SELF

[Jack D Ripper]

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The relationship between this dead, meaningless aspect of the material world, which can be fully described in objective, measurable physicalist terms, and the the conscious experiential world of Subjects with a sense of self raises many philosphical conundrums. Not just the Hard Problem or Free Will, not just epistemological and ontological, but questions about the very nature of Being. Which science, rooted in our physicalist observations, doesn't seem equipped to answer.

But then, what can? Are the questions Phenomenologists explore answerable? Even meaningful? Or is the material world, which through physical processes somehow resulted in conscious Subjects emerging, the full story? I think the latter is all we can ever address beyond untestable speculations, enmeshed in bias and solipsism.

I presume you mean by the "Hard Problem" what has been called the "hard problem of consciousness". Not everyone thinks that is the great problem some philosophers imagine it to be:

https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/202 ... 09/5861711

I am inclined to think we should wait for more information from neuroscience before coming to some conclusion or other. There is much to be learned about how the brain works, though progress is being made. There are many, of course, who are too impatient for waiting for actual evidence, and so they tend to just make stuff up. That kind of approach, not surprisingly, tends to lead to error and very bad philosophy. But there is a long tradition of doing bad philosophy, as I have mentioned in another thread:

Does philosophical inquiry lead to truth?

In most cases, no, absolutely not. We can know this absolutely from the fact that different philosophers disagree on what is true, in widely diverging ways. If you have taken an elementary logic class, you should know absolutely that most philosophers must be wrong.

...

Most of what passes for philosophy is drivel. That fact should be appreciated so that one might be more careful about how one approaches the subject, to avoid wasting one's time and ending up believing stupid nonsense, which may lead to one wasting the rest of one's life pursuing phantoms.

[Gertie]

Gertie wrote: ↑
Today, 12:15 pm
...
The relationship between this dead, meaningless aspect of the material world, which can be fully described in objective, measurable physicalist terms, and the the conscious experiential world of Subjects with a sense of self raises many philosphical conundrums. Not just the Hard Problem or Free Will, not just epistemological and ontological, but questions about the very nature of Being. Which science, rooted in our physicalist observations, doesn't seem equipped to answer.

But then, what can? Are the questions Phenomenologists explore answerable? Even meaningful? Or is the material world, which through physical processes somehow resulted in conscious Subjects emerging, the full story? I think the latter is all we can ever address beyond untestable speculations, enmeshed in bias and solipsism.

I presume you mean by the "Hard Problem" what has been called the "hard problem of consciousness". Not everyone thinks that is the great problem some philosophers imagine it to be:

https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/202 ... 09/5861711

I am inclined to think we should wait for more information from neuroscience before coming to some conclusion or other. There is much to be learned about how the brain works, though progress is being made. There are many, of course, who are too impatient for waiting for actual evidence, and so they tend to just make stuff up. That kind of approach, not surprisingly, tends to lead to error and very bad philosophy

How do you envisage further studies of brains and interventions on them could potentially, in principle, go beyond noting correlations to resolve the hard problem of consciousness?

[Jack D Ripper]

I presume you mean by the "Hard Problem" what has been called the "hard problem of consciousness". Not everyone thinks that is the great problem some philosophers imagine it to be:

https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/202 ... 09/5861711

I am inclined to think we should wait for more information from neuroscience before coming to some conclusion or other. There is much to be learned about how the brain works, though progress is being made. There are many, of course, who are too impatient for waiting for actual evidence, and so they tend to just make stuff up. That kind of approach, not surprisingly, tends to lead to error and very bad philosophy

How do you envisage further studies of brains and interventions on them could potentially, in principle, go beyond noting correlations to resolve the hard problem of consciousness?

Without knowing yet what they will discover, it is hard to say exactly what will come of it. But I will give an analogy. Ancient people thought of fire as a substance, as a thing. The modern view of what fire is, is that it is not a substance, but is a process, the rapid oxidation of a material.

The mind, too, seems like a process rather than a substance. It, like fire, is not a static thing; there is always "movement", always thoughts coming and going. So looking for it as a thing is probably misguided. Consciousness is like fire, a process, not like a substance, like aluminum.

In short, I think we can summarily dismiss all claims about consciousness that define it as a thing, as a substance, because it does not seem to be a substance, according to the best available evidence.

The past gains in knowledge about the brain that science has provided has pretty well destroyed some of the old philosophical views of what a mind is. One would be in denial of the gains to take a position like the old substance dualist position, in which the mind is imagined to be completely immaterial and somehow magically connected to one's body. The fact that the mind can be affected by brain injury (in pretty interesting ways; see things like The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks) pretty well rules that out, as destroying part of a brain is just destroying matter and how could that make any difference in a substance that is immaterial? Of course, denial of reality is not new, and so some philosophers maintain primitive positions that are pretty well known to be wrong by anyone who pays attention to actual evidence.

Now, I don't expect you to be fully satisfied with this, as I have not explained how consciousness works. Of course, I do not know and cannot tell you; no one can. But enough is known to make it reasonable to take a wait and see approach to what neuroscientists discover.

Like with the example of fire, science may tell us that consciousness is not what people have imagined it to be.

[Gertie]

I am inclined to think we should wait for more information from neuroscience before coming to some conclusion or other. There is much to be learned about how the brain works, though progress is being made. There are many, of course, who are too impatient for waiting for actual evidence, and so they tend to just make stuff up. That kind of approach, not surprisingly, tends to lead to error and very bad philosophy

How do you envisage further studies of brains and interventions on them could potentially, in principle, go beyond noting correlations to resolve the hard problem of consciousness?


Without knowing yet what they will discover, it is hard to say exactly what will come of it

Yes I agree we don't know what exactly neuroscience will uncover, but I asked a different question more relevant to the Hard Problem. Namely, in your opinion what in principle is potentially discoverable via neuroscience which could in principle resolve the Hard Problem?

Consciousness is like fire, a process, not like a substance, like aluminum. ... In short, I think we can summarily dismiss all claims about consciousness that define it as a thing, as a substance, because it does not seem to be a substance, according to the best available evidence.

Brains are material things and have processes, so I don't think we can dismiss substance dualism or panpsychism out of hand on the basis that a substance can't have processes.

It strikes me it boils down to reducibility - is phenomenal experience reducible to material processes that we just haven't discovered/understood yet. Or is it a different type of fundamental constituent of the universe (substance), which is (at least sometimes) in some relationship with the material stuff of the universe - as we observe in neural correlation.

And it's hard to see how ever more detailed observations of correlation under different conditions can even in principle answer that, at least without changing our current physicalist model of the world and how it works.

[Jack D Ripper]

...

Consciousness is like fire, a process, not like a substance, like aluminum. ... In short, I think we can summarily dismiss all claims about consciousness that define it as a thing, as a substance, because it does not seem to be a substance, according to the best available evidence.

Brains are material things and have processes, so I don't think we can dismiss substance dualism or panpsychism out of hand on the basis that a substance can't have processes.

I did not state that "a substance cannot have processes." I have no idea where you got that idea. With fire, substances are involved. But the substances themselves are not the fire; the fire is the process, not the substances. If the substances are present, but not the process, then there is no fire. Of course, without the substances relevant to fire, then there can be no process of fire. That is, there must be oxygen and something to burn (fuel) in order for there to be fire. But the mere existence of oxygen and fuel is not a fire. The fire is the rapid oxidation of the fuel, which is a specific process of the materials involved.

To give a crude example, one can have gasoline in a room with air (that has oxygen), but that does not mean that there is a fire in the room. But one can have gasoline, in a room with air, that is on fire, in which case, the gasoline is rapidly oxidizing (i.e., it is burning). What is called "fire" is the process of that combining of materials (fuel and oxygen), but it is not the materials themselves.

It strikes me it boils down to reducibility - is phenomenal experience reducible to material processes that we just haven't discovered/understood yet. ...

Heat is something that is very much counter to what people originally thought. It is simply motion. The difference between a hot cup of coffee and a cold cup of coffee is that the molecules in the hot coffee are moving faster than the molecules in a cold cup of coffee. That is something very different from what people expected, but has been discovered by science. There was all sorts of BS nonsense that people believed about heat and cold before that discovery. The same may well be true of consciousness, that when someone figures out what the processes are, they will not be what many have expected. But before a discovery is made, one cannot say what it will be. Just making up stuff without bothering with any facts is not going to help one understand anything, though it often fools people into believing they know things when they really don't.

When one does not know the answer to a question, the honest approach is to say that one does not know. The dishonest approach is to make up some BS nonsense and pretend one knows. I suggest that we wait until we get more information, and not make up BS nonsense.

[Gertie]

Brains are material things and have processes, so I don't think we can dismiss substance dualism or panpsychism out of hand on the basis that a substance can't have processes.

I did not state that "a substance cannot have processes." I have no idea where you got that idea.

I thought you were dismissing substance dualism on the grounds that conscious experience is a process, sorry if I misunderstood. Re-reading you make a different argument -

the old substance dualist position, in which the mind is imagined to be completely immaterial and somehow magically connected to one's body. The fact that the mind can be affected by brain injury (in pretty interesting ways; see things like The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks) pretty well rules that out, as destroying part of a brain is just destroying matter and how could that make any difference in a substance that is immaterial?

My response to this is that until we understand the mind-body relationship we can't rule out some form of substance dualism or panpsychism. Calling it ''magic'' might just mean it doesn't fit within our current scientific model, which might well be the case. Hence I keep asking you what neuroscience might in principle discover to explain how and why experience exists at all? What current scientific theory could explain conscious experience as an emergent property of material brain processes, which neuroscientists might find evidence of in brains?

Because when you say this -

''I suggest that we wait until we get more information, and not make up BS nonsense.''

advocates of the Hard Problem will ask what evidence could even in principle explain consciousness? The point that we once didn't realise heat is an emergent property of molecules in motion is valid. That has become incorporated into our physicalist model. The question of whether conscious experience which has radically different, scientifically unobservable and sometimes contradictory properties to material brains can be similarly reducible to material stuff and forces is still in question. Because our current model of material stuff and forces would not predict the emergence of conscious experience or explain it. So we don't even know what to look for.

If conscious experience can't be accomodated within our current scientific model, then speculative hypotheses are a potential way forward. Claiming to know the answer is ********.

[Jack D Ripper]

I did not state that "a substance cannot have processes." I have no idea where you got that idea.

I thought you were dismissing substance dualism on the grounds that conscious experience is a process, sorry if I misunderstood. Re-reading you make a different argument -

...

I am dismissing substance dualism and panpsychism, but not the idea that a substance can have a process. There is no evidence for substance dualism (or panpsychism) and it also fails to explain anything. It just kicks the can down the road, as it were, and then adds a new problem of how these substances, that are completely different from each other, could possibly have any effect on each other.

It does not explain anything because just saying that there is a substance that thinks tells us nothing about how thinking happens, of what thinking is.

It is analogous to another pseudo-explanation for things, the claim that god did it. Saying "God did it" is a pseudo-explanation, something that takes the place of an explanation, but does not really explain anything. Primitive people regarded a rainbow as a sign from god, which some regarded as an explanation, but it does not explain how god did it; it does not explain how it came to be or what it is. It only answers the question of who did it, and does not explain how it came to be at all. It is kind of like someone asking how this stone arch was made:



And someone replies that it was made by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. That tells us who did it, but it does not answer the question that was asked, of how it was made.

And so it is with substance dualism (and panpsychism), saying that there is this special substance that thinks, tells us nothing about how thinking occurs, or what thinking is.

We also have no evidence of this magical substance, which is completely undetectable. It only serves as a pretend explanation for something without actually explaining anything at all.

[Gertie]

I am dismissing substance dualism and panpsychism

Then you're claiming materialist substance monism is true, and hand waving what are, currently at least, apparently intractable issues like the hard problem and explanatory gap. Which substance dualism/panpsychism are alternative explanations for.

Maybe you're right, but there is no way to test materialist monism. There's a reason you haven't been able to come up with anything we could even in principle scientifically look for to support it. No-one has. So you can't know that.

[Jack D Ripper]

I am dismissing substance dualism and panpsychism

Then you're claiming materialist substance monism is true...

No. Rejecting two claims does not entail claiming something else.

[Gertie]

Then you're claiming materialist substance monism is true...

No. Rejecting two claims does not entail claiming something else.

What other option is there?

[Waechter418]

I perceive Self as an inter/extrapolation dynamic that may manifest as Atman, as well as personal* Self (also known as Ego) - and various in-betweens.

* Lat: persona = mask of actor

[intrTek_Alan]

Subjecting Self to intellectual/logical exercises tends to fragment/obscure Self and thus impede/reduce its usefullnes

Commander Spock, first officer of the USS Enterprise, might ask the following. Does selfish self exist because of basic emotion; basic survival instinct; greed? Does emotion cloud and confuse the clarity of thought needed to ponder a true self?

Perhaps logical self is more useful than emotional self, and can achieve, or progress, further. While, emotional self is more effective, or adept, in producing its lesser denomination of usefulness.

[RJG]

Depending what we mean by "self", Buddhists believe there is no such thing, that the 'self' is an illusion.

The "self" is an "experiencer". And logically an "experiencer" cannot experience him-self (X<X). So in this sense, any experience of self (e.g. true "self-awareness") is just an illusion.

We all have a picture in our head of who/what we are, but none of us can logically see who/what we really are. A rock can tap many things, but never it-self. We can experience many things, but never our-selves.

[LuckyR]

Depending what we mean by "self", Buddhists believe there is no such thing, that the 'self' is an illusion.

The "self" is an "experiencer". And logically an "experiencer" cannot experience him-self (X<X). So in this sense, any experience of self (e.g. true "self-awareness") is just an illusion.

We all have a picture in our head of who/what we are, but none of us can logically see who/what we really are. A rock can tap many things, but never it-self. We can experience many things, but never our-selves.

Such an oversimplification (since the advent of recording), to be almost meaningless in the Modern age. If I observe an event in real time I will have a visual and auditory observation of external events, say the behavior of my coworkers. Everyone agrees there. If someone videotapes the same interaction, I can perform that observation tomorrow if I wasn't present today. Similarly if I am videotaped, I can observe myself in an identical way.

Everyone also knows that of the 5 senses, vision and hearing are geared externally whereas taste, smell and touch are at least partially internally directed. If you include other senses such as proprioception, which are entirely internal, we experience ourselves all day every day. Nonsense about rocks notwithstanding.

[RJG]

The "self" is an "experiencer". And logically an "experiencer" cannot experience him-self (X<X). So in this sense, any experience of self (e.g. true "self-awareness") is just an illusion.

Everyone also knows that of the 5 senses, vision and hearing are geared externally whereas taste, smell and touch are at least partially internally directed. If you include other senses such as proprioception, which are entirely internal, we experience ourselves all day every day.

I don't disagree that we can experience many bodily sensations. But the experiencer of these sensations cannot logically experience himself (the self/experiencer himself), on at least two different fronts.

1. The subject (or the experiencer; self) cannot logically be in two places at one time. X<X is logically impossible. Since experiencing is a one-way (incoming) event, a subject cannot be outside of himself to then experience himself. He cannot be both the subject and the object (the observer and the observed) simultaneously.

2. Also, when we experience, we can only experience 'experiences' (sensations, feelings, urges, etc) and not actual 'things' or 'selfs', themselves.

Therefore, true "self-awareness" is a myth; illusion. An experiencer (a "self") can experience many things, but never itself, ...much like a stone can tap many things, but never itself.