The Human Brain Is Incapable Of Understanding Anything

Discussion in 'Alternative Theories' started by Steve Klinko, Apr 29, 2021.

  1. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    No I am serious. You obviously have calculated the mushy stuff in our skull is not enough to carry out our activities

    Further you have carried out a calculation leading you to determine a brain
    QUOTE If your Physical Brain had to do this without the Visual Experience it would certainly need to be as big as a Refrigerator UNQUOTE

    So how many blind people have you seen getting around with a refrigerator size brain?

    Average adult brain 1,300 to 1,400 gram

    Did you estimate or work out mass of one the size of a refrigerator?

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  3. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    You are the one saying the conscious experience is NOT in the neural activity, yet you offer no proof of this, just your say-so. You are the one saying we would need brains the size of refrigerator. Yet we obviously don't have brains the size of fridges, yet we still have conscious experience. You are the one who is being incoherent.
     
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  5. Steve Klinko Registered Senior Member

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    I'm saying that you are just Speculating that Consciousness is 100% a function of our Brains. There is no evidence of that in Science. The only things Science can study are the Neural Correlates of Consciousness, and Science has made great progress with that in the last hundred years. But measuring Neural Activity is not the same thing as measuring actual Conscious Activity. This is just a fact of Reality. Show me how something like the Experience of Redness is a function of Brain Activity?
     
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  7. Steve Klinko Registered Senior Member

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    This is a Thought Experiment. The Refrigerator reference is to help you think, but it looks like it might not be working for you. First, just imagine not having the Visual Experience that you have, even though all the Neurons are still normally firing for Visual Experience. Do you really Believe that the Blind Neural Activity is going to still let you See?

    Blind people don't really get around so well do they?
     
  8. Steve Klinko Registered Senior Member

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    I said if we didn't have Conscious Experiences we would need Refrigerator sized Brains. Since we have Conscious Experiences we don't need Refrigerator sized Brains. This is a Thought Experiment. I always say nobody Knows what Conscious Experience is. I don't Know what it is, and you don't Know what it is. The irrefutable Logic in Speculating that maybe Consciousness is not in the Neurons, but rather that Consciousness Connects with the Neurons, is the fact that Science has not been able to show how Consciousness is in the Neurons even after trying to prove this for a hundred years. Explain to me how something like the Experience of Redness is in the Neural Activity. Redness is a Conscious Experience and only Exists in the Conscious Mind. Redness (plus all other Experiences) is some other kind of Phenomenon than any other Phenomenon Science has discovered. Start from the Conscious Experience itself. What is that Redness that you have always Experienced? It isn't an Illusion. It is a Real Phenomenon that exists in the Manifest Universe that we live in.
     
  9. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    CAPTCHAs have to be constantly upgraded as bots become more adept at interpreting them. The "simple" NASA drone that's flying around on Mars is analyzing the data versions of camera images in order to "perceive" its environment. We have robots and autonomous vehicles creating much more sophisticated information maps or "p-zombie" representations allowing them to navigate through obstacle courses.

    IOW, you're underestimating what blindsight, "deaf hearing" and "feeling-less tactility" processing in smart machines or p-zombies in general can accomplish, both today and especially in the future.

    Even in the brain, there are equivalent dynamic data patterns or NCCs for the experiences we are having that are doing the actual legwork. (At least in the epiphenomenalism-like context that science usually operates under of allowing no immaterial causes.) For investigators, it would be not the experience of "green" or "pain" that causes us to report such and react a certain way, but the NCC configurations as the causal source.

    I personally feel that epiphenomenalism is a stretch -- the human body shouldn't be aware of experiences if they have no return effect. And consequently it would be an astonishing coincidence enduring for millions of years that neural data structures causing us to report a fictional, phenomenal character of the world also happen to really have those applicable, impotent manifestations reliably parallel to them. But EP helps emphasize that these neural correlates are sophisticated enough to yield those body behaviors/responses. In theory, little should prevent technological substrates from achieving the same complexity, as well augmenting those machines with "fictional" narrative tendencies if the same parallelism doesn't occur for them (i.e., designing them to pretend to have experiences).

    As an alternative to epiphenomenalism, I turn to Russellian monism. Data configurations can potentially have phenomenal character associated with them because that is the intrinsic nature of matter (the latter is converted to artificial, abstract description when stripped of the original outer appearances and quantitative properties of perception and instrument detection, anyway).

    Thus, in "Russellian materialism" a neural correlate is extrinsically the "biologically described stuff" and intrinsically the "qualia manifested stuff" -- both can be treated as causal since they're just different sides of the same coin.

    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, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains." --Time Reborn
    - - -

    Michael Lockwood (the philosopher, not the other guitarist): "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 sense, 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.

    This idea has appealed to me ever since I first encountered it in the writings of Bertrand Russell (1927); I shall therefore refer to it as 'Russellian materialism'. The view antedates Russell, however. Its clearest nineteenth-century exponent was the mathematician William Clifford (1878), who influenced Sir Arthur Eddington (1928), among others." --The Enigma of Sentience
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    Russellian Monism: . . . physics describes what mass and charge do, e.g., how they dispose objects to move toward or away from each other, but not what mass and charge are. Thus, [Bertrand] Russell writes the following about the events physics describes: "All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent." (Russell 1959: 18)

    To understand the first core thesis, structuralism about physics, consider David J. Chalmers’s description of how physical theory characterizes its basic entities:

    …physical theory only characterizes its basic entities relationally, in terms of their causal and other relations to other entities. Basic particles, for instance, are largely characterized in terms of their propensity to interact with other particles. Their mass and charge is specified, to be sure, but all that a specification of mass ultimately comes to is a propensity to be accelerated by certain forces, and so on. Each entity is characterized by its relation to other entities, and so on forever. …The picture of the physical world that this yields is that of a giant causal flux, but the picture tells us nothing about what all this causation relates. Reference to the proton is fixed as the thing that causes interactions of a certain kind, that combines in certain ways with other entities, and so on; but what is the thing that is doing the causing and combining? As Russell (1927a) notes, this is a matter about which physical theory is silent. (Chalmers 1996: 153)

    As Lockwood stated, this conception was also around in prototype form before Russell articulated it. The following is circa 1892.

    Charles Sanders 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". --Man's Glassy Essence​
     
    Last edited: May 4, 2021
  10. river

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    All based on the Physical .

    The physical core of the Atom is physical .
     
  11. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    ????
     
  12. river

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    What is your question ?
     
  13. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    "????" indicates bafflement as to what you were specifically referring to or what your point was.

    EDIT: Never mind. This futile dialogue should not be consuming any more space in the thread.
     
  14. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    --- deleted duplicate post---
     
  15. river

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    Agreed

    Carry on .
     
  16. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    Explain to me how it's not in the neural activity.

    Red is the name we have given to the frequency/frequencies of light that the rods and cones in our eyes respond to in the 650 nm range. The typical person has three color receptors in their eyes, these correspond to what we call primary colors. There is nothing mysterious about it.
     
  17. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    Where is this consciousness if not in the brain?
     
  18. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    I think this be one of them strange creatures Captain. He thinks people who don't exist, gods, mess with our minds arrrh

    We go about our business hauling keel but it ain't us 'cause we are part of the Universe and somefing he call Kosmic brain is telling me to do the hauling Captain

    Gives me the creeps Captain. One day Kosmic brain will tell me to toss him overboard to check the keel and sail away forgetting he down there

    He can take my Kosmic brain w've 'im

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  19. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Obviously, not having a refrigerator size brain is to blame

    I can see it in the text books now Scientists are building the world's first refrigerator size brain to help blind people

    They are working alongside Scientists building a matchbox size nuclear power plant to supply electrical power

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  20. gmilam Valued Senior Member

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    Haven't read where he's mentioned gods... but his consciousness argument is very reminiscent of the ever popular "soul" argument.
     
  21. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Yes exactly what I meant Captain. Perhaps he might be a step down from god and into the mystical spiritual we are all one with the Universe and our small puny brain gets its power from the Cosmic brain to which we are all connected

    My 2 cents

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  22. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    What else could it be? Other organs?
    What else could it be a function of? Our brain is our processor, I don't believe our spleen, or our skin is involved in the 'experience of redness', my money is on the brain.
     
  23. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Explain to me what a Experience of Redness is

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