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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Nov 28, 2015 - 03:05pm PT
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The fact remains that science hasn't a clue as to what constitutes conscious thought.
Oh yes science has clues, but it is clearly missing the whole picture which must be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, over time.
Science does this , among other motivations, in order to dispel competing explanations-- such as demons and spirits responsible for heat and not the activity of atoms generating IR, for instance
What explanation gets at the heart of physical phenomena? How does dispelling the pain or discovering its source ( a tumor maybe) stand up against subjective experience without answers but with plenty of hurt?
In this case science , if applied intelligently, stands on the side of survivabilty. Subjective experience in and of itself only leads to more pain and the increased possibility of premature death.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 28, 2015 - 03:28pm PT
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Science does this , among other motivations
Science doesn't do any such thing.
Science itself is pure.
It's YOU that does these things .....
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Nov 28, 2015 - 03:34pm PT
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Science doesn't do any such thing.
So...science as a method and process of seeking explanations does not seek explanations?
Fact : Science is driven by humans with curiosity to find out why things work the way they do,
It's YOU that does these things .....
This has nothing to do with me personally, nor with you either.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 28, 2015 - 06:03pm PT
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Moosey, you hit a nail on the head. Some here think that the human mind is some sort of unique and powerful thing. The truth is, all animals have a mind of sorts, from the most simple organisms to the most complex.
People who study brain anatomy see many of the same structural features in animal brains that they do in humans. Are animals emotional? Well, my dog certainly is. She is also fairly intelligent, and understands a lot of English words.
You can learn a lot about an animal by studying its brain, and although right now, humans are the most intelligent, it isn't by much. Whales and dolphins also have huge brains. They have language, but their anatomy prevents a couple of important things: the written word and technology. Other than that, they could be close to as intelligent as humans are, if you were to take away writing and opposable thumbs.
They think. They react. They know sadness and happiness. How do you narrow this thread down to only one species? I've never heard Largo mention another animal, even from a comparative anatomy standpoint. Ignoring the brains and minds of animals really restricts our focus. A lot can be learned simply by studying the brains of rats.
As to knowledge gained from the senses, this is the first definition of "empirical knowledge." Some animals certainly experience it, and they obviously learn.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 28, 2015 - 06:48pm PT
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feeling is beyond mere brain structure as endured deeply personal experience
Upon what do you base that statement?
At the age of 9 years Eric Kandel's life took a new direction as the storm of WW II blew across Europe. He spent a lifetime curious about the basis of enduring personal experience. He found a few answers.
How carefully have you looked into what science has to say about consciousness? Do you dismiss all scientific knowledge of brain as mere "objective processing?" Do you require a soul or other homunculus to be the experiencer? Can you entertain another possibility?
edit:
http://neurology.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?bookid=1049§ionid=59138676
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Nov 28, 2015 - 08:03pm PT
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don't fantasize any idea that i don't respect the sciences…far from it…especially where scientists appreciate exploring the unknown…
i highly recommend to this forum a recent six part PBS special series called The Brain by renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman
http://www.eagleman.com/research/11-david-eagleman/113-the-brain-pbs
Also, someone here, perhaps Base104, got me interested in Rupert Sheldrake's work. My old friend and climbing partner Gifford Pinchot introduced me to him in person on Cortes Island. We have been discussing a possible collaborative essay/research paper on 'morphic resonance influencing the advancement of skills within the rock climbing community'..in case anyone else here might be interested in contributing. Warning: if you comment on this I may be asking permission to quote you…;-)
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 28, 2015 - 08:17pm PT
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Why do we not experience pain when we are unconscious?
because left your body.
During that time Paramatma takes care of it.
Modern gross materialists are clueless .....
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Nov 28, 2015 - 09:12pm PT
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Oh yes science has clues, but it is clearly missing the whole picture which must be pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, over time.
Oh not really, science as of yet has no clue as to the nature of individual conscious experience and what it is. The speculation of material nature for that activity has no more efficacy than the speculation of a non material nature. I would recommend the discussion I posted above between Stoppard and the author of the book on altruism. A fascinating discussion.
What science has a clue about is form (structure) but content still mystifies.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 28, 2015 - 09:28pm PT
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Oh yes science has clues
Oh not really, science as of yet has no clue
Science doesn't need any clues
Science already knows and remains perfect.
It's the practitioners of Science that are either clueless or have a clue according to their developed consciousness.
Again ... consciousness is the root ....
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 28, 2015 - 09:35pm PT
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Ed, you haven't had an experience that broke the Rule of Mind stating that we cannot pay attention to more than one thing at a time. No one has. Ever. For the simple reason that our mind cannot do so. Your confusion comes from not understanding the terms and what is involved. Unless you have made a special study of this material, there is no way to know what otherwise, anymore than I can know about Chinese with no study of the subject.
To understand your experience as described, first understand that awareness and “paying attention” are not the same phenomenon. What you described is a passive state of receptive awareness in which you were aware – to greater or lesser degrees - of several streams of mental data simultaneously. The curious detachment associated to this state is universal.
Most everyone has experienced this phenomenon in some way or another, and it is most easily and readily experienced with material and situations in which we are familiar – in your case, lecturing a class on a subject that you probably taught many times, in much the same way, at much the same time of day, etc. Once the material is ingrained in us the intellectual part of our instinctual minds (to use Sufi terminology) can handle the task largely on auto-pilot (instinctively) while our awareness is vague or even keenly aware of our minds chewing on something else – at the same time.
The most common version of this phenomenon is probably experienced when we drive a piece of road we have driven many times before, and our attention wanders and follows this of that thought for many miles before we come back to the here-and-now job of driving and only driving. We were all along AWARE of driving, to lesser of greater degrees, but our attention was largely on watching the thought or memory dance through our minds, sometimes for miles.
Paying attention is a much different phenomenon than that just described re Ed lecturing his class on auto pilot while another thought worked it way out in his mind.
Paying attention is a conscious, intentional aiming (taking aim) of our awareness at a specific target, requiring our focus to narrow on the target at the exclusion – to lesser or greater degrees – of everything else in our field of awareness. Once our awareness is consciously locked onto a specific person, place, thing or phenomenon, we cannot simultaneously and consciously pay attention to a second target in the same consciously directed and focused way.
Think of this in terms of a visual field. When we focus on something in the immediate foreground, everything in the background is blurred.
We can only pay attention to the foreground or the background, and Nature blurs (so to speak) one of the other as needed to assist our focus. We can, however, be aware of all that is before us.
Hope that makes it clear.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 28, 2015 - 10:49pm PT
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lecturing a class on a subject that you probably taught many times,
not true, it was the first time teaching that particular class
and there was no sense of detachment, it was two sets of thoughts happening simultaneously, and discursively...
...it was an odd experience.
Now I might have been working quite a bit on some aspects of that physics at the time, as teaching usually involves a lot of learning too, and examining many aspects of the a particular topic.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Nov 29, 2015 - 01:40am PT
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Ed, you haven't had an experience that broke the Rule of Mind stating that we cannot pay attention to more than one thing at a time.
We can and do 'pay attention' to myriad things at once - that's yet another thing the brain/mind 'does' and the reason why meditation is not necessarily a simple thing. Seems rather ironic to constantly be saying "discursive this" and "discursive that" and then claim we can't pay attention to more than one thing. Better to think of it as a whirl of conscious (foreground) and unconscious (background) thought operating in a dynamic where individual thoughts and attentions are moved to the fore or to the back by varying degrees - i.e. it isn't binary / on or off but rather more like white and black with near-infinite shades of gray in between.
Split brain
He was able to split his vision [37] so that each eye reads its corresponding page, allowing him to read both pages at once. He also had developed language areas in both hemispheres, something very uncommon in split-brain patients.
some scientists are stuck with the unfounded assumption that the mind stops when the meat body stops
Funny, four pages back it was seemingly impossible to get a simple yes or no answer on this out of anyone.
Oh, and at least Sheldrake owns his panpsychic beliefs.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 29, 2015 - 06:44am PT
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What science has a clue about is form (structure) but content still mystifies.
Is memory a kind of content? Are emotions?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 29, 2015 - 09:44am PT
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and there was no sense of detachment, it was two sets of thoughts happening simultaneously, and discursively...
...it was an odd experience.
But you were not in a consciously directed mode of intentionally paying attention to one or the other trains of thought. You were present with both strands simultaneously, and I would wager that the math problem was working it's own way out as you witnessed it, rather than you intentionally working on it as you concurrently spoke to the class.
Fact is, we cannot intentionally direct our attention to more than one thing at a time. What Healj is talking about is being aware of mayriad things at once - which we all do all that time. But a non-pathological brain cannot intentionally pay attention and discursively task two problems simultaneously. Period.
The reason the word "discursively" is used it that in the study of mind, this is a technical term that allows us to avoid the muddled terminology that Healje is using, where he conflates awareness with paying attention. To understand the differences you need to empirically understand how focus works and does not work.
We can only "pay attention" when we narrow focus our awareness onto this or that, though as Ed has shown, our minds can simultaneously be aware of several things, including the unconscious or automatic processing of information without our directed and intentional effort to do so.
What Healje is saying per moving this or that to the foreground or background is the slide-trombone action of our focus, which operates much like a telephoto lens, pulling tight to pay attention, and going wide when discursive, intentional thought stops. The "degrees" that Healje talks about has to do with the focus. Paying attention is another mater. Let me give you an example to help make it all clear.
I grew up pretty damn sure that I was going to be a musician (drums) for the rest of my life and went at it hard, taking private lessons and playing in all kinds of bands and orchestras and drumming comps and so forth. Soon as I had the chops, I started playing jazz (maybe around 13 or 14) because that was the hardest discipline and the most fun.
Now playing jazz in an ensemble group of five or six people involved the same process of awareness that Healje mistakenly described per "paying attention," when in fact what was happening is that a muscian is forced to pay attention to his own playing (which is largely happening instinctively) while being AWARE of the other musicians in the group as the song was unfolding and people were ad-libbing in turn.
This is largely an open focus exercise of trying to be aware of as many moving parts as possible, and as Healje said, this kind of multi-awareness drill can and does happen in real time in a sliding kind of dynamic.
Now take another example of playing the drums, this time in a sight-reading competition, which is one of the hardest intellectual or info processing challenges I have ever done - and it's a totally different matter than Healje's sliding attention dynamic.
The drummer stands in front of a snare drum on a stand, and one of the judges places on the music stand before you a piece of sheet music you have never seen before. Drum music is really a kind of math notation because each note has a time value (quarter, eighth, sixteenth notes ect) that you have to execute according to a master meter or beat/tempo. Mix in a bunch of tricky rudiments which are gymnastics with the sticks plus all the dynamics of playing this or that hard or soft (forte to pianissimo) and you can see how tricky this work was to do.
Now the only chance anyone has to sight read like this is to narrow focus on the sheet music and have at it, paying full attention to the task at hand. The Rule of Mind saying a non-pathological mind can only pay attention to one thing at a time refers to the fact that when a drummer is sight reading a new chart, as mentioned above, he or she cannot, for example, simultaneously compose new poetry. Sight reading music and writing poetry are both intentional, and directed discursive tasks, NOT examples of being passively aware of various concurrent data streams.
This underscores the need to have a common language to talk about mind, and my suggestion has been to start with the triad of awareness, focus and attention, which are discrete and vastly different functions. And lest you have worked on these aspects from the level of mind, you will inevitably confuse and comingle the terms and functions in ways that muddle the whole thing up.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 29, 2015 - 10:06am PT
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But you were not in a consciously directed mode of intentionally paying attention to one or the other trains of thought. You were present with both strands simultaneously, and I would wager that the math problem was working it's own way out as you witnessed it, rather than you intentionally working on it as you concurrently spoke to the class.
that's not how I experienced it, I was both lecturing the class and working out some physics (not "doing a math problem," at least not the way you imagine that... as a rout process of applying rules for solution, what I was engaged in required focus, attention and thought, as did the lecturing).
I'm not sure where you come up with these absolutes regarding attention... perhaps you can provide a bit more than just your assertions.
You can certainly define "attention" in such a way to eliminate any other phenomenon (you do this all the time with your pronouncements of what is and isn't "true") but the subsequent definition may not be a good description of the phenomenon. You seem to insist that "attention" is defined in such a way that one can only focus on a single thought/process/etc... so by definition I could not do what I claimed to do or, said another way, my interpretation of the experience is not what I was experiencing. If you insist on the later, I wonder of your stated commitment to the primacy of experience.
It is interesting that you would insist on that primacy, yet interpret someone's experience as being an incorrect interpretation of that experience.
Which is it?
I, for one, am certainly open to the possibility that my perception of an experience, my subsequent interpretation, and my description of that experience may not be what was actually happening, but in large part my perception of what was happening... and as such could be a subjective variance of an objective reality.
But I can see how this would give you problems. Instead, you seek to "educate" me on my experience and "teach" me how to interpret the experience. Obviously an "objective" process (after all, it depends on our mutual agreement of commonality) which corrects my "subjective" experience.
What am I to believe? the corrections to my interpretation, or my actual experience?
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Nov 29, 2015 - 10:19am PT
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It is interesting that you would insist on that primacy, yet interpret someone's experience as being an incorrect interpretation of that experience.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Nov 29, 2015 - 11:25am PT
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What am I to believe? the corrections to my interpretation, or my actual experience?
Reason mediates experience. Both are part of the make up of what we are.
Nice review of Dawkins new book Sunday NYTs:
"By Science Dawkins proves we're not in any way reducible to mere lumbering (or any other kinds of) robots for our genes. Even though the price of our ability to learn and marvel is death, and our genes have at least theoretical immortality, there really but tiny vehicles of our own wonder."
Something to ponder. What is it our potentially immortal genes carry if not mind?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 29, 2015 - 12:00pm PT
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what else?
the structure of the digestive system..
which has both a mouth and an anus...
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Nov 29, 2015 - 12:10pm PT
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what else?
the structure of the digestive system..
which has both a mouth and an anus...
Strikes me that there are those in science who see it as necessary to diminish the wonder and potential of human consciousness, or diminish the idea that being human offers the opportunity for creation and decency that extends beyond the need of our genes to simply survive and in the face of our finality gives us a kind of nobility. Too bad. Sometimes I wonder how uniformly consciousness is distributed, perhaps when science learns to measure it we'll find out.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 29, 2015 - 12:19pm PT
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Because Ed's last rant was a separate issue, it deserves a separate post. He said:
Quoting me: "Later, after gorging on the bird, I'd like to take up the equally wonky belief that "mind' can be fully known understood through a thorough investigation of objective functioning.
I consider this wild claim not only as the dark side of scientism (insinuation that the only viable knowledge arises from quantification of objective functioning), but as an approach that has resulted in nothing whatsoever per the study of mind or consciousness, focusing as it does on data processing. Put differently, one has to know what is involved to know what to investigate.
Sentience, consciousness and "mind" are not themselves molecular nor yet strictly biological phenomenon (remember, as Chalmers, Harris and many others have clearly pointed out, mind is not reductive to biology), so the cogent study of mind itself (NOT objective functioning) begins with qualia, awareness, attention, and focus, the cornerstones of mind/first person experience itself.
Ed replied: As far as I understand, no one has come close to proving in any way that "mind" is not a strictly biological phenomenon. If they have, please point to the literature.
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What Ed is saying here, quite mistakenly, is that mind, itself, IS biology. That the two are self-same. What he means to say, if he hopes to make any sense, is that he believes there is a direct and unbroken causal link between brain and mind.
Put differently, Ed's belief states that mind is an emergent function of brain, and once the data is in, we will be able to reverse engineer mind directly back to the workings in the brain which will be proven to "cause" or "source" or "create" mind. Again, a common position.
Now before we move on, let's look at what has made Ed believe what he believes, and why. remember, Ed's world revolves on models, so the question is, what model(s) is Ed referring to or using to approach the subject of mind?
First, in all of science, reductionism - the investigation of components - can largely tell us what some thing IS. That is, there is rarely if ever a phenomenon or object above and beyond the sum of the parts, some thing/object/phenomenon that is qualitatively totally different than the parts themselves or combination thereof.
So it is only natural and automatic that Ed should approach mind in the same way as we would an acorn or a positron, using the component/reductionist approach.
Now note that whatever Ed finds, or discovers per components, and whatever the macro level thing that emerges, or the emergent function as well, that this will ALWAYS BE AN OBJECT, and that object will always test out as the same object no matter who measures it.
That is to say, if we take a particular pine cone, that pine cone will be an object by basic nature, and that particular pine cone's nature and physical components (sap, thorns, etc.) will remain constant no matter if a Russian or a Mexican sets to measure it (examine it scientifically). It remains the same cone. The same physical object.
Now the next step to understanding is to first admit that subjective and objective are not qualitatively the same phenomenon. This is so basic that no sane man would feign challenge it. Even Ed will not go on record as saying that his subjective experience of eating cranberry sauce is qualitatively the very same issue as the measurements of our pine cone. The very notion is patently absurd.
Now what makes mind and sentience unique is that first-person subjective experience - the very bedrock of mind - is NOT an object. Whereas we can grab the pine cone, pass it around and measure the cone itself and the cone will give the same stats no matter who is measuring, we cannot transmute the subjective itself in the objective, hold it up like a pine cone and measure it. You cannot make the first person the third person and have the selfsame phenomenon. It will not simultaneously be the same phenomenon, anymore then heads can be tales at the same time. It is one or the other. That much is clear to a child.
So Ed does the next best thing because without an object, he cannot measure, and without measurements, he has no certainly and nothing else to do which he can believe in. And so he implies that the subject IS an object (biology, or specifically, the brain). That is, mind ITSELF is a biological phenomenon that we can measure, at least once we have the right instruments and knowledge/data, just as we do a pine cone.
Not so much ....
The reason that subjectively is not reducible to objective functioning is because at some juncture you stop talking about subjectivity and are talking about brain. And clearly you cannot simply leave the subjective behind and continue talking about the subject itself. The idea is preposterous.
Truth is, mind organizes itself on another level than the biological in the sense that MH2 said that biology itself is not to be found at the atomic level. It orgainizes farther up the ladder. And the causal links to the phenomenon are not the interlocked chain of biners that Ed is suggesting and which hold true in the world of objects.
Let me provide an example.
About fifteen years ago I went back and got a grad degree in clinical psych because the subject always interested me and I could do it at night. One of the big tasks in psychology is diagnosis, and the old promise of the "medical model" was that so long as you got the diagnosis correct, and because all behavior and mental issues are strictly biological (as we have seen Ed claim, that mind IS only biological), then treatment was simply a matter of providing the right drug, which could tweak the biology this way or that, and viola, the mental issue would vanish. Except it didn't always work out that way.
As it happens there are may mental conditions that are largely if not entirely biological such as ADD (there are six types, actually, and stimulants exacerbate one kind called the "Ring of Fire") bipolar disorder, etc. However so-called personality disorders do not respond to medications.
If you have every known a person with full-blown Borderline Personality Disorder, you will know for certain that this condition is real as a hurricane. And so difficult to treat that once the diagnosis is in most insurance companies will not pay for treatment because it is largely ineffective. That is, Borderline Personality is NOT biological. Drugs don't fix it. Drugs were sometimes helpful for symptoms, but did nothing to cure or even change the underlying disorder.
This and the other examples provided hopefully have made clear that Ed's claim that mind and biology are the ("strictly") same phenomenon, that subjectivity is objectivity, etc., are all beliefs built on measuring objects. In fact subjectivity is the threshold where numbers run out because there is no object or thing to measure. What you will be measuring is brain function, an objective measure. It is not experience/subjectivity ITSELF, and the fact that the two might be causually linked no more tells us what mind is anymore than a the investigation of a mother tells us everything about the child.
Is there any current example of mind existing independently of a biological system? No, there is not.
I AGREE WITH THIS
So it is not such a speculation to look for a biological explanation for mind, it is, in fact, entirely logical to look there for such an explanation. And it is highly likely that such an explanation will be found there.
What Ed is hoping for here is that matter/material will provide an answer to how mind is created. And he believes this because this component-measuring technique has always worked on other objects. And it has been shown to work on the data processing functions of the brain as well, per memory, visual coding, etc. But Ed also wants and quite possibly believes that biology can and will tell us what mind IS, believing as he does that if you get he objective fully wrangled, per objective functions, you know all there is to know about the subjective. This is where Ed had entirely left his depth.
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There is no philosophically certain arguments regarding mind, that is for sure, but fortunately we do not depend on philosophical foundations for doing good science.
I have no idea what Ed is talking about here. The Rules of Mind are not philosophical arguments, but empirical facts. The fact that the mind is not reductive to object functioning is not a philosophical argument, it simply means that you cannot talk about two different and specific phenomenon at once. Common sense.
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Science itself is not understood by philosophers, but science exists and is practiced at a very high level, all without the philosophical certainty of its validity.
Ed knows nothng about philosophy as a serious study lest he would never had uttered that howler.
Many of the most prominent philosophers were scientists or math folk - Whitehead, Boehm, Russel, Leibnitz, etc. making Ed's statement totally ridiculous. Science is measuring and cross referencing your experimental results per investigating objects. Or strictly speaking, science is the systematic study of the structure and behavior of physical objects and their relations through observation and experiment.
What part of that are you proposing is "not understood by philosophers?" This whole business of science as mysterious process beyond philosophers (many of whom ARE scientists) is really poor research.
"Just eat the steak"
It is entirely possible that what we experience as "mind" is yet another perception, that hasn't much to do with what mind actually is... just what we perceive it to be.
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Here, Ed has once again gotten tripped up by conflating content (WHAT you perceive) and the phenomenon of perception itself.
The study of mind is not about WHAT is perceived, but the process and phenomenon of perception. And chances are that what Ed is so desperately driving at per what mind "actually is," inevitably refers to a data processing style function that you can measure and objectify as "this." And "this" in this regards will be an explanation per how the phenomenon of mind is physically created by antecedent atomic stirrings. In short, Ed is banking on a mechanical model telling us what mind IS, bottom to top.
Put differently, for Ed to really get at what he is saying, he would have to be asked to put the content of his mind aside (all the people, places, things and phenomenon - from feelings and thoughts on down), and then to answer his own question and describe to us what he experiences as "mind." Do your find an object there, Ed? D you find that the phenomenon of perception is itself a perception? Of what? That's called an circular argument. You are, as a scientist, addicted and fused to objects. Remove the fusion with objects and what do you experience as mind?
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Our perceptions are notoriously approximate... providing a good model for what is happening, but doing it in that quite lovable patchwork way we find in all biological systems.
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Many would argue that our perception of things are not only approximate, but are totally created by mind because at bottom, there is no thing called material at all. On a meta level there appear to be things and objects, and they can break our bones. But when we keep reducing what do we get down to?
Saying that science can not be used to successfully explain mind is a real stretch, and it is an opinion based on no real argument, scientific or philosophical. Whether or not this is a solvable problem really has to do with the empirical process, a process we cannot foresee the conclusion of...
If nothing else, Ed sticks to his materialist guns to the end, regardless of the arguments. The fact that Ed states that there is no real argument simply means that Ed didn't bother to read the stuff Paul provided per the "hard problem' and all the rest.
Fact is, Ed is only looking for an explanation for how he believes mind is created, and apparently has no interest in what mind IS, which is more than we can ever expect science to provide.
If physics could answer what life IS, there would be no other subjects, no psychology, sociology, etc., and of course there is. Ed has simply been made to believe that so long as he knows the objective, he will knows all there is to know about the subjective. But in fact an objective investigation of the brain would never disclose the presence of sentience because is is not an object that you can point to and say, "That is awareness."
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Many more centuries of philosophy than of science have been at this, and philosophy has little to show for the effort. Even the problems framed by the philosophical arguments might be totally irrelevant to the answer.
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Have been at what, Ed, and what philosophical studies are you referring to, specifically? You'll pulled a Sara Palin here, Ed.
I believe you have done little to no reading of the philosophical literature (on mind) at all, not even the basic stuff like Chalmers.
None of the philosophical studies have been trying to explain how mind was sourced by brain, but rather they were attempts to investigate what mind and subjective experience IS.
You are apparently satisfied by an explanation that describes how the brain processes information, believing that all issues of mind are thus disclosed by said measurements. Again, your bedrock belief seems to be that if you understand how some object works on the material level, there in nothing else to know. In other words, the secrets of the meta are ALWAYS and entirely contained in the micro.
What's more, your take on philosophy is - well, pretty laughable, believing as you do that philosophy was all along trying to do science without instruments, and that now that we have the instruments, we can finally and properly answer the big philosophical questions - that is, measuring objects can give us a definitive answer to what subjectivity IS, and so for.
Of course this is scientism once again - believing that the boys with the rulers will crack the essential questions with measurements, and that what is not a measurement might be philosophy, but it is never the truth. The fact that you believe that the study of mind is to seeks measurements, and should, since these along betray the truth, is a pretty good case for you to dive into Chalmers at the very least and get straight on what the questions actually are.
Science has produced a number of models, many of which have been shown, by science, to be inadequate to explain the phenomenon, though many have had good success in explaining parts of the phenomenon.
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Again, you will get no argument from me that measuring has produced many fantastic answers per objects and how they do what they do. If science has provided answers per the essential truths about subjective experience itself (NOT objective functioning), kindly show me the literature.
I do agree that we will never be able to explain what goes on in Largo's mind, and while that is the most important question for Largo, it probably isn't very relevant for the science.
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Again, what you always betray in these underhanded swipes is your addiction to content. If you removed what goes on in your mind and sat for a moment with mind, what measurement do you find? What quantification? What object?
JL
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