Does MEF have any characteristics in common that distinguishes them all as physical? Or are their individual characteristics axiomatic for the designation “physical” (i.e., does anything with any of the characteristics of either M, E, or F automatically qualify as “physical”)?
Is spacetime physical (i.e., does it share any of the characteristics of MEF, or are the characteristics of spacetime axiomatically “physical”)? Also, what specifically eliminates consciousness under the panpsychic position?
Here’s where we’re probably going to hit our first point of contention. You say that the spatial MEF arrangements can be developed into temporal MEF arrangements called “processes”, but don’t the MEFs already possess temporal arrangements? If they didn’t, they would not exist in time, which I believe would render them non-physical under your characterizations.
If all spatial MEF arrangements are indeed already part of some process, then I would expand on my response to AHunter3: if physical entities are inextricably involved in processes at every level of inspection, what is the justification for embracing a physicalist philosophy vs. an interactionist philosophy?
Well, yeah, I think that’s what I mean. It mystifies me that people champion physicalism as the explanation of subjective awareness rather than as an interesting, fruitful way to explore the questions surrounding the subject. I’ve argued before that as far as I can tell, “the effect on consciousness of certain physical molecules” is nil, and that the correlations between cognitve functions and brain regions are spotty, controversial, and in the end still only correlations, and still only address putative cognitive functions, not awareness.
That’s why I can’t understand the impression I get from many physicalists: “Well, ‘case closed’! We have a few important details to work out, but basically, we’ve nailed it”. When I look at the same evidence they do, I just seethis.
Also, I can’t tell from your last post whether you consider MEFs to tightly, but imperfectly, reflect reality-as-it-is; or if you consider them as metaphors: extremely useful fictions, but fictions nonetheless.
Also, part 2: What characteristics do MEFs share with subjective awareness? How are you translating (or building) from MEF to awareness? (This question may or may not be jumping the gun, but it’s inevitable considering the thread’s emphasis on PM/CS)
Wow…I’m new here and I’m duly impressed with y’all
Certainly I cannot hope to match wits with such great minds, however,
I do have a question, maybe even two:
If, in fact, someone could tell you/him/her/them the definite, undeniable
truth about what is really ‘what’, would it enrich your/their life, make everything
all better? What would be solved if every single person on earth knew,
beyond all doubt, that everything is about physicalism?
If your answer to this is yes, in what ways would knowing make a difference?
In actuality, aren’t there pretty darn good arguments for all philosophies, be
it physicalism, theism, solipsism, panpsychism, pantheism, merrimism, etc.
Isn’t it even possible that they can all be subscribed to…all jumbled up
together and used as one?
Creating jumblism<<<<< I’m kidding, but still…
Oh, another thing…how do we even know we’re really here, existing? Maybe we’re imagining everything. That would put a whole new light on physicalism, or any ism, for that matter. Is there proof that we are really here?
Or maybe we’re like a huge “Truman Show” that some other life force is watching?
Placing bets on what we’ll do next.
I’d suggest the latter: like I keep saying, all definitions must start somewhere. You’re asking the equivalent of “Do metabolism, growth and reproduction have any characteristics in common that distinguishes them all as alive?”, which rather strays from the point.
Your question should rather be posed the other way around: Do MEF share characteristics of spacetime? Like I said, absolute cutting edge physics might suggest a formulation like this – that matter, energy, forces and even time are all manifestations of space itself. But this is, again, a somewhat esoteric bifurcation. So, yes, it’s probably more useful here to take the physicality of spacetime and the stuff in it as axiomatic. (Which, of course, I tried to make explicit with my premises in the OP with which you could disagree at will, thus cutting short the debate in an instant.)
From physicality? Fuck knows – you’d best ask one, since I have trouble getting anything other than simple assertions that consciousness can’t be physical out of any of them. (They also simply assert that the lan vital is just different, without saying how.)
Of course they can possess temporal arrangements – that’s the point, but it’s the point you seem to have trouble accepting, so I took it a little further back. Remember, I suggested a starting point of mutually understood “things like” molecules, rocks, cells and PC’s. These things in particular we can think of as being frozen, static spatial arrangements of smaller bits, whatever they are. We can photograph them (ie. capture the arrangement at a single frozen instant) and you recognise them just as easily. This, I think, is what you generally refer to as a thing (correction invited again – in fact, just append these 3 words silently to every sentence).
From there, consider a movie of these objects. We are then, yes, watching that spatial arrangement develop over time - a spatio-temporal arrangement. We can see the reactions of the molecule, the geological change of the rock, the metabolism of the cell, the computations of the PC. This is why the definition I offer for “physical” (which, by the way, I don’t think is really all that important here anyway – any more than an evolution debate requires a definition of life) involves arrangements in spacetime – all one word, per Einstein. Thus if you don’t like matter, energy and forces having no temporal component, fine, I agree: that’s why I suggested teh definition in the first place. The distinction between spatial and spatio-temporal arrangements was only for your edificational benefit anyway!
Hair-splitting irrelevance IMO, since I’d characterise interactions as physical (spacetime, remember). So that really is as insubstantial a tomato-tomahto distinction as I’ve ever seen (which perhaps explains why the Stanford site doesn’t even have a separate entry for it). If you adopted interactionism, great – I’d think of you as joining the same side as me. (Indeed, I find the whole emergent vs. eliminative materialism rather a non-debate, so let’s not wind up in that muddy field either).
Then I think you’re strawmanising physicalism a little. Like I said, it’s the position that consciousness has a physical basis. It doesn’t provide the explanation itself – that is the Challenge of the Millennium for cognitive science. And you’re as entitled to be as dissatisfied with the gaps in that as with those in evolutionary biology, cosmology or any other science.
Desflurane is a physical molecule. It makes me unconsciousness. How it does so is the Challenge, but we cannot deny that it does so.
I am aware of far less when my brain shows only a tiny fraction of waking activity. When correlations become so strong after all other factors have been investigated, we can IMO start to talk about causation. The “how” is then the eminently scientific enterprise of filling explanatory gaps, which still exist in al other sciences.
For the Nth time, cognitive science has all kinds of explanatory gaps – it’s anything but ‘closed’. But so do all other sciences, since otherwise we could close their university departments worldwide. Physicalism is merely the position that those explanations, whatever they are, don’t require anything other than generally biological stuff doing generally computational things: no God, no soul, no epiphenomenal ectoplasm, no vitalistic equivalent - you know what I’m talking about. It really is that reasonable, straighforward and conservative a position for an ape to set forth, so there’s no reason to “get impressions” which are altogether more radical, unless you particularly want to debate them rather than what I’m actually saying.
That cartoon appearing at the start of Consciousness Explained, of course. That you still feel it applies having read it suggests to me that your difficulties are in what can be explained in principle in science (cognitive or not), hence this thread.
There’s no such thing as matter, energy and forces? I don’t really feel a force of gravity or impact? I’m not really made of matter? Energy is fictional? That barks up the tree of idealism quite loudly to me – if matter, energy, forces and spacetime are fictional then I’d struggle to come up with something which isn’t. Reality as far as I can tell is based on arrangements of these elements: minds are caused by brains, and brains are made of stuff.
Not directly, except perhaps for a small subset of phenomena: Like I say, I’m a physicalist but not a reductionist. We look back through evolution, forming atoms from subatoms/energy (stellar nucleosynthesis), then atoms togther into molecules (chemistry), molecules together into bigger molecules (polymolecular chemistry), bigger molecules into self replicating molecules (molecular biology), forming structures (cellular biology), and further multicellular structures, which replicate-mutate-compete (evolutionary biology) to ultimately become primitive jawless fish (first working memory), and on to reptiles (first R-complex brains), mammals (first limbic system), primates (first frontal cortex) and homo sapiens sapiens (first enormous frontal cortex). Somewhere in there, a transition from lack of awareness (ie. what my corpse has) to awareness (ie. what I have right now) took place, if only gradually. We don’t have to refer to eg. quantum mechanics for each step: biologists don’t need physics degrees to do biology, even though they can easily consider animals to be machines which are ultimately made of atoms and molecules.
Not at all - that’s the some/all set fallacy rearing its ugly head again. When I say that falsifiable predictions are the hallmark of a valuable model, of course I’m not saying that every aspect is or should be predictable. I’ve said this many times, but I’ll say it again. Understanding the weather in terms of matter, energy and forces does not require us to predict it for the year 3000. If that were the absurdly high threshold for what counts as “understanding”, there is arguably no such thing as understanding at all in most sciences.
Without diving into the details of string theory and whether it really has replaced other theories based upon Quantum Dynamics, the above statement is an abuse of language. Admitedly, it is difficult not to abuse language when discussing quantum events and explanations, but this kind of easy aphorism does nothing to illuminate the basic paradox that II Gyan II was questioning.
Interactions do, indeed, require two or more entities. Now, the question of whether those entities meet the requirements of traditional physicalism might be interesting, but the message of “vacuum fluxuations” is not that “it’s all verbs”. The messge of vacuum fluxuations is that a quantum vacuum is not as empty as it seems. One can argue whther an energy potential is physical (I would argue that it is, under the definitions of conventional physicalism), but when using English one cannot meaningfully describe an energy potential as a verb.
“verbs all the way down” wasn’t a dead-serious post. The notion that the entire universe is essentially a vacuum fluctuation (not merely the notion that vacuum fluctuations do exist), however, was.
OK, fair enough, but not necessarily of objects, “things”. Matter at the bottom rung would appear to consist of the interaction of quantum possibilities, which in turn are reciprocal deviations from a net sum of 0.
If you limit yourself to talking about particles that do not consist of interactions, you have nothing to say and nothing to say it about, there’s no there there.
Well – the whole idea of what constitutes a “thing” in such a Universe is actually pretty interesting. From my perspective, it appears that you are trying to make statements about a “matter”::“not matter” dichotomy from within a contex tin which there is essentially (and I do mean essentially) no such distinction.
“Interactions” is a pretty tricky word to use, here. The expression of a quantum possibilitiy as a “real” (or virtual, for that matter) particle can be described in probabilistic terms. However, describing that expression as an interaction between possibiliities is not necessarily more apt than describing it as the outcome of an event or as a member of a sequence or even as a note in a symphony.
Perhaps I am misinterpreting the thrust of your comment, though. The line about “reciprocal deviations from a net sum of 0” confuses me: zero-point energy is not zero, that’s pretty much the interesting thing about it and the basic explanation for virtual particles and the cosmological constant.
Great to have you along, Spiritus. Any suggestions regarding what I’m under- or over-emphasising here, or whether I’m taking an entirely wrong tack, would be welcomed.
Sentient, at first it seemed sensible to me that since we were trying to come to a mutual understanding of the term “physical”, we should start at the simplest level and work our way up. In hindsight, I see what should have been obvious to me in the first place: in physics, the “simplest” level is inherently the most controversial and difficult to understand. So, with your indulgence, let me once more sweep the table clear, take your suggestion to concentrate (at least for the time being) on the molecules/rocks/cells/computers level of inquiry, and bring the focus down to a few key issues (and again, I’m not trying to ignore or side-step your posts; I’m just trying to keep us off the roundabouts, and I repeat my offer to address directly anything you’ve posted thus far).
Let me start with the following because it seems like one of the few areas where we’re not talking past each other, i.e., I think we understand each others view, we just flat-out disagree:
I can and do deny it. As I’ve said before, more than once I’ve had a noseful of Desflurane (at least, I’m pretty sure it was Desflurane): what I was aware of got all blurry and strange, then sharpened into the worried/relieved faces of my loved ones peering over me in the recovery room. There was no point at which I had no subjective awareness, i.e., subjective awareness never “disappears” - you’re always subjectively aware, and always have been.
There is no way to substantiate that claim with third-person science, of course, which is one reason I think third-person science is demonstrably limited when it comes to exploring consciousness. However, instead of third-person science, we can look at it analytically: If ever, at some point, you were not aware, how would you know? What would non-awareness be an awareness of? In the same way, as long as you can remember, you’ve always been aware. What would a memory of non-awareness be a memory of?
Aware of “far less” is still aware. We’re not discussing the extent or quality of what you’re aware of, we’re discussing being aware, and being aware is like being pregnant: there’s no such thing as “more or less” pregnant, you either are or you aren’t.
I don’t know what you’re referring to here. What other factors and how were they investigated?
This is a sticking point for me. Nothing in the chain you describe implies awareness, or a mechanism for its occurrence. Atoms form molecules, molecules form neurons, and neurons form brains, and then it stops cold: “electro-chemical neuronal activity” is the end of the story, with no awareness anywhere along the line. It’s as if we put the alarm clock back together and it seemed to be working perfectly when we suddenly realized there was a part left over.
I have a few questions around this, but let me start here: Physically, what is the function of awareness? (i.e., what physical purpose does awareness serve that cannot be served by non-aware cognitive processing?)
Ok; you draw a line, or establish some kind of threshold, for predictions in order for them to qualify as evidence. What is the “threshold for prediction” in the case of subjective awareness?
OK, but what with all this table-sweeping it’s rather difficult to tell whether I’m making any progress in my quest to make physicalism seem reasonable to you. If I answer one of your questions with the best paragraphs I can muster and no more mention is made of it, I can’t tell whether you’re ignoring it because I’ve convinced you or because it’s such utterly evasive balls that you recognize a dead end when you see one. Some indication of those issues which have attained the magical “not unreasonable anymore” threshold would be very useful.
What about that hour or so which demonstrably passed between the blurriness and the loved ones? If you were aware of that hour, great, please go right ahead and tell me or them all about it. If you weren’t, then that hour constitutes a point at which you were not aware. Really, what you’re proposing seems to me to be far more unreasonable and, dare I say it, perverse a use of plain English than anything I’ve ever seen even in anti- or non-physicalist literature. When you ask those loved ones why the clock seems wrong, don’t you believe them when they say that you’ve been doing an incredibly convincing corpse impression for an hour, and even play you the video? If you sat on the jury in an assault trial in which the prosecution told the court that in front of numerous witnesses the defendant knocked the victim unconscious, would you raise your hand and ask the judge to strike the comment from the record because you think no such thing is possible? What about the years before you were conceived? I’d love to hear your account of what you were aware of then, if you always have been.
Come, I implore you, let us ditch this sophistry. But if for some bizarre reason you cannot bring yourself to do so, let us at least not deny that physical molecules like LSD and psilocybin affect our consciousness despite being mere arrangements of everyday atoms (which in other arrangements have no such effect whatsoever). Your position that the effect on consciousness of certain physical molecules is nil is simply absurd on its face, but if that’s the hill you want to fight on, fair enough: We can explore your alternative explanations for such effects.
Evidence, similar to that which convinces me that there’s a real place called Australia, Ancient Greeks built the Acropolis and the Holocaust actually happened. How else do you explain the clocks, loved-one testimony and video?
Nothing, of course: they’re mutually exclusive entities. Are you seriously asking this?
It wouldn’t be a memory at all. Why are you positing one?
Interesting experiments beckon there: we use graduated desflurane doses, and after X minutes ask the patient what they were aware of in that X minutes. Do you think that no matter how high the dose, the answers will all be the same?
I mean a well designed control, ie. trying to be as certain as possible that the variable the experiment is testing is the only significant thing changed in one case but not in the other.
But you agree that homo sapiens are aware, at the very very least. If you think that, say, homo erectus wasn’t, we can look at the differences between the two. If you think he was, but Australopithecus wasn’t, we can look at the differences between the two. If you think he was, but earlier primates weren’t, we can look at the differences between the two, etc. Or, we could work our way up using today’s animals and ask you whether, say, ants or bees or fish or pigeons have awareness by examining precisely what their electro-chemical neuronal activity encodes. Either way, you draw the threshold where you dare and then we talk, or you refuse to draw any threshold whatsoever and we talk about the awareness of molecules, corpses and rocks (which even ‘awkward’ philosophers like Searle and McGinn consider “ludicrous” and “absurd”, but good luck with it anyway).
Why must there be one?
As in any heterophenomenonlogical experiment, repeatability is effectively a prediction that if you run the same experiment again in the future, you’ll get results which are just as statistically significant. Again, this is just the methodology of all kinds of other sciences (*eg.*biological, medical or environmental science) applied to responses from supposedly aware entities.
Having said all of this, note that I think we’re rather starting to jazz-improv free-associate again – any thread will spiral out of control without dedicated focus. In My Opinion, none of what we’re talking about in this particular post is all that important in relation to your first bullet point regarding what I mean by physical. Has that been resolved yet to something approaching your satisfaction?
Sorry, I thought we had covered all this. Let me recap:
I do not find physicalism per se unreasonable. This is not an altering of position on my part; you have to remember that this whole thing started when I stated my bewilderment concerning the dominance of the physicalist philosophy in PM/CS. I did not introduce the term “reasonable” into our exchange; you did when, in response to my statement, you asserted that my bewilderment was tantamount to saying that the alternatives to physicalism seem just as reasonable as physicalism.
You’ve said yourself that at this stage of the game, physicalism does not have an explanation for subjective awareness. Neither do the alternatives. The lack of explanation for subjective awareness is why I find the physicalist philosophical position as unreasonable as the alternatives when it comes to PM/CS.
Nope, I’m sticking to muh guns on this one. And accusations of sophistry don’t exactly further the conversation; I have no history of presenting deceptive arguments on this board (stupid arguments, maybe; inchoate arguments, certainly. But not deceptive.)
Now then… first of all, you’re conflating a lack of awareness with a lack of behaviors you’ve associated with awareness. The latter is the only thing you or anyone else can test for or observe (whether video taped or live). That there are many credible (and disturbing) reports of completely unresponsive patients who were nonetheless fully aware during their operations, and that observations of behavior start becoming highly problematic in cases of people afflicted with, say, paralysis or catatonia demonstrates the inherent unreliability of those observations when it comes to determining awareness. Simply put, there is no way to confirm awareness (or lack thereof) from behavioral observation.
Second, you don’t take into account that someone may simply not remember what they were aware of. We’ve all been in the position of forgetting things we were once aware of, and that situation is even more likely to occur with an anesthetized patient, seeing as how some anesthetics are formulated specifically with such an outcome in mind.
Third, you say that according to the clock an hour has passed. But the only reason we need clocks in the first place is because our awareness of time is ridiculously malleable. When we’re bored, minutes are experienced like hours; in deep concentration, hours disappear so quickly we wonder why it’s “suddenly” dark outside. And that occurs even without time-distorting, psychoactive drugs like anesthesia.
Fourth, my experience of awareness is atemporal.
Rudolf Carnap once wrote:
“Einstein said the problem of the Now worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation. So he concluded that ‘there is something essential about the Now which is just outside the realm of science’.”
(BTW, if anyone can document Carnaps’s claim, or has found similar sentiments in writings by or about Einstein, I’d appreciate a reference.)
Yogi Berra, as usual, highlighted the problem more succinctly:
Teamate: “Hey, what time is it?” Yogi: “You mean now?”
From an experiential standpoint, it’s never the past or the future; it’s always now and always has been. Sure, what I’m aware of is in constant flux, but that I’m aware is not.
Which brings us to:
I disagree. LSD and psilocybin do not affect my awareness at all; they only affect what I am aware of.
With LSD molecules I’m aware of the trails my hands seem to be leaving in the air. With ethanol molecules, I’m aware of a doubling of objects in my vision. Pretty much any molecule that I ingest will have an effect, whether I’m consciously aware of that effect or not.
As I said above, what I’m aware of is constantly changing: one minute I’m sleepy, the next drunk, the next absorbed in a movie, etc… But being aware doesn’t change; it’s just what I am.
See previous.
See previous.
Since no one knows how neurons process information, we’re a long way from controlling enough variables to be able to determine that a specific cognitive function is caused by specific neural correlates in a given brain region. You’re free to leap that explanatory chasm; I’ll wait until the gap has closed a bit.
Where did “drawing thresholds” come from? I said that nothing in the chain of physicality that you describe implies awareness, or a mechanism for its occurrence. If that’s correct, what other evidence are you drawing on in order to ascribe awareness to anything?
??? Are you suggesting awareness is an epiphenonomenon?
Well, no, but as I said, I realized that there was no way that my simple question was gonna have a simple answer (as the exchange between ** AHunter3** and Spiritus demonstrates), and for our purposes, it probably doesn’t need one. But the contents of the post are indeed important in relation to my first bullet point because all the bullet points were in relation to physicalism in PM/CS.
And what is “bewilderment” but a Buridanian inability to offer even a slight preference for one alternative over another? All I can do in the face of such all-encompassing confusion is to satisfy myself that you are no less bewildered about such elementary things as whether or not eg. anaesthetic knocks you out or the Holocaust happened – if you really are so terminally bewildered, well, I’ll have done all I can. I’m just asking whether you’re the tiniest bit more convinced of my position with each post, since if you’re less convinced I might be better off stopping now (if it were only you and not an additional audience I was trying to be convincing before).
Only if, by that criterion, there’s no explanation for galaxies, fossils or hurricanes either. I’d say there are modes of explanation for each of them, and subjective awareness, the latter being primarily by reference to senses and working memory.
OK, I apologise for ‘sophistry’ (I meant fallacious rather than deceptive, by the way). Your argument is stupid and inchoate.
Agreed (as I have agreed many times regarding the ubmyterious “privacy” of subjectivity), just like I can only observe the lack of behaviour of living things when I look at a corpse, not the lack of life itself. This is irrelevant. You still have to accommodate the evidence regarding that hour.
Not credible to me, they’re not. Don’t go woo woo on me now, friend. Would repeated appearances in these “visions” of bizarre verbal suggestions from the surgeons (“Hey get that green sheep out of theatre!” … and later … “Doctor, where did the green sheep come from?”) convince you that these stories were only powerful dreams?
Great – if you were aware during that hour, go right ahead and describe the operation. Or were you not aware during that hour? You are evading this fundamental and obvious point. I’ve not asked you any (non-rhetorical) questions so far, but I’d like you to answer these questions from that paragraph as worded, if you would:
When you ask those loved ones why the clock seems wrong, don’t you believe them when they say that you’ve been doing an incredibly convincing corpse impression for an hour, and even play you the video? If you sat on the jury in an assault trial in which the prosecution told the court that in front of numerous witnesses the defendant knocked the victim unconscious, would you raise your hand and ask the judge to strike the comment from the record because you think no such thing is possible? What about the years before you were conceived? I’d love to hear your account of what you were aware of then, if you always have been.
I do take account of it – in fact I keep saying that I consider working memory to be a crucial element of awareness.
Like when we’re not aware for an hour. Again, what’s you description of what you think happened in that hour, given the evidence. If you say “nothing”, how do you explain the results of the surgery?
So you were aware for that whole hour, then?
Are you saying that they affect the light incident on your retina or the objects in the room? Nonsense – they affect your mind.
So physical molecules affect your consciousness, yes?
And it doesn’t change for that anaesthetised hour?
Non-answer: Please complete the sentence: The explanation for the clock, video and my loved ones telling me I was unconscious is …
Just walk me through it, if you could: You think the answers will be different for tiny and large doses?
So if we had two identical twins and one suffered brain damage to a specific brain region and subsequently lost a very very specific cognitive ability (like, say, new memory formation), that’s not a good enough control?
You agree that homo sapiens has awareness, yes? (And it wasn’t a chain of physicality (that’s what I’m trying to ultimately convince you of), it was a chain of evolution. My position is tht awareness emerged from non-awareness, just as life emerged from non-life. The precise threshold fo awareness doesn’t really matter, any more than the precise threshold for “life”
No, I’m asking why you posit a purpose to it. (Of course I don’t believe in zombies, which can give the same HP results wihtout awareness).
Great, I assume we can tick that box as “done”, then, and move onto the second where we can discuss what constitutes evidence and statistical significance in biological and computational science and then ask if cognitive science is any different.
The way this anaesthetic stuff is going, what I’m strongly getting from you is a tendency towards an “–ism”. This is great progress! I don’t want my curiosity to kill the cat by prematurely making an observation which disturbs the system, but the “–ism” I’m smelling very strongly is solipsism. I had thought it highly unlikely that we’d ever actually get one here on the SDMB, but you would do it proud. The next few posts should make the smell stronger or weaker, and should be very interesting.
Ah, reading again I thought you were referring to Pam Reynolds or some such guff. Yes, of course some patients don’t get a big enough dose - that’s why anaesthetists are paid so handsomely for such a difficult skill. I’m talking about the vast majority of anaestehetes (not aesthetes - even the very word must be objectionable to you, surely?) who get a proper dose and say, like you, that they were inly aware of blurriness and loved ones.
You misunderstand. My bewilderment is over why it is supposedly preferable to cleave to a doctrine, spending copious amounts of energy in defense of premises that are self-described as provisional, and encumbered with large explanatory gaps, rather than just simply carrying on with the inquiry.
Sorry, but I’m not going to accept the attempted devolution from an explanation to a mode of explanation. If subjective awareness can be explained by reference to senses and working memory then by all means, give us the details.
Well, since you cannot experience my consciousness directly, you have absolutely no way of demonstrating my argument to be fallacious. Your charge of sophistry remains unwarranted.
:rolleyes:
What?! You just agreed that the only evidence available to observers in that hour cannot confirm awareness or a lack thereof. I’m under no obligation to accommodate inconclusive evidence.
Of course. I expect that their experience of time and the content of their awareness would be very different than mine considering that I was under anesthesia. In fact, I expect that their experience of time and the content of their awareness is going to be at least somewhat different than mine all the time.
Of course not. The same way that if my wife said “Damn, this ice cream is cold.” , I wouldn’t say “You are incorrect. What you refer to as ‘cold’ is actually a relative lack of heat energy transfer from the ice cream’s environment”. And the same way that if someone said “Come look; the sun is setting”, I wouldn’t immediately correct them by launching into a lecture on heliocentrism with allowances for special relativity.
When people say “He was (knocked) unconscious”, it may not accurately describe the phenomenon they’re observing, but it’s good enough for the conversation at hand; just like the phrase “The sun is setting”.
I said as far as I can remember I have been aware. I certainly have no knowledge or memories of not being aware.
I’ve already described numerous possibilities for what might have happened in that hour, and I have no need to explain the results of the surgery: not being aware of the surgery doesn’t imply that I wasn’t aware of anything.
Could be. A smeary, time-distorted awareness is still awareness. Or, I could have been aware and just forgotten most of it due to the anesthesia.
That’s exactly what I’ve repeated ad nauseaum: under their influence, what I’m aware of changes dramatically, but the fact that I am aware does not change.
Physical molecules affect the content of my conscious awareness.
In my own experience, as far as I can tell? No. And as far as you or anyone else can tell, definitely not.
… that people will frequently describe phenomenon they’re observing with only a superficial accuracy, or simply metaphorically, especially when that description is good enough for purposes of the conversation at hand.
What in the hell difference does that make when we’ve already established that an inability to answer questions does not guarantee a lack of awareness?
Of course not. Just because the water stops flowing when a pipe breaks doesn’t mean the pipe caused the water. The inability to lay down new memories may mean the area is one of many factors involved in memory formation, or perhaps even just memory retrieval.
Ok, since you can’t answer when awareness emerges from non-awareness, at least tell me how awareness emerges from non-awareness.
And since you side-stepped the statement, I’ll resubmit it as a question:
What in the physicalist description of MEF/spacetime implies awareness, or a mechanism for its occurrence?
Let me simplify: What is the physical effect of awareness? How are other potential physical causes of that effect eliminated?
Hmmm, let’s see… in this thread you’ve referred to me as Buridan’s ass, you’ve accused my position of being absurd and me of sophistry, you’ve compared me to a Holocaust denier, and now you’ve decided that I “smell” like a solipsist (solipsism is a position I flatly reject, which you would have known had you simply bothered to ask).
This crap is tiresome and annoying, and worst of all, dealing with it wastes my time. If these snide remarks are going to continue appearing in this thread, I’m not.
Because, like I said in my ‘couple of points’, there will never be a stage in our enquiry at which we have anything more than results and alternative interpretations thereof. If the presence of a single ‘provisional’ premise or explanatory gap is enough to confound even stating one’s preferred option, then Buridan’s asses are we all, and absurd denials of scientific or historical consensus become reasonable.
Then, due to the presence of explanatory gaps in every single field of human endeavour, there’s no such thing as explanation.
No, I said it was as conclusive as confirming life or lack thereof by oberving a corpse. I still think that’s as conclusive as we need things to be to make progress away from Buridan assism.
Yes, but that wasn’t quite the question. They weren’t looking at any old thing – a field, a TV programme, someone else – they were looking at you, saying that you seemed corpse-like and utterly unresponsive and unaware of what was happening to you. Do you believe them, given that you can’t tell them what you were aware of either?
Is any phenomenon “accurately” described, then? Is “good enough for conversation” not as good as it gets?
This is crucial – we can develop this a long way, with your permission. There are clearly times you cannot remember (1944, for instance). You were not aware then, and therefore have not always been aware, yes?
OK, what were you aware of then? When I’m aware of things, I don’t need to speak of “possibilities” – I just go right ahead and say precisely what I was aware of.
And when I’m aware, I respond immediately to those things I’m aware of – even if I forget them later there’s still clear evidence that I’m not just some slab of unresponsive meat.
OK, save this for a moment.
There is no difference between you being unanaesthetised for an hour and being anaesthetised for an hour? On second thoughts, scratch that – I’ll address it more directly in a moment.
Can you give an example of something which isn’t “superficially accurate”?
But the ability to respond to stimuli is still an important datum to be accommodated in our entire inquiry. Again, more on this in a moment.
And which other factors would you suggest have comparable relevance?
Just as I suggest that life emerges from non-life via the replication of molecules, I suggest that awareness emerges from non-awareness via the processing of sensory input in working memory. If the presence of a single explanatory gap counfounds such mechanistic explanations entirely, then both cognitive science and biology are equally worthless endeavours.
I’m not sure I understand the question, or at least, what answer you could possibly find satisfactory. Is there anything in the physicalist description of MEF/spacetime which impliesweather, or erosion, or life, or computation? I’m genuinely struggling to think of it. If I can’t, would you consider climatology, geology, biology and computer science to be equally flawed in their explanations?
Again, I can’t help running a CATEGORY ERROR AT LINE 1: DOES NOT COMPUTE when I read these questions, although please believe me that I’m trying my very best to answer them helpfully. Again, could we use “life” as a template in place of “awareness” just to see what kind of answers you’re seeking? The only answers I can think of have to do with heterophenomenology and encrypted activity in a computer chip and the like, and even then they seem a poor fit.
I apologise yet again, unreservedly. (Well, OK, my reservations are that
The bit about seeking a “perfect philosophy” in my OP was a general observation not specifically aimed at you, so I was surprised when you brought up Buridan’s ass.
I do think your position is absurd, but that’s what debate is all about, and I’d consider you an honest friend if you thought the same of mine.
I apologised and withdrew the ‘sophistry’ charge.
I think Holocaust denial is a very interesting point in this thread – I’m not comparing you yet, but I’d like to explore why you so easily step off the fence on the side of Holocaust-Actually-Happened-ism but have such trouble with other –isms.
I apologise for any negative connotations of “smell” – that was absolutely not my intention, and I’ll use “I’m, perhaps mistakenly, detecting a tendency towards …” or some such phrase instead if you like.)
But you seem to flatly reject everything – I’m trying to gauge whether you reject solipsism more than panpsychism, theism, physicalism or whatever. Physicalism is merely the position I reject least, too!
I apologise yet again but, please, let us not be overly sensitive – apart from my characterisation of your anaesthete argument as stupid (and it’s getting less stupid the more we discuss it – result!), I can assure you that all of the remarks you consider snide were made completely innocently.
So let me explain why the anaesthetic thing came up in the first place, and why it’s an important part of this thread (despite being slightly peripheral to the main “bullet point” issues for each of us). I think we can still make progress despite the IMO unnecessarily confusing terminology you insist upon, but I’ll just have one more shot at clarifying it for our audience. “A large dose of the simple physical molecule desflurane doesn’t result in a lack of awareness, it just changes what you’re aware of”, right? That’s still the datum I’m saying is fundamentally important which we’ll debate in a moment, but let’s just explore your personal language a little more.
Hypothetically, if the desflurane changed what I was aware of to nothing, ie. I was aware of nothing, then that makes me not aware, period, agreed? It will have caused a lack of awareness, yes? There is no difference between not being aware of anything and not being aware.
So what are you aware of under a large dose of desflurane? You’ve said you were only aware of blurriness and loved ones. If you can’t tell me anything you were aware of between the two, how is that different to being aware of nothing between the two?
You might say that there was a something you were aware of, but you couldn’t tell me at the time and you didn’t remember later. But you are then asserting awareness with absolutely no evidence for it whatsoever, behavior-based or not, not even your own personal, subjective testimony! It would be the equivalent of me saying “there are no faeries in my garden” and you saying “oh yes there are, and the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate they’re not”.
If you want me to help you understand why physicalism is so overwhelmingly dominant, here we have a crucial point at which you are in the underwhelming minority. I’m not suggesting the argument ad populum that you’re therefore wrong, but I think you should understand why all your physicalist friends don’t ascribe to the, let’s say, eccentric position on the limb you’re choosing here: because awareness under anaesthetic is an unnecessary entity given the evidence for it. (And note that positing awareness despite no behaviour which suggests anything like it strongly suggests panpsychism, but I digress).
Nevertheless, I think the two premises you posited in that post:[ul][li]You are always aware.[/li][li]There are no levels of awareness – it’s as binary as pregnancy.[/ul]… do have interesting logical consequences which might allow some progress. Neither I nor any physicalist I know would ascribe to them, but we can explore what kind of alternative “-isms” they do suggest.[/li]
Let’s, for your argument’s sake, say that under desflurane you’ re aware of less. You were aware of the lights and objects in the room (visual), the pain which the operation aimed to remedy along with your muscle positions etc. (tactile/motor sensory), and your “thoughts” (let’s call it cortical function – the combination of you memories and the like), but under desflurane you are no longer. That is still a crucially important explicandum here. It’s just a bunch of atoms! Fluorine, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen – the stuff in your toothpaste! And yet, the arrangement in your toothpaste doesn’t make clocks jump hours and loved ones tell strange stories with accompanying videos. These simple physical molecules, these specific alternative arrangements of toothpastey stuff, affect what we’re aware of! They cause a difference in it!
Do you not see the importance of this fact? It means that this “awareness”, whatever it is, must as the very least have some physical component, otherwise how could a simple molecule have such bizarre consequences? Even if your premises are correct, and you are no less aware – the “subject” of your awareness is merely your heartbeat, breathing and maybe the odd sound in the operating theatre – that a simple physical molecule even has such an effect is a devastating blow against the idea that awareness has nothing to do with the physical.
But let’s go on from there. The absolutely minimal neural activity under desflurane is confined to the ancient R-complex at the centre of the brain. It’s effectively the only neuroanatomical element we share with the dinosaurs and reptiles. You see the conclusion here? If “You under anaesthetic” are as aware as you sitting there awake, despite clearly different behaviour (or lack of), there is no reason to consider, say, crocodiles to lack the same awareness as you.
But the crucial line of reasoning I alluded to earlier concerns the absence of your awareness before your conception. What was it about those specific years called “other-wise’s infancy” which brought about a transition from non-awareness to awareness? Surely, it was the development of the physical organ, your brain and nervous system. Just as the atoms in desflurane can form toothpaste, which has no strange effects like making clocks seem to jump, so the atoms of your brain which were disparately spread all over the world such that they engendered no “awareness” (ie. you weren’t aware of anything when you were disparate atoms – or do you find this statement objectionable?) gradually formed an arrangement in space and time such that awareness emerged.
But back to the anaesthetised hour. Because you are positing “awareness” in that hour despite no memory thereof, heterophenomenological (HP, or third-person-observed) responses or evidence of any other kind, that is the beginning of a step away from science, you see? You say that you flatly reject solipsism, but you cannot be sure that, say, I have this awareness thing as well as you. You can only believe so, state your positive opinion of such, based solely on my behaviour and responses. HP is all cognitive science can deal with and still be called “science”. If this is the point which makes you say you don’t understand why physicalism is overwhelmingly dominant, well, maybe you never will. But I’ll still try my very best: my outputs have plenty more permutations yet!
If someone feels that explanatory gaps are small and provisional premises few when it comes to a satisfactory accounting of conscious awareness, I have no objection to them selecting and stating their preferred option (and never have). Since I, however, feel that the explanatory gaps are very large and the provisional premises numerous, there is, for me, no clear preference among the options: I prefer to wait until more information is forthcoming.
You said that physicalism has no explanation for conscious awareness, and I agreed. Now you’re saying that physicalism can only offer a mode of explanation, and that it, like everything else, has explanatory gaps. I agree with that too, but, what of it? I can get a mode of explanation (with explanatory gaps) from the Raelians, fer crissakes.
Well, since you’ve set me up to beat my wife, I’ll decline further comment on your statement.
To reiterate: Yes, of course I believe that I appeared to them to be unresponsive and unaware. My ability or inability to tell them what I was aware of is irrelevant. (more on this below)
That depends, of course, on the conversation. When I’m talking to my inexperienced, computer-abhorring friend about how websites “work”, the demand for accuracy and detail will be much less stringent than when I’m talking to a website developer.
Hmmm. I’ll take this up below.
I cannot offer a more precise description than blurry, smeary, vague, disjointed, etc. The possibility that awareness under anesthesia may be somewhat or wholly ineffable doesn’t bother me in the slightest; ineffability of the contents of awareness is hardly confined to anesthesia.
Awareness and response are not inextricably linked. This is not even a point of contention.
The conversation with the website developer I alluded to earlier.
Comparable relevance? Comparable to what?
HOW? You’ve only told me that awareness emerges from non-awareness via the processing of sensory input in working memory, not how it supposedly occurs.
No, I’m not willing to use “life” as a template in place of “awareness”. I’m not convinced it’s an appropriate substitution, and I don’t see the need for a template; the scenario is simple and straightforward: if awareness emerges from non-awareness, there must be some way to physically distinguish between that which is aware, and that which is not. Awareness must leave some physical trace of its presence, and there must be a way to identify the cause of that trace as awareness. Hence my questions:
What is the physical effect of awareness? How are other potential physical causes of that effect eliminated?
I understand that you find my terminology unnecessarily confusing, but you must understand that the feeling is mutual. The last paragraph above is not only unnecessarily confusing, but wholly unnecessary.
If I said to you “I ate nothing”, it doesn’t mean I sat down with a plate of nothing, sliced off a chunk of nothing, put nothing in my mouth and chewed on nothing. It means I did not eat.
The way you worded that last paragraph, I have to make sure that when you say the desflurane hypothetically “caused a lack of awareness”, you do not mean it caused an impoverishment of awareness, but an utter cessation of awareness; no awareness, none, zippo, nada.
Saying “the desflurane changed what I was aware of to nothing, ie. I was aware of nothing”, is tantamount to saying “I was aware of something, but the deflurane changed what I was aware of to nothing, i.e., I was still aware, but what I was aware of was “nothing”.
I’ll pick one more nit just to make sure we’re in agreement: when you say “There is no difference between not being aware of anything and not being aware”, you mean anything at all, whatsoever, right? (i.e., if what I was aware of happened to be ineffable, undifferentiated, or unidentifiable, I’m nonetheless still aware, right? )
Between the two? There is no between the two; that implies a gap in my awareness, and as I’ve been arguing, that has not been my experience, nor is it logically possible.
On what basis are you discounting my “own personal, subjective testimony” of blurriness sharpening into loved ones as evidence? If I was aware of more than that during the operation, and forgot it by the time I reported my experience to you, so what? If you asked me what color tie Jack Nicholson was wearing in the movie I just saw, and I couldn’t remember, you couldn’t conclude that I must not have been aware during the movie.
That’s interesting and ironic, because the way you’ve been describing it, conscious awareness under physicalism seems in many ways similar to panpsychism.
[quote]
Nevertheless, I think the two premises you posited in that post:[ul][li]You are always aware.[/li][li]There are no levels of awareness – it’s as binary as pregnancy.[/ul][/li][/quote]
For the sake of clarity, I should jump in here and point out that it’s binary only to a third-person observer who is judging for themselves whether or not I am aware.
While they have absolutely no direct access to my awareness, I do, and in my experience, awareness is not binary; I’m just aware and that’s it… I have no access to or knowledge of a state of non-awareness. It’s as if we were arguing about my current location and you said “Well, the choice is binary; either you’re south of the north pole, or you’re north of the north pole”, and I’m thinking “Huh? There is no ‘north of the north pole’”.
Well, I can’t mount a defense for something I’ve never said. I’ve never once claimed, stated, or argued for the idea that awareness has nothing to do with the physical. That would be like saying the Mona Lisa had nothing to do with paint.
First of all, I’ll need a cite for “The absolutely minimal neural activity under desflurane is confined to the ancient R-complex at the centre of the brain”… that statement doesn’t sound right at all, at least not the way it’s worded.
I’m having a hard time even making sense of this one. You compare the “R-complex” within a human brain with the brain of crocodile as if they were interchangeable. That alone is enough to sink your argument.
You go on to conclude that an unanesthetised crocodile has the same awareness as me, despite the fact that you’ve specified that the measures of awareness you’re utilizing are behavioral. If you think an anesthetised other-wise and an unanesthetised crocodile have the same awareness, then go ahead and try to operate on an unanesthetised crocodile and see if it exhibits the same behaviors.
I’m incredibly hesitant to start into a discussion which attempts to delineate the nature of time, the nature of awareness, and the implications of one for the other. I suspect we would die long before the thread does, and would have little progress to show for our efforts.
However, you conclude by stating that my disparate atoms gradually formed an arrangement in space and time such that awareness emerged. We can definitely start that conversation:
How does awareness emerging from non-awareness occur?
In fact, since we’re attempting to cover so many issues and our posts are getting loooonger and loooonger, I’m strongly in favor of picking out one point of clear disagreement and concentrate on that. The question of if and how awareness emerges seems ideal because it’s at the heart of PM and the physicalist approach to PM.
Well, that’s a mischaracterization of my position, which I hope has now been clarified.
Just help me out here: you’ve said you “flatly reject solipsism”. Am I to take it that, however unreasonable physicalism or panpsychism are to you, that solipsism is more unreasonable? I’m just trying to rank your preferences, since I would describe myself as a physicalist only because it’s the one I * reject least*.
Of course: yet again, we are both well-read enough to know what the options are. I’m merely asking you is whether you personally find that mode of explanation as reasonable as those of cognitive science.
It being a statement of my position, not yours, so I don’t see how I’m setting you up for anything.
But even with the website developer, you’ll be using all kinds of inaccuracies throughout. It’s not really a “wall of fire”, it’s a series of reflective regions on a spinning disc which yadda yadda yadda … until the light emitted by your monitor attains an arrangement you call, for some reason, “satisfactory”. My point is that language is “shortcuts”, and I entirely agree that the “accuracy threshold” depends on the conversation. I merely think that this conversation needs some leniency if we’re to make progress.
Blurry, smeary, vague, disjointed what, might I ask? Sights, sounds, pain? Remember, we’re talking about in that hour, not merely the first and last minute when you were leaving or entering wakefulness.
Well, I can think of ways to contend, actually, but they won’t add to progress so I won’t for the sake of this argument.
Comparable to the obvious relevance of the fact that he’s just had a physical chunk of his brain messed about. But since you’re not suggesting that awareness has nothing to do with the physical, I needn’t pursue this.
This is the entire purpose of this thread: to convince you that it is reasonable to believe that the processing of sensory input in working memory is ultimately what this thing we call awareness is, and that human awareness is the sum of its (poorly understood) processing parts. Not to convince you to believe it – I don’t give to hoots, just as I don’t with Lib – just to convince you that considering physicalism to be the least unreasonable position of the various options isn’t …well… whatever you currently think it is. Again, I said at the start that I would sometimes only be able to argue by analogy. So I can only say that I think the 19th Century vitalist being told the mechanism for molecule replication and asking “Yes, but how is that life??” is a very close analogy here.
What if the trace it left of its presence was neural activity?
Why? Again (analogy only), is the behaviour of cells and molecules identifiable as “life”? No – “life” is just what we call it. (Who knows?, perhaps inaccurately.)
Right. I’d like to explore the difference between being aware of “something ineffable” and being aware of “nothing” (ie. not being aware at all, ie. having no awareness). If you were aware of “nothing”, that would be pretty ineffable and impossible to describe, wouldn’t it?
I’m finding this a little confusing – please, I’m doing my best not to misrepresent you here so I explicitly invite correction. You’ve said that what you were aware of in that hour was “Blurry, smeary, vague, disjointed”, so the timeline goes: Loved ones saying “goodbye” - Blurry, smeary, vague, disjointed – loved ones saying “hello” (*ie.] “Blurry, smeary, vague, disjointed” being between the two). Here you’re saying there is nothing between the two. “Blurry, smeary, vague, disjointed” != “nothing”, right? So is there a between the two, or not?
How would you later know if you were? And if you don’t, what is the necessity of positing awareness then?
But if you were blind I’d be pretty sure you were never aware of Jack’s tie colour, agreed?
I suppose it is in some ways: physicalists just draw a threshold of what counts as “awareness” and what doesn’t (just as for “life”), while panpsychists don’t (just as vitalists don’t for “life”). In fact, panpsychism can reasonably be called dualistic physicalism (as, indeed, I said here.
I’d suggest that hypothetical non-aware entities wouldn’t by definition have “experience” or “knowledge”, either – even the word “you” is pretty much synonymous. I’m trying to steer away from what I see as a tautology there.
Hmm, I’d suggest the analogy is more “Either you existed in 1944 or you didn’t”, but I’ll com to that in a moment.
Great, thanks for clearing that up – I beg your indulgence in just helping me straighten out things that might seem obvious (since you often do object to what what I think is obvious). Now, the question is what else has awareness “to do with” other than the physical. The Mona Lisa is an arrangement of paint, agreed? There is nothing non-physical about the Mona Lisa, agreed?
OK, largely confined so (ie. it’s by far the most active part). But I can’t deny the non-zero energy of the rest of the brain so, OK, let’s scratch this completely.
OK, consider it sunk – my point was that human R-complexes aren’t identical either, only similar.
No, I didn’t, I said that there was no reason to consider it lacked the same awareness as you, but like I say I don’t think this will be very productive so I withdraw it.
Please, I beg your indulgence – I think it’s the most promising avenue of all!
Do you agree with me that it did? Or do you consider the alternative, that you were aware in 1944, just as reasonable?
Like the emergence of life from non-life … I don’t know. I know only that it did. Explaining them both in physical terms is the Challenge of the Millennium.
Sorry, that sounds like a false dichotomy. I’m just seeking to ascertain your position on whether you were or were not “aware” in 1944. Surely you agree that you weren’t (because there was no “you”!), don’t you?
We can then explore what more than the development of your physical anatomy is correlated with the transition from an absence of awareness to a presence in that time period.
Absent any reply for 12 days, friend, I assume you’re either inordinately busy or have rather lost the motivation to continue. Either way, I’m happy to accommodate another table-sweep to get back to your bullet points or whatever it is which you consider so unreasonable about physicalism that you simply cannot understand its domination of today’s intellectual culture.
However, I think the status of awareness or not-awareness in, say, 1944 (or 6 Bn years ago, for that matter) is a crucial datum to be accommodated in one’s position. If awareness was absent then, it must have emerged over time. (Similarly, if life was absent in 6 Bn BC it must have emerged over time too, although I cannot confidently tell you precisely how.) To thus consider emergentism as marginally less unreasonable than its alternatives is an important step to take since it excludes certain positions. Nevertheless, if you don’t find this particularly interesting we can drop it.
