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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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The Hard Problem can be cast in various forms, but one of the more popular angles is to simply wonder how the brain, if viewed as a biomechanism, can "create" consciousness.
That is not my problem.
I consider the brain to be the substrate of consciousness.
You might agree.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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We don't have reduced awareness...
Au contraire, I'd say such a claim about being unconscious is, at best, a case of both wishful thinking and an odd kind of intellectual optimism. But again, good to finally get to you saying something concrete in the way of awareness being 'fundamental'.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 2, 2017 - 10:14pm PT
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Healyje, not sure what you are saying. If I ever do.
And MH2, using a word like substrate says little unless you get into what that means, functionally. Does the substrate cause or support a phenomenon above and beyond the firing neurons? Or are the firing neurons themselves conscious? Put differently, in functional terms, what is the relationship between the substrate and consciousness. If you favor phrases like, "Consciousness is what the substrate does," you invite the Hard Problem since any schoolboy will quite naturally ask: How? If you say, "Through the neural processes," you have provided a description but not an explanation.
With virtually any other phenomenon in Nature, describing physical processes goes most if not all the distance in explaining a phenomenon since a link to antecedent physical processes always leads to an objective physical result, so to speak. If matter suddenly becomes a phenomenon entirely other than an external physical force, object or phenomenon, the "how and why" questions will always be there. If you go to the fallback position that objective and subjective are selfsame, then you are left with an inherent property.
That's why for many, the entire riddle of mind breaks down to two basic positions: That sentience itself is inherent, or that the Hard Problem can be answered mechanistically, though the logical coherence of the latter is questionable, at best (because your Uncle has to become your Aunt in the process).
Or you can take Uncle Dennett's position that consciousness is imagined, which postulates consciousness in the bargain - or leaves you with unconscious imagining, a howler by most any measure.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Largo,
no sense.
Likely if the mind [through evolution?] can make any feelings it can make the feeling of awareness and that is all awareness might be. awareness = a single feeling.
Much like our vision which is not continuous but continually refreshes at some persistence rate so likely does the generation of feelings and the feeling of being aware.
Yes, Awareness = a single type of feeling that comes up when we are not really busy. Busy = skiing down the Needles Eye ski run at Mary Jane at my limit after conditions have changed from when I last did the run of Needles Eye. The condition of the feeling that I am aware is not there during this kind of run. That feeling of being aware is for the leisure skiers not the focused.
And when my sentient being is focused on helping an injured climber the sense of awareness does not arise. Afterwords I feel as if I were an agent to work out the logistics of how this person might be helped -- no tears are shed and no sad feeling arise, just the doing of what we can do to help.
Both these situations seem like the actions of an agent -- a mere robot and we love this type of experiencing.
Wasn't it P D Ouspensky that claimed we normally have 48 forces working on us but when we are focused there are only 24 and when we are in grief there are 96 forces working on us. And when our minds get in the best state there are only 8 forces working on it. No science as I know it is going on here thought.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Healyje, not sure what you are saying. If I ever do.
a) That, again, after 15k posts and even if you aren't owning it, you are at least saying something 'tangible' like "//awareness is fundamental", as opposed to saying more or less nothing at all.
b) That the idea "We don't have reduced awareness..." when unconscious is some pretty desperate reaching as is your radio analogy.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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what is the relationship between the substrate and consciousness
It gives you a way to learn about consciousness by studying the brain.
Our current knowledge of brain function and its relationship to consciousness cannot be briefly described or easily understood anymore than a person can leap into the deep end of meditative practice with no buildup.
Familiarity with scientific method is a good start. However, there is much more needed to get a good understanding of this complex and interrelated world of ours.
A person may be able to get sound out of a violin. Does that mean they can play it? The violin also takes time to master. Developing an understanding of the science of a topic like brain function is similar.
Another question concerns a person's tastes and aptitudes. It wouldn't matter how much time I spent on the viola; I would never be good and probably never even come to like it. I gave it a try, though, back in middle school.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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healyje: . . . 'tangible' like "//awareness is fundamental", as opposed to saying more or less nothing at all. . . . the idea "We don't have reduced awareness..." when unconscious is some pretty desperate reaching
jgill: When you reach emptiness in meditation, on the other hand, you must be conscious if you remember the experience. So your awareness was not entirely empty but displayed a touch of consciousness.
We can’t say what consciousness is. Can we say what it isn’t? Isn’t that the same conundrum?
Nothingness is just a concept created in the mind. There is nothing concrete about it.
Technically, “emptiness” is not nothingness. Emptiness points to the unsubstantiability of objects. But, that is not nothingness.
One can see the truth that it’s impossible to say what anything is finally and accurately and completely, be it a chair, a quark, or mind.
Cintune,
I’m taken with the tagline on the website you just posted: “NEUROLOGICA blog: Your daily fix of neuroscience, skepticism, and critical thinking.”
Daily fix? Would you say it’s an addiction?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Hubert L. Dreyfus, Philosopher of the Limits of Computers, Dies at 87
"Professor Dreyfus, an adherent of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (he had written seminal introductory works on both men), posited a different view of human beings and their interactions with the world around them.
There was no objective set of facts outside the human mind, he insisted. Human beings experienced learning as a partly physical interaction with their surroundings, and interpreted the world, in a process of continual revision, through a socially determined filter."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 3, 2017 - 08:35am PT
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Dingus, no cigar I'm afraid that awareness itself is a "feeling."
Once again you have fallen prey to a cardinal flub - conflating content (feelings, sensations, thoughts and memories) with BEING aware of same. That will simply leave you with not only a circular argument, but also the Hard Problem to wrangle. Content - all of it - is just data, impermanent and fleeting. The fact that we are aware of data of any kind is the phenomenon of awareness.
One of many breakthroughs clients find during psychotherapy and counseling is the moment they achieve at least some distance from their feelings, which can become oceanic so long as they are fused or enmeshed with them. When a person can start objectifying their feelings and start talking about them, they slowly start to change.
Any basic contemplation exercise will make clear to you that emotions and awareness are not remotely the same. Awareness itself has no emotional tones.
The radio analogy was used simply to illustrate and example of signal interrupt, NOT as an attempt to say the brain transmits a signal.
And MH2, you say, "Our current knowledge of brain function and its relationship to consciousness cannot be briefly described or easily understood." Nevertheless with your "substrate" analogy, aren't you basically saying that the substrate "creats" or gives rise to consciousness, or is the agency from which consciousness emerges - it's just that we don't yet understand the mechanism? That still leaves you with the Hard Problem, big as sh#t. Ain't no escaping that.
If you are not thinking of this relationship in terms of a mechanism, then was is your take on it.
Once again, IMO, conflating content with awareness is a misstep that bedevils any lucid investigation into the consciousness. It will always involve magic or the Hard Problem. If you believe that feelings ARE awareness, you have overlooked all the times you have NOT had feelings and yet were still aware. Or all those times when content fell away (became background) during relaxation or whatever and your awareness actually became more acute. So feelings AS awareness is a pretty easy one to write off.
It's interesting to me to work through the logic to understand the philosophical positions that people are defending, which usually drives heir responses. I think one of the biggest hurtles is the idea that you can noodle the whole thing from the outside. That, I believe, is what leads to wholesale conflation because from the outside we will always be fixated on content. That's how we are made.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Interesting that Largo defends the point-of-view that is essentially impossible to justify, and equally impossible to demonstrate... to wit, that humans possess something that no other thing in the universe possess.
And the entire body of philosophical work based on the premise that this attribute is on equally shaky ground, basically a justification for the idea of human exceptionalism, based solely on the inability to provide a definitive explanation of the phenomenon.
The "experience" of an astroid as it circles the Sun is unique, and it's history can be read in its structure by those who possess the tools to do so. It has a beginning and an end, and lives a life both solitary and interlocked by the gravity of others. And, as far as we know, possess no awareness of its existence.
Unfettering humans from the universe's physical domain requires the invention of that other domain, and the only way of doing that is to propose that that domain is "nothing," a place of no description, though defined by its being antithetical to "something," the place where we live.
But interestingly, while our understanding divides in exactly the same way, the "known" and the "unknown" we pursue the dynamic of knowing... and are skeptical of the dichotomy that divides the universe into the "knowable" and the "unknowable," which also deserves attention.
The declaration of "unknowable" requires a bit of discussion, and while implicit in this thread, hasn't really been developed.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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The radio analogy was used simply to illustrate and example of signal interrupt, NOT as an attempt to say the brain transmits a signal.
Oh, I got the analogy, I was questioning its appropriateness and application to awareness in relationship to unconsciousness.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 3, 2017 - 09:17am PT
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I knew I shouldn't have used a metaphor for consciousness. None work because sentience is not "like" any other phenomenon in reality.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Well, that's certainly an assertion.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Largo,
I did not say that the feeling of awareness had or needs any emotional overtones. It comes about when one feels -- "I see or I am seeing or I am aware. But I am saying awareness is just a feeling that can come about when we are looking at what you call content and otherwise one is not very busy. The feeling of awareness or having or needing an awareness does not come about when we are very busy and focused. Think of downhill skiing at your limit. You then are not going around thinking or feeling, "Oh great I am aware". There just is no place for that knowing of that puny detail or using some energy to maintain such a feeling. Or I can slow way down and think Oh it is great to be aware of such forces or whatever.
All organisms have some kind of monitoring of their surroundings and you can call this awareness if you want. But most of these organisms do not go around saying they are aware, which is simply saying a word for the feeling that describes what state you are in regarding this monitoring.
I am of the mind that when science can explain the arising of any one feeling it can explain them all.
I can easily understand clear written science but your last rebuttal fell short of having such illumination for me.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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sycoax,
and since you are doing multitasking, are you really getting anything done?
what about litotes?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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To me the known and unknown are relativistic according to our knowledge at the time which we assume will be ever increasing. The knowable and especially the unknowable are the answers to those things which our ape minds and ape developed technology will never be capable of understanding. We don't expect an ant to understand Plato and realistically we can't expect ourselves to know the universe, let alone its purpose or meaning. Other more evolved intelligent life on other planets would almost certainly have better ideas about this than we do - assuming we could understand and communicate with them.
The more important forms of knowledge in the meantime seem to me, to involve how we support our huge population, how we get it back into some kind of balance with our own ecology, and how we maintain some kind of humane order in the process of doing so. Also of course, how we evolve new systems of behavior and meaning appropriate to our current age and predicament..
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Research in Awareness
"We are using the notion of awareness as an umbrella term for intelligence, cognition, consciousness, agency, as well as self-awareness. In short, any form of responsiveness of autonomous agents in complex systems to each other and to their environment"
This would include non-conscious awareness.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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jgil,
This would include non-conscious awareness.
Yes, as in monitoring the environment non-consciously and there is also feeling of having awareness [i am aware] which is not necessarily doing monitoring but lip service to some form, however minor, of some iota of monitoring.
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