Reality Based Matter

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Spellbound, Jan 27, 2015.

  1. Spellbound Banned Valued Senior Member

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    MONISTIC IDEALISM

    In searching for the fundamental basis of physical reality and the nature of the mind, Goswami (1993) has defined consciousness as,


    "the agency that affects quantum objects to make their behavior sensible."


    In choosing this criterion he hopes to show how mind can effect matter non-energetically because they share the same essence.

    By making the leap from a universe based on bits of matter, to one based in consciousness, he hopes to logically and coherently resolve some of the major paradoxes of physics. He suggests that instead of everything being made of atoms, everything is made of consciousness.


    If quantum objects are waves that spread in existence at more than one place, as QM has shown, then consciousness may be the agency that focuses the waves so we can observe them at one place.


    http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_psycho08.htm


    Monistic idealism holds that matter is not fundamental, consciousness is. It makes sense to propose such a notion if one hopes to explain certain Quantum Mechanical behaviors. We arrive at a dual aspect reality of consciousness and the external world, mind and matter, subjective and objective, within and without, Quantum and Classical, the abstract and the concrete. The above view takes consciousness as a reality based matter. It suggests that consciousness and matter share the same essence and so are able to effect each other (brain/ mind dualism). While thought and the brain are both objects that are reality based, so to is the mind - an abstract consisting of language (both verbal and non-verbal). Consciousness is hence a form of matter or reality, resolving dualism.
     
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  3. quantum_wave Contemplating the "as yet" unknown Valued Senior Member

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    R√, that philosophy, though possibly true, does not seem to have the characteristics that would make it a useful study from the perspective of physics. I'm quick to say that there are laws of nature that we don't yet understand, and consicousness has many interacting elements to it that we probably aren't even aware of, let alone understand.

    We realize what we call consciousness, but nothing that is observational and repeatable, and at the same time understood in regard to how it works, seems to be detectible. But I also often say that anything that seems quite mysterious, or even Supernatural, has natural causes that we don't yet understand. However, my own search for reality beings me to my philosophy, not the other way around.
     
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  5. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    This is just more quantum woo. We've been over what is wrong with it elsewhere.
     
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  7. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    The precursors for consciousness would have to be fundamental (just as the micro-entities and principles of physics have to exist beforehand to produce biological bodies). But they're not organized at the bottom as the kind of all-out, everyday meaning of "mind" associated with brains. Especially that featuring cognition / identification and responses dependent upon a complex version of storage (memory).

    "Consciousness" is too broad a term for any metaphysical outlook that purports to have one foot in science. That said, it's a widely abused choice also used for the panpsychism solution to the Hard Problem (as demonstrated in the quote below). As a mitigated alternative, "proto-consciousness" would less mistakenly specify that it refers only to the globally-available antecedents that could yield an upper-level mind when arranged in the appropriate complex patterns. [Precursors like chemical interactions / electrical manipulations or general mechanistic structure and its dynamics being primal to nature; the retaining of certain states being possible (antecedent primitive for memory); and some as yet unknown elemental provenance for the phenomenal manifestations.]

    In terms of consciousness as mere "outward behavior / action" -- such is quite already derivable from the known furniture of chemistry, physics, biology, and computer science . EXCEPT the internal / private experiences associated with perception and thought. The latter are so alien to what falls out of those fields (and conventional materialist philosophy) that some experts have gone to the absurd extreme of denying that we even have experiences.

    Eric Schwitzgebel has contended that ANY sufficient explanation of consciousness (which resolved the mystery of experience) would unavoidably be crazy, since it would force something to be ascribed to the current inventory of the physical sciences which would not normally be discovered / needed by their methodology (this includes Identity Theory). As again, the only evidence for these "showings" of sensory and thinking affairs is internal / private to the outward appearance and measurements of brain tissue, neural relationships / functioning, etc. Experience is a clunky add-on to a descriptive / quantitative understanding of the world. (Never mind that those external affairs themselves are originally presented as / extracted from the same qualitative events. The typical newbie to the Hard Problem enters neck-high in naive realism, and accordingly can barely tolerate or apprehend that, much less handle the extended consequence of indirect realism.)

    Oliver Burkeman: [...] in the last few years, several scientists and philosophers, [David] Chalmers and [Christof] Koch among them, have begun to look seriously again at a viewpoint so bizarre that it has been neglected for more than a century, except among followers of eastern spiritual traditions, or in the kookier corners of the new age. This is “panpsychism”, the dizzying notion that everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious when put into certain configurations. Koch concedes that this sounds ridiculous: when he mentions panpsychism, he has written, “I often encounter blank stares of incomprehension.”

    [...] The argument unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality – such as space, mass, or electrical charge – just do exist. They can’t be explained as being the result of anything else. Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that consciousness could be like that, too – and that if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter.

    Koch’s specific twist on this idea, developed with the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, is narrower and more precise than traditional panpsychism. It is the argument that anything at all could be conscious, providing that the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organised. The human brain certainly fits the bill; so do the brains of cats and dogs, though their consciousness probably doesn’t resemble ours. But in principle the same might apply to the internet, or a smartphone, or a thermostat. (The ethical implications are unsettling: might we owe the same care to conscious machines that we bestow on animals? Koch, for his part, tries to avoid stepping on insects as he walks.)

    Unlike the vast majority of musings on the Hard Problem, moreover, Tononi and Koch’s “integrated information theory” has actually been tested. A team of researchers led by Tononi has designed a device that stimulates the brain with electrical voltage, to measure how interconnected and organised – how “integrated” – its neural circuits are. Sure enough, when people fall into a deep sleep, or receive an injection of anaesthetic, as they slip into unconsciousness, the device demonstrates that their brain integration declines, too. Among patients suffering “locked-in syndrome” – who are as conscious as the rest of us – levels of brain integration remain high; among patients in coma – who aren’t – it doesn’t. Gather enough of this kind of evidence, Koch argues and in theory you could take any device, measure the complexity of the information contained in it, then deduce whether or not it was conscious.

    But even if one were willing to accept the perplexing claim that a smartphone could be conscious, could you ever know that it was true? Surely only the smartphone itself could ever know that? Koch shrugged. “It’s like black holes,” he said. “I’ve never been in a black hole. Personally, I have no experience of black holes. But the theory [that predicts black holes] seems always to be true, so I tend to accept it.”

    It would be satisfying for multiple reasons if a theory like this were eventually to vanquish the Hard Problem. On the one hand, it wouldn’t require a belief in spooky mind-substances that reside inside brains; the laws of physics would escape largely unscathed. On the other hand, we wouldn’t need to accept the strange and soulless claim that consciousness doesn’t exist, when it’s so obvious that it does. On the contrary, panpsychism says, it’s everywhere. The universe is throbbing with it.
    --Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?; THE GUARDIAN, Jan-21-2015 / science section
     
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2015
  8. JBrentonK Banned Banned

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    The only problem I have is he is showing that consciousness is effected.

    The mind needs to first be proven to exist.
     
  9. Spellbound Banned Valued Senior Member

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  10. theorist-constant12345 Banned Banned

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    ''He suggests that instead of everything being made of atoms, everything is made of consciousness.''

    I am consciously aware when something made of atoms makes impact on me. Matter exists without the mind because we can feel its presence.
     
  11. Spellbound Banned Valued Senior Member

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    CC,

    Consciousness relates reality to perception. It is therefore real. If it were but an illusion, nothing within it could possibly correspond to the reality of perception. Therefore, you can think of the relationship between mind and reality as a self-referential feedback loop from which localized or distinct consciousnesses are born. Consciousness is therefore a form of matter or reality. One that we do not fully comprehend the mathematics of.
     
  12. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    Consciousness is explainable or reducible to the affairs of the physical sciences when construed along the lines of how behaviorism treated it [or perhaps today's eliminative materialism]: As just the specialized outward actions and responses of a body, object, etc behaving with awareness of its environment (like a robot navigating around a table or identifying a flower vase). In that context, consciousness is little more than a concept / summary label superimposed over a complex of pre-existing properties and forces mechanistically arranged into a functional structure (that either is or mimics a brain or brain/body).

    Again, it's only the "internal manifestations" (experiences) of matter organized into such a mental system which do not fall out of current science / conventional materialist furniture. Indeed, there would be no evidence of them privately occurring if not for the personal testimonies of people that they have such. [Much less the zero expectation of them emerging from known facts, and having a necessary causal role for conscious activity which would be successful even without experience].
     
  13. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Consciousness is emphatically NOT "a form of matter". It is a process.
     
  14. Spellbound Banned Valued Senior Member

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    Consciousness can be detected by MRI and PET scans. You can think of thought as an electrical signal between neurons and axons. If it were not then neurons could not possibly generate it. It exists. Read CC's first response above.
     
  15. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Sure it is a electrical signal. But an electrical signal is not made of matter. It is made by the motion of matter, but is not itself matter. It is a change in an electric field, that's all. And of course "it exists". A change in an electric field transmits energy. But energy is not matter.

    CC's contribution does not address this, so far as I can see. He or she seems to be talking about something else.
     
  16. Spellbound Banned Valued Senior Member

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    Energy, which can be converted to matter and back, is based in reality.
     
  17. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Of course. But the fact energy can be converted to matter does not mean it is matter. There is a reason why we distinguish between the two, after all. If you allow yourself to think consciousnes is matter, in the next breath you will be saying consciousness is made of particles and then it will be another short step back to quantum woo.

    I think the notion of consciousness as arising from matter in motion, and thereby creating signals, is a more productive way to think of it. It seems to me consciousness is the subjective experience of mental activity, i.e. signals between nerves in the brain. There is no doubt at all that this activity is real: it can be physically detected as you rightly say. But these signals consist physically of changes in electrical potential and their result is the processing of information. Consciousness is an emergent property of neural activity, if you like.
     
  18. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    Things that can interact with or influence each other [and the conditions / activities they generate] are by virtue of that fact members of the same regulatory system (whether the latter is conceived as world, universe, the natural realm, "reality", etc). It's trivially the case that matter / energy, consciousness, the weather, nuclear fusion in stars, etc, are thereby components, residents, happenings, procedural events belonging to same system of governance.

    A computer that analyzes a data-structure (whether image file, sound file, etc) and correctly identifies it as the "Eiffel Tower" or "Johnny B. Goode" has, in a limited sense, become conscious or aware of what that information represents. But it's the kind of cognition that is bereft of that analysis of an image or music pattern also "showing itself" as a picture or sound. [IOW, a qualitative event interrupting the conventional nothingness of material or non-phenomenal existence, the unaware state which a decomposing mammal returns to after death.]

    Again: If that experience characteristic of consciousness is discarded or ignored (which tends to be case in science's functional analysis of how a brain works), then "mental" simply becomes a summarizing label for the specialized activities which result from yet another kind of mechanistic organization. ["Mechanistic" doesn't refer here to just classical machines with interlocking gears, but to functional structures in general which produce results from interacting components and manipulation of pre-existing agencies, forces, etc.]

    Your outer apprehension of a person named Sam detecting a table and moving around it, Sam identifying the table and that action, and Sam providing memory-based understandings of that situation (as symbols, thoughts, language)... Would be nothing more than the usual matter / energy proceedings transpiring in the universe (just a more complex or higher order of such). Sam's performance is apprehended / measured in the public or extrospective realm. Where there is no apprehension of or evidence of some micro-processes in a brain having a hidden, "internal dimension" to themselves consisting of an external world, dreams, and personal thoughts being displayed as assorted modes of experience. EXCEPT to that particular brain itself (and discounting its reports of such internal phantoms as unreliable in scientific context). A brain "processing visual information" should at least be vaguely akin to how a computer recognizes such a data-structure, with mechanistic routines being triggered in successful response to that feat of identification. Rather than a "showing of the image" interrupting the usual nothingness, as a potentially unnecessary add-on.

    This is why, in papers about the hard problem, it is the "easily resolved" problems of consciousness (understanding it as those mechanistic affairs above) that may instead be set aside, so that the term "consciousness" is narrowly used as a synonym for experience alone. Whatever is affiliated with internal qualitative manifestations as opposed to the outer appearances, measurements, technical descriptions, etc, used for referring to a manner of existence that is normally invisible when minus that feature of brain / mind (i.e., the external environment's representation and "showing" as those aforementioned phenomenal presentations, feelings, etc).
     
    Last edited: Jan 29, 2015
  19. Spellbound Banned Valued Senior Member

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    CC,

    The brain then is a self-operational computer allowing itself to choose its own inputs or stimulus and responses. Or does it really choose these stimuli and responses on its own account? I recently read the following article which states that complexity is the most natural or simple law of the universe. IOW, that the universe can be regarded as a vast machine churning out complex systems such as brains.

    When a computer is analyzing a data-structure it is following a predetermined "logic" invented by man. But when a brain is analyzing a data-structure it follows a logic invented by the universe. The question is how do we logically duplicate this ability? Well, we can study and then repeat nature or reality to create artificial intelligence.

    He points out that scientists are increasingly beginning to discuss how the basic structure of the universe seems to favor the creation of complexity. The large scale history of the universe strongly suggests a trend of increasing complexity: disordered energy states produce atoms and molecules, which combine to form suns and associated planets, on which life evolves. Life then seems to exhibit its own pattern of increasing complexity, with simple organisms getting more complex over evolutionary time until they eventually develop rationality and complex culture.

    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150123102221.htm
     
  20. Sarkus Hippomonstrosesquippedalo phobe Valued Senior Member

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    Spellbound, your insight is so deep and profound that it is giving me headaches.

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    Sure, but one often uses the notion of it being "matter" merely to distinguish it from being a non-material substance. I.e. They group anything that arises solely from matter, e.g. as an emergent property, as being "material" and thus "matter".
    Indeed, that is how I also think of it. But I also have no issue in deeming it material in nature, and thus also "of matter". But I would only really do this without clarification in discussion / opposition to the view of their being a non-material realm / soul / spirit etc.

    So, as CC infers, "matter" is a catch-all for the notion of physical matter and all that is driven by / emerges from it during the passage of time in accordance with the laws that govern the behaviour of the matter.
     
  21. Spellbound Banned Valued Senior Member

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    Thank you for your sarcasm. It really shows your ignorant stupidity.

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    My second comment may really have been simplistic but it was meant to make a point. My first comment was an attempt to answer a rather deep question about consciousness not being separate from matter and energy and therefore based in reality. This point was necessary because many are still ignorant about this. It is flawless truth.
     
  22. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    OK fair enough, if this is how "matter" is used in philosophy, then I withdraw my objection to it in the context of this kind of discussion.

    What bothers me chiefly is that there can be a danger of applying the same definition of matter in the context of science and reaching silly conclusions. The quantum woo we saw at the start of this thread makes me fear something of the sort might happen.
     
  23. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    If substance dualism is the concern here, then it's probably the case that it's indeed still popular among the masses. But in the physical sciences and the mainstream philosophical community it fell out of favor long ago. There are other "dualities" still hanging around like epiphenomenalism, double-aspect theory, and so forth -- but those dichotomies are taken to be distinctions occurring within a monistic worldview.

    Accordingly, I don't want to leave the impression that there will never be an eventual solution for the hard problem, or a sufficient explanation for experience that makes it fully belonging to the set of physicalist furniture, via revisions of conventional philosophical materialism and science's physics. One answer has been around for some time, and actually pre-dates Bertrand Russell, which the author of this linked article / opinion chooses as an origin (note Peirce's earlier quote further below, with historical contributions from Ernst Mach, Kant, and Hume also available but being overkill to provide): A Way Forward To Solve The Hard Problem Of Consciousness .

    In contrast to Chalmers' final sentence at the very bottom of this post that the "physical" does not entail phenomenal properties, this remedy does consist of fundamentally accepting that matter / energy [M/E] is more than measurements and outer relationships likewise expressed quantitatively, with additional abstract description. IOW, that M/E has an internal qualitative character which is what is recruited by brain processes for producing the phenomenal manifestations of extrospection and introspection.

    This solution might be construed as neutral monism or panprotoexperientialism, or essentially both amounting to a similar core idea. The older generation of philosophers and scientists that were only capable of knee-jerk rejections toward this general direction are gradually dying out and being replaced by newer generations that have less qualms about exploring it. [Such as Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi's recent attempt to wrestle it quantitatively into the information disciplines of science]. Thus, someday the hard problem may be rendered defunct.

    Charles Peirce: "Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness [qualitative events]." --Man's Glassy Essence

    David Chalmers: It is often noted that physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their relations to other entities, which are themselves characterized extrinsically, and so on. The intrinsic nature of physical entities is left aside. Some argue that no such intrinsic properties exist, but then one is left with a world that is pure causal flux (a pure flow of information) with no properties for the causation to relate. If one allows that intrinsic properties exist, a natural speculation given the above is that the intrinsic properties of the physical - the properties that causation ultimately relates - are themselves phenomenal properties. We might say that phenomenal properties are the internal aspect of information. This could answer a concern about the causal relevance of experience - a natural worry, given a picture on which the physical domain is causally closed, and on which experience is supplementary to the physical. The informational view allows us to understand how experience might have a subtle kind of causal relevance in virtue of its status as the intrinsic nature of the physical. This metaphysical speculation is probably best ignored for the purposes of developing a scientific theory, but in addressing some philosophical issues it is quite suggestive. --Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness

    Michael Lockwood: Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five senses, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity. --1998, p.88, “The Enigma of Sentience”, in Hameroff, S.R. et al, 1998, 83–95

    John Gregg: It is worth noting that, properly speaking, physicalism itself can be seen as a kind of functionalism. This is because at the lowest level, every single thing that physics talks about (electrons, quarks, etc.) is defined in terms of its behavior with regard to other things in physics. If it swims like an electron and quacks like an electron, its an electron. It simply makes no sense in physics to say that something might behave exactly like an electron, but not actually be one. Because physics as a field of inquiry has no place for the idea of qualitative essences, the smallest elements of physics are characterized purely in functional terms, as black boxes in a block diagram. What a photon is, is defined exclusively in terms of what it does, and what it does is (circularly) defined exclusively in terms of the other things in physics (electrons, quarks, etc., various forces, a few constants). Physics is a closed, circularly defined system, whose most basic units are defined functionally. Physics as a science does not care about the intrinsic nature of matter, whatever it is that actually implements the functional characteristics exhibited (and described so perfectly in our laws of physics) by the lowest level elements of matter. Thus physics itself is multiply realizable. --Functionalism: Can't we just say that consciousness depends on the higher-level organization of a given system?

    David Chalmers: Purely physical explanation is well-suited to the explanation of physical structures, explaining macroscopic structures in terms of detailed microstructural constituents; and it provides a satisfying explanation of the performance of functions, accounting for these functions in terms of the physical mechanisms that perform them. This is because a physical account can entail the facts about structures and functions: once the internal details of the physical account are given, the structural and functional properties fall out as an automatic consequence. But the structure and dynamics of physical processes yield only more structure and dynamics, so structures and functions are all we can expect these processes to explain. The facts about experience cannot be an automatic consequence of any physical account, as it is conceptually coherent that any given process could exist without experience. Experience may arise from the physical, but it is not entailed by the physical. The moral of all this is that you can't explain conscious experience on the cheap. --Facing Up To The Problem Of Consciousness
     

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