Given answers to the matter versus consciousness question

[Kermit Rose]

How does something as immaterial as consciousness arise from something as unconscious as matter?

Franklin Veaux

Consciousness appears to be an emergent phenomenon from sufficiently complex reflexive information processing systems.

We see examples all the time about how inert matter, when carefully arranged, gains the ability to do things that even a small rearrangement will destroy. A car's engine is merely inert metal, unable to move, but arrange that inert matter in just exactly the right way and now suddenly that inert, unmoving matter can move all by itself. Computer chips are made from silicon. A pile of sand, of and by itself, can neither process nor store information, but arrange it in exactly the right way and now all of a sudden it can.

It used to be believed that life was magical, but as we learned more about the molecular machinery of like, we discovered it's not Magic at all--living cells are basically machines. Extraordinarily tiny, exquisitely complex machines, but machines nonetheless. We are really close to being able to build simple single-called organisms in the lab; in fact, there's even a name for this kind of science (synthetic biology).

We don't yet fully understand what consciousness is is or how it works, so it's easy for it to SEEM like magic, just like cells seemed magic to people a hundred years ago or a car engine would seem magic to a member of a pre-industrial civilization. But that doesn't mean consciousness is magic!



John Purcell

This is a hotly-debated topic, with people like David Chalmers on one side of the debate, and the materialist Daniel Dennett (and most scientists, but not all) on the other. Chalmers holds that consciousness is a separate and very real independent phenomenon, while Dennett says (to caricature him slightly) that basically no, it isn't.

Perhaps the really interesting question is, does consciousness actually arise from matter? Or do we have non-material minds that are interpreting something or other as physical matter?

The first idea is currently unprovable; some say that it has to do with complexity, or some kind of reflexivity, or even quantum physics.

The second idea is pretty wild, but it doesn't necessarily mean that "everything is in our minds". That our minds do interpret our experiences to give us our sense of space, time and physical matter is beyond doubt; the question is, how much of it is "out there" and in what sense; and how much of it is a matter of interpretation?


Pete Ashly
You have heard that everything is energy and matter essentially "forces" in empty space, right?  Perhaps your dualistic preconceptions form the root of a manufactured problem.


Gustavo Muslera, Linux Sysadmin
 
How does something immaterial as the magic of a great book arise from something as mundane as ink over paper? Or a complex computer program or data in digital form from something like computer memory or storage?

The point is that is not any arrangement of matter, or ink over paper, or circuitry. Is from that order that all the magic comes from. And as any magic, it resides in a good part in the observer.



James Kent, Programmer, Writer, author of ... (more)

This is a flawed question. Consciousness is demonstrably material, not immaterial. You can remove and change the material that makes consciousness (neurons in a brain, or chemicals in a brain, for instance) and the quality of the consciousness then changes. The question should be, "Why do people persist in assuming consciousness is immaterial?



Michel Poisson, Graphic Arts - Escaping the Bang

It arises from living matter. And one of the main attributes of even the simplest living matter is its reactivity to its environment. Just about any sufficiently advanced living being displays one form or another of it.

And is consciousness immaterial? None of its dependencies are. Simple molecules can perturb it or turn it off. Faulty connections or missing brain components will distort it or mangle it into uselessness.

Is it any useful to consider it separate from its neuronal processors?


Muhammed Fatih Özdemir

The guru should answer this question as well: "How does something as material as an utterance arise from something as unconscious as obeying grammar rules?"

My answer for both questions is just neural signalling but yet we don't completely know how such signalling causes emergence of conscious and unconscious processes.


Greg Sunderland, Quantum physicist

Here's what the leading physicists of last century said about that:

Max Planck: "I regard consciousnes as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness."

Martin Rees: "The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it, not the other way around."

Niels Bohr: "Real things are not made of real things"


Gert Braakman

It's us humans who created an artificial line dividing material things and consciousness. They are one and the same process, with different densities, qualities and levels of organisation. It's not consciousness that creates matter or matter that creates consciousness. They are different elements of the same process.


Keith Allpress

How can you claim it is immaterial? It exists, so of course it is not.


Rehan Arif

I may be wrong here but let me give it a try:
The question does not appear to be very valid, for it tries to draw a dialectical situation in order to create an irony. We know that consciousness springs from thought, a mental faculty specific to the animal Kingdom (and probably plants, and then to non-living things, if there be a hint of such a case). Let's call the thoughtful entities of such kind, beings.
Now, all being have the capacity to think, or to have some mental framework of the world around them as part of their brain activity. that is how species develop learning capability, schema concepts,  and survival skills.
One class of beings, The Being, is capable of much more. that is, it can imagine itself, it can think about itself in addition to the world around it. that certain centre in the mind, the imagined self, essentially brings about the knowledge of the being, called consciousness.


David Nyman

This might interest you: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


Roger James Thornton Brown

Matter arises from consciousness, not the other way around.


Shlomo Friedman

Matter does not exist outside of consciousness. Quantum physics, and the double slit experiment prove that.


Harsh Khandelwal, Thinker.

For all we know, whoever can convincingly say that matter is unconscious?? And for other, whoever can convincingly say consciousness is driven from matter, and not from energy!? It's a deeply speculative question about something we know practically nothing about other than the fact that the realization of the self is consciousness!


Murari Das, Free radical - on the run from... (more)

It is a separate energy according to Lord Krishna.

Bhagavad Gita informs us:

BG 7.4:  Earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intelligence and false ego -- all  together these eight constitute My separated material energies.

BG 7.5: Besides these, O mighty-armed Arjuna,  there is another, superior energy of Mine, which comprises the living  entities who are exploiting the resources of this material, inferior  nature.

[Bruno Marchal]

On 22 Jan 2015, at 21:31, Kermit Rose wrote:

How does something as immaterial as consciousness arise from something as unconscious as matter?

Franklin Veaux

Simple. That just never happen. 

Consciousness emerge from the computations (that is the "immaterial" but true, or false, sigma_1 relations).

You all need to agree on is elementary arithmetic, and the assumption that there is no magic in the brain.

Then you can explain why consciousness cannot definite itself, why it can dream, and indeed can suffer from persistent collective coherent dreams.

What many people seems to miss, is that if we attribute a mind to a digital machine, the mind belongs already to an immaterial being, but that immateriality is "contagious" on the environment below the substitution level. It leads to a many mind inteoretatiuon of arithmetic from its average internal Löbian observers.

Consciousness appears to be an emergent phenomenon from sufficiently complex reflexive information processing systems.

OK, but with computationalism, it has to emerged from a larger spectrum than the physical. 

We see examples all the time about how inert matter, when carefully arranged, gains the ability to do things that even a small rearrangement will destroy. A car's engine is merely inert metal, unable to move, but arrange that inert matter in just exactly the right way and now suddenly that inert, unmoving matter can move all by itself. Computer chips are made from silicon. A pile of sand, of and by itself, can neither process nor store information, but arrange it in exactly the right way and now all of a sudden it can.

Yes, you can ascribe the number 1 to the number of orange in the basket, but the number 1 cannot. (if he could think) He would be inderminate on all its "incarnation" (one last cigare in the box), one bill payed today, one lunch, one planet, one natural satellite, ...

Once you truncate at a digital or discrete level, you relativize the object to an infinity of relative realizations all already emulated by elementary arithmetic.

It used to be believed that life was magical, but as we learned more about the molecular machinery of like, we discovered it's not Magic at all--living cells are basically machines. Extraordinarily tiny, exquisitely complex machines, but machines nonetheless. We are really close to being able to build simple single-called organisms in the lab; in fact, there's even a name for this kind of science (synthetic biology).

We don't yet fully understand what consciousness is is or how it works, so it's easy for it to SEEM like magic, just like cells seemed magic to people a hundred years ago or a car engine would seem magic to a member of a pre-industrial civilization. But that doesn't mean consciousness is magic!

OK. Can't agree more, but if you push that logic, soon or later you will understand that the notion of matter might belong to that kind of magic we better should not introduce. 

This extends Darwin, even the physical laws have an explanation; basically as sort of relative dreams invariants.

John Purcell

This is a hotly-debated topic, with people like David Chalmers on one side of the debate, and the materialist Daniel Dennett (and most scientists, but not all) on the other. Chalmers holds that consciousness is a separate and very real independent phenomenon, while Dennett says (to caricature him slightly) that basically no, it isn't.

Perhaps the really interesting question is, does consciousness actually arise from matter? Or do we have non-material minds that are interpreting something or other as physical matter?

The second way. 

The first idea is currently unprovable; some say that it has to do with complexity, or some kind of reflexivity, or even quantum physics.

The second idea is pretty wild, but it doesn't necessarily mean that "everything is in our minds".

Hmm... yes, it leads to God created the integers, and all the rest is in the mind of the integers. 

It is "our" mind, but in a larger sense that "our"-the-humans.

That our minds do interpret our experiences to give us our sense of space, time and physical matter is beyond doubt; the question is, how much of it is "out there" and in what sense; and how much of it is a matter of interpretation?

You have the "simple" notion of arithmetical truth (definable in math, but not in arithmetic), and the intensional nuance impose by incompleteness to the correct (arithmetically) machine.

Pete Ashly
You have heard that everything is energy and matter essentially "forces" in empty space, right?  Perhaps your dualistic preconceptions form the root of a manufactured problem.

Can't agree more.

Gustavo Muslera, Linux Sysadmin
 
How does something immaterial as the magic of a great book arise from something as mundane as ink over paper? Or a complex computer program or data in digital form from something like computer memory or storage?

The point is that is not any arrangement of matter, or ink over paper, or circuitry. Is from that order that all the magic comes from. And as any magic, it resides in a good part in the observer.

The whole magic, mind and matter is in the mind of the universal machine. But the real magic is in the complex relmation between the machines and the truth about the machine, and the abyss of possible delusions, etc.

James Kent, Programmer, Writer, author of ... (more)

This is a flawed question. Consciousness is demonstrably material, not immaterial. You can remove and change the material that makes consciousness (neurons in a brain, or chemicals in a brain, for instance) and the quality of the consciousness then changes. The question should be, "Why do people persist in assuming consciousness is immaterial?

Well bugs can altered the quality of the work done by my computer, but this is because you relate the consciousness of a person to the body you can see. But the consciousness itself is related to an infinity of bodies.

To say that consciousness is material (and thus primitively material) violates computationalism at the start, and is vague and ambiguous: what matter is needed, and what is her non Turing emulable role exactly.

Michel Poisson, Graphic Arts - Escaping the Bang

It arises from living matter. And one of the main attributes of even the simplest living matter is its reactivity to its environment. Just about any sufficiently advanced living being displays one form or another of it.

And is consciousness immaterial? None of its dependencies are. Simple molecules can perturb it or turn it off. Faulty connections or missing brain components will distort it or mangle it into uselessness.

Is it any useful to consider it separate from its neuronal processors?

Yes, to install it on different neuronal processors, and travel in the Solar system at the speed of light.

Muhammed Fatih Özdemir

The guru should answer this question as well: "How does something as material as an utterance arise from something as unconscious as obeying grammar rules?"

My answer for both questions is just neural signalling but yet we don't completely know how such signalling causes emergence of conscious and unconscious processes.


Greg Sunderland, Quantum physicist

Here's what the leading physicists of last century said about that:

Max Planck: "I regard consciousnes as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness."

Nice!   (But not as an argument for collapse, only for selection)

Martin Rees: "The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it, not the other way around."

Wave collapses ? Hmm, don't think so.

Niels Bohr: "Real things are not made of real things"

Indeed. 

Gert Braakman

It's us humans who created an artificial line dividing material things and consciousness. They are one and the same process, with different densities, qualities and levels of organisation. It's not consciousness that creates matter or matter that creates consciousness. They are different elements of the same process.


Keith Allpress

How can you claim it is immaterial? It exists, so of course it is not.

All mathematical objects or relations are immaterial, and exists, in some sense. 

The question is just undecided today if what we need to assume is immaterial or material.

With computationalism, we don't need more than too assume elementary immaterial things, like numbers or combinators, ...

Rehan Arif

I may be wrong here but let me give it a try:
The question does not appear to be very valid, for it tries to draw a dialectical situation in order to create an irony. We know that consciousness springs from thought, a mental faculty specific to the animal Kingdom (and probably plants, and then to non-living things, if there be a hint of such a case). Let's call the thoughtful entities of such kind, beings.
Now, all being have the capacity to think, or to have some mental framework of the world around them as part of their brain activity. that is how species develop learning capability, schema concepts,  and survival skills.
One class of beings, The Being, is capable of much more. that is, it can imagine itself, it can think about itself in addition to the world around it. that certain centre in the mind, the imagined self, essentially brings about the knowledge of the being, called consciousness.

OK. But without magic, at some point you will have to explain matter from statistics on number dreams (to be short).

David Nyman

This might interest you: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Can't agree more.

<sigh>

Roger James Thornton Brown

Matter arises from consciousness, not the other way around.

Excellent (with respect to comp, the universal machine, the mystics, the (neo)-platonists.

Shlomo Friedman

Matter does not exist outside of consciousness. Quantum physics, and the double slit experiment prove that.

Is only the beginning of evidences for that. OK.

Harsh Khandelwal, Thinker.

For all we know, whoever can convincingly say that matter is unconscious?? And for other, whoever can convincingly say consciousness is driven from matter, and not from energy!? It's a deeply speculative question about something we know practically nothing about other than the fact that the realization of the self is consciousness!


Murari Das, Free radical - on the run from... (more)

It is a separate energy according to Lord Krishna.

Bhagavad Gita informs us:

BG 7.4:  Earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intelligence and false ego -- all  together these eight constitute My separated material energies.

BG 7.5: Besides these, O mighty-armed Arjuna,  there is another, superior energy of Mine, which comprises the living  entities who are exploiting the resources of this material, inferior  nature.

Yes, it makes me possible to send this mail indeed, except I have to shut down my Modem first, pfft damn matter!

Bruno

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