Trasducing

[Glenn]

"It is the theory that the brain is a type of transducer, that is, a device or an organ that converts one signal to another signal, commonly from one medium to another. A microphone, for example, is a transducer that converts sound waves to electrical current. Your eye is a transducer that converts light to vision."

https://mindmatters.ai/2021/08/a-neuroscience-theory-that-actually-helps-explain-the-brain/

[Martin Harran]

On Tue, 31 Aug 2021 05:23:57 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
wrote:

>"It is the theory that the brain is a type of transducer, that is, a device or an organ that converts one signal to another signal, commonly from one medium to another. A microphone, for example, is a transducer that converts sound waves to electrical current. Your eye is a transducer that converts light to vision."
>
>https://mindmatters.ai/2021/08/a-neuroscience-theory-that-actually-helps-explain-the-brain/

The original article [1] by Robert Epstein [2] is a very interesting
read. His transducer ideas are at this stage speculative, but he does
offer ideas that address things where purely materialistic approaches
to consciousness have failed miserably, what David Chalmers famously
labelled "the hard problem".


[1]
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/your-brain-is-not-a-computer-it-is-a-transducer


[2] Robert Epstein is senior research psychologist at the American
Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California. He
holds a doctoral degree from Harvard University and is the former
editor-in-chief of Psychology Today magazine. He's authored 15 books
and more than 300 articles on various topics in the behavioral
sciences.

[Zen Cycle]

the analogy fails in that a transducer is a device that converts one form of energy into another. Better analogies would be a how a microphone or imaging device turns light or sound into electrical energy. Eyes and ears convert light and sound into electrical impulses which are then processed by the brain, in the same way that a computer can be used to process the electrical signals from microphones or imaging devices. This excludes the brain from the 'transducer' category.

IMO any discussion of the brain as a transduction device where the electrical impulses from our sensory organs are turned into impressions, emotions, and reactions is more of a philosophical or metaphysical discussion. It's a discussion of the nature of consciousness. IMO trying to use a 'transducer' label is at best obfuscatroy.

[Glenn]

Your education was wasted on you.

[Martin Harran]

On Thu, 2 Sep 2021 07:13:59 -0700 (PDT), Zen Cycle
<funkma...@hotmail.com> wrote:

>On Thursday, September 2, 2021 at 5:15:06 AM UTC-4, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Tue, 31 Aug 2021 05:23:57 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
>> wrote:
>> >"It is the theory that the brain is a type of transducer, that is, a device or an organ that converts one signal to another signal, commonly from one medium to another. A microphone, for example, is a transducer that converts sound waves to electrical current. Your eye is a transducer that converts light to vision."
>> >
>> >https://mindmatters.ai/2021/08/a-neuroscience-theory-that-actually-helps-explain-the-brain/
>> The original article [1] by Robert Epstein [2] is a very interesting
>> read. His transducer ideas are at this stage speculative, but he does
>> offer ideas that address things where purely materialistic approaches
>> to consciousness have failed miserably, what David Chalmers famously
>> labelled "the hard problem".
>>
>>
>> [1]
>> https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/your-brain-is-not-a-computer-it-is-a-transducer
>>
>>
>> [2] Robert Epstein is senior research psychologist at the American
>> Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California. He
>> holds a doctoral degree from Harvard University and is the former
>> editor-in-chief of Psychology Today magazine. He's authored 15 books
>> and more than 300 articles on various topics in the behavioral
>> sciences.
>
>the analogy fails in that a transducer is a device that converts one form of energy into another. Better analogies would be a how a microphone or imaging device turns light or sound into electrical energy. Eyes and ears convert light and sound into electrical impulses which are then processed by the brain, in the same way that a computer can be used to process the electrical signals from microphones or imaging devices. This excludes the brain from the 'transducer' category.

I don't quite follow your logic there, at best it seems like a severe
bout of pedantry.

>
>IMO any discussion of the brain as a transduction device where the electrical impulses from our sensory organs are turned into impressions, emotions, and reactions is more of a philosophical or metaphysical discussion.

That sounds rather like a reluctant admission that despite a lot of
effort, science has produced nothing of value here.

[Zen Cycle]

Breathable air is wasted on you

[Zen Cycle]

On Thursday, September 2, 2021 at 1:05:06 PM UTC-4, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Sep 2021 07:13:59 -0700 (PDT), Zen Cycle
> <funkma...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Thursday, September 2, 2021 at 5:15:06 AM UTC-4, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> On Tue, 31 Aug 2021 05:23:57 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
> >> wrote:
> >> >"It is the theory that the brain is a type of transducer, that is, a device or an organ that converts one signal to another signal, commonly from one medium to another. A microphone, for example, is a transducer that converts sound waves to electrical current. Your eye is a transducer that converts light to vision."
> >> >
> >> >https://mindmatters.ai/2021/08/a-neuroscience-theory-that-actually-helps-explain-the-brain/
> >> The original article [1] by Robert Epstein [2] is a very interesting
> >> read. His transducer ideas are at this stage speculative, but he does
> >> offer ideas that address things where purely materialistic approaches
> >> to consciousness have failed miserably, what David Chalmers famously
> >> labelled "the hard problem".
> >>
> >>
> >> [1]
> >> https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/your-brain-is-not-a-computer-it-is-a-transducer
> >>
> >>
> >> [2] Robert Epstein is senior research psychologist at the American
> >> Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California. He
> >> holds a doctoral degree from Harvard University and is the former
> >> editor-in-chief of Psychology Today magazine. He's authored 15 books
> >> and more than 300 articles on various topics in the behavioral
> >> sciences.
> >
> >the analogy fails in that a transducer is a device that converts one form of energy into another. Better analogies would be a how a microphone or imaging device turns light or sound into electrical energy. Eyes and ears convert light and sound into electrical impulses which are then processed by the brain, in the same way that a computer can be used to process the electrical signals from microphones or imaging devices. This excludes the brain from the 'transducer' category.
> I don't quite follow your logic there, at best it seems like a severe
> bout of pedantry.

Hardly pedantic. Transduction is a very basic concept. It's the conversion of one form of energy into another. The analogy was made in the OP :

"A microphone, for example, is a transducer that converts sound waves to electrical current. Your eye is a transducer that converts light to vision."

The first half of that is correct. The second half is the leap. The transduction performed by the eye is the conversion of light into electrical impulses. It is these electrical impulses that the brain processes and becomes vision. The brain processes information. Attempting to call processing 'transduction' is a gross oversimplifiction of the how the brain turns electrical impulses from our sensory organs into impressions, emotions, and reactions. He's trying to reduce consciousness and personality into a simple possibly quantifiable conversion process. I would think you and glenn of all people would take severe issue with that.

> >IMO any discussion of the brain as a transduction device where the electrical impulses from our sensory organs are turned into impressions, emotions, and reactions is more of a philosophical or metaphysical discussion.

> That sounds rather like a reluctant admission that despite a lot of
> effort, science has produced nothing of value here.

That's quite a leap, first off, science has in fact produced a great deal of value into researching the nature of consciousness and personality. There is an entire branch of science dedicated to it that you very cleverly listed in your first response. You might want to stick to theological discussions.

[Glenn]

On Thursday, September 2, 2021 at 10:05:06 AM UTC-7, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Sep 2021 07:13:59 -0700 (PDT), Zen Cycle
> <funkma...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >On Thursday, September 2, 2021 at 5:15:06 AM UTC-4, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
> >> On Tue, 31 Aug 2021 05:23:57 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>
> >> wrote:
> >> >"It is the theory that the brain is a type of transducer, that is, a device or an organ that converts one signal to another signal, commonly from one medium to another. A microphone, for example, is a transducer that converts sound waves to electrical current. Your eye is a transducer that converts light to vision."
> >> >
> >> >https://mindmatters.ai/2021/08/a-neuroscience-theory-that-actually-helps-explain-the-brain/
> >> The original article [1] by Robert Epstein [2] is a very interesting
> >> read. His transducer ideas are at this stage speculative, but he does
> >> offer ideas that address things where purely materialistic approaches
> >> to consciousness have failed miserably, what David Chalmers famously
> >> labelled "the hard problem".
> >>
> >>
> >> [1]
> >> https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/your-brain-is-not-a-computer-it-is-a-transducer
> >>
> >>
> >> [2] Robert Epstein is senior research psychologist at the American
> >> Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California. He
> >> holds a doctoral degree from Harvard University and is the former
> >> editor-in-chief of Psychology Today magazine. He's authored 15 books
> >> and more than 300 articles on various topics in the behavioral
> >> sciences.
> >
> >the analogy fails in that a transducer is a device that converts one form of energy into another. Better analogies would be a how a microphone or imaging device turns light or sound into electrical energy. Eyes and ears convert light and sound into electrical impulses which are then processed by the brain, in the same way that a computer can be used to process the electrical signals from microphones or imaging devices. This excludes the brain from the 'transducer' category.
> I don't quite follow your logic there, at best it seems like a severe
> bout of pedantry.

There is no logic there, nor is it pedantic.

> >
> >IMO any discussion of the brain as a transduction device where the electrical impulses from our sensory organs are turned into impressions, emotions, and reactions is more of a philosophical or metaphysical discussion.
> That sounds rather like a reluctant admission that despite a lot of
> effort, science has produced nothing of value here.

Sarcasm won't help you.

> >It's a discussion of the nature of consciousness. IMO trying to use a 'transducer' label is at best obfuscatroy.

He didn't even bother reading the original article.

[Martin Harran]

On Thu, 2 Sep 2021 12:04:03 -0700 (PDT), Glenn <GlennS...@msn.com>

Where's the sarcasm?

[Martin Harran]

On Thu, 2 Sep 2021 11:44:39 -0700 (PDT), Zen Cycle

It's pedantic because the microphone starts the process.

>
>The first half of that is correct. The second half is the leap. The transduction performed by the eye is the conversion of light into electrical impulses. It is these electrical impulses that the brain processes and becomes vision. The brain processes information. Attempting to call processing 'transduction' is a gross oversimplifiction of the how the brain turns electrical impulses from our sensory organs into impressions, emotions, and reactions. He's trying to reduce consciousness and personality into a simple possibly quantifiable conversion process. I would think you and glenn of all people would take severe issue with that.
>

Why on earth do you think I would have a problem with that?

>> >IMO any discussion of the brain as a transduction device where the electrical impulses from our sensory organs are turned into impressions, emotions, and reactions is more of a philosophical or metaphysical discussion.
>
>> That sounds rather like a reluctant admission that despite a lot of
>> effort, science has produced nothing of value here.
>
>That's quite a leap, first off, science has in fact produced a great deal of value into researching the nature of consciousness and personality.

It has nothing to offer in as to how "electrical impulses from our
sensory organs are turned into impressions, emotions, and reactions" -
your statement that I was responding to.

> There is an entire branch of science dedicated to it that you very cleverly listed in your first response. You might want to stick to theological discussions.
>

You might want to learn to not make assumptions about people who
happen to disagree with you on some point or other.

[Zen Cycle]

This might help:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pedantic

> >
> >The first half of that is correct. The second half is the leap. The transduction performed by the eye is the conversion of light into electrical impulses. It is these electrical impulses that the brain processes and becomes vision. The brain processes information. Attempting to call processing 'transduction' is a gross oversimplifiction of the how the brain turns electrical impulses from our sensory organs into impressions, emotions, and reactions. He's trying to reduce consciousness and personality into a simple possibly quantifiable conversion process. I would think you and glenn of all people would take severe issue with that.
> >
> Why on earth do you think I would have a problem with that?

Because you wrote "despite a lot of effort, science has produced nothing of value here." which doesn't have even the smallest grain of truth.

> >> >IMO any discussion of the brain as a transduction device where the electrical impulses from our sensory organs are turned into impressions, emotions, and reactions is more of a philosophical or metaphysical discussion.
> >
> >> That sounds rather like a reluctant admission that despite a lot of
> >> effort, science has produced nothing of value here.
> >
> >That's quite a leap, first off, science has in fact produced a great deal of value into researching the nature of consciousness and personality.
> It has nothing to offer in as to how "electrical impulses from our
> sensory organs are turned into impressions, emotions, and reactions" -
> your statement that I was responding to.
> > There is an entire branch of science dedicated to it that you very cleverly listed in your first response. You might want to stick to theological discussions.
> >
> You might want to learn to not make assumptions about people who
> happen to disagree with you on some point or other.

In this thread you've written two demonstrably false statements:

"despite a lot of effort, science has produced nothing of value here."

and

"It's pedantic because the microphone starts the process." - which is nowhere close to an example of pedantry _and_ shows you don't understand the flaw in the analogies presented in the OP (but hey, what do you expect from the discovery institute).

I'm not making an assumption. I've seen your posts on theological issues and even though there are those here that disagree with your positions you usually offer lucid discussion. In this case however, it's pretty clear you aren't getting the point.

FWIW, I didn't bother with the Mind Matters article because it's from the discovery institute which means by definition they're getting it wrong, but I did read the Discover article. And yes, Epstein is very clearly forging full steam into the area of metaphysics.

[Burkhard]

But wasn't that simply echoing the point you had made? It followed the
sentence where you said that this was a philosophical or metaphysical
issue, not one of science.

So I thought you are in violent agreement there

[Zen Cycle]

No, I wrote that epsteins work was on transduction was in the realm of metaphysics. Martin was making a much more broad statement about scientific research into consciousness in general.

[Burkhard]

Possibly, though I saw his "here" as referring to the paper that you
yourself had criticized on these grounds - and after all his initial
take on its scientific merits seem to have been more positive than
yours, so reading this as a criticism of scientific progress in general
would be rather inconsistent.

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 3 Sep 2021 06:46:21 -0700 (PDT), Zen Cycle

I did NOT make any "much more broad statement about scientific
research into consciousness in general". In my OP, I made a comment
specifically relating to qualia with a reference to David Chalmers'
"hard problem". In reply to your post, I made a targeted statement in
regard to your comment about how "electrical impulses from our
sensory organs are turned into impressions, emotions, and reactions".
I pointed that out to you in my last post but you have chosen to
ignore it. Trying to move the goalposts by misrepresenting what I said
or handwaving about theology doesn't cut it. You need to show actual
examples of how science has come up with an explanation for how we
experience qualia or else accept that what I said was fully justified.

[Mark Isaak]

Consciousness is not a form of energy. To speak of transduction of
thought is to appeal to muddled metaphors. The exercise is more likely
to hinder research in consciousness than to help it.

--
Mark Isaak eciton (at) curioustaxonomy (dot) net
"The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred
to the presence of those who think they've found it." - Terry Pratchett

[Mark Isaak]

On 9/3/21 7:13 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
> [...] You need to show actual

> examples of how science has come up with an explanation for how we

> experience qualia . . .

In an important sense, we don't experience qualia. Rather, qualia
create the experience of "we". The "we" is the endpoint; to put it into
one's theories before it is fully explained is to assume one's conclusion.

[Zen Cycle]

After rereading the thread, then this message and Burkhards comments, I understand the disconnect. The point I was trying to make is the statement from the discovery institute page of "A microphone, for example, is a transducer that converts sound waves to electrical current. Your eye is a transducer that converts light to vision" is a bad analogy based on the basic definition of a transducer. If one qualifies a microphone as transducer of sound energy to electrical energy, the correct analogy would be that the eye converts light to electrical energy (via synapse) - not vision.

I did miss your comment "It has nothing to offer in as to how electrical impulses from our sensory organs are turned into impressions, emotions, and reactions". I blame typing before my coffee has cooled enough to drink. Still, I still don't agree with that statement, or even the (now what I understand to be) more narrow context of "science has produced nothing of value here".

There are thousands of research projects into characterizing emotion and consciousness without reaching into metaphysics. Christof Koch and Francis Crick (yes, _that_ Crick) worked 30 years ago in the field of neural correlates of consciousness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness). While Chalmers may opine that such research can't answer his 'hard problem', for you to claim "science has produced nothing of value here" even within the more narrowed context is at best hyperbolic. Bringing this back around to Epstein, the attempt to explain the transition of states of consciousness via Transduction is a misappropriation of the term and concept. To your point "science has produced nothing of value here", even Epstein refers to specific scientific research on the claustrum in his article.*

Who knows, I could be wrong and the concept of transduction may turn out to be widely accepted in the field of consciousness, but for me, Epsteins theory is still firmly panted in the realm of metaphysics, not hard science.

* The Discover article refers to "The claustrum coordinates cortical slow-wave activity" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-020-0625-7) - ironically coming full circle back to Koch and Crick, who published "What is the function of the claustrum? (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1569501/) in 2005. Francis Crick was making edits to the second draft of the paper when he died. Koch is still very much with us, and has published over 300 papers and books on consciousness and neuroscience.

[Glenn]

On Friday, September 3, 2021 at 10:30:06 AM UTC-7, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 9/3/21 7:13 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
> > [...] You need to show actual
> > examples of how science has come up with an explanation for how we
> > experience qualia . . .
>
> In an important sense, we don't experience qualia. Rather, qualia
> create the experience of "we". The "we" is the endpoint; to put it into
> one's theories before it is fully explained is to assume one's conclusion.
> --

Why is your sense of qualia important? Do apples have different qualia for different people?

[Glenn]

Consciousness is a force. Consciousness directs action. That is undeniable. The metaphors are fair and obvious. Energy is a property that is transferred to a system to do work. You think it comes from the physical brain. Others think it is property of the Universe, transferred to living things to do work.

If consciousness is a property of the Universe,

Max Tegmark says he believes consciousness is a state of matter.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/physicists-say-consciousness-might-be-a-state-of-matter/

The atheist activist "Mark Isaak" might not agree, but many well known professionals have
made similar statements as Tegmark.

"They have turned to the alternative view that it is actually a fundamental quality of the Universe."

http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/psychology/consciousness-fundamental-quality-universe-07291.html

For those few that are truly interested and not dogmatic, an interesting piece:

"But perhaps consciousness is not uniquely troublesome. Going back to Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, philosophers of science have struggled with a lesser known, but equally hard, problem of matter. What is physical matter in and of itself, behind the mathematical structure described by physics? This problem, too, seems to lie beyond the traditional methods of science, because all we can observe is what matter does, not what it is in itself—the “software” of the universe but not its ultimate “hardware.” On the surface, these problems seem entirely separate. But a closer look reveals that they might be deeply connected."

https://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 3 Sep 2021 11:52:11 -0700 (PDT), Zen Cycle

You said earlier that you didn't bother with the Mind Matters article

because it's from the discovery institute which means by definition

they're getting it wrong [a sentiment I agree with, which is why I
went to the original article], but you did read the Discover article;
now you say you were referring to the Mind Matters article. If you'll
forgive the pun, I wish you'd make your mind up.

>>of "A microphone, for example, is a transducer that converts sound waves to electrical current. Your eye is a transducer that converts light to vision" is a bad analogy based on the basic definition of a transducer. If one qualifies a microphone as transducer of sound energy to electrical energy, the correct analogy would be that the eye converts light to electrical energy (via synapse) - not vision.
>
>I did miss your comment "It has nothing to offer in as to how electrical impulses from our sensory organs are turned into impressions, emotions, and reactions". I blame typing before my coffee has cooled enough to drink.

I take that as a begrudging admission that you were wrong in the
attack you made on me. It would have been nicer if you had taken me
out of the bucket you put me into with Glenn but apparently that would
be too much to hope for.

>Still, I still don't agree with that statement, or even the (now what I understand to be) more narrow context of "science has produced nothing of value here".
>
>There are thousands of research projects into characterizing emotion and consciousness without reaching into metaphysics. Christof Koch and Francis Crick (yes, _that_ Crick) worked 30 years ago in the field of neural correlates of consciousness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness). While Chalmers may opine that such research can't answer his 'hard problem', for you to claim "science has produced nothing of value here" even within the more narrowed context is at best hyperbolic.

Yet you cannot give a single example of how any of that research
explains qualia.

> Bringing this back around to Epstein, the attempt to explain the transition of states of consciousness via Transduction is a misappropriation of the term and concept. To your point "science has produced nothing of value here", even Epstein refers to specific scientific research on the claustrum in his article.*
>
>Who knows, I could be wrong and the concept of transduction may turn out to be widely accepted in the field of consciousness, but for me, Epsteins theory is still firmly panted in the realm of metaphysics, not hard science.

Epstein recognises that science is currently making little or no real
progress in regard to qualia so he is suggesting going back to first
principles to see if we can identify different paths that science
might fruitfully research and find explanations. You tried to make out
that I was rejecting work on this for theological reasons. The exact
opposite applies - I thoroughly welcome the exploration of new ideas
and approaches. You are the one who seems hung up on theology and
afraid to open the door to any research that might in any way give
even a hint of support for any form of dualism; I regard that sort of
attitude as far more harmful to scientific progress than either
Creationism or ID.

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 3 Sep 2021 10:25:11 -0700, Mark Isaak
<eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:

>On 9/3/21 7:13 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
>> [...] You need to show actual
>> examples of how science has come up with an explanation for how we
>> experience qualia . . .
>
>In an important sense, we don't experience qualia. Rather, qualia
>create the experience of "we". The "we" is the endpoint; to put it into
>one's theories before it is fully explained is to assume one's conclusion.

Sounds like a bit of philosophical navel gazing - certainly no science
involved.

[Martin Harran]

On what basis do you state that?

>To speak of transduction of
>thought is to appeal to muddled metaphors.

All metaphors have limitations. It seems to me that those who attack
weaknesses in them generally do so in the absence of being able to
attack the underlying ideas that the metaphors are used to explain.

>The exercise is more likely
>to hinder research in consciousness than to help it.

In what way *hinder* research?

[broger...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, September 4, 2021 at 3:10:07 AM UTC-4, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Sep 2021 11:52:11 -0700 (PDT), Zen Cycle
> <funkma...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>

<snip a lot>

> >There are thousands of research projects into characterizing emotion and consciousness without reaching into metaphysics. Christof Koch and Francis Crick (yes, _that_ Crick) worked 30 years ago in the field of neural correlates of consciousness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness). While Chalmers may opine that such research can't answer his 'hard problem', for you to claim "science has produced nothing of value here" even within the more narrowed context is at best hyperbolic.
> Yet you cannot give a single example of how any of that research
> explains qualia.

Personally, I think that explaining qualia or answering the "hard problem" of consciousness, is sort of like explaining "life." Nowadays, vitalism is not really much of a thing any more and most people are content to describe life by describing the physical and biochemical things that happen in living things. Not many people say - "That's all great, but it doesn't explain life itself." As more of the "easy" problems of consciousness get solved, ie the mechanistic, behavioral ones, I think questions about "how qualia are produced" or the "hard question" itself will just gradually wither away. A brain looks different from the inside than from the outside in the same way that a cone looks different when viewed from above than when viewed from the side.
<snip a lot>

[Martin Harran]

On Sat, 4 Sep 2021 03:10:34 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"
<broger...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Saturday, September 4, 2021 at 3:10:07 AM UTC-4, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Fri, 3 Sep 2021 11:52:11 -0700 (PDT), Zen Cycle
>> <funkma...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>
><snip a lot>
>> >There are thousands of research projects into characterizing emotion and consciousness without reaching into metaphysics. Christof Koch and Francis Crick (yes, _that_ Crick) worked 30 years ago in the field of neural correlates of consciousness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness). While Chalmers may opine that such research can't answer his 'hard problem', for you to claim "science has produced nothing of value here" even within the more narrowed context is at best hyperbolic.
>> Yet you cannot give a single example of how any of that research
>> explains qualia.
>
>Personally, I think that explaining qualia or answering the "hard problem" of consciousness, is sort of like explaining "life."

I don't think that it is a useful comparison. We might not have a
generally accepted definition of "life" but there seems to be pretty
general agreement on *what* is alive and what isn't; if I understand
it correctly, the only real area of disagreement is whether or not
viruses count as lifeforms. The opposite applies with consciousness.
There seems to be a general acceptance that other primates have some
level of consciousness but widespread disagreement as to whether other
animals have consciousness, let alone fish and plants or even
inanimate objects as increasing numbers of researchers seem to be
considering. I also think the whole question of consciousness is very
pertinent in regard to the ongoing developments in artificial
intelligence.

>Nowadays, vitalism is not really much of a thing any more and most people are content to describe life by describing the physical and biochemical things that happen in living things. Not many people say - "That's all great, but it doesn't explain life itself."

I'm not sure about your "most" and "not many"; I certainly am
fascinated by the question of just what life really is and I don't
think I am part of a small minority. There also is still a lot of
scientific work going on - it seems a contradiction to be
investigating abiogenesis without some reference point as to what life
is.

>As more of the "easy" problems of consciousness get solved, ie the mechanistic, behavioral ones, I think questions about "how qualia are produced" or the "hard question" itself will just gradually wither away.

I somehow doubt that. However we define consciousness, I think we can
agree that insatiable curiosity abut what things are and how they work
is a major feature of human consciousness.

[jillery]

Pedantically, metaphors are not explanations in themselves. Instead
they are illustrations within an explanation. As such, metaphors can
illustrate explanations well, poorly, or even contrarily aka
"muddled", especially in cases where metaphors sneak in unstated
assumptions, whether intentionally or not, ex. design.

In the case of consciousness, it is a process of life, but is not
itself a form of energy, any more than is life. To use another
metaphor, consciousness and life are like fire, in that all are
exothermic chemical processes. IOW they are the processes that
transduce (note the spelling) chemical energy to heat energy.

And to illustrate the limitations of metaphors, my metaphors above do
not imply people spontaneously combust, nor that fire has jerky knees.

--
You're entitled to your own opinions.
You're not entitled to your own facts.

[broger...@gmail.com]

There's no scientific investigation about what life is. There's no answer to the question possible. All we can do is decide what things we want to call alive and why we want to call them that. We can investigate them to our heart's content and describe all of their properties and behaviors in detail and still the question of whether they are alive or not is just a question about how we want to use the word "life."

> >As more of the "easy" problems of consciousness get solved, ie the mechanistic, behavioral ones, I think questions about "how qualia are produced" or the "hard question" itself will just gradually wither away.
> I somehow doubt that. However we define consciousness, I think we can
> agree that insatiable curiosity abut what things are and how they work
> is a major feature of human consciousness.

Sure, there are tons of things to be insatiably curious about as to how the brain works. I don't deny that there will always be questions about how conscious operates. But I think that the "hard question" will just cease to seem so interesting, as more and more is understood about how the brain does its thing. There may certainly remain people who ask about something (an animal or a robot) "But is it really conscious?" who will persist in thinking that they are asking something deep about the world, whether than thinking about how they want to use a word.

[Mark Isaak]

Oddly, that is what I thought of the brain-as-transducer idea you posted.

Consciousness is a hard problem for at least two reasons. First,
because "consciousness" is very poorly defined, and second because it is
so familiar that calling it "familiar" is an understatement. The
metaphor of a fish trying to understand water might be helpful, but even
that understates the case. Consciousness is not a piece that can be
examined in a fMRI; it is what we are when we are trying to understand
consciousness.

You are correct that what I wrote is not science. The science is being
done by people experimenting with illusions, drug effects, induced
out-of-body experiences, brain damage case studies, and much more. But
I think some philosophy is necessary to avoid (or at least reduce) the
all-too-common mistake of thinking, "this is part of the body where
consciousness lies."

[Glenn]

On Tuesday, August 31, 2021 at 5:25:06 AM UTC-7, Glenn wrote:
> "It is the theory that the brain is a type of transducer, that is, a device or an organ that converts one signal to another signal, commonly from one medium to another. A microphone, for example, is a transducer that converts sound waves to electrical current. Your eye is a transducer that converts light to vision."
>
> https://mindmatters.ai/2021/08/a-neuroscience-theory-that-actually-helps-explain-the-brain/

"Electromagnetic energy in the brain enables brain matter to create our consciousness and our ability to be aware and think, according to a new theory developed by Professor Johnjoe McFadden from the University of Surrey.
Publishing his theory in the eminent Oxford University Press journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, Professor McFadden posits that consciousness is in fact the brain’s energy field."

https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuroscience/news/new-theory-suggests-consciousness-is-the-brains-energy-field-341866

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnjoe_McFadden

[Mark Isaak]

Knowing what energy is. Energy is involved in consciousness, of course,
but energy is involved in practically everything. If you regard
consciousness as a form of energy, then you would also need to consider
a pinball game, a lunar eclipse, and the formation of a stalactite as
separate forms of energy.

>> To speak of transduction of
>> thought is to appeal to muddled metaphors.
>
> All metaphors have limitations. It seems to me that those who attack
> weaknesses in them generally do so in the absence of being able to
> attack the underlying ideas that the metaphors are used to explain.

If the listener does not understand the underlying ideas (which, I
grant, I do not), then the metaphor failed in its intent.

>> The exercise is more likely
>> to hinder research in consciousness than to help it.
>
> In what way *hinder* research?

Leading to dead ends.

[Glenn]

Information scares you, doesn't it.

> >> To speak of transduction of
> >> thought is to appeal to muddled metaphors.
> >
> > All metaphors have limitations. It seems to me that those who attack
> > weaknesses in them generally do so in the absence of being able to
> > attack the underlying ideas that the metaphors are used to explain.
> If the listener does not understand the underlying ideas (which, I
> grant, I do not), then the metaphor failed in its intent.
> >> The exercise is more likely
> >> to hinder research in consciousness than to help it.
> >
> > In what way *hinder* research?
> Leading to dead ends.
> --

[Martin Harran]

On Sat, 4 Sep 2021 09:29:07 -0700, Mark Isaak

<eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:

>On 9/4/21 12:07 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
>> On Fri, 3 Sep 2021 10:25:11 -0700, Mark Isaak
>> <eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On 9/3/21 7:13 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
>>>> [...] You need to show actual
>>>> examples of how science has come up with an explanation for how we
>>>> experience qualia . . .
>>>
>>> In an important sense, we don't experience qualia. Rather, qualia
>>> create the experience of "we". The "we" is the endpoint; to put it into
>>> one's theories before it is fully explained is to assume one's conclusion.
>>
>> Sounds like a bit of philosophical navel gazing - certainly no science
>> involved.
>
>Oddly, that is what I thought of the brain-as-transducer idea you posted.

That's not the way it came across to me. It sounded more like "OK,
guys, what we're doing isn't working, let's try this approach and see
if it gets us somewhere." A perfectly rational and reasonable
suggestion.

[Martin Harran]

On Sat, 4 Sep 2021 10:13:20 -0700, Mark Isaak

We may know what energy is, though I'm not sure that we understand it
completely. We don't know what consciousness is so I don't see how we
can say that it is or isn't energy.

>Energy is involved in consciousness, of course,
>but energy is involved in practically everything. If you regard
>consciousness as a form of energy, then you would also need to consider
>a pinball game, a lunar eclipse, and the formation of a stalactite as
>separate forms of energy.
>
>>> To speak of transduction of
>>> thought is to appeal to muddled metaphors.
>>
>> All metaphors have limitations. It seems to me that those who attack
>> weaknesses in them generally do so in the absence of being able to
>> attack the underlying ideas that the metaphors are used to explain.
>
>If the listener does not understand the underlying ideas (which, I
>grant, I do not), then the metaphor failed in its intent.
>
>>> The exercise is more likely
>>> to hinder research in consciousness than to help it.
>>
>> In what way *hinder* research?
>
>Leading to dead ends.

Why are you worried about dead ends? It seems to me that dead ends are
part and parcel of research; I doubt if there was ever any significant
scientific discovery that wasn't preceded by a whole series of dead
ends.

[Martin Harran]

On Sat, 4 Sep 2021 09:14:35 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"

I read a book a few years ago, it may have been 'The Shallows: How the
Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember' by Nicolas
Carr but I don't have a copy to hand to check it. In the book, the
author bemoans the modern trend where the Internet puts us into a
particular bubble and focuses on providing us with ever more
information that is really only reinforcement of what we already know
or think. He compares this to the early days of the Internet and
search engines where users came upon all sorts of unexpected material.
He described it as something along the lines of olden days when
intrepid explorers wandered the world and gathered in inns to discuss
the wonders they had seen and the monsters they had wrestled. He
worried in particular about the loss of serendipity.

Okay, maybe a bit on the hyperbolic side but a lot of truth in it at
the same time. I think the same principle applies to science. Slow,
painstaking progress, building incrementally on what we already know,
is the backbone of science but science also needs a bit of blue sky
exploration, people who are not afraid to go where nobody has gone
before. It seems to me that alternative approaches to investigating
consciousness are something of a forbidden land in the eyes of many
scientists; I get the impression that that is fired primarily by an
intense fear of opening the door to dualism. In my mind, that is
philosophy being allowed to dictate to science what can and can't be
studied.

[broger...@gmail.com]

I think you have to be more specific about what alternative approaches neuroscientists are intensely fearful of. I generally don't think that scientists are afraid of dualism because dualism is hardly more of a thriving concern than YEC. And if you can suggest an approach to neuroscience based on dualism, you'll have to overcome the problem of how all those material scientific instruments can ever interact with non-material stuff and how the non-material stuff can ever interact with the brain.

So, I guess the short form of the question is "What experiment is it that you think neuroscientists are too terrified to try because it would open the door to dualism?"

[Zen Cycle]

On Saturday, September 4, 2021 at 3:10:07 AM UTC-4, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Sep 2021 11:52:11 -0700 (PDT), Zen Cycle
> <funkma...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> >After rereading the thread, then this message and Burkhards comments, I understand the disconnect. The point I was trying to make is the statement from the discovery institute page
> You said earlier that you didn't bother with the Mind Matters article
> because it's from the discovery institute which means by definition
> they're getting it wrong [a sentiment I agree with, which is why I
> went to the original article], but you did read the Discover article;
> now you say you were referring to the Mind Matters article. If you'll
> forgive the pun, I wish you'd make your mind up.

Try thinking for a change, Martin. I didn't read need to the Mind Matters article. The reference was posted in the OP.

Just to help you out since it seems as if _you_ haven't had your coffee, Glenn listed the following quote:

"A microphone, for example, is a transducer that converts sound waves to electrical current. Your eye is a transducer that converts light to vision"

My response to that was:

"the analogy fails in that a transducer is a device that converts one form of energy into another. Better analogies would be a how a microphone or imaging device turns light or sound into electrical energy. Eyes and ears convert light and sound into electrical impulses which are then processed by the brain, in the same way that a computer can be used to process the electrical signals from microphones or imaging devices. This excludes the brain from the 'transducer' category. "

I read the Discover article and found that Epstein made no such analogies. Epstein referred to a microphone as _part_ of the entire process of how his voice makes it to someone's radio, and very specifically notes the correct usage of transduction, even with his statement:

" Our sense organs — eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin —transduce distinctive properties of electromagnetic radiation, air pressure waves, airborne chemicals, liquid-borne chemicals, textures, pressure, and temperature into distinctive patterns of electrical and chemical activity in the brain."

He then goes on the parse it further, epstein writes:

"If you never teach that scientist about transduction, he or she might never unravel the mysteries of that phone."

Because transduction is _part_ of the process, not _the_ process. So the mind matters article quote of "Your eye is a transducer that converts light to vision" is a bad analogy based on the basic definition of a transducer. It's another example of how the discovery institute gets things wrong.

> > I did miss your comment "It has nothing to offer in as to how electrical impulses from our sensory organs are turned into impressions, emotions,
> > and reactions". I blame typing before my coffee has cooled enough to drink.
>
> I take that as a begrudging admission that you were wrong in the
> attack you made on me.

First off, your first response to me was to accuse me of pedantry*. My response of 'stick to theology' was because your very clearly don't see the bad analogy in the mind matters article. Secondly, it was an admission that I inadvertently missed a comment you made since you accused me of deliberately ignoring it. If you recall, I also wrote that I disagree with it.

> It would have been nicer if you had taken me
> out of the bucket you put me into with Glenn but apparently that would
> be too much to hope for.

If it makes you feel any better, I don't put you in, or any where near the bucket with Glenn. With very few exceptions, most of the posters in this forum have agreed with one or more positions held by others that they usually disagree with. Peter, Freon Bob, and Glenn have all made statements I agree with. That doesn't put me in the same bucket as them.

> >
> >There are thousands of research projects into characterizing emotion and consciousness without reaching into metaphysics. Christof Koch and
> >Francis Crick (yes, _that_ Crick) worked 30 years ago in the field of neural correlates of consciousness
> >(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness). While Chalmers may opine that
> >such research can't answer his 'hard problem', for you to claim "science has produced nothing of value here" even
> > within the more narrowed context is at best hyperbolic.
>
> Yet you cannot give a single example of how any of that research
> explains qualia.

And this is why I said you should stick to theology. Here's an analogy that might help: Spooky Entanglement had been theorized for decades. For most of that time, quantum physicists weren't even sure how it could be tested. Electron Spin turned out to be the key. When Electron spin was discovered, it wasn't done in the context of Spooky Entanglement. It was an "aha" moment that some researchers had when they observed spin correlations at a distance.

This brings us to Neural Correlates of Consciousness. Since you're making it more obvious that your mother used to do your homework for you, here's just one research paper (that conveniently references Crick and Koch):

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18701321/
from the abstract:
"Neuroimaging confirms major activations in regions of the basal brain during primordial emotions in humans. The behaviour of decorticate humans and animals is discussed in relation to the possible existence of primitive awareness."......"There is contemporaneous rapid disappearance of particular regions of brain activation which suggests they may be part of the jointly sufficient and severally necessary activations and deactivations which correlate with consciousness "

Hmmmm, research into the physics of the brain in the context of explaining awareness and consciousness? Ya think that just _might_ have applications in helping to understand how humans interpret their environment? .....nah.

That's just one of the thousands of research papers and books written by people approaching the idea from hard science. Koch has written or co-authored over 300 papers and books himself.

> > Bringing this back around to Epstein, the attempt to explain the transition of states of consciousness via Transduction is a
> > misappropriation of the term and concept. To your point "science has produced nothing of value here", even Epstein refers to specific
> > scientific research on the claustrum in his article.*
> >
> > Who knows, I could be wrong and the concept of transduction may turn out to be widely accepted in the field of consciousness,
> > but for me, Epsteins theory is still firmly panted in the realm of metaphysics, not hard science.
>
> Epstein recognises that science is currently making little or no real
> progress in regard to qualia

I think he's being dismissive. He make several dubious claims in that article, such as "the brain is not a storage device": He writes:

"piano virtuoso and conductor Daniel Barenboim memorized all thirty-two of Beethoven’s sonatas by the time he was 17, and he has since memorized hundreds of other major piano works, as well as dozens of entire symphony scores — tens of millions of notes and symbols."

followed by:

"Do you think all this content is somehow stored in Barenboim’s ever-changing, ever-shrinking, ever-decaying brain? Sorry, but if you study his brain for a hundred years, you will never find a single note, a single musical score, a single instruction for how to move his fingers — not even a “representation” of any of those things. The brain is simply not a storage device. It is an extraordinary entity for sure, but not because it stores or processes information. "

To state someone has memorized a vast amount of information , then write that the brain is not a staorage device seems to me to be a pretty serious congitive disconnect. Then he goes on to write several paragraphs denigrating hard scientific research in paranormal activity.

Wait, So the brain doesn't store or process information - it 'transduces' from some other unknown medium, but these scientists doing research into telepathy are quacks. Sure.

> so he is suggesting going back to first
> principles to see if we can identify different paths that science
> might fruitfully research and find explanations. You tried to make out
> that I was rejecting work on this for theological reasons.

No, I suggested that someone with such a hard bent towards the supernatural (your belief in god) usually has a hard time with someone that says things like consciousness and humanity can be characterized by the scientific process. (the fact that epstein seems to be talking out both sides of his mouth at one not withstanding)

> The exact
> opposite applies - I thoroughly welcome the exploration of new ideas
> and approaches. You are the one who seems hung up on theology and
> afraid to open the door to any research that might in any way give
> even a hint of support for any form of dualism;

Not at all. My hang-up is with how epstein seems dismissive of the vast amount of hard science being done in the field of consciousness, then very vociferously denigrates hard science into para-normality, then suggest the brain does not store of process information but simply channels ('transduces') from the ether. Yet to you, this is not a hard turn into pure metaphysics.

> I regard that sort of
> attitude as far more harmful to scientific progress than either
> Creationism or ID.
> >

* From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pedantic:
"Pedantic is an insulting word used to describe someone who annoys others by correcting small errors, caring too much about minor details, or emphasizing their own expertise especially in some narrow or boring subject matter."
"A pedantic person may do lots of annoying things, such as point out minor errors, correct people who make small mistakes, and brag about their own knowledge and expertise."

[Zen Cycle]

On Sunday, September 5, 2021 at 6:10:07 AM UTC-4, broger...@gmail.com wrote:

> I think you have to be more specific about what alternative approaches neuroscientists are intensely fearful of.
> I generally don't think that scientists are afraid of dualism because dualism is hardly more of a thriving concern
> than YEC. And if you can suggest an approach to neuroscience based on dualism, you'll have to overcome the
> problem of how all those material scientific instruments can ever interact with non-material stuff and how the
> non-material stuff can ever interact with the brain.
>
> So, I guess the short form of the question is "What experiment is it that you think neuroscientists are too terrified to try because it would open the door to dualism?"

Epstein isn't a neuroscientist but he seems pretty terrified about the field of Post-Material research. Curious, since he suggests in the article that Martin referenced in his initial response that:
"If modern brain scientists begin to look for evidence that the brain is a transducer, ......They might even be able to create devices that send signals to a parallel universe, or, of greater interest, that receive signals from that universe. "

Worse yet, Epstein writes an entire section in that article denigrating paranormal research, but then writes the following:

"And have you ever met a stranger who made you feel, almost immediately, that you had known him or her your entire life? And sometimes this stranger has the same feeling about you. It’s a strong feeling, almost overwhelming. We can try to explain such feelings with speculations about how a voice or physical characteristics might remind us of someone from our past, but there is another possibility — that in some sense you had actually known this person your whole life. If the brain is a bidirectional transducer, that is not a strange idea at all.

In fact, when viewed through the lens of transduction theory, none of these odd phenomena — dreams, hallucinations, lucidity that comes and goes, blind vision, and so on — looks mysterious. "

[Zen Cycle]

Yes, stupid. Some people don't like apples. Some people are allergic to apples. Qualia is by definition subjective experience. Feel free to stop making your idiocy more obvious any time now.

[Glenn]

Thanks for playing. So you agree we don't experience qualia.

[Mark Isaak]

On 9/5/21 1:27 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Sep 2021 10:13:20 -0700, Mark Isaak
> <eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:
>
>> On 9/4/21 12:12 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
>>> On Fri, 3 Sep 2021 10:17:07 -0700, Mark Isaak
>>> <eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:

>>>> [...]

>>>> Consciousness is not a form of energy.
>>>
>>> On what basis do you state that?
>>
>> Knowing what energy is.
>
> We may know what energy is, though I'm not sure that we understand it
> completely. We don't know what consciousness is so I don't see how we
> can say that it is or isn't energy.

We don't completely understand water either, but I think it is safe to
say that consciousness is not water.

"Energy is the quantitative property that must be transferred to a body
or physical system to perform work on the body, or to heat it." A lot
of the time that I'm conscious, I'm not getting any work done, nor am I
heating anything more than when I'm not conscious.

>>>> The exercise is more likely
>>>> to hinder research in consciousness than to help it.
>>>
>>> In what way *hinder* research?
>>
>> Leading to dead ends.
>
> Why are you worried about dead ends? It seems to me that dead ends are
> part and parcel of research; I doubt if there was ever any significant
> scientific discovery that wasn't preceded by a whole series of dead
> ends.

Indeed. No doubt more dead ends will be encountered in due course. But
that does not mean people should pursue courses that are more likely to
lead to them than other courses.

In another post, you referred to the transducer idea as something worth
trying out. (Please correct if this is not an accurate paraphrase.) I
have some sympathy with that; with hard problems, wild ideas *are* worth
considering. But if they are considered a little bit and don't lead
anywhere, they are probably not worth considering further. And I just
don't see the leads. The article I read threw out various concepts --
transduction, hallucinations, consciousness, etc. -- but didn't show how
one lead to another. I got the impression that the intent was to
suggest that mentioning two concepts in the same sentence was supposed
to be enough to link them causally. Perhaps there *is* something there,
but saying "there's something there" isn't enough; you need to show me.

[jillery]

There are very few things, if any, we understand completely. That
doesn't stop us from knowing many things about many things.

Even though we don't know "completely" what consciousness and energy
are, that doesn't stop us from knowing what they are not. Although
consciousness uses energy, as do all processes, it isn't energy by any
reasonable definition of the terms.

>>Energy is involved in consciousness, of course,
>>but energy is involved in practically everything. If you regard
>>consciousness as a form of energy, then you would also need to consider
>>a pinball game, a lunar eclipse, and the formation of a stalactite as
>>separate forms of energy.
>>
>>>> To speak of transduction of
>>>> thought is to appeal to muddled metaphors.
>>>
>>> All metaphors have limitations. It seems to me that those who attack
>>> weaknesses in them generally do so in the absence of being able to
>>> attack the underlying ideas that the metaphors are used to explain.
>>
>>If the listener does not understand the underlying ideas (which, I
>>grant, I do not), then the metaphor failed in its intent.
>>
>>>> The exercise is more likely
>>>> to hinder research in consciousness than to help it.
>>>
>>> In what way *hinder* research?
>>
>>Leading to dead ends.
>
>Why are you worried about dead ends? It seems to me that dead ends are
>part and parcel of research; I doubt if there was ever any significant
>scientific discovery that wasn't preceded by a whole series of dead
>ends.

[Glenn]

On Sunday, September 5, 2021 at 11:25:06 AM UTC-7, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 9/5/21 1:27 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
> > On Sat, 4 Sep 2021 10:13:20 -0700, Mark Isaak
> > <eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:
> >
> >> On 9/4/21 12:12 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
> >>> On Fri, 3 Sep 2021 10:17:07 -0700, Mark Isaak
> >>> <eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:
> >>>> [...]
> >>>> Consciousness is not a form of energy.
> >>>
> >>> On what basis do you state that?
> >>
> >> Knowing what energy is.
> >
> > We may know what energy is, though I'm not sure that we understand it
> > completely. We don't know what consciousness is so I don't see how we
> > can say that it is or isn't energy.

> We don't completely understand water either, but I think it is safe to
> say that consciousness is not water.

Water does not make decisions such as whether to hold up it's left hand to wave bye bye.
If you know what energy is, you know that act entails energy transfers.

But when it come right down to it, none of us knows what energy is, anymore than we really know what "matter" is.
A "force" is easier to understand and less likely to be regarded as an unknown like energy or matter.
Consciousness is a force. Unless you regard humans and all life as being nothing more than unconscious robots fooling ourselves into thinking we have free will to determine whether we wave bye bye to the friends leaving on the boat, you must consider that consciousness is a force that initiates energy transfers.

>
> "Energy is the quantitative property that must be transferred to a body
> or physical system to perform work on the body, or to heat it." A lot
> of the time that I'm conscious, I'm not getting any work done, nor am I
> heating anything more than when I'm not conscious.

Your claim assumes you know what consciousness is and when you are and are not "conscious".

[Zen Cycle]

As many before me have pointed out to you before, responses such as that are why people see you as an idiot.

[Glenn]

Thanks for playing, again. So you believe apples have qualia. Who am I to question that?

[Martin Harran]

On Sun, 5 Sep 2021 06:44:45 -0700 (PDT), Zen Cycle

I have never challenged any settled science here; on the contrary, I
have made it abundantly clear on numerous occasions that where
evidenced science contradicts or challenges religious belief, the
onus is on religion to accommodate that science. Your dismissal of me
as having “such a hard bent towards the supernatural” and accusation
of me having a hard time with the scientific process simply highlights
your own extreme prejudices towards anyone with religious belief; that
is reinforced by your persistence in trying to make theology part of
the discussion when theology is not mentioned in Epstein’s article and
no one else here has tried to associate his ideas with theology. I
have found that trying to have a rational discussion with someone do
deeply prejudiced is an utter waste of time so I will waste no more
time on it.

[Martin Harran]

On Sun, 5 Sep 2021 03:06:49 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"

[Martin Harran]

On Sun, 5 Sep 2021 03:06:49 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"

There has been an undoubted swing away from dualism in scientific
circle over the last half century or so, but I get the impression that
there is now an increasing disenchantment with materialism’s failure
to provide answers in the area of consciousness and an increasing
support for looking at new approaches. FWIW, I don’t think it is a
strictly ‘either or’ choice, my own feeling is that the answers lie
somewhere in the middle between dualism and materialism but even the
suggestion of a middle ground raises the hackles of those resolutely
opposed to any hint of dualism. Philip Goff has written quite a lot in
that area in relation to panpsychism and reaction to it - I thought
his ideas were well presented in his book ‘Galileo’s Error’ (though I
hated the title which came across to me as a form of literary
clickbait).

>And if you can suggest an approach to neuroscience based on dualism, you'll have to overcome the problem of how all those material scientific instruments can ever interact with non-material stuff and how the non-material stuff can ever interact with the brain.
>
>So, I guess the short form of the question is "What experiment is it that you think neuroscientists are too terrified to try because it would open the door to dualism?"

I am not a scientist nor am I involved in scientific research so it’s
hardly up to me to suggest what sort of experiments might take place.
Anyway, my point here is not about specific experiments, it is about
leaving the door open to new approaches. Take for example Suzanne
Simard who has been investigating whether trees can communicate with
each other and with other species in their vicinity.

https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/suzanne-simard-overcame-adversity-to-unlock-the-secret-world-of-trees/

https://bit.ly/3DNJsDH

I don’t know enough about the subject to judge whether her results
and conclusions are good, bad or indifferent but if they are open to
criticism, that should be based on scientific argument and reasoning,
not the blithe dismissal of it as “not science” accompanied by the
sort of vitriolic attacks she has endured. It seems to me that those
guilty of such dismissal and attacks are more concerned with
maintaining their own comfort zones than they are in potentially
opening up new areas of knowledge.

[Martin Harran]

On Sun, 5 Sep 2021 11:22:35 -0700, in talk.origins Mark Isaak

Yes, I agree with that but it applies to materialistic approaches as
well as non-materialistic ones. My issue here is not that
non-materialistic ideas are dismissed when shown to be unsuccessful,
it is that there are too many people who want to strangle them at
birth in favour of work that is clearly not producing results. (Again
for clarity, I am talking about the hard problem with qualia, not with
the neurological research into consciousness in general).

[Zen Cycle]

On Monday, September 6, 2021 at 10:40:07 AM UTC-4, martin...@gmail.com wrote:

> I have never challenged any settled science here; on the contrary, I
> have made it abundantly clear on numerous occasions that where
> evidenced science contradicts or challenges religious belief, the
> onus is on religion to accommodate that science. Your dismissal of me
> as having “such a hard bent towards the supernatural” and accusation
> of me having a hard time with the scientific process simply highlights
> your own extreme prejudices towards anyone with religious belief; that
> is reinforced by your persistence in trying to make theology part of
> the discussion when theology is not mentioned in Epstein’s article

You obviously didn't read the article, or you have a different definition of 'theology' than anyone else.

"Nearly all religions teach that immaterial realms exist that transcend the reality we know. For Christians and Muslims, those realms are Heaven and Hell."

"William James, a prominent Harvard philosopher and also arguably America’s first psychologist. In 1898, James published a short book entitled Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine, in which he praised his contemporaries for boldly using scientific methods to investigate "providential leadings [sic] in answer to prayer, instantaneous healings, premonitions, apparitions at time of death, clairvoyant visions or impressions, and the whole range of mediumistic capacities.""

"alternative medicine guru Deepak Chopra says that ancient Hindu texts teach that the material world we know is nothing but a projection from the universal consciousness that fills all space. From this perspective, death is not an end; it is a merging of a relatively pathetic human consciousness with that of the dazzling universal one. "

"we might also begin to unravel some of the greatest mysteries in the universe: where our universe came from, what else and who else is out there — even whether there is, in some sense, a God."

[Glenn]

On Monday, September 6, 2021 at 9:25:07 AM UTC-7, funkma...@hotmail.com wrote:
> On Monday, September 6, 2021 at 10:40:07 AM UTC-4, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > I have never challenged any settled science here; on the contrary, I
> > have made it abundantly clear on numerous occasions that where
> > evidenced science contradicts or challenges religious belief, the
> > onus is on religion to accommodate that science. Your dismissal of me
> > as having “such a hard bent towards the supernatural” and accusation
> > of me having a hard time with the scientific process simply highlights
> > your own extreme prejudices towards anyone with religious belief; that
> > is reinforced by your persistence in trying to make theology part of
> > the discussion when theology is not mentioned in Epstein’s article
> You obviously didn't read the article, or you have a different definition of 'theology' than anyone else.

Or you are using your own definition of theology for your own purposes. You've ignored Martin's accusation against you, and cut his paragraph in half.

>
> "Nearly all religions teach that immaterial realms exist that transcend the reality we know. For Christians and Muslims, those realms are Heaven and Hell."
>
> "William James, a prominent Harvard philosopher and also arguably America’s first psychologist. In 1898, James published a short book entitled Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine, in which he praised his contemporaries for boldly using scientific methods to investigate "providential leadings [sic] in answer to prayer, instantaneous healings, premonitions, apparitions at time of death, clairvoyant visions or impressions, and the whole range of mediumistic capacities.""
>
> "alternative medicine guru Deepak Chopra says that ancient Hindu texts teach that the material world we know is nothing but a projection from the universal consciousness that fills all space. From this perspective, death is not an end; it is a merging of a relatively pathetic human consciousness with that of the dazzling universal one. "
>
> "we might also begin to unravel some of the greatest mysteries in the universe: where our universe came from, what else and who else is out there — even whether there is, in some sense, a God."
> and
> > no one else here has tried to associate his ideas with theology. I
> > have found that trying to have a rational discussion with someone do
> > deeply prejudiced is an utter waste of time so I will waste no more
> > time on it.

You've succeeded in verifying Martin's accusations against you.

[broger...@gmail.com]

I would say that it's better not to try to diagnose the motives of the people who disagree with you. You probably don't like it when it's done to you, and in any case, one can always imagine ignoble motives for any position that anyone holds. Better to stick to the (in this case) scientific details. If you can't be specific about the sort of experiment you think neuroscientists are terrified of because it might open the door to dualism, then there's nothing specific to discuss.

[Glenn]

Wow, what a pronouncement. You must feel the gravity of the situation. Apparently you are not about leaving the door open to new approaches.

[Martin Harran]

On Mon, 6 Sep 2021 11:36:25 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"

I suspect that if I said something along those lines in other
contexts, I would very quickly be accused of victim blaming.

[broger...@gmail.com]

I don't see how that statement would constitute victim blaming. And as long as the focus stays on arguments rather than on the hypothetical arguments the other guy might have for making them, it won't even come up.

I'm afraid that I still don't see anything more detailed than "Those folks are afraid of dualism and it's limiting the experiments they do." It would make things clearer if you could give an example of the sort of doable experiment that might support a dualist view of consciousness and showed that people had been shying away from doing it. Otherwise, you end up with a position like that of one occasional creationist here who keeps saying that science is straight-jacketed by methodological naturalism, but never actually proposes an experiment about anything at all that doesn't use methodological naturalism. The general principle that one should be open to new approaches is fine, and lots of scientists make their names by coming up with new approaches; but they are always more specific than "We need a new approach."

[Mark Isaak]

First, how do you know that the materialist work on consciousness is not
producing results? How many of the relevant peer-reviewed journals do
you read? I know from reading popular literature that the work has
progressed at least until 2005. Do you think it has stopped since then?

Second, what non-materialistic approaches? How do you strangle
something that isn't there?

[Glenn]

How do you swat gravity?
I suppose I shouldn't bother with someone who thinks that they "know" things by reading popular literature.

[Martin Harran]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 04:27:52 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"

“I would say that it's better not to try to diagnose the motives of

the people who disagree with you. You probably don't like it when it's
done to you, and in any case, one can always imagine ignoble motives

for any position that anyone holds. And as long as the focus stays on

arguments rather than on the hypothetical arguments the other guy

might have for making them, it won't even come up.”

That seemed to imply that the attacks on Simard were possibly
justified and she more or less imagined the vitriol behind them.

[Martin Harran]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2021 09:26:23 -0700, Mark Isaak

! would have expected any significant breakthroughs to generate some
publicity.

>How many of the relevant peer-reviewed journals do
>you read? I know from reading popular literature that the work has
>progressed at least until 2005. Do you think it has stopped since then?

Yet you cannot give a single example of anything that takes us nearer
an understanding of qualia.

[broger...@gmail.com]

I'd say that any work done on sensory processing pathways takes us nearer to an understanding of qualia, unless one defines qualia in such a way that they are, by definition, not scientifically investigable.

[broger...@gmail.com]

As I said "as long as the focus stays on the arguments rather than on the hypothetical motives the other guy might have for making them, it won't even come up."

[Martin Harran]

Examples continue to be notable by their absence.

[Burkhard]

You could simply take any study on sensory processing is Bill's point,
and there are hundreds every year.

Here a book I'm just reading:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128124925/multisensory-perception

or this
https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/3/2/31
or this
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0178097




What they have in common is that they don't talk explicitly about qualia
explicitly, because they do think of it just like "life", a comparison
Bill made before. Rather than trying to give the "essence" of the
predicate "being alive", it simply tries to find more and more
statements that are true of things that are alive and not of others
(rejection of vitalism) Similarly, research into colour perception,
sound perception etc etc is tremendously successful, and thus needs not
talk about qualia at all.

There are others who think that the term has explanatory value, and that
this value is scientifically accessible, examples would include

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2019/00000026/f0020009/art00002

or

https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2019/00000026/f0020005/art00004

From a philosophical perspective, I think the first approach is very
much the approach Lewis took in his classical paper, Should a
materialist believe in qualia? Australasian Journal of Philosophy,
73(1), 140–144. These are all "theory centric" views of qualia, as
opposed to "property centric: views such as Levine, (Materialism and
qualia: The explanatory gap. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64,
354–361) who would argue that science has little to say on them, but
not because of a clash between materialism and non-materialism, but
causal-theoretical vs non-causal accounts

[Zen Cycle]

On Wednesday, September 8, 2021 at 10:20:08 AM UTC-4, Burkhard wrote:
> Martin Harran wrote:
> > On Wed, 8 Sep 2021 03:28:01 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"
> > <broger...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>>>
> >>>> First, how do you know that the materialist work on consciousness is not
> >>>> producing results?
> >>> ! would have expected any significant breakthroughs to generate some
> >>> publicity.
> >>>> How many of the relevant peer-reviewed journals do
> >>>> you read? I know from reading popular literature that the work has
> >>>> progressed at least until 2005. Do you think it has stopped since then?
> >>> Yet you cannot give a single example of anything that takes us nearer
> >>> an understanding of qualia.
> >>
> >> I'd say that any work done on sensory processing pathways takes us nearer to an understanding of qualia
> >
> > Examples continue to be notable by their absence.
> You could simply take any study on sensory processing is Bill's point,
> and there are hundreds every year.
>
> Here a book I'm just reading:
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128124925/multisensory-perception
>
> or this
> https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/3/2/31
> or this
> https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0178097
>

And there is the entire field of Neural Correlates of Consciousness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness) the was already presented to Martin, yet he chose to completely ignore.

And how's this for research into what constitutes qualia? Hundreds of studies assessing the metrics associated with beauty. Here's one, with other references noted in the side panes.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4013689/
"Cross-cultural variation in men's preference for sexual dimorphism in women's faces" Marcinkowska et al

[Glenn]

"Galileo's error in removing qualities, sensations and awareness from the world, leaving
only a universe of quantities and of quantifiable relationships, led to an equally
profound error about the nature of time."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/19364/1/Physics-Time%20and%20Qualia%20-%20Smolin-Verde-7-24-2021-FINAL.pdf

[Mark Isaak]

I have mentioned popular books on the subject in the past. Does that
not qualify as publicity?

>> How many of the relevant peer-reviewed journals do
>> you read? I know from reading popular literature that the work has
>> progressed at least until 2005. Do you think it has stopped since then?
>
> Yet you cannot give a single example of anything that takes us nearer
> an understanding of qualia.

I don't read neurology journals, either.

How about the fact that out-of-body experiences can be reliably induced
in normal people with a little video technology properly applied. Does
that have implications for consciousness?

[broger...@gmail.com]

It is trivially easy to find examples of recent research on sensory processing. Perhaps you insist that they have the word qualia somewhere in the title or text - which would be sort of equivalent to saying that biology papers are only about life if they include the phrase "elan vital."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8226161/

And you still haven't given an example of the sorts of experiments that neuroscientists are afraid to perform because they are terrified of opening a door to dualism.

[Martin Harran]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2021 08:38:49 -0700, Mark Isaak

Yeah, the last time we had this discussion, you particularly
recommended Susan Blackmore's book, "Consciousness: A Very Short
Introduction". That didn稚 work out too well for you when I quoted the
author痴 own words from the book:

"No one has yet succeeded in bridging the fathomless abyss, the great
chasm, or the explanatory gap between inner and outer, mind and brain,
or subjective and objective."

>
>>> How many of the relevant peer-reviewed journals do
>>> you read? I know from reading popular literature that the work has
>>> progressed at least until 2005. Do you think it has stopped since then?
>>
>> Yet you cannot give a single example of anything that takes us nearer
>> an understanding of qualia.
>
>I don't read neurology journals, either.

You and I both have an interest in consciousness and I get the
impression that other regulars here share that interest to various
degrees. I would have thought that if there had been any significant
breakthroughs that some of us would have heard of them; your holding
onto the idea that there might be something out there we have missed
comes across as a reluctance to accept something that doesn稚 fit in
with what you want to believe is true.

>
>How about the fact that out-of-body experiences can be reliably induced
>in normal people with a little video technology properly applied. Does
>that have implications for consciousness?

The New Scientist account of that work says 滴is [Ehrsson痴]
conclusion is that our perception of self within the body is tightly
bound to how our brains process information from our senses.納1] Even
if that is true (the researchers seem to acknowledge some shortcomings
in their work), I don稚 see how it contributes to resolving Chamber痴
hard problem. We already know that neural process are the mechanism by
which qualia are created but that doesn稚 seem to help us to
understand what qualia really are. Again recognising that analogies
have limitations, I see a similarity with computers here. An
electronics engineer who has never seen a computer before will likely
be able to figure out all the electronic parts and the movement of
data between them. That will not give him any understanding of the
Operating System that runs on the computer or the word processing
programme that runs on top of the OS, let alone where the ideas come
from that I use that word processor to communicate to others.

[1]
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12531-out-of-body-experiences-are-all-in-the-mind/#ixzz75xpE5V00

[Martin Harran]

On Wed, 8 Sep 2021 09:06:03 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"

No, I’m not saying anything as stupid as that, please give me a bit of
credit

>- which would be sort of equivalent to saying that biology papers are only about life if they include the phrase "elan vital."
>
>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8226161/

That’s a good example of what I mean. It seems a good piece of work in
increasing our understanding of the role that colour plays in sensory
perception but I don’t see how it contributes to a better
understanding of qualia; one of the classic examples given for the
hard problem is how do you explain red to a person who has never
experienced red. How does that research contributes to answering that
question?

>
>And you still haven't given an example of the sorts of experiments that neuroscientists are afraid to perform because they are terrified of opening a door to dualism.

I’m not sure why you are stuck on that point - I’ve already said that
I’m not qualified to design such experiments and that my arguments are
based not on specific ideas but on general opposition within the
scientific community to non-materialistic suggestions that discourages
even tentative exploration of alternative approaches.

[Martin Harran]

To clarify, I am not dismissing the value of work being done on
consciousness like the examples you and Bill Rogers have given.
Without wanting to belabour an analogy, the electronics engineer in
the above example plays a vialt role and without him or her, I
wouldn’t have a word processor to communicate my ideas. My core
argument is that work done on consciousness so far has provided
understanding of a very limited area of consciousness and there is no
indication that it will take us beyond those limitations. That is why
I find interesting articles like the one by Michael Egnor being
discussed here; I don’t know whether his ideas will stand up to
scrutiny or succeed in what seems to be his objective – encouraging
other to figure out ways of testing this – but I do believe that ideas
like this are necessary and should not just be dismissed out of hand
as some people here seem to be doing.

[broger...@gmail.com]

Qualia are clearly the result of sensory processing. Seems to me that better understanding how sensory processing works contributes to a better understanding of qualia, in the same way that understanding how intermediary metabolism works contributes to a better understanding of life.

>one of the classic examples given for the
> hard problem is how do you explain red to a person who has never
> experienced red. How does that research contributes to answering that
> question?

How do you explain ultraviolet vision to a human who does not have visual receptors for ultraviolet wavelengths? You explain how it works. You give examples of plants that look monochromatic in the visible spectrum but show patterns in the UV range that pollinators can see. You show them false color images that show those patterns in visible wavelengths. Etc.

> >
> >And you still haven't given an example of the sorts of experiments that neuroscientists are afraid to perform because they are terrified of opening a door to dualism.
> I’m not sure why you are stuck on that point - I’ve already said that
> I’m not qualified to design such experiments and that my arguments are
> based not on specific ideas but on general opposition within the
> scientific community to non-materialistic suggestions that discourages
> even tentative exploration of alternative approaches.

That's really too generic. How can you claim that science is discouraging even tentative exploration of alternative approaches if you have no specifics whatsoever about what the experiments done under the alternative approaches would be like in the first place? Or that the generic "non-materialistic approach" leads to any doable experiments at all? If you are not qualified to think of such experiments, that's fine; but then you are also not qualified to claim that scientists are avoiding your non-materialistic alternative. Scientists make their name by thinking up alternative approaches to unsolved problems, but they do so by coming up with something more significant than "we should try an alternative approach."

You used the phrase in another post "what qualia really are." That, I think is the issue. In my view it is similar to asking what life *really* is. It's a misguided question. There is nothing to "what life really is" beyond the details of what living things do and how they do it. Likewise, I think there is nothing to "what consciousness really is" or "what qualia really are," beyond the details of what conscious things do and how they do it (e.g. how their sensory processing works). The difference between life and consciousness is that we have a more detailed understanding of how livings things do the things that make us call them "living" than we do of how conscious things do the things that make us call them "conscious". But that's not a qualitative difference between the two questions; it's just the result of biochemistry and cell biology being easier to do relevant experiments in than neurobiology.

[Burkhard]

one to watch for the future for a purely naturalistic approach that
combines both issues is Mel Andrews, I liked Mel's paper on the free
energy principle and look very much forward to the PhD once it is
completed (full disclosure I gave a guest lecture on their course on
ethics in medical AI, and felt rather flattered :o))

https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/andrewm7

[Mark Isaak]

One problem I have with your argument is that you don't accept progress
as progress until *everything* is explained. But you don't need
breakthroughs for a field to advance.

Second, I agree with broger's analogy of consciousness with life. We
don't throw up our hands in despair because we don't understand what
life "really is." Rather, we know a lot of the details of how it works
and how many of those details fit together. And it takes a 1000-page
textbook to *summarize* those details. Expect a similar level of detail
with respect to consciousness. No "breakthrough" would come close to
fitting in a press release.

Then there is the problem of definition. As I have said before,
consciousness is not one thing. There is the qualia aspect, which
research on sensory perception is elucidating. There is sense of self,
which out-of-body research addresses. Other research is being done on
memory, mental models of mind, and probably other relevant areas that I
have not considered.

Finally, you keep referring to "general opposition within the

scientific community to non-materialistic suggestions that discourages

even tentative exploration of alternative approaches." And yet I have
not seen the slightest indication, from you or anywhere, that any such
opposition exists, or that any alternative approaches are known and not
being explored.

Indeed, my impression is that the opposition goes the other way. I
think most people do not want an explanation of consciousness, unless
that explanation is some form of Cartesian dualism. They want the "I"
that they see themselves as being not to be made up of reducible parts.
I expect scientists studying consciousness are aware of this attitude
and slant (or omit entirely) their public reports accordingly.

[broger...@gmail.com]

..................................

> Finally, you keep referring to "general opposition within the
> scientific community to non-materialistic suggestions that discourages
> even tentative exploration of alternative approaches." And yet I have
> not seen the slightest indication, from you or anywhere, that any such
> opposition exists, or that any alternative approaches are known and not
> being explored.

Indeed, there may be too much dualism in current approaches rather than not enough. Certainly most scientists are not dualists, but a kind of folk dualism is extremely common in the way most people think about their own consciousness, and it may infect the thinking even of neuroscientists who would explicitly reject dualism. It seems fairly common to think of sensory processing to deliver some input to some key center in the brain where it is integrated and used to make decisions about behavior, as though there were an immaterial, little man sitting in a control room somewhere in the brain (maybe in the pituitary, just ask Descartes) for whom all the data is displayed. Nobody doing research in the field would do anything but laugh at such a model if it were framed in that way, but it does perhaps underlie experiments designed to look for where exactly consciousness is happening in the brain. It might be better to think that there's no need for a locus of integration; different sensory systems may influence behavior independently with the integration following automatically from the fact that the light waves and sound waves are both coming from, say, an attacking tiger, and that behavior is integrated automatically because it's done by a single body. Integration need not be something performed in a small, specific spot in the brain. It may be a mistake to think that consciousness is a definite sort of thing you can look for at all, rather than just being a suite of loosely associated behaviors that some living things perform. I expect it's pretty hard to eradicate all traces of "folk dualism" from your mind, but that doing so will be more helpful in understanding consciousness than an attempt to dream up experiments based on an explicitly dualist view.

[Martin Harran]

[snip for focus – I will respond to your other points later]


Although I’m responding to Mark’s post, this is intended as a
composite response to Mark, Bill Rogers and Burkhard who have all
claimed that looking for an explanation of “consciousness” is akin to
looking for an explanation of “life”.

I don’t think that comparison stands up.

First of all, whilst we do not have a precise/ /definition of life, we
all recognise life. Every day, doctors around the world turn off life
support machines because they no longer consider the person to be
alive which is just about as final a decision as you can make; there
are, of course, objections to their decisions but those are generally
made by distraught relatives or others acting on emotive grounds, not
scientists or medics.

Compare that to consciousness. I had a particularly vivid dream last
night, where I interacted with real life people in real life places
and made various decisions; was I conscious during that dream? Or what
about a journey I made by car the other day where, when I got to my
destination, I had no recollection of the places I passed, the traffic
lights and junctions I negotiated; I obviously did the journey on
‘autopilot’ – was I conscious during that?

Despite some of the fuzziness about what being alive means, there is
also a general acceptance of what qualifies as being alive; as I
mentioned before, the only ‘edge’ case I am aware of is viruses, there
seems to be quite a lot of disagreement about whether they qualify as
lifeforms. It’s very different with regard to consciousness; many
(most?) scientists would confine it to animals with a brain but some
are now starting to consider plants as having a form of consciousness.
Panpsychists like Philip Goff believe that consciousness is not just
tied to life, that it exists independently, not in a dualist sense but
as something built up from small building blocks in the same way that
life is built up from atoms; that seems to be potentially supported by
a growing interest in the possible relationship between consciousness
and quantum physics.

We also know a heck of a lot about life and how it works. We know that
every living thing has come from a previous living thing and can all
be traced back to a single, simple lifeform; we don’t yet know for
certain exactly how the that first lifeform came into existence but we
know enough to be highly confident that it came about as a result of
chemical action; we also have a general idea of when various aspects
of life came into being, when land animals first appeared, how flight
and bipedalism started and so on and, for millions of species, we can
trace their biological evolution in detail. So where and when did
consciousness enter the story; what has been its evolutionary path?

We know that every gene in our body comes from either our mother or
our father and which genes govern which parts of our physical
structure; what are the equivalent underlying elements of
consciousness? To the best of my knowledge, there has been no
identification of DNA contributing to consciousness so where does it
come from, is it in some way the outcome of inheritance like our
physical features and many of our mannerisms are? We know about the
basic building blocks of life and how new life gets created; what are
the building blocks of consciousness, how does it get developed from
egg to adulthood?

Mark has accused me of arguing that because we don’t know everything,
we don’t know anything. That is simply not the case. As outlined
above, I realise that we don’t know everything about life but we
certainly know *a lot* about it, enough, in my opinion, to understand
it well. As far as I can see, whilst current research has taught us a
lot about neurological processes and how sensory input works, it
hasn’t even got us off the starting block for dealing with what
Chambers labelled the ‘hard question’. What particularly bothers me is
not so much that we don’t have answers, it is more that we don’t even
seem to have any real idea what shape those answers might be.
Significant scientific progress don’t just happen out of the blue,
scientists generally have some idea of what they are looking for.
When Darwin identified Natural Selection, he was looking for something
that would explain the hierarchical structure of life that was already
well recognised. When Crick and Watson went searching for the
structure of DNA, they were already aware of genes and their role. I
get the impression that much of our current neurological research into
consciousness is based on little more than a conviction that it *must*
be neurological and if we keep digging, we will eventually find
*something*, even though we have no real idea of what that something
may be.

[broger...@gmail.com]

Indeed, there is not a consistent definition of consciousness. That, to me suggests that consciousness is not one thing, and that to treat it as one thing which needs to be explained or which comes with a "hard problem" is an error. Rather than one thing being consciousness, there are a lot of behaviors that are performed by things which we call conscious. The real questions are about figuring out how those behaviors work. Whether you want to call some particular one of those behaviors conscious or not (like driving on autopilot) the interesting thing is to figure out how it works, not to decide what you want to call it.

>
> Despite some of the fuzziness about what being alive means, there is
> also a general acceptance of what qualifies as being alive; as I
> mentioned before, the only ‘edge’ case I am aware of is viruses, there
> seems to be quite a lot of disagreement about whether they qualify as
> lifeforms. It’s very different with regard to consciousness; many
> (most?) scientists would confine it to animals with a brain but some
> are now starting to consider plants as having a form of consciousness.

Again these are arguments about how you want to use the word "conscious." They are not arguments about what's happening or how it happens. Science can figure out what happens and the mechanisms by which it happens, but it can't tell you how you choose to use a word.

> Panpsychists like Philip Goff believe that consciousness is not just
> tied to life, that it exists independently, not in a dualist sense but
> as something built up from small building blocks in the same way that
> life is built up from atoms; that seems to be potentially supported by
> a growing interest in the possible relationship between consciousness
> and quantum physics.

And grouches like me would say that "consciousness" is not a thing anyway, but simply a word we use to describe a bunch of behaviors and that once you've figured out how those behaviors happen, you've figured out consciousness.

>
> We also know a heck of a lot about life and how it works. We know that
> every living thing has come from a previous living thing and can all
> be traced back to a single, simple lifeform; we don’t yet know for
> certain exactly how the that first lifeform came into existence but we
> know enough to be highly confident that it came about as a result of
> chemical action; we also have a general idea of when various aspects
> of life came into being, when land animals first appeared, how flight
> and bipedalism started and so on and, for millions of species, we can
> trace their biological evolution in detail. So where and when did
> consciousness enter the story; what has been its evolutionary path?

That depends on how you choose to use the word consciousness. Since it's not neatly defined, the question of how it evolved is not neatly defined either - there's not a clear question to ask, so there's not a clear answer. But if you ask about how some specific behavior evolved, how some sort of response to the environment or some social behavior that requires anticipating the intentions of others, then there's at least a shot of formulating a question that's answerable in principle.

>
> We know that every gene in our body comes from either our mother or
> our father and which genes govern which parts of our physical
> structure; what are the equivalent underlying elements of
> consciousness? To the best of my knowledge, there has been no
> identification of DNA contributing to consciousness so where does it
> come from, is it in some way the outcome of inheritance like our
> physical features and many of our mannerisms are? We know about the
> basic building blocks of life and how new life gets created; what are
> the building blocks of consciousness, how does it get developed from
> egg to adulthood?
>
> Mark has accused me of arguing that because we don’t know everything,
> we don’t know anything. That is simply not the case. As outlined
> above, I realise that we don’t know everything about life but we
> certainly know *a lot* about it, enough, in my opinion, to understand
> it well. As far as I can see, whilst current research has taught us a
> lot about neurological processes and how sensory input works, it
> hasn’t even got us off the starting block for dealing with what
> Chambers labelled the ‘hard question’.

The three of us you are responding to, as I understand it, reject the idea of the "hard question" itself.

>What particularly bothers me is
> not so much that we don’t have answers, it is more that we don’t even
> seem to have any real idea what shape those answers might be.
> Significant scientific progress don’t just happen out of the blue,
> scientists generally have some idea of what they are looking for.
> When Darwin identified Natural Selection, he was looking for something
> that would explain the hierarchical structure of life that was already
> well recognised. When Crick and Watson went searching for the
> structure of DNA, they were already aware of genes and their role. I
> get the impression that much of our current neurological research into
> consciousness is based on little more than a conviction that it *must*
> be neurological and if we keep digging, we will eventually find
> *something*, even though we have no real idea of what that something
> may be.

If you think there are non-neurological roots for the behaviors that make up consciousness, please go ahead and suggest what they might be, along with, maybe, some idea about how to test for those non-neurological roots.

I think there is this difference between the "hard question" of abiogenesis and the "hard question" of consciousness. The hard question of abiogenesis is hard because there are no traces left of what was going on 4 billion years ago, proto-biochemically, and less than great information even about what the chemical condition were. But it's a well formed question, and , in principle we could figure it out someday. The hard question of consciousness is hard because it's poorly formed and assumes (mostly on the basis of how we use the word conscious) that consciousness is a discrete thing, rather than a loosely connected set of behaviors.

[Mark Isaak]

You bring up two issues. One, how poorly defined "consciousness" is, is
a point I have made repeatedly myself. You mention dreams. Other
examples that are problematic to the concept of consciousness are the
drunk who acts like he is fully cognizant but does not remember anything
he did the next morning, the sleepwalker who performs complex acts with
no awareness later or at the time, the schizophrenic who hears voices in
his head which he does not recognize as coming from himself, and anyone
experiencing any of the many types of hallucinations. These and other
such examples show that consciousness is an amalgam of several different
things, including at least memory, perception, awareness, and sense of
self. I don't think this helps your case, because there are scientists
working on all of these parts, and we know a lot more about them now
than we did 30 years ago.

Your main issue, though, is that the analogy with life is invalid
because life, unlike consciousness is better defined. However, I think
that makes the analogy stronger. You yourself admit that there is
fuzziness to the definition of life, so at best the distinction with
consciousness would be one of degree and not of kind. And "life" is
fuzzy not just at the beginning- and end-of-life cases and with prions
and viruses, but also with cellular slime molds and colony organisms
such as Portuguese man-o-wars that throw the concept of individual lives
into confusion. Life and consciousness are alike in that the far
endpoints, which also happen to be the common cases, are clear, but
there are plenty of other cases in between those endpoints that are hard
to define.

> Mark has accused me of arguing that because we don’t know everything,
> we don’t know anything.

That's not what I said. I said you don't seem to accept anything as
progress until we know everything. Your "starting block" comment below
is one reason why I believe that.

> That is simply not the case. As outlined
> above, I realise that we don’t know everything about life but we
> certainly know *a lot* about it, enough, in my opinion, to understand
> it well. As far as I can see, whilst current research has taught us a
> lot about neurological processes and how sensory input works, it
> hasn’t even got us off the starting block for dealing with what
> Chambers labelled the ‘hard question’.

Just to add some perspective, the "starting block" for the question of
consciousness, I would say, was Rene Descartes' writings in 1641. We
have come a long, long way from the starting block.

I don't think Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness" is hard at all.
Experience is memory of self. Both memory and self are well studied
and becoming better studied all the time. Neurologists already know a
lot about how they work. (My impression, though, is that work on memory
is far more advanced than work on self.)

> What particularly bothers me is
> not so much that we don’t have answers, it is more that we don’t even
> seem to have any real idea what shape those answers might be.
> Significant scientific progress don’t just happen out of the blue,
> scientists generally have some idea of what they are looking for.

When philosophers were looking to understand what life is, they made no
progress until they stopped thinking of life as some vital element (a
label to use because they didn't have any idea what they were looking
for) and started looking at elements of life like metabolism and
reproduction.

You may have hit upon the main problem with study of consciousness.
People who cannot clearly define consciousness do not know what they are
looking for. But I submit those people are not, for the most part, the
neurologists studying consciousness.

> When Darwin identified Natural Selection, he was looking for something
> that would explain the hierarchical structure of life that was already
> well recognised. When Crick and Watson went searching for the
> structure of DNA, they were already aware of genes and their role. I
> get the impression that much of our current neurological research into
> consciousness is based on little more than a conviction that it *must*
> be neurological and if we keep digging, we will eventually find
> *something*, even though we have no real idea of what that something
> may be.

[Zen Cycle]

On Friday, September 10, 2021 at 12:10:09 PM UTC-4, Mark Isaak wrote:
> On 9/10/21 2:32 AM, Martin Harran wrote:

> > Mark has accused me of arguing that because we don’t know everything,
> > we don’t know anything.
> >
> That's not what I said. I said you don't seem to accept anything as
> progress until we know everything. Your "starting block" comment below
> is one reason why I believe that.

That's my impression of Martins position as well....'if it doesn't prove everything it proves nothing (of value to understanding qualia)'

>
> > That is simply not the case. As outlined
> > above, I realise that we don’t know everything about life but we
> > certainly know *a lot* about it, enough, in my opinion, to understand
> > it well. As far as I can see, whilst current research has taught us a
> > lot about neurological processes and how sensory input works, it
> > hasn’t even got us off the starting block for dealing with what
> > Chambers labelled the ‘hard question’.
> >
> Just to add some perspective, the "starting block" for the question of
> consciousness, I would say, was Rene Descartes' writings in 1641. We
> have come a long, long way from the starting block.

And to dismiss the vast amount of research into now the brain processes sensory perceptions simply because they don't theorize an understanding of qualia with "this research has gotten us nowhere" is both narrow-minded and short-sighted.

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 10 Sep 2021 03:15:43 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"
<broger...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Friday, September 10, 2021 at 5:35:09 AM UTC-4, martin...@gmail.com wrote:
>> On Thu, 9 Sep 2021 07:31:24 -0700, Mark Isaak
>> <eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:
>>
>> >On 9/9/21 4:36 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
>> >> To clarify, I am not dismissing the value of work being done on
>> >> consciousness like the examples you and Bill Rogers have given.
>> >> Without wanting to belabour an analogy, the electronics engineer in
>> >> the above example plays a vialt role and without him or her, I
>> >> wouldn't have a word processor to communicate my ideas. My core
>> >> argument is that work done on consciousness so far has provided
>> >> understanding of a very limited area of consciousness and there is no
>> >> indication that it will take us beyond those limitations. That is why
>> >> I find interesting articles like the one by Michael Egnor being
>> >> discussed here; I don't know whether his ideas will stand up to

>> >> scrutiny or succeed in what seems to be his objective - encouraging
>> >> other to figure out ways of testing this - but I do believe that ideas

>> >> like this are necessary and should not just be dismissed out of hand
>> >> as some people here seem to be doing.
>> >
>> >One problem I have with your argument is that you don't accept progress
>> >as progress until *everything* is explained. But you don't need
>> >breakthroughs for a field to advance.
>> >
>> >Second, I agree with broger's analogy of consciousness with life. We
>> >don't throw up our hands in despair because we don't understand what
>> >life "really is." Rather, we know a lot of the details of how it works
>> >and how many of those details fit together. And it takes a 1000-page
>> >textbook to *summarize* those details. Expect a similar level of detail
>> >with respect to consciousness. No "breakthrough" would come close to
>> >fitting in a press release.
>> >
>> >Then there is the problem of definition. As I have said before,
>> >consciousness is not one thing. There is the qualia aspect, which
>> >research on sensory perception is elucidating. There is sense of self,
>> >which out-of-body research addresses. Other research is being done on
>> >memory, mental models of mind, and probably other relevant areas that I
>> >have not considered.

>> [snip for focus - I will respond to your other points later]

>>
>>
>> Although I'm responding to Mark's post, this is intended as a
>> composite response to Mark, Bill Rogers and Burkhard who have all
>> claimed that looking for an explanation of "consciousness" is akin to
>> looking for an explanation of "life".
>>
>> I don't think that comparison stands up.
>>
>> First of all, whilst we do not have a precise/ /definition of life, we
>> all recognise life. Every day, doctors around the world turn off life
>> support machines because they no longer consider the person to be
>> alive which is just about as final a decision as you can make; there
>> are, of course, objections to their decisions but those are generally
>> made by distraught relatives or others acting on emotive grounds, not
>> scientists or medics.
>>
>> Compare that to consciousness. I had a particularly vivid dream last
>> night, where I interacted with real life people in real life places
>> and made various decisions; was I conscious during that dream? Or what
>> about a journey I made by car the other day where, when I got to my
>> destination, I had no recollection of the places I passed, the traffic
>> lights and junctions I negotiated; I obviously did the journey on

>> 'autopilot' - was I conscious during that?

Ok the. You made the point that 'life' is similarly poorly defined so
I identified a range different features of life, each of which that
can be scientifically explained - DNA, reproduction, evolution, cell
structure, life cycle, etc. Why don't you take some of these
behaviours that you think constitute consciousness and give and
equivalent scientific explanation for how they come about.

>>
>> We know that every gene in our body comes from either our mother or
>> our father and which genes govern which parts of our physical
>> structure; what are the equivalent underlying elements of
>> consciousness? To the best of my knowledge, there has been no
>> identification of DNA contributing to consciousness so where does it
>> come from, is it in some way the outcome of inheritance like our
>> physical features and many of our mannerisms are? We know about the
>> basic building blocks of life and how new life gets created; what are
>> the building blocks of consciousness, how does it get developed from
>> egg to adulthood?
>>
>> Mark has accused me of arguing that because we don't know everything,
>> we don't know anything. That is simply not the case. As outlined
>> above, I realise that we don't know everything about life but we
>> certainly know *a lot* about it, enough, in my opinion, to understand
>> it well. As far as I can see, whilst current research has taught us a
>> lot about neurological processes and how sensory input works, it
>> hasn't even got us off the starting block for dealing with what
>> Chambers labelled the 'hard question'.
>
>The three of us you are responding to, as I understand it, reject the idea of the "hard question" itself.

So what is your alternative for dealing with the issuesthat the hard
question refers to? I asked you in another post how you explain the
colour red to someone who has never seen red. You responded by talking
about wavelengths and visual receptors which are correct scientific
details but do not address the "hard question" that you claim does not
exist so let me put it another way - how do those visual receptors and
wavelengths create the sense of awe that many people experience when
they see a spectacular red sunset?

>
>>What particularly bothers me is
>> not so much that we don't have answers, it is more that we don't even
>> seem to have any real idea what shape those answers might be.
>> Significant scientific progress don't just happen out of the blue,
>> scientists generally have some idea of what they are looking for.
>> When Darwin identified Natural Selection, he was looking for something
>> that would explain the hierarchical structure of life that was already
>> well recognised. When Crick and Watson went searching for the
>> structure of DNA, they were already aware of genes and their role. I
>> get the impression that much of our current neurological research into
>> consciousness is based on little more than a conviction that it *must*
>> be neurological and if we keep digging, we will eventually find
>> *something*, even though we have no real idea of what that something
>> may be.
>
>If you think there are non-neurological roots for the behaviors that make up consciousness, please go ahead and suggest what they might be, along with, maybe, some idea about how to test for those non-neurological roots.
>
>I think there is this difference between the "hard question" of abiogenesis and the "hard question" of consciousness. The hard question of abiogenesis is hard because there are no traces left of what was going on 4 billion years ago, proto-biochemically, and less than great information even about what the chemical condition were. But it's a well formed question, and , in principle we could figure it out someday. The hard question of consciousness is hard because it's poorly formed and assumes (mostly on the basis of how we use the word conscious) that consciousness is a discrete thing, rather than a loosely connected set of behaviors.

Seems a bit odd that we have been able to figure out so much about
events that happened billions of years ago and left no trace but we
have been able to figure out so little about what is going on around
us right now.

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 10 Sep 2021 09:09:34 -0700, Mark Isaak

<eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:

>On 9/10/21 2:32 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
>> On Thu, 9 Sep 2021 07:31:24 -0700, Mark Isaak
>> <eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On 9/9/21 4:36 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
>>>> To clarify, I am not dismissing the value of work being done on
>>>> consciousness like the examples you and Bill Rogers have given.
>>>> Without wanting to belabour an analogy, the electronics engineer in
>>>> the above example plays a vialt role and without him or her, I
>>>> wouldn't have a word processor to communicate my ideas. My core
>>>> argument is that work done on consciousness so far has provided
>>>> understanding of a very limited area of consciousness and there is no
>>>> indication that it will take us beyond those limitations. That is why
>>>> I find interesting articles like the one by Michael Egnor being
>>>> discussed here; I don't know whether his ideas will stand up to

>>>> scrutiny or succeed in what seems to be his objective - encouraging
>>>> other to figure out ways of testing this - but I do believe that ideas

>>>> like this are necessary and should not just be dismissed out of hand
>>>> as some people here seem to be doing.
>>>
>>> One problem I have with your argument is that you don't accept progress
>>> as progress until *everything* is explained. But you don't need
>>> breakthroughs for a field to advance.
>>>
>>> Second, I agree with broger's analogy of consciousness with life. We
>>> don't throw up our hands in despair because we don't understand what
>>> life "really is." Rather, we know a lot of the details of how it works
>>> and how many of those details fit together. And it takes a 1000-page
>>> textbook to *summarize* those details. Expect a similar level of detail
>>> with respect to consciousness. No "breakthrough" would come close to
>>> fitting in a press release.
>>>
>>> Then there is the problem of definition. As I have said before,
>>> consciousness is not one thing. There is the qualia aspect, which
>>> research on sensory perception is elucidating. There is sense of self,
>>> which out-of-body research addresses. Other research is being done on
>>> memory, mental models of mind, and probably other relevant areas that I
>>> have not considered.
>>

>> [snip for focus - I will respond to your other points later]

>>
>>
>> Although I'm responding to Mark's post, this is intended as a
>> composite response to Mark, Bill Rogers and Burkhard who have all
>> claimed that looking for an explanation of "consciousness" is akin to
>> looking for an explanation of "life".
>>
>> I don't think that comparison stands up.
>>
>> First of all, whilst we do not have a precise/ /definition of life, we
>> all recognise life. Every day, doctors around the world turn off life
>> support machines because they no longer consider the person to be
>> alive which is just about as final a decision as you can make; there
>> are, of course, objections to their decisions but those are generally
>> made by distraught relatives or others acting on emotive grounds, not
>> scientists or medics.
>>
>> Compare that to consciousness. I had a particularly vivid dream last
>> night, where I interacted with real life people in real life places
>> and made various decisions; was I conscious during that dream? Or what
>> about a journey I made by car the other day where, when I got to my
>> destination, I had no recollection of the places I passed, the traffic
>> lights and junctions I negotiated; I obviously did the journey on

>> 'autopilot' - was I conscious during that?

The problems arising from poor definition are a direct result of our
lack of knowledge. We all seem to agree that 'life' is just as poorly
defined yet as I type this, I am drinking a coffee and keeping an eye
on a spider building an intricate web in the corner of my office
ceiling. Now, I can't give you a precise definition of life but I can
sure as heck tell you that the spider is alive but the mug out of
which I am drinking my coffee is not alive and I can give you good
scientific reasons for how I have arrived at those conclusions. Is the
spider conscious? I certainly don't know, can you tell me whether it
is or is not conscious? Again, please provide scientific grounds for
your conclusion.

And how does the spider *know* how to build that web? Is it something
it inherited from it's parents? If you reckon so, please explain the
mechanism by which it inherited that knowledge as, to the best of my
knowledge, nobody has been able to show a relationship between DNA and
things like memory in the way that we can relate other physiological
features to specific genes or groups of genes.

A difference that makes no difference - you are still completely wrong
as shown by my acceptance that although we haven't found all the
answers to what 'life' is, I do recognise the substantial progress we
have in our understanding and intricate knowledge how many key aspects
of it work.

>
>> That is simply not the case. As outlined
>> above, I realise that we don't know everything about life but we
>> certainly know *a lot* about it, enough, in my opinion, to understand
>> it well. As far as I can see, whilst current research has taught us a
>> lot about neurological processes and how sensory input works, it
>> hasn't even got us off the starting block for dealing with what
>> Chambers labelled the 'hard question'.
>
>Just to add some perspective, the "starting block" for the question of
>consciousness, I would say, was Rene Descartes' writings in 1641. We
>have come a long, long way from the starting block.

Can give any examples of what you mean by coming "a long way"?

>
>I don't think Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness" is hard at all.

So how do you explain the things we experience (please back it up with
some science)?

> Experience is memory of self. Both memory and self are well studied
>and becoming better studied all the time. Neurologists already know a
>lot about how they work. (My impression, though, is that work on memory
>is far more advanced than work on self.)

Your argument would carry more weight if you were able to offer
specific examples relating to memory and self rather than vague terms
like "well studied" and "becoming better studied".

>
>> What particularly bothers me is
>> not so much that we don't have answers, it is more that we don't even
>> seem to have any real idea what shape those answers might be.
>> Significant scientific progress don't just happen out of the blue,
>> scientists generally have some idea of what they are looking for.
>
>When philosophers were looking to understand what life is, they made no
>progress until they stopped thinking of life as some vital element (a
>label to use because they didn't have any idea what they were looking
>for) and started looking at elements of life like metabolism and
>reproduction.
>
>You may have hit upon the main problem with study of consciousness.
>People who cannot clearly define consciousness do not know what they are
>looking for. But I submit those people are not, for the most part, the
>neurologists studying consciousness.

Neurologists are studying neurological activity - that is perfectly
clear. The problem come when people - neurologists or otherwise - try
to claim that consciousness is purely a result of that neurological
activity with no explanation of how it happens, let alone scientific
evidence.

[broger...@gmail.com]

There's plenty of work on how perception works, right? That's a major component of consciousness; there's lots of work on how that works. Part of consciousness certainly is the sense that we are responsible for our own movements. There's a fair bit of work about what is required for us to have the sense that we are responsible for a particular sort of movement e.g epileptic fits, dosing Ouija boards, a bunch of psychology experiments that measure the time delay between initiating an action and seeing it happen that determine whether you think you voluntarily did the action. Speech and inner speech are also important aspects of consciousness and studies of individuals with strokes or other forms of brain damage give information about how those things work. Memory is also an important aspect - there's plenty of work on how memory works at the neuronal level, at least in simple organisms.

Remember - this is all experimentally much harder than biochemistry. You can just put an enzyme in a test tube and measure its efficiency, its dependence on divalent cation cofactors, etc. It's not so easy to work on a conscious brain. But that is not a reason to throw in the towel. Or to invent non-material something or other that magically explains it all.

Is there any reason to think it does not result from memory and associations of those wavelengths with past experiences and cultural training? A sense of awe is a particular cluster of emotions; why should they not be triggered by "visual receptors and wavelengths" feeding into a brain full of memories and associations encoded in neurons linked to emotional centers?

I do not know about you yourself, but for many people uncomfortable with materialism, there seems to lie an 19th or 18th century view of what matter is - little hard atoms moving about the void. And an idea that it somehow denigrates the most meaningful aspects of life, falling in love, hearing the St. Matthew Passion, being awed by your red sunset, to think that it's all just material. The other way to look at it, though, is to say that matter is great, that all sorts of meaningful, important, and moving things are among the things made up of purely material causes. I love my wife - it's not remotely in any way a diminution of that love to think that it is the result of biochemical and neurological processes in my brain. Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang is transcendently moving to me, even if its "merely" horse hairs scraped over cat gut.

> >
> >>What particularly bothers me is
> >> not so much that we don't have answers, it is more that we don't even
> >> seem to have any real idea what shape those answers might be.
> >> Significant scientific progress don't just happen out of the blue,
> >> scientists generally have some idea of what they are looking for.
> >> When Darwin identified Natural Selection, he was looking for something
> >> that would explain the hierarchical structure of life that was already
> >> well recognised. When Crick and Watson went searching for the
> >> structure of DNA, they were already aware of genes and their role. I
> >> get the impression that much of our current neurological research into
> >> consciousness is based on little more than a conviction that it *must*
> >> be neurological and if we keep digging, we will eventually find
> >> *something*, even though we have no real idea of what that something
> >> may be.
> >
> >If you think there are non-neurological roots for the behaviors that make up consciousness, please go ahead and suggest what they might be, along with, maybe, some idea about how to test for those non-neurological roots.
> >
> >I think there is this difference between the "hard question" of abiogenesis and the "hard question" of consciousness. The hard question of abiogenesis is hard because there are no traces left of what was going on 4 billion years ago, proto-biochemically, and less than great information even about what the chemical condition were. But it's a well formed question, and , in principle we could figure it out someday. The hard question of consciousness is hard because it's poorly formed and assumes (mostly on the basis of how we use the word conscious) that consciousness is a discrete thing, rather than a loosely connected set of behaviors.
> Seems a bit odd that we have been able to figure out so much about
> events that happened billions of years ago and left no trace but we
> have been able to figure out so little about what is going on around
> us right now.

Does it really? What we can figure out about abiogenesis is simply whether, in test tubes under the right conditions, specific reactions can occur, ie whether relatively short RNAs can act as catalysts for biochemical reactions, that sort of thing. Compared to pulling apart a brain and figuring out all the connections required for King Lear to inspire a tragic catharsis is obviously a far more difficult problem, experimentally. But there's nothing in the components of the system that violate physical laws and, more importantly, there's nothing to be gained from invoking non-material causes. Such causes can't be examined empirically. And neither you, nor as far as I can tell anybody else, has actually suggested an experiment based on dualistic assumptions that would help.

[Burkhard]

try
Fletcher, Liz. "Memories are made of this: the genetic basis of memory."
Molecular medicine today 3, no. 10 (1997): 429-434.

P.K. Panegyres, The contribution of the study of neurodegenerative
disorders to the understanding of human memory, QJM: An International
Journal of Medicine, Volume 97, Issue 9, September 2004, Pages 555–567

Napolitano, M., Marfia, G. A., Vacca, A., Centonze, D., Bellavia, D., Di
Marcotullio, L., ... & Calabresi, P. (1999). Modulation of gene
expression following long-term synaptic depression in the striatum.
Molecular brain research, 72(1), 89-96.

Day, Jeremy J., and J. David Sweatt. "DNA methylation and memory
formation." Nature neuroscience 13.11 (2010): 1319-1323.

and a whole lot of others

[Burkhard]

Martin Harran wrote:
> On Fri, 10 Sep 2021 09:09:34 -0700, Mark Isaak

><big snip>

>>
>> You may have hit upon the main problem with study of consciousness.
>> People who cannot clearly define consciousness do not know what they are
>> looking for. But I submit those people are not, for the most part, the
>> neurologists studying consciousness.
>
> Neurologists are studying neurological activity - that is perfectly
> clear. The problem come when people - neurologists or otherwise - try
> to claim that consciousness is purely a result of that neurological
> activity with no explanation of how it happens, let alone scientific
> evidence.

Please give a cite to scientific papers that made this claim

[Glenn]

On Sunday, September 5, 2021 at 7:25:07 AM UTC-7, funkma...@hotmail.com wrote:
> On Friday, September 3, 2021 at 6:35:07 PM UTC-4, Glenn wrote:
> > On Friday, September 3, 2021 at 10:30:06 AM UTC-7, Mark Isaak wrote:
> > > On 9/3/21 7:13 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
> > > > [...] You need to show actual
> > > > examples of how science has come up with an explanation for how we
> > > > experience qualia . . .
> > >
> > > In an important sense, we don't experience qualia. Rather, qualia
> > > create the experience of "we". The "we" is the endpoint; to put it into
> > > one's theories before it is fully explained is to assume one's conclusion.
> > > --
> > Why is your sense of qualia important? Do apples have different qualia for different people?
> Yes, stupid. Some people don't like apples. Some people are allergic to apples. Qualia is by definition subjective experience. Feel free to stop making your idiocy more obvious any time now.


So it is the apples that have qualia, and we don't experience qualia. Good to know.

[Glenn]

"Lucid dreams are when you know that you're dreaming while you're asleep"
https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/lucid-dreams-overview

That means you were conscious. You would not need to ask if you were conscious
had you experienced a lucid dream.
When you say "I interacted", you're describing consciousness.

>Or what
> about a journey I made by car the other day where, when I got to my
> destination, I had no recollection of the places I passed, the traffic
> lights and junctions I negotiated; I obviously did the journey on
> ‘autopilot’ – was I conscious during that?

You lack an available memory of the event. Doesn't mean you weren't conscious or that the memory
of the event does not exist.
The real question would be whether unconscious people can drive in traffic successfully. Which begs the question,
what is "on autopilot"? Human's autonomic nervous systems are not equipped for such behavior, nor is it capable of making arbitrary decisions that are required when driving to a "destination".

[Mark Isaak]

Note that there have been reputable philosophers who would have said
that even your coffee mug is conscious. I can't tell you whether the
spider is conscious until I have an operational definition. I, for one,
don't think it matters. What matters are the more detailed questions
you raise -- what is the mechanism of inherited behavior, how does
physiology relate to memory, and questions like that.

To borrow your own phrasing: Substantial progress in our understanding
and intricate knowledge how many key aspects of it (consciousness, in
this case) work. Memory and perception in particular, but certainly not
limited to those areas.

>>
>> I don't think Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness" is hard at all.
>
> So how do you explain the things we experience (please back it up with
> some science)?
>
>> Experience is memory of self. Both memory and self are well studied
>> and becoming better studied all the time. Neurologists already know a
>> lot about how they work. (My impression, though, is that work on memory
>> is far more advanced than work on self.)
>
> Your argument would carry more weight if you were able to offer
> specific examples relating to memory and self rather than vague terms
> like "well studied" and "becoming better studied".

I shall dip back into the literature. If you want answers sooner than a
couple months from now, you could do the same yourself.

>>
>>> What particularly bothers me is
>>> not so much that we don't have answers, it is more that we don't even
>>> seem to have any real idea what shape those answers might be.
>>> Significant scientific progress don't just happen out of the blue,
>>> scientists generally have some idea of what they are looking for.
>>
>> When philosophers were looking to understand what life is, they made no
>> progress until they stopped thinking of life as some vital element (a
>> label to use because they didn't have any idea what they were looking
>> for) and started looking at elements of life like metabolism and
>> reproduction.
>>
>> You may have hit upon the main problem with study of consciousness.
>> People who cannot clearly define consciousness do not know what they are
>> looking for. But I submit those people are not, for the most part, the
>> neurologists studying consciousness.
>
> Neurologists are studying neurological activity - that is perfectly
> clear. The problem come when people - neurologists or otherwise - try
> to claim that consciousness is purely a result of that neurological
> activity with no explanation of how it happens, let alone scientific
> evidence.

The reason people expect consciousness to have neurological correlates
is not "just because." It is in part because physical causes,
especially those which affect the brain, are seen to affect
consciousness in predictable ways, and in part because cartesian dualism
has led to nothing except arguments against cartesian dualism.

[Martin Harran]

On Sun, 12 Sep 2021 17:52:14 +0100, Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
wrote:

>Martin Harran wrote:
>> On Fri, 10 Sep 2021 09:09:34 -0700, Mark Isaak
>><big snip>
>
>>>
>>> You may have hit upon the main problem with study of consciousness.
>>> People who cannot clearly define consciousness do not know what they are
>>> looking for. But I submit those people are not, for the most part, the
>>> neurologists studying consciousness.
>>
>> Neurologists are studying neurological activity - that is perfectly
>> clear. The problem come when people - neurologists or otherwise - try
>> to claim that consciousness is purely a result of that neurological
>> activity with no explanation of how it happens, let alone scientific
>> evidence.
>
>Please give a cite to scientific papers that made this claim

I wasn't referring to specific scientific papers, I was talking about
an attitude that seems prevalent. Do you disagree that there is very
strong resistance to anything that in any way smacks of dualism?

[Martin Harran]

On Sun, 12 Sep 2021 17:47:05 +0100, Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
wrote:

Interesting article. They address the mechanics of memory, not the
underlying issue of how we experience what we do experience which we
have been discussing here but that is fair enough as a response to my
specific question of a relationship between DNA and things like
memory.

Hands up, there has been a lot more done on this than I was aware of
and, whilst a lot of the ideas are speculative, there is little doubt
that DNA methylation does play a key role in creating and storing
memories. There is one thing that is not clear to me, and this may
just reflect my lack of knowledge in the area. I understood epigenetic
changes in DNA to be mainly associated with traumatic or stressful
events. It seems to me that the first spiders learning to weave webs
would have gone through a slow, incremental process rather than a
sudden event. Do we have any evidence to show that a gradual process
like that can cause DNA methylation?

Another thing that I had been thinking about for a while is why the
focus on neurology and consciousness seems to be focused almost
entirely on the brain. We know that there are strong ties between
emotions and other parts of our body such as the heartbreak we feel
from grief, the butterflies we get in our stomach when we are nervous,
the clenching of our bowels(not always successful) when we are
frightened, and so on. The Day and Sweatt paper does refer to the CNS
rather than the brain and I wonder if we should perhaps be thinking
about consciousness as a whole-body experience rather than a brain
function. That could possibly tie in with the experiments on plant
communications carried out by Novoplansky and Simard where some of the
elements of consciousness seem to take place without a brain.

[Martin Harran]

On Sun, 12 Sep 2021 09:30:32 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"

I have no problem in admitting that I don't know either way whether it
results from memory and associations of those wavelengths with past
experiences and cultural training. It is people who are committed to
materialism who seem to have an issue with admitting their lack of
hard knowledge about it.

>
>I do not know about you yourself, but for many people uncomfortable with materialism, there seems to lie an 19th or 18th century view of what matter is - little hard atoms moving about the void. And an idea that it somehow denigrates the most meaningful aspects of life, falling in love, hearing the St. Matthew Passion, being awed by your red sunset, to think that it's all just material.

That comment is a good example of the patronising, if not downright
insulting, attitude common among materialists that annoys me - the
suggestion that people who are not convinced about materialism are
thinking with their hearts, not their minds. That is certainly not
true in my case and I doubt that it was true of some of our greatest
intellectuals such as Erwin Schrödinger or David Chalmers.

>The other way to look at it, though, is to say that matter is great, that all sorts of meaningful, important, and moving things are among the things made up of purely material causes. I love my wife - it's not remotely in any way a diminution of that love to think that it is the result of biochemical and neurological processes in my brain. Beethoven's Heiliger Dankgesang is transcendently moving to me, even if its "merely" horse hairs scraped over cat gut.
>> >
>> >>What particularly bothers me is
>> >> not so much that we don't have answers, it is more that we don't even
>> >> seem to have any real idea what shape those answers might be.
>> >> Significant scientific progress don't just happen out of the blue,
>> >> scientists generally have some idea of what they are looking for.
>> >> When Darwin identified Natural Selection, he was looking for something
>> >> that would explain the hierarchical structure of life that was already
>> >> well recognised. When Crick and Watson went searching for the
>> >> structure of DNA, they were already aware of genes and their role. I
>> >> get the impression that much of our current neurological research into
>> >> consciousness is based on little more than a conviction that it *must*
>> >> be neurological and if we keep digging, we will eventually find
>> >> *something*, even though we have no real idea of what that something
>> >> may be.
>> >
>> >If you think there are non-neurological roots for the behaviors that make up consciousness, please go ahead and suggest what they might be, along with, maybe, some idea about how to test for those non-neurological roots.
>> >
>> >I think there is this difference between the "hard question" of abiogenesis and the "hard question" of consciousness. The hard question of abiogenesis is hard because there are no traces left of what was going on 4 billion years ago, proto-biochemically, and less than great information even about what the chemical condition were. But it's a well formed question, and , in principle we could figure it out someday. The hard question of consciousness is hard because it's poorly formed and assumes (mostly on the basis of how we use the word conscious) that consciousness is a discrete thing, rather than a loosely connected set of behaviors.
>> Seems a bit odd that we have been able to figure out so much about
>> events that happened billions of years ago and left no trace but we
>> have been able to figure out so little about what is going on around
>> us right now.
>
>Does it really? What we can figure out about abiogenesis is simply whether, in test tubes under the right conditions, specific reactions can occur, ie whether relatively short RNAs can act as catalysts for biochemical reactions, that sort of thing. Compared to pulling apart a brain and figuring out all the connections required for King Lear to inspire a tragic catharsis is obviously a far more difficult problem, experimentally. But there's nothing in the components of the system that violate physical laws and, more importantly, there's nothing to be gained from invoking non-material causes. Such causes can't be examined empirically. And neither you, nor as far as I can tell anybody else, has actually suggested an experiment based on dualistic assumptions that would help.

It doesn't have to be based on dualistic assumptions. I have
previously referred to work on communications in plants by people like
Novoplansky and Simard - the thread "Consciousness in Plants" back in
Feb last year. That thread degenerated into a debate on what does and
does not qualify as consciousness. Whatever definition we use,
however, it is clear that plants do exhibit the ability to exchange
and react to information which is one of the key elements of
consciousness. As mentioned in another post to Burkhard, that could
suggest that we should be looking at consciousness as a whole-organism
matter rather than just brain driven.

I have also said that I find plausible some of the arguments by Philip
Goff that consciousness exists in its own right, not in the
traditional dualist sense used to support religious belief but as
separate natural particles that are built up into what we recognise as
consciousness in a way not unlike how atoms are built up into our
physical bodies. Although it is not a comparison that he himself
makes, I see a similarity with dark matter; when it was first
proposed, dark matter was a solution that was entirely hypothetical,
not based on any evidence. Once people started taking it seriously,
ways of researching it were found. I think the same could well happen
with alternative ideas to pure materialism.

[broger...@gmail.com]

And yet, weren't you the one who told us that scientists were holding back from doing experiments because they were "terrified of opening the door for dualism"? If it's fair for you to bring in the supposed emotional motivations of those who disagree with you, why is it not fair for them to do the same to those who hold your position?

Sure, I think it's fairly well accepted that the brain does not produce consciousness in isolation from the rest of the body. And there is plenty of research on how the brain interacts with the rest of the body - the immune system, the microbiome, even.

>
> I have also said that I find plausible some of the arguments by Philip
> Goff that consciousness exists in its own right, not in the
> traditional dualist sense used to support religious belief but as
> separate natural particles that are built up into what we recognise as
> consciousness in a way not unlike how atoms are built up into our
> physical bodies.

Why do you find that more plausible than the possibility that consciousness is built up by the interactions of neurons? In one case we have simple systems we understand reasonably well and complex organizations of them, the alteration or destruction of which alters or destroys consciousness. In the other, we have postulated, unobserved, atoms of consciousness about which nobody knows anything, and yet you're comfortable taking their hypothetical existence as an explanation?

>Although it is not a comparison that he himself
> makes, I see a similarity with dark matter; when it was first
> proposed, dark matter was a solution that was entirely hypothetical,
> not based on any evidence. Once people started taking it seriously,
> ways of researching it were found.

Not sure why you want to link dualism to religion. One could easily be an atheist dualist or a Christian materialist. (Indeed, Christianity, before it absorbed a lot of Greek philosophical ideas and a touch of Gnosticism seems to me to have been non-dualist).

>I think the same could well happen
> with alternative ideas to pure materialism.

How? How can something non-material influence something material like an experimental apparatus? If something can influence matter, then it is something material.

I trust you will demand as much detail from the idea that there might be "atoms of consciousness" as you do from current (materialistic) research on consciousness.

[Burkhard]

Martin Harran wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Sep 2021 17:52:14 +0100, Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>
> wrote:
>
>> Martin Harran wrote:
>>> On Fri, 10 Sep 2021 09:09:34 -0700, Mark Isaak
>>> <big snip>
>>
>>>>
>>>> You may have hit upon the main problem with study of consciousness.
>>>> People who cannot clearly define consciousness do not know what they are
>>>> looking for. But I submit those people are not, for the most part, the
>>>> neurologists studying consciousness.
>>>
>>> Neurologists are studying neurological activity - that is perfectly
>>> clear. The problem come when people - neurologists or otherwise - try
>>> to claim that consciousness is purely a result of that neurological
>>> activity with no explanation of how it happens, let alone scientific
>>> evidence.
>>
>> Please give a cite to scientific papers that made this claim
>
> I wasn't referring to specific scientific papers, I was talking about
> an attitude that seems prevalent.

"seems" is doing a LOT of work here I'd say

> Do you disagree that there is very
> strong resistance to anything that in any way smacks of dualism?

by neuroscientists? No. And you also didn't come up with a single
example of what they could do different from what they actually do, and
also meets your demand for a dualist theory.

[Glenn]

Give it a break. Atheists and materialists are threatened by dualism.

[Mark Isaak]

On 9/17/21 9:06 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
>
> Another thing that I had been thinking about for a while is why the
> focus on neurology and consciousness seems to be focused almost
> entirely on the brain. We know that there are strong ties between
> emotions and other parts of our body such as the heartbreak we feel
> from grief, the butterflies we get in our stomach when we are nervous,
> the clenching of our bowels(not always successful) when we are
> frightened, and so on. The Day and Sweatt paper does refer to the CNS
> rather than the brain and I wonder if we should perhaps be thinking
> about consciousness as a whole-body experience rather than a brain
> function. That could possibly tie in with the experiments on plant
> communications carried out by Novoplansky and Simard where some of the
> elements of consciousness seem to take place without a brain.

I am about half through a book which touches on some of these issues.
It is _Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of
Consciousness_ by Peter Godfrey-Smith. A lot of it is about the minds
of octopuses, which have most of their neurons in their arms, not their
brains, and Peter notes that humans, too, can make decisions with their
limbs that bypass consciousness. He also, briefly, addresses sentience
in plants.

His in an evolutionary approach, and he makes the point that an
explanation of consciousness needs to consider its gradual origin, a
little bit at a time. He shows that we, even at our best, have room to
be more conscious than we are, so by implication we are not at an
endpoint of consciousness either.

Another interesting bit of trivia I got from the book: The octopus's
esophagus passes through the middle of its brain.

[Glenn]

That makes him sound silly, and he may very well be. There is a difference between
our limited senses providing us with information (more conscious of) and consciousness.
To make a claim that we could be more conscious of self existence (consciousness) is extraordinary, and
beyond reason or logic.
From what I have read of this author, he is just another atheist materialist trying to tear down the concept of consciousness as non-physical and not a force. Likely (since you all like the word) you or he or both are just silly buggers. Most likely both of you are.

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2021 18:25:30 +0100, Burkhard <b.sc...@ed.ac.uk>

Where did I demand a dualist theory?

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2021 10:19:55 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"

I did not say that I find it more plausible. What I said was that
despite extensive research, we have not made any real progress in
getting from neurological interactions to what we regard as conscious
experience; we should therefore be open-minded to examining other
ideas. You asked for examples of other ideas, I gave Goff's ideas as
just one example.

>In one case we have simple systems we understand reasonably well and complex organizations of them, the alteration or destruction of which alters or destroys consciousness. In the other, we have postulated, unobserved, atoms of consciousness about which nobody knows anything, and yet you're comfortable taking their hypothetical existence as an explanation?
>
>
>
>>Although it is not a comparison that he himself
>> makes, I see a similarity with dark matter; when it was first
>> proposed, dark matter was a solution that was entirely hypothetical,
>> not based on any evidence. Once people started taking it seriously,
>> ways of researching it were found.
>
>Not sure why you want to link dualism to religion.

Some people do link dualism to religion; I'm simply clarifying that
Goff is not one of those people. I can't figure out how saying that I
find plausible the ideas of someone who doesn't make that link somehow
implies me *wanting* to make it.

> One could easily be an atheist dualist or a Christian materialist. (Indeed, Christianity, before it absorbed a lot of Greek philosophical ideas and a touch of Gnosticism seems to me to have been non-dualist).
>
>>I think the same could well happen
>> with alternative ideas to pure materialism.
>
>How? How can something non-material influence something material like an experimental apparatus? If something can influence matter, then it is something material.
>
>I trust you will demand as much detail from the idea that there might be "atoms of consciousness" as you do from current (materialistic) research on consciousness.

Of course I would.

[Martin Harran]

On Fri, 17 Sep 2021 12:24:22 -0700, Mark Isaak
<eci...@curioustaxonomyNOSPAM.net> wrote:

>On 9/17/21 9:06 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
>>
>> Another thing that I had been thinking about for a while is why the
>> focus on neurology and consciousness seems to be focused almost
>> entirely on the brain. We know that there are strong ties between
>> emotions and other parts of our body such as the heartbreak we feel
>> from grief, the butterflies we get in our stomach when we are nervous,
>> the clenching of our bowels(not always successful) when we are
>> frightened, and so on. The Day and Sweatt paper does refer to the CNS
>> rather than the brain and I wonder if we should perhaps be thinking
>> about consciousness as a whole-body experience rather than a brain
>> function. That could possibly tie in with the experiments on plant
>> communications carried out by Novoplansky and Simard where some of the
>> elements of consciousness seem to take place without a brain.
>
>I am about half through a book which touches on some of these issues.
>It is _Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of
>Consciousness_ by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

I actually bought that book last year and read the first few chapters
which I found very interesting but I got distracted by other things
and never got back to it; I've moved it back up the reading list
again.

>A lot of it is about the minds
>of octopuses, which have most of their neurons in their arms, not their
>brains, and Peter notes that humans, too, can make decisions with their
>limbs that bypass consciousness. He also, briefly, addresses sentience
>in plants.
>
>His in an evolutionary approach, and he makes the point that an
>explanation of consciousness needs to consider its gradual origin, a
>little bit at a time. He shows that we, even at our best, have room to
>be more conscious than we are, so by implication we are not at an
>endpoint of consciousness either.
>
>Another interesting bit of trivia I got from the book: The octopus's
>esophagus passes through the middle of its brain.

A book I am reading at the moment that you might find interesting is
"Conversations on Consciousness: Interviews with Twenty Minds" by
Susan Blackmore in which she relates conversations she had with
leading philosophers and scientists. I'm only about a quarter of the
way through but it is fascinating to see how many of the arguments we
have here are mirrored in the opinions of those she talks to - and
also the occasional abrasiveness! For example, she talks to David
Chalmers and he chats about length about the 'hard problem' associated
with his ideas; when he talks to Patricia & Paul Churchland and
mentions Chalmers' hard problem, Patricia replies dismissively "Oh,
his presumption strikes me as ridiculous." :)

[broger...@gmail.com]

You skipped over this. I assume, then, that you agree that it's generally better not to infer the emotional reasons why people hold beliefs in opposition to one's own, whether that be suggesting they are put off by the mechanical appearance of materialism, or claiming they are "terrified" of opening the door to dualism?

I think we are coming to the end here. I simply disagree that we are not making any "real progress" on understanding conscious experience. But that's because, I suppose, that I don't think there's a "hard problem" there, just a lot of complex, but "easy" (in Chalmer's sense) problems.

As for Goff, his ideas will get taken seriously by neuroscientists to the extent that they are defined enough to be testable. Otherwise it becomes a case of "I don't think the naturalistic explanation of consciousness is adequate, therefore, I'll insert an untestable idea that appeals to me." A dualism of the gaps.

You think it is implausible that continued research on things like the physical mechanisms of perception and memory, or the study of the way injuries to the brain effect conscious experience will explain consciousness satisfactorily to you. That may well be true. Only time will tell.

[Martin Harran]

On Sat, 18 Sep 2021 03:29:02 -0700 (PDT), "broger...@gmail.com"

No, I skipped over it because I don't think that the two statements
are equivalent. Even if they were, "two wrongs don't make a right" has
never appealed to me as an argument so I have neither time nor
appetite to be distracted into an argument about their equivalence.

I never said any such thing. All that I said was that neurology has
produced nothing significant to explain what we experience through
consciousness *to date* and that we should therefore consider also
exploring other areas - I never suggested that such research should
cease or that it can *never* produce answers. I really wish people
would stop putting words into my mouth.

[Martin Harran]

On Sat, 18 Sep 2021 13:14:06 +0100, Martin Harran
<martin...@gmail.com> wrote:

[...]

>Even if they were, "two wrongs don't make a right" has
>never appealed to me as an argument

Should be "two wrongs make a right"

[...]