SentientMeat
Look, I know all this minutiae is frustrating and if you want to bow out, I’ll just say thank you; you’ve given me much to think about.
My whole point in engaging in this conversation was to try and demonstrate that when it comes to higher cognitive functions, especially subjective awareness, we have a lot of interesting WAG’s but precious little evidence or even unambiguous, repeatable data. Certainly not enough to strongly support any “ism”, even physicalism.
My position is that sensory information sorted into memory as moderated by chemical emotion is how the mind works, that these elements explain awareness, or at least many aspects of it. I contend that in the video of me under general anaesthetic, I was not aware. My preferred explanation for this, out of all of the alternatives, is that anaesthetic subdues brain function to the point where awareness disappears for a time.
If your position is that these elements do not explain the origin of awareness, so be it. I have agreed with you numerous times that one cannot be aware of non-awareness. I merely asked you wether you thought (not whether you knew) that I was not aware in that video of me. I think so, in any case. This is my position, my guess, my belief, my opinion. I do not know that I was not aware (or indeed, that the sun will appear to move relative to the horizon tomorrow or that I am not in the Matrix).
If you could tell me what your position actually is, we could have a useful conversation.
Well, there’s a difference between “abuzz”, “depressed” and near zero. When I casually remarked all those posts ago the “physical molecules can affect our minds or make it temporarily disappear entirely” I thought we might all reasonably agree that I was not aware when under general anaesthetic, and that awareness might indeed be graded “foggily” as you put it from that non-existent state on up to this level I, and I believe you, experience. (I cannot know that you experience that level, or indeed anything, of course.)
So I’ll try again: In your opinion, was my awareness numbed in that hour?
Liberal ,
I’ve forgotten some of my Modal Logic it seems. Could you remind me of something?
What would the notation “<>[sup]-2[/sup]A” mean? “–<>A” or “-<><>A”? In other words, if in the General Axiom I make h=1, i=0, j=-1, and k=-2, which of the following axioms do I thereby generate for my model:
“<>A → -–<>A”
or
“<>A -> --<><>A”
?
The more I think about it the more I think I remember it was the latter, and the more it seems that must be it in any case. But could you confirm this for me?
Thanks…
-FrL-
Your first link takes me to Steven Pinker’s “How the mind works”. Pinker has repeatedly stated, just like I have been stating here, that he thinks understanding subjective awareness, the subject under discussion here, is forever beyond our conceptual grasp (Actually, I’m less pessimistic; I just think it’s currently beyond our conceptual grasp, and hence there are no explanations for it).
Your second link takes me to Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained”. Since Pinker and Dennett disagree precisely on the irreducibility of subjective awareness, I’d be interesting in knowing how you manage to reconcile these opposing viewpoints, given that you’re presenting them in support of your position.
My position is that holding any position that purports to explain awareness is unwarranted by the neurological “evidence”, and that it’s fruitful to examine why, when it comes to subjective awareness, conclusive evidence is so damn elusive.
Well, my reading of the two (and others) is that they all largely agree on most aspects of cognitive science and what physical behaviour correlates with what subjective experience. I would agree that Pinker is far more cautious regarding what he would consider a complete explanation of subjective awareness than Dennett’s bold (and IMO overblown) claims.
But I’d suggest that this is rather more the usual level of disagreement in any scientific field: what satisfies Dennett does not quite count as an “explanation” to Pinker, in the same way that some archaeologists are satisfied by a single meteor impact at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary and others are not, or some geophysicists say that magnetic north is still not genuinely explained. Can we reduce subjective awareness to physical cortices and memory? Not very well, no. Yet. And no better than we reduce the global climate to energy and water vapour.
But the physicalist does not quite go so far: his position is simply that nothing exists but the physical, even if everything cannot yet be fully explained therewith. Climatology and geophysics might be utterly baffling, but we would still not appeal to the non-physical when we hit a snag. In the same way, cognitive science and neuropsychology are only in their infancy, and explaining the origin of mind is the challenge of the millennium, but proposing such a dualism as phsyical and non-physical is, to me, worth a slashing with Ockham’s Razor. As far as I could tell, neither Pinker nor Dennett suggested such a dualism. Do you?
And I’m sorry to harp on about it, but again I ask: In your opinion, was I aware under general anaesthetic?
I’m suggesting there’s no current neurological “evidence” for or against dualism. (Also, correct me if I’m misreading you, but in your description of physicalism, dualism is impossible by definition, right?)
I’ve answered this several times: In my opinion, I have no way of knowing whether or not you were aware under general anesthetic and neither does anyone else.
It’s like you’re asking me: “In your opinion, is there a greenish rock buried somewhere on Saturn?” How the hell would I know?
I’ve actually never seen it. But given the S4 Axiom (A -> A), I would read <>[sup]-2[/sup]A as ~(<><>)A, or simply ~<>A (which = ~A).
No doubt unintentionally, you seem to be implying that I have evaded your question. I might ask you five times whether, in your opinion, I was mugwax when I passed out. If your responses are an attempt to get me to get me to clarify what I mean by mugwax, then I cannot call you evasive. I’ll say again, if you’ve tied awareness to the brain, then definitively, you cannot be aware when your brain is anesthetized. There is no need to draw any conclusion, because the premise states the condition. But under that condition, you were not aware yesterday, because yesterday-brain does not exist. I’m beginning to wonder whether you aren’t really asking about memory rather than awareness. Since you were on the table breathing, and the anesthetist was monitoring the EEG of your frontal lobe activity, it is entirely possible that you were aware but the anesthetized hippocampus simply doesn’t remember any of it.
Very well, Lib an dother-wise, according to your definition of “awareness”, whatever that might be, is there any difference in it when under general anaesthetic?
other-wise: I’ve been happy for you to declare your position as the fence and to endure the pot-shots therefrom, but I think you overestimate the strength with which I am putting forward my position here. If I could ask you to read the entire thread again, you’ll find I’ve stated the same reservations over and over.
I am simply telling you where my Belief-O-Meter needle points. I am hypothesising a computer which sorts sensory input into memory, moderated by chemical emotion and which labels memories using language. I am saying that I believe that this hypothetical computer would have a subjective experience (which we couldn’t know). Not the subjective experience anything like mine - maybe more like that of an insect or a lizard, but a subjective experience. Sensory input, memory and chemical emotion are all demonstrably physical, insofar as cognitive science studies the physical.
So when I say that I guess the mind is essentially physical, I am simply extending what I say about gravity, or magnetic north, or the weather, to the mind, even though NONE of those things are yet explained properly. That physical molecules have such a profound effect on the mind is merely another datum in that overall view. Just as one does not conclude that Darwinism is justified by a single fact, so it is with my view of physicalism: it is the position I have come to accept after surveying all of the available facts.
So, in the interests of a genuine debate, I politely request: Please provide a word, or phrase, or paragraph, or whatever, which best describes your philosophical position, and we can compare yours to mine. I admit that mine is highly imperfect, as I have said many times in this very thread, but we might find that yours is in a different league altogether.
I like the “state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness” definition. That allows drugged people, autistic people, and newborns to be “aware”. So far as I can tell, there is no difference in it when under general anesthetic. (It is, after all, undifferentiated.) But that is not to say that you will remember what you were conscious of when the hippocampus recovers. An eternal awareness (if you will allow me a slight digression) can be imagined to be like that. There are no memories because there is no past.
Perhaps later, yes.
But the point we can take from my exposition is that this is just a truism. You seem to take it in some Cartesian Medidator sense. It is simply the character of empirical investigations.
Funny you should mention arithmetic. Do you remember, at all, learning it? Did you make mistakes…?
I have two responses open to me. One is a favorite of mine: “I can’t possibly be making a mistake. --But some day, rightly or wrongly, I may think I realize that I was not competent to judge.” 
The other is: the only way I can imagine that I would be wrong is if someone could demonstrate mind-independent categories or could demonstrate that what we know, or say we know, we know without appeal to such categorization. I am not clear how this could possibly be done, and so that means, no, I cannot be wrong (but some day…). I tend to look at it as a definitional framework for explanations rather than something “I know”, and earlier I even mentioned that I try to shift the burden of proof onto my detractors. A low tactic, to be sure, but some say turnabout is fair play. 
But that is quite the point, epistemologically speaking. What is the nature and limit of human knowledge?
I would find such a belief useful if I could see benefit I might have from it. I am not looking for the ultimate science experiment or a mystical path to enlightenmight, just a little hint that it serves some purpose to posit mind-independence.
One purpose (and it might take a bit of thought to discern how spectacular it really is) would be awareness from an objective reference frame. Mind-dependency necessitates subjectivity.
A little drive by …
Much of this current conversation seems a bit moot to me. Being someone interested in how things really do work I wonder if many of the classic epistemolgic questions are really moot at this point. Or if they are, even worse, trite. For practical purpose a brain independent reality exists and it is made of something. Our quest for knowledge is to form systems that increasingly better model that reality as we are capable of percieving it using our cognitive systems and their extensions. Our awareness, our consciousness, is an emergent property (not an epiphenomenom) needed to tell self from nonself and to achieve goals. It emerges from a self referential patterns that includes itself as an object set.
And the aside, some serious physicists wonder if the physical is an illusion and all reality is information at its core. It can all come round after all.
Or, as I have been arguing, intersubjectivity, there being no basis for knowledge subjectively.
That was @Lib.
DSeid, “for all practical purposes…” For practical purposes we simply assume the world is how it appears. That position, termed ‘naive realism’, is idealism at heart. Idealism in its many appearances is not a popular position, philosophically, but I find some of them quite workable, and strongly feel that those represent the “best” positions to work from, given the many reasons I’ve outlined. As ever, I shy away from mind-dependence and strike the empirical chord with “mere” correspondence–that is, our categorization is the beginning of the analysis, and because of that, we cannot reach outside of it. I do not feel this constitutes denying reality any special stature. Recognizing what we have to work with is not a matter of denial.
But the very interesting part is not that they are oracles, but that they are extensions. They do not probe in any special way, they become another sensory apparatus. Much like when I prod something with a stick, I deduce its hardness not because I have sensed it, and not because “hardness” is a “real” property (whatever that means, which is usually “mind-independence”), but because the stick is an extension of my own senses.
Yes, there was a difference in my awareness when I was under general anesthetic (see post #52). But then, what-I’m-aware-of and how I’m aware (sober? drunk? sleepy? engrossed?) is always changing. It’s just being aware that doesn’t change.
I think I can take a crack at this, but could you narrow it down a little? You’d like me to describe my philosophical position on…?
That is, not because I have sensed it with the “normal” senses.
And so you would not say that general anaesthetic makes you unconscious? (Indeed, that there is any such thing as unconsciousness or lack of awareness, nor that physical molecules such as alcohol or LSD affect consciousness, mind or awareness?) If this is indeed your position, I feel we have found our point of irreducible divergence and must leave it to our audience to decide which is the most reasonable option.
If 1+1=2 is right, then I was sometimes mistaken. Can 1+1=2 be wrong, and if not, can it really be considered “knowledge”?
And, conversely, how can something uncertain be called “knowledge”? Surely a more accurate word would be belief, guess or opinion (regardless of one’s confidence therein)?
bolding mine. I feel we have explored the limit of knowledge ad nauseam. I’d now like to turn to its nature, and specifically its origin. Could you please provide a brief description of how you think entities which could know things (ie. minds) came to exist where none did before?
Well, as I said to Lib, if your position is that I was aware when under anaesthetic, I must simply disagree and leave our respective positions to the judgement of the audience. That you nevertheless consider that physical molecules affect awareness is an important datum in itself, since it implies that awareness must at least have some physical element.
Metaphysics. My position is that gravity, magnetism and the weather are all physical things, even if they have not yet been fully explained physically: I do not propose a dualism of physical things and Higgs bosons, nor physical things and ice ages, nor physical things and Earth’s poles. I extend this to the mind and awareness (while recognising than we can no more grasp what it’s like to be another mind any more than what it’s like to be a boson, or a magnet, or a cloud): I contend that non-physical things are an unnecessary dualism if the existence of the physical is postulated. So, are you a realist or an idealist, a dualist or a monist, a theist or atheist? Do you consider that awareness is a fundamentally different thing from physical things like gravity, life and weather?
Who knows? Biology hasn’t defined life. Physics hasn’t defined gravity. Medicine hasn’t defined consciousness. Philosophy hasn’t even defined existence. I imagine that it is possible for one part of the brain to be conscious (keeping in mind the term is vague) and another part to be unconscious. I mean hell, you could blow the whole thing up and surely it will have no physical mechanism for consciousness.
But for me, the question is whether the brain is the person. I think our irreducible divergence has been covered long ago. Man is a dual creature, having a mind and a spirit. It is the latter that is his essence, and the latter that preceded his existence as an animal. He is both physical and metaphysical. It seems to me that the physicalist must accept the axiom <>A -> A. If something can be true, then it must be true. If in some world among the many worlds it is possible that God exists, then God must exist. And because He must exist, He actually exists in every world: <>A <-> A.
Yes, I realize that it is an unfortunate contradiction that the physicalist must accept the possiblity of the metaphysical, but such is the nature of untenable positions. It is no different from the skeptical epistemologist who declares axiomatically that all axioms are invalid. The physicalist must introduce entities in an attempt to eliminate the metaphysical. These entities are unnecessary, and as such, violate Ockham’s Razor.
It all comes back to my original comment on the matter of awareness: it stands to reason that there are two different awarenesses, one temporal and one eternal, and neither accessible to the other. The temporal awareness is indistinguishable from memory; the eternal awareness is, obviously, without memory. What is there to remember when there is no past?
Someone asked about the practicality of this discussion. As in all things, what is practical depends on what you are practicing. If your concern is with temporal awareness, then it is practical that you compare anesthetized brains with awake brains (and, of course, deal with the subnormative brains of infants and opium addicts). But if your concern is with eternal awareness, then it is practical to go about the business of studying eternity. In the end, for me, epistemology is justified by its objectivity. God knows. And that is the source of all justifed knowledge.
Pretty symbols on a page. The physicalist denies the metaphysical, and considers ontology a bunch of vanilla-flavoured hooey. The metaphysical is itself an unnecessary entity which receives a deserved Chelsea grin from good old Ockham, and an eternal awareness utter a philosophical chocolate teapot of wishful thinking. It stands to reason that just as there were no minds or awareness for 13 billion years, so there will be none after death.