A simple conundrum

Suppose I decide to raise arm. I do so and the arm is raised. But how is that even possible? How can the mental event of intending to move one's arm cause the physical event of the arm raising up? Are not all physical events only caused by preceding physical events? (causal closure). Whence this assumption that we can mentally cause physical events to happen? And can we live our lives without assuming they do?

 

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This illustrates the imaginary problems one can get into with a Cartesian duality model of the mind.

There is no hard and fast distinction between “mental” and “physical” events. Your mental process are patterns of electrochemical signals, as are the motor nerve impulses that cause your arm to rise. So there is no issue here.

 

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The answer to your question is: The brain (and cells) create "Action_potentials"
I don't dare post more, but check it out.

A general description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential
A more in-depth description: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK538143/#

 

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Let's suppose that instead of intentionally raising your arm you experience a sudden myoclonic spasm which causes your arm to raise up. Supposedly that involuntary experience is as much of a pattern of synaptic firing in your brain as is you intentionally raising your arm. How is it that there is a mental experience of us raising our arm intentionally while otoh we have no mental experience of intentionally raising our arm with the spasm? The mental decision to move your arm and the synaptic firing moving it can't be the same thing can they?

 

One thing that bewilders me about any sort of synaptic reductionism to explain mental events is how what seems to be the same unit (synapses and action potentials in neurons) can generate such a huge variety of mental experiences. From vision to hearing to touch to taste to smell to language to pain to memory to thought to dreaming to bodily movement and the whole mixed bag of different feelings and emotions that make us human. How does such a manifold diversity of mental operations and experiences arise from the same basic unit of synaptic firing?

 

Of course not. You have a pattern of neural activity in the brain which is involved in the process of thinking about something, and then, separately, you have a motor command to raise the arm, which is a distinct nerve impulse set in train as the outcome of the thinking process. Spasms can be motor impulses triggered by other processes.

 

Since a philosophical zombie sports a similar "will" or issues commands to its limbs (all mechanism and no inner appearances), one would have to resort to experiential content alone causing the body to do something, in order to potentially pose a problem.

Like a person speaking or writing about the green of spring leaves, the odor of blossoms, the taste of garlic, the sharp pain of a thorn pressing against the skin and so forth. Note that this would refer to the manifestations themselves or the "phenomenal meaning" of such terms -- and not scientific descriptions of color as EM frequencies, odor as chemical composition, etc.

One could get around the causality of qualia -- of brain activity being affected by them so that it has knowledge of them -- by proclaiming that there are neural correlates in the brain devoted to maintaining the fiction or pretense that electrochemical processes possess such intrinsic states (that are publicly inaccessible). Evolution introduced these personal myths for some functional or beneficiary reason.

However, apart from the most extreme devotees of eliminativism or illusionism, it would seem a far-fetched conspiracy attributed to biological processes, that we would all be so well coordinated in our beliefs about non-existent, private phantasms.

And then there's the introspective fact that we can each verify those qualitative properties as presenting themselves. Again, only the most dogmatic or demented extreme phenomenal nihilists would be in denial of the manifestations of color, sound, etc blatantly showing themselves in their own consciousness.

Of course, in my view... Primitive, intrinsic states would exist prior to brain organization or the emergence of a psychological level (and be ontological rather than mental or psychological). But the regular crowd would construe them as mental events even at the most base stratum, and thereby why they entertain panpsychism.

Lee Smolin: The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness[1] whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains. --Time Reborn

- - - footnote - - -

[1] The phenomenal manifestations alone, actually -- not cognitive abilities like identification, understanding, intelligence, memory recall. Consciousness is an umbrella term, and using its generality merely obfuscates the item or area of interest which one is narrowly addressing.
_

 

I think that Anil Seth raises a very interesting concept of what consciousness is and how it manifests as a systemic "expectation" and shifts its neural chemistry to deal with specific conditions that seem to present themselves.

In AI an example might be preselecting a word processing program from a mathematical calculus program, as required by the type of information to be processed.

IMO, this also results in what we call "selective attention", which allows us to focus on specific details of the incoming information, without being overwhelmed by the total amount of information present.

He coined the term "controlled hallucination" to describe that the brain is a prediction engine.

Anil Seth: "We predict ourselves into existence".

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

more.... https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2022/march/being-you-new-science-consciousness-anil-seth#

Would that model answer your question of how the brain can anticipate what specific data it is supposed to process......???

 

I suppose. But it complicates the issue of mental causation. Do you think you raising your arm is hallucinated as well?

 

Do you view the process of thinking as causing the motor command or only seeming to?

 

Eh? Causing. But this seems so obvious that I must be missing some problem that you perceive in all this. What is the problem?

 

Just to reiterate the OP, the idea that the mind can effect physical events, as in causing one's arm to raise up, is a problem in that the mind is commonly viewed as non-physical. How can a non-physical entity cause physical events? More specifically, how can thoughts which do not have any physical properties like spatial extention or materiality or shape cause events that do have these physical properties? I take it that you do not view the mind as non-physical. That it is as physical as the brain is. Is that your view?

 

In anticipation of the claim of identity theory, that mental states are identical to physical states of the brain, I submit the following objection brought up by Hilary Putman. It is called the argument from multirealizability. I know. Big word huh? But the argument is really simple and concise:

"The most famous objection to type identity theory was developed by Putnam. He argues that mental properties are not identical to physical properties because the same mental property can be related to different physical properties. For example, the brain states that relate to pain may well be different in different species, in humans and birds, say, but pain is the same mental state. If this is true, there are creatures who, when they are in pain, have different physical properties from us when we are in pain. Therefore, ‘being in pain’ cannot be exactly the same thing as having a particular physical property. This is the argument from ‘multiple realizability’.

As Putnam presents it, this is an empirical argument, but it is a very plausible one. It becomes yet more plausible when we consider other mental states and nonterrestrial species. If there are aliens, given that they evolved completely separately from us, if they have mental states, it is extremely unlikely that they will have the same physical states as us. But according to type identity theory, to have a particular mental state is just to have a particular physical state. So the theory is making a very implausible prediction."

A second but similar objection was raised by Saul Kripke, making a case against identity theory based on logical necessity:

"The argument can also be rephrased as an a priori argument from conceivability:

1. It is conceivable, and therefore possible, for a being with quite a different physical constitution from us to have the same thoughts or sensations.
2. But it is inconceivable, and therefore impossible, for something both to have and not have a certain property.
3. Therefore, mental properties can’t be the same as physical properties."

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3-euw1-ap-pe-ws4-cws-documents.ri-prod/9781138793934/A22014/materialism/Objection to type identity theory.pdf

 

I had thought that should have been clear from post 2.

 

OK
so
I'm thinking of a chicken with it's head cut off running around spraying blood everywhere
no brain?

 

Given how much of Mike's regular behavior persisted, makes one wonder what the rest of its brain had been good for.

Mike the Headless Chicken
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken

Mike the Headless Chicken was a male Wyandotte chicken that lived for 18 months after his head had been cut off, surviving because most of his brain stem remained intact and it did not bleed to death due to a blood clot. After the loss of his head, Mike achieved national fame until his death in March 1947.

video link --> Zombie Rooster

 

It certainly is! The proof lies in the "fake hand" experiment, where the brain assimilates a fake hand as the real thing. Optical illusions are hallucinations where the brain makes a best guess of reality.

But does it matter? The brain produces "action potentials" that act on the muscle fibers and trigger a physical response. Not all intentional physical action is precise, but relies on a "best guess", and "best muscle control".

And it appears that the simplest organisms like single cells can also have the ability to communicate and relay data, making the cell a tiny data processor (unconscious brain) as well.

This can demonstrated with the quasi-intelligent behavior of the multi-nucleic single-celled "slimemold" that already displays a high level of "problem solving" survival skills.

This cytoplasmic blob is capable of astounding feats of "best guesses and logical behaviors". A slime mold can "walk" (pseudopodia), solve mazes, draw maps, tell time, react to temperature. And, in nature, we can see them do it.

Human body-cells also communicate from cell to cell, human brain driven ability to walk is still performed at the cellular level by the same cellular communication system as a slime-mold, but is triggered by an evolved brain that controls the production of action potentials.

 

Not sure why a dualist perspective must creep in here. Mental could simply be a term we use to describe brain processes from a particular perspective. Just because we call this interior modeling "mental" does not force us to declare some basic ontological difference from physical processes. A brain seen from outside is a collection of physical processes; seen from within, such processes present as mental. Mental becomes this umbrella term for brain processes as drafted or modeled by that brain itself.

A fine-grained MRI shows someone's C-fibers firing. That someone's brain shows "beige, with small black dots." We are really just dealing with two different sorts of narrative of an experience.

 

But how can there be an inside view of the brain at all? It is afterall a purely physical blob of cells and neurons and blood vessels and connective tissue with nothing more than an outside view. There cannot be another view to physical objects insofar as we are agreeing that to be physical they can have nothing other than an outside or objective view. The inside or subjective view is totally dark and silent and intangible, While events are indeed happening in it, like synapses firing and cells dividing and molecules interacting, all those events are also totally physical too and so are happening totally non-consciously or "in the dark". How is it then that there IS this view of what it is like to be brain? How, iow, does a mass of physical matter acquire an inside view of itself and the world in general in the form of mental properties like thought and intention and feelings and memories and sensations? I ask this rhetorically to make clear the fundamental distinction between brain and mind. One is physical and only has an outside view and the other is mental and only has an inside view. One is the object and the other is the subject.

 

How should it feel to be an autonomous biological machine if not like "this"?