A question for the materialists on consciousness

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by fogpipe, Oct 17, 2014.

  1. Landau Roof Registered Senior Member

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    @Aqueous Id - I tried to read your last post thorough over and over, but it's just too much work. Fogpipe makes a few valid points above. Mostly I just have to ask, so you suppose you're right and all the best men, and women too, in countless different cultures, of various religious faiths over the past two or three thousand years -including Siddhartha Gautama- they all got it wrong and were laboring under misconceptions, but you, superior man that you are- have finally got it all right? - this meditation thing, and it's not all that it's cracked up to be ("nothing more than an artifact of delusion") and, oh yeah, there is no God!? And you expect us too take you seriously!? Just who is it you fancy you are?

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  3. wellwisher Banned Banned

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    Humans and Cultures are divided in introversion and extroversion. Introversion looks on the inside for meaning and stimulation, using techniques like meditation and prayer. While extroversion looks outside for similar things. It is not that one is right and the other is wrong. Each will appeal more to people and to cultures of each type.

    I am more of an introvert. This is more of a default due to a high level of sensitivity, such that too much external stimulation can sometimes cause sort of an overload. This type of brain wiring is good for science observation, since tiny things stand out due to the high sensitivity for my brain instrument. Someone with a lower threshold of sensitivity may need and take stronger stimulus. This type of stimulation may not appear from within. Internal data may be too subtle and does not register, as well as the stronger external sensory. It all depends how you are wired.

    My brain also tends to work in cycles between extroversion and introversion, with the summers the time I feel more extroverted. I enjoy the bright light of the sun and warm air on my skin. I like the crowds and all the bikinis. But by the winter, my sensitivity begins to get higher, due to less background stimulation, such that I prefer introversion, looking inside for subtle things.

    Neurons are at their highest potential when they are at rest. This is due to the cell expending energy to create a membrane potential; potential energy for firing. The sensory systems fire neurons. This lowers the average potential of the neurons, such that the set point can lower.. This is why the need for stronger stimulation can appear. The lower set point makes it harder for the neuron to fire, requiring stronger triggers.

    Introversion, by cutting off the sensory systems, allows the set point to rise. This can change the phase of the firmware allowing other parts of the mind/firmware to become more conscious. Both are useful and allow access to the entire range of the mind and firmware.

    For me in summer, the strong stimulation lowers the set point, so I can have more access to the firmware connected to my animal nature. Animals are extroverts. For animals excessive stimulation causes mass brain discharge toward lower set point for fight/flight energy and firmware. Once the trigger is gone, the neurons rebuild the set point to take advantage of their high level sensory sensitivity; tiny triggers for food. Cycling between states is natural.
     
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  5. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    You seem to be taking an extremely crude psychological hypothesis about how people behave socially and applying it to epistemology. This seems like a horrible mistake. Additionally, most religious people will say that they are looking outwards from themselves for their beliefs, i.e., they are looking to their religion and the deities of their religion.
     
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  7. Sarkus Hippomonstrosesquippedalo phobe Valued Senior Member

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    I would say that consciousness is part of what the brain does. Much of what it does is not consciousness, or result in consciousness, or is what one may be conscious of.
    I would question the interpretation of the evidence that you believe shows consciousness occurring in totally dead brains.
    As for reviving lucidly in patients with Alzheimers and dementia, since when are those patients considered unconscious? Their brains may be addled and their memories and wiring shot to pieces, but they remain conscious, don't you agree?
    So I'm puzzled by this supposed example.
    You mean apart from the fact that anesthetists are capable of making people unconscious through drugs that limit brain activity in certain areas?
    http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-03-brain-regains-consciousness-video.html
    With this evidence, it is more rational to assume that that reduced brain activity results in unconsciousness, rather than inhibiting whatever "extra" you theorise is required.
     
  8. fogpipe Registered Member

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    Its interesting to me reading this thread. Over the years i have gone from being a hard materialist to the consciousness as some kind of transcendental field to my current thinking, thats its just a fundamental property of the universe. The theory that i like the best lately as far as the relation of the brain and body to the mind is the Penrose - Hameroff Orch OR model. This is a video from the internet interview show called Singularity with Stuart Hameroff explaining the theory :
     
  9. krash661 [MK6] transitioning scifi to reality Valued Senior Member

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    look into melanie boly's work
     
  10. fogpipe Registered Member

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    For me, wellwishers post rings true on a general level and many religions look to the subjective for meaning, the eastern religions especially. Even many varieties of christianity stress a "personal" relationship with their diety.
    The eastern religions have provided tools for subjective exploration, just as western science has provided tools for exploration of the purely material. Since there would be no perception of the material world without the subjective and personal it seems to me a mistake to discount or devalue either set of tools or the importance of either kind of exploration.
     
  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    To me, perhaps naively, it seems that the synapse is a constituent bit of a substrate, and those loops etc are patterns supported by the substrate, and that they themselves are substrate for the next level of organization, and so forth. And at the mind level of organization, those patterns of patterns exist, just as the organization of atomic behaviors we call a "baseball" exists at its level - the implication would be that cause/effect explanations for their behavior would of course draw their causes and effects from the appropriate level. One speaks of fastball grips and bat speed, not quantum electrodynamics. That is not fantasy.

    An analogy might be an eddy in the water of a river. Notice that they are recurrent, self-reinforcing, maintained over time partly by the structure of the bed and partly by gravity and so forth, but independent in existence etc. The synapse then lines up with a nexus of forces in that eddy, the firing a water molecule passing through the nexus, and so forth. You can watch eddies hit each other, combine and split, move around, change size and shape, pick up debris and move it, rise and fall in the water, and all the explanations or "causes" for this are at that level - nothing in particular at the atomic level is a "cause" of an eddy or its behavior. It's a substrate, the water, and so it constrains but does not cause. Neurons to not cause ideas - dreams do.

    That's the hardest thing to imitate, technically, so far - as somebody once pointed out, Deep Blue required a team of maintenance guys and cable electrical service to a powerful generator just to match chess moves with a guy who had dressed himself, brought himself to the table, could carry on conversations and keep track of his surroundings, and was moving his own pieces, while running for hours on a ham sandwich .

    From low to high that doesn't matter. Patterns are not caused or explained by substrates, in general (constraints can be visible). From high to low it isn't true - once we have at least some aspect of the experience of qualia localized in a brain, we can both predict and measure various probabilities of specific neural firings upon evocation of that experience, repeatably. We can also discover and measure physical changes in neural connection patterns etc from repeated such evocations and "learning".
     
  12. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Finding that certain neurons fire when we are thinking a thought or conscious of something doesn't offer any explanation of HOW this happens. Even if the same neurons are found to fire to produce the same thought every time, knowing this amounts to knowing whenever you rub a lamp a genie appears. It's essentially magic--you doing something and something unexplainable happens. Poof. But science is about describing HOW this happens. We will need to bridge the gap from physical structures to mental properties somehow. But I don't see how that will occur. There's nothing more different from my conscious thought of my mother than some cells firing electrical signals to each other inside my wet dark brain. They don't overlap in any sense.
     
  13. Sarkus Hippomonstrosesquippedalo phobe Valued Senior Member

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    Interesting, MR... you conclude that "we don't know how..." when viewing something materialistically, and so inject a "something else" for which you can only conclude "we don't know how..." when it comes to this something else interacting with the material, plus "we don't know what..." when it comes to explaining what this something else actually is.

    You see a gap, but rather than work to try to find a place where the sides might actually meet, you build a bridge over the unknown with just another unknown.
     
  14. Waiter_2001 Registered Senior Member

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    Consciousness includes vital signs: breathing and heartbeat.
     
  15. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Am I wrong? DO we know how consciousness arises from the brain, if at all?

    I don't inject anything. Consciousness is real and consists of mental properties, qualia, etc.

    I don't do anything the hard problem hasn't already done. I merely repose the question "what gives rise to consciousness", the answer to which nobody has a clue about yet.

    What unknown bridges my gap? I haven't posited anything that bridges it. The mystery remains what it is.
     
  16. PhysBang Valued Senior Member

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    No, at best you list a number of challenges to a scientific program and then you declare the program impossible because the challenges have not yet been overcome.

    It's like you are sitting in 1492 and, even though there is a ton of evidence that the Earth is round, you refuse to believe it because nobody has yet sailed around the Earth and you refuse to believe that it is possible because nobody has yet done it.

    You actually posit that there is a gap bigger than the one that already exists: you suppose that there is not merely an epistemological problem regarding the workings of matter, you posit that there is an additional substance with unknown properties that, in some wholly unknown way, interacts with matter. So you require that human beings are governed by physics except in some special ways that their bodies sometimes violate the laws of physics to behave in an entirely different way. You have no mechanism for how something could violate the laws of physics, even though you posit this. You are heaping unknowns onto this problem.
     
  17. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Since I don't ascribe to the superstitious elements of Buddhism, it never mattered to me how they characterized their ritual experiences, since, with a few exceptions, there is no rational basis for one meditant to ascribe the same qualities to the meditative state that any other meditant would do. I did see value, though, in the placebo effect for laying the suggestion that such frameworks exist absolutely. In fact a lot of the surrounding discussion involves ritual practices which in my view are the same thing -- a structure which helps induce what self hypnosis. And to be clear, since that may not be the best term to describe it, I'm referring to the deliberate reduction in neurotransmitter in the brain, to distinguish it from what otherwise comes across as an almost metaphysical change.

     
  18. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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  19. krash661 [MK6] transitioning scifi to reality Valued Senior Member

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    2,973
    again,
    look into melanie boly's work
     
  20. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    16,608
    Go ahead then and tell us how consciousness arises from the brain. I'll wait..

    Actually its like I'm sitting in 2014 waiting for materialists to give this great explanation of consciousness that they tout so much but never seem to offer.


    I don't know that consciousness violates the laws of physics. Perhaps we haven't discovered all the laws there are. Maybe consciousness has its own laws. Lots of room for discovery here, but I'm not going to play along with the game that we all understand how consciousness and neural firings are the same thing when clearly they're not. The gap between physical and mental exists whether you wanna admit it or not.
     
  21. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Yes that was all I was trying to say.

    No, not really. I am equating them, in their internals, namely the quieting of select regions of the brain.

    No, I am a strident atheist.

    Self-hypnosis. The clinical project I participated in formed the basis of my experiment a couple of years after I started parcticing meditation.

    It's certainly useful to try to understand what is happening during meditation and hypnosis, just as it is a matter of importance in Health studies to understand what is happening during epilepsy (in this case, in regard to hallucinations, etc.) I am limiting my remarks to the neuroscience of meditation and hypnosis, since I do not follow any of the rituals of Buddhism or any other mystical religion.

    That's not my interest. My interest is/was in trying to learn to quiet the targeted brain areas, as experienced meditants do. I have no interest in the rituals.

    Thanks, some day I would like to find a community of practitioners of the self hypnosis technique I experimented with.

    I encourage you to look at the links from NPR concerning the links between brain activity, neurotransmitter, the reported sense of "Oneness" (this was a pronounced experience that came to me in my experiment) which is attributed to the mindful state of Buddhist meditants, as well as the religious experience reported by other people, as well as hearing voices (epilepsy, psychosis, prayer/ritual inducement) or the hallucinatory imagery of dreams, as was the direction of my experiment.

    I do think that this thread is talking around the question of neuroscience, without really wanting to investigate it as I think it should be investigated. That being said, I can appreciate your long experience doing meditation, as well as Yazata's, and all the other fine folks here. I would have been doing it for some 30 or 40 years now had I not been dissuaded by the ritual elements, and what the atheist/skeptic in me regards as a fascination with sort of magical powers and properties. I also envy the meditants who gain from their Buddhist experience without feeling encroached upon by that sort of thing.
     
  22. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    6,152
    The how is probably not going to satisfy you. And I think it might involve some exploration in biology -- not sure if you're interested in that or not. But for me, I don't think I can begin to wrap my mind around this discussion without starting with the basics. And by that, I mean, understanding what it means for cells to organize into organisms of higher systemic function. This begins with understanding the huge evolutionary leap that occurred between monocytes and colonial metazoans. That, is, chemical signalling evolved. Fast forward to the Cnidaria (hydra, jellies) and the first nervous process appears, merely as a reflex reaction to the umbrella. By the time flatworms appeared, the nerves were serving as information pathways between a primitive brain (ganglion) which serves to centralize body functions. These genera of animals have notochords, the precursor to the vertebrate spinal chord. But by the time vertebrates appear, sentience appears, although we can say for sure that many invertebrates behave quite the same, as if they are sentient. The one that comes to mind is the octopus which certainly behaves in many ways like an emotional animal.

    I haven't understood your position exactly. The material cause of consciousness is brain tissue -- specifically the formation of synaptic junctions, and the establishment of circulating pules within specific tissues. That material cause is, in the most simplified description, quite the same as the reflex response in a jellyfish, closing its umbrella (or releasing paralyzing spicules) upon tactile stimulus. It is functionally the same in the primitive colonial organisms that swim toward the light, but materially it is quite different, since now pulse transmission is involved.

    I don't think physics has much to do with it. It's only occurring in the alert brain, therefore biology would be the place to go for answers.

    Well of course not. We live in an age of overwhelming discovery, but it's only an precursor to future discovery.

    That's a good place to start. I would suggest enumerating them:
    (1) you need a brain
    (2) the brain needs a given amount of evolutionary development
    (3) that brain must be reasonably healthy
    (4) it must be awake
    (5) it must be reasonably alert

    Maybe you can think of more items, or a different way to analyze the question, but at least this is a start.

    No, but as you develop that list above you can begin to sort out which firings are and are not responsible for consciousness. That's a start. We have to start dragging in a lot more information to round this out.

    Except for the links established in your list, I'm not sure that matters as far as the OP is concerned. It looks like we already have more evidence of a material based consciousness than we need to answer the main question in play.
     
    Last edited: Oct 20, 2014
  23. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    Also, the patterns (here referring to ones on PET scans) are virtually indistinguishable, except for which regions of the brain are involved. In my naive mind, this tells us there is a functional block diagram at some level of analysis which can be used to establish a rough picture of which brain areas are "most responsible" for consciousness, which at least should be compatible with what a neurologist would say.

    That still leaves it to decide if the pulses "tickle consciousness out of the aether" -- which seems to be the idea of the folks who link consciousness to the cosmos -- or whether the nature of a pulse simply lends itself to circulation in a keep alive circuit, and that there is no electromagnetic interface to the cosmos --- which is a tempting idea to entertain. Not to mention way cool and the great stuff of sci fi.

    I had to think about this for a moment. It got me to thinking about how the keep-alive circuits in the brain began in connection with, say, motor control. For that matter the neurons that innervate the muscle tissues form a substantial part of the nervous system overall. I think in most cases those are also based on pulse trains. Also, for coordinated movement there needs to be feedback from tactile sensors, so it seems like there is something very basic about loops and repeating pulses, that was probably established before true sentience evolved. It almost seems like this is as basic as it gets, everything we think we are, and all we think about, are sets of sensations, thoughts and feelings trapped in these eddies, giving us the illusion that consciousness is something other than what it really is.

    This is adds some dimension to the idea of cause. If I could stitch ten neurons together in a loop, and then introduce an exciting pulse, then I should be able to predict the way this would look on, say, an oscilloscope. From this point of view, it's the delay through each cell that's creating the pulse recirculation . . . that plus the fact that it's wired as a loop. So while I could say the infrastructure is the cause, that would seem kind of trivial. Of course here we're really trying to understand what sentience means, which kicks this question into the other dimensions of cause.

    I tend to agree that dreams cause ideation, because I think "dream" needs to be loosely defined. In fact I earlier was using the term "dream-like". It may be that here the idea of cause and effect is kind of problematic. If I consciously try to picture the Kundalini force as a bright light (one of the meditation techniques I practiced) then I at least initially caused that visual activity to occur as a matter of choice. But after I've become slightly non-responsive, because I've shut down my normal attention centers and gone into a trance, it may be that visual activity is enabled to run free, coupled to the imagination much like in a true dream.

    I agree that neuronal tissues form a sort of substrate. I wouldn't say that neurons exclusively cause sentience, but that the substrates tends to support those eddies once they are started. If we're looking for the starting pulse that triggers a particular sentient experience, then that gets problematic, although I think we could make some headway by trying to list how it probably happens. My guess is that we will end up finding that the triggers are primarily realtime sensory stimuli, or else ideas retrieved from memory. But then those are all configured as pulse trains, too. So if we try to draw a boundary which encloses all of that, I think we end up with physical stimulation alone lying outside the boundary. One of the things they talk about in biology is that the motivational centers of the brain are set up to trigger these eddies, as we're calling them. It's probably harder to leave motivation (or the religious idea of "free will") to the artifacts of the substrate and it's various running algorithms, since that makes it so difficult to understand the physical elements of true choice. But then, that in my mind is just another case of arriving at an answer (or half-answer) which isn't very comforting in the sense that it probably runs counter to the common belief that a person is more than a biological system.

    I think this energy conservative feature is what allowed primitive brains to work in the first place. Once that infrastructure proved feasible, the evolution of new processing pathways seems inevitable -- depending on the needs of the organism within the context of the niche, of course.

    In some ways they are governed by the length of the axon, and other physical processes (like myelination), and in some ways they are governed (in shape) by the actual geometry of the racetrack they are circulating in. But in other ways they are governed by outside stimulation. For example, the motor control developed in a child learning to walk can be attributed to experience, but then the shape of that pattern on a PET scan falls into the motor region, as if to say it's attributed to some particular parts of that substrate. At some point we would need to tackle PET scans to get closer to this.

    The other way to look at this is that, for a given set of neurons connected for life support at birth, with, say, the beginnings of facial recognition and motor control, those neurons in the conscious regions of the brain are bombarded by a deluge of sensory stimulation -- esp. now that doctors recommend lots of bright sounds and colors for babies to process -- but in any case it's a deluge over a lifetime. The neurons might be considered a physical substrate, but additional functionality doesn't necessarily appear until after the junctions are connected -- and that generally requires sensory stimulation. So cause and effect can be considered from these different levels. We might say a junction is caused by learning, or we might say it's caused by the innate curiosity that hardwired intelligence, and therefore the genetic bootstrap is the chief cause, but then that can be attributed to the DNA and so forth.

    I would also think that to wade through this we would need to consider the embryonic development of the brain, since that says something about the way the bootstrap programs physically emerge from the DNA.

    In fact the PET scan has illustrated this remarkably well.
    Right. The stuff I posted from NPR takes this thread to a another level, in that it suggests that habitual practices (religious ritual, to include prayer & meditation) seem to actually steer the way the synaptic junctions grow together, to reshape the brain, as if to say all such practices physically reinforce the
    beliefs that engendered them. Once the person is wired that way it's probably hard for them to regress. Or, from their vantage point, they are enlightened now, something that can't be undone short of injury.
     

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