Quote from: jpinkman on April 06, 2013, 03:50 amSo there are tons of schools of thought resulting from tangents of materialism. But philosophy only takes you to the conceptual realm. It's from there that we expect scientists to make contributions in the empirical realm. Scientists have produced some theories of consciousness over the last 30 years that I've been reading through:Let's see Crick and Koch proposed certain 35-75 Hz neural oscillations in cerebral cortex are the biological basis of consciousness and the claustrum may be responsible for the unified nature of conscious experience. Edelman and Tononi proposed whatever the fuck this is supposed to mean: a group of neurons can contribute directly to conscious experience only if it is part of a distributed functional cluster that, through reentrant interactions in the thalamocortical system, achieves high integration in hundreds of milliseconds. Baars proposed consciousness arises from the contents of a global workspace, a sort of blackboard by which various unconscious processors communicate information to the rest of the system. Hameroff and Penrose proposed that quantum coherence and quantum-gravity-induced collapses of wave functions are essential for consciousness. Fascinating theory by the way. Stapp proposed that the brain evolves a superposition of action templates, and the collapse of this superposition gives rise to conscious experience.But these theories are total distractions because they don't even address the question, the essence of qualia. How does a cluster of red sensing neurons give rise to the subjective feel of redness for instance? If scientists can't even answer this fundamental question then how do they hope to answer how the brain gives rise to the entire stream of consciousness? Thank you for sharing your knowledge; I'm sure you know how difficult a really spot-on condensing of information can be to find and how valuable it often is. I appreciate your time :) I did actually know about Penrose's theory already, and I agree, it really is a fascinating thought. It's my understanding that the structures he describes exist in all cells though, and that at least as presented it would mean that our entire bodies cause consciousness -- which of course has some bizarre problems that don't fit with reality as we know it.QuoteNow get this, because scientists are in the embarrassing position of having to explain how in studying consciousness why they can't seem to come up with a scientific theory of consciousness they've actually come up with responses to this question of which there are 3 competing responses (nicknames mine):1) The Copout response (Pinker,McGinn): Although consciousness arises naturally from brain activity, humans lack the cognitive capacity required to formulate a theory. And actually I gotta share this quote with you since it hilariously mimics how you answered this question. When Pinker was asked how consciousness arises from materialist systems he says:"Beats the heck out of me. I have some prejudices, but no idea ofhow to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither doesanyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight;neither does any finding in neuroscience, once you clear up the usualconfusion of sentience with access and self-knowledge."2) The "work hard and we'll succeed" response: We must keep experimenting until we find the empirical fact that leads to a theoretical breakthrough. This seems to be the least worst and most widely adopted scientist response.3) The "Deny there was ever a question" response (Churchland, Dennett, Chomsky): There is no fucking mind-body problem because there is no mind to reduce to body and no body to which mind can be reduced. So I don't know about you but I find the ways the scientific community has reacted in its response to why they can't answer the hard problem of consciousness rather entertaining even while woefully inadequate. ;)Yeah, that is amusing. It's nice to be reminiscent of Pinker. I don't know a great deal about him, but I know a little and if I'm going to be reminding people of somebody, he seems like a good person to bring to mind :)QuoteQuoteI'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.Hm. I think you'll have to explain that one for me. To me, determinism seems very rigid and it's hard for me to see how one might not be a 'strict' determinist yet still call themselves a determinist. The question of determinism seems to me to boil down to whether life on earth was predetermined at the the moment of big bang or not. Back when the physical universe was perceived as governed strictly by Newtonian physics the rationale of determism had a very seductive appeal. But these days its more appropriately a question left to quantum physics. Until we find the way to measure the velocity and position of a particle at the same time then QM shows there's randomness involved in our world coming into its state of being and our existence. How does your determinism fit within this paragon or does it?So here we run into a problem. I may not even be using the word "determinist" correctly. Let me look it up... er, yes, I'm using it correctly after all. I'm not sure what you're asking then, actually? I don't think it boils down to that at all really. I think it boils down to whether or not you have "faith" (pardon the word, lol) in physical laws & behavior as we've come to expect them? I mean... maybe the problem here is that I don't have any classical education in the way of quantum physics? Because I don't see how it has any influence on determinism at all -- I mean so what if this is one possible world out of an innumerable number that could have been... it still obeys physicality, right? So what if the particle went through slit A or slit B or both -- when it happens to be "decided" or "observed" or whatever the fuck happens when you "collapse the wave function," it's still going to determine absolutely what reality is. The fact that it's truly random doesn't change that?QuoteQuoteMaybe 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 guess I wasn't clear as to what I've been trying to say. What I was trying to point out is, how is it that these distortions that are supposed to occur to the electro-chemical connections between neurons that goes on that neural scientists think is necessary for us to even have thoughts, how do these distortions happen to these neural connections when there are no electro-chemical connections detected going on in the brain at all?So, my perception of memory is foggy. It's somehow stored in the structure of the human brain, which is modified and refined and all of that as we live and go through the day and whatnot. Chemicals alter it, experiences alter it, etc., etc.. I have no idea whatsoever how we access it, but I do know that it appears to be widespread and non-localized. Removing a portion of rat's brains doesn't remove ALL the memory of how to get to the end of a maze. No matter what part of the rat's brain they destroy first, there doesn't appear to be any single location for the memory of how to run the maze. The more of the brain they destroy, the more of the memory is gone and the more unsure the mouse appears -- but they always run the maze better than they should if they have no memory of it at all. I think the experiments are terribly cruel and probably shouldn't be allowed, but they exist. I choose to learn from them, that's all.So given the incredible state of the brain at the time of death, it doesn't seem contradictory to me that upon "waking up" from death, a person's brain could interpret whatever happened prior to death and/or during death as a funky, totally whacked out memory of what happened. I don't know, that's how I explain near death experiences anyway. I'm very open to more likely explanations.QuoteQuoteI'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.I did a poor job of explaining what I meant. Let me try again. When I spoke of the hour long NDE I wasn't speaking from the subject's conception of time. I'm talking about empirical reality where subjects can be clinically dead for hours. How is it that a subject can be clinically dead for hours with no measurable brain activity, be revived, and have a NDE when in order to imagine anything they would need to have electro-chemical connections going on in the brain? That's fundamentally what I find baffling before even getting into whether what they saw was real or hallucinatory fiction. In order to 'see' anything they had to have measurable brain activity and they didn't.Same thing as above: I don't see the contradiction in perceiving an event that ended in seconds (death of the brain) as having continued for hours, given the circumstances and the extreme states that come about when instinctively attempting to avoid death (chemical release, etc.).QuoteI think I see what you're saying here. You're coming from the perspective of a strict monist.You know it's funny, I've thought this way for so goddamn long that I'm not even sure what initially made me come to my core conclusions. I think lack of evidence, mostly. I can remember sitting there writing in my journal about this when I was a kid... how I felt like there was so much more to this world than I could see... but that I could find absolutely no evidence of it whatsoever, and so it must be an illusion. Bizarre to think about how much of my life hinged on that one perception, and how I'd probably be running around taking acid thinking I saw God if I hadn't decided that. Weird...