Rational, evidence-based, non-materialist model of mind-brain interaction

[Bernardo]

Originally Posted by Interesting Ian

Maaneli and Bernardo,

Here's a video which will help both of you understand some of the issues regarding QM.

Cool ...

[Maaneli]

Originally Posted by Bernardo

To you it clearly doesn't, but it is just vanilla Dummettian anti-realism. But then again, Idealism is also illogical to you. This is not sarcasm: logic can be subjective. There are many different versions of logic in philosophy, with different axioms, proving this statement. My favorite logic (Intuitionism) would probably drive you nutts. Yet it is academically recognized.



We can sufficiently approximate the true facts of the matter in a description, given our cognitive circumstances. That approximation is always metaphorical, given that the true facts of the matter are more likely to escape our cognitive abilities than not. After all, there is no reason to believe that our cognitive apparatus would have evolved to completely understand itself (recursion, which is at the root of Idealism).

Human understanding requires analogies, comparisons, and metaphors with objects and phenomena that are understood, i.e. phenomena in space-time. The human cognitive apparatus has evolved under those circumstances, after all. Therefore, it is entirely valid, and even necessary, to use metaphors within that context, even if the facts of the matter are suspected to completely transcend them.





To the extent that language descriptions of anything beyond empirical observation are always a metaphor, this sounds challenging... You see, language is symbol; symbol is metaphor.

Mathematics is also a metaphor when applied as a description. The numbers and symbols are not the thing they are supposed to represent; they just represent them.

I sense that you, like the vast majority of people today, sometimes mix up symbols (concepts, metaphors) with the thing they represent. I posted about it a couple of days ago here. So when you get someone like me who is explicit in stating all his descriptions are 'as if' descriptions (anti-realist metaphors), that makes you jerk.

All we can intellectually articulate are concepts, symbols, which represent more or less accurately the facts of the matter, given our cognitive limitations. All facts of the matter that escape the limits of human direct experience can only be approximated through these metaphors.



That's intended as a more-or-less accurate metaphor. And it's not realist at all, in the sense that I am talking about MINDS, not anything OUTSIDE OF MIND. There are no 'folds out there;' they are the topology of mind.



This is an illogical statement. "MY collective field of human experience"? It is either mine or it is collective. I meant the collective.



Sure. I am not a solipsist. I am an Idealist: There is nothing outside mind, even though what I experience as MY mind is just a topological subset of a broader mental field. So there are realities my egoic self does not have access to; but they are all experiences in mind; the very same mind I am a part of.



I don't understand what you mean here. What exactly is the contradiction you are seeing?



Oh gosh.... IT IS A METAPHOR!

I was originally consistent when I stated that there is no objective canvas of space-time. Then you started firing left-and-right on everything I said because any description in language assumes space-time by construction, so you thought everything I said was incoherent. I thought it was a pity that you couldn't give yourself permission to look at my argument because you couldn't go past this perceived incoherence, so I suggested you assume, JUST FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT, that space-time did exist objectively. But now you come back and say "Ahh! You're inconsistent! An Idealist should not grant objective space-time!"

YES! That's where I started from.





You see, you believe all final truths about nature, mind, and the human condition can be captured precisely, completely, and literary in a mathematical model that fits within human brains.

I don't make that assumption because I see absolutely ZERO reasons why our cognitive apparatus should have evolved to be able to do that. Here is a little video you may like: Consciousness and the limits of Science - Boundaries of the Knowable (1/10) - YouTube.

So I am just being consistent with my position that the best we can do is to approximate the facts of the matter with more-or-less accurate metaphors; even highly complex mathematical metaphors, whose usefulness I will never deny. Because I am open and explicit about this, and because it falls short of what you believe is possible, everything I say comes across to you as dis-satisfactory.



Did you see the new thread I started? I link to a better description of what I meant here, which may help. But to answer: Yes, you are right in a way. The collective unconscious, being oscillations taking place in unfolded regions of mind, does 'happen' outside of the folds.



Oh, I accept space-time as a fact of experience! My only point is: space-time is not a fundamental, objective canvas outside of mind, and wherein mind 'lives.' It's just part-and-parcel of subjective experience, like material objects and energy flows. But as experience, SPACE-TIME IS REAL. Since my entire ontology is an ontology of experience, I grant space-time the same reality I grant the computer I am typing on right now. Similarly, I granted the OBSERVED non-locality that same ontological substance too: the substance of experience.



Not at all. Idealism here means one very specific thing, so let's spell it out through a comparison, to be precise:

REALISM: The world each one of us experiences is a brain-constructed 'hallucination' modulated by signals coming from an abstract world outside of minds. The objects you actually see are all inside your head; the real objects are in an inaccessible abstract space. Your real skull is beyond the stars you see when you look up the sky, because the stars are also brain-reconstructions inside your head (there is actually a materialist paper saying exactly this). If there were no minds, that abstract objective world would still exist, outside of mental experience. Mind is inside a structure of that abstract, objective world that we call a brain. (this definition of materialism is not polemic)

BERNARDO'S IDEALISM: There is no world outside of mind modulating a brain-constructed hallucination. Subjective experience itself is all there is. The objects you see are the actual objects, insofar as 'actual' means that they are felt experiences. Your body is inside your mind, not your mind in your body.

Now let's come back to the point: By acknowledging that other egos have experiences that do not overlap with the experiences of my ego I am, in no way whatsoever, departing from the position that there is no objective world outside of mind; or that bodies are inside the mind. I am simply acknowledging that my ego does not have access to the entire field of mind.



Oh, please don't then, because I am also entertaining you out of respect and goodwill. I am disappointed by what I perceive as an impossibility to help you break out from very naive-realist assumptions about nature and the role of science, and the fact that you seem to have more difficulty with simple philosophical arguments than I initially thought. It costs me time to write these answers to you; time I don't really have. Philosophy is a hobby for me, for I hold a full-time job as a company executive. Had I read this comment of yours before I started replying, I wouldn't have.

Let's wrap it up here.

Yes, I'll just comment finally that I did my best to understand your approach, and to the best of my assessment, it seems to me your research program is well-intended but ultimately too vague and incoherent at the moment to be taken seriously (which is not to say that there couldn't be a more precise and coherent variant of some of your ideas in the future). I know you think that's because I'm too entrenched in "very naive realist assumptions", but I disagree of course and suspect that that's your way of not dealing with my criticisms directly. In any case, we'll just have to agree to disagree for now.

P.S. About Dummettian anti-realism, I'll look into that because I know Dummett is a well respect academic philosopher. I doubt it'll change my assessment of your idealist model, but if it does, I'll let you know. Also, I'll comment that I think your ideas would benefit considerably from the vetting of peer-review by professional philosophers. So I would recommend trying to get your ideas published in an academic philosophy journal, especially if you want your ideas taken seriously by the relevant people (academic philosophers who have the best expertise to evaluate your claims).

[AusMan]

Originally Posted by Bernardo

Of course not. The hypothesis in my paper is:

-- All conscious experiences are irreducible, existing in a unitary superset;
-- Individual brains filter out most of the superset, creating individual subsets. Typically these subsets are different. But everything in each subset is universally available, in the sense that it's all fundamentally part of the superset;

Bernardo, I've just now initially read and like your paper and loosely subscribe to a filter model myself, only I haven't nutted it out in so much detail. I have some quibbles which given further reflection may evaporate so no point elucidating them.

You may have already discussed this elsewhere, I don't know since this is the first work of yours I've read, but it would seem to me that evidence put forward for reincarnation may be neatly explained by the filter model in that a localised consciousness, P1(a self), accesses memories from another localised consciousness, P2, (all such information being stored in the superset (Bohm's implicate order?)) and mistakenly believes them to have been experiences of their own (P1).

Personally, I think a filter model explains many phenomena with simple elegance and it will be interesting to consider what other kinds of predictions the hypothesis makes.

[Enrique Vargas]

Originally Posted by Bernardo

Since I don't refer to any of my books in the article, and since it's available entirely for free, I thought it is appropriate to share this with you:

http://paranthropologyjournal.weebly...vol_3_no_3.pdf

(See first article)

Just stumbled upon this. Promptly downloaded and saved. Thank you, Bernardo.

[Interesting Ian]

Originally Posted by AusMan

Bernardo, I've just now initially read and like your paper and loosely subscribe to a filter model myself, only I haven't nutted it out in so much detail. I have some quibbles which given further reflection may evaporate so no point elucidating them.

You may have already discussed this elsewhere, I don't know since this is the first work of yours I've read, but it would seem to me that evidence put forward for reincarnation may be neatly explained by the filter model in that a localised consciousness, P1(a self), accesses memories from another localised consciousness, P2, (all such information being stored in the superset (Bohm's implicate order?)) and mistakenly believes them to have been experiences of their own (P1).

Personally, I think a filter model explains many phenomena with simple elegance and it will be interesting to consider what other kinds of predictions the hypothesis makes.

I've written about the filter hypothesis too here.

[eveshi]

Originally Posted by AusMan

You may have already discussed this elsewhere, I don't know since this is the first work of yours I've read, but it would seem to me that evidence put forward for reincarnation may be neatly explained by the filter model in that a localised consciousness, P1(a self), accesses memories from another localised consciousness, P2, (all such information being stored in the superset (Bohm's implicate order?)) and mistakenly believes them to have been experiences of their own (P1).

Might be, but if this were the case, why would the children only have access to the memories of one specific person (as it is mostly the case in reincarnation cases, at least of the Stevensonian type)? Wouldn't we expect more cases where one child has tapped into the memories of several people?

The fact that the children only remember the life of one specific person, a person they also strongly identify with, suggests to me that there is a special connection between the children and the persons whose lives they remember, and that they do not have access to any random person's memories.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by AusMan

Personally, I think a filter model explains many phenomena with simple elegance and it will be interesting to consider what other kinds of predictions the hypothesis makes.

It explains just about anything with simple elegance because it is basically unfalsifiable. If you take everyone's memories and unload them into a global addressable memory space, possibly retaining a small amount of local memory, you can explain everything that a network of computers can do, which is just about everything. This is particularly true if you (rightly so) allow for various error situations.

I cannot think of a single neuroscientific discovery that would put the kibosh on transmission theory. I suppose one possibility is that we build a conscious machine and are willing to admit that if we didn't include a transceiver to the global memory then there probably isn't such a memory.

~~ Paul

[Johann]

Originally Posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

It explains just about anything with simple elegance because it is basically unfalsifiable. If you take everyone's memories and unload them into a global addressable memory space, possibly retaining a small amount of local memory, you can explain everything that a network of computers can do, which is just about everything. This is particularly true if you (rightly so) allow for various error situations.

I cannot think of a single neuroscientific discovery that would put the kibosh on transmission theory.

Did Bernardo not say he working on making predictions that were testable? He provided one awhile back, but I do not remember what it was exactly. In any case, his model need not be totally falsifiable to be scientific; it just needs to have some way that it can acquire or lose favor, like many worlds, string theory, TSQM, Copenhagen, etc.

- Johann

[Scott]

Originally Posted by Bernardo

Cool ...

I liked the Kinetic hack that lets you posses a chair - the segment right above it.

As for the QM - 'So far it has been just philosophical and theoretical', 'no one has conducted an experiment to confirm'.

At the extremes Science gets weird.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Johann

Did Bernardo not say he working on making predictions that were testable? He provided one awhile back, but I do not remember what it was exactly. In any case, his model need not be totally falsifiable to be scientific; it just needs to have some way that it can acquire or lose favor, like many worlds, string theory, TSQM, Copenhagen, etc.

Those are primarily interpretations. I think the actual theory needs to be falsifiable. Otherwise it's purely a question of what's in and out of style.

Perhaps it could make some predictions that are clearly not made by conventional neuroscientific theories. But that's a bear, because we don't understand either theory enough to know what they "can't possibly predict." Many such predictions would fall in the parapsychology arena, but we know those are still considered dicey. And even if we all believed in telepathy, for example, we don't know that it is definitely ruled out by conventional neuroscience.

I'm perfectly happy to keep transmission theory on the table, but it's not quite time to start gloating about how it explains everything.

~~ Paul