How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
Think of the primary substance as being a particle that has no mass, an omnipresent unspoken of Individual Infinitely Finite Indivisible Singularities made manifest within the Darkness of a State, Field, of Singularities, State of a Transcendental Fully Random, number, quantum, of Metaphysical Singularities, having no relative, numerical value, having a numerical value of Zero-0. A State in which everything is motionless.
First motion being being the insignificant inner motion within each of the individual Singularities
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
I would, rather, that the scientific paradigm, in terms of substance and monism, is not falsifiable. No possible exception could be found. Once found, it would be called material, absorbed into the monism. And since many religions are monisms - Hinduism is at least in many of its forms - this isn't really problematic, even there. i see a lot of research moving in directions that pantheists would appreciate. I also see more scientists considering types of action at a distance. The fact that science treats everything new as matter does not mean there will be no paradigm shift, it just means that scientists will likely not change that facet of their metaphysics, even if there is a paradigmatic shift in terms of the range of phenomena.Count Lucanor wrote: ↑April 19th, 2018, 9:04 pm
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.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
A question we should be asking is how would we expect a disembodied "thing" to interact with a physical "thing" and what evidence do we have to demonstrate that such a phenomenon occurs?
Of course the most obvious answer to this question can found by examining our own being "I am a physical thing, which interacts with a non physical thing - my mind". This answer of course doesn't bring us any closer to the challenge of seperating the body and mind. It in fact demonstrates the difficulty we have in establishing a foundation to build an argument from, because even when examining our own mind, consciousness and soul (whatever a soul is) we are unable to escape the fact that we are physical things that experience non physical things - consciousness and mind.
So perhaps before discussing the how's we ought to be discussing the why?
As in WHY would one believe that a disembodied mind can even operate in the first place?
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
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.
But here the air is getting thin. Language starts to bewitch us. Flies get trapped in the fly bottle, to use Wittgenstein's metaphor. We say that consciousness of matter is an emergent property of matter. But what does this mean? Nothing. Language stands still. If we do not have a material mechanism connecting matter to consciousness of matter, we have not said anything. 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.
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.
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.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
The soul has Passion; Passion being an innate, inner motion, that takes the form of an Oscillation, is the insignificant innate, inner motion, vibration, of an Infinitely Finite Indivisible Singularity.
Passion being the seed of all Living Things; all Living things being defined as all things said to exist as a material, physical Reality.
Consciousness said to be the soul by religious persons attempting to discover Man's Immortal Soul.
When God breathed his breath, Immoral Soul, Spirit, Passion, into Man's Nostrils It was not man that became an immortal soul, it was God that became a Living Soul, God alive in the Flesh Body of Man
The Soul is not a materiality nor is Consciousness but that does not mean that Consciousness is the Soul.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
On the other hand, it is not clear that we need to know what is going on at the quantum level to explain what is going on at other levels and so a physical or material explanation may still be possible.
Another way to put the problem is to ask whether the problem can be solved by metaphysics or if it is to be solved it must be by science. At a minimum it seems clear that any metaphysical answer must depend on the evidence of science. In addition, a correct scientific explanation would put an end to the matter but nothing ever puts metaphysical speculation to an end.
Do we have good reason to think there may a such a thing as a disembodied consciousness? That depends on what you consider to be good reason. I am not aware of any evidence of disembodied consciousness. What would stand as evidence?
If soul/mind/consciousness is necessarily embodied this raises the question of whether any body sufficient or must it be a living body or only living bodies that are sufficiently complex? All the evidence that I am aware of points to complex living bodies.
I do not think that “consciousness of the gaps” is any more persuasive than “God of the gaps”.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
I agree that to achieve a "TOE" in terms of substances is a futile exercise. But in the words of Karl Jaspers there is always more knowledge beyond the horizon of current knowledge. IMHO Tamminen, you are being quite true to the principles of Analytic Philosophy and as a result have given over your philosophical duty to correct sciences metaphysical mistakes. Continental Philosophy is in a much healthier state and is not afraid to step on TOES.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.
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.
But here the air is getting thin. Language starts to bewitch us. Flies get trapped in the fly bottle, to use Wittgenstein's metaphor. We say that consciousness of matter is an emergent property of matter. But what does this mean? Nothing. Language stands still. If we do not have a material mechanism connecting matter to consciousness of matter, we have not said anything. 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.
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.
Physical science has come to self imposed limits. These limits are set by their empirical requirement that substance discovery must be verified with instruments made of known substances. That standard is rapidly coming to an end. This is because they have realized that one result of that overbearing empiricism is to have limited our knowledge of substance in the world to only 10% of the known mass in the world. Even from early times they started to give up on a strict empiricism. Instead, rather than directly experiencing substances (quarks, etc.) with instruments, they mostly theorize what is there and try to predict their effect on the world after splitting a nucleus e.g..Tamminen wrote: ↑April 20th, 2018, 11:41 am 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.
Those only theoretical structures have almost always been the case in psychology (ID, EGO, SUPEREGO, Collective Unconscious) and nobody expects otherwise. Biology sprinkles some magic emergence properties onto chemistry and then proceeds to describe the behavior of cell parts including coordinated movement of signal cells that are mobile or motor molecules that work carrying loads on highways to the tune of a drummer that has not been found. There is no "why" that can't just be dismissed as an emergent property.
There must be more layers, metaphysical, to be discovered and as philosophers we can help science find them, even if they are not a complete exposition of consciousness.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
Yup.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.
Does this theory also explain itself and the development of the theory in the scientific community?
Not all matter is conscious of itself. Only some matter. See below.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.
If you say so.But here the air is getting thin. Language starts to bewitch us. Flies get trapped in the fly bottle, to use Wittgenstein's metaphor.
No, it means that Consciousness is the result of what matter does, but it would be impossible to explain by reference to the smallest bits of matter we know of, currently quarks[?]. So we abstract away details until we see a structure that “emerges”. We abstract away until we get to a level where we can talk about “functions” and “signals” and “concepts”. Each of these things has a physical mechanism at bottom, but we can ignore most/all from that bottom level. So we can talk about consciousness using these terms, understanding they are grounded in physical mechanisms.We say that consciousness of matter is an emergent property of matter. But what does this mean? Nothing.
Okay, but we do. At least, I do.If we do not have a material mechanism connecting matter to consciousness of matter, we have not said anything.
Speak for yourself. And I don’t claim to have a theory of everything, but I do claim to have a theory that explains consciousness in terms of the physics we have in hand now.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.
This is simply not true. When a function is it’s own argument, we call it recursion.And this is not due to our lack of insight. It is due to the nature of reality.
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.
This, amazingly enough, is almost exactly correct. “We” are collections of functions, and the world supplies the arguments. While a collection of functions can be realized via mechanisms, that collection will not have direct (subjective) knowledge of those mechanisms. But if that collection includes the ability to represent arbitrary concepts, that collection can ultimately come to represent/understand the mechanisms as concepts.We are the function, the world is the argument.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
Is the Copernican paradigm falsifiable? Is it possible to find an alternative model to the heliocentric system? It seems that every new discovery since Newton will be added to that paradigm, will improve it, refine it, will take into account small differences, but ultimately, there's no escape from it. Does that really represent a problem in terms of the accurate description of reality? Of course not. New discoveries are not simply stacked up at the margins with no relation to the core theoretical framework. They are pieces that fit in the puzzle and confirm the reality of the whole picture. Monism and materialism are falsifiable in the sense that you could look for pieces that don't fit in the puzzle, but complete another theoretical framework, just like materialism did when it tore down the old idealist paradigm. But just as the heliocentric model tore down the geocentric model, there is no way back and no alternative models left. That's because of the weight of the facts, not because of a capricious convention.Karpel Tunnel wrote:I would, rather, that the scientific paradigm, in terms of substance and monism, is not falsifiable. No possible exception could be found. Once found, it would be called material, absorbed into the monism.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
You may need to clarify exactly what you mean here? You seem to be implying that from a materialistic perspective that consciousness is a property of matter and that matter Is conscious of itself?
It would be more accurate if we were to say that consciousness emerges via a neurological process which is contingent on bio chemical matter.
But here the air is getting thin. Language starts to bewitch us. Flies get trapped in the fly bottle, to use Wittgenstein's metaphor. We say that consciousness of matter is an emergent property of matter. But what does this mean? Nothing. Language stands still.
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.
We most likely won't find a material mechanism to link matter and consciousness, but this is not a problem for a materialist. Science has undoubtedly proven that we have the ability to detect, measure and understand things which do not consist of matter. However, eventually we always find a relationship between the thing we are measuring and a material object which somehow influences the outcome of what we are measuring.If we do not have a material mechanism connecting matter to consciousness of matter, we have not said anything. 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.
Such relationships are evident when observing the influence neurological activity has on cognitive ability. Patience of brain injuries and Alzheimers offer great insight into the relationship of the brain, mind and consciousness. We can detect a decrease in cognitive ability while simultaneously measuring a decrease in neurological activity.
The point is although the connection itself may be some what elusive the relationship between matter and consciousness is still evident. Consciousness operating independently of matter on the other hand? I have yet to see any convincing evidence to warrant even contemplating the possibility that this could occur.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
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.Thinking critical wrote: ↑April 21st, 2018, 12:26 am You may need to clarify exactly what you mean here? You seem to be implying that from a materialistic perspective that consciousness is a property of matter and that matter Is conscious of itself?
It would be more accurate if we were to say that consciousness emerges via a neurological process which is contingent on bio chemical matter.
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. 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.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.
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.'We most likely won't find a material mechanism to link matter and consciousness, but this is not a problem for a materialist. Science has undoubtedly proven that we have the ability to detect, measure and understand things which do not consist of matter. However, eventually we always find a relationship between the thing we are measuring and a material object which somehow influences the outcome of what we are measuring.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
I think we're probably starting to go round in circles, here goes -
Scientific materialism is our prevailing paradigm, but -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.
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?
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.
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. 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.
You really can't be certain consciousness is an emergent property of material processes. 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.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.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.
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, 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.
If we could exactly duplicate a conscious critter we'd expect it to be conscious. If we changed anything, the substrate or the patterns of interactions, we wouldn't be so confident, because we don't know the necessary and sufficient conditions.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.
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.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.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?
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?
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.Thinking critical wrote: ↑April 21st, 2018, 12:26 am We most likely won't find a material mechanism to link matter and consciousness, but this is not a problem for a materialist. Science has undoubtedly proven that we have the ability to detect, measure and understand things which do not consist of matter. However, eventually we always find a relationship between the thing we are measuring and a material object which somehow influences the outcome of what we are measuring.
Such relationships are evident when observing the influence neurological activity has on cognitive ability. Patience of brain injuries and Alzheimers offer great insight into the relationship of the brain, mind and consciousness. We can detect a decrease in cognitive ability while simultaneously measuring a decrease in neurological activity.
The point is although the connection itself may be some what elusive the relationship between matter and consciousness is still evident. Consciousness operating independently of matter on the other hand? I have yet to see any convincing evidence to warrant even contemplating the possibility that this could occur.
This emerging is very problematic and leads us astray, in my opinion.It would be more accurate if we were to say that consciousness emerges via a neurological process which is contingent on bio chemical matter.
I wonder what those conditions could be. JamesOfSeattle has his own theory, which I do not buy.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.
Maybe, but I used it as a metaphor, and in my context the principle is valid, I think.JamesOfSeattle wrote: ↑April 20th, 2018, 8:14 pm When a function is it’s own argument, we call it recursion.
I think I have criticized the ontological commitments of the materialistic science all the time in my posts. But as I wrote, science works well on its own territory, and a unified science based on physicalism and materialism is a theoretical possibility, as long as it does not cross its limits and start speaking about consciousness as a property of matter, for instance.
Right.There must be more layers, metaphysical, to be discovered and as philosophers we can help science find them, even if they are not a complete exposition of consciousness.
I agree that it is difficult to imagine a disembodied consciousness. I also agree that consciousness needs a living body. This does not mean, however, that consciousness can be reduced to material, neurological phenomena. Correlations and material connections are totally different things.Fooloso4 wrote: ↑April 20th, 2018, 6:06 pm Do we have good reason to think there may a such a thing as a disembodied consciousness? That depends on what you consider to be good reason. I am not aware of any evidence of disembodied consciousness. What would stand as evidence?
If soul/mind/consciousness is necessarily embodied this raises the question of whether any body sufficient or must it be a living body or only living bodies that are sufficiently complex? All the evidence that I am aware of points to complex living bodies.
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