Consciousness is logically impossible yet exists.

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
Gertie
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Re: Consciousness is logically impossible yet exists.

Post by Gertie »

Meta!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m30aaI5Yf8

Interesting angle/unangle.

Average Bozo put their finger on the prob I have.

''Consider the following statement in the circumstance of sorting apples on a moving belt:
This apple is red.[10]
Upon observation, the apple is an undetermined color between yellow and red, or it is mottled both colors. Thus the color falls into neither category " red " nor " yellow ", but these are the only categories available to us as we sort the apples. We might say it is "50% red". This could be rephrased: it is 50% true that the apple is red. Therefore, P is 50% true, and 50% false. Now consider:
This apple is red and it is not-red.
In other words, P and not-P. This violates the law of noncontradiction and, by extension, bivalence.''

I don't think this works, because you can just say this apple is mottled, with parts here and there being red. That's not a fundamental prob of logic, just a lack of specificity in a world of stuff made up of parts isn't it?

Logic is itself derived from how we observe the physical world to be (at the level of resolution we experientially model it, so not at the level of QM). So logic deriving from a physicalist model of the world isn't likely to have a fundamental prob with describing the world and how it works at the physicalist level. QM presents probs to that derived conceptualisation of logic and cause and effect, because we don't experientially model the world at the QM level of resolution, we have to discover that QM level of resolution through technological observation and adapt our deductions accordingly).
Next, consider things like the phenomenon of Qualia and related sentient experiences (metaphysical phenomena), or otherwise the various qualities of consciousness that are “mottled” together during everyday cognition (feelings/logic and so forth), that also suggests a type of both/and phenomenon instead of an either/or logical approach:

“St. Thomas, the Intellectualist, had argued that the intellect in man is prior to the will because the intellect determines the will, since we can desire only what we know. Scotus, the Voluntarist, replied that the will determines what ideas the intellect turns to, and thus in the end determines what the intellect comes to know.”

How to we reconcile that either/or thinking?
Well we can look at the correlated physical parts (neural correlation) and see lots of roughly identical neurons, which form patterns of connections creating dedicated subsystems, which are also neurally interacting affecting each other. There will be correlated mechanisms for functions like attention and focus, and somehow bringing everything together as an experiential unified field of consciousness. All of that physical stuff going on in the brain hasn't been identified yet, but probably won't present a fundamental challenge to science or logic, hasn't so far at least.

If phenomenal experience is seen as a different type of manifestation of those scientifically understandable physical processes and relationships of parts, we've resolved the mottling issue in principle. The unified field of consciousness is like the mottled apple, and we can theoretically categorise this and that part of seeing, hearing, thinking, desiring,etc, in a similar sort of way we can categorise the correlated physical neural subsystems for seeing, hearing, thinking, desiring, etc. There doesn't seem to be an in principle fundamental challenge to logic there, just another way of recognising the relationship between the parts and the whole.
And so returning to the phenomenon of ‘driving and not driving’ how is that possible? Consider an individual driving their car, daydreaming about the beach, running a traffic light then crashing. In a dualist sense if you will, which mind was driving and which mind was on the beach? Suppose I argue I was consciously at the beach watching a cute babe swimming, while running the traffic light and crashing. Was that experience real? Well, yes it was real.

It was real to me at that time in the same sense, manner and respect happening all at the same time. For all I knew, I was on the beach, yet my body was still driving the vehicle. That said, you may wonder which mind was on the beach and which mind was driving? And if I was not physically on the beach, was my thought about the beach, in-itself, metaphysical? In any case, how can one physically be in two places at one time? Again, for all that person knew, they were on the beach and not driving. So, you could say that they were sort-of driving when they crashed. Is that considered a true statement? What does sort-of mean? Would that violate the rules of either/or thinking?
The beach part was real in the form of phenomenal experience, the car part had a physical reality too.

I don't think there are two minds present in that scenario. The largely unconscious parts of your brain were on autopilot while driving because that didn't require much attention or focus, you were doing something automatic and familiar and other parts of your brain's subsystems manifested in the space left, day dreaming about the beach. But focus doesn't obliterate the unified field where you're still more 'vaguely' seeing the road, that's still there. We seem to have brain mechanisms primed for change which can snap attention back to the unexpected which might require a response, but yours let you down there. Functionally speaking there's nothing weird here, it's just that snap back attention mechanism didn't work well enough.

You can imagine your ancestor walking through the savannah thinking about this and that, maybe usefully planning the meal she'll create with the berries she's going to collect... then hearing a rustle in the bush and snapping her attention to that bush fearing a threat, adrenaline spiking, unconscious bodily functions shifting to fight/flight/freeze mode. In evolutionary functional terms it makes sense. Even if it's only a rabbit she can add to the pot, the ability to snap focus on change is obviously useful.
In summary, I will argue that our consciousness exists, yet like other naturally occurring phenomena (Time itself, the Will, etc.) or otherwise the nature of one’s conscious existence, it is all considered logically impossible (by definition). Hence, ‘driving and not driving’ is a description of naturally occurring conscious phenomenon which is considered logically impossible, yet still exists.
I'd say it raises issues of mind-body monism and dualism. And when you delve into those issues you find that functional explanations will hold, but issues of substance and properties run into fundamental problems and paradoxes. It's at that level we run into into the Hard Problem and where physicalism and its associated science and logic have limitations. What is the fundamental nature of the stuff/processes in the mind-body relationship, and indeed what is the nature of that relationship.

But in theory substance monism and dualism don't have a fundamental prob I can see with 'mottling', or parts in relation to the whole - except in fundamental terms of substance and properties (as opposed to whole and parts). I think...
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3017Metaphysician
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Re: Consciousness is logically impossible yet exists.

Post by 3017Metaphysician »

Gertie wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 6:20 am Meta!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m30aaI5Yf8

Interesting angle/unangle.

Average Bozo put their finger on the prob I have.

''Consider the following statement in the circumstance of sorting apples on a moving belt:
This apple is red.[10]
Upon observation, the apple is an undetermined color between yellow and red, or it is mottled both colors. Thus the color falls into neither category " red " nor " yellow ", but these are the only categories available to us as we sort the apples. We might say it is "50% red". This could be rephrased: it is 50% true that the apple is red. Therefore, P is 50% true, and 50% false. Now consider:
This apple is red and it is not-red.
In other words, P and not-P. This violates the law of noncontradiction and, by extension, bivalence.''

I don't think this works, because you can just say this apple is mottled, with parts here and there being red. That's not a fundamental prob of logic, just a lack of specificity in a world of stuff made up of parts isn't it?

Logic is itself derived from how we observe the physical world to be (at the level of resolution we experientially model it, so not at the level of QM). So logic deriving from a physicalist model of the world isn't likely to have a fundamental prob with describing the world and how it works at the physicalist level. QM presents probs to that derived conceptualisation of logic and cause and effect, because we don't experientially model the world at the QM level of resolution, we have to discover that QM level of resolution through technological observation and adapt our deductions accordingly).
Next, consider things like the phenomenon of Qualia and related sentient experiences (metaphysical phenomena), or otherwise the various qualities of consciousness that are “mottled” together during everyday cognition (feelings/logic and so forth), that also suggests a type of both/and phenomenon instead of an either/or logical approach:

“St. Thomas, the Intellectualist, had argued that the intellect in man is prior to the will because the intellect determines the will, since we can desire only what we know. Scotus, the Voluntarist, replied that the will determines what ideas the intellect turns to, and thus in the end determines what the intellect comes to know.”

How to we reconcile that either/or thinking?
Well we can look at the correlated physical parts (neural correlation) and see lots of roughly identical neurons, which form patterns of connections creating dedicated subsystems, which are also neurally interacting affecting each other. There will be correlated mechanisms for functions like attention and focus, and somehow bringing everything together as an experiential unified field of consciousness. All of that physical stuff going on in the brain hasn't been identified yet, but probably won't present a fundamental challenge to science or logic, hasn't so far at least.

If phenomenal experience is seen as a different type of manifestation of those scientifically understandable physical processes and relationships of parts, we've resolved the mottling issue in principle. The unified field of consciousness is like the mottled apple, and we can theoretically categorise this and that part of seeing, hearing, thinking, desiring,etc, in a similar sort of way we can categorise the correlated physical neural subsystems for seeing, hearing, thinking, desiring, etc. There doesn't seem to be an in principle fundamental challenge to logic there, just another way of recognising the relationship between the parts and the whole.
And so returning to the phenomenon of ‘driving and not driving’ how is that possible? Consider an individual driving their car, daydreaming about the beach, running a traffic light then crashing. In a dualist sense if you will, which mind was driving and which mind was on the beach? Suppose I argue I was consciously at the beach watching a cute babe swimming, while running the traffic light and crashing. Was that experience real? Well, yes it was real.

It was real to me at that time in the same sense, manner and respect happening all at the same time. For all I knew, I was on the beach, yet my body was still driving the vehicle. That said, you may wonder which mind was on the beach and which mind was driving? And if I was not physically on the beach, was my thought about the beach, in-itself, metaphysical? In any case, how can one physically be in two places at one time? Again, for all that person knew, they were on the beach and not driving. So, you could say that they were sort-of driving when they crashed. Is that considered a true statement? What does sort-of mean? Would that violate the rules of either/or thinking?
The beach part was real in the form of phenomenal experience, the car part had a physical reality too.

I don't think there are two minds present in that scenario. The largely unconscious parts of your brain were on autopilot while driving because that didn't require much attention or focus, you were doing something automatic and familiar and other parts of your brain's subsystems manifested in the space left, day dreaming about the beach. But focus doesn't obliterate the unified field where you're still more 'vaguely' seeing the road, that's still there. We seem to have brain mechanisms primed for change which can snap attention back to the unexpected which might require a response, but yours let you down there. Functionally speaking there's nothing weird here, it's just that snap back attention mechanism didn't work well enough.

You can imagine your ancestor walking through the savannah thinking about this and that, maybe usefully planning the meal she'll create with the berries she's going to collect... then hearing a rustle in the bush and snapping her attention to that bush fearing a threat, adrenaline spiking, unconscious bodily functions shifting to fight/flight/freeze mode. In evolutionary functional terms it makes sense. Even if it's only a rabbit she can add to the pot, the ability to snap focus on change is obviously useful.
In summary, I will argue that our consciousness exists, yet like other naturally occurring phenomena (Time itself, the Will, etc.) or otherwise the nature of one’s conscious existence, it is all considered logically impossible (by definition). Hence, ‘driving and not driving’ is a description of naturally occurring conscious phenomenon which is considered logically impossible, yet still exists.
I'd say it raises issues of mind-body monism and dualism. And when you delve into those issues you find that functional explanations will hold, but issues of substance and properties run into fundamental problems and paradoxes. It's at that level we run into into the Hard Problem and where physicalism and its associated science and logic have limitations. What is the fundamental nature of the stuff/processes in the mind-body relationship, and indeed what is the nature of that relationship.

But in theory substance monism and dualism don't have a fundamental prob I can see with 'mottling', or parts in relation to the whole - except in fundamental terms of substance and properties (as opposed to whole and parts). I think...
Gertie!

Thanks for your contribution. I love the Bowie lyrics (God rest his soul).

Let's take one issue at time (this time). BTW, I've always like China Girl and Rebel Rebel, but this one 'live' has a cool groove to it (I'm an ex-music major/ play bass in a band but play all instruments, written/recorded music, etc):

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. I can definitely appreciate a possible way out this dilemma (of binary truth values/'true or false' only-explaining or describing the nature of cognition), by simply saying that the apple is 'mottled'. Let's assume that works, proposition A : 'My consciousness is mottled'. What would that mean? What is its truth value? On might then ask, what would be its premise? For example, let's look at a possible way out:

The subject-person is mottled because all minds are mottled. Or, Because all minds are mottled and Socrates has a mind, Socrates is mottled.

What does or what could that mean (what are its implications)?

Let's take our discourse a bit slower this time if you're okay with that.
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” "Spooky Action at a Distance"
― Albert Einstein
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3017Metaphysician
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Re: Consciousness is logically impossible yet exists.

Post by 3017Metaphysician »

Thomyum2 wrote: August 2nd, 2022, 8:04 pm
3017Metaphysician wrote: August 2nd, 2022, 5:24 pm Thank you Tom for such thoughtful response. I pretty much established what I thought was real but can certainly offer another interpretation. What becomes real for that person, is the person who believes they are consciously on the beach, but in fact were driving instead. Their perceived experience of being on the beach, has become their reality. Otherwise, in principle, they would not choose to intentionality crash the vehicle.

To your second point, when I described the mind driving it was a figure of speech of course. Like a ghost in the machine, one mind was on the beach while the other mind was driving. Meaning, the subject-person perceived part of his mind being on the beach while driving. And for all he knew, he was 'in fact', physically on the beach. The other 'fact' as it were, was that he was driving the car. So arguably, you have two truth values (of both fact and reality) or a gradient of truth value of only one reality in the mind. In any case, while driving, his reality existed on the beach and not driving.

You raise an important distinction I think. I would be happy to entertain the parsing of the distinctions between facts and reality, if that is where you might be going with it... ? I think that might be an interesting metaphysical/epistemic exercise worth pursuing in this scenario.

With respect to the mind's location, can you elaborate a bit more on that? It is a bit reminiscent of William James's stream of consciousness phenomena whereby he postulated consciousness happens to the person, not by the person... suggesting a knower who is not known. Or, having thoughts without a thinker.

With respect to proof, the 'phenomenal' example, is the person unintentionally crashing, and God forbid, killing themselves in the [cognitive] process. Or if he survived, the truth value of him describing the phenomenon itself, which would be something described as being logically impossible.
You're most welcome, thank you for your engaging reply!

I'm not entirely satisfied with your definition of 'real' here, at least as I'm understanding it. It's seems to me you're taking 'real' in two different senses, which may be creating something like a four-term fallacy in your argument. If we take reality as the product of the mind, then at the point that mind goes to the beach, that becomes the reality and the driving of the car would cease to be real.

Yes, I agree, that was his reality at that point in time.


If the car crashed, that would have to be someone else's reality, someone else who was not the driver but was conscious of the driving of the car, no?

Why yes. I never thought of that, but that's a very intriguing supposition. That being the case, the phenomenon itself has the 'appearance' as if some one else was driving the car! But the concept 'appearance' would be the source of yet another paradox because by observation, it is the same person who appears to be driving, yet on the beach, all at the same time. In a way (though another discussion) this circles back to, say, James's notion of our stream of consciousness being something that happens to us, not by us. In the same way, The Ghost in The Machine bears this out... .

So we have two problems. One of observation and one of an independent existence causing us to drift into a dream while driving!



Because the driver was no longer in the car if they were on the beach, unless perhaps you would propose something like a parallel universe. On the other hand, if we take reality as being something separate from the mind and that exists independently of it, then if the mind experiences something different from that reality then it would be an illusion, not a separate or additional reality. So the being on the beach wasn't real, it just seemed to be so to the driver. Or is there another sense of 'real' that I'm missing something in what you're saying?

That's a great distinction. The problem is, that person, in his mind, perceived that they were physically on the beach. In much the same way of perhaps Berkley's Subjective Idealism, their 'truth value' (that's what we are trying to parse here) was being physically on the beach. But that's either a paradox of sorts, or logically impossible. Again, all that person knew was that they were on the beach. Their 'conscious mind' was focused on the beach. Fascinating.

With regard to the mind's location, it's a category error to me because mind is not a physical entity. Mind consists of thoughts and ideas, not physical objects, so can't be described as having a place in physical space relative to other objects. The mind can think of locations, but it cannot be in a location. As an analogy, it's like asking: what is the location of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? or Shakespeare's Hamlet?
Another wow moment Tom. I agree. Thank you for pointing that out. That's all part of our problem in figuring this stuff out logically. I love the analogical reference to music of course, but let's keep in mind (no pun intended) that much like consciousness itself, we have both the physical (quantities) and metaphysical (qualities) of cognition, those being both material and immaterial. So in the same way, we have a music disk as the material medium, but the mind as the information processor who converts sound waves into immaterial subjective feelings. We need both to make sense of the metaphysical phenomenon.
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” "Spooky Action at a Distance"
― Albert Einstein
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JackDaydream
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Re: Consciousness is logically impossible yet exists.

Post by JackDaydream »

3017Metaphysician wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 10:15 am
Thomyum2 wrote: August 2nd, 2022, 8:04 pm
3017Metaphysician wrote: August 2nd, 2022, 5:24 pm Thank you Tom for such thoughtful response. I pretty much established what I thought was real but can certainly offer another interpretation. What becomes real for that person, is the person who believes they are consciously on the beach, but in fact were driving instead. Their perceived experience of being on the beach, has become their reality. Otherwise, in principle, they would not choose to intentionality crash the vehicle.

To your second point, when I described the mind driving it was a figure of speech of course. Like a ghost in the machine, one mind was on the beach while the other mind was driving. Meaning, the subject-person perceived part of his mind being on the beach while driving. And for all he knew, he was 'in fact', physically on the beach. The other 'fact' as it were, was that he was driving the car. So arguably, you have two truth values (of both fact and reality) or a gradient of truth value of only one reality in the mind. In any case, while driving, his reality existed on the beach and not driving.

You raise an important distinction I think. I would be happy to entertain the parsing of the distinctions between facts and reality, if that is where you might be going with it... ? I think that might be an interesting metaphysical/epistemic exercise worth pursuing in this scenario.

With respect to the mind's location, can you elaborate a bit more on that? It is a bit reminiscent of William James's stream of consciousness phenomena whereby he postulated consciousness happens to the person, not by the person... suggesting a knower who is not known. Or, having thoughts without a thinker.

With respect to proof, the 'phenomenal' example, is the person unintentionally crashing, and God forbid, killing themselves in the [cognitive] process. Or if he survived, the truth value of him describing the phenomenon itself, which would be something described as being logically impossible.
You're most welcome, thank you for your engaging reply!

I'm not entirely satisfied with your definition of 'real' here, at least as I'm understanding it. It's seems to me you're taking 'real' in two different senses, which may be creating something like a four-term fallacy in your argument. If we take reality as the product of the mind, then at the point that mind goes to the beach, that becomes the reality and the driving of the car would cease to be real.

Yes, I agree, that was his reality at that point in time.


If the car crashed, that would have to be someone else's reality, someone else who was not the driver but was conscious of the driving of the car, no?

Why yes. I never thought of that, but that's a very intriguing supposition. That being the case, the phenomenon itself has the 'appearance' as if some one else was driving the car! But the concept 'appearance' would be the source of yet another paradox because by observation, it is the same person who appears to be driving, yet on the beach, all at the same time. In a way (though another discussion) this circles back to, say, James's notion of our stream of consciousness being something that happens to us, not by us. In the same way, The Ghost in The Machine bears this out... .

So we have two problems. One of observation and one of an independent existence causing us to drift into a dream while driving!



Because the driver was no longer in the car if they were on the beach, unless perhaps you would propose something like a parallel universe. On the other hand, if we take reality as being something separate from the mind and that exists independently of it, then if the mind experiences something different from that reality then it would be an illusion, not a separate or additional reality. So the being on the beach wasn't real, it just seemed to be so to the driver. Or is there another sense of 'real' that I'm missing something in what you're saying?

That's a great distinction. The problem is, that person, in his mind, perceived that they were physically on the beach. In much the same way of perhaps Berkley's Subjective Idealism, their 'truth value' (that's what we are trying to parse here) was being physically on the beach. But that's either a paradox of sorts, or logically impossible. Again, all that person knew was that they were on the beach. Their 'conscious mind' was focused on the beach. Fascinating.

With regard to the mind's location, it's a category error to me because mind is not a physical entity. Mind consists of thoughts and ideas, not physical objects, so can't be described as having a place in physical space relative to other objects. The mind can think of locations, but it cannot be in a location. As an analogy, it's like asking: what is the location of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? or Shakespeare's Hamlet?
Another wow moment Tom. I agree. Thank you for pointing that out. That's all part of our problem in figuring this stuff out logically. I love the analogical reference to music of course, but let's keep in mind (no pun intended) that much like consciousness itself, we have both the physical (quantities) and metaphysical (qualities) of cognition, those being both material and immaterial. So in the same way, we have a music disk as the material medium, but the mind as the information processor who converts sound waves into immaterial subjective feelings. We need both to make sense of the metaphysical phenomenon.
The relationship between music and consciousness is important. I am a strong fan of David Bowie and find many of his albums wonderful, especially 'Aladdin Sane'. I grew up listening to Bowie and Roxy Music and have found some of the legends like Bob Dylan and John Lennon to be parallel to great philosophers. It may be that music is about metaphysics but its medium manages to combine rationality and emotions in such a way that it can really move people and alter states of consciousness profoundly.
Gertie
Posts: 2181
Joined: January 7th, 2015, 7:09 am

Re: Consciousness is logically impossible yet exists.

Post by Gertie »

3017Metaphysician wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 8:55 am
Gertie wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 6:20 am Meta!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m30aaI5Yf8

Interesting angle/unangle.

Average Bozo put their finger on the prob I have.

''Consider the following statement in the circumstance of sorting apples on a moving belt:
This apple is red.[10]
Upon observation, the apple is an undetermined color between yellow and red, or it is mottled both colors. Thus the color falls into neither category " red " nor " yellow ", but these are the only categories available to us as we sort the apples. We might say it is "50% red". This could be rephrased: it is 50% true that the apple is red. Therefore, P is 50% true, and 50% false. Now consider:
This apple is red and it is not-red.
In other words, P and not-P. This violates the law of noncontradiction and, by extension, bivalence.''

I don't think this works, because you can just say this apple is mottled, with parts here and there being red. That's not a fundamental prob of logic, just a lack of specificity in a world of stuff made up of parts isn't it?

Logic is itself derived from how we observe the physical world to be (at the level of resolution we experientially model it, so not at the level of QM). So logic deriving from a physicalist model of the world isn't likely to have a fundamental prob with describing the world and how it works at the physicalist level. QM presents probs to that derived conceptualisation of logic and cause and effect, because we don't experientially model the world at the QM level of resolution, we have to discover that QM level of resolution through technological observation and adapt our deductions accordingly).
Next, consider things like the phenomenon of Qualia and related sentient experiences (metaphysical phenomena), or otherwise the various qualities of consciousness that are “mottled” together during everyday cognition (feelings/logic and so forth), that also suggests a type of both/and phenomenon instead of an either/or logical approach:

“St. Thomas, the Intellectualist, had argued that the intellect in man is prior to the will because the intellect determines the will, since we can desire only what we know. Scotus, the Voluntarist, replied that the will determines what ideas the intellect turns to, and thus in the end determines what the intellect comes to know.”

How to we reconcile that either/or thinking?
Well we can look at the correlated physical parts (neural correlation) and see lots of roughly identical neurons, which form patterns of connections creating dedicated subsystems, which are also neurally interacting affecting each other. There will be correlated mechanisms for functions like attention and focus, and somehow bringing everything together as an experiential unified field of consciousness. All of that physical stuff going on in the brain hasn't been identified yet, but probably won't present a fundamental challenge to science or logic, hasn't so far at least.

If phenomenal experience is seen as a different type of manifestation of those scientifically understandable physical processes and relationships of parts, we've resolved the mottling issue in principle. The unified field of consciousness is like the mottled apple, and we can theoretically categorise this and that part of seeing, hearing, thinking, desiring,etc, in a similar sort of way we can categorise the correlated physical neural subsystems for seeing, hearing, thinking, desiring, etc. There doesn't seem to be an in principle fundamental challenge to logic there, just another way of recognising the relationship between the parts and the whole.
And so returning to the phenomenon of ‘driving and not driving’ how is that possible? Consider an individual driving their car, daydreaming about the beach, running a traffic light then crashing. In a dualist sense if you will, which mind was driving and which mind was on the beach? Suppose I argue I was consciously at the beach watching a cute babe swimming, while running the traffic light and crashing. Was that experience real? Well, yes it was real.

It was real to me at that time in the same sense, manner and respect happening all at the same time. For all I knew, I was on the beach, yet my body was still driving the vehicle. That said, you may wonder which mind was on the beach and which mind was driving? And if I was not physically on the beach, was my thought about the beach, in-itself, metaphysical? In any case, how can one physically be in two places at one time? Again, for all that person knew, they were on the beach and not driving. So, you could say that they were sort-of driving when they crashed. Is that considered a true statement? What does sort-of mean? Would that violate the rules of either/or thinking?
The beach part was real in the form of phenomenal experience, the car part had a physical reality too.

I don't think there are two minds present in that scenario. The largely unconscious parts of your brain were on autopilot while driving because that didn't require much attention or focus, you were doing something automatic and familiar and other parts of your brain's subsystems manifested in the space left, day dreaming about the beach. But focus doesn't obliterate the unified field where you're still more 'vaguely' seeing the road, that's still there. We seem to have brain mechanisms primed for change which can snap attention back to the unexpected which might require a response, but yours let you down there. Functionally speaking there's nothing weird here, it's just that snap back attention mechanism didn't work well enough.

You can imagine your ancestor walking through the savannah thinking about this and that, maybe usefully planning the meal she'll create with the berries she's going to collect... then hearing a rustle in the bush and snapping her attention to that bush fearing a threat, adrenaline spiking, unconscious bodily functions shifting to fight/flight/freeze mode. In evolutionary functional terms it makes sense. Even if it's only a rabbit she can add to the pot, the ability to snap focus on change is obviously useful.
In summary, I will argue that our consciousness exists, yet like other naturally occurring phenomena (Time itself, the Will, etc.) or otherwise the nature of one’s conscious existence, it is all considered logically impossible (by definition). Hence, ‘driving and not driving’ is a description of naturally occurring conscious phenomenon which is considered logically impossible, yet still exists.
I'd say it raises issues of mind-body monism and dualism. And when you delve into those issues you find that functional explanations will hold, but issues of substance and properties run into fundamental problems and paradoxes. It's at that level we run into into the Hard Problem and where physicalism and its associated science and logic have limitations. What is the fundamental nature of the stuff/processes in the mind-body relationship, and indeed what is the nature of that relationship.

But in theory substance monism and dualism don't have a fundamental prob I can see with 'mottling', or parts in relation to the whole - except in fundamental terms of substance and properties (as opposed to whole and parts). I think...
Gertie!

Thanks for your contribution. I love the Bowie lyrics (God rest his soul).

Let's take one issue at time (this time). BTW, I've always like China Girl and Rebel Rebel, but this one 'live' has a cool groove to it (I'm an ex-music major/ play bass in a band but play all instruments, written/recorded music, etc):

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. I can definitely appreciate a possible way out this dilemma (of binary truth values/'true or false' only-explaining or describing the nature of cognition), by simply saying that the apple is 'mottled'. Let's assume that works, proposition A : 'My consciousness is mottled'. What would that mean? What is its truth value? On might then ask, what would be its premise? For example, let's look at a possible way out:

The subject-person is mottled because all minds are mottled. Or, Because all minds are mottled and Socrates has a mind, Socrates is mottled.

What does or what could that mean (what are its implications)?

Let's take our discourse a bit slower this time if you're okay with that.
Is it a coincidence the world went to **** when Bowie died? I don't think so! Enjoyed that crackling live vid, thanks!

I feel like I'm missing your point...again.  But  OK,   you want a true/false statement about human conscious experience which is the equivalent of the mottled apple?  A mottled apple being a discrete object made up of parts which have different properties (eg red and not red parts), rather than a whole made up of parts with identical properties (eg all red).  


Bearing in mind experience is something which happens over time like a process, rather than a static object,  I guess something like -


''A human subject's  conscious experience manifests as a private, first person pov, discrete unifield field of consciousness, experientially embodied in space and time but not bounded by it, containing different types of experiential content''.  Therefore Plato's phenomenal experience manifests as... the above.

The implication is that experience manifests as a discrete, private, first person pov unified field which is the sum of its different parts?  There are different 'flavours' of experience like there are different colours of a mottled apple, which come together as a discrete whole? 



Is this what you're after? Or do I need even babier steps ;)
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Re: Consciousness is logically impossible yet exists.

Post by 3017Metaphysician »

JackDaydream wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 2:15 pm
3017Metaphysician wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 10:15 am
Thomyum2 wrote: August 2nd, 2022, 8:04 pm
3017Metaphysician wrote: August 2nd, 2022, 5:24 pm Thank you Tom for such thoughtful response. I pretty much established what I thought was real but can certainly offer another interpretation. What becomes real for that person, is the person who believes they are consciously on the beach, but in fact were driving instead. Their perceived experience of being on the beach, has become their reality. Otherwise, in principle, they would not choose to intentionality crash the vehicle.

To your second point, when I described the mind driving it was a figure of speech of course. Like a ghost in the machine, one mind was on the beach while the other mind was driving. Meaning, the subject-person perceived part of his mind being on the beach while driving. And for all he knew, he was 'in fact', physically on the beach. The other 'fact' as it were, was that he was driving the car. So arguably, you have two truth values (of both fact and reality) or a gradient of truth value of only one reality in the mind. In any case, while driving, his reality existed on the beach and not driving.

You raise an important distinction I think. I would be happy to entertain the parsing of the distinctions between facts and reality, if that is where you might be going with it... ? I think that might be an interesting metaphysical/epistemic exercise worth pursuing in this scenario.

With respect to the mind's location, can you elaborate a bit more on that? It is a bit reminiscent of William James's stream of consciousness phenomena whereby he postulated consciousness happens to the person, not by the person... suggesting a knower who is not known. Or, having thoughts without a thinker.

With respect to proof, the 'phenomenal' example, is the person unintentionally crashing, and God forbid, killing themselves in the [cognitive] process. Or if he survived, the truth value of him describing the phenomenon itself, which would be something described as being logically impossible.
You're most welcome, thank you for your engaging reply!

I'm not entirely satisfied with your definition of 'real' here, at least as I'm understanding it. It's seems to me you're taking 'real' in two different senses, which may be creating something like a four-term fallacy in your argument. If we take reality as the product of the mind, then at the point that mind goes to the beach, that becomes the reality and the driving of the car would cease to be real.

Yes, I agree, that was his reality at that point in time.


If the car crashed, that would have to be someone else's reality, someone else who was not the driver but was conscious of the driving of the car, no?

Why yes. I never thought of that, but that's a very intriguing supposition. That being the case, the phenomenon itself has the 'appearance' as if some one else was driving the car! But the concept 'appearance' would be the source of yet another paradox because by observation, it is the same person who appears to be driving, yet on the beach, all at the same time. In a way (though another discussion) this circles back to, say, James's notion of our stream of consciousness being something that happens to us, not by us. In the same way, The Ghost in The Machine bears this out... .

So we have two problems. One of observation and one of an independent existence causing us to drift into a dream while driving!



Because the driver was no longer in the car if they were on the beach, unless perhaps you would propose something like a parallel universe. On the other hand, if we take reality as being something separate from the mind and that exists independently of it, then if the mind experiences something different from that reality then it would be an illusion, not a separate or additional reality. So the being on the beach wasn't real, it just seemed to be so to the driver. Or is there another sense of 'real' that I'm missing something in what you're saying?

That's a great distinction. The problem is, that person, in his mind, perceived that they were physically on the beach. In much the same way of perhaps Berkley's Subjective Idealism, their 'truth value' (that's what we are trying to parse here) was being physically on the beach. But that's either a paradox of sorts, or logically impossible. Again, all that person knew was that they were on the beach. Their 'conscious mind' was focused on the beach. Fascinating.

With regard to the mind's location, it's a category error to me because mind is not a physical entity. Mind consists of thoughts and ideas, not physical objects, so can't be described as having a place in physical space relative to other objects. The mind can think of locations, but it cannot be in a location. As an analogy, it's like asking: what is the location of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? or Shakespeare's Hamlet?
Another wow moment Tom. I agree. Thank you for pointing that out. That's all part of our problem in figuring this stuff out logically. I love the analogical reference to music of course, but let's keep in mind (no pun intended) that much like consciousness itself, we have both the physical (quantities) and metaphysical (qualities) of cognition, those being both material and immaterial. So in the same way, we have a music disk as the material medium, but the mind as the information processor who converts sound waves into immaterial subjective feelings. We need both to make sense of the metaphysical phenomenon.
The relationship between music and consciousness is important. I am a strong fan of David Bowie and find many of his albums wonderful, especially 'Aladdin Sane'. I grew up listening to Bowie and Roxy Music and have found some of the legends like Bob Dylan and John Lennon to be parallel to great philosophers. It may be that music is about metaphysics but its medium manages to combine rationality and emotions in such a way that it can really move people and alter states of consciousness profoundly.
Jack!

Indeed. In the sense that music is a metaphysical language that's considered universal, by the majority of people, it would be most notably worthy of another thread. For instance, Schopenhauer is the only post modern philosopher I know of that ventured into that area of perception. Although Kant's 'Aesthetics' might be a good comparison to begin thinking about it.

Kant said: Genius is the talent (natural endowment) that gives the rule to art. Since talent is an innate productive ability of the artist and as such belongs itself to nature, we could also put it this way: Genius is the innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art. (sect.46)

Kant’s theory of [arguably musical] genius – for all its vagueness and lack of philosophical rigor – has been enormously influential. In particular, the radical separation of the aesthetic genius from the scientific mind; the emphasis on the near-miraculous expression (through aesthetic ideas and attributes) of the ineffable, excited state of mind; the link of fine art to a ‘metaphysical’ content; the requirement of radical originality; the raising of poetry to the head of all arts – all these claims (though not all of them entirely unique to Kant) were commonplaces and wide-spread for well over a century after Kant.


Then, Schopenhauer writes:

Music … stands quite apart from all the [other arts]. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man’s innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi [“an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting”] which Leibniz took it to be… We must attribute to music a far more serious and profound significance that refers to the innermost being of the world and of our own self.

"At this intersection of world and self is the will and, Schopenhauer argues, music’s unique power lies in its ability to capture precisely that:"

Music is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is, indeed as the Ideas are, the multiplied phenomenon of which constitutes the world of individual things. Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. For this reason the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.

Jack, maybe start a thread that contemplates the subject-object dynamic of desire, feeling, and the will, as well as the feeling of one's perceived transcendence of the subject-object itself.
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” "Spooky Action at a Distance"
― Albert Einstein
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Re: Consciousness is logically impossible yet exists.

Post by 3017Metaphysician »

Gertie wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 3:35 pm
3017Metaphysician wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 8:55 am
Gertie wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 6:20 am Meta!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m30aaI5Yf8

Interesting angle/unangle.

Average Bozo put their finger on the prob I have.

''Consider the following statement in the circumstance of sorting apples on a moving belt:
This apple is red.[10]
Upon observation, the apple is an undetermined color between yellow and red, or it is mottled both colors. Thus the color falls into neither category " red " nor " yellow ", but these are the only categories available to us as we sort the apples. We might say it is "50% red". This could be rephrased: it is 50% true that the apple is red. Therefore, P is 50% true, and 50% false. Now consider:
This apple is red and it is not-red.
In other words, P and not-P. This violates the law of noncontradiction and, by extension, bivalence.''

I don't think this works, because you can just say this apple is mottled, with parts here and there being red. That's not a fundamental prob of logic, just a lack of specificity in a world of stuff made up of parts isn't it?

Logic is itself derived from how we observe the physical world to be (at the level of resolution we experientially model it, so not at the level of QM). So logic deriving from a physicalist model of the world isn't likely to have a fundamental prob with describing the world and how it works at the physicalist level. QM presents probs to that derived conceptualisation of logic and cause and effect, because we don't experientially model the world at the QM level of resolution, we have to discover that QM level of resolution through technological observation and adapt our deductions accordingly).
Next, consider things like the phenomenon of Qualia and related sentient experiences (metaphysical phenomena), or otherwise the various qualities of consciousness that are “mottled” together during everyday cognition (feelings/logic and so forth), that also suggests a type of both/and phenomenon instead of an either/or logical approach:

“St. Thomas, the Intellectualist, had argued that the intellect in man is prior to the will because the intellect determines the will, since we can desire only what we know. Scotus, the Voluntarist, replied that the will determines what ideas the intellect turns to, and thus in the end determines what the intellect comes to know.”

How to we reconcile that either/or thinking?
Well we can look at the correlated physical parts (neural correlation) and see lots of roughly identical neurons, which form patterns of connections creating dedicated subsystems, which are also neurally interacting affecting each other. There will be correlated mechanisms for functions like attention and focus, and somehow bringing everything together as an experiential unified field of consciousness. All of that physical stuff going on in the brain hasn't been identified yet, but probably won't present a fundamental challenge to science or logic, hasn't so far at least.

If phenomenal experience is seen as a different type of manifestation of those scientifically understandable physical processes and relationships of parts, we've resolved the mottling issue in principle. The unified field of consciousness is like the mottled apple, and we can theoretically categorise this and that part of seeing, hearing, thinking, desiring,etc, in a similar sort of way we can categorise the correlated physical neural subsystems for seeing, hearing, thinking, desiring, etc. There doesn't seem to be an in principle fundamental challenge to logic there, just another way of recognising the relationship between the parts and the whole.
And so returning to the phenomenon of ‘driving and not driving’ how is that possible? Consider an individual driving their car, daydreaming about the beach, running a traffic light then crashing. In a dualist sense if you will, which mind was driving and which mind was on the beach? Suppose I argue I was consciously at the beach watching a cute babe swimming, while running the traffic light and crashing. Was that experience real? Well, yes it was real.

It was real to me at that time in the same sense, manner and respect happening all at the same time. For all I knew, I was on the beach, yet my body was still driving the vehicle. That said, you may wonder which mind was on the beach and which mind was driving? And if I was not physically on the beach, was my thought about the beach, in-itself, metaphysical? In any case, how can one physically be in two places at one time? Again, for all that person knew, they were on the beach and not driving. So, you could say that they were sort-of driving when they crashed. Is that considered a true statement? What does sort-of mean? Would that violate the rules of either/or thinking?
The beach part was real in the form of phenomenal experience, the car part had a physical reality too.

I don't think there are two minds present in that scenario. The largely unconscious parts of your brain were on autopilot while driving because that didn't require much attention or focus, you were doing something automatic and familiar and other parts of your brain's subsystems manifested in the space left, day dreaming about the beach. But focus doesn't obliterate the unified field where you're still more 'vaguely' seeing the road, that's still there. We seem to have brain mechanisms primed for change which can snap attention back to the unexpected which might require a response, but yours let you down there. Functionally speaking there's nothing weird here, it's just that snap back attention mechanism didn't work well enough.

You can imagine your ancestor walking through the savannah thinking about this and that, maybe usefully planning the meal she'll create with the berries she's going to collect... then hearing a rustle in the bush and snapping her attention to that bush fearing a threat, adrenaline spiking, unconscious bodily functions shifting to fight/flight/freeze mode. In evolutionary functional terms it makes sense. Even if it's only a rabbit she can add to the pot, the ability to snap focus on change is obviously useful.
In summary, I will argue that our consciousness exists, yet like other naturally occurring phenomena (Time itself, the Will, etc.) or otherwise the nature of one’s conscious existence, it is all considered logically impossible (by definition). Hence, ‘driving and not driving’ is a description of naturally occurring conscious phenomenon which is considered logically impossible, yet still exists.
I'd say it raises issues of mind-body monism and dualism. And when you delve into those issues you find that functional explanations will hold, but issues of substance and properties run into fundamental problems and paradoxes. It's at that level we run into into the Hard Problem and where physicalism and its associated science and logic have limitations. What is the fundamental nature of the stuff/processes in the mind-body relationship, and indeed what is the nature of that relationship.

But in theory substance monism and dualism don't have a fundamental prob I can see with 'mottling', or parts in relation to the whole - except in fundamental terms of substance and properties (as opposed to whole and parts). I think...
Gertie!

Thanks for your contribution. I love the Bowie lyrics (God rest his soul).

Let's take one issue at time (this time). BTW, I've always like China Girl and Rebel Rebel, but this one 'live' has a cool groove to it (I'm an ex-music major/ play bass in a band but play all instruments, written/recorded music, etc):

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. I can definitely appreciate a possible way out this dilemma (of binary truth values/'true or false' only-explaining or describing the nature of cognition), by simply saying that the apple is 'mottled'. Let's assume that works, proposition A : 'My consciousness is mottled'. What would that mean? What is its truth value? On might then ask, what would be its premise? For example, let's look at a possible way out:

The subject-person is mottled because all minds are mottled. Or, Because all minds are mottled and Socrates has a mind, Socrates is mottled.

What does or what could that mean (what are its implications)?

Let's take our discourse a bit slower this time if you're okay with that.
Is it a coincidence the world went to **** when Bowie died? I don't think so! Enjoyed that crackling live vid, thanks!

I feel like I'm missing your point...again.  But  OK,   you want a true/false statement about human conscious experience which is the equivalent of the mottled apple?  A mottled apple being a discrete object made up of parts which have different properties (eg red and not red parts), rather than a whole made up of parts with identical properties (eg all red).  


Bearing in mind experience is something which happens over time like a process, rather than a static object,  I guess something like -


''A human subject's  conscious experience manifests as a private, first person pov, discrete unifield field of consciousness, experientially embodied in space and time but not bounded by it, containing different types of experiential content''.  Therefore Plato's phenomenal experience manifests as... the above.

The implication is that experience manifests as a discrete, private, first person pov unified field which is the sum of its different parts?  There are different 'flavours' of experience like there are different colours of a mottled apple, which come together as a discrete whole? 



Is this what you're after? Or do I need even babier steps ;)
Yes Gertie, I think that's a start.

First, in my view your were intuitive enough to suggest things like "experience is something which happens over time like a process, rather than a static object" which I can assume means that you recognized the limitations of a priori/either-or, true/false kinds of thinking(?) If correct, you hit on something very important, which you will see as we go through this.

And so one reason why consciousness 'violates' the many of the rules of formal logic is because formal logic is also static. It's truth values don't change. But guess what, we change. The act of thinking itself changes. And as you so well suggested, so does experience itself. Experience without change has no meaning. So I'm with you so far!

Of course, the opposite is true too, in that in certain aspects of reality, the logic of language itself cannot change. Certainly many new concepts can evolve and new words/meanings can be developed (i.e., urban dictionary), but the meaning of those established concepts/words themselves have to stay the same and cannot change. If they changed, there would be no coherence in any communication. Yet, the world around us is in a constant state of change. A simple example of that inconsistency would relate to the simple act of speaking or writing. If we took change literally, as in everything is changing around us, one cannot even discuss anything absolute since no permanence exists. The illusion of time works similarly, but that's yet another metaphysical discussion for another time.

So, back to the issue at hand. If we are using binary truth value from 'unchanging logic' (true or false by definition only), and if we use your foregoing argument viz. the OP, we still get something like: "Because all minds are mottled and Socrates has a mind, Socrates is mottled."

Then you replied by suggesting that personal experience takes primacy by way of your propositions, correct? And more importantly, it's the purely subjective over the purely objective battle of opposite's. Oddly enough, that actually takes us back to some of our earlier discussions we've had about parsing those two concepts. Right?

In summary there, here is part of our problem in our context of discussion:

1. Crashing the car is primarily a subjective truth/experience and has phenomenal truth value that changes with time. Like consciousness itself, Subjective truth value is both/and.

2. Describing it, after the fact, from the rules of logic and language and words, is primarily an objective truth that doesn't change. Objective truth value of either/or.

So in effect, using Item 2. as a criteria or method to explain the phenomenal experience of the mind, makes it (the mental phenomenon) logically impossible using the static rules of formal logic. I'll stop there. Thoughts so far? (Then we'll pull it together and talk about some real world examples involving cognition, feeling, intellect also... .)
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” "Spooky Action at a Distance"
― Albert Einstein
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Re: Consciousness is logically impossible yet exists.

Post by JackDaydream »

3017Metaphysician wrote: August 4th, 2022, 11:09 am
JackDaydream wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 2:15 pm
3017Metaphysician wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 10:15 am
Thomyum2 wrote: August 2nd, 2022, 8:04 pm

You're most welcome, thank you for your engaging reply!

I'm not entirely satisfied with your definition of 'real' here, at least as I'm understanding it. It's seems to me you're taking 'real' in two different senses, which may be creating something like a four-term fallacy in your argument. If we take reality as the product of the mind, then at the point that mind goes to the beach, that becomes the reality and the driving of the car would cease to be real.

Yes, I agree, that was his reality at that point in time.


If the car crashed, that would have to be someone else's reality, someone else who was not the driver but was conscious of the driving of the car, no?

Why yes. I never thought of that, but that's a very intriguing supposition. That being the case, the phenomenon itself has the 'appearance' as if some one else was driving the car! But the concept 'appearance' would be the source of yet another paradox because by observation, it is the same person who appears to be driving, yet on the beach, all at the same time. In a way (though another discussion) this circles back to, say, James's notion of our stream of consciousness being something that happens to us, not by us. In the same way, The Ghost in The Machine bears this out... .

So we have two problems. One of observation and one of an independent existence causing us to drift into a dream while driving!



Because the driver was no longer in the car if they were on the beach, unless perhaps you would propose something like a parallel universe. On the other hand, if we take reality as being something separate from the mind and that exists independently of it, then if the mind experiences something different from that reality then it would be an illusion, not a separate or additional reality. So the being on the beach wasn't real, it just seemed to be so to the driver. Or is there another sense of 'real' that I'm missing something in what you're saying?

That's a great distinction. The problem is, that person, in his mind, perceived that they were physically on the beach. In much the same way of perhaps Berkley's Subjective Idealism, their 'truth value' (that's what we are trying to parse here) was being physically on the beach. But that's either a paradox of sorts, or logically impossible. Again, all that person knew was that they were on the beach. Their 'conscious mind' was focused on the beach. Fascinating.

With regard to the mind's location, it's a category error to me because mind is not a physical entity. Mind consists of thoughts and ideas, not physical objects, so can't be described as having a place in physical space relative to other objects. The mind can think of locations, but it cannot be in a location. As an analogy, it's like asking: what is the location of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony? or Shakespeare's Hamlet?
Another wow moment Tom. I agree. Thank you for pointing that out. That's all part of our problem in figuring this stuff out logically. I love the analogical reference to music of course, but let's keep in mind (no pun intended) that much like consciousness itself, we have both the physical (quantities) and metaphysical (qualities) of cognition, those being both material and immaterial. So in the same way, we have a music disk as the material medium, but the mind as the information processor who converts sound waves into immaterial subjective feelings. We need both to make sense of the metaphysical phenomenon.
The relationship between music and consciousness is important. I am a strong fan of David Bowie and find many of his albums wonderful, especially 'Aladdin Sane'. I grew up listening to Bowie and Roxy Music and have found some of the legends like Bob Dylan and John Lennon to be parallel to great philosophers. It may be that music is about metaphysics but its medium manages to combine rationality and emotions in such a way that it can really move people and alter states of consciousness profoundly.
Jack!

Indeed. In the sense that music is a metaphysical language that's considered universal, by the majority of people, it would be most notably worthy of another thread. For instance, Schopenhauer is the only post modern philosopher I know of that ventured into that area of perception. Although Kant's 'Aesthetics' might be a good comparison to begin thinking about it.

Kant said: Genius is the talent (natural endowment) that gives the rule to art. Since talent is an innate productive ability of the artist and as such belongs itself to nature, we could also put it this way: Genius is the innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art. (sect.46)

Kant’s theory of [arguably musical] genius – for all its vagueness and lack of philosophical rigor – has been enormously influential. In particular, the radical separation of the aesthetic genius from the scientific mind; the emphasis on the near-miraculous expression (through aesthetic ideas and attributes) of the ineffable, excited state of mind; the link of fine art to a ‘metaphysical’ content; the requirement of radical originality; the raising of poetry to the head of all arts – all these claims (though not all of them entirely unique to Kant) were commonplaces and wide-spread for well over a century after Kant.


Then, Schopenhauer writes:

Music … stands quite apart from all the [other arts]. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man’s innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi [“an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting”] which Leibniz took it to be… We must attribute to music a far more serious and profound significance that refers to the innermost being of the world and of our own self.

"At this intersection of world and self is the will and, Schopenhauer argues, music’s unique power lies in its ability to capture precisely that:"

Music is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is, indeed as the Ideas are, the multiplied phenomenon of which constitutes the world of individual things. Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. For this reason the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.

Jack, maybe start a thread that contemplates the subject-object dynamic of desire, feeling, and the will, as well as the feeling of one's perceived transcendence of the subject-object itself.
Funnily enough, I did write a thread on music and the mind a few months ago. However, I do have a couple of ideas for threads and may tie in will, desire etc to one of these ideas. I may start a thread sometimes next week, although I am a bit busy because I am looking for somewhere to move to. I am on my way to view one at the moment and you may like the name of the area, as it is called Amen corner and it took me a while to get used to you being' Metaphysician'.

I have found Schopenhauer's understanding of will very useful, because blending all the various ideas, ranging from Kant, Jung and the new physics is complicated, to try to link it all together in a synthetic way. It is like finding missing parts in a jigsaw puzzle. One writer who I am also wishing to find writing by is Deleuze on the idea of immanence. It may be about building up a picture of consciousness, in relation to rational ideas and the parts which go beyond logic.
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Re: Consciousness is logically impossible yet exists.

Post by 3017Metaphysician »

JackDaydream wrote: August 4th, 2022, 2:30 pm
3017Metaphysician wrote: August 4th, 2022, 11:09 am
JackDaydream wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 2:15 pm
3017Metaphysician wrote: August 3rd, 2022, 10:15 am

Another wow moment Tom. I agree. Thank you for pointing that out. That's all part of our problem in figuring this stuff out logically. I love the analogical reference to music of course, but let's keep in mind (no pun intended) that much like consciousness itself, we have both the physical (quantities) and metaphysical (qualities) of cognition, those being both material and immaterial. So in the same way, we have a music disk as the material medium, but the mind as the information processor who converts sound waves into immaterial subjective feelings. We need both to make sense of the metaphysical phenomenon.
The relationship between music and consciousness is important. I am a strong fan of David Bowie and find many of his albums wonderful, especially 'Aladdin Sane'. I grew up listening to Bowie and Roxy Music and have found some of the legends like Bob Dylan and John Lennon to be parallel to great philosophers. It may be that music is about metaphysics but its medium manages to combine rationality and emotions in such a way that it can really move people and alter states of consciousness profoundly.
Jack!

Indeed. In the sense that music is a metaphysical language that's considered universal, by the majority of people, it would be most notably worthy of another thread. For instance, Schopenhauer is the only post modern philosopher I know of that ventured into that area of perception. Although Kant's 'Aesthetics' might be a good comparison to begin thinking about it.

Kant said: Genius is the talent (natural endowment) that gives the rule to art. Since talent is an innate productive ability of the artist and as such belongs itself to nature, we could also put it this way: Genius is the innate mental predisposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to art. (sect.46)

Kant’s theory of [arguably musical] genius – for all its vagueness and lack of philosophical rigor – has been enormously influential. In particular, the radical separation of the aesthetic genius from the scientific mind; the emphasis on the near-miraculous expression (through aesthetic ideas and attributes) of the ineffable, excited state of mind; the link of fine art to a ‘metaphysical’ content; the requirement of radical originality; the raising of poetry to the head of all arts – all these claims (though not all of them entirely unique to Kant) were commonplaces and wide-spread for well over a century after Kant.


Then, Schopenhauer writes:

Music … stands quite apart from all the [other arts]. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man’s innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi [“an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting”] which Leibniz took it to be… We must attribute to music a far more serious and profound significance that refers to the innermost being of the world and of our own self.

"At this intersection of world and self is the will and, Schopenhauer argues, music’s unique power lies in its ability to capture precisely that:"

Music is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is, indeed as the Ideas are, the multiplied phenomenon of which constitutes the world of individual things. Therefore music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas. For this reason the effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.

Jack, maybe start a thread that contemplates the subject-object dynamic of desire, feeling, and the will, as well as the feeling of one's perceived transcendence of the subject-object itself.
Funnily enough, I did write a thread on music and the mind a few months ago. However, I do have a couple of ideas for threads and may tie in will, desire etc to one of these ideas. I may start a thread sometimes next week, although I am a bit busy because I am looking for somewhere to move to. I am on my way to view one at the moment and you may like the name of the area, as it is called Amen corner and it took me a while to get used to you being' Metaphysician'.

I have found Schopenhauer's understanding of will very useful, because blending all the various ideas, ranging from Kant, Jung and the new physics is complicated, to try to link it all together in a synthetic way. It is like finding missing parts in a jigsaw puzzle. One writer who I am also wishing to find writing by is Deleuze on the idea of immanence. It may be about building up a picture of consciousness, in relation to rational ideas and the parts which go beyond logic.
Jack!

Hahaha, that was very special of you to go back in time (from the old forum) :lol: Thank you for spreading the love. I do like this one much better. Funny how things evolve... .

Okay I missed that thread... . I do think you could approach it more via Jung, James, Maslow, Freud, Fromm, and other cognitive science folks because philosophy is a bit deficient in those specific areas of phenomenology, and how music effects us (and the causality of same).

We obviously have some sort of universal desire for music.........
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” "Spooky Action at a Distance"
― Albert Einstein
Gertie
Posts: 2181
Joined: January 7th, 2015, 7:09 am

Re: Consciousness is logically impossible yet exists.

Post by Gertie »

meta!
I feel like I'm missing your point...again. But OK, you want a true/false statement about human conscious experience which is the equivalent of the mottled apple? A mottled apple being a discrete object made up of parts which have different properties (eg red and not red parts), rather than a whole made up of parts with identical properties (eg all red).

Bearing in mind experience is something which happens over time like a process, rather than a static object, I guess something like -

''A human subject's conscious experience manifests as a private, first person pov, discrete unifield field of consciousness, experientially embodied in space and time but not bounded by it, containing different types of experiential content''. Therefore Plato's phenomenal experience manifests as... the above.
The implication is that experience manifests as a discrete, private, first person pov unified field which is the sum of its different parts? There are different 'flavours' of experience like there are different colours of a mottled apple, which come together as a discrete whole?



Yes Gertie, I think that's a start.

First, in my view your were intuitive enough to suggest things like“experience is something which happens over time like a process, rather than a static object”which I can assume means that you recognized the limitations of a priori/either-or, true/false kinds of thinking(?) If correct, you hit on something very important, which you will see as we go through this.

Well as I've said before I think our notion of logic derives from the way we experience the world, rather than logic being a something in itself which dictates how we experience the world.   That has to caveat all our conceptualisations of what is and isn't logical.  Thus QM can come along and tell us something can sorta be in two places at once, or cause and effect is actually probalistic for example. 
And so one reason why consciousness 'violates' the many of the rules of formal logic is because formal logic is also static. It's truth values don't change. But guess what, we change. The act of thinking itself changes. And as you so well suggested, so does experience itself. Experience without change has no meaning. So I'm with you so far!

 Whoa! 

But... logic can account for change, it's just generally presented as a snapshot.

A cannot be A and not A at the same time. It's either raining or not, doesn't mean it will always be raining.

Everything is what it is. A is A, that is, identical with A. A=A. If any statement is true, then it is true. That's a snapshot too. Doesn't mean my tomatoes won't rot, or be digested into poop next week.

The law of the excluded middle: A is either A or not A. A cannot equal non A or be non A. Again, today I'm not a hairdresser, tomorrow I might be.


Of course, the opposite is true too, in that in certain aspects of reality, the logic of language itself cannot change. Certainly many new concepts can evolve and new words/meanings can be developed (i.e., urban dictionary), but the meaning of those established concepts/words themselves have to stay the same and cannot change. If they changed, there would be no coherence in any communication.

Well there are words with meanings and then there's syntactical grammar. Grammar is structured in a way which reflects how we think, how we experience the world as working, and turn it into a coherent model.   Subject -->  Verb -->  Object.   I, the agent, Kick,  do something causally,  to the Ball,  object. Basic grammar includes verbs/action - change is incorporated into the structure of grammar.


Where-as the  semantic meaning of words are shared/agreed codes/symbols for the content - which the grammar structures in a coherent way reflecting our experience of how the world is structured. (The words 'I', 'kick' and 'ball' all have particular meanings, which create broader descriptions within the logic of the syntactical structure).   We can discover new things needing new words, or describe the stuff and processes of the world in lots of ways, and if we agree a new way is appropriate it'll catch on.  But grammar is basically a static set of rules because it's structual, and its rules reflect how we experience the rules by which world works, the way we create our coherent internal model. 


Yet, the world around us is in a constant state of change. A simple example of that inconsistency would relate to the simple act of speaking or writing. If we took change literally, as in everything is changing around us, one cannot even discuss anything absolute since no permanence exists. The illusion of time works similarly, but that's yet another metaphysical discussion for another time.

Right - tho I don't think time is an illusion, in that things really do change.  I think... So you might say a snapshot is a temporal absolute. Or something...
So, back to the issue at hand. If we are using binary truth value from 'unchanging logic' (true or false by definition only), and if we use your foregoing argument viz. the OP, we still get something like: "Because all minds are mottled and Socrates has a mind, Socrates is mottled."

Then you replied by suggesting that personal experience takes primacy by way of your propositions, correct? And more importantly, it's the purely subjective over the purely objective battle of opposite's. Oddly enough, that actually takes us back to some of our earlier discussions we've had about parsing those two concepts. Right?
Not quite...



In a nutshell I'm saying (limited and flawed) humans phenomenally experience the world in idiosyncratic individual first person perspective ways.  But we are similar enough to compare notes (symbolically/linguistically), from which we create a shared model of what the world is made of and how it works - and our concept of what is logical arises from that model, which itself has arisen from how we humans experience the world.  So for example I experience the world as having patterns which seem predictable - causal.  I compare notes with you, and everybody else, and we all agree.  We create a shared model of the world working causally.  Our grammar reflects this.  Logic derives from it.
In summary there, here is part of our problem in our context of discussion:

1. Crashing the car is primarily a subjective truth/experience and has phenomenal truth value that changes with time. Like consciousness itself, Subjective truth value is both/and.

2. Describing it, after the fact, from the rules of logic and language and words, is primarily an objective truth that doesn't change. Objective truth value of either/or.

So in effect, using Item 2. as a criteria or method to explain the phenomenal experience of the mind, makes it (the mental phenomenon) logically impossible using the static rules of formal logic. I'll stop there. Thoughts so far? (Then we'll pull it together and talk about some real world examples involving cognition, feeling, intellect also... .)
I don't get where you're going following my own understanding of the issues in play!   So this just doesn't follow for me. 



Crashing my car happens as both a physical and experiential real phenomenon in time, if time is a marker of change.  I think change is real in the world independant of conscious experience, tho time/measurement of change can be experienced relatively.



A linguistic  description can be a third person observation/explanation  of what physically happened during the crash.  Or a  first person description of what it was like for you. Both are real.  And time/change is a feature of both descriptions.



Now my first person private experiential description might be I was experiencing being on the beach.  A passing witness's third person description  of the physically observable thing happening   would be I was  sitting in the car.  The contradiction arises if conscious experience is bound by physics.  Because physical objects like a human body (forgetting QM for now) can't be in two places at the same time.  But conscious experience has different qualities to physical stuff, one being it can 'extend'  to the beach without my body going there. 



We're not getting any closer are we? 
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3017Metaphysician
Posts: 1621
Joined: July 9th, 2021, 8:59 am

Re: Consciousness is logically impossible yet exists.

Post by 3017Metaphysician »

Gertie wrote: August 6th, 2022, 1:44 pm meta!
I feel like I'm missing your point...again. But OK, you want a true/false statement about human conscious experience which is the equivalent of the mottled apple? A mottled apple being a discrete object made up of parts which have different properties (eg red and not red parts), rather than a whole made up of parts with identical properties (eg all red).

Bearing in mind experience is something which happens over time like a process, rather than a static object, I guess something like -

''A human subject's conscious experience manifests as a private, first person pov, discrete unifield field of consciousness, experientially embodied in space and time but not bounded by it, containing different types of experiential content''. Therefore Plato's phenomenal experience manifests as... the above.
The implication is that experience manifests as a discrete, private, first person pov unified field which is the sum of its different parts? There are different 'flavours' of experience like there are different colours of a mottled apple, which come together as a discrete whole?



Yes Gertie, I think that's a start.

First, in my view your were intuitive enough to suggest things like“experience is something which happens over time like a process, rather than a static object”which I can assume means that you recognized the limitations of a priori/either-or, true/false kinds of thinking(?) If correct, you hit on something very important, which you will see as we go through this.

Well as I've said before I think our notion of logic derives from the way we experience the world, rather than logic being a something in itself which dictates how we experience the world.   That has to caveat all our conceptualisations of what is and isn't logical.  Thus QM can come along and tell us something can sorta be in two places at once, or cause and effect is actually probalistic for example. 

Are you sure Gertie? There are things in the mind that exist a priori, like intuition, wonder, and so forth. For example, to utter the judgement or proposition that : 'all events must have a cause' , is something beyond pure reason. A transcendental kind of thinking, as it were.
And so one reason why consciousness 'violates' the many of the rules of formal logic is because formal logic is also static. It's truth values don't change. But guess what, we change. The act of thinking itself changes. And as you so well suggested, so does experience itself. Experience without change has no meaning. So I'm with you so far!

 Whoa! 

But... logic can account for change, it's just generally presented as a snapshot.

Indeed. An unresolved paradox. Yet another problem relative to logic and logically impossible things-in-themselves. Dualism (being v. becoming) is the classic example. Or in the context of logical propositions; a static sense of logical necessity.

A cannot be A and not A at the same time. It's either raining or not, doesn't mean it will always be raining.

Everything is what it is. A is A, that is, identical with A. A=A. If any statement is true, then it is true. That's a snapshot too. Doesn't mean my tomatoes won't rot, or be digested into poop next week.

The law of the excluded middle: A is either A or not A. A cannot equal non A or be non A. Again, today I'm not a hairdresser, tomorrow I might be.

Driving while daydreaming is like saying : driving and not driving. Or if you prefer, 'kind-of' driving, but not 'really' driving. So the truth value's of something that is 'kind-of' or 'not really' in propositional form violates the axiom of either/or logic. Instead, the conscious phenomenon is both/and.
Of course, the opposite is true too, in that in certain aspects of reality, the logic of language itself cannot change. Certainly many new concepts can evolve and new words/meanings can be developed (i.e., urban dictionary), but the meaning of those established concepts/words themselves have to stay the same and cannot change. If they changed, there would be no coherence in any communication.

Well there are words with meanings and then there's syntactical grammar. Grammar is structured in a way which reflects how we think, how we experience the world as working, and turn it into a coherent model.   Subject -->  Verb -->  Object.   I, the agent, Kick,  do something causally,  to the Ball,  object. Basic grammar includes verbs/action - change is incorporated into the structure of grammar.


Where-as the  semantic meaning of words are shared/agreed codes/symbols for the content - which the grammar structures in a coherent way reflecting our experience of how the world is structured. (The words 'I', 'kick' and 'ball' all have particular meanings, which create broader descriptions within the logic of the syntactical structure).   We can discover new things needing new words, or describe the stuff and processes of the world in lots of ways, and if we agree a new way is appropriate it'll catch on.  But grammar is basically a static set of rules because it's structual, and its rules reflect how we experience the rules by which world works, the way we create our coherent internal model. 


Yet, the world around us is in a constant state of change. A simple example of that inconsistency would relate to the simple act of speaking or writing. If we took change literally, as in everything is changing around us, one cannot even discuss anything absolute since no permanence exists. The illusion of time works similarly, but that's yet another metaphysical discussion for another time.

Right - tho I don't think time is an illusion, in that things really do change.  I think... So you might say a snapshot is a temporal absolute. Or something...

Time is a huge subject in itself. But for now, I think we can safely say the illusionary aspects vis a vis logic is our perceptions of it, and its violation of binary truth value (past, present, future), which are three truth values in themselves that can't be reconciled by either/or determinations.
So, back to the issue at hand. If we are using binary truth value from 'unchanging logic' (true or false by definition only), and if we use your foregoing argument viz. the OP, we still get something like: "Because all minds are mottled and Socrates has a mind, Socrates is mottled."

Then you replied by suggesting that personal experience takes primacy by way of your propositions, correct? And more importantly, it's the purely subjective over the purely objective battle of opposite's. Oddly enough, that actually takes us back to some of our earlier discussions we've had about parsing those two concepts. Right?
Not quite...



In a nutshell I'm saying (limited and flawed) humans phenomenally experience the world in idiosyncratic individual first person perspective ways.  But we are similar enough to compare notes (symbolically/linguistically), from which we create a shared model of what the world is made of and how it works - and our concept of what is logical arises from that model, which itself has arisen from how we humans experience the world.  So for example I experience the world as having patterns which seem predictable - causal.  I compare notes with you, and everybody else, and we all agree.  We create a shared model of the world working causally.  Our grammar reflects this.  Logic derives from it.

In summary there, here is part of our problem in our context of discussion:

1. Crashing the car is primarily a subjective truth/experience and has phenomenal truth value that changes with time. Like consciousness itself, Subjective truth value is both/and.

2. Describing it, after the fact, from the rules of logic and language and words, is primarily an objective truth that doesn't change. Objective truth value of either/or.

So in effect, using Item 2. as a criteria or method to explain the phenomenal experience of the mind, makes it (the mental phenomenon) logically impossible using the static rules of formal logic. I'll stop there. Thoughts so far? (Then we'll pull it together and talk about some real world examples involving cognition, feeling, intellect also... .)
I don't get where you're going following my own understanding of the issues in play!   So this just doesn't follow for me. 

In short, think of the problem like the distinctions between a priori and a posteriori truth values. As such, crashing the car is more a posteriori, and describing the phenomenon is a priori. Hence:

1. Crashing the car: truth values of; a posteriori, subjectivity, empiricism, experience, both/and, and so forth.

2. Describing the crash: truth values of; a priori, objectivity, rationalism, either/or and so forth.




Crashing my car happens as both a physical and experiential real phenomenon in time, if time is a marker of change.  I think change is real in the world independant of conscious experience, tho time/measurement of change can be experienced relatively.

No exception taken there. Time and change seems to have it's own self-organized way of existing, giving the impression or perception of an independent existence of some kind.

A linguistic  description can be a third person observation/explanation  of what physically happened during the crash.  Or a  first person description of what it was like for you. Both are real.  And time/change is a feature of both descriptions.



Now my first person private experiential description might be I was experiencing being on the beach.  A passing witness's third person description  of the physically observable thing happening   would be I was  sitting in the car.  The contradiction arises if conscious experience is bound by physics.  Because physical objects like a human body (forgetting QM for now) can't be in two places at the same time.  But conscious experience has different qualities to physical stuff, one being it can 'extend'  to the beach without my body going there. 

Agree. And those qualities allow for things being experienced as contradictions, and ultimately, logically possible. For all that person knew, they were physically on the beach and not driving. Hence, using the rules of binary truth values, 'driving and not driving'.



We're not getting any closer are we? 
In contradiction and paradox, you can find truth!
“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” "Spooky Action at a Distance"
― Albert Einstein
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