Consciousness; a logical consequence of life

Thanks for the links, Billy. I'll have to go back and read them in more detail when I get settled.

The “real-time simulation of the visual world” is via the same mechanism used in night dreams, so this proves the concept. We only ever see but the inside of our heads.

Some “illusions” occur, such as when I thought there was a fire at the base of a sign from far away, but when I got closer saw it was some ribbons flying about.

Wish I still had the Sciam link, but I agree to no faster than ‘c’, as they claimed by “communication”.

Dennet’s book is full of great stuff, but he ended up explaining everything but consciousness.

More another time. Just slept for 14 hours, enjoying that virtual reality which employs the same simulation model as when awake. I once lucidly inspected a wood railing real close, and it was perfect. Then an obvious ‘mistake’ of some walking green triangles went by, on the deck, posing as bugs. Another funny thing was that, soon thereafter, a tornado was approaching, but I wasn’t worried at all since I knew it was a dream. It veered away, as I directed it to do.

 

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I read the “Genuine Free Will is Possible” post.

Great idea, especially the part about symbols being able to violate physical reality.

The probabilistic ‘free will’ would pretty much do what the ‘fixed’ will’ would do, most of the time, but for the probabilistic variances close to the most likely point, along with some rare, far out things that might end up seeming out of character at some point.

So, how do we unfix the will? We don’t, but learning and experience provide for a new, yet still [fairly] fixed will with a wider repertoire.

“
Originally Posted by PhilosopherKnight
...But the bottom line is that man's will is not free.
Essay on Free Will:
http://www.ethicalfocus.org/platform/49-ethics/99-free-will-the-last-great-lie

My take is similar (but I now accept a modicum of free will, as proposed by Billy T):

What is the “secret” of human behavior, one that’s really so much the saving grace that we may even keep it from ourselves rather than very far into it try to delve? What is it that should be so confidential, classified, and undisclosed—its potential kept under wraps, so very contra; informally: hush-hush; formally: sub rosa?

Well, it’s a revelation of splendor, one that’s often good to surrender but is also very well to remember. Is the will free to will one’s actions otherwise? Can antecedent conditions be ignored? Can the self be an unmoved mover? Not really, but… and what of those tendencies of evo’s realm that have been imprinted on one’s genetic film—those of temperament, role preferences, emotions, responses, and even one’s most revered moral choices—those invoices from which one rejoices?

Well, these are not choices at all in of any free will voices. In essence, from the basis of one and from all that one has become from life’s total behavioral reactions, there are probabilities of actions—some patterns that are very likely and some patterns highly unlikely. Is free will a necessary fiction, a kind of a religion? No and yes if it’s to provide an essential berth for one’s morality, meaning, and worth.

So, then, with this “free will” become, one might then succumb to systematic deception about one’s causal connection to that of nature, a roadblock, a detour that’s neither possible, necessary, nor desirable. The enemies to these “free will” motifs would be the mythical cultural beliefs that explain behaviors and feelings in terms of unknowable forces and beings. But, to protect one’s moral virtues should one still believe oneself’s purview to be as an ultimately responsible agent, lo—a self creation ex nihilo, a god-like, miniature first cause who chooses without it being determined by one’s own muses?

Well, maybe, but, nay, really not, nil, for there is no contra-causal free will. What the good then of this fix we’re in? Such it is then that we can gain a measure of peace rather than the anger of resentment’s crease when someone does or says something ‘bad’, even those close relatives you once had. For the civil-law-breakers and all those ungiving takers we’ll no longer incarcerate for punishment, being so irate at the jail’s bait, but so that society will be protected and that they might emerge corrected from the swill of a prison mill, fulfilled with a new unfree will that points more toward goodness, or at least away from badness. Thus, the action of metaphysical justification for a total retribution then greatly softens, a relief from the stress, so often, for it’s no longer induced from the abuse produced. Really? Truly.

Indeed, we become less self-conscious, more playful, less noxious, more gracious, less callow, and less likely to wallow in the sorrow that is so hollow and shallow in its excessive self-blame, pride, envy, or resentment—now all put aside. Aren’t we changing the will here as we go? Yes but mostly no, for the will must ever follow what we know. Then we are learning—the only hope for larger earnings from the will’s then wider yearnings! Yes, overturning.

What if to learning we are averse? What a curse! Might as well call the hearse. So, then, all in all, though a tempt, it is that we humans are not exempt from the laws of physics—a preempt although we’ve been wired to make the attempt—a seeming violation by nature of its own universal law and structure. No, it’s not a violation I would call, for science still did tell us all. It’s all part of the structure; one can never cheat Mother Nature. Hail, then, to the physic.

Well, it’s not so bad, is it? Although we can never will the will, its motives ever our intent to fulfill; it is that we have no free will. True, plus we can expand the will’s horizoning through our broader learning’s wisening. Yes, learn today and by tomorrow, say, the will may have a different sway. I wouldn’t want it any other way, for then I wouldn’t be me—my screenplay. What other ways can we improve the play? Well, we have patience and delay, for we don’t have to act right away—until a more creative solution appears?

(as written a few months ago)

 

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To SciWriter: Thanks for reading my somewhat long essay: “Genuine Free Will is Possible” and of course it pleases me that you thought it has some “great ideas,” however, it only states that free will need not conflict with the laws of physic, not that it is anything more than a universal illusion.

As my other link in post 20 shows, in general “we” (our conscious selves) are the last to know what the not accessible to consciousness parts of the brain have decided, I tend to think genuine free will is only an illusion – a presumption that “we” are deciding, making choices, etc. we make as we are ignorant of the facts that that other, not accessible to consciousness brain areas of the brain, has already decided/ chosen/ etc. and is only informing the brain in which consciousness exist of its decisions / choices.

In fact even my “Genuine Free Will is Possible” escape from the laws of physics MAY be false – a trick of misrepresentation. I.e. The RTS is in some senses a computational program very probably executing in parietal brain, but most programs use deterministic logic, so their computed results are deterministically achieved too; However, not all clear, unambiguous statement have true values (a definite, well defined deterministic result)*.

Also there is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem which may destroy this expectation of deterministic results from a deterministic program. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems)

Some might suggest “fuzzy logic” also can help for an escape from a deterministic logic. I know little of it but think there is no hope there, from what I do know about “fuzzy logic.” It is my understanding that "fuzzy logic" is fully deterministic logical code that simulates some uncertainity.

*My favorite example of this lack of truth value to clear statements is a self referencing statement net such as:

(1) Statement (2) is false.
(2) Statement (1) is false.

Despite being simple clear assertions, neither statement is either true or false.

But in the brain, there could be dozens of statements in the unstable self referencing net and how it "settles down" to a conclusion would be much like "random free will" that quantum mechanics in the microtubles could also provide.

Your post 22 is difficult to follow for me even reading it twice, but I think I understand some of it. It seems to be text you wrote for other purpose some time ago. I gather from it, that you, like me, tend to think free will is only an illusion, but also like me, you are no longer completely sure it is only illusion.

 

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The alternative-opposite to 'determined' would be 'undetermined', which would have made us air-heads, doing or saying any old thing based on nothing at all. Obviously, that would not have worked out well, and so it doesn't happen, at least for the most part. This other shoe dropping as the other, scarier option might give some pause to the advocates of free will.

I'm sure there can be 'ties', in which one shirt or tie can wear as well as another, but still, we might pick the closest one, or the one that we think is cleaner.

As for no air-heading, I do expect some jokes about some SciForum members, but again that gets down to slow learning, learning disabilities, or strong emotions blocking the rational-logical flow (emotions have a direct and separate path into consciousness). Wider learning makes for better 'choices' by the will.

 

The corpus callosum is a structure of the mammalian brain in the longitudinal fissure that connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres. It also facilitates communication between the two hemispheres. It is the largest white matter structure in the brain, consisting of 200-250 million contralateral axonal projections. It is a wide, flat bundle of axons beneath the cortex. Much of the inter-hemispheric communication in the brain is conducted across the corpus callosum. (Wiki)

When the corpus callosum between the brain hemispheres is cut, along with some other connecting areas, to grant relief to those having hourly epileptic seizures, the right and left hand can then work in opposition to each other, neither knowing what the other is doing. Sometimes, one hand will even do something ‘bad’, such as choking one’s neck, but the right hand will come to the rescue, as in ‘my hand is killing me!’.

There are other examples, too, but, in short, it is seen that the person now has two minds, two consciousnesses and two selves. Of course, the brain stem still sends common signals to both hemispheres and to the visual system and to some others that still inform both sides.

This shows, yet again, that the brain is the source of consciousness, mind and self.


We seem to identify with the 'I' of consciousness, which is the same as the way we use 'I' in the English language, yet, we often talk to ourselves, which, I suppose, is the higher, more global part of the brain, saying, to some more lower or simpleton area, "What the Hell were you thinking?"

 

Hmmm, I agree with the thread title Consciousness is a logical and natural consequence of life, but I think this spiderweb of spread has taken the concept in the typical directions.

Consciousness is nothing more than a living things awareness of what is around it. The requirements of life to gather energy, grow and continue living require consciousness of the environment. In humans and many other animals there is a feedback loop - after all we and parts of us exist in the environment we are able to be aware of ourselves. Even an amoeba doesn't try to eat it's own tail.....

Awareness, consciousness, life...

 

As far as we've not really gotten…

How does “what it is like” become of the neurological states correlating to it?

It 'must' be that information, neurological in this case, gives rise to conscious knowledge of it, kind of an ‘it’ (realness and knowing) from ‘bit’ (information). This is where we are led. What about the indefinite quantum states that collapse into the real? This also seems as ‘it’ from ‘bit’.

We are going no place really fast?

 

Perhaps we should move on to life, of how the inanimate becomes animated. I know, we’re just trading one tough question for another, but life did come about before consciousness did. I don’t pretend to know all of what I am talking about. I’m counting on other posters to pick up on any accidental sparks of insight herein:

LIFE EXPLAINED (not really)

It is, of course, that atoms and molecules make it up, through a casual nexus of physical-chemical reactions; however, this observation cannot be equated to an “explanation”, for it seems not to be plainly reductive, and so we must delve deeper, for there may very well be a background behind what the chemicals do. According to the quantum realm, “matter” is only composed of potentiality—it only becomes matter when it’s “real-ized” by interaction.

In a stable configuration of matter, such as in the inanimate, all the quantum uncertainties are effectively statistically averaged out, this thus ever being deterministic; but in the case of the statically unstable but dynamically stable configurations, the “lively” features of the underlying quantum structure have a chance to surface to the macroscopic level; that is, to life, ad I wish I knew how.

The electric dipole moment of biomolecules might be the ordering parameter for the corresponding macro-quantum system, and so this could result in a change in quality for that macro configuration. There is the particle and there is the wave—either one forced on us by our observations, being jointly known as the ‘wavicle’, all three states of which are probably truly not the actual reality.

There are, strictly speaking, no objects that are identical with themselves over time—the temporal sequence remains open; nature is often no longer seen as clockwork, but only as a “possibility gestalt”, the world occurring anew each moment. The deeper reality from which the world arises, in each case, acts as a unity in the sense of an indivisible “potentiality”, which can realize itself in many possible ways, it not being a strict sum of the partial states.

What remains unchanged over time are certain properties that find expression in the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, electrical charge, etc., these necessarily being closer to the basis of all. It appears to us, though, that the world consists of parts that have continued from “a moment ago”, and thus still retain their identity in time; yet, matter really only appears secondarily as a congealed potentiality, a congealed gestalt, as it were. Physical phenomena may not made of basic building blocks but are perhaps made of “elementary processors”, which are complex-valued field “operators” that depend on time and location. These generate certain overlappings of correlated multi-dimensional wave fields that are propagating through time, fields of possibility, whose intensity is a measure of the probability of an object-like realization, this intensity being very sensitive to the relative phase of the overlapping partial waves.

There are no point masses then, but only smudged particles, such as we know of in the space-filling representations of the distribution of electrons in the shells of atoms—the ‘cloud’. There is a relationship structure that arises not only from the manifold and the complicated interactions of the imagined building blocks of matter, but also one that is substantially more inherent and holistic, again such as we see in quantum physics. So, there is form before substance, relationality before materiality. It’s hard to imagine pure relationships existing without a material substrate, but, consider electromagnetism: it fills space—without a material substrate, or consider a music CD—its singers and instruments encoded in a relationship structure. The material CD is only a carrier, of secondary importance, its information being primary, an analogy to particles and waves’ descriptions. Impressions of realizations are left in our 3D world by the gestalt that “lives” in the multi-dimensional spaces of quantum superpositional possibility.

Quantum systems of many quantum states are not so much systems as they are holistically differentiated process structures. However, considering them as systems, they are complex, meaning here that such systems cannot be reduced to simpler systems without breaking connections; thus there can be no clear reductions, for, as in chaos theory, there are embedded instabilities—and if we disregard even the tiniest correlations then we may severely distort the result. We can no longer just analyze the parts but must try to use much more sophisticated statistical methods, these being more than the simple probability to which we are accustomed. Waves can reinforce, weaken, or even cancel out, this all being a kind of generation of partial disconnectedness by intermediate extinctions, such as in the way a biological organism forms from a single cell by successive cell divisions, which do not occur by parting, but by repeated formation of semi-separating cells walls; however, this is only a very rough analogy.

Via metabolism, life forms have a sufficiently powerful energy pump, one that could conceivably generate states of thermal disequilibirium in molecular systems embedded in certain substrates that would excite certain low-frequency collective modes of vibration with great power, perhaps via mechanisms similar to Bose-Einstein condensation, the electric dipoles coming into play as an ordering parameter; however, this is not a conclusive, direct connection. Information appears only in the animate, and is furthermore exchanged, the meanings somehow combining to make sense in some nonreductive process—the relational reality of life happening at this semantical level of information exchange.

Life is not mindless; it is inspired; it’s meanings cannot be discovered by observation, but only by participation. Life’s entities embrace one another: cell, organism, species, and biotope. A living creature is more like a poem, revealing further dimensions and expressing new properties at every level of organization: letter, word, sentence and [uni]verse.

Somehow, perhaps, quantum states that continue on further in the quantum superposition have reached more efficiency and effectiveness, with all the paths being tried out, just as in the 95% efficient photosynthesis methods seen, and so that’s what collapses out of it, the more productive paths that last, one usually with the least amount of effort, too.

Or not, if reductive.