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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 24, 2017 - 01:23pm PT
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What does your path of inquiry offer? Please be explicit.
For many, the path is simply to try and realize Socrates prime directive: know thyself. Some are content to know themselves by way of electrical circuitry. Others use other methods. Tastes differ. Not everyone is cut out to be an electrician nor yet a subjective adventurer.
The reason I have never been remotely convinced that electrical circuitry had anything to do with awareness is many fold, but started when I first dug into EEG and qEEG work and had electrodes attached to my head and the head of many others and watched the electrical signal on the computer monitor giving us a real-time measurement of phase and amplitude and coherence and a bunch of other data across the Delta to High Beta (Gamma) frequencies and never, after years of experimentation, got the slightest indication that we were ever looking at anything but unconscious brain artifact. That this artifact had a direct effect on mental content was indisputable, and indeed generic brain patterns could predict to an amazing degree subjective states like bi-polar disorder, ADD, depression, etc. And so -called mystical states could be induced through entrainment, especially in the Theta and Alppa frequencies. But the fun work was always using conscious intent to alter the brain waves, or to use reward programs that when consciously (focused attention) followed would actually change the brains output. (PET, MRI and other rigs were more comprehensive by a long shot but we could never get the vast amount of hours on these machines needed to get a feel for the work
The interesting revelation we all got from this training is that the brain is a vast feedback mechanism but it operates entirely on autopilot, decisions being made according to a combination of genetic programming and conditioning. However the brain could not come up with options outside of the sphere of this programming and conditioning because it did not have a feedback loop outside of itself. That is what the qEEGs provided, and those were marshaled by the subject's awareness. Once the brain could be shown what it was doing and given an alternative (produce less delta and more low beta across the SMR strip, for example), it would respond. But the brain itself, at the level of electrical output, was not "conscious." That's why I chuckle to myself when folks like Graciano have the brain - with no input beyond its own on-board data - "attributing" or "self-designating" capacities to itself, including awareness - a process that postulated awareness before any attributions of self-designations would even be possible, plus the impossibility of "imagining" possibilities that were not derived from in situ data. What's more, for the brain to accomplish this, it would have to break free of the determined nature of its functioning and commit an act of truly free will - that is, derive an answer that was not informed by or beholden or causally connected to its internal data, something (awareness) totally out of the blue that was categorically different than anything else in the galaxy. This, by any definition, is magic.
The path of my inquiry is basically to slowly but surly seek to square my academic training in the issues and themes we discus here with the practical or applied work I have done in brain and biofeed back training (which will once for all kill any illusions you have that mind and body are not one unified system) and all the years doing the subjective adventures. In the process I'd like to make clear that in my opinion and experience, a strictly mechanistic view of consciousness will always boil down to two options: that the brain IS conscious, inherently, or that a magical mechanism is evoked to "create" consciousness. I disagree with both versions. Informational, processing, complexity. and electrochemical explanada refer to objective functioning. There are plenty of examples in Nature of these functions and not a single one has ever shown the slightest sign of exhibiting consciousness. Not one.
The inherent or fundamental angle is worth exploring, however, especially in those cases where fundamental forces are widely accepted as starting points, say, in physics.
There are four fundamental interactions or forces (gravitation, electromagnetism, the weak interaction, and the strong interaction), fundamental because they are the foundation stones of the standard model theory. None of these forces can be described as being created or sustained by more fundamental mechanisms. And none of them considered "other worldly" or magical or wo wo. They simply are. Some might say that they were created by the big ass bang, but said bang arose out of nothing at all, or else you are left with an eternally cycling process of inflation and contraction where nothing was "created" because there was never a first instance.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 24, 2017 - 02:15pm PT
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the fact that you are using an evaluation system at all
I was not using an evaluation system. That is your take.
I have no objection to emptiness eluding evaluation. What I question are the evaluations you keep making of it.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Feb 24, 2017 - 05:52pm PT
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Nice, Jan.
Buddhism has survived as long as it has because of its ability to adapt to a new culture. It’s been said that is one of the more important reasons why ancient Rome’s power lasted a millennia. “Hey, your gods are our gods; we observe religious practices; how can we participate? Oh, BTW, we’re handling the civic stuff from now on.”
It’s a little surprising to me that there have not been obvious American Zen masters who are fully liberated. Maybe I should say the same for other non-oriental countries. I’ve heard there are some things that must be translated into American culture, but it has not yet been achieved.
(I took a course in Japanese culture by a Kabuki master at the U of I, and I know some things about Ikebana, but not enough to see different disciplines. Cool. The Kabuki master did the neatest renditions of Western tragedies using Kabuki augmented by space music. Mesmerizing. That looked like adaptation to me.)
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Feb 24, 2017 - 08:35pm PT
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That's a wonderful selfie, but don't you think you are a bit overdressed?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 25, 2017 - 09:29am PT
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So I sense our interest in the subject of "free will" at long last is winding down. So here's a top candidate video that's my personal choice as a grand finale...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
Joshua Greene
(currently reading his Moral Tribes)
Steven Pinker
Daniel Dennett
Claim: Thinking of human behavior as purely mechanical makes people less retributive.
QT: Assuming the claim is true, is this a good thing?
"Everything changes when it's something physical. People are more understanding."
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Feb 25, 2017 - 11:12am PT
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About 10 years ago we built this and it was AMAZINGLY functional
for such a simple, easy to build thing.
Would a more complex motor be ever so much, slightly, aware of itself? At what point would a complex information processor finally become aware of itself? Would that awareness be in the metal and wire or the electric current used to energize that machine? Does the metal become aware by virtue of its complexity? If not does that mean that mind is separate from machine in some way? Again, then where is mind is it in the metal and wire or the electric current or the information being processed?
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Feb 25, 2017 - 12:31pm PT
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Again, then where is mind is it in the metal and wire or the electric current or the information being processed?
Well, we know that conscious awareness in living things is dependent upon the nominally unconscious components you have mentioned. Even " in the metal" is central to the supporting bio energetic processes of awareness. Most people don't understand how the photoelectric effect takes place within the retinal pathways. A photon of sunlight strikes a tissue containing a metallic substrate and !voila!, an electron is liberated.
Are any one of the biologic processes,when considered separately, responsible for human life? No. Just as a solo violin does not an orchestra make. However, working happily together, things like DNA, sunlight, water, electrons -- produces the miracle: a Beethoven string quartet.
The provenance of life does indeed spring from such low-born ancestors as your basic garden-variety electron; a dollop of sunlight, a little sprinkle of wasser, and lots and lots of ordinary time.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Feb 25, 2017 - 03:55pm PT
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Again, then where is mind is it in the metal and wire or the electric current or the information being processed?
Sorry, but this seems like a rather naive argument.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 25, 2017 - 06:45pm PT
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The reason I have never been remotely convinced that electrical circuitry had anything to do with awareness is many fold, but started when I first dug into EEG and qEEG work and had electrodes attached to my head and the head of many others and watched the electrical signal on the computer monitor giving us a real-time measurement of phase and amplitude and coherence and a bunch of other data across the Delta to High Beta (Gamma) frequencies and never, after years of experimentation, got the slightest indication that we were ever looking at anything but unconscious brain artifact.
You were barking up the wrong tree. If this is the perspective you now have, I hope that you did not throw away the key to the lock.
Trying to figure out what consciousness is from EEG is like trying to figure out what frogs are from the rhythmic sounds of the swamp.
You need to look more deeply and broadly at what the mind is made up of.
In my own day in the neuroscience field, I was most interested in learning and memory. I find it strange that many people are puzzled by consciousness and awareness, which we can look at as much as we have patience for in our own heads, and never really understand, and seem not to be puzzled by how we store and access information, which is a mystery that can be unravelled.
Ramón y Cajal was the first to report seeing dendritic spines:
and furthermore:
Cajal proposed that physical changes in spines could be associated with neuronal function and learning
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4404913/
One of Cajal's personality traits was his strength of character. Indeed, Cajal was Aragonese and, in the popular culture of Spain, Aragonese and other northern Spaniards are considered to be single-minded and persistent. This is captured in a tale of an Aragonese farmer (“baturro”) riding his donkey on the train tracks and, when faced with an incoming train at full speed and blowing its whistle to warn him, tells the train that “blow as much as you want, but you are the one who needs to step out of the tracks.”
(from the above reference)
from his Wikipedia entry:
He was an avid painter, artist, and gymnast
another entry that shows him in the same league as Patrick F. McManus:
his imprisonment at the age of eleven for destroying his neighbor's yard gate with a homemade cannon
So, how is it that we can remember things?
First, of course, it is necessary to become aware of them, but here we are not trying to mystify by talking about "pure" or "raw" awareness. Just awareness will do, brought to us from the world outside our heads to inside of it by sensory receptors and axons dutifully if unglamorously transmitting information.
One of the strangest things about memory is its persistence, though you would be forgiven for not appreciating that, if you think at the level of words and their definitions, and do not trouble yourself with details of how functions of the brain are implemented.
Dendritic spines look more and more like a prescient guess by that Aragonese artist of the Golgi stain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadherin%E2%80%93catenin_complex_in_learning_and_memory
Without memory, we would not be discussing any kind of awareness, or consciousness, or mind, or what it might be like to be a bat.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 25, 2017 - 09:01pm PT
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As a follow-up to the poster who pointed out that mind is the past tense of the verb "to mine," phonetically, and to give flavor to what neuroscience is:
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Feb 26, 2017 - 06:39am PT
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MH2: Without memory, we would not be discussing any kind of awareness, or consciousness, or mind, or what it might be like to be a bat.
I wonder what my wife’s stepfather who has Alzheimer’s would say about that? He visits our home and gets lost in our living room. Even his long term memory is failing. Last night he could not remember whether or not his parents had a college education. They did, advanced ones at that.
There seems to be no doubt that he's aware of the moment. Just try to avoid asking him how his day went. He doesn't really know.
There is "muscle memory," you know, and it's not all located in the brain. Procedural knowledge and episodic knowledge are not semantic knowledge.
Awareness seems considerably more complex than you suggest, IMO.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Feb 26, 2017 - 06:46am PT
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Hey, thanks for that, HFCS! Just finished Dennett's opening talk. I must say, I don't think he was very convincing in his arguments for compatibilism. To tell you the truth, I was hoping he had more (although he never got to his second main point (yet)). I'm in the other camp so far, but I would love to be convinced of compatibilism. Looking forward to the rest.
So, I watched the other two talks. I liked Pinker's the best. He came up with the answer to should we be held responsible for our actions affirmatively, but not because he is a compatibilist (which, based on what he said, I would have to think that he is not) but because of societal reasons. He gave agency to society and put that front and center.
I want to watch the rest, but I also just bought Homo Deus and, of course, there's the Sunday NY Times. It's shaping up to be a great morning.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 26, 2017 - 07:42am PT
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There is "muscle memory," you know, and it's not all located in the brain.
True, there is the spinal column, also.
My point was that in order to discuss the issues I mentioned, you first need to learn about them. Later in life you may forget them along with a lot of other stuff.
It was only a point about timing. If you don't first learn language, there will be no discussion as we know it, here.
I worked in a nursing home for 10 years. We had a resident who never spoke but he followed directions spoken to him and did woodworking, painting, and other arts and crafts. His diagnosis was autism. He lived to 92.
You may make assumptions about awareness in others, but if you are making decisions about how to care for them or otherwise interact with them you must go on what you observe. Some people with advanced dementia show very little awareness, but if you hand them a fork they will use it to eat with or if you give them a pen they will write with it, or at least try to.
It is wonderful to see how old people who seem lost may remember music and show happiness when they hear it and sing or play a musical instrument. We had a gent who could not tell you his own name, but if you handed him a harmonica it was a miracle and everyone within earshot could not help but dance.
If your wife's stepfather doesn't bump into furniture in the living room, he is aware of more than his own awareness.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 26, 2017 - 09:40am PT
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I have tried to bring up the practical issues of "consciousness" (aka "mind," "awareness," etc) but failed to as elegantly as MH2 did above.
The vicissitudes of living provide an observatory with which to test our ideas regarding these topics, and provide what I believe are the best definitions of "consciousness," "awareness," "mind."
Largo dismissed this line of inquiry in some post on some related thread as dealing with "damaged" individuals who could not be thought of as representative of the topic. He essentially dismissed the issues of early childhood, for which we all have murky memories (if any memories at all) of those early times in our lives.
But those put in care of those people have a responsibility to develop some practical understanding.
I gave an example of the definition of consciousness used by hospital workers to determine the status of patients. I find it somewhat delightful that when typing into the Google search bar "assessment of consciousness" that the top hit on the reply is to a nursing website.
http://www.nursingtimes.net/clinical-archive/neurology/neurological-assessment-1-assessing-level-of-consciousness/1703021.article
which provides a very interesting definition, as well as defining "levels" of consciousness.
There you will find the statement:
"It is not possible to directly assess the level of consciousness - it can only be assessed by observing the patient’s behavioural response to different stimuli."
which is completely understandable in a "medical" setting, but at odds with the philosophical discussion we have been engaged in for quite sometime.
MH2 related the story of various patients who exhibit a broad range of behaviors which seem to be paradoxical given our "theory of mind" which indicates that that theory breaks down.
My suspicion is that Largo's philosophical musings rejects these examples because they cannot be explained by his own "theory of mind," and so he rejects the data to preserve the theory. But any such theory must come to grips with these examples.
But by so doing, those theories must accept the physical origin of "mind," "consciousness," "awareness," etc... or explain how these, if unphysical, affect the physical, but then by the same token how the "physical" affects the "unphysical." The simple symmetry of this causal connection essentially brings these two domains, the "physical" and the "unphysical" together, which is not part of Largo's program.
If there is no such causal symmetry, then we have an interesting discussion, part of which had been undertaken by evoking quantum mechanics. And while quantum mechanics can be interpreted as breaking the causal connections of our everyday experiences (what physicists refer to as "classical") there is predictability in quantum mechanics, though of a probabilistic type. Causality is alive and well in the quantum world, though calculating the probabilities might run up against our ability to enumerate all of the possibilities. The distinction is an important one.
It is by their behavior that we know them... any definition of "mind," "consciousness," "awareness," etc. must occur in the context of this behavior, and in turn, in the social context in which that behavior is both observed and interpreted.
Attempts to answer the OP question will come up short otherwise.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Feb 26, 2017 - 01:28pm PT
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Nice post, MH2 (yours was good too, Ed)!
So, I still haven't watched the second part of that hour and forty-something minute podcast that HFCS posted, but I've been thinking about the three talks on and off today.
The first thing you have to know (and I'm speaking to every one except HFCS) is that all three speakers are definitely in the camp that mind is a product of brain. All of them reject the notion of ghost in the machine or the possibility of a soul. They are all ardent evolutionists. So, they already are on one side of the main topic of debate in this thread. The philosophical question that they are debating is, having rejected the idea of soul and accepting a basically deterministic Universe, can individuals truly be responsible for their actions and what should society's response be to that question?
My take is that Dennett's (compatibilist) stance is trying hard to legitimize our common notions of responsibility for our actions by linguistic sleight-of-hand. I think that Joshua Greene is right. Dennett is trying to hold on to something (he's the old guy) that needs to be discarded entirely. Evolutionary arguments alone are sufficient.
Pinker brings a breath of fresh air into the debate, IMO.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Feb 26, 2017 - 04:06pm PT
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The inherent or fundamental angle is worth exploring, however, especially in those cases where fundamental forces are widely accepted as starting points, say, in physics . . . . There are four fundamental interactions or forces ... None of these forces can be described as being created or sustained by more fundamental mechanisms
It seems you are implying awareness is an independent "force" that reacts with the physical, rather than it being an outcome of the purely physical. So brain doesn't produce mind?
Causality is alive and well in the quantum world, though calculating the probabilities might run up against our ability to enumerate all of the possibilities. The distinction is an important one
And this seems to close the door on much of the metaphysics you have espoused, JL. Do you have much contact these days with the Prodigies?
I'd like to make clear that in my opinion and experience, a strictly mechanistic view of consciousness will always boil down to two options: that the brain IS conscious, inherently, or that a magical mechanism is evoked to "create" consciousness. I disagree with both versions
I don't think that Corn Spirit's complexity of circuitry is in any way "magical" and that mind may indeed come as an apparent emergent property from that complexity. One doesn't need to invoke supervenience and other philosophical notions. Or that brain, as a kind of radio, tunes in an independent awareness.
But maybe that's not what you are implying, and your inquiries are more astute than I have guessed.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 27, 2017 - 09:04am PT
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When the mind uses only the brain it becomes a robot and animalistic consciousness.
When the mind uses the brain and the soul, then it becomes a human being ....
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Feb 27, 2017 - 10:28am PT
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I don't think that Corn Spirit's complexity of circuitry is in any way "magical" and that mind may indeed come as an apparent emergent property from that complexity. One doesn't need to invoke supervenience and other philosophical notions. Or that brain, as a kind of radio, tunes in an independent awareness.
Isn't the word magic a bit vague.
How is it that consciousness can't, in the same manner light is, be an inevitable product of certain processes of the release of energy and in that sense be as light is, a transcendent and universal quality/thing, photons in the case of light, that is simply not understood, but nevertheless is as eternal as the universe is and again transcendent, integral and inevitable?
Call me naïve, but I don't see how magic comes into the picture. Who believes in magic?
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Feb 27, 2017 - 10:33am PT
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Sorry Paul, but just about every evolutionary biologist would say that YOU do.
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