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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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2) "The human mind and the rest of the body constitute an indissociable organism, integrated by mutually interactive biochemical and neural regulatory circuits."
Indissociable?
You are barking up the wrong tree.
Phineas Gage is not available to us, today. How sure are you of what has been written about him?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Scientists look for insight and a sense for beauty in their fields, and they seem to distrust and avoid emotion in their work.
Where does a sense of beauty come from?
I think you are overly influenced by the stereotype that scientists are unemotional.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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When I stumble upon an unexpected insight in mathematics it elicits a feeling of excitement. Like finding a passage over a difficult rock pitch.
Sometimes I wonder if awareness is a biological equivalent of the aether. We keep thinking it has a kind of existence apart from content, when in fact it may not. The Zen experience notwithstanding, for the mind attempts to please, and what seems "real" in a trance may not be.
JL's argument is, as MikeL has described, a negative theory, leading nowhere.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 5, 2017 - 05:07pm PT
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Dear John, this process is not a simple mechanism [of the "if so explain it" -- type] but a reiterative system within the brain & body. The external sensing organs and the feeling modules of the brain play our conscious over and over. Specifically the feeling modules along with sensory data input [of what is permitted to conscious awareness] are played against the self module again & again. The awareness feeling module is played with sensory data when there is no urgency at hand. When this happens the self feels awareness. A more urgent situation may need fear and then its module is played but not the passive awareness feeling module.
With the advent of words the self module could play the words "I am aware" when the awareness feeling module is active.
Man, this is just hopelessly muddled, in my opinion.
And ending with the wonky idea - right out of Integrative Information Theory - that the brain "assigns" awareness to itself. As if reiterative (to to say or do again or repeatedly; repeat, often excessively) action, or any type, can give rise to awareness.
In most ever example give above, awareness is already postulated. There is no "feeling" in any module till it is aware. Prior to that, there is just molecular activity.
"The awareness feeling module is played with sensory data" leans toward the module itself being aware, or it drums up awareness by way of interface with sensory data (content). And awareness is again, postulated.
What your begging for is some physical process that begets awareness through it's own process(s), which once it becomes sufficiently repeated and layered (complexity argument), awareness arises - by virtue of the spinning molecules.
I would repeat what a leading neuroscientist recently said - that not only is this unexplained by any known theory, no one has even the slightest idea of what a physical model would even look like that could explain it.
And when you say, "The external sensing organs and the feeling modules of the brain play our conscious over and over," who can possibly unpack what that means?
Sometime when I have the energy I'll relate a conversation I had with a engineering prof at UCLA (and into AI) who I shared a ten hour flight with to Zurich a few weeks ago. Great stuff. Learned a lot.
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WBraun
climber
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The modern material scientists say there is no need for life (God) and thus they are sent to artificial intelligence and artificial everything by that karmic reaction.
All the gross materialist's theories are actually negative because life itsef is not ever material to begin with.
Life is completely always positive.
Thus the modern scientist continually fails while unknowingly masquerading themselves as believing they are in a positive consciousness .....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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I would repeat what a leading neuroscientist recently said
Who?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Science seems to have been founded upon experiment and ratiocination / reason. Scientists look for insight and a sense for beauty in their fields, and they seem to distrust and avoid emotion in their work. Damasio’s work might suggest that emotionless reasoning may be just plain wrong—maybe even pathological and counterproductive. If emotion is inextricably a part of human reasoning, what then of scientific objectivity?
I like to say that science seems to work even though humans do it. Precisely because we are biased. But scientists are also aware that they may bring biases to their work and find ways to test their assumptions to reveal them.
I don't think there is a single scientists who isn't emotional, and who would deny that that can be a part of their work, and that "scientific objectivity" requires an understanding of just how those biases enter into their work.
In the end, the various methods that have been developed and seem to work, independent verification is one, that requires the communication of scientific results with sufficient detail to enable independent verification, etc, etc.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Largo,
Man, this is just hopelessly muddled, in my opinion.
Exactly -- "muddled". I can understand how it seems muddled to a person who has zero comprehension of how modules work together to form systems. Such testimony shows you have little understanding for such synthesis as Damasio hints.
When you have the wrong idea of what awareness actually is you are likely to get nowhere with Damasio as it is mechanisms. Damasio says the brain and body are in a tight resonance loop. From your chatter here and in the past I would gather you do not understand much about feedback loops.
What your begging for is some physical process that begets awareness through it's own process(s), which once it becomes sufficiently repeated and layered (complexity argument), awareness arises - by virtue of the spinning molecules.
Here again we see your lack of systems understanding and your belittlement of complicated systems by referring to these systems as simply the complexity argument. You are looking for a one shot simple idea of how awareness happens but its not likely to be the case. As I say our mind's vision is that fleeing process repeated of specific signals send thru a very specific platform [the brain and body] over and over.
And when you say, "The external sensing organs and the feeling modules of the brain play our conscious over and over," who can possibly unpack what that means?
Damasio, go read his works. We are tired of those crappy arguments by you expecting us to give you one liner on what awareness is while denying the use of mechanisms [and systems]-- stupid. Can you understand how his modules form a system that is akin to our experience? "over and over" displays your lack of systems understanding as you seem to want an awareness module which does not exist.
In most ever example give above, awareness is already postulated. There is no "feeling" in any module till it is aware. Prior to that, there is just molecular activity.
The feeling module is a set of responses sent through the brain/body loop [Damasio says they are out of our control ] that give rise to the self getting a report of the body condition as such and such. And yes molecules are likely to be unpacked and repacked again and again. The material of brains in this world is molecules.
Sometime when I have the energy I'll relate a conversation I had with a engineering prof at UCLA (and into AI) who I shared a ten hour flight with to Zurich a few weeks ago. Great stuff. Learned a lot.
Don't bother. I have spend more than a 1000 hrs talking to engineering profs. But from the sounds of things he likely was not a systems engineer or you still haven't grasp that type of synthesis?
I would repeat what a leading neuroscientist recently said - that not only is this unexplained by any known theory, no one has even the slightest idea of what a physical model would even look like that could explain it.
Some neuroscientist simply are not systems people and are somewhat likely to believe any one has any clues as they do not have any clues as to what a physical model would look like. And maybe they do not understand Damasio?
When we compare our cherished views of what awareness is with other views of what awareness is, those others can not make any sense when we are incorrigible.
Or if you had gone thru the gateless gate would you know?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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There are many other views of Damasio’s work. I'd post more here, but access is limited to academics, and I forgot my password at the U of A to get in. (Sorry.)
No matter what theory or framework one has an interest in, there are always holes and parts that don’t add-up or make sense. I’d say that is the very nature of all studies, Q.E.D. No matter what theory or framework one likes, it’s useful and maybe important to look at opposing viewpoints. (As the fellow in The Guardian notes at the end of his article: “Long may pluralism reign.”)
You may recognize some of Largo's ideas expressed herein below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/books/review/Block-t.html?
SELF COMES TO MIND
Constructing the Conscious Brain
By Antonio Damasio
367 pp. Pantheon. $28.95
In “Self Comes to Mind,” the eminent neurologist and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio gives an account of consciousness that might come naturally to a highly caffeinated professor in his study. He emphasizes wakefulness, self-awareness, reflection, rationality, “knowledge of one’s own existence and of the existence of surroundings.”
That is certainly one kind of consciousness, what one might call self-consciousness. But there is also a different kind, as anyone who knows what it is like to have a headache, taste chocolate or see red can attest. Self-consciousness is a sophisticated and perhaps uniquely human cognitive achievement. Phenomenal consciousness by contrast — what it is like to experience — is something we share with many animals. A person who is drunk or delirious or dreaming can be excruciatingly conscious without being wakeful, self-aware or aware of his surroundings.
The term “conscious” was first introduced into academic discourse by the Cambridge philosopher Ralph Cudworth in 1678, and by 1727, John Maxwell had distinguished five senses of the term. The ambiguity has not abated. Damasio’s distinctive contributions in “Self Comes to Mind” are an account of phenomenal consciousness, a conception of selfconsciousness and, most controversially, a claim that phenomenal consciousness is dependent on self-consciousness.
Phenomenally conscious content — what distinguishes the experience of blue from the taste of chocolate — is, according to Damasio, a matter of associations that are processed in different brain areas at the same time. What makes a conscious state feel like something rather than nothing is explained as a fusion of mind and body in which neurons become “extensions of the flesh.” Self-consciousness is the result of a procession of neural maps of inner and outer worlds. What’s more, he argues, phenomenal consciousness depends on self-consciousness. Without a self, he writes, “the mind would lose its orientation. . . . One’s thoughts would be freewheeling, unclaimed by an owner. . . . What would we look like? Well, we would look unconscious.”
Even fish and lizards have a kind of minimal self, one that combines sensory integration with control of information processing and action. But Damasio’s self is not minimal. It is inflated with self-awareness, reflection, rationality, deliberation and knowledge of one’s existence and the existence of one’s surroundings, and this is what he ends up arguing a being needs in order to have phenomenal consciousness.
You may have sensed that I think there is a problem with Damasio’s emphasis on self-consciousness: indeed, “Self Comes to Mind” is mainly about self-consciousness rather than experiential phenomenal consciousness. And the book is not about geology or underwear or many other things either. So what?
I can explain the problem by a brief detour into a different book, “The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” (1976), by the American psychologist Julian Jaynes. Jaynes held that consciousness was invented by the ancient Greeks between 1400 and 600 B.C. He argued that there was a dramatic appearance of introspection in large parts of the “Odyssey,” as compared with large parts of the “Iliad,” which he claimed were composed at least a hundred years earlier. The philosopher W. V. Quine once told me that he thought Jaynes might be on to something until he asked Jaynes what it was like to perceive before consciousness was invented. According to Quine, Jaynes said it was like nothing at all — exactly what it is like to be a table or a chair. Jaynes was denying that people had experiential phenomenal consciousness based on a claim about inflated self-consciousness.
Damasio also denies phenomenal consciousness because of the demand of a sophisticated self-consciousness. You may have noticed an exciting report a few years ago of a patient in a persistent vegetative state (defined behaviorally) studied by the neuroscientists Adrian Owen and Steven Laureys. On some trials, the two instructed the patient to imagine standing still on a tennis court swinging at a ball, and on others to visualize walking from room to room in her home. The patient, they found, showed the same imagistic brain activations (motor areas for tennis, spatial areas for exploring the house) as normally conscious people who were used as controls.
More such cases have since been discovered, and this year Owen and Laureys described a vegetative-state patient who was able to use the tennis/navigation alternation to give yes-or-no answers to five of six basic questions like “Is your father’s name Alexander?” These results are strong evidence — though not proof — of phenomenal consciousness in some of those who showed no behavioral signs of it. But Damasio scoffs, saying that these results “can be parsimoniously interpreted in the context of the abundant evidence that mind processes operate nonconsciously.” His skepticism appears to be grounded in the fact that these patients show no clear sign of self-consciousness and thus constitute a potential roadblock in front of his theory.
Damasio also stumbles over dreaming. In dreams, phenomenal consciousness can be very vivid even when the rational processes of self-consciousness are much diminished. Damasio describes dreams as “mind processes unassisted by consciousness.” Recognizing that the reader will be puzzled by this claim, he describes dreaming as “paradoxical” since the mental processes in dreaming are “not guided by a regular, properly functioning self of the kind we deploy when we reflect and deliberate.” But dreaming is paradoxical only if one has a model of phenomenal consciousness based on self-consciousness — on knowledge, rationality, reflection and wakefulness.
Contrary to Damasio’s point of view, there is good evidence that vivid conscious experience may be antithetical to self-reflective activity. In one experiment, the Israeli neuroscientist Rafi Malach presented subjects with pictures and asked them to judge their own emotional reactions as positive, negative or neutral — a self-oriented, introspective task. He then presented different subjects with the same pictures and asked them to very quickly categorize the pictures as, for example, animals or not. Of course these subjects were seeing the pictures consciously, but Malach found that the brain circuits involved in scrutinizing self-reactions (as indicated by the emotional reaction task) were inhibited in the fast categorization task. Subjects also rated their self-awareness as high in the emotional reaction task and low in the fast categorization task. As Malach puts it, these results comport with “the strong intuitive sense we have of ‘losing our selves’ in a highly engaging sensory-motor act.”
Damasio argues that a creature without sensory integration and control of thought and action would be unconscious. But even if that is true, it does not show that phenomenal consciousness requires self-awareness, reflection, wakefulness, or awareness of one’s existence or surroundings. This argument conflates the minimal self with the inflated self.
Is this discussion of any practical importance? Yes. Phenomenal consciousness is what makes pain bad in itself and pleasure good. Damasio’s refusal to regard phenomenal consciousness (without the involvement of the inflated self) as real consciousness could be used to justify the brutalization of cows and chickens on the grounds that they are not self-conscious and therefore not conscious. Damasio, in response to those who have raised such criticisms in the past, declares that in fact he thinks it “highly likely” that animals do have consciousness. But this doesn’t square with the demanding theory he advances in his book, on the basis of which he denies consciousness in dreams and in “vegetative state” patients who can answer questions. He owes us an explanation of why he thinks chickens are conscious even though dreamers and the question-answering patients are not.
(Ned Block is the Silver professor of philosophy, psychology and neural science at New York University.)
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And from The Guardian . . . .
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/12/self-comes-mind-damasio-review
Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio - review
Steven Rose examines a neurologist's attempt to explain why we have conscious selves
Steven Rose
Friday 11 February 2011 19.05 EST
Consciousness has become a hot topic for brain scientists. Once, we were content to leave the interminable mind/brain problem to philosophers and theologians. Speculation remained a CLM – a career-limiting move — for ambitious young researchers. No longer. Armed with novel tools, from genetic manipulation to brain imaging, flush with funding, and convinced that neuroscience has the key to the human condition, the hunt is on. Experiments, conferences and books proliferate, and philosophers of mind can no longer be taken seriously until they have done an internship in a neurophysiology lab.
Neuroscientists, especially those of us trained in the Anglo-American tradition, tend to be as mechanically materialist as was "Darwin's bulldog", Thomas Huxley, in the 19th century, when he remarked that mind is to brain as the whistle is to the steam train – a mere epiphenomenon. Thoughts, feelings, intentions, reasons – all are causally generated by brain processes, and it is these latter that do the real business. Hence for Francis Crick, "you are nothing but a pack of neurons", free will is located in the cingulate gyrus, and consciousness in the claustrum – two small regions of the human brain's massive cerebral cortex. Self-styled "neurophilosophers" such as Patricia Churchland follow in their footsteps, proposing that mental language is mere "folk psychology", destined to be reduced and replaced by a biologically precise language of neural connections and brain activity.

Consciousness is a term with multiple meanings. David Lodge has argued that the richness of individual conscious experience, that essential subjectivity, is better explored in novels and poetry than by neuroscientists. Most consciousness researchers ignore this rich heritage; for them the word signifies simply the obverse of being unconscious or asleep – that is to be awake, aware, attending and alert to one's immediate surroundings. Consciousness studies typically involve experimental subjects fitted with brain readout devices such as an electroencephalogram. They are asked to make a decision – for instance when to press a button — and to state the time at which they became aware that they had made the decision. It turns out that the EEG indicates that the brain has made the decision some few thousandths of a second before subjects "know" they have decided. So why bother with consciousness at all? Couldn't that fantasy creature, a mindless zombie, do the job just as well?
For biologists though, consciousness, if not an accidental epiphenomenon, must be an evolved property with a function of some benefit to its possessor. As of course it is: being conscious gives us humans the capacity to learn from the past, to anticipate and plan for the future, to establish and maintain social relations, to imagine and create societies, technologies, art and literature. This has – so far – proved a successful evolutionary strategy. Yet human consciousness appears to be not merely quantitatively but qualitatively distinct from that of even our closest evolutionary neighbours, chimps and bonobos. And as one needs a brain to be conscious in any of the word's multiple meanings, there must be something about the human brain that differentiates us from the bonobos and enables consciousness.
It is these issues that Antonio Damasio, a neurologist now based in California, has wrestled with in a series of books over the past two decades. He has several advantages over his American neuroscientific peers. His continental European training sensitises him to the reductionist traps that ensnare so many of his colleagues. The book is dedicated to his neurologist wife Hanna, whose work with brain- and consciousness-damaged patients, brings her closer to real life than the remote context and artificial experimental set-ups of the neuropsychology lab. Inclined though he is to define consciousness narrowly ("a state of mind in which there is knowledge of one's own existence and of the existence of surroundings") and to put to one side its content – what we actually think about – his is the only one of the many consciousness books weighing down my shelves that feels it necessary to mention Freud's, as opposed to an anaesthetist's, use of the term unconscious.
Anyone who has read any of Damasio's previous three books will find Self Comes to Mind retreading some familiar territory, though here set in a firmly evolutionary context. In Damasio's terminology, even single-celled organisms such as bacteria or amoebae have a minimal sense of self, working to preserve their internal integrity against foreign incursion. They also show primitive emotions, the earliest forerunners to our own experiences of pain and pleasure, moving away from noxious stimuli and towards food sources. In accord with standard physiology Damasio calls the processes by which an organism stabilises its body state homeostatic. (I prefer the term homodynamic; stasis, after all, is death). In multicellular organisms, which appear later in evolutionary history, the cells that recognise the presence of such stimuli are separated from those that must co-ordinate the organism's responses to them. Before nervous systems evolved, the sense-receptor cells signalled to those co-ordinating the response through chemicals (hormones) that diffuse through the body. Later in evolution, dedicated signalling lines (nerves) appear, connecting the receptor cells with a central group of nerve cells – neurons – that are the forerunners to our own brains.
Brains are by no means the only game in town; bacteria and plants of course flourish quite well without, and will probably outlive humans. But our ancestors took a different route, building bigger and more complex brains. Within such brains neurons communicate with each other by myriad connections. These fluctuating patterns can form representations of both the external world and the body state of the organism that owns them. Such brains enable their possessors to learn and remember, to recognise the present in the context of the immediate past and the imminent future. To Damasio this means that they are, or possess, selves. In animals with big brains, emotions – mere bodily responses – become translated into feelings, and with feelings, a mind – "a subtle flowing combination of actual images and recalled images in ever-changing proportions" – emerges from the brain. Many large-brained creatures thus have minds, however alien they may be to our own. But consciousness emerges only when – to quote the book's title – self comes to mind, so that in key brain regions, the representational maps of sensory experience intersect with the encoded experiences of past that self provides. This, enabled by the evolution of language, makes possible autobiographical memory – the narrative of our lives that we humans all possess and which is the basis for consciousness.
This, briefly summarised, is the latest version of Damasio's theory. The story is told in prose of intermittently easygoing lucidity, but his primary training as a neurologist compels him into passages of detailed neuro-anatomy, locating brain regions functionally responsible for enabling particular aspects of consciousness. But which bits of the brain might be involved, though of passionate concern to neuroscientists, isn't the crucial issue – which is whether Damasio has thereby solved what has been called the "hard problem" of consciousness studies by relating third-person "objective" accounts to first-person subjectivity. I fear that however convincing his evolutionary story may be, simply to state that these brain processes translate into mental experience leaves us, despite some very elegant hand-waving, exactly where we were before. And herein lies the paradox of the book's subtitle. Brains are not conscious; people are. Our brains enable our consciousness, just as our legs enable our walking, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold has pointed out. But to attribute the property of a whole to that of a part is to commit what philosophers refer to as the mereological fallacy (one that I confess I have not been entirely innocent of in my own writings).
In everyday thought and speech we have reasons, intentions, feelings. In brainspeak we have synapses, firing patterns, neurotransmitters. For the mechanical materialist, the latter causes the former – and in his routine use of causal language Damasio reveals himself as just that. This is why the weakest part of the book is the concluding chapters, where he extends his central principle of homeostasis to embrace human history, society and culture. But it is possible to be a non-reductionist materialist. The language of mind and consciousness relates to the language of brains and synapses as English does to Italian; one may translate into the other, though always with some loss of cultural resonance. But we do not have to assign primacy to either. Long may pluralism reign, and we conscious beings continue to employ our minds and brains to enhance our understanding of both.
(Steven Rose's The 21st-Century Brain is published by Vintage.)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Consciousness is a term with multiple meanings.
from the Steven Rose article in The Guardian.
That is pretty much where debates about the nature of consciousness begin and end. A person can say almost anything they want about consciousness and not be wrong.
But if you want to get into it:
http://web.mit.edu/abyrne/www/what_phen_conc_is_like.html
My take-away is that Damasio is one of those scientists who has been drawn to the consciousness question after his more productive work is behind him and senility may be creeping in:
he extends his central principle of homeostasis to embrace human history, society and culture.
(Steven Rose on Damasio's book, Self Comes to Mind)
Other examples: Sir Francis Crick, Roger Penrose, and Rodolfo Llinás
From the tone of the article it appears that some people who are philosophically inclined may feel threatened by neuroscience:
free will is located in the cingulate gyrus, and consciousness in the claustrum
Just because the cingulate gyrus and the claustrum may have something to do with whatever free will and consciousness are does not mean that those are clearly defined functions contained in those locations.
But it would be nice to call that good and go on to other affairs.
And I doubt that Thomas Huxley called the steam whistle of a train a "mere epiphenomenon." The train produces an effect we call a whistle. The brain produces effects we call mind.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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addressing Rose's claim of Damasio making the mereological fallacy:
MikeL,
from Steven Rose
But to attribute the property of a whole to that of a part is to commit what philosophers refer to as the mereological fallacy (one that I confess I have not been entirely innocent of in my own writings) .
Does this guy have any reading comprehension? Damasio says the brain and body are in a very tight resonance loop. If S. Rose is going to do a book review, how about understanding Damasio's material?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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All are simply speculations. Some more interesting and convincing than others. Some point out rubrics that authors or researchers did not see or intend than the academics who ran the research and reported it. That job is the job of editors of newspapers, of news sections, of journals, of books that invite papers from academics. It takes kind of "mandarin” in the field to see the entire territory and note where the holes in knowledge are and prioritize them so that a field might move forward faster or more completely.
I understand the reviews do not agree with your views. That’s how it goes. Research appears to move forward in fits and starts and through loose consensus that changes its mind like an amoeba changes its shape and moves about.
I’ve often read articles, talked with colleagues about them, and became completely mystified that what I read and saw was not at all what others read and saw.
The chair of my dissertation committee was the editor of the lead journal in my field, and sometimes I wondered if we were on the same planet. I have to say that over time, I came to see (with great hindsight) that his views and understanding of the field was an order of magnitude better than mine. (Of course it was.)
And, what the heck—It’s not like the New York Times or The Guardian are top-tier, peer-reviewed journals.
Be well.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Okay Mike L those were just book reviews. The amoeba still moves.
As more research is done and mental processes are nailed down, the theories of consciousness that do not fit the the growing portion of the research are likely to drop away? From your current amusement and career in the field of consciousness what it the next better theory of consciousness than Damasio's that has some research substantiation?
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Where are the ducks?
When I was quite young my parents bought a record player and even some kid's records. Once, while listening to the sound of some ducks quacking which was coming from the black carbon plastic record and player I naively climbed up the record player console to look at the ducklings. I was disgusted as there were no ducks at the top of the console, just the spinning vinyl and the needle arm. But I still wondered, where are the ducks?
To me the real thing-in-itself would be the hearing & seeing of live ducks quacking not hearing a recording of ducks quacking. Well, the mind/brain has its own private things-in-themselves [representations?] constructs of the way things are. Usually [maybe always] they lack detail, as for example we are amazed at the detail contained photos. And so it goes that we, in our minds, do make constructs of how we think things are from those scanty brain constructs.
Chalmers and Largo might say but I am thirsty -- I feel the need to drink and can imagine the water going down my throat. That signaling of thirst arose in core consciousness, homeostasis, which is much like the old sensor in Largo's back yard, but still its message is a type of awareness. To get these 200+ lb beasts to move for water takes some real jolting and the brain's method has been around for some time. Make 'em feel thirsty [run a feeling module]. And of course they are aware that they feel thirsty, which is HOC [[high order consciousness] from Block's nomenclature suggested by RMH2 ].
The very nature of awareness changes from CC [core consciousness] to HOC. We only know those constructs of the brain which happen to be not exactly things-in-themselves. We are likely to be disgusted when zeroing in on what is the thing-in-self of our feeling of awareness. There are no ducks quacking in the vinyl just a representation of quacking that deceives us. And so some are likely to find self conscious awareness [the category of Damasio's view] would simply make us zombies or whatever. HOC adds crap but with mental work we can get rid of the crap.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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I understand the reviews do not agree with your views.
Both reviews are lengthy in the context of SuperTopo posts. I questioned a few points made by Steve Rose.
Writers for the NYT and The Guardian have their own biases, as I have mine.
Raising questions and challenging different points of view should be a part of the conversation on this thread. The things we agree with typically require less or no comment.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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On the other hand, when it comes to consciousness, the contention may be uncalled for.
from the Alex Byrne piece which Dingus McGee refers to:
to borrow a memorable phrase from Mark Johnston—that this is one of those genial areas of enquiry in which the main competing positions are each in their own way perfectly true.
see
Johnston, M. (1992). How to speak of the colors. Philosophical Studies, 68, 221-63.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dingus,
I had no career in the study of consciousness. My training and research focus was on embryonic markets—how they arose and developed into territories that could be measured and function (i.e., the liquidity of a market). At first early formative markets couldn’t be measured normally because they were just coalescing, sort of like how our solar system formed in its very beginning before one could even call it a solar system. My wont to talk about those formations led me to take graduate courses in cognitive science because my research suggested that before a tangible, measurable marketplace could form, visions had to be bought and sold among stakeholders so that resources could build a functional marketplace. At the same time, my field of training was developing various conversations about managerial cognition, so my work created a little spark.
I would have to add that my constructs and their measurements were so unavoidably tenuous that many in my field could not grasp a material argument and suggested in presentations that I my research must have had measurement or statistical errors. (Trying to prove that something *is not there* appears impossible.)
At the same time, I had already dug deep in meditation, and my observations there were dove-tailing with my research studies on the following subjects: epistemology, social construction, postmodern complaints about academic hegemony, and how science / research *gets done.*
Contrary to your views, I don’t see that anything has gotten nailed down about consciousness. I find no theories about consciousness (or anything else for that matter) that I can rely upon in my life or in studies. As I said above, there are always those holes and gaps. Rather than finding satisfaction in knowledge, I find satisfaction in the conversations. I believe in play. I enjoy playing around with ideas, and that requires that I don’t take any of them all too seriously or concretely. (In any analysis, a kind of “emptiness” shows up.)
Yeah, where are the ducks? I don’t think one can say. All we appear to have that we can be sure about is this thing we’re calling consciousness, and that “thing” appears to be everything. Before we go about saying how we have consciousness or how it works, it might be better if we were to say what consciousness is—but that appears to be impossible. Viola. It’s the most essential koan (other than death) there is. It’s like trying to prove that something isn’t there. One cannot deny it (consciousness), yet one cannot say what it is.
I already said that I like and have used Damasio’s work on emotion / somatic markers.
BTW, did you note how both writers from the NYT’s and The Guardian focused on Damasio’s claims on the relationship between consciousness of self and consciousness of phenomena? (And as a climber, did you note the slight reference to “flow,” or being consumed in-the-moment as one can in climbing? Does one have to be aware of oneself to be aware?) Could you perhaps see how conversations about base or pristine awareness (awareness that supports or gives rise to phenomena) could be entangled in with consciousness of self and consciousness of phenomena?
It’s these issues, I’d say (and Largo and others who are focusing on “The Hard Problem” I think) that are the crucial problems to be tackled. Damasio’s speculation of how different parts of the brain orchestrate activity is clever and interesting but perhaps not crucial. It’s like knowing how the parts of a car go together but never quite understanding a car’s meaning.
Does a car have a meaning? Only within a context, right?
What’s “our” context?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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It’s like knowing how the parts of a car go together but never quite understanding a car’s meaning.
Cars have many meanings.
Then Williams saw the most beautiful car he had ever seen.
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1281932&msg=1281932#msg1281932
I find no theories about consciousness (or anything else for that matter) that I can rely upon in my life or in studies.
No General Relativity? You can rely on that one, but your opinion won't make any difference to how the planets stay in their orbits or how light is bent by the Sun.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Damasio describes dreams as “mind processes unassisted by consciousness.”
This is truly nonsense. Particularly regarding lucid dreaming or the Art of Dreaming, where one is pure consciousness and intent.
.....
So many, many words to describe a commonality: the distinction between self-reflection and losing the sense of self when swept up in an experience, like the flow of climbing. But the strange examples are interesting.
I believe in play
My academic career was at a small state university which prioritized teaching (mostly undergraduates) over research. Since I enjoyed exploration I played around with a number of mathematical ideas, publishing most of them. Then in retirement (2000) I have avoided journals and have written many short notes on elementary ideas (and posted them for what it's worth). That's the ultimate pleasure when one has put aside competitive inclinations. The play is the thing. We are climbers, right?
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WBraun
climber
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Consciousness explains what is the mind of all other species and living entities.
The key to it all is again as being said ad-nauseam ..... consciousness, .... since it is the root and whole source of everything ......
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