussion doesn't seem to have considered experiments made in sensory deprivation
Sensory deprivation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sensory deprivation or perceptual isolation[1] is the deliberate reduction or removal of stimuli from one or more of the senses. Simple devices such as blindfolds or hoods and earmuffs can cut off sight and hearing respectively, while more complex devices can also cut off the sense of smell, touch, taste, thermoception (heat-sense), and 'gravity'. Sensory deprivation has been used in various alternative medicines and in psychological experiments (e.g., see isolation tank).
Short-term sessions of sensory deprivation are described as relaxing and conducive to meditation; however, extended or forced sensory deprivation can result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations,[2] bizarre thoughts, and depression.[3]
my understanding of is that we need constant stimulation from the 'physical world' to think 'normally'
this turns out to be particularly important to pilots flying in clouds and/or at night using only flight instruments; where 'vertigo' can quickly prove deadly
especially piloting 'stealth' aircraft; where some special classified equipment called a 'time-space-reference-generator' is required to keep pilots operating 'sanely'
my opinion is that this effect kills a lot of SCUBA divers; perhaps half a dozen each year in Monterey Bay alone
so if we have a hard time keeping our wits about us in a sensory deprivation tank or IFR aircraft cockpit...
...how well can most people be expected to perform upon body death?
(assuming you don't totally buy into the old 'everything just goes black' hypothesis)
Edit: 'string theory' and 'multi-verses' in physics are now saying that our known perceptions of the 4D universe (XYZ plus time) exist only as a thin membrane upon a larger universe of eleven dimensions across multiple parallel universes
a bit like my observation that our physical universe is just the froth on the surface of an ocean
perhaps our main challenge with this whole discussion is that we are chronically experiencing 'sensory deprivation'
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Nov 25, 2011 - 10:59pm PT
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Thanks Ed and Tom for laying out your two different views so articulately. I'm a big believer in basic international English that doesn't require professional jargon. I think you've both proved that it can be done.
Of course my own personal inclinations are toward Tom's view of the universe, near death experiences being a particularly interesting case which would seem to support both views. Electrical stimulation of a certain section of the brain provokes near death experiences.
At the same time, people undergoing near death experiences via natural traumas, report phenomena that do not equate with our current notions of the brain's capabilities. These include blind people who were formerly sighted being able to describe the appearance including colors of hair and clothing of the people working on them in the ER, and resusitated people being able to repeat conversations between the ER personnel which took place during the moments the machines showed they were brain wave dead.
Ironic isn't it, that medical resusitation technology thanks to science, has reinvigorated many old debates about brain and mind and what happens after death?
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Nov 25, 2011 - 11:30pm PT
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Jan, obviously you and i have many points of agreement
what may not be quite so obvious is that i agree with most of what is being posted in this thread and have been fascinated by the learning experience
i do not see the various viewpoints as being inconsistent; rather that people are not seeing there are different ways of viewing the same things; which are yet not contradictory to each other
sort of like Ed Witten resolving the five versions of string theory with the 11 dimensions of M-theory
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MH2
climber
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Nov 26, 2011 - 12:19am PT
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"The first time I died it was an eye-opener. Literally.
I got a call from a researcher at Duke. He said he had seen my paintings in the National Geographic and Smithsonian magazines and wanted to engage me as illustrator for an expedition he was planning.
I explained that I was blind and had been for eighteen months.
He said he knew; he said that was why they wanted me.
[skip to near the end]
Was it subjective or an objective reality? The question had no significance. This was more real than anything that had ever happened to me or ever would again."
from the Terry Bisson story Necronauts
But I agree with Riley.
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Nov 26, 2011 - 12:29am PT
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There is something "extra"
"I" experience. YOU can try to measure it with a a big magnet or a precise Microscope. You may write all the formulae that can fit in the universe.
But you will utterly fail to approach encompassing one second of my experience by those methods.
Yet while trying and failing you will be living it.
Perhaps all matter FEELS some way about this. Then there is no "extra". There is merely misunderstood matter.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Nov 26, 2011 - 12:30am PT
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To not see inconsistencies is to ignore massive amounts of evolutionary and biological history.
No, it just requires a longer time frame than the evolution of physical life on this planet and assumes that evolution doesn't have to be just a physical phenomenon.
As for Riley's argument, recent discoveries has shown that at least a certain percentage of people in a vegetative state have some awareness, as do people in a coma. These and near death experiences at least provide some interesting data for scientists to work on to draw up new parameters of brain functioning. And you're right, the NDE's weren't hooked up to EKG's but were flat lining on the ER equipment which medics assumed made them brain wave dead, particularly when 5 minutes had passed.
As for sitting at the bedside of dying people, I've had a different experience on occasion. Not to mention Kubler-Ross. It seems some people experience more than others which backs up Tom's suppositions about there being more than one way to see these things.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Nov 26, 2011 - 01:53am PT
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sitting in meadow grass watching someone ascend El Cap is not an equivalent experience to being up there climbing
a viewpoint of the living observing the dying does not ensure understanding the experience of death
nor does either point-of-view invalidate the experience from the other viewpoint
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
The shaggy fringe of Los Angeles
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Nov 26, 2011 - 10:06am PT
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our physical universe is just the froth on the surface of an ocean
Great viewpoint, Tom! I like that.
In my own spiritual quest I recently moved to the view that the origin of the universe is and always has been; now.
Also that it is not an otherness, not just mine, but "ours."
Once freed from a tangled mind, it is a wonderful game to be entered every morning.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 26, 2011 - 01:30pm PT
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Ed wrote:
By "human experience" you mean, of course, what we are taught or learn about what other humans experience.
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Nope. You started and defended yourself from a false supposition, IMO.
You're supposition - which you have mistaken for subjective experience - is what (in the 50s) has long been called classical conditioning. That is, a conditioned response is the "learned" response to a previously neutral stimulus. This is in keeping with a physicalist mechanistic view of the life, where 1st person subjective experience is seen as an evolved, mechanical by-product of material stirrings. This, of course, is a functional analysis ignoring the qualitative differences between subjective and objective, and yet another attempt to collapse the subjective into the objective.
Of course we are full of conditioned responses - from hunger to fear to (fill in the blank). But these responses - be they learned or spontanteous - are simply more qualia in the field of subjective awareness.
Ultimately I'm not talking about content here, but the experiential subjective flow of whatever passes through awareness. Ed is convinced that this flow is learned and conditioned or at any rate entirely manufactured by and extruded through an evolved brain. Fair enough. But I feel that he looses his way when he insists that all that is extruded through and all the conditioned responses are qualatitively the VERY SAME as any other objective function.
Take the outstanding photo Ed posted. Only a dead man could look at that pic and not have a response (instinct). Is your experience of this response (conditioned or otherwise), and the response itself, the VERY SAME thing? Do you not have some sense of something beyond the mechanistic arising and falling of stimuli in your awareness? Are we saying that subjective experience is ONLY neurological stimuli? I'm not saying that at all.
Basically, if you insist that responses are themselves raw experience itself, then you have reframed experience into being an objective function and have side stepped the "hard question" once more, not by answering it, but through collapsing the 1st person into 3rd person functioning/reaction.
Perhaps a way to get at this without having people conveniently redefine raw experience in terms of a mechanical process is to ask: Contrast 1st and 3rd person. What is the QUALITATIVE difference beyond mere neurological stimulus?
Another angle might be:
In mathematics, a "function" associates one quantity (the argument or input of the function) with a second quantity, the value of the function, also known as the output. Using this model,subjective experience can be viewed as a functional output of the brain.
In common usage, "function" refers to "the action for which a person or thing is particularly fitted or employed." So perhaps Ed’s description of subjective experience is a workable, objective, 3rd person definition of subjectivity in terms of functionality. What is missing, of course, is the qualitative aspect, which makes all the difference. When just the measurable quantitative aspects are considered, we get Ed’s definition, or one lashed tight to mechanical processes. But in doing so we loose the qualitative subjective aspect which is our fundamental reality, and which in and of itself is neither mechanical or a function. This is an issue that one can only stand pat on if they refused to move out of the 3rd person, or to consider 1st person subjectivity as a 3rd person objective function, basically objectifying experience. The next step is what Ed did, which is to say that experience is ITSELF the objectification, in real time, of
conditioned responses. In other words there is no separation between the objective and the subjective, that the subjective experience of being Ed is, in fact, the same as a grid diagram for a go cart.
Some other questions that come up out of this discussion are: What does subjective experience present beyond the merely functional? And what is the qualitative as contrasted to the quantitive, or do you see the qualitative as “produced” by and derived from the qualitative to the extent that it is needless to differentiate?
Also, note that Ed never stated what he felt were the limitations of measuring subjective experience, because (I am guessing here - but not really) he feels there inherently aren't any so long as 1st person experience is viewed as an evolved, reactionary mechanism, and not as subjectve field/flow.
Perhaps the last question is: Does qualitative have ANY significance, anywhere in the universe, above and beyond the quantitative?
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 27, 2011 - 01:32am PT
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Ed is convinced that this flow is learned and conditioned or at any rate entirely manufactured by and extruded through an evolved brain. Fair enough. But I feel that he looses his way when he insists that all that is extruded through and all the conditioned responses are qualatitively the VERY SAME as any other objective function.
perhaps you jumped to conclusions too quickly Largo, what I said was that we learn how to interpret the flow and express it... the only way I know about the "human experience" is through communication with other humans. It is the only way to know that others experience similar things. And it is decidedly "3rd person."
My point is that our way of describing "the flow" may actually be "3rd person" for that part of the mind that is discursive, that that part of mind may not have direct access to "the flow" and makes things up about it...
...I cannot describe that part of my experience, the "first person" part, it is beyond expression, as you have pointed out many times. I am not unaware of it though.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Nov 27, 2011 - 03:02am PT
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Near death experinces mean absolutely nothing scientificaly. Dreams and visions of a half baked conscious and subconscious. Or just out right jibberish.
It seems to me this could be said about every human experience and emotion which can not be measured by science. Science doesn't deny that falling in love exists however, just that science can't measure it.
As for Kubler Ross, I'm well aware of her stages of death and dying which the scientific community accepted and still does. Interesting though, that as soon as she began talking about the spiritual aspects of being at so many children's deaths, the medical community turned her right off.
I understand that it is not the job of science to explain non material phenomenon. I also happen to think it is not the job of science to pronounce on the impossibility or ridiculous nature of non material phenomenon. When that's done, the scientist is no longer doing science, just engaging in personal opinion.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Nov 27, 2011 - 07:07am PT
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In your opinion.
Which is not the same as science.
Because science doesn't deal with such matters.
So we're back to people's subjective experiences again
and other people judging them.
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
The shaggy fringe of Los Angeles
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Nov 27, 2011 - 09:52am PT
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I find it interesting that there are those who fail to recognize that there is a life force.
The difference between a dead body and a live one: The live one has a life force.
The life force seems to ebb and rise. Ever meet someone nearly dead or someone so alive it seemed remarkable?
You can choose to believe that you are nothing more than a squishy ball of meat inside a cranium but how that is conscious has yet to be explained by science. Thus it is simply a belief.
I can see with my eyes the difference between a dead animal and live one. Therefore I can see the life force or spirit.
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MH2
climber
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Nov 27, 2011 - 11:41am PT
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from JL:
Take the outstanding photo Ed posted. Only a dead man could look at that pic and not have a response (instinct). Is your experience of this response (conditioned or otherwise), and the response itself, the VERY SAME thing? Do you not have some sense of something beyond the mechanistic arising and falling of stimuli in your awareness? Are we saying that subjective experience is ONLY neurological stimuli? I'm not saying that at all.
A fruit fly looking at Ed's photo would have a response. One might go further and say that a video camera looking at it would also have a response. So I guess you are talking more of an emotional reaction than an unspecified response. Unless your question could also apply to the video camera.
An emotion could be "beyond the mechanistic arising and falling of stimuli in your awareness," but only in the sense of being triggered at a different time and place than the light falling on your retina provoking a response in the optic nerve.
Nothing you become consciously aware of has a quick or straightforward explanation. By that stage in the process, your brain has already done many operations on the input.
Vision is a great example to use to explore what is known about how the brain works.
Hubel and Wiesel greatly advanced the understanding of how the visual system takes an input like Ed's photo and processes it. At the outermost stage, the retina detects colors, brightness, and edges. Deeper, in the part of the cerebral cortex most involved with vision, neurons become more specialized, some responding best (or only), to vertical lines, some to horizontal lines, some to vertical lines moving left-to-right, and so on. The findings of Hubel and Wiesel suggested that your experience of a particular visual input at the conscious level might be dependent on activity in a small group of neurons dedicated to recognizing only that input among the many possible.
Like experience in the broader sense, vision doesn't come ready-made in the newborn. It is built up over time. As Hubel and Wiesel also showed, early visual experience molds the way in which neurons in the visual cortex will respond to visual inputs. It is only because of previous experience with seeing trees, for example, that we are able to identify their outline in Ed's photo, an important factor in the way we perceive the scale in the picture and enjoy it.
At the limit, it is possible that activity in a single neuron could indicate that you had, for example, just recognized your grandmother. In Largo's terms, this would be a key step in you experiencing your grandmother. After the recognition stage, the so-called "grandmother cell" could stimulate an emotional response via its connections to other parts of the brain. That would be another part of you experiencing your grandmother.
Your grandmother could also be recognized through other sense modalities, but perhaps all roads lead to one neuron in charge of recognizing your grandmother in all her manifestations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_cell
The grandmother cell isn't a very helpful idea, because there's no good way to look for one. You are faced with either presenting a very specific stimulus and trying to search through billions of neurons for the one triggered by that stimulus, or picking one neuron and testing it with thousands of inputs. Neither approach is practical.
It may also be that recognizing Grandma is shared in a diffuse way among a few or very many neurons. But there is no reason to think that such experience has some other basis than the brain. "Subjective field/flow" could be another way of saying that the natives (=neurons) are restless. They are always dancing. To the beat of your heart or the drawing of your breath, if to nothing else.
Neuroscientist Eric Kandel had this to say on the 50th anniversary of Hubel and Wiesel's 1959 paper:
"We have the feeling that we interact with each other - when I speak to you and you listen to me - that we are directly experiencing one another. Hubel, Wiesel, and Mountcastle have made us realize that this is an illusion, a perceptual illusion. The brain does not simply take the raw data that it receives through the senses and reproduce it faithfully in the brain. Rather, each sensory system first analyses and decomposes, and then restructures the incoming raw sensory information according to its own built-in connections and rules."
The grandmother cell hasn't been abandoned and some recent results are very intriguing.
"This neuron is responding to the concept, the abstract entity, of Halle Berry," says Quiroga. "If you show a line drawing or a profile, it's the same response. We also showed pictures of her as Catwoman, and you can hardly see her because of the mask. But if you know it is Halle Berry then the neurons still fire."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7567
The principal investigator doesn't believe in the limiting case - that a single neuron is the gateway to recognition - and they couldn't test every possible input to the neurons they did study, but they did find surprisingly choosy neurons.
Human single-neuron responses at the threshold of conscious recognition.
R. Quian Quiroga, R. Mukamel, E. A. Isham, R. Malach, and I. Fried
PNAS, 4 March 2008
http://www.vis.caltech.edu/~rodri/papers/PNAS_2008.pdf
But we must remember that genetics, environment, drugs, disease, or trauma can make a big difference in the way people experience things.
//To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars.
His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them//
Funes the Memorious
Jorge Luis Borges
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Nov 27, 2011 - 11:59am PT
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Ha-ha, . . . I was wrong. This thread isn't dead! It's aliiiiivvveeeeeeee! :-D
Ed, I was not exasperated. I just think that we have heard one another pretty well, we know that we have fundamental differences of opinion, and we are not about to change each other's minds with words. It's a problem with words, data, and measurements: they don't convince anyone of anything. Conviction is an inside job.
You have my respect, Ed, have no doubt.
Be well.
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