On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 12:52:54 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: > > > > On 5/13/2019 11:22 PM, Philip Thrift wrote: > > > > On Tuesday, May 14, 2019 at 12:14:48 AM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote: >> >> >> >> On Monday, May 13, 2019 at 6:55:03 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: >> >> The physical model that says consciousness is the brain processing >>> information by neuron's firing at synapses...a very successful model. >>> >> >> >>> Brent >>> >> >> >> >> I completely missed the news of that success, explicitly stating: "a very >> successful model". >> >> Can you cite something that states that this is a scientific consensus? >> >> Now that is what I would call mysterian. >> >> @philipthrift >> > > > http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Models_of_consciousness > > Summary > > Because consciousness is a rich biological phenomenon, it is likely that a > satisfactory scientific theory of consciousness will require the > specification of detailed mechanistic models. The models of consciousness > surveyed in this article vary in terms of their level of abstraction as > well as in the aspects of phenomenal experience that they are proposed to > explain. At present, however, no single model of consciousness appears > sufficient to account fully for the multidimensional properties of > conscious experience. Moreover, although some of these models have gained > prominence, *none has yet been accepted as definitive, or even as a > foundation upon which to build a definitive model.* > > > A successful model has predictive power and consilience in a certain > domain. It doesn't have to predict everything to be successful. Newton's > theory of gravity didn't explain why lead is heavier than iron or why the > planets had the orbits they have. I only meant that the neurobiological > theory of the brain is successful in predicting that specific chemicals > that interact with neurotransmitters will affect conscious thoughts and > electrical stimulation of the brain will produce thoughts specific to the > location. All the models mentioned in your link implicitly assume this > foundation of neural activity. I notice however that Jeff Hawkins model > of memory->prediction is not included, although I think he's one of the > most serious researchers https://numenta.com/ > > Brent >
"Neural-firing patterns" (information processing - which alone could be simulated in a conventional supercomputer - may be a big part of a theory, but may not be the whole thing. A chemical role is likely critical. Consciousness: A Molecular Perspective https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/2/4/26/htm ... 4. Panpsychism Some proponents of information-processing theories have recently appealed to the philosophy of panpsychism In its most common form, as advocated for example in, panpsychism is primarily justified by philosophical reasoning, namely that it is unintelligible to get consciousness from unconscious matter. With physicalists, panpsychists share the standard intuition that macroscopic properties inevitably are the result of the dynamics of elementary, microscopic entities. However, they differ from standard physicalists in that they assume that matter, even in its most basic form, is conscious. Panpsychism could thus be distinguished from physicalism by its ontological commitment to some form of mentality inherent in all forms of matter. There are problematic issues though. It seems implausible to just “merge” psychological with physical properties; the structures of physical and psychological theories are very different from each other. For example, on the (sub-)atomic scale individuality is a misnomer (something like “an individual electron” does not exist). On the level of psychology just the opposite is true: Individuals abound. Accordingly, the introduction of “proto-consciousness”, a precursor of consciousness in elementary physical systems, seems necessary. The belief in proto-consciousness, however, brings with it a problem of emergence: How do higher forms of consciousness result from a complex combination of proto-consciousness? This has been called the “combination problem” for panpsychism, which becomes even more pressing once one has taken a molecular perspective. If quarks and electrons are (proto-)conscious, what about atoms and molecules? Atoms and molecules form cells which in turn form tissue that makes up the whole organism. This question thus naturally leads to the puzzle of identifying the point of emergence of higher forms of consciousness starting with proto-consciousness. Judging purely from empirical knowledge, it is implausible that it takes place at a lower level than other life-processes (i.e., lower than at the level of biochemistry); and it is also implausible that it exclusively takes place at much higher levels either, because much of what is biologically relevant already takes place (or is initiated) at the level of cellular and molecular interactions (e.g., transcription, self-replication, formation of a boundary, synaptic transport etc.). So why not also the emergence of organism-level consciousness from proto-consciousness? Chemistry, after all, is the paradigmatic science of emergence. It is quite appropriate then to suspect that chemistry or molecular biology is the place where to look for a mechanism underlying the emergence of consciousness. But if this were the case, and if we shared the panpsychist belief that some form of (proto-)consciousness is realized in all physical systems, then the intuition that inorganic chemicals (like the ones that make up rocks and chairs) are devoid of any consciousness would almost certainly be false—at least potentially there would still be some form of (proto-)consciousness left in those systems. This is due to the fact that there is no sharp distinction between organic and inorganic chemicals, similar as there is no sharp distinction (according to panpsychism) between conscious and unconscious matter. Any organic molecule is composed of (and is in principle synthesizable from) parts of inorganic compounds (pure carbon is inorganic, but most organic material is carbon-based etc.). It should be possible then to experimentally probe panpsychism and perhaps arrive at artificially produced conscious systems—analogous to research currently done in synthetic biology. Rejecting this possibility leaves us with a strange variant of panpsychism, according to which proto-consciousness is had by elementary particles, gets lost in the process of forming atoms and molecules, and emerges again at the higher neuronal level. This leads to a complementary problem of dissolution, that is, to explain how and why proto-consciousness dissolves or degrades. To date, there are no philosophical arguments that would render this plausible. Such thinking even seems incoherent, given the panpsychist’s intent to state the ubiquity of consciousness in nature and to avoid any bifurcation into “conscious” and “non-conscious” domains, which were reminiscent of introducing a conceptual mind/matter split. From an explanatory standpoint, the situation is even worse than before because we would not only have to account for the emergence of organism-level consciousness but also for the loss of proto-consciousness in any theory based on this variant of panpsychism. So, given a panpsychist ontology (second row of Table 1), one could either acknowledge chemistry’s explanatory role for the emergence of higher forms of consciousness from proto-consciousness (E), which would possibly result in an experimental research program, or one could live with a “gapped-panpsychism” that assumes that proto-consciousness were lost at one point and regained later on (L). 5. The Middle Ground We have argued that the molecular sciences are important for consciousness studies—regardless of one’s ontological commitments. The relation between consciousness and chemistry could be one of reduction (molecular mechanisms causally related to the phenomenology of consciousness), supervenience (chemistry specifies the dynamics of the relevant substrate that supports consciousness), or intra-attributive emergence (higher forms of consciousness emerge from proto-consciousness, initiated by certain chemical reactions). It is improbable that exclusively one of these relations holds: First, it is plausible that some properties related to the phenomenology of consciousness could reductively be explained in terms of molecular mechanisms, whereas other properties might require explanation in terms of higher (e.g., systemic) levels of organization; and second, neatly distinguishing between reduction, supervenience and emergence with respect to phenomenology might be difficult in the concrete case; just as chemistry, the middle ground between (atomic) physics and (cellular) biology, resists any attempt to unambiguously classify its phenomena into the categories of reduction, supervenience or emergence. To summarize, let us repeat the arguments given above. We were interested in the question to what extend molecular research is relevant to consciousness studies. Traditionally, it has been assumed that either neuroscience or fundamental physics is the relevant discipline which ought to make a contribution to a science-based understanding of consciousness. We have challenged this mainstream view by noting that there is an intermediate level—the level of the molecular sciences—that might be equally important. There is no principled reason not to engage in a molecular research program, no matter whether one believes that consciousness could reductively be related to a molecular mechanism or whether one thinks consciousness should primarily be studied in terms of information-processing. This is also true if one endorses panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is irreducible and ubiquitous in the universe, because there are open puzzles (the combination problem) that might require us to take molecular transformations into account. Once one has taken a molecular perspective, some important issues in consciousness studies are readily appreciated; these pertain to molecular mechanisms related to the phenomenology of consciousness, the relativity of substrate-independence in biology and the difficulties concerning emergence and the apparent loss of proto-consciousness in a panpsychist model. @philipthrift -- 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/43cad1b8-66d4-48ea-9115-efc9dbffe11c%40googlegroups.com.
