On 18 October 2013 12:24, Craig Weinberg <whatsons...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The decision to go to the store, A, is associated with certain brain >> processes, and the getting in the car and driving to the store, B, is >> associated with different brain processes. The brain processes >> associated with A *cause* the brain processes associated with B. That >> is to say, a scientist anywhere in the universe could observe the >> physical processes A and the physical processes B and see how the >> former lead to the latter without necessarily having any idea about >> the supervenient consciousness. > > > Ok, I can work with this. First let me say that, given your assumptions, > your reasoning is absolutely correct. The assumptions themselves, although I > don't think they are even conscious, are also completely reasonable. That is > a perfectly reasonable expectation about nature, and it is one that I myself > shared until fairly recently. > > Starting with the first assumption: >"The decision to go to the store, A, is > associated with certain brain processes" > > To that I say, lets slow down a moment. What do we know about about the > association? As far as I know, what we know is that > > 1) measurable changes in brain activity occur in synchronization to > self-reported or experimentally inferred changes in subjective states. > 2) the regions of the brain affected have been mapped with a high degree of > consistency and specificity (although the anomalies, such as with people who > live seemingly normal lives with large parts of their brain 'missing' makes > that kind of morphological approach potentially naive) > 3) that externally induced brain changes will induce changes in subjective > experience (so that brain changes cannot be epiphenomenal). > > What we do not know is that > > 4) the entirety of our experiences are literally contained within the > tissues of the brain, or its activities. > 5) that the brain activity which we can observe with our contemporary > instruments is the only causal agent of subjective experience. OK up to here. > 6) that subjective experiences cannot cause observable brain changes (to the > contrary, we count on subjects being able to voluntarily and spontaneously > change their own brain activity). We don't know this for sure, but it goes against every scientific observation. If a subjective experience is supervenient on the underlying physical process then the observable brain changes can all be attributed to this underlying physical process. If not, then the observable brain changes cannot all be attributable to the underlying physical process; i.e., a miracle will be observed. But no miracles have actually been observed. > 7) that neuronal activity is not also associated with microphenomenal > experiences which are subconscious to us at the personal level. (The article > at the top of the thread shows that the opposite is true, in the sense that > we can access and control individual neuron behaviors strictly through > direct subjective attention). > The next assumption I think takes a turn from the relatively innocuous to > the ideologically biased. > > To say "The brain processes associated with A *cause* the brain processes > associated with B." doesn't really work. Let's say that some alien > neurologist thinks that the world financial markets are the activity of a > global brain. She observes that certain numbers that come out of the NASDAQ > are associated with the construction of new suburban houses. Having access > to a precision magnetic stimulation instruments, she is able to change the > numbers in the NASDAQ computers, and sure enough, most times the expected > effect materializes. She concludes therefore, as you would in her position, > that the market indicators associated with the real estate development A > *cause* the market indicators associated with commercial development months > later (B). This view assumes that the actual participants in the economy, > and the actual conditions of their experienced lives are not functionally > necessary to transform A into B. If the alien neurologist is wrong she is wrong about details. She is not wrong about the fact that the building of new houses in the suburbs is caused by antecedent physical events. > In the same way, we could say that a drug like cocaine changes brain > activity to match that of a person who was living a very exhilarating life, > and by the logic that you are suggesting, as long as the drug supply did not > run out, the person's life would eventually have to change automatically to > match the enhanced brain activity. The cocaine may cause a feeling of exhilaration but it will not cause all the other thoughts, memories, achievements etc. of an exhilarating life. The two situations have different physical antecedents and a different result. > By underestimating the role of consciousness, and overlooking its obvious > significance in creating and shaping its activities *through* the brain, > rather than activities *of* the brain, you wind up with a worldview in which > no form of consciousness could plausibly exist. For that reason, the > hypothesis you assume must be abandoned with prejudice. Not only should we > resist falling back on the whole set of hypotheses which fail to account for > consciousness in any way, but I recommend that we start from the polar > opposite assumption, in which the association of brain states A and B are > not the relevant causes, but are actually the event horizon of a completely > different set of causes which are impersonal but intersect the personal, > sub-personal, and super-personal ranges of awareness. It is like the stop > motion video that I linked, where impossible things seem to happen without > any camera tricks. > > There will always be a plausible chain of causality to explain how A becomes > B, but it is wrong. If we look at traffic patterns of a city, we can imagine > that a flood of people leaving a parking lot is not leaving a concert at the > same time, but just a statistical inevitability because of the nature of how > traffic events are distributed around cities. It's a perfectly reasonable > and scientific view, and it may be statistically successful even in > predicting these parking lot evacuations accurately. It's still the wrong > way to look at it. It still doesn't work if you try put a thousand cars in > the middle of the desert and expect them to build a city. That you can't exactly account for the physical cause of something doesn't mean it isn't there. Traffic patterns like weather patterns are entirely due to the motion of atoms bumping against each other. They can be roughly, but not precisely predicted. The lack of, or indeed impossibility of precision does not mean they are magic. > Can you see how modeling nature from the outside in has a big hole in it, > and why that hole would be a catastrophic mistake to overlook when studying > consciousness? No account of consciousness is needed in explaining behaviour. No account of consciousness is needed in explaining the weather either, even though for all we know, weather patterns have associated subjective experiences too alien for us to guess at. >> This is according to the scientific >> account of nature. If the scientific account of nature is wrong then >> the scientist would look at the physical processes B and declare that >> there must be some supernatural influence, > > > Not supernatural, just transmeasurable. How would the scientist presume to > speak for nature? A terrible scientist if you ask me. "Whatever doesn't fit > in my microscope is supernatural". This is the problem. We already have, > with our own consciousness, a better window into neuroscience than any > instrument could possibly give us. Not that the perspective of a non-human > system is not valuable, of course it is, but nothing about the brain would > be worth the effort were it not for our own subjective appreciation of what > it does. No fMRI machine has the faintest idea what a brain is or why is has > to generate images of it. From the perspective of non-humans, the brain is > food, or a source of energy, or just a blob of decaying ooze. The scientist might be wrong about what exactly goes on in the brain but is probably not wrong in the assumption that the only influences on brain behaviour are physical ones. >> as he cannot explain how >> they come about given the antecedent A and the laws of physics. > > > IMO, there are can be no 'laws' of physics. There is only sense. Incidents > and co-incidents of orderly 'seems like'. The "laws" are just observed regularities. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
