Is dualism the key to understanding human culture and consciousness?

[swat4life]

But I wasn't assuming everyone else knows as little as you about what you chose to cut 'n paste...

Have you actually met Hameroff? Watched one his presentations? You would understand why I would say he is indeed just a showman. Putting it politely.

I could be as specific as you like about his bogus ways.

Here is a starter for you, the kind of thing he throws into his slide shows, where the casual listener wouldn't know whether he is talking fact or speculation.

http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/consciousevents_files/fig04.gif

A tubulin dipole. Perhaps you could give us your opinion of whether this is fact or speculation.

Can you point to any peer-reviewed research which support your claim that

i) Hameroff's work is "entertainment not science..."
ii) Hameroff has bogus ways
iii)Hameroff is a showman

Otherwise we are back to where the conversation began. Someone on an internet forum rendering a glaringly subjective "opinion" about the peer-reviewed, Accredited-university-supported work of another scientist. For all I know, the guy took your place on the high school rugby team and you've hated him ever since. Or, perhaps you are a fiscal liberal and he's a conservative and you hate him for it. Or, perhaps you don't like names that begin with H.

See where I am going with this? This is how conscientious thinkers - especially those who are aware of how the brain processes information selectively based on pre-existing biases and perceptions - evaluate sensory input. (See Brown's work, "PHYSIOLOGICAL PARAMETERS AND LEARNING" out of RMIT University, Australia concerning this claim).

I don't accept anything as fact without careful consideration. Furthermore, I have little patience for particularly bold, subjective opinions that aren't at least substantiated by some sort of research. So when you make scientifically undocumented statements like the few enumerated above - particularly those that seek to attack both the character and validity of another scientist's work - it should be clear for you to see how it would raise an RAS red-flag to the discerning eye. Therefore, I'll leave you to convince the other readers. Perhaps they've different standards than I do.

Enjoy...

 

[apeiron]

You sure don't know Hameroff. He loves being attacked because it at least gives him publicity.

I have actually been pointed about him in print a few times. Yet he is still keen enough to keep speaking to me. He is a likeable type in that way.

If you are a fan of Hameroff, checked his latest? Here's the link he emailed me just a couple of week's back.

Friends and colleagues

The conscious pilot - Dendritic synchrony moves through the brain to mediate
consciousness has been published in Journal of Biological Physics
and is available online through Springer Open Access
http://www.springerlink.com/content/?k=10.1007/s10867-009-9148-x

 

[madness]

This is the type of stuff I was talking about in my earlier posts:





And as far as descartes goes Joe is right again, the famous "Cogito, ergo sum" argument.
It would be better to use the PROPER Descartes argument for positing the soul.

I believe the Descartes argument for the soul is like this:

It is possible to imagine my mind without my body.
Descartes concluded that since you can IMAGINE your mind separate from your body they must be separate entities. Your mind can't be your body. Because if you imagined yourself without your body you would also be imagining yourself without your mind.

I think it's pretty clever. When taking this into consideration though you have to go into what it means and not just skim the surface.

That's what I said! I said that my experiences exist whether or not my brain exists, hence my experiences are not my brain.
JoeDawg - even if a causation is found between brain activity and mind, it doesn't matter. My point is that mind and brain are not the same. The p-zombie stuff may be standard, but it illustrates the point that mind and brain are different things. At the moment, I believe the study of how an experience can emerge from purely physical phenomena is beyond the realm of science. Even if we pinpointed a chemical reaction or a neural process which caused an experience, we would have no idea how the experience came to be through the physical interactions. There is a missing link between physical processes and the resultant subjective experience.

 

[apeiron]

[Even if we pinpointed a chemical reaction or a neural process which caused an experience, we would have no idea how the experience came to be through the physical interactions. There is a missing link between physical processes and the resultant subjective experience.]

This would just mean that you failed to model the causality involved. You have merely identified some correlation (I drink beer/I feel drunk).

But that failure does not automatically rule out future success.

 

[Sorry!]

That's what I said! I said that my experiences exist whether or not my brain exists, hence my experiences are not my brain.
JoeDawg - even if a causation is found between brain activity and mind, it doesn't matter. My point is that mind and brain are not the same. The p-zombie stuff may be standard, but it illustrates the point that mind and brain are different things. At the moment, I believe the study of how an experience can emerge from purely physical phenomena is beyond the realm of science. Even if we pinpointed a chemical reaction or a neural process which caused an experience, we would have no idea how the experience came to be through the physical interactions. There is a missing link between physical processes and the resultant subjective experience.

You seemed to have just selectively quoted me. The morning/evening star is a great example of how this argument does not lead to valid conclusions. Your jumping the gun by asserting the soul exist with no proof aside from 'nothing else explains this'

 

[JoeDawg]

JoeDawg - even if a causation is found between brain activity and mind, it doesn't matter. My point is that mind and brain are not the same.

Ok, but we have a whole lot better handle on what brain is. What the mind is, is open for debate. So you can believe what you like, but unless you have something concrete to back up your opinion... well... whose going to care.

The p-zombie stuff may be standard, but it illustrates the point that mind and brain are different things. At the moment, I believe the study of how an experience can emerge from purely physical phenomena is beyond the realm of science.

You are free to believe whatever you like, but given our lack of knowledge with regards to neuroscience/psychology etc... it seems a pretty irrational conclusion.

Even if we pinpointed a chemical reaction or a neural process which caused an experience, we would have no idea how the experience came to be through the physical interactions.

That's reductionism.
Even if we know which way the wind is blowing, doesn't mean we know why it becomes a hurricane. So what?

There is a missing link between physical processes and the resultant subjective experience.

Well, sure, but the fact human beings are ignorant about the world, doesn't mean the world is a magical fairy land powered by pixie dust.

 

[madness]

I think people are misunderstanding my stance here - I'm not arguing for the soul, I'm arguing that qualia exist and aren't accounted for in physical theories. My problem is not that materialism hasn't yet found the mechanism for how qualia arise, but that there can be no possible explanation from a purely materialistic framework. Qualia have an ontological existence as much as matter does, but are not described as part of any physical theory. This is why the problem is not merely due to reductionism or a lack of knowledge of neuroscience.

 

[apeiron]

I could generally agree with this if by materialism you mean by explanation rooted in located substances - the usual atomistic and reductionist style of explanation in most scientific models.

My argument was that the essence of mindfulness would have to be reduced in the opposite direction, towards the notion of global form. But I still think of this as a physical or material approach because it is a systems approach (and so actually involves the interaction of the local and the global, the form and the substances).

The only thing that really bugs me is the use of "qualia". It is an atomistic term which unwittingly perhaps puts you right back in zone of located substances.

Once you get convinced that qualia unquestionably exist - why I just introspect and there they are, buzzing about like little experiential pixels - then you have dropped yourself back down the reductionist hole and left yourself open for all the crackpot ideas like QM consciousness and magical oscillation frequencies.

So yes, it seems pretty clear that consciousness cannot be well modeled in terms of located substances. If anything, it is a form, a global organisation. And so you have to start using the language of form, not get tripped up by words like qualia, words that are rooted in substance ontology - suggesting matter is one kind of atom, experience is another.

Which is true dualism, the fallacious kind. When you have two kinds of substance, rather than the useful modelling dichotomy of substance and form, the pairing of the local and the global view.

Bad dualism = substance + substance.

Good dualism = substance/form.

 

[madness]

I don't see how complexity of material interactions can explain away our innate experiences. I don't see qualia as particles in space, I consider the experience of redness or hotness or coldness to be qualia. Materialism can explain how a photon hits a photoreceptive cell, how this causes neurons to fire in the brain and so on, but at what point does it explain how an experience occurs. If we didn't know experiences occured, we would have no reason to infer from the activity of the brain that a colour was being perceived (I know that is strange because we need experiences to look at the brain). How can the complexity of the system resolve this?

 

[JoeDawg]

I don't see how complexity of material interactions can explain away our innate experiences. I don't see qualia as particles in space, I consider the experience of redness or hotness or coldness to be qualia.

Well, I don't have an explanation of qualia, I haven't seen one yet. So what?

Explanations can be tough things to come by, especially when we aren't even sure what matter is made up of. Ultimately the jury is still out. We know qualia of some sort exists, we can't avoid it, but what it is, we just don't know.

Qualia as far as I can tell, is basically just information represented in a certain fashion. No less abstract than numbers or words. So I don't worry so much about 'redness', which could reduce down to an arbitrary, but useful, category of information. In that sense, the 'colour we see' is just a variable, a representation of a certain spectrum of information. The framework of that information is simply useful, but has no other essential existence.

 

[Sorry!]

I think the problem here is you are following the Cartesian argument I previously posted. Where the body is separate from the mind on the basis we can imagine it that way.

It's hard to pinpoint where this argument goes wrong (which it does) but I think its a contingency problem. This goes for the p-zombie argument as well. Just because you can THINK your experiences can exist without you doesn't mean in this world that's how it occurs.
Of course it may turn out to be this way once more evidence comes on the problem; if ever.

I think someone needs to revamp the concept of qualia so that these experiences are not separate from humans... I don't see the necessitiy in doing this other that to disprove physicalist.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

I think people are misunderstanding my stance here - I'm not arguing for the soul, I'm arguing that qualia exist and aren't accounted for in physical theories. My problem is not that materialism hasn't yet found the mechanism for how qualia arise, but that there can be no possible explanation from a purely materialistic framework. Qualia have an ontological existence as much as matter does, but are not described as part of any physical theory. This is why the problem is not merely due to reductionism or a lack of knowledge of neuroscience.

You are looking at a computer monitor right now. What you are seeing on the screen is sort of an "emergent property" of the system. You could bring up a window and have it display the source code for everything you are seeing. With enough knowledge you can possibly even read that code and determine what bits of code are responsible for what. To go even further you could theoretically pull out your hard drive and, with the proper instruments, find the actual physical location of the code on the disc. We can map out and explain every detail of this system from the disc to the code to the visually represented user interface on the screen. Would you argue that what you see on your monitor is an entirely separate entity from the rest of your computer? That the explination of material interactions in the system can not explain the visual representation you see before you?

If your answer is no then consider this... We can explain just about everything about how your physical brain and nervous system works. We don't fully understand the "code" but we are working on it. The major difference between your nervous system and the computer is that you are the only person capable of "observing" the "user interface". We can all sit around a computer, point out things on the screen, and explain them. We can not do the same with what anyone of us is perceiving "in our head". We can only infer and assume by experience and communication that our experiences are at least similar if not the same. Is this reason enough to make our "minds" a special exception? To say that our personal experiences are something separate from the physical phenomena that accompany them?

As for qualia, these seem like phantoms. I can look at a cloud and see that it looks like a dog but that does not mean there truly exists some canine quality to it. It is merely an artifact created by pattern recognition. Many artifacts like this exist in human perception and are explainable by the physical interactions and "coding" in our brains and nervous system. Many electronic sensor devices produce artifacts as well when they glitch or receive input that they are not equiped to deal with. Would you call the readings of an electronic sensor qualia?
I know that these artifacts are not what define qualia but I believe they show a problem in the idea of qualia and the idea of the mind body seperation. Glitches and gaps in the capacity of our nervous system to perceive reality produce artifacts that can be explained by physical mechanisms and if we poke around inside your head we can even induce experiences of qualia independant of your normal perception of reality. Your brain can be manipulated to "hear" colours and "see" sounds, entirely alien qualia.
Qualia also seems to be primarily just another "I can see it and you can't" argument as I discussed in the first half of my post.

 

[madness]

I think the problem here is you are following the Cartesian argument I previously posted. Where the body is separate from the mind on the basis we can imagine it that way.

It's hard to pinpoint where this argument goes wrong (which it does) but I think its a contingency problem. This goes for the p-zombie argument as well. Just because you can THINK your experiences can exist without you doesn't mean in this world that's how it occurs.
Of course it may turn out to be this way once more evidence comes on the problem; if ever.

I agree that it may not be possible for my experiences to exist without my brain (although I can't be sure because I don't know how consciousness arises from matter). The point is, because I can imagine me going about my daily business but not having any conscious awareness at all, there must be a distinction between mind and matter. It may be that in our universe, qualia can only exist when a brain causes them to arise. But I can imagine another universe where the same brain exists, but no qualia. Because I can make this conceptual distinction, it seems reasonable to ask why things are one way and not the other.
And to TheStatutoryApe. I don't think the analogy is quite the same. The computer screen is just a set of pixels firing out photons, so you are simply linking two different complex physical phenomena. The brain/mind problem links completely different phenomena.

 

[Sorry!]

I agree that it may not be possible for my experiences to exist without my brain (although I can't be sure because I don't know how consciousness arises from matter). The point is, because I can imagine me going about my daily business but not having any conscious awareness at all, there must be a distinction between mind and matter. It may be that in our universe, qualia can only exist when a brain causes them to arise. But I can imagine another universe where the same brain exists, but no qualia. Because I can make this conceptual distinction, it seems reasonable to ask why things are one way and not the other.
And to TheStatutoryApe. I don't think the analogy is quite the same. The computer screen is just a set of pixels firing out photons, so you are simply linking two different complex physical phenomena. The brain/mind problem links completely different phenomena.

Yes this is what I thought you were thinking along the lines of.

As I stated before though this has the contingency problem. Just because what I imagine in one world does not necessarily make it true in another world. It has to do with IDENTITY. You should read up on identities a bit more.

I'll try to explain what I am going on about here:

So in this world A=B (a could be body;b could be qualia). This however does not mean that it has to hold true ALL the time. We can demonstrate that we are ABLE to IMAGINE A=/=B in another world but that does not mean it is contingent with OUR world.

For instance imagine you had six fingers. It is NOT possible that you have BOTH 6 fingers AND 5 fingers. So instead we say in your imaginative world you have 6 fingers and in this world you have 5.

Same thing if I asked you to imagine yourself 10 years older... How can you be both 30 and 40 at the same time?

I think a good read on identity is Kripke, Leibniz, David Lewis, and Hegel. In no particular order just how they popped up into my head. I would probably learn about Leibniz/Hegel first as they set the major ground work for identity. Lews/Kripke go on about what I think is called modal realism.

 

[madness]

I'm not sure. I can't even imagine a world in which body = qualia as you put it. I definitely couldn't believe that this was true in our world.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

And to TheStatutoryApe. I don't think the analogy is quite the same. The computer screen is just a set of pixels firing out photons, so you are simply linking two different complex physical phenomena. The brain/mind problem links completely different phenomena.

I don't believe it to be the same only similar. The computer takes input, processes it, and creates a representation of it. The manner in which a computer does this is quite different from the manner in which a nervous system does it. What about this, aside from the fact that you are the only "observer", makes the representation of information "in your head" such a different phenomenon?

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

I'm not sure. I can't even imagine a world in which body = qualia as you put it. I definitely couldn't believe that this was true in our world.

Then what of the fact that manipulation of the brain induces experiences of different "qualia"?

 

[Sorry!]

I'm not sure. I can't even imagine a world in which body = qualia as you put it. I definitely couldn't believe that this was true in our world.

Aside from what StatApe pointed out your mistakenly taking 'body' to mean 'human' body. Body just means physical form. Everything has a body. For qualia I would say their body is more the brain. I'm sure experiencing qualia is not a HUMAN experience, other creatures can experience the same things we can even make robots know when it is experiencing certain colours etc... So for me to say it is the human body is completely rediculous which is why I never said that.

 

[JoeDawg]

I'm not sure. I can't even imagine a world in which body = qualia as you put it. I definitely couldn't believe that this was true in our world.

Have you ever seen one of those paint-by-numbers kits you can buy?

It gives you the outline of a picture with numbers all over it, a set of different colored paints, and a chart that tells you which paint color corresponds to which number.

Even television, or a computer monitor, builds the picture one pixel at a time, in this paint by numbers fashion. Although much faster obviously.

So, red is just representation, no different from 1 or 5, or 'bird'. Its the pattern that we arrange the numbers in that gives the picture its meaning. So its not just about one neuron firing, its about what happens when certain ones fire together and in what order that gives us our picture.

 

[wittgenstein]

What about the below pattern?* Is it a pattern of a young girl or a pattern of an old lady? Perhaps, information is more than just a pattern.
* physics forum did not let me change my site to a better one and I lost the site.

 

[wittgenstein]

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/YoungGirl-OldWomanIllusion.html"

 

[wittgenstein]

If I understand the process in Godel's brain while he thinks of his incompleteness theorm, do I understand his incompleteness theorm? Is the math superfluous? Is there a difference between a computer understanding an equation and a conscious person understanding the same equation?

 

[wittgenstein]

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Rabbit-DuckIllusion.html"

 

[wittgenstein]

Or are you saying that information is when one pattern ( the pattern of our neurons firing) is superimposed on another pattern )? If so, then there is no difference between a current computer and a conscious understanding. Are you saying that computers are conscious or that people are not conscious?

 

[Moridin]

* The nature of subjective experience, or 'qualia'- our 'inner life' (Chalmers' "hard problem");
* Binding of spatially distributed brain activities into unitary objects in vision, and a coherent sense of self, or 'oneness';
* Transition from pre-conscious processes to consciousness itself;
* Non-computability, or the notion that consciousness involves a factor which is neither random, nor algorithmic, and that consciousness cannot be simulated (Penrose, 1989, 1994, 1997);
* Free will; and,
* Subjective time flow.

There are, arguable, perfectly tenable non dual explanations for all of those points. For instance, Dennett denies qualia, rejects any notion of a Cartesian theater (leads to an infinite regress), holds that cognition is an emergent property, does not agree that cognition is non-computational, that compatibilist freedom is fully compatible with determinism. The last point is too vague for me to address.

I will ask my general purpose questions for the dualist perspective and see if anyone care to discuss these from a dualist stand point. I would be very interesting how a dualist would respond to these.

If the mind is not the brain, then

- Why is there a correlation between brain damage and impaired cognitive functions?
- Why is there a correlation between chemical imbalances and impaired cognitive functions?
- Why is there a correlation between drug use and impaired cognitive functions?
- Why is there a correlation between complexity of the brain and complexity of the mind in the animal kingdom?
- How does the immaterial part of cognition interact with the material part? Anything that can interact with something material must surely be material by definition.
- Why did human evolution select for large, messy, and vulnerable brains? If that which we really do is determined by a Cartesian style ghost in the machine, then there is no evolutionary rationale for these sort of brains.
- Why does the brain appear to be modular?
- When and how in the evolutionary history of the human brain did it become dual? Most dualists do not hold that the other great apes or, say, amniotes, are dual in this way. Why?

etc.

It seems to me that these questions are very difficult to answer from the dualist perspective. It also seems that dualism is a minority position among cognitive scientists and that a lot of scientists who are uncomfortable with a non-dual explanation is really looking for a skyhook (An explanation of design complexity in the universe that does not build on lower, simpler layers). Obviously, this last part is an heavily biased interpretation in favor of some sort of mind-brain identity explanation.

 

[Moridin]

Or are you saying that information is when one pattern ( the pattern of our neurons firing) is superimposed on another pattern )? If so, then there is no difference between a current computer and a conscious understanding. Are you saying that computers are conscious or that people are not conscious?

Maybe if you think of cognition as gradual, rather than an all-or-nothing property, these sorts of reasoning might become clearer.

 

[wittgenstein]

"Maybe if you think of cognition as gradual, rather than an all-or-nothing property, these sorts of reasoning might become clearer."
Moriden
My posts in this thread deal only with JoeDawg's contention that information is a pattern and only a pattern. Perhaps a good analogy is that if one sees understanding as a pattern in our brain superimposed on outside reality, then the pattern in one's brain can be thought of as a grid. Grids must be taken "all or nothing"*.Note that i do not take this position, I only offer it as a possible defense of JoeDawgs position. If one rejects the double pattern idea then one is left with the single pattern explanation of information, which I hope I have shown to be absurd.
* I am not saying that a grid must streach to infinity.

 

[JoeDawg]

Or are you saying that information is when one pattern ( the pattern of our neurons firing) is superimposed on another pattern )? If so, then there is no difference between a current computer and a conscious understanding. Are you saying that computers are conscious or that people are not conscious?

My impression is that computers are not conscious, at least, in the same way we are, but neither are dogs or mice, or whales or paramecium. I don't know what consciousness is, that's just what seems to be the case. I do think one can get a good analogy from databases, which put data into a certain context. All our knowledge is context specific, but we can also do a statistical analysis and make predictions.

 

[Moridin]

This statement will obviously be filled by my prejudices and biases, but it seems to me that viewing consciousness or cognition as an all-or-nothing proposition that applies to only to humans is terribly anthropocentric and extra-natural. It also seems reasonable to hold that other organisms can use contextual clues to make predictions about the world. There is at least a clear evolutionary rationale for ability for (crude) prediction, just like there is a clear evolutionary rationale for (crude) eyes for locomotive organisms that live in a transparent medium.

 

[Coldcall]

There must be different levels of conciousness. The idea that human's suddenly developed consciousness as an emergent property seems pretty unlikely. More like that consciousness emerged slowly, layer upon layer, and no doubt there were important bifurcations along the way, but it did not happen overnight.

I would imagine even microbes have some level of consiciousness. Perhaps the ability to reproduce is a twin requisite for consciousness to emerge in its most primitive configuration and we happen to be at the other end of the scale.

If microbes and animals don't have any consciousness then it would appear that they are some sort of zombie type cut-outs used as stepping stones for us and consciousness to evolve. Unlikely.

 

[wittgenstein]

I'm confused. Why do you think that I said that only humans can be conscious? True, I did say that current computers are not conscious but that was the extent of my eliminations for possible consciousness.