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

Post by Namelesss »

Count Lucanor wrote: April 17th, 2018, 8:42 am
Nameless wrote: The theory of evolution fails for the very same reason that the theory of 'creationism' fails.

Both require 'time'. Both require the 'motion' that 'time' necessarily theoretically, describes.
Zeno has proven, logically, how 'motion' is not possible.
That is one such proof, there are others.
You must be kidding.

Nope.
Nor is that a refutation of anything.
It is the beginning of an ad-hom fallacy, or an easy attempt at dismissal.
Discrediting me does not discredit what I say.
You can't really think that after a thousand of years our knowledge of Physics has not moved an inch.

Again, you offer no refutations so far...
Nor need I defend words that I never offered, nor even implied.

And, yes, you are correct, it seems; I "can't really think that after a thousand of years our knowledge of Physics has not moved an inch"! *__-
Zeno's paradoxes were a nice mind experiment and quite an achievement in the art of sophistry, but that's about it.

Again, no refutations offered, no 'fallacies' revealed in the logic.
No critical examination of the logic.
Do you place any credibility in logic?
Does logic trump experience/perceptions?
His fallacies were proven wrong in practice from the beginning
No, that is, again, not so.
To attempt to invalidate logic using anecdotal perceptions, that are easily explained in the 'motionless theory', is not a valid rebuttal.
'Kicking the rock' does not prove or disprove the illusion of 'physicality' or 'motion'.
and refuted by modern calculus, among other disciplines.
I don't 'believe' it!
Even 'math' cannot be so ignorant as to accept such 'unexamined assumptions', if so, it is 'unhinged' from any Reality;

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
-- Albert Einstein
Quoted in J R Newman, The World of Mathematics

Motion is impossible at the end of any critical examination, certainly to philosophy, which is informed by all branches of science.

And those alleged 'other disciplines'?
Nameless wrote:Since you seem to have a proclivity for well used and well respected leaders of their fields, have you ever heard of the Nobel physicist Richard Feynman?;

Every moment of existence exists Now!

"The Laws of Nature are not rules controlling the metamorphosis of what is, into what will be. They are descriptions of patterns that exist, all at once... " - Genius; the Life and Science of Richard Feynman
All 'eternity' at once; Here! Now!!

A Holistic Universe!

No motion, no time = no time/motion for creation, no time/motion for evolution.

What is, naively, seen as 'evolution' is merely a... conglomeration of multiple Perspectives (of the One Universal Consciousness), Here! Now! of the One Reality/Universe/Truth.
Maybe you should look up which study gave Feynman his Nobel prize. You will realize how ridiculous it sounds the idea that he advocated for a motionless, unchanging universe.
What sounds ridiculous to you is hardly a refutal or a rebuttal.
The notion of flying machines sounded ridiculous to many.
Until the evidence became more evident.
And trying to dismiss Feynman's brilliance/genius on such nigggardly ( the double 'g', for some reason, got censored) grounds is unworthy of response.
Where's YOUR Nobel, for anything!?
Nameless wrote:In short, your 'evolution' is a mirage founded on a mirage (the common dream within a dream of 'reality') that is not possible otherwise, 'make-believe'.
It is a theory that will, eventually become obsolete, just like your 'materialism'.

That aught to either fulfill your demands for food for rational thought, another Perspective, and if not, I haven't wasted too much time. *__-
So, you appeal to Feynman to refute biology. You must be clueless, because I can't think of a worse strategy. Feynman was a theoretical Physicist, not a biologist.

You are floundering in the confusion and emotional need to defend and validate, any way possible, your invested beliefs.
QM informs all other branches of science, or they become unhinged to Reality and as obsolete as the materialistic strain of your beliefs.
Physics, QM, in simple terms, 'informs' biology.
Nameless wrote:Materialism/physicalism is obsolete because it has never proven it's 'assertion' that Consciousness/thought is manufactured or stored in the brain, or anywhere else, for that matter.
Well, that's obviously completely false. Consistenly, consciousness and agency is only found in material bodies with nervous systems.

This is getting boring. There is no good science to support your beliefs, and much the opposite.
I offered a valid response to your demands.
It didn't occur to me that no matter what I offered, if it threatens your beliefs, it will be summarily argued, dismissed, ignored, attacked with fallacious arguments...
Belief infections are highly symptomatic.
Everything but logical/rational.
As far as I am concerned, I answered your demanded answer and presented a consistent alternative Perspective to 'evolution/creation'.
What you think about it, what you must think about it, is not my concern.
All the wishful thinking in the world cannot change that fact. So far, no alternative has been found. No "non-material" system is known, what it's made of, how it works, what are its components, its relationships, nothing, zero. A complete void. Start getting something, that's what I call getting serious.
There is so much logically wrong with this mess that I am not going to waste any more time with it. Especially since 'logic' doesn't seem to hold as high a place as your emotional needs.
I am not trying to convince you of anything, I gave what was asked.
What you do with it is your problem;
All 'meaning' exists in the 'eye (thoughts) of the beholder'!

Happy Trails! *__-
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Gertie »

Count Lucanor wrote: April 17th, 2018, 9:19 am
Gertie wrote:This model doesn't include experiential states in its description of the world and how it works, and there is no place in the Standard Model for consciousness. There is an Explanatory Gap where a Theory of Consciousness should be in that materialist model. There is no established scientific Theory of Consciousness, which explains how it comes about, its units of consciousness, measurements, equations, a position on reducibility, the necessary and sufficient conditions, third person objective testability - the meat and potatoes of a scientific theory.

What we do have are observations, the key one imo being neural correlation, which does imply a direct relationship between material stuff and its patterns of interactions and experiential states, but does not provide an explanation for that relationship, a Theory.
That's just plainly wrong. You forget that there is neuroscience, neurobiology, cognitive science, etc., all of which rely on the materialist model of the universe to contribute to the Theory of Mind. They all study the relationship between physiological processes and the agent's behavior, which is what accounts as experience for every organism. Of course, idealists will not be satisfied, as what they want is a theory of the "substance of consciousness", a substance they already assumed must exist, although they can offer absolutely no systematic description of it and no evidence.
CL the reason I asked you to lay out your own argument for substance monism, is that then you will see what the assumptions and problems are once you have to give your own explanation and justifications. That's the point at which they arise.

I can guess from the very vague claim you've made that 'mind is what the brain does', rather than 'mind is what the brain is', that your claim is that experiential states are a novel emergent property of material processes, which itself requires an explanation, a mechanism, laws even. Which would require us expanding our current scientific model of how the world works.

But without identifying that mechanism, explaining how it fits within a materialist model, and being able to test your claim, it remains one hypothesis amongst many which would fit our observations. That's why it isn't the established Theory.

Such a hypothesis also bumps into well known problems, such as causal relationships between 'mind and matter'. If experiential states are an emergent evolutionary adaptation which benefits the organism, it can only be useful if mind exerts 'top down' causation on the body. How? And what about the problem of over-determinism, if the material processes themselves can in principle account for all our behaviour, why did this redundant parallel experiential system evolve, when there would be no adaptive pressure?

The difficulties soon become evident once you start to examine the positive argument in support of the claim. Doesn't mean it's wrong, but it raises more questions than it answers, suggesting to me that it's missing something.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Gertie »

BigBango wrote: April 16th, 2018, 10:09 pm Gertie, what a wonderful encapsulation of the issues in your last post. You have trumped Tamminen and maybe even Searle in exposing the deficiencies of materialism to account for our being in the world.

What I would like to do in this post, without again repeating my thesis, is expose to you what the problems I have with my own theory and appeal to you for your advice and any constructive criticism you might have.

First of all let me declare the relevant conclusions that I have arrived at regarding the nature of the experiential subject who has our brain/nervous system for its experience.

In every cell, whether singular or multicellular there are advanced micro-civilizations that existed before the Big Bang. They have values/meaning baggage and they have real energy needs to persist in time without losing what they value or deter them from the need for adventure in the world.

The first problem I have with my theory is that it does not solve the mind/body problem. This is because it suggests that there are turtles all the way down or as Wittgenstein points out there are not any solutions in suggesting that there is a person inside of us that is the experiencer.

In spite of that, I wonder if a billion or so micro-galactic civilizations in a cell of their creation can't be a legitimate candidate for being the self/subject of the experience it has in the world. I am asking what could possibly be a candidate for the experiencer?

In my thesis, the other criticism I get is that I am a creationist and that conflicts with the theory of evolution. My answer is that the galactic civilizations use the DNA twisted helix as a platform for constructing biological entities for the purpose of harvesting energy but they let evolution play out in selecting better harbingers of their survival goals.

I would be interested in your comments.
You're very gracious BB - you must be new! ;)

The science underlying your idea is way beyond me I'm afraid, and my first impression was much like Greta's - trippy stuff! I'll have a go tho, never know it might spark some useful thoughts for you.

Then my thought was are you suggesting the physical (?) 'people' inhabiting this previous universe literally physically shrunk over generations, but still fully in tact? But then having somehow kept their physical (?) and mental integrity during their universe's dying entropy stages, didn't physically expand in this universe's inflation. Just the physics of all that looks like it needs a lot of explanation to this lay person.

Doesn't it put the origin of experiential states back to a less knowable stage, rather than answering it? It makes these experiencing units fundamental to our universe, but leaves a question over how they originally came about?

There's the testability issue of course.
The first problem I have with my theory is that it does not solve the mind/body problem. This is because it suggests that there are turtles all the way down or as Wittgenstein points out there are not any solutions in suggesting that there is a person inside of us that is the experiencer.
I don't necessarily see this as problem. There's no evidence for a 'mini-me' experiencer-self located somewhere in the brain watching the Cartesian Theatre play out. No command and control centre has been located. Rather the brain (nervous system really) appears to consist of subsystems of very similar cells which interact with external stimuli, internally and with each other.

It seems to me that a sense of a singular unified self is likely an emergent property of those interactions. Resulting from experiential states manifesting as a discrete unified field in humans, located in a specific body, located in (and moving through) a specific place and time, with a specific first person pov. And supplemented by our internal talky voice, giving a running commentary. It makes sense to me that a species as complex as us, with so many complex subsystems, evolved a sense of being a single unified self in order to make sense of the otherwise cacophanous chaos of perceptions, sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories, etc. In order to create a coherent model of the world, which isn't just a flickering, overwhelming, confusing bombardment. So I think our ability to create useful coherent models evolved with our increasingly complex brains (along with mechanisms for filtering and focussing), and the sense of being a discrete unified self is part of that process.

I suppose this would mean in your model that the discrete conscious units located in their particular subsystems would have developed an ability to organise along similar lines, presumably sculpted by evolutionary pressures in this universe, as more complex species evolved, the physical and experiential in tandem? How the accumulation of individual 'units of consciousness' could manifest as a discrete unified field with a sense of self requires further explanation, but that problem is true of many hypotheses.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Gertie »

BB

PS In case you're not aware, Penrose has his own ORCH OR consciousness hypothesis he's working on, again the science is way beyond me, but he does strike me as the sort of original thinker/scientific genius combo who could get somewhere.
http://www.neurohumanitiestudies.eu/arc ... usness.pdf
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Count Lucanor »

Nameless wrote: Nope.
Nor is that a refutation of anything.
It is the beginning of an ad-hom fallacy, or an easy attempt at dismissal.
Discrediting me does not discredit what I say.
Nameless wrote: Again, you offer no refutations so far...
Nor need I defend words that I never offered, nor even implied.
And, yes, you are correct, it seems; I "can't really think that after a thousand of years our knowledge of Physics has not moved an inch"! *__-
Nameless wrote: Again, no refutations offered, no 'fallacies' revealed in the logic.
No critical examination of the logic.
Do you place any credibility in logic?
Does logic trump experience/perceptions?
Nameless wrote: No, that is, again, not so.
To attempt to invalidate logic using anecdotal perceptions, that are easily explained in the 'motionless theory', is not a valid rebuttal.
'Kicking the rock' does not prove or disprove the illusion of 'physicality' or 'motion'.
Nameless wrote:What sounds ridiculous to you is hardly a refutal or a rebuttal.
The notion of flying machines sounded ridiculous to many.
Until the evidence became more evident.
Your expectations in this "debate" are clear: while you offer cheap lazy commentaries that barely resemble an argument, I'm supposed to go to great lengths to refute them. That looks like a pretty bad deal and I will not fall for it. You know the old saying: you only get as much out of it as you put into it, and right now you have not offered a challenge worth my attention.
Nameless wrote: And trying to dismiss Feynman's brilliance/genius on such nigggardly ( the double 'g', for some reason, got censored) grounds is unworthy of response.
Where's YOUR Nobel, for anything!?
Again, you resort to fallacies to conceal the failure to provide sound arguments. I haven't dismissed Feynman's brilliance, because I don't even need to. He remains a brilliant guy...in the fields in which he actually worked extensively, not being biology one of them. And actually, it's quite silly to treat great scientific figures as some kind of dogmatic gurus invested with robes of universal wisdom.
Nameless wrote: QM informs all other branches of science, or they become unhinged to Reality and as obsolete as the materialistic strain of your beliefs.
Physics, QM, in simple terms, 'informs' biology.
As preposterous as that statement is, I'm not sure why I can't laugh out loud at it. It's not even a good joke. But anyway, your disinformed beliefs in magical realms are, as those of all credulous folks, quite boring. The only fun comes from highlighting its ridiculousness.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Sy Borg »

BigBango wrote: April 16th, 2018, 10:09 pmFirst of all let me declare the relevant conclusions that I have arrived at regarding the nature of the experiential subject who has our brain/nervous system for its experience.

In every cell, whether singular or multicellular there are advanced micro-civilizations that existed before the Big Bang. They have values/meaning baggage and they have real energy needs to persist in time without losing what they value or deter them from the need for adventure in the world.
Not quite as small but perhaps almost as provocative - some microbes may be more sentient than we assume: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4396460/
Behavior generation lies at the heart of all cognitive inquiry, and while unicellular organisms are simpler than metazoans in structure, they are not always behaviorally less complex. The well-described social predation style, rippling behavior and fruiting body formation of Myxococcus xanthus arguably are more complex than the activities of most Porifera and even some worms with simple nervous systems.

Extensive experimental evidence shows that microbial behavior is guided by processes that, in other contexts, are readily regarded as part of biological cognition, capacities which together encompass an organism’s ability to navigate, become familiar with, value, learn from and solve critical existential problems within its world of experience, including coordinating action with conspecifics. This may explain why, for the past several decades, microbial researchers increasingly have helped themselves to cognitive terminology (i.e., ‘decide,’ ‘talk,’ ‘listen,’ ‘cheat,’ ‘eavesdrop,’ ‘lure,’ ‘vote’) to describe complex bacterial behavior, often without caveat (e.g., Adler and Tso, 1974; Fuqua and Greenberg, 1998; Ben-Jacob et al., 2004; Bassler and Losick, 2006; Baker and Stock, 2007; Williams et al., 2007).

In the following pages I hope to show that such linguistic usage is not wholly metaphorical. I believe there is something going on at the microscopic level that doesn’t just ‘look’ cognitive, it is cognitive, or, more accurately, it is typically considered cognitive when studied in animals more like us.
From the paper's introduction:
Yet cognitive scientists largely remain oblivious to research into microbial behavior that might provide insights into problems in their own domains, while microbiologists seem equally unaware of the potential importance of their work to understanding cognitive capacities in multicellular organisms, including vertebrates.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by BigBango »

Gertie wrote: April 17th, 2018, 9:40 pm
You're very gracious BB - you must be new! ;)

The science underlying your idea is way beyond me I'm afraid, and my first impression was much like Greta's - trippy stuff! I'll have a go tho, never know it might spark some useful thoughts for you.

Then my thought was are you suggesting the physical (?) 'people' inhabiting this previous universe literally physically shrunk over generations, but still fully in tact? But then having somehow kept their physical (?) and mental integrity during their universe's dying entropy stages, didn't physically expand in this universe's inflation. Just the physics of all that looks like it needs a lot of explanation to this lay person.

Doesn't it put the origin of experiential states back to a less knowable stage, rather than answering it? It makes these experiencing units fundamental to our universe, but leaves a question over how they originally came about?

There's the testability issue of course.

I don't necessarily see this as problem. There's no evidence for a 'mini-me' experiencer-self located somewhere in the brain watching the Cartesian Theatre play out. No command and control centre has been located. Rather the brain (nervous system really) appears to consist of subsystems of very similar cells which interact with external stimuli, internally and with each other.
Gertie, I am new to this forum, easy to spot I suppose.

Let me clear up a misconception. No one is shrinking or failing to expand in my theory of micro galactic civilizations. The big Crunch is all the black hole centers (in a large local area possibly) of the pre-BB universe collapsing into a singularity. Every three of those galactic centers having shed their civilizations end up, after the expanding plasma cools, as one neutron/proton of our world. If an X civilization sought out it's X galactic center in the new world it would be cozying up to a neutron/proton and everything is still the same size it was.
Gertie wrote: April 17th, 2018, 9:40 pm
In your thesis, it is not a problem. However some earlier cognitive scientists did suggest there was a person inside of us that was the experiencer. That is the famous Humunculus that Wittgenstein clearly blasted. I bring it up as a problem for my thesis because I have whole civilizations inside of every cell. So, even though you were easy on me, I have a rebuttal that you give me no reason to reveal. Let me just mention one road block. We all have this bias that we assume an "analysis" or "reduction" of an entity should reveal simpler elements. I think this is probably true for physical objects, but not necessarily true for animate things.

It seems to me that a sense of a singular unified self is likely an emergent property of those interactions. Resulting from experiential states manifesting as a discrete unified field in humans, located in a specific body, located in (and moving through) a specific place and time, with a specific first person pov. And supplemented by our internal talky voice, giving a running commentary. It makes sense to me that a species as complex as us, with so many complex subsystems, evolved a sense of being a single unified self in order to make sense of the otherwise cacophanous chaos of perceptions, sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories, etc. In order to create a coherent model of the world, which isn't just a flickering, overwhelming, confusing bombardment. So I think our ability to create useful coherent models evolved with our increasingly complex brains (along with mechanisms for filtering and focussing), and the sense of being a discrete unified self is part of that process.

I suppose this would mean in your model that the discrete conscious units located in their particular subsystems would have developed an ability to organise along similar lines, presumably sculpted by evolutionary pressures in this universe, as more complex species evolved, the physical and experiential in tandem? How the accumulation of individual 'units of consciousness' could manifest as a discrete unified field with a sense of self requires further explanation, but that problem is true of many hypotheses.
You. with your emergent self avoids that problem but I would argue against that position because it is basically an eliminative materialist thesis. We need to have a better account of the reasons why "folk psychological talk (I believe, I desire, etc.)" is so damn good. I disagree here with Tamminen when he says "All the evidence is there already, we must only see our situation as it is not creating pseudo problems". We must not abrogate our duty as philosophers to correct the metaphysical commitments that science has made when those commitments are wrong.

I have focused, up until now, mostly on the physics of my thesis and I am aware of Penrose, who is doing great work in this area. I don't buy his excursions into a theory of consciousness but I identify completely with his vertical evolution of universes as opposed to parallel universes. What I am now trying to shift into is the how chemistry could morph into biology without invoking the "explains everything" emergent properties and, of course the metaphysical basis for the success of "folk psychology".

Thanks again for youranalysis. It does help me dive into these, for me, new areas.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Gertie »

I'm probably the last one to ask about your idea, as you've likely realised! That sort of physics is way beyond me, so it's hard to for me to really grasp what you're proposing.
We all have this bias that we assume an "analysis" or "reduction" of an entity should reveal simpler elements. I think this is probably true for physical objects, but not necessarily true for animate things.
Agreed. I'm open to the possibility that we might need to let go of many of our assumptions, because they simply don't seem to give us the adequate toolkit to address the mind/body problem. And I think it's great that people are looking afresh and coming up with new ideas. However, along with being open-minded in general, I think we have to be rigorous about specific hypotheses. Ultimately the question we have to ask is how can we know if this or that hypothesis is on the right track? And that's tricky in itself.
You. with your emergent self avoids that problem but I would argue against that position because it is basically an eliminative materialist thesis. We need to have a better account of the reasons why "folk psychological talk (I believe, I desire, etc.)" is so damn good.
I'd say that an emergent sense of being a unified Experiencer-Subject-I (noun) as a Something apart from the Experiencing itself (verb), is neutral as regards experiential states being reducible to material stuff. That takes a bit better explaining tho, and it sounds like you've got that aspect of your hypothesis covered, but I'm happy to try to explain more clearly if you're interested.

It also relates to what you point out here, what you might call our 'natural grammar' of Subject (I) -> Verb (desire) -> Object (chocolate cake obs) -
We need to have a better account of the reasons why "folk psychological talk (I believe, I desire, etc.)" is so damn good.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Count Lucanor »

Gertie wrote:CL the reason I asked you to lay out your own argument for substance monism, is that then you will see what the assumptions and problems are once you have to give your own explanation and justifications. That's the point at which they arise.
Suppose that someone made a good case for dualism and got me convinced. And then someone else came along and said: "how about a third substance? Lay out your argument that the universe is not made out of an additional third substance." And then a fourth, and so on. So, being materialism and monism the prevailing paradigm of natural sciences, the burden to present an alternative to the scientific worldview lies in those who posit the existence of non-material realms. Mere objections to the consistency of the materialist model of the universe is simply not enough.
Gertie wrote:I can guess from the very vague claim you've made that 'mind is what the brain does', rather than 'mind is what the brain is', that your claim is that experiential states are a novel emergent property of material processes, which itself requires an explanation, a mechanism, laws even. Which would require us expanding our current scientific model of how the world works.
Certainly consciousness is an emergent property of material processes. Does it require an explanation? Sure. It has been provided by neurobiology and other sciences that deal with the physiology of living beings. The sensory mechanisms that are involved in perception and constitute the basis of common experience are well understood. The brain processes, the parts involved, their location, the nature of the connection between neurons, are mechanisms that have been studied and of which we have a fairly good idea how and why they work as they do, but more importantly, how all of this affects the experience of an organism, to the point that we can predict states induced by the manipulation of such mechanisms, either accidentally or on purpose. For sure, we cannot reproduce such mechanisms outside of an organism, which implies that the complexity of both the neural connections and the other biological processes involved are not fully within reach of our knowledge; there are still gaps to fill, but nothing indicates that they will be filled with something other than material processes.
Gertie wrote: Such a hypothesis also bumps into well known problems, such as causal relationships between 'mind and matter'. If experiential states are an emergent evolutionary adaptation which benefits the organism, it can only be useful if mind exerts 'top down' causation on the body. How? And what about the problem of over-determinism, if the material processes themselves can in principle account for all our behaviour, why did this redundant parallel experiential system evolve, when there would be no adaptive pressure?
We have gone over that already. There's no need to state a case on the "causal relationship between mind and matter" or between "body and experiential states". Such statement already implies an unjustified ontological categorization of the concept of mind as a singular, independent substance on itself. Going back to a previous example, it's like requiring a causal relationship between matter and blood circulation. There's no experience without a body, it is a material organism that goes through experiential states, and in such states participates the whole body, which includes the brain.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Karpel Tunnel »

Count Lucanor wrote: April 19th, 2018, 8:20 am Suppose that someone made a good case for dualism and got me convinced. And then someone else came along and said: "how about a third substance? Lay out your argument that the universe is not made out of an additional third substance." And then a fourth, and so on. So, being materialism and monism the prevailing paradigm of natural sciences, the burden to present an alternative to the scientific worldview lies in those who posit the existence of non-material realms. Mere objections to the consistency of the materialist model of the universe is simply not enough.
Science will add anything it verifies or, really, decides is verified to the set 'material' or 'physical'. When you accept an expanding set like that, the term material is meaningless, it has simply become synonymous with 'what is considered real' Right now we have neutrinos passing through us in the trillions (or billions or whatever it is) every second, mass-less particles, fields, particles in superposition all considered material. Dark energy and dark matter are now considered real and therefore material and regardless of what properties they have or do not have, they will get batched in this 'monism'.
I think if many theists understood what passes for 'material' today in terms of properties, they might think the dualism/monism debate is a matter of language use debate rather than ontology. Others would not of course, but I find the use of the term material and other words based on that root...hm...propagandist. IOW it seems to be saying. this substance exists and others do not. It makes a stand against the non-material. But in fact it happily absorbs anything, and would guess it will continue to.

While I am not saying Angels are made up of neutrinos, we really do not know what the heck will be confirmed by science in the coming centuries and what properties these X Ys and Zs will and will not have. But unfortunately we can be pretty sure they will all be called material.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Wayne92587 »

The existence or non-existence of an entity that is not measurable within the five dimensions of Space-Time is uncertain.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Karpel Tunnel »

Wayne92587 wrote: April 19th, 2018, 2:32 pm The existence or non-existence of an entity that is not measurable within the five dimensions of Space-Time is uncertain.
I can't measure consciousness. I wouldn't even know what the units are. I have no doubt it exists however.

I am not sure if this is a response to my post. But I will say that' measurable', or 'has effects' is a much better way of describing what science considers real - which is why some scientists are eliminative materialists, which is so funny and then also terrible. I don't see any commitment to substance in science or that as substance is always the way physicist view what they consider real. I have seen the real described as information, in other cases that we are potentially (and to some probably) in a simulation. QM's view of the real as substance is quasi at best. In fact it makes more sense, I think, so far that is, to call it energism, rather than materialism, with 'matter' being one of the forms of energy. That seems more in accordance with QM. And, heck, we have no idea what dark matter and dark energy are, but whatever they are, I guarantee they will be described as the same substance as everything else so far, even if they share no properties - other than 'have effects' and 'seem to exist repeatedly'.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Duckrabbit »

I would opine that those who seek a solution to "the hard problem" or who otherwise seek for an accounting of the subjective in the physical sciences, including physics, biology, chemistry, neurology, etc., are the monists and the materialists. They are still waiting for these sciences to explain subjectivity, minds. They speculate on what these findings might look like. Even those who believe that physics cannot explain mind because it is a separate, dual substance, are still ultimately materialists. They long for mind to be some kind of material; then they could expound theories about it that look like those of theoretical physics. But physics cannot explain that which is not physical - which does not exist in space and time; that is, which cannot be detected by perception or whose existence cannot be hypothesized based on perceptions (in the literal sense). Cells, wavelengths, quanta, can only be found or hypothesized through perception. They do not take account of the perceivers (except as to how the perceived is affected by the perception). They are not meant to. That is not their task. It is like asking me to tell you what I see and taking me to task for not accounting for my experience of what I'm seeing. That is not what you asked me to tell you when you asked me to tell you what I see.

So how do we account for experience, and who the "I" is that is having experiences? It depends what you mean by "account for". I am not going to account for them in the same way I would account for the objects and events in the world we perceive. I can talk about them in the language of psychology. But this does not satisfy people looking for an answer to the "hard problem". Nagel concludes What is it Like to be a Bat? by stating a belief that science may some day offer an explanation in terms of, for all intents and purposes, physics. Searle thinks we may well find that all will be found to be one substance. But that's another hope on the same level. (And where does saying everything is "one substance" get us? We'll still divide it up into categories.)

Why are findings of psychology not accepted as viable "accountings for"? I think it is because we yearn (as Kant noted) for some theory of everything. But things can only be explained finitely. As Wittgenstein says, "explanations must come to an end". We cannot view the world or explain it from a position outside it. Kants says any metaphysics cannot step outside the bounds set by experience. We can break things down and see how they work in terms of other things, but we always must have some reference; some context. So-called ultimate questions cannot be answered because they cannot be asked; they have no sense. This is a logical stipulation, not an epirical one. I think a perfectly good answer to the question "why do we have private experiences", is: "why not?" I think the mystics may have the proper methods of investigation to answer such questions as "What?", "When?", "Who?" "Why?", and "What the F...?".


Note: In a previous posting I misspelled Count Lucinor's name. Apologies.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by BigBango »

The Consciousness or "I" of the Cell

First I will summarize pages 57-61 of "Life Itself" Exploring the Realm of the Living Cell by Boyce Rensberger for context and then I will offer my own thesis for the coordinating consciousness or the "I" of the cell.

First he identifies the problem that arises when trying to understand the obvious coordination that occurs when individual cells embark on journeys like movement in a culture dish, sperm seeking the egg and other adventurous cell behavior. He mentions Albrecht Buchler who says " The 'Brain' is not the cell's nucleus or the genes it contains. All biologists accept that genes are repositories of information that govern the cell's chemical and behavioral potentials, but that they are essentially passive players in the moment to moment behavior of the cell. Moreover you can take the nucleus out of a cell, and the cell will continue to behave normally, responding appropriately to environmental cues."

Buchler goes on to speculate that the brain lies in the centrosphere. From the centrosphere a dense network of microtubules reaches out - like a nervous system to all the points on the periphery of the cell. He says it seems obvious, their activity must be coordinated if the cell is to move in a coherent fashion. Lying within the centrosphere are two cylinders, each looking like lead pipes welded side by side. They are bundled microtubules just like the ones used by motor molecules in other parts of the cell. Buchler then speculates that the centrioles are the cell's eyes. He also notes that during motion the centrioles are positioned forward toward the direction of motion. He furthers that speculation saying that the two centrioles could be sensing any electromagnetic radiation that might be emitted from another cell.

Crick and Penrose both link these organelles to - consciousness. The movement of electrons within the tubules is seen to be analogous to the unpredictable influences of quantum mechanical processes.

My objection to their thesis is that even if these tubules act like wiring in a quantum computer you still do not have "I". Where is the "I" that observes the conclusions of the quantum computer?

In my thesis, the "I" is the micro-galactic civilizations that have created this whole mechanical structure to help them survive and continue to experience the outcomes of various adventures that they cannot pursue in this post BB world without finding a world whose chemistry they can manipulate for their own purposes.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Count Lucanor »

Karpel Tunnel wrote: April 19th, 2018, 8:44 am
Count Lucanor wrote: April 19th, 2018, 8:20 am Suppose that someone made a good case for dualism and got me convinced. And then someone else came along and said: "how about a third substance? Lay out your argument that the universe is not made out of an additional third substance." And then a fourth, and so on. So, being materialism and monism the prevailing paradigm of natural sciences, the burden to present an alternative to the scientific worldview lies in those who posit the existence of non-material realms. Mere objections to the consistency of the materialist model of the universe is simply not enough.
Science will add anything it verifies or, really, decides is verified to the set 'material' or 'physical'. When you accept an expanding set like that, the term material is meaningless, it has simply become synonymous with 'what is considered real' Right now we have neutrinos passing through us in the trillions (or billions or whatever it is) every second, mass-less particles, fields, particles in superposition all considered material. Dark energy and dark matter are now considered real and therefore material and regardless of what properties they have or do not have, they will get batched in this 'monism'.
I think if many theists understood what passes for 'material' today in terms of properties, they might think the dualism/monism debate is a matter of language use debate rather than ontology. Others would not of course, but I find the use of the term material and other words based on that root...hm...propagandist. IOW it seems to be saying. this substance exists and others do not. It makes a stand against the non-material. But in fact it happily absorbs anything, and would guess it will continue to.

While I am not saying Angels are made up of neutrinos, we really do not know what the heck will be confirmed by science in the coming centuries and what properties these X Ys and Zs will and will not have. But unfortunately we can be pretty sure they will all be called material.
You've made a fairly good point. Ultimately what matters is what's real and we will keep calling material the whole set of properties and causal relations, the order of things and the intrinsic laws that govern them. The missing piezes of the model are being added up as science advances. To look for an alternative worldview implies finding a completely new, different, unrelated model. The chances of shifting paradigms and returning to the old beliefs in supernatural realms get everyday even closer to zero.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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