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[Interesting Ian]

Originally Posted by Venom

There is an overwhelming amount of studies in neuropsychology proving that brain is creating the consciousness.

Are you sure you mean actually proving it rather than merely making it the more reasonable hypothesis?? If so I would be extremely interested in reading the details of these studies. Thanks.

[Phronk]

Originally Posted by Interesting Ian

Are you sure you mean actually proving it rather than merely making it the more reasonable hypothesis?? If so I would be extremely interested in reading the details of these studies. Thanks.

Me too. Through my 7 years of studying psychology, I haven't come across much. Some that could be interpreted that way, maybe, but I haven't seen this overwhelming number of studies Venom speaks about.

Most neuroscience is correlational research. It doesn't "prove" that the brain creates consciousness any more than it proves that the consciousness creates the brain. Experimental work often does go in the opposite direction; something about consciousness or behaviour is manipulated and its effect on the brain is measured. Actually manipulating the brain to demonstrate the causal direction Venom implies is rare (though becoming more common with things like TMS).

For the record, it's my personal belief that yes, the brain is consciousness and consciousness is the brain (and parts of the body, too, obviously). Even if not, that doesn't mean consciousness is some "immaterial" thing (whatever that even means). But it would be intellectually dishonest of me, as a scientist, to say that there is overwhelming evidence for this hypothesis yet. It's still partly mysterious - one of the big mysteries remaining about our existence - and mysteries are what makes science so exciting to the people who recognize them for what they are.

[mszlazak]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Well why bother posting here? Seriously, there are lots of wacky places on the internet where I don't post, and presumably you don't either - so obviously you must think this place is a little different.

Because I get to engage with clever folk like you of course! But seriously, if psi can withstand rigorous scrutiny then I want to know about and if it cannot then I want others to know about it.

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Venom,

I am glad you agree that the "hard problems" are still unsolved. I like to think about these problems with the aid of a little gedanken experiment:

Suppose you could scan a brain at some instant in time and transfer its state into a gigantic computer. This is obviously not practical - particularly if you need detail at the quantum wave function level, but in the spirit of gedanken experiments you have to decide if the scan is possible in principle, and if not, why not.

OK, imagine now that the computer can simulate the time evolution of the brain, and has a file of relevant input to absorb as the simulation proceeds.

Q1 - Is the computer simulation conscious or not? If you decide not, then specify what has been lost by this process!

Q2 - If you think the computer simulation is fully conscious, then what happens if we re-run the program - say to debug it - does the program re-live the same experience each time you re-start it!

Q3 - If you are being super-materialist and have answered "Yes" so far, consider this. A computer program together with its data is really analogous to a mathematical theorem - the output is a foregone conclusion every time it is run on a suitable computer (with any random number generators re-set of course). The actual physical computer is only necessary to exhibit the theorem - but theorems are true throughout space and time! So where is the conscious experience actually located?

Now we inject some possible realism. The computer program can obviously be enormously simplified without damaging the essence of the 'mental computation'. Hormones don't presumably need to be recorded molecule by molecule - maybe a real number representing an overall concentration will do, etc. In other words, the computer simulation might not even be gedanken (except, perhaps for the original scanning process).

Bizarrely, the above argument seems utterly unaffected by considerations of 40 Hz oscillations, ideas of emergence, attempts to question the idea of a stream of consciousness (all we need is consciousness as we all experience - however flawed), or any conceivable new discovery in neuroscience!

Working through that series of ideas always leaves me with a profound feeling that there is something deeply incomplete about the modern scientific view of the process. No amount of tinkering with the details of neurophysiology seems able to address that hole. Somewhere science has made an assumption that seemed obvious, but is actually false.

To me, the fact that consciousness seems so hard to reconcile with the supposed physical reality, leaves me far more open to ideas like the various ψ-like phenomena, particularly since these ideas are really being rejected because they don't fit in with conventional science - not because the evidence is so weak - I suspect you would probably agree with that.

David

You don't have to answer yes to Q1 and Q2 to be a materialist. Only if you are a functionalist would you answer yes to both of these. But many materialists have turned away from functionalism, and towards an outright identification of mental states with physiological states.

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[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by mszlazak

But seriously, if psi can withstand rigorous scrutiny then I want to know about and if it cannot then I want others to know about it.

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My strong sense is that it is not the quality of the experiments that damns ψ, but the fact that most people think it is impossible to incorporate it into science.

If you answer no to Q1 or Q2, you really need to specify what it is about the physiological state that distinguishes it from an equivalent electronic state in the computer. I think this is where (non-functionalist) physicalists get fuzzy and vague. They are struggling with the fact that they don't have any way - even in principle - to take a physical system and determine if it is conscious - so they are more or less saying that the physiological brain tissue has some intangible extra X.....! It almost sounds as if they are re-inventing the soul!

And how to functionalists deal with my point Q3?

To me, Q3 (which I have not seen expressed elsewhere, but it is probably implicitly contained in Shadows of the Mind) is the real killer. Computers don't really do anything, except act as a crutch to help us see relationships between program+data+output which are already there. Moreover, since to a physicalist, the brain is simply acting as a data processor, this observation would also apply to the brain itself!

These considerations drive me towards a reality which is part physical and part mental. That is a very radical step, but once you take it, ψ cease to seem implausible (and it opens up a huge can of worms of other possibilities). Instead of thinking of ψ as a series of random, absurd anomalies with no real relationship to normal science, it may make sense to think of it as an experimental probe of the physical/mental interface that the above argument seems to indicate must exist.

David

[mszlazak]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

If you answer no to Q1 or Q2, you really need to specify what it is about the physiological state that distinguishes it from an equivalent electronic state in the computer. I think this is where (non-functionalist) physicalists get fuzzy and vague. They are struggling with the fact that they don't have any way - even in principle - to take a physical system and determine if it is conscious - so they are more or less saying that the physiological brain tissue has some intangible extra X.....! It almost sounds as if they are re-inventing the soul!

And how to functionalists deal with my point Q3?

To me, Q3 (which I have not seen expressed elsewhere, but it is probably implicitly contained in Shadows of the Mind) is the real killer. Computers don't really do anything, except act as a crutch to help us see relationships between program+data+output which are already there. Moreover, since to a physicalist, the brain is simply acting as a data processor, this observation would also apply to the brain itself!

David you are mixing up non-functionalist materialism with functionalist materialism.

Functionalist materialists want to equate conscious experience with structural properties, rather than with strictly physical or physiological properties. In other words, they equate the mind with software, rather than hardware or "wetware." Many materialists find this equation implausible because it seems odd that your material construction should be irrelevant to how you feel. Furthermore, there is a more basic reason for not wanting to follow functionalists in equating conscious states with structural ones. The unique selling point of materialism was that it promised to restore causal power to conscious states. By identifying conscious properties with brain properties, materialists hoped to cure the impotence associated with epiphenomenalism. But will this be achieved if we identify conscious properties with structural properties, rather than the more down-to-earth physiological states which realize those structures in different organisms? After all, it is presumably the passage of specific human neurotransmitters across synapses which causes my arm muscles to contract. Not some abstract structural property which I may share with say octopuses. Functionalists identify human pain with some structural property which we share with octopuses. This structural property must be distinct from any specific physiological property, since humans and octopuses have different physiologies. Yet it is the physiological properties, different in humans and octopuses, which cause our respective limbs to move. So the more abstract structural property cannot be doing any causing itself. Functionalists thus seem to end up on the same side as epiphenomenalism, viewing the pain itself as a puff of smoke, emitted by the train of real causation, but inefficacious in itself.

Thus many materialist philosophers of mind have turned away from functionalism, and towards an outright identification of pains and other mental states with physiological states. Mental states are hardware or "wetware", not software. However, there is a cost to this reaction against functionalism. Materialists now seem committed to a kind of chauvinism, for they hold that beings with different physiologies cannot share our feelings. Still, perhaps materialists can live with this. They don't have to deny that octopuses have unpleasant feelings of any kind. It is only that they now distinguish them from human pains. Put like this, it doesn't seem so crazy. It seems all right to distinguish human pains from octopus pains, if this is the price of restoring their causal powers.

Originally Posted by David Bailey

These considerations drive me towards a reality which is part physical and part mental.
David

Materialists, of any stripe, still need to face up to dualist arguments developed by Saul Kripke and Frank Jackson. Kripke's zombies share both structural and physiological properties of their minded originals, yet lack their conscious properties. Similarly, Jackson's neuroscientist Mary knows all of the structural and physiological properties involved with human color vision. Yet she didn't know about the conscious experience itself until she left her shadowy colorless house and for the first time experienced color, like redness. (You'll have to look these two up for more details).

Materialists have an answer. They can say that Kripke and Jackson only establish a difference at the level of concepts, not a difference at the level of the properties themselves. Materialists will allow that we have two different ways of thinking about mental properties: we can think of them as conscious, and we can think of them as material. But materialists will deny that there are actually two properties here, as opposed to one property thought about in two ways. So materialists will urge that Kripke's and Jackson's arguments seem possible but they are not.

This materialist line does not persuade everybody. Colin McGinn thinks it beggars belief that our vibrant awareness of bright colors could simply be the same thing as neurons firing off in our gelatinous brains. McGinn accepts that a distinct realm of non-material conscious states would lack any causal power over matter, so there is no question of detecting it via its effects, and thus that Dualism cannot avoid the absurdities of epiphenomenalism. Nor does the dualist seem to have any other way of telling when it is around. Dualism thus promises to leave us eternally in the dark about the conscious life of non-human creatures. While McGinn appreciates the reasons for wanting to identify mind and brain, he argues that we lack any conception of how they could be identical. Given this dilemma, he concludes that the problem of consciousness lies beyond human comprehension. Materialists will object that mysterians like McGinn have given up to quickly, their mysterian case rests on nothing more than their blank incredulity at the idea that "soggy grey matter" might constitute "technicolor phenomenology". Furthermore, materialists can offer an explanation of why the mind-brain eqaution seems so counter-intuitive, even if it is true! According to materialism, color experience is identical to activity in the visual cortex. But we can think of it either as cortical activity or by re-enacting the experience. So when we think of it the former way, we feel that we are somehow leaving out the experience itself, since we aren't re-enacting it. This doesn't mean that the cortical thought isn't about the same thing as the imaginative thought. We shouldn't allow ourselves to be distracted from this sensible conclusion by the particular fact that we have a special way of thinking about conscious experiences -- namely, by re-enacting them.


This ends some of the more abstract arguments from materialism. What is still needed is a theory of consciousness.

---------------------------------

[David Bailey]

Mszlazak,

Wow - I have to bow to your superior knowledge of the philosophy of consciousness - but in a way all those philosophical nuances are there because conventional science has really found itself stumped - we don't need a philosophy of electromagnetism!

BTW, I am reading Paul Churchland's book "Matter and Consciousness".

A non-functionalist would answer "No" to my Q1, but that isn't really reasonable unless he can specify what aspects of the physiological brain are needed for true consciousness, and why. There is a real danger here that obscure philosophy can gloss over really stupid intellectual positions, of the form, "It can't be conscious unless it is wet and made of neurons - no reason, it just can't!".

I think my point is that when the sceptics here write in a dismissive way of ψ phenomena and researchers, they would do well to remember the muddle at the heart of the conventional theories.

Paul Churchland seems dismissive of dualists, but when you see the intellectual knots that people get into otherwise, some form of dualism (or even a world composed only of mental stuff, in which physical matter is a mental construction) seems to make more sense. Taking the idea of mind-stuff seriously is a big step, but is it so stupid?

Research like that of Ruper Sheldrake's is obviously difficult to make totally rigorous - rather like astrophysics. One experiment can always be explained away in some other ad hoc way - maybe novae that exploded long ago are dimmer than expected because there was more dust about then (say) - easier to believe than "dark energy". However, astrophysicists are used to the idea that multiple experiments, each of which is potentially flawed, can collectively tell us something real. This is where I feel that sceptics are getting it wrong. They don't want to take a mass of research and look for a coherent message in it all - they just want to dismiss it experiment by experiment, totally forgetting that this research may be the real solution to the philosophical muddle that we have just discussed!

David

[mszlazak]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Mszlazak,

... conventional science has really found itself stumped ...

A non-functionalist would answer "No" to my Q1, but that isn't really reasonable unless he can specify what aspects of the physiological brain are needed for true consciousness, and why.

Whether you're coming from a materialist, dualist or mysterian point of view, everybody admits that they have not worked out a theory of consciousness. In fact, the notion of "consciousness" maybe the problem. So the search is on for a theory. In any case, whatever the philosophical position, such a theory would tell us what is required for consciousness. It would distinguish those brain activities which yield consciousness from those which do not. With luck, such a theory ought to be able to tell us which animals are conscious.

Originally Posted by David Bailey

There is a real danger here that obscure philosophy can gloss over really stupid intellectual positions, of the form, "It can't be conscious unless it is wet and made of neurons - no reason, it just can't!".

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Paul Churchland seems dismissive of dualists, but when you see the intellectual knots that people get into otherwise, some form of dualism (or even a world composed only of mental stuff, in which physical matter is a mental construction) seems to make more sense. Taking the idea of mind-stuff seriously is a big step, but is it so stupid?

My previous post on these three positions makes it fairly clear that materialism gives the best chance of a theory of consciousness. Mysterianism, by definition can't provide a theory at all and dualism finds itself in a very similar predicament, leaving us in the dark. Dualism, from the get go, can't give a theory of interaction, it can't tell whether other non-humans are conscious and it's stuck with all the absurdities of epiphenomenalism.

So, I agree with Churchland, dualism is stupid

Originally Posted by David Bailey

I think my point is that when the sceptics here write in a dismissive way of ψ phenomena and researchers, they would do well to remember the muddle at the heart of the conventional theories.

Skeptics are not being dismissive of psi, they just don't see any convincing evidence for its existence and they don't see parapsychologists providing any good theories of psi. So there nothing to provide the consciousness researcher except one mystery being substituted by another mystery that we have no convincing evidence of.

Originally Posted by David Bailey

Research like that of Ruper Sheldrake's is obviously difficult to make totally rigorous - rather like astrophysics. One experiment can always be explained away in some other ad hoc way - maybe novae that exploded long ago are dimmer than expected because there was more dust about then (say) - easier to believe than "dark energy". However, astrophysicists are used to the idea that multiple experiments, each of which is potentially flawed, can collectively tell us something real. This is where I feel that sceptics are getting it wrong. They don't want to take a mass of research and look for a coherent message in it all - they just want to dismiss it experiment by experiment, totally forgetting that this research may be the real solution to the philosophical muddle that we have just discussed!

David

This is mostly non-sense.

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[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by mszlazak

This is mostly non-sense.
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LOL - go on, try re-reading it, and see if you can see the sense in it!

David

[mszlazak]

Originally Posted by David Bailey

This is where I feel that sceptics are getting it wrong. They don't want to take a mass of research and look for a coherent message in it all - they just want to dismiss it experiment by experiment, totally forgetting that this research may be the real solution to the philosophical muddle that we have just discussed!
David

I'll be more specific. There is no analogy between the errors of various astronomy or astrophysics experiments and experimental errors in parapsychology. If Sheldrake says there is and given his credentials then I think he is lying. So what Sheldrake has misled you to conclude above is not true and that is why I called it non-sense.

Now do you have anything else to say about consciousness and materialism?

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[David Bailey]

Let's be clear - I am making the analogy between some of Sheldrake's experiments and experiments in astrophysics.

In both cases, it is nearly impossible to devise an experiment that is totally free from criticism. Discussions here have shown how hard it is for even skeptics to devise a way to do some of these experiments in a way that is above criticism. That does not usually mean the signal is not there - just that someone can come up with a hypothesis (usually untested) that just might achieve the results some other way.

I am talking about systematic errors - not statistical errors. For example, the presentiment experiments just might suffer from a systematic error associated with the anticipation effect. Radin claims he has evidence that any such effect would be vanishingly small in his case - so some doubt remains. However, these problems are in the nature of the subject - you can't get subjects to stay alert for hour after hour in such experiments - so the number of presentations is not as great as you would like.

For me there is a strong analogy with other areas of science where one single type of experiment can't be conclusive because the experiment can't be totally controlled - the experimenter could not place the novae at convenient places before they exploded - or make sure some other feature of the early universe did not change their brightness.

When several pieces of evidence pointed in the same direction, the concept of an accelerating expansion was more or less accepted. My point is that intense skepticism of the type applied to ψ experiments would have prevented that process happening - a potential flaw would have been found in each kind of experiment and the whole lot would have been dismissed. Astronomers would be going round saying "There is no evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating!".

David