Quote from: jpinkman on March 30, 2013, 01:41 pmAh ... brilliant autodidact bent on reinventing the wheel and more in your lifetime now are you? ;) I should've guessed. You make it sound as though it's arrogance that drives me, when really it's... necessity I suppose. It isn't that I think I'm smarter than everyone else who's ever lived or even that I just want to do it myself all alone: it's that I can't stop thinking about this shit. Not that I really want to, mind you... it's extremely difficult to find relevant literature though. I also don't read as much as I should. Too much time spent responding to brilliant shadows on illicit forums, perhaps ;)QuoteQuoteSo to get back to the matter at hand, this "qualia" thing: I don't think that there is the stark separation that you assume there is between the experience and the comprehension of it (you along with most everybody else in the world). I believe that they are fundamentally the same: that you cannot have one without the other. That experiencing the "qualia" of seeing a color is an intrinsic part of understanding what a color is. I've slowly come to the conclusion over the past several years that comprehension and understanding are not the things that people think they are -- that to understand a thing, we really only need to have a mental representation that we can somehow relate to other mental representations. That these representations and neuronal structures are formed as we age and develop, and as we acquire more of them and the structures and connections between them (abstractly speaking, not physical connections) become more complex and richer, our awareness and our understanding of each grows. There is no understanding of a color without the experience of a color -- I don't think that's a meaningful concept at all, and there's nothing that really needs to be resolved about it.Very perceptive, there's no doubt something to your description of neural connections and pattern recognition which I read a paper in support of this a while ago I'll have to try and find. But I would dispute your blurring of the distinction between experience and comprehension because there does seem to be a subtle difference beween those two words. If tomorrow I had a stroke and suffered achromatopsia which erased my ability to perceive color, it doesn't mean I don't comprehend the colors when in fact I have firsthand experiential knowledge of it since I still have the mental representation of it in memory. The Sensation of seeing a color is the process that detects stimuli whereas comprehension/cognition is the process of knowing it. Sensations are obviously a source of knowledge in the world, but the sensation itself we have when we see a color is just that patch of color, and sensing a patch of colour is not knowledge itself and therefore IMO we cannot say that pure sensation is cognitive. Until it's processed in relation to things that are correlated with it and giving rise to images and memories after the sensation of the color is faded it can be a source for knowledge. But I don't see how pure sensation can be cognitive until its processed mentally as a subject in relation to you in the act of seeing it, at which point it becomes a source for knowledge.Hmm... I think I see what you're getting at... I'm not sure how to respond to that. Perhaps I'm wrong; it's rare, but I have seen it happen on occasion, hah...QuoteI'm not sure what you mean by the "you can't tell that it's been removed". I can definitely tell when I'm spun out from being up for 3 days. My mind is fuckin sludge and my brain is oatmeal. ;D I also remember reading an article written by someone that had had a frontal lobotomy in the sixties where he described after the op that he definitely noticed something where something was missing even if he couldn't place what. I think it would be hard not to tell that some form of sensation, perception, or cognition was no longer available to you that you previously enjoyed.Of course I'm not saying that the brain isn't imperative to our functional operation in the physical world. Unquestionably there's no way to empirically deny it. Just that consciousness seems to demand a greater explanation than reductionist materialism. Maybe I stated it too strongly -- you're describing exactly what I'm talking about, I think. Noticing that something's missing. Missing as opposed to what...? A memory? A comparison to prior experiences? A fleeting, vague sense that there was at one point "something more?" That's what I'm saying seems to me to be the result of introspective comparison. Judging current performance and subjective awareness by comparing it to prior states. But you can't actually say "the portion of my brain that tweaking for 3 days has impaired is my ventral striatum," or some gibberish (anatomy was never my strong suit). Unless of course you determine that by deduction, obviously. What I'm saying is that it's only by contrasting possibilities that we seem to have a gauge of our performance, not actual awareness of it beyond our comparisons.Which in my mind is why the lobotomy fellow felt that were was "something missing," but had no clue what. He couldn't really put his finger on it, just a vague comparison that he had something then that he doesn't now (or didn't later -- whatever).QuoteQuoteActually, I generally refrain from stating it because I find it's an almost impossibly unacceptable position for most people -- and there are much more important things to convince people of, and you must always choose your battles carefully and at the right time -- but yes. That is actually what I'm saying. That we don't deserve credit for our successes nor punishment for our evils. That we're slaves to our biology, and that we ultimately have no more free will than a rain drop falling from the sky. We simply twist and morph endlessly as we fall through the molecules in the air on our way to death, unable to do anything at all to change what course we take.I don't believe we do change our brain's state. I think we're passive observers who think we do. But why wouldn't we think that? We arise from the biology. Assuming consciousness is a property inherent to the physiological basis of the human brain, it seems quite natural that we'd feel we're in control. A little strange and requiring some loosening of the concept of what the experience of "thinking we're exercising free will," truly is -- but still not entirely unexpected. Mistaken, but quite naturally so.Interesting. So how do you square your deterministic beliefs with quantum indeterminancy, or more to the point, with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in which the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa? Einstein always thought of the uncertainty principle as a stopgap measure "God does not roll dice" but since his death its been discovered that it's not just the observer effect of QM but universal to everything (or everything with a wave like system, which from what we know from Einstein-Broglie that matter also is a wave, means pretty much everything) on a quantum level, making uncertainty a fundamental property of quantum systems and integral to our understanding of modern chemistry. I guess what I'm getting at is that believing in determinism seems to me to require a leap of blind faith at odds not only with our current understanding of modern physics and chemistry but also neurophysiology and psychology including experimental evidence. Experiments, Wheeler and Zeilinger come to mind, have shown that we have a participatory role in the universe as an observer and we can indeed change the future depending on how we measure an experiment. Generally the future remains undetermined unless its been measured/observed.I'm not saying this as a necessary advocate of "free will", a philosophically nebulous term in itself with many disagreements on what it means, but I don't see why the law of the excluded middle should apply here that requires an either or proposition; just that determinism itself seems inherently flawed.I'm not saying I'm a strict determinist. That's ludicrous in the face of modern physics. I'm saying that quantum indeterminacy does not change the implications of determinism in general. So we'll never know where a particle is until it's actually there in the moment -- it's still going to deterministically influence things once it's actually there. ... that's a terrible way of putting it... nothing else is coming to mind though. I'm just saying I don't believe it's possible for us to "will" the world into obeying our thoughts through sheer discipline or something, and if my mind is indeed caused by my physiology, and I cannot simply "will" my physiology to change... I must therefore be a complete slave to my physiology no matter what my perception of it is. I certainly think I'm pressing these keys right now, but logically it must be that I'm not willfully doing it -- it just feels that way. That's all I was getting at.QuoteI guess what I was trying to say is that there are correlative brain states to every thought we have. These brain states consist of electro-chemical activity. It's not just one neuron responsible for consciousness let alone a thought, but neurons strung together through an action potential. The near consensus among neural scientists is that you need an entire neural network of activity to have anything resembling a thought. You described one aspect in your description of what can happen to neurons when we don't get enough sleep and stay up for days ... they can fail; but of course it's more than just that. As a signal passes through the synapses it becomes vulnerable to amplication, distortion, elimination, colorization, etc by other chemicals introduced into the larger system by trauma, DRUGS, fatigue, DRUGS, excitation, DRUGS, design, DRUGS, etc. :o This is how we understand the brain and how it functions. So when someone is resuscitated after having no measurable brain activity for up to an hour or two, how is it possible that they have a NDE when to even imagine it unconsciously would require some measurable electro-chemical brain activity? There would be no action potentials or neurotransmissions connecting neural nets to be subject to distortion in the first place. All the while subjects repoting NDEs that underwent clinical death report exceptional lucidity in their memory of it. Based on the materialist empirical understanding of how the brain functions this is just not possible. This would mean that everyone that had a NDE would have be to be bullshitting through their teeth the moment they're revived which I think is highly implausible. These aren't anecdotes of NDEs from superstitious folk of western Zaire, but western societies and in some cases atheists with no expectations or beliefs in anything of that sort.Maybe the problem is you aren't allowing enough distortion between what we perceive and what is...? I think it's perfectly believable that the brain, when suffering catastrophic damage and probably unimaginable levels of fear, would end up with an extremely flawed perception of what actually happened. I'm saying I believe it's entirely possible that whatever happens while the brain dies could be interpreted at a later time as a near death experience, when really, there was nothing that happened at all.I'm saying I don't believe in hour long near death experiences, only that people can remember them happening when they didn't. The human memory is terribly malleable; that seems a lot more likely to me than the brain being active while there's no activity within it.QuoteAnother example is when people have irreversible dementia or severe mental illness that experience sudden lucidity before they die. They recognize family members, lose delusions, and talk coherently right before they die. Based on our understanding of their damaged brain physiology this wouldn't be possible. Not to say this ALWAYS happens with people that are irreversibly brain damaged, but are isolated incidents.Unless this happens every single time or a statistically significant portion of times, I don't think it's evidence of anything but them having gotten lucky and their brain having a "good 5 minutes," before death. I don't really know, I've never heard of this phenomenon.QuoteQuoteAgain, I have absolutely no clue how our brains cause consciousness. But the alternative is that consciousness is somehow tied to our brain. Because if our brain goes away, people sure seem to go away along with it -- which means even if our brain *isn't* just our biology, then it's something that the physical matter of the world has absolute power over. Which makes it, in turn, nothing more than matter that's very real and very influenced by other matter. Unless of course you're saying it's only influenced one-way, and our bodies simply die when our brains do.Again, that violates the conservation of energy. Which could be possible and which I'm willing to allow for the possibility of, but you need some pretty serious evidence to back up a claim of the only phenomenon in the known universe that creates or destroys energy.I don't really have an answer about the inherent contradiction between dualism and conservation of energy as I don't find any of the present arguments that attempt a refutation particularly compelling. I can only offer that the mind does have an affect on the body so what might appear an ostensible violation in appearance is not real. If we do things for reasons, our beliefs and desires cause some of our actions. And if this is all physical matter I can only refer back to how matter, regardless of its organization, can produce conscious thoughts, feelings and perceptions which materialism can't explain. :) No, certainly doesn't explain it in our current understanding of it. But what exactly does explain it? Nothing that I'm aware of, personally.QuoteI will admit I'm not big into duelism either as it seems to be riddled with just as many issues if not more as material monism. The answer is very likely somewhere in between OR better yet I'm hopeful that a new Big Idea will come along that creates a new paradigm altogether and this problem can be buried once and for all. ;) And with regards to your "consciousness is somehow tied to our brain", well isn't it? Since how we direct our attention can directly affect our neurochemistry doesn't that show that our brains can be directly affected by our consciousness?Sorry, I was trying to lead you along a line of thought that supports my position. Obviously I did a poor job. What I'm saying is that if whatever our consciousness is composed of is influenced by physical matter, then it seems to be very much the same as physical matter -- which means the soul is either not influenced by the physical world *at all*, and therefore cannot possibly have anything to do with our consciousness (since if the brain dies, we seem to -- so it's influenced by matter), or it's just a funny kind of matter that isn't really "spiritual" or "metaphysical" in nature at all. That was my point.