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

Post by BigBango »

Greta: I will get back to your post on our common ancestral cell, but Tam is flooding the airwaves.

Tam: While I think your attempt to elevate subjectivity is commendable, I also think it falls short of showing our universe is one in which the "meaning" of life has any meaning. Your metaphysics is just to shallow or other worldly to do the job. Your analysis is about all one can do and still not trample on the metaphysical space you leave to science as does most analytical philosophers these days.

Your reasoning that experience of the world is necessary for the world to have any meaning is correct. However, you need to go further than that or you run into the problem Cycswan mentions in GSC (Generic Subjective Continuity). That of forever experiencing all possible lives from the most pleasurable to the most painful. Your philosophy needs to show that living and experiencing a meaningful life is possible, even guaranteed, for an eternal awareness of the world to have some point to it. If GSC can't do that it falls short of putting us in a meaningful world. A world that is not experienced is a surd. A world that ends is a surd. At least GSC bridges those gaps by connecting one instantiation with the next, a slight bump in the road.

In my thesis a world expanding faster and faster forever is a surd because it leads to the end of any significant value of socialization. But, at this point, I think it is to big of a problem to address, other than suggesting at some point in our future the expansion will reverse and become a contraction. To that end I focus on the meaning of our world and how it could preserve meaning across Big Crunches that are followed by Big Bangs. If meaning cannot cross that event then the evolution of the world seems pointless and is simply a surd.

Most of us seem to feel that our life has meaning past our death if only because our children carry on possessing to some degree an identity that is like our own. Certainly the Republicans work tirelessly for an end to the "Inheritance Tax". :) An infinite subjective awareness seems to Trump those meager claims of a world only inherited by your children.

But let us take GSC to the next level. The meaning gained in an evolving world must be able to transcend Big Crunches. A world that must always be relived, wiped clean, starting completely over, to regain any meaning seems to me a surd. If that is our world then "experience" itself seems tarnished.

To satisfy that goal you will need to jump into the deep end of the metaphysical pool. Remember that Ockham's Law, if true, should be spelled Okam's Law. But it isn't. Anyway Ockham's Law is only to be invoked to select the simpler of different theories that are offered to explain the same facts. What I am doing, in my imagination, is to come up with a world that, at least, is not a surd. I am not aware of any competing theories, including GSC.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Felix »

"To satisfy that goal you will need to jump into the deep end of the metaphysical pool."

Just be sure to wear your metaphysical life preserver. I'd hate to see you drown and lose your subjective awareness.
"We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are." - Anaïs Nin
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Consul
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Consul »

Greta wrote: May 12th, 2018, 12:45 am
Consul wrote: May 11th, 2018, 10:47 pmThere is a biosphere on Earth, but the Earth itself (qua planet) is not a living being or organism.
Biology cannot exist without active geology. Biology and geology are separated by emergences but they remain are still inextricably lined as a single system, that includes the atmosphere and magnetosphere.
I recommend this video, Inevitable Life? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw. It is serious and I am confident you will like it as much as I did (relevance to this part of the conversation at a shade after 14 mins and onwards).
All living systems require some scaffolding to support those systems, which is exactly the issue at hand in the thread. Biology's scaffold is both itself (eg, microbes, plants) and geology.
Prof. Eric Smith's "take-home thoughts":
• Metabolism first!
• Life arose and persists to enable metabolism
• Emergence of life a chemical breakdown
• Biosphere is part of the geosphere

Yes, the biosphere emerged from the geosphere. Biology is biochemistry.

"[T]he moment some non-metabolic (downhill) replicator acquired an energy-gathering capability, could be thought of as the moment that life began."
 (p. 158)

"Abiogenesis and biological evolution are one continuous process—abiogenesis (the transformation of non-living matter to earliest life) is the low-complexity phase, biological evolution is just the high-complexity phase. That unification serves to clarify the physical process that led from simple abiotic beginnings right through to complex life. By uncovering the process that connects inanimate to animate, the essence of what it is to be alive begins to materialize. The emergence of life was initiated by the emergence of a simple replicating system, because that seemingly inconsequential event opened the door to a distinctly different kind of chemistry—replicative chemistry. Entering the world of replicative chemistry reveals the existence of that other kind of stability in nature, the dynamic kinetic stability of things that are good at making more of themselves. Exploring the world of replicative chemistry helps explain why a simple primordial replicating system would have been expected to complexify over time. The reason: to increase its stability—its dynamic kinetic stability (DKS).
Yes, living systems involve chemical reactions, lots of them, but the essence of life, the process that started it all off, was replication."
(p. 162)
 


"Biology then is just a particularly complex kind of replicative chemistry and the living state can be thought of as a new state of matter, the replicative state of matter, whose properties derive from the special kind of stability that characterizes replicating entities—DKS [dynamic kinetic stability]. That leads to a working definition of life: a self-sustaining kinetically stable dynamic reaction network derived from the replication reaction." (pp. 163-4)

"So there we have it. Even though life is an extraordinarily complex phenomenon, the life principle is surprisingly simple. Life is just the resultant network of chemical reactions that emerges from the continuing cycle of replication, mutation, complexification, and selection, when it operates on particular chain-like molecules—in the case of life on Earth, the nucleic acids. It is possible that other chemical systems could also exhibit this property, but so far this question has yet to be explored experimentally. Life then is just the chemical consequences that derive from the power of exponential growth operating on certain replicating chemical systems." (p. 164)


(Pross, Addy. What is Life? How Chemistry becomes Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.)

By the way:

"Each human is, of course, composed of billions of individual cells, some 10^13 of them, and of many different kinds. Remarkably however, each human being actually consists of ten times as many bacterial cells as human ones. From a numerical point of view, we are more bacterial than human! Literally billions of these bacteria, comprising hundreds of different species, reside in our gut, in other body cavities, on our skin. Each human is more a superorganism—a giant network—than an organism. These bacteria may be so integral to human health that they have recently been described as the 'forgotten organ'! The point is that each and every human individual, and so every multicell creature, is more an ecological network than a single living entity."

(Pross, Addy. What is Life? How Chemistry becomes Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. pp. 187-8)

See: More than half your body is not human

"More than half of your body is not human, say scientists. Human cells make up only 43% of the body's total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.…"

So a human organism is itself an ecosystem.
Greta wrote: May 12th, 2018, 12:45 amThus, our areas of difference pertain to the possibility of high levels of integration, now and in the future, of large entities and the possibility that undiscovered substrates may (or may not) exist in either other dimensions (string theory) or via other undiscovered mechanism. This is an area still rife with "unknown unknowns", and that will remain the case until the precise mechanisms of life and consciousness are understood and, perhaps, replicable.
What is understood very well is that the mechanisms of life are chemical ones, and that the mechanisms of consciousness are neurological ones.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Consul
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Consul »

Tamminen wrote: May 12th, 2018, 9:35 amJust to clarify the relation between subjectivity and an individual subject: As I said, individual subjects are manifestations of subjectivity. This means that we are all subjectivity's projects of existing.
"Subjectivity" is an abstract noun, but you're reifying or personifying what it refers to—as if subjectivity were itself a subject or person. This makes no sense!
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Tamminen »

Consul wrote: May 12th, 2018, 3:15 pm
Tamminen wrote: May 12th, 2018, 9:35 amJust to clarify the relation between subjectivity and an individual subject: As I said, individual subjects are manifestations of subjectivity. This means that we are all subjectivity's projects of existing.
"Subjectivity" is an abstract noun, but you're reifying or personifying what it refers to—as if subjectivity were itself a subject or person. This makes no sense!
We must sometimes use expressions that make no sense if not read in context. What I call subjectivity is the continuity of experiencing, that which connects individual subjects and makes them successive projects in the common subjective time. This is a metaphysical hypothesis, but it makes sense in its context. Subjectivity is not a person, it is what unites and connects persons.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Tamminen »

Suppose there are two successive experiences in subjective time. Both of them are experiences of an individual subject. If there is nothing in the second experience that refers to the first, they are two separate individual subjects, and if there is a reference relation, also known as memory, between them, they belong to the same individual subject. But what remains the same, connecting those experiences whether they belong to the same individual or two separate individuals, is what I have called subjectivity. It is the present experience continuing its existence in varying forms and contents, crossing the borders we call death. Death is forgetting. We all know what it is like to be dead, we only do not remember our death. And how could we, for "if I am, then death is not, if death is, then I am not" (Epicurus).

So concepts that at first look abstract and do not seem to make sense become very concrete and understandable when seen as part of the whole picture. But we can always use more descriptive concepts if we find them. We must usually create new concepts when we do metaphysics, as was the case with Heidegger for instance. Understanding new ideas is difficult because people do not have the same horizon of thinking as the proponent of the idea has, after developing the idea alone for a long time. We have the problem of communication that is seen also on this forum where the dialogue always becomes a collection of several parallel monologues that touch each other here and there.
BigBango
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by BigBango »

Felix wrote: May 12th, 2018, 3:01 pm "To satisfy that goal you will need to jump into the deep end of the metaphysical pool. (BigBango)"

Just be sure to wear your metaphysical life preserver. I'd hate to see you drown and lose your subjective awareness.
That is a hoot Felix:

The problem is that I am, as a "philosophical generalist", hoping someone will throw me a lifeline. But NO, even if I were a scientific generalist that boat just passes by loaded with the specialists that can, ay least, get funding for their efforts and board the happy boat.

To be a generalist philosopher is even worse because one must give up his metaphysical baggage to the science cops for a security check!
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Sy Borg »

Consul wrote: May 12th, 2018, 3:08 pm
Greta wrote: May 12th, 2018, 12:45 am Biology cannot exist without active geology. Biology and geology are separated by emergences but they remain are still inextricably lined as a single system, that includes the atmosphere and magnetosphere.
I recommend this video, Inevitable Life? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw. It is serious and I am confident you will like it as much as I did (relevance to this part of the conversation at a shade after 14 mins and onwards).
All living systems require some scaffolding to support those systems, which is exactly the issue at hand in the thread. Biology's scaffold is both itself (eg, microbes, plants) and geology.
Prof. Eric Smith's "take-home thoughts":
• Metabolism first!
• Life arose and persists to enable metabolism
• Emergence of life a chemical breakdown
• Biosphere is part of the geosphere

Yes, the biosphere emerged from the geosphere. Biology is biochemistry.

"[T]he moment some non-metabolic (downhill) replicator acquired an energy-gathering capability, could be thought of as the moment that life began."
 (p. 158)

"Abiogenesis and biological evolution are one continuous process—abiogenesis (the transformation of non-living matter to earliest life) is the low-complexity phase, biological evolution is just the high-complexity phase. That unification serves to clarify the physical process that led from simple abiotic beginnings right through to complex life. By uncovering the process that connects inanimate to animate, the essence of what it is to be alive begins to materialize. The emergence of life was initiated by the emergence of a simple replicating system, because that seemingly inconsequential event opened the door to a distinctly different kind of chemistry—replicative chemistry. Entering the world of replicative chemistry reveals the existence of that other kind of stability in nature, the dynamic kinetic stability of things that are good at making more of themselves. Exploring the world of replicative chemistry helps explain why a simple primordial replicating system would have been expected to complexify over time. The reason: to increase its stability—its dynamic kinetic stability (DKS).
Yes, living systems involve chemical reactions, lots of them, but the essence of life, the process that started it all off, was replication."
(p. 162)
 


"Biology then is just a particularly complex kind of replicative chemistry and the living state can be thought of as a new state of matter, the replicative state of matter, whose properties derive from the special kind of stability that characterizes replicating entities—DKS [dynamic kinetic stability]. That leads to a working definition of life: a self-sustaining kinetically stable dynamic reaction network derived from the replication reaction." (pp. 163-4)

"So there we have it. Even though life is an extraordinarily complex phenomenon, the life principle is surprisingly simple. Life is just the resultant network of chemical reactions that emerges from the continuing cycle of replication, mutation, complexification, and selection, when it operates on particular chain-like molecules—in the case of life on Earth, the nucleic acids. It is possible that other chemical systems could also exhibit this property, but so far this question has yet to be explored experimentally. Life then is just the chemical consequences that derive from the power of exponential growth operating on certain replicating chemical systems." (p. 164)


(Pross, Addy. What is Life? How Chemistry becomes Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.)

By the way:

"Each human is, of course, composed of billions of individual cells, some 10^13 of them, and of many different kinds. Remarkably however, each human being actually consists of ten times as many bacterial cells as human ones. From a numerical point of view, we are more bacterial than human! Literally billions of these bacteria, comprising hundreds of different species, reside in our gut, in other body cavities, on our skin. Each human is more a superorganism—a giant network—than an organism. These bacteria may be so integral to human health that they have recently been described as the 'forgotten organ'! The point is that each and every human individual, and so every multicell creature, is more an ecological network than a single living entity."

(Pross, Addy. What is Life? How Chemistry becomes Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. pp. 187-8)

See: More than half your body is not human

"More than half of your body is not human, say scientists. Human cells make up only 43% of the body's total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.…"

So a human organism is itself an ecosystem.
Greta wrote: May 12th, 2018, 12:45 amThus, our areas of difference pertain to the possibility of high levels of integration, now and in the future, of large entities and the possibility that undiscovered substrates may (or may not) exist in either other dimensions (string theory) or via other undiscovered mechanism. This is an area still rife with "unknown unknowns", and that will remain the case until the precise mechanisms of life and consciousness are understood and, perhaps, replicable.
What is understood very well is that the mechanisms of life are chemical ones, and that the mechanisms of consciousness are neurological ones.
Yes, the Earth is a single living system, of which life is the most animated part - the part that expresses.

An area where we seem to differ is that you see consciousness as an on/off situation, as in awake or asleep, whereas I see consciousness as part of a larger continuum of reactivity complexity.

Based on the shape of current events and development, it appears that the next step beyond human consciousness is linked brains drawn into a single hub capable of prioritising and making sense of multiple subjective points of view at once, just as our brains draw together the data of the senses to form a (relatively) singular viewpoint. The problem of other minds - the opacity of others' subjective opinions - is arguably the human brain's greatest limitation, solved only in part by communication and networking advances.

I also think consciousness/qualia is more divisible than is usually claimed, and one doesn't need multiple local brains like an octopus, as this is demonstrated most clearly in those with brain hemisphere connection issues.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Wayne92587 »

Before the Beginning of the Creation of the Heavens and the Earth, the Universe, the Reality of Everything that now exists in the material sense of the word, was the essence of God's Being, State of Mind.

The statement, “I am”; First person singular of “being”; the essence of Individual “being”, the essential Nature of an animate Entity.
"I am," is a little more than a statement as to self awareness; it is about the depth of self awareness.

Dig deep into the Identity of first person singular of, “being”; I am; God.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Consul »

Greta wrote: May 12th, 2018, 9:28 pmYes, the Earth is a single living system, of which life is the most animated part - the part that expresses.
No, only that part of the Earth which is the biosphere is a biological (eco)system; and it's not one in the sense of being one single organism. It's a complex of organisms which is not itself an organism.
Greta wrote: May 12th, 2018, 9:28 pmAn area where we seem to differ is that you see consciousness as an on/off situation, as in awake or asleep, whereas I see consciousness as part of a larger continuum of reactivity complexity.
Physiological sensitivity (reactiveness/responsiveness to physical or chemical stimuli) is not to be confused with psychological sentience. The former may be necessary for the latter, but it isn't sufficient for it. Plants have the former, but they lack the latter (in the sense that they lack subjective sensations/sense-impressions).
Greta wrote: May 12th, 2018, 9:28 pmBased on the shape of current events and development, it appears that the next step beyond human consciousness is linked brains drawn into a single hub capable of prioritising and making sense of multiple subjective points of view at once, just as our brains draw together the data of the senses to form a (relatively) singular viewpoint. The problem of other minds - the opacity of others' subjective opinions - is arguably the human brain's greatest limitation, solved only in part by communication and networking advances.
I also think consciousness/qualia is more divisible than is usually claimed, and one doesn't need multiple local brains like an octopus, as this is demonstrated most clearly in those with brain hemisphere connection issues.
Can one (field/stream of) consciousness have more than one subject? Can one subject have more than one (field/stream of) consciousness? These are interesting but complicated questions, and the answers depend partly on what kind of things subjects are. With this being off-topic too, I'm not going to give any answers here.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by BigBango »

Consul wrote: May 12th, 2018, 3:08 pm
Prof. Eric Smith's "take-home thoughts":
• Metabolism first!
• Life arose and persists to enable metabolism
• Emergence of life a chemical breakdown
• Biosphere is part of the geosphere

Yes, the biosphere emerged from the geosphere. Biology is biochemistry.

"[T]he moment some non-metabolic (downhill) replicator acquired an energy-gathering capability, could be thought of as the moment that life began."
 (p. 158)

"Abiogenesis and biological evolution are one continuous process—abiogenesis (the transformation of non-living matter to earliest life) is the low-complexity phase, biological evolution is just the high-complexity phase. That unification serves to clarify the physical process that led from simple abiotic beginnings right through to complex life. By uncovering the process that connects inanimate to animate, the essence of what it is to be alive begins to materialize. The emergence of life was initiated by the emergence of a simple replicating system, because that seemingly inconsequential event opened the door to a distinctly different kind of chemistry—replicative chemistry. Entering the world of replicative chemistry reveals the existence of that other kind of stability in nature, the dynamic kinetic stability of things that are good at making more of themselves. Exploring the world of replicative chemistry helps explain why a simple primordial replicating system would have been expected to complexify over time. The reason: to increase its stability—its dynamic kinetic stability (DKS).
Yes, living systems involve chemical reactions, lots of them, but the essence of life, the process that started it all off, was replication."
(p. 162)

"Biology then is just a particularly complex kind of replicative chemistry and the living state can be thought of as a new state of matter, the replicative state of matter, whose properties derive from the special kind of stability that characterizes replicating entities—DKS [dynamic kinetic stability]. That leads to a working definition of life: a self-sustaining kinetically stable dynamic reaction network derived from the replication reaction." (pp. 163-4)

"So there we have it. Even though life is an extraordinarily complex phenomenon, the life principle is surprisingly simple. Life is just the resultant network of chemical reactions that emerges from the continuing cycle of replication, mutation, complexification, and selection, when it operates on particular chain-like molecules—in the case of life on Earth, the nucleic acids. It is possible that other chemical systems could also exhibit this property, but so far this question has yet to be explored experimentally. Life then is just the chemical consequences that derive from the power of exponential growth operating on certain replicating chemical systems." (p. 164)
But why, Consul, are the chemical systems replicating?

In "The Way of the Cell" by Franklin M. Harold chapter one "Schrodinger's Riddle" Harold summaries our progress in biology from just after WWII before the discovery of the structure and function of DNA. Schrodinger, a physicist, wrote a very influential book entitled "What is Life". I think you also quoted that now ancient tiny book. That book had a big influence over research for the next thirty years and was called the "salad years".

Harold then asks, given this shift from large biological organizations in cells to cell chemistry seemed to be the answer to biology's deep problems.

He says "Can we say then that the riddle of life has been read - or soon will be, pending only the clarification of a few outstanding details? ... But anyone familiar with living creatures will protest that the compendium of molecules and mechanisms omits the very singularities that answer to one's intuitive sense of what 'life' means. Surely, a satisfying reading of Schrodinger's riddle should have something to say about cells, those universal units in which the phenomena of life is dispensed. And it should bear on the kind of observations with which biology has traditionally been concerned: morphology, structure serving function, goal seeking behavior, reproduction, complexity uniqueness and diversity. Physicists and chemists have every reason to take pride in their achievement. But traditional biologists are equally justified in pointing out how much remains to be accounted for, and to wonder whether, in abandoning the organism for the molecules, we have forgotten what the question was."

Seeing what results from the pressures of replication and not seeing any replicative provocateur leads us to assume molecules have properties that are not predicted in their pure chemistry. That is simply an error in analysis and our failure to look for the "subject" that needs to get energy from its environment. For that purpose it needs to perfect that negantropy conversion. Increasing the order within the cell so that this anti-entropic process is perfected for its purposes. The "subject" crafts his hold on inanimate matter for his purposes.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by Consul »

BigBango wrote: May 13th, 2018, 12:42 pmBut why, Consul, are the chemical systems replicating?
I don't know. As far as abiogenesis (the evolutionary transition from nonliving matter to living matter) is concerned, there is still an explanatory gap (which is getting smaller thanks to scientific progress).
BigBango wrote: May 13th, 2018, 12:42 pmIn "The Way of the Cell" by Franklin M. Harold chapter one "Schrodinger's Riddle" Harold summaries our progress in biology from just after WWII before the discovery of the structure and function of DNA. Schrodinger, a physicist, wrote a very influential book entitled "What is Life". I think you also quoted that now ancient tiny book. That book had a big influence over research for the next thirty years and was called the "salad years".
The book I quoted from has the same title as Schrödinger's, but it's another book writen by Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan.
BigBango wrote: May 13th, 2018, 12:42 pmHarold then asks, given this shift from large biological organizations in cells to cell chemistry seemed to be the answer to biology's deep problems.

He says "Can we say then that the riddle of life has been read - or soon will be, pending only the clarification of a few outstanding details? ... But anyone familiar with living creatures will protest that the compendium of molecules and mechanisms omits the very singularities that answer to one's intuitive sense of what 'life' means. Surely, a satisfying reading of Schrodinger's riddle should have something to say about cells, those universal units in which the phenomena of life is dispensed. And it should bear on the kind of observations with which biology has traditionally been concerned: morphology, structure serving function, goal seeking behavior, reproduction, complexity uniqueness and diversity. Physicists and chemists have every reason to take pride in their achievement. But traditional biologists are equally justified in pointing out how much remains to be accounted for, and to wonder whether, in abandoning the organism for the molecules, we have forgotten what the question was."

Seeing what results from the pressures of replication and not seeing any replicative provocateur leads us to assume molecules have properties that are not predicted in their pure chemistry. That is simply an error in analysis and our failure to look for the "subject" that needs to get energy from its environment. For that purpose it needs to perfect that negantropy conversion. Increasing the order within the cell so that this anti-entropic process is perfected for its purposes. The "subject" crafts his hold on inanimate matter for his purposes.
There is a consensus in natural science that abiogenesis is a purely physicochemical process that doesn't involve any physicochemically irreducible life-energy, life-force, "élan vital" or "vital spirit". In contemporary biology, vitalism is as dead as the dodo.
That said, it is nevertheless true that "living and non-living entities are strikingly different." (Addy Pross) On the other hand, both living entities and nonliving ones are physicochemical systems.
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by BigBango »

Consul, I would agree with you that "vitalism" is dead. There is no "vital" force in molecules. Neither are electrons "conscious", which has been asserted to the tune of a book on its possibility. I also am not asserting that panspermia, life from other planets came here.

What I am proposing is a continuously evolving universe preceding the big Bang in which "meaning" is preserved across the violent transition of that ancestor world from its independent galaxies into a collapsed state where each three predecessor galactic centers become one neutron/proton in the new world. A Big Crunch followed by a Big Bang, plasma and then cooling. Many of the civilizations preceding that violence where extremely old and had developed the technology to escape its calamitous demise. In 4 billion years or so we will have to have developed the technology to seamlessly merge our planet into the bigger Andromeda galaxy that we will collide with. We don't want to either be flung off into empty space or be thrown into Andromeda's black hoe center. We will do this because we will want to preserve the things we value in the world, butterflies, live pigs and my vinyl records!

Add the next 15 billion years and we will have a lot more baggage. In other words "old" civilizations will have lots of baggage and the means to keep it.

Then for every neutron/proton in our world there must be tiny, to us, civilizations that have returned to put our molecules to work for them/us. Thus we are those civilizations and we have animated this planet for our purposes. In that way, we preserve "our meaning" from before the Big Bang and join to it the meaning we gather in this new world, using our supra-creations to find it.

Vital molecules - NO. Vital companions of molecules, YES.
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Re: How does a disembodied soul/mind/consciousness operate?

Post by JamesOfSeattle »

BigB, in what sense is “meaning” preserved, what do you mean by “meaning”, and how can a neutron contribute to “meaning” at our scale?

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

Post by Sy Borg »

Consul wrote: May 13th, 2018, 10:11 am
Greta wrote: May 12th, 2018, 9:28 pmYes, the Earth is a single living system, of which life is the most animated part - the part that expresses.
No, only that part of the Earth which is the biosphere is a biological (eco)system; and it's not one in the sense of being one single organism. It's a complex of organisms which is not itself an organism.
I am obviously not saying that the Earth is an animal - it's a planet. I actually know this.

The geosphere and biosphere are not separate. The first lithotrophs converted geology into themselves, which we call biology to recognise the emergence of systemic complexity - but these are just parts of one deeply interconnected living system that can now see deeply into space, detect vibrations in the fabric of spacetime, identify asteroids and other threats in the environment.

To suggest that the geosphere and biosphere are not one living system is akin to deeming yourself not a living system, only your internal organs. Doubt me? Change just one element and the effects flow through the geosphere, biosphere and atmosphere, and that is what's happening at present with carbon release.

Why assume that current levels of integration of these things are static for all time? Things develop. Once life was very simple, now it's more complex. Once the Earth was much more simple than today. If minds can emerge at our planetary surface scale, why could minds not be currently be in the process of emerging at larger sizes? At present larger minds are seemingly not present because so much can be explained by physics, but they may be, like early life, in a process of continuing integration that my result in the development of sensing and perhaps, subsequently, minds.
Consul wrote:
Greta wrote: May 12th, 2018, 9:28 pmAn area where we seem to differ is that you see consciousness as an on/off situation, as in awake or asleep, whereas I see consciousness as part of a larger continuum of reactivity complexity.
Physiological sensitivity (reactiveness/responsiveness to physical or chemical stimuli) is not to be confused with psychological sentience. The former may be necessary for the latter, but it isn't sufficient for it. Plants have the former, but they lack the latter (in the sense that they lack subjective sensations/sense-impressions).
I would argue that plants are almost all sense impression. They are not so internal as animals, so what you see is what you get, whereas most of what goes on within intelligent animals is hidden.

Rather than having specialised organs to feel and sense, plants have many self-repeating structures, much like sponges, so the sensing is happening all over rather than via specialised, non-repeating organs so their senses are far more localised.

You are braver than me to confidently declare that plants and other complex, ostensibly brainless entities lack any equivalent processes to neuronal activity. For me the jury is out because plant sensing and ostensibly intelligent behaviours are an active area of research I'm not prepared to pre-empt.
Consul wrote:
Greta wrote: May 12th, 2018, 9:28 pmBased on the shape of current events and development, it appears that the next step beyond human consciousness is linked brains drawn into a single hub capable of prioritising and making sense of multiple subjective points of view at once, just as our brains draw together the data of the senses to form a (relatively) singular viewpoint. The problem of other minds - the opacity of others' subjective opinions - is arguably the human brain's greatest limitation, solved only in part by communication and networking advances.
I also think consciousness/qualia is more divisible than is usually claimed, and one doesn't need multiple local brains like an octopus, as this is demonstrated most clearly in those with brain hemisphere connection issues.
Can one (field/stream of) consciousness have more than one subject? Can one subject have more than one (field/stream of) consciousness? These are interesting but complicated questions, and the answers depend partly on what kind of things subjects are. With this being off-topic too, I'm not going to give any answers here.
If there are different kinds of consciousnesses rather than just ours, then that has implications for the OP, especially since the idea of a human mind in a non human package. As far as I am concerned, if we approach the problem without worrying about religious claims, the thread subject matter opens up and becomes more interesting IMO.
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