Challenge to debunkers: Can you prove hallucinations are generated inside brain :-)

[Interesting Ian]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Okay, but I can affect your thinking about something by poking your brain,

Or by poking the remote robot's brain.

so it appears to have a location. How can I affect something by poking it with a physical object if it is no-where?

Why shouldn't you be able to? This just seems to be your claim that the physical should not be able to interact with the non-physical. In which case why do you think this? Is it derived from your experience of the world? Or is it an a priori presumption you hold? If the latter how do you justify this?

Then why doesn't it make sense to ask how we read someone else's mind?

~~ Paul

For more or less the same reason why it doesn't make sense to ask how the Universe is able to exist from one second to the next.

[mszlazak]

Originally Posted by Tor

The fact that my consciousness is real, not some illusion, is beyond logic. But what it does is not.

I believe consciousness is a real phenomena but not intrinsically or fundamentally real.

The statement that consciousness is beyond logic is not clear. People logically think about consciousness all the time and consciousness is not just logical thinking, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Originally Posted by Tor

If consciousness is encountered at the quantum level, then surly it is relevant to ask a quantum physicist. But I'd rather that all fields work together to broaden our understanding. And as I said before, the other fields need to update their view of what physics is today, not just ignore QT as insignificant.

As an example of interdisciplinary biology work that actually does take quantum physics seriously, check out this abstract from Nature about quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems. This isn't about consciousness, but it shows that the usual objections against those that think QM effects in biology are important are misguided.

A big "if" and while we wait for something, anything, meaningful from quantum physicists on consciousness, in the meantime, and for over the last century, consciousness was being encountered in psychology, psychiatry, neurology, cognitive and computer science, and dealt with, heterophenomenologically, with great success. I won't hold my breath for the former but will put my money on the latter.

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[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Interesting Ian

Why shouldn't you be able to? This just seems to be your claim that the physical should not be able to interact with the non-physical. In which case why do you think this? Is it derived from your experience of the world? Or is it an a priori presumption you hold? If the latter how do you justify this?

You said:

Those experiences which have an external origin can be said to be have a location (appropriately defined). These will include physical objects, but also pains. Those experiences internally generated eg thinking about something, cannot be said to have any location in any meaning of the word.

So you are saying that thinking is an internally generated experience that is no-where. How can I affect your thinking by poking your brain, which is some-where? What sort of connection is there between something that is some-where and something that is no-where? Is there is kinda-somewhere-but-not-really place where they meet? Can I walk from the some-where thing along that path to the no-where thing?

My question about the physical interacting with the mental has to do with dualism. If you can convince me that there is only one fundamental existent, the mental, then I won't ask how its various aspects can interact. However, your statements above sound like dualism to me.

For more or less the same reason why it doesn't make sense to ask how the Universe is able to exist from one second to the next.

Color me baffled.

~~ Paul

[Tor]

Originally Posted by mszlazak

The statement that consciousness is beyond logic is not clear. People logically think about consciousness all the time and consciousness is not just logical thinking, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

Another way to express what I mean by consciousness being beyond logic is that it is something fundamental, not reducible. That which everything else I know is built on. All I know may be fake, everything around me may be illusions. Every sense impressions I get may be a trick. But my consciousness is real. It is the one thing I can not doubt. It just is.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Tor

Another way to express what I mean by consciousness being beyond logic is that it is something fundamental, not reducible. That which everything else I know is built on. All I know may be fake, everything around me may be illusions. Every sense impressions I get may be a trick. But my consciousness is real. It is the one thing I can not doubt. It just is.

But that does not mean that it is irreducible. Perhaps your consciousness is being generated in your head by aliens.

Also, what do you mean that your sense impressions may be a trick, but your consciousness is real? If that is true, I can enumerate every single aspect of what you call consciousness and state that it is a trick. Your sense impressions, your qualia, your emotions, etc., etc.: they are all tricks.

~~ Paul

[mszlazak]

Originally Posted by Tor

Another way to express what I mean by consciousness being beyond logic is that it is something fundamental, not reducible. That which everything else I know is built on. All I know may be fake, everything around me may be illusions. Every sense impressions I get may be a trick. But my consciousness is real. It is the one thing I can not doubt. It just is.

I don't doubt your consciousness experiences are real but anyone, even you, can doubt that consciousness is fundamental. That's why there are so many positions on the issue and you can understand those positions.

Anyway, sounds like you're waxing idealist, in which case the position is unfalsifiable and pratically pretty much useless.

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[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

I don't think telepathy is the same thing as a metamind [external non physical mind] . It's existence certainly doesn't imply that my consciousness is seated somewhere other than my brain.

~~ Paul

Actually it does Paul, psi is almost certainly being produced by an external mind, due to natural selection. .

When someone accepts the evidence for weak psi, it is true one can argue psi is a brain function but only *until* they witness stronger psi (no matter how rare or erratic) - then psi cannot be viewed as a brain function anymore because if psi was a brain function it would have evolved to be commonly strong but it hasn't. The fact psi hasn't evolved to be commonly strong means psi is being filtered out. The brain evolved to filter out psi , that is why it is commonly found weak (i.e. a borderline effect in parapsychology trials and why it is also very rarely and erratically strong (sporadic breakthroughs in brain filtering).

[Open Mind]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

As usual, each step of consciousness that evolved had survival value, until we reached the current state of affairs.

Maybe so, but I don't think you can name the many theoretically physical steps leading to mental like consciousness coming to exist, as it does in humans, with each supposedly only a survival advantage to a physical reality. Paul, you cannot rule out we are evolving invisibly too and that some invisible senses beyond our purely physical senses are also having evolutionary benefits from interacting with matter. For example by the brain filtering past memory of ourselves (and others) and by filtering telepathy, is rather like the birth of a new individualized identity and our consciousness/minds could be splitting like cells do too

Libertarian free will is a different topic. Libertarian free will is an incoherent concept. Feel free to start a thread on it.

My brain may make some decisions nonconsciously, but once they are made I know about them. Then I can ponder them and, with my feeling of will, decide that I should do something different next time, or reinforce the current action, or leave town. There is a giant feedback loop.

What about ..... '...My consciousness makes some decisions, but once they are in my external memory, I know them . Then I can ponder them and, with my feeling of will, decide that I should do something different next time or reinforce the current action or leave town. There is a giant feedback loop between consciousness and memory via a brain filter...'

Hehe

[Tor]

Originally Posted by mszlazak

I don't doubt your consciousness experiences are real but anyone, even you, can doubt that consciousness is fundamental. That's why there are so many positions on the issue and you can understand those positions.

Anyway, sounds like you're waxing idealist, in which case the position is unfalsifiable and pratically pretty much useless.

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To say that the conscious experience is real, but that consciousness itself doesn't really have any reality (just being an epiphenomena), sounds to me like a paradox. What is having these experiences then?

An epiphenomenal consciousness is no consciousness at all.
The only way I can see how you can make all of this work, while being committed to mainstram materialism, is to postulate that some sort of awareness property is embedded in matter itself (like charge).

I do not want to put myself in any category. Being to sure of anything usually just locks one's mind to other possibilities. But I do think that there is sufficient empirical evidence to show that the materialistic paradigm, although being a useful tool, is only one perspective of something much greater. What this is though remains to be seen.

I have a question for all of you here, who seem to have embraced deterministic materialism:

Do you actually believe that what is going on on this forum, in the final analysis, is just the mindless random dance of elementary particles writing posts about psi and consciousness?

[David Bailey]

Originally Posted by Tor

The only way I can see how you can make all of this work, while being committed to mainstram materialism, is to postulate that some sort of awareness property is embedded in matter itself (like charge).

Yes, I tend to think along those lines, and the interesting thing about new properties like that is that they more or less have to be conserved - otherwise you have the new fundamental whatever being created out of ordinary matter, so it is no longer fundamental. Charge is, of course, conserved, but it comes with two possible signs. This would tend to suggest that consciousness either goes on for ever in some form, or is cancelled out by some anti-consciousness

David