How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
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Gertie
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Gertie »

Karpel Tunnel wrote: April 21st, 2018, 4:17 am or she said, he says slapping his forehead.
*curtsies*

:)
Justintruth
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Justintruth »

Tamminen wrote: April 20th, 2018, 11:41 am Suppose we have a perfect theory of matter, an improved standard model, a theory that describes in a logically consistent way everything that happens in nature. This theory also explains all physiological phenomena including brain events.
So for example I create a physical state vector and have several new operators that allow me to know what experiencing is occurring. Not just sense experience but also what thoughts, emotions, pains etc. The range of such operators is no longer Hilbert space. It is phenomenology of some precise kind. What is the set of possible experiencings? What subset is achievable with a human brain and what subset requires other features perhaps artificially generated.
Does this theory also explain itself and the development of the theory in the scientific community? If materialism is consistent it must claim that the possibility of having a theory of matter must itself be a property of matter. Matter must be conscious of itself. And this claim is not unusual.
Yes, scientifically in a constrained definition of "explain" to mean once the laws are established they can be used to predict what happens and "why" in the sense that they refer to the law. In fact evolution is the theory of that development. Here are some results: Ontology is such that existence can be assigned to objects in a three dimensional space as being. Where there is no object there is nothing which is non-being in the naive sense. This space is somehow used to process our visual experience. For example a line drawing of a cube can have its back face become its front and that is caused by "trying" to see it that way but that is an event. That ontological feature allows objectivity and underlies set theory, which underlies mathematics. Intellectually we have taken it beyond our imagination and we have multiple unimaginable dimensions. Further using "existence" we are able to formally define infinity in definitions like the mathematical definition of "continuous" or in the mathematical definition of "limit". This underlies our technology and partly explains why humans have achieved biological plague conditions.

It does seem like the way to go is just to realize that matter can become conscious under certain configurations and try to find out what those configurations are, define somehow the phenomenological possibility space, and map the physical state vector into it. We know we can smell, taste, hear, see. Are there other phenomenal categories not yet discovered? What are they? Can the existing categories be expanded? How many primary colors can be generated? What is the range of pitch in sound for any device?

Our biology also has ways of experiencing experiencing which is not objective but underlies the meaning of Being. This ontological feature allows an alternate ontology. That ontology is the basis of much of the art wold. It is coupled to our sexuality, and is the basis of religion in the mystical sense but excluding fundamentalism which is just bad science. It also underlies the experience of love and plays a very big role in reproduction. Most significantly it is the basis of the survival instinct.

Evolution needed the objective ability in order for us to model what will happen physically. But it needed us to want to survive individually and as a race. That is why we have those two ontological feature categories. They are clusters of ontological possibilities.

Here ontology is not "what". Rather it is the experiences of "that".
But here the air is getting thin.
Zarathusta's mountain?
Language starts to bewitch us. Flies get trapped in the fly bottle, to use Wittgenstein's metaphor.
Wittgenstein failed to understand language. He never became enlightened and failed to achieve awareness of the ontological possibilities. He is very misleading. In general the continental philosophers are much better.

However, there is that flower he picks up near the end of his life while driving in a car with a friend (see Monk's biography). And his near monastic tendency. And his last words are genuine. He was a monk in search of a monastery and a religion and in great need of satori. Had he lived a little longer? When I say the continental philosophers are much better I do not mean they are better men. They are not. Wittgenstein was a wonderful man - even a great man. And many of the continental phisosophers were small, damaged men, ethically compromised. Heidegger a genuine, even eager, Nazi. Backstabbing and grabbing limelight. Profiting off of prostituting their philosophy
Paradoxical that understanding does not lead to greatness.

We say that consciousness of matter is an emergent property of matter. But what does this mean? Nothing. Language stands still.
Dead wrong. The meaning is scientific. It has to do with the way what we experience is modeled. You are mimicing Wittgenstein. Heidegger said "Science does not think" but it does. It just does not investigate its own foundation. It is not philosophy. And it can be said. The emergence means something very simple. Disassemble a brain and there is not experiencing there. Assemble it in a proper way and experiencing occurs there. That is far from a meaningless statement. It is expressing an accident of nature and existence.

If we do not have a material mechanism connecting matter to consciousness of matter, we have not said anything.
Wrong. We do not even have "mechanisms" anymore in physics. The notion of a "mechanism" is what occurred in us primitively and allowed us to survive given our size and speed. But we created instruments and then scientific theories that go way beyond that. We also created topology which is way beyond ancient Greek mathematics. And using that language we can say the scientific laws that express very general laws of what we find in nature allowing us to predict the nature of certain experiences and explain much of what we experience through our senses in mathematical terminology.

We say those laws are "counterintuitive". Another, better way to say it is "counter-instinctive" but they are understandable and communicable in language.
And here all bridges break down. We have no idea of what kind of a mechanism could connect those conceptually incompatible categories to build a unified, materialistic theory of everything. And this is not due to our lack of insight. It is due to the nature of reality.
The theory will not be materialistic. Even our physical theories are hardly materialistic once you look at them in detail The closest we have is mass-energy. The notion of matter is a medieval concept. It has to do with what stays the same when essence has changed. It is well defined their but has not been well defined since. In fact "matter" is not defined in science, or perhaps you can say it is just a reference either to those particles that have rest mass or to singularities in the space related to the stress-mass-energy tensor. But that tensor has momentum flux and stress and all kinds of not material notions in it. There is no "stuff" anymore. And we no longer look for "mechanism". We look for mathematical expression.
Trying to explain consciousness by its objects is like Munchausen trying to lift himself from his hair. Or, as Wittgenstein says in Tractatus, a function cannot be its own argument. We are the function, the world is the argument.
You cannot explain any contingent fact. The problem is that consciousness has not been seen in its existential context. Not only trying to explain consciousness is impossible. Try to explain an electron. Nothing can be explained. It can be described and we often call a description an explanation. But it does not mean we know the reason for it. I remember being 16 years old and realizing that science did not explain. I was leaving the school and questioned a trusted teacher. He pulled a pen out off his pocket and giggled it and dropped it. "They can't even explain that" he said smiling.

He did not mean that they had no theory of gravity. He meant that the theory itself was based on contingent facts the presence of which had no explanation. Why is the law of gravity the way it is? Could it have been otherwise and why isn't it. That is his intent.

Modal logic will I think give us the right way to express this logically. A pen will fall in a gravitational field necessarily when released due to a law that is contingent and whose validity is based on contingent experience.

Mystery is inherent in conscious and existence and is related to the mystery of time. Here mystery means not something that can be known but is not.

If you look at Dan Dennett that provocature you will find where he says that he is proposing the "only type of explanation you can have". In fact explanation of any kind is impossible and life is a mystery.
We need not speak about substances. We should only speak about the ontological structure of reality, the structure of our being in the world. And the basic structure is: the subject is conscious of the world. After seeing this triadic structure we should start analyzing each of those three components and the relations between them. And this is philosophy, not science. Science does a good job inside its own territory, but unreflective as it is, it does not always see that it has crossed its limits and has come to a dead end.
That basic structure is present in the natural standpoint. You ignore the fact of mysticism which allows us to transcend that structure. And you also are failing to make the distinction between descriptions of "what is" - essentially natural science, with descriptions of our experience of the fact that it "is". Science is necessary and as it turns toward the brain it will have to specify existence and ontological experiencing as a posit, and define when and how consciousness if it occurs just as it must do with color. Any anesthesiologist knows something of this already.

That these descriptions and scientific laws provide no explanation as to why they are that way ultimately, does not invalidate their descriptions of the facts dealing with what is. It is "natural" science after all. Not metaphysics.

Ultimately, though there is a germ of a gem in what you say, for to conceive of our lives purely scientifically will never exhaust our possibilities. Here ordinary language does, in fact fail.

In the end we need poetry in order to speak.

And in the end we need to do more than talk. So much talk. Wittgenstein was great not because of his philosophy. It was because of his actions. He gave up his money. Tried to teach children. Withdrew to Norway. Masturbated and faced it. Swept the floor of his hut. And struggled to be. I personally think he made it in spite of his philosophy not because of it. His lack of philosophical success was a great burden on his life and he struggled his whole life consequently. But what monk can claim better? Who, after emerging into that light can sustain a presence and language there. Not even Bob Dylan. Yet Wittgenstein pressed on to his final magnificent utterance confirming his community..... "Tell them".... who? "..them..." that he had a "wonderful" life. What spirit in those dying words. What expression of community. A hand reaching out.

Wonder. We have that and more. But the philosophical conversation has to change. Unless the world is educated soon it will be too late. We are like children in a gasoline plant with leaky valves striking our matches as if they were toys. And it cannot be just the academy. We need a revolution in philosohy and then pedagogic efforts and a massive scale.
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Thinking critical
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Thinking critical »

Karpel Tunnel wrote: April 21st, 2018, 1:41 am That might be correct - as a description of a materialist perspective- but more clearly a materialist must say that consciousness is matter. Just as a rock is matter.
Perhaps there are degrees of materialism? I consider my self a materialist, however I do not view consciousness as consisting of matter any more than I view seeing, or hearing as something which consists of matter. Consciousness it appears is the experience of neurological activity. The relationship consciousness has to neurological activity is to a degree what coldness is to ice and what heat is to fire......we understand the physical cause down to a subatomic level, we understand the relationship between fire and heat, ice and cold yet the hotness, coldness itself does not consist of matter cause it is a thing which is experienced, I propose that consciousness exists within the same spectrum.
Possibly correct, but we do not know what those conditions are. Anmals were considered not conscious within science up into the 70s, or at best one could be agnostic, but to speak of animal intentions, cognition, desires, emotions, was considered a damaging professional no no.
If this was in fact the case I suspect there would have been a religious agenda behind such views in an attempt to place humans in a special category all of there own and to reserve a space to insert the so called soul.
Now plants are more and more being consider to communicate, react, choose, and have awareness. There is a bias in science that we are the only conscious beings, and with reluctance grant it to things like us.

I can't speak on behalf of the scientific community however I personally have not had the impression that consciousness is considered to only be a trait of humans, hence why in my earlier post the necessity of clarity in regards to what is meant by consciousness.
And so, regardless of the properties of the 'thing' we call it material. This makes for an expanding set of the 'material' and further is completely unfalsifiable metaphysics. When the term material is used it harks back to the dualisms and seems to be denying there can be dualism and as if using that term has meaning about substance. When in fact it only means, we have decided this is real. Whereas many dualists, once they saw the full range of possible material qualities and materials that do not have qualities we associated with matter earlier, might well say, Oh, ok, you are including any thing real, regardless of qualities, in the set matter. I find it more useful to think of some things as being in two categories, but perhaps we do not disagree. Just as you might speak of matter and energy, while I retain the dualism as useful talk, you say they are the same kind of thing, fine. And so with neutrinos and particles in superposition - perhaps even cats and other objects, even worlds in superposition - and massless particles and so on. That all gets batched as matter.And the dualist is happy to think there is simply a language use issue happening. While the epistemologist notes the impossibility of falsifying it. And the believer in what the skeptic calls the supernatural says 'you haven't ruled out any phenomenon, so I got no problem either.'
Great summary, the language which emerges from the intuitive views I think attempts to draw similar conclusions, they just tend to take different paths.
Tamminen wrote: April 21st, 2018, 4:17 am Correlations between experiences and brain events are evident, but I claim that there cannot be a material bridge between them, and this is what "hardcore materialists" say there must be, I suppose.
As I mentioned above, I certainly wouldn't claim that the bridge is necessarily a material one just that consciousness is contingent on the existence of matter behaving in a certain way.
It would be more accurate if we were to say that consciousness emerges via a neurological process which is contingent on bio chemical matter.
This emerging is very problematic and leads us astray, in my opinion.
How so?
It means nothing because to simply say consciousness is an emergent property of matter, is itself meaningless. Rocks are composed matter yet show no signs of consciousness, there are certain conditions which must be met before matter has the ability to experience its own existence.
I wonder what those conditions could be.
We can only draw conclusions from what we observe here on earth and from methods by which we can interact with things to determine whether or not they are conscious in ways we are familiar with. Therefore we can infer that matter must interact at a biochemical level before we would expect to see evidence of consciousness.
This cocky little cognitive contortionist will straighten you right out
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Tamminen »

What makes consciousness so peculiar that it cannot be handled with empirical physicalistic science? It is the fact that consciousness is always my consciousness, whoever that 'I' happens to be. Consciousness is private, although accessible in others by language and other behavior. Therefore we need an additional component to really understand what consciousness is: the subject. The subject is transcendental. It is like a point or an empty table, a “nothingness” that gets its content with my being in the world, or my being conscious of the world. But it is always already there along with its content, and without it there would be nothing, literally, although it has no independent being outside of its being conscious of the world. So the ontological structure of reality is not “only matter” or “mind and matter” but “the subject conscious of the world”. But we must not interpret this structure as three different substances. It is a concrete totality, and none of its components can be removed without destroying all.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Duckrabbit »

I would like to add an addendum to the concluding though of my last post:

I think the mystics may have the proper methods of investigation to answer such questins as: Who?, When?, Why?, and What the f...? The job of the sciences is to deal with: How?
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Karpel Tunnel »

Thinking critical wrote: April 21st, 2018, 9:17 am Consciousness it appears is the experience of neurological activity.
Maybe, but we don't know. Neurons are associated with all sorts of functions within awareness. We don't know what is aware and what is not. Plants are starting to be accepted as experiencers. Not quite mainstream, but not flaky anymore. Awareness may, for all we know, be a property of matter (or the real), and then cognitive processes come in at higher levels and or high speeds in certain kinds of more complicated matter or matter complicated in certain ways. We do not know.
The relationship consciousness has to neurological activity is to a degree what coldness is to ice and what heat is to fire......we understand the physical cause down to a subatomic level, we understand the relationship between fire and heat, ice and cold yet the hotness, coldness itself does not consist of matter cause it is a thing which is experienced, I propose that consciousness exists within the same spectrum.
Wouldn't the heat be energy or lack of it in these instances and the coldness and heat just reifications for processes that happen because of, say, differentials. If it is energy it is, to materialists matter.
If this was in fact the case I suspect there would have been a religious agenda behind such views in an attempt to place humans in a special category all of there own and to reserve a space to insert the so called soul.
It was the case. A nice summary is in the introduction to https://www.amazon.com/When-Elephants-W ... 0385314280

1) whatever the roots of the bias, this is not long ago and it was in science and held by primarily atheist scientists. 2) it shows that a paradigmatic bias can oppose the obvious even in science.
Now plants are more and more being consider to communicate, react, choose, and have awareness. There is a bias in science that we are the only conscious beings, and with reluctance grant it to things like us.
I can't speak on behalf of the scientific community however I personally have not had the impression that consciousness is considered to only be a trait of humans, hence why in my earlier post the necessity of clarity in regards to what is meant by consciousness.
I think awareness is a better word. And, also, 'experiencing'. That something has experiences.

Consciousness gets conflated with self'consciousness, consciousness of self, self-identity (and conscience for that matter) and also just plain old sounds high-falutin'. To say that something experiences X, to me is clearer.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Tamminen »

Justintruth wrote: April 21st, 2018, 9:10 am The emergence means something very simple. Disassemble a brain and there is not experiencing there. Assemble it in a proper way and experiencing occurs there. That is far from a meaningless statement. It is expressing an accident of nature and existence.
I only take this point from your comments, and this is also for 'Thinking critical'.

When we speak about emerging properties we mean something like water molecules arranging in a certain way so that we have ice instead of liquid water. All this happens on the physical level. But experiencing is something totally different. It is true, of course, that experiencing presupposes certain kinds of neural interconnections, but to say that certain experiences emerge from certain kinds of neural connections is not, in my opinion, the right way of seeing the situation. Experiences are subjective. They presuppose the experiencing subject. They do not emerge from neural networks without the being of the subject, perhaps even creating the subject at the same time. No, the being of the subject is fundamental for there being experiences at all. Experiences and brains are on fundamentally different ontological levels, and no kind of emerging can happen here if we do not define emergence in a new way.

The rest of your post was very interesting. I know that I should not admire Wittgenstein's thinking as much as I do.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Count Lucanor »

Gertie wrote:Scientific materialism is our prevailing paradigm, but -

Why believe it is complete, when experiential states has no place in its model of what the world is made of and how it works?
No one said our knowledge is complete. But anyway, we go round in circles since the very start, since you keep saying that experiential states are completely absent of a materialist model of the universe, which is completely untrue. And I highlight once again that this view you have is based on a previous endorsement of the dualistic view. So you mean by "experiential states" the effects of stimuli on a "little man" or "homunculus" inside people's bodies, which is supposed to be a localized center of agency. Your theory of mind goes along the lines of the "brain in a vat" scenario, which is demonstrably false.
Gertie wrote:There is no established scientific theory of material monism, such a claim isn't grounded in science, science has no established view, it's an open question. Hence people look to alternative ways of addressing the problem, like philosophy.
That is also not true. It may look like there's no scientific model of material monism, in the same way that no one is bringing up the heliocentric model again, it's already the established model. There can't be concessions: there can't be a hybrid model where the Earth and the Sun are both the center of our solar system. If you take one model, you're forced to abandon the other. The same happens with our materialist conception of the universe, you cannot say: "it's partially true, but it can be reconciled in our scientific knowledge with a non-materialist view". If it were partially true, then actually it would be false, and anything goes, which is the same as throwing science out the window.
Gertie wrote: And remember not so long ago substance dualism was the established paradigm, but as we learned more and changed our ways of thinking about the world, a better model replaced it. Better, but not complete, and there's no reason to think it's not going to change.
We may refine the heliocentric model, but the chances of going back to the geocentric model are zero.
Gertie wrote:
QM has opened up a new paradigm which we're still exploring, maybe answers lie there, or maybe there's some more fundamental aspect of the universe we're still missing.
From a scientific point of view, QM has opened roads to explore, but none of them points to a non-material realm, assuming we knew what that is supposed to mean.
Gertie wrote:
You really can't be certain consciousness is an emergent property of material processes.
We certainly can. We don't know of any non-material processes. Yet, there is consciousness and it is clearly associated with material processes, to the point that absent those material processes, consciousness disappears too.
Gertie wrote:
You can be persuaded that's the best fit we have for the evidence, but without understanding how it works, (some say we can't even say how it could work) there's no certainty.
We may have not figured out 100% how it works, but we have figured out a lot, so far consistent with consciousness being an emergent property of material processes.
Gertie wrote:
What you go on to describe are observations of neural correlation, not an explanation for them. If we understood the explanation we'd know why some parts of the brain manifest conscious experience and some don't,
If by explanation you mean a detailed analytic description of every event at every instance, every level of reality, accounting for absolutely every variable, every entity and every circumstance, you're demanding for science something that science has not demanded of itself. Science is a methodological tool, the best and more trustable approximation to reality, which means making sense of it and arriving to enough certainties as to be able to predict effects of its causes and control the forces of nature. Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter didn't explain why those moons were there, but that didn't change the fact that they were there. That was figured out later. There are more than enough observations and explanations of how organisms employ their senses and nervous systems in their experiences, we know those bodily parts operate and consciousness is dependent on them. We don't know exactly how the "moons" get there, but we know they are where they are supposed to be, consistently.
Gertie wrote:
we'd know if rocks or quarks are conscious, we'd know whether a computer which exactly mimicked neural interactions would be conscious. We don't know any of these things, because we don't understand the relationship between matter and experiential states.
Actually we already know all of that. Neither rocks, nor quarks, nor computers, are conscious. They cannot perceive because they don't have sense organs, and they cannot have awareness and agency, because they don't have nervous systems.
Gertie wrote:
Emergence is a claim about the relationship between matter and experiential states. I'm pointing out a problem with it. Identity monism is another, substance dualism is another, eliminative materialism is another (the Churchlands must've been high when they came up with that one), panpsychism, property dualism, anomalous monism, and so on. There are no dearth of conceptual approaches, but as I've said, there are serious problems establishing which, if any, are correct.
I can only agree that any other approach, different than materialist monism (and I should add, different than dialectical materialist monism), has serious problems.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by BigBango »

Wow so many great posts on this thread. I can't keep you all straight. I think all of you are making very good, well expressed critical points. The only poster I continually seem to disagree with has a strong voice and expresses himself clearly is Count Lucanor. I cannot help but want to address him as Sir Lancelot is in a current add on TV that would go like this if it were for Count Lucanor - "Hey, Count Losenor you have the patchy beard of a prepubescent Count and the feeble fingers of an old peasant women. So I dedicate this post to him.
Count Lucanor wrote: April 21st, 2018, 2:48 pm
Gertie wrote:Scientific materialism is our prevailing paradigm, but Why believe it is complete, when experiential states has no place in its model of what the world is made of and how it works?
No one said our knowledge is complete. But anyway, we go round in circles since the very start, since you keep saying that experiential states are completely absent of a materialist model of the universe, which is completely untrue. And I highlight once again that this view you have is based on a previous endorsement of the dualistic view. So you mean by "experiential states" the effects of stimuli on a "little man" or "homunculus" inside people's bodies, which is supposed to be a localized center of agency. Your theory of mind goes along the lines of the "brain in a vat" scenario, which is demonstrably false.
I completely agree with you that Wittgenstein caught a true fallacy by outing the idea of a homunculus as an explanation of the concentrated sensory experience with which it can then act as a self. It solves nothing because the little person has the identical mysteries one is trying to explain.

Let us consider if we have the same fallacy when the inner "thing" is a collection of micro-galactic technologically advanced pre-BB civilizations. This collection considered abstractly is not turtles all the way down. It is rather a fractal decomposition of the world. The matter of these living entities is so much smaller than the matter of our bodies we become forced by science to have to consider its essence to be immaterial because its matter is way to much tinier than we can detect. But let us not forget that even though we may have to accept the bodies of those micro-entities as immaterial they should, in a true fractal decomposition of our world, also have a mind/soul that to them would be immaterial. Because of that this fractal decomposition of our world does not solve the mind/body problem but it does introduce, not a "person in a person", but the real existence of massive amounts of "socialization" in a person. In every cell of our body are old technologically advanced civilizations that carry meaning from all the vertical universes that have evolved into ours. They are here, they are us and they have the will to construct with their technology and our chemistry cells that can evolve in our world and provide them with sustenance and a need for adventure.

What is the technology with which these civilizations make these moves in a world that seemingly dwarfs their very being. They searched in our world for a planet with a chemistry they could tamper with. They can turn on or off for short bursts electromagnetic generators. They can attach to certain molecules for stability, they can gently push/pull strengthen/weaken or break electromagnetic bonds in the molecules they are near. In this way, it appears to us that either there are emergent properties arising necessarily from our chemistry or their is an immaterial agency which mysteriously controls us and lives on after our death or it is what I believe to be a fractal micro civilizations carrying meaning from all previous universes into a new adventure and search for meaning in our own world.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Tamminen »

Justintruth wrote: April 21st, 2018, 9:10 am It is expressing an accident of nature and existence.
My point is that experiencing is not an accident of nature or existence. It is a necessary component of the subject's being in the world. The subject is something we cannot get rid of, without it there would be nothing, which would be self-contradictory. The being of the world is necessary as well, because existence means being related to the world. And experiencing or consciousness is the subjective side of this relation, the body being its objective side. So there is nothing accidental in the basic structure of reality that constitutes our existence. And there is nothing but our existence if we think about it thoroughly. So "I am experiencing the world" is where all roads of being lead in the end. Someone might say that they lead to death, but that does not change anything.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Wayne92587 »

The Heavens and the Earth, the Universe, the Reality of everything that exists in the material sense of the word is made up of a monism, an unspoken of number, quantity, of Individual Omnipresent Singularities having no relative, numerical, value, having a numerical value of Zero-0, existing within the Omniscience of a State of Randomness, the Transcendental (Metaphysical) Fully Random State of Quantum Singularity.

Nothing, within Quantum State of Random Singularity having any Relative, Numerical Value, Everything having numerical value of Zero-0, to include Time, Space and motion.

Time at a standstill at the Zero-0 Hour, Space being like a Great Void,0, motion being meaningless, without displacement, without angular momentum, without velocity of speed an direction, Nothing being measurable as to location and momentum, Nothing being Readily Apparent.

The existence or nonexistence of anything being Uncertain.

The Reality of Everything being born the Omnipresent Random Transcendental Singularities of Zero-0 within the State of Singularity being Transcendental.

Random Singularities of Zero-0 being reborn, spontaneously converted into Singularities of One-1, at the beginning moment of the Creation of the first Singularity to have a numerical value of One-1, the Reality of First Cause; 0/1.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Gertie »

CL

I think we'll just have to agree to differ on this.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Count Lucanor »

Gertie wrote: April 22nd, 2018, 1:12 pm CL

I think we'll just have to agree to differ on this.
Well...some agreement is better than nothing, I guess.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Wayne92587 »

Thinking critical;
WHY would one believe that a disembodied mind can even operate in the first place?
;

Desire!

High Flight
By John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

"Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds -
and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of -
wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.
Hovering there I've chased the shouting wind along
and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.
"Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
where never lark, or even eagle, flew;
and, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
the high untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand and touched the face of God."
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Thinking critical
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Location: Perth, Australia (originally New Zealand)

Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Thinking critical »

Karpel Tunnel wrote: April 21st, 2018, 11:16 am Wouldn't the heat be energy or lack of it in these instances and the coldness and heat just reifications for processes that happen because of, say, differentials. If it is energy it is, to materialists matter.
This explains the process, but not the nature of the outcome. From macroscopic to sub-atomic reality, particles interact with each other and causation flows on to effect. The process is something we understand, we see patterns and algorithms, predict outcomes and so fourth.
It is the effect which the subject experiences - the coldNESS the hotNESS which does not consist of matter/energy that I am comparing consciousness to.
Now one might point out the experience of hot/cold is caused from nerve endings sending signals to pain receptors in our brain and start explaining a biological and neurological process. They may then say this still doesn't explain how the subjective mind experiences the sensation.
If you have followed this thought process then you have missed the point. By explaining away the causal process of hot and cold you still haven't explained the ontological nature of the hot or cold experience which exists independently from matter or energy. However we tend to overlook this problem because of the objective nature - we understand the cause, we understand the biology.......problem solved.
Consciousness can be explained the same way, it is the experience of the mind. The mind being the collection of data received via neurological activity. This experience we have of self, world and thought is a hologram - result of neuro activity as sight/image is a result of eye. The functin of the organ/brain (specific assembly of electrons) is intrinsic to the nature of its outcome - the nature of the outcome being the perception of reality experienced by the individual.
Tamminen wrote: April 21st, 2018, 2:12 pm
I only take this point from your comments, and this is also for 'Thinking critical'.

When we speak about emerging properties we mean something like water molecules arranging in a certain way so that we have ice instead of liquid water. All this happens on the physical level. But experiencing is something totally different. It is true, of course, that experiencing presupposes certain kinds of neural interconnections, but to say that certain experiences emerge from certain kinds of neural connections is not, in my opinion, the right way of seeing the situation. Experiences are subjective. They presuppose the experiencing subject. They do not emerge from neural networks without the being of the subject, perhaps even creating the subject at the same time. No, the being of the subject is fundamental for there being experiences at all.
In the attempt to separate the brain from the subject you are left with the task of explaining why drugs can alter state of minds? When people don't feel like themselves from mental illness why would drugs which effecr chemical levels alter moods? Why do personalities (projection of self) change after brain injuries?
You say the experience is contingent on the subject, I say the subject emerges/grows/evolves from the experience. Neonates do not show any signs of recognising self at birth however they react to the environment suggesting they have atleast a basic capacity to experience some forms of emotional reactions.
Now perhaps by stating "the being of the subject" you are not referring to i think, therefore I am if not what does this mean exactly?
Experiences and brains are on fundamentally different ontological levels, and no kind of emerging can happen here if we do not define emergence in a new way.
Ontologically, Yes they are - but what is the ontological difference between experience and consciousness? I refer to emergence as a gradual, evolving process.
As our brains evolved and our neuro pathways increased in complexity our conscious awareness and clearity also increased. We went from more that just seeing and reacting to our environment to looking, learning and interacting with it.
This cocky little cognitive contortionist will straighten you right out
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