dmb says: After looking at the most recent responses from you guys it seems pretty clear that we need to back up. It seems to me that both of you are pretty foggy about what the problem is. Krimel, for example, has somehow managed to equate pre-conceptual experience with the unconscious. That's just not what we're talking about here and the hard problem of consciousness is not about unconsciousness. For example, Pirsig says that Quality is the first thing you know, James says pure experience is the immediate flux of life and that we act on it, and Dewey distinguishes it the conceptual with the non-conceptual with the simple terms "known" and "had". In each case, we are talking about the immediately felt quality of conscious experience. We're just talking about the distinction is between feelings and thoughts, between qualia and conceptual knowledge.
[Krimel] Part of the problem with consciousness is the difficulty of saying what it is, what to leave in and what to leave out. It is a term with such varied meanings that it is quite possible for three or more to gather together to discuss it, yet never mention the same thing twice and no one notices. In your examples you talk about, consciousness in terms of "first thing" and "immediate." As I see this you are referring to a property of consciousness usually termed awareness. That is, what occupies ones attention. What our being is focused on in the Now. Awareness or being in the moment is the synthesis and focus of the various parallel processes of the body. It is what we attend to. It skips around. It flits between what is immediately present and things remembered. It works like a police scanner cycling through the parallel processes of sensation, emotion, memory. From them, awareness creates a whole. This is in fact exactly how the visual system, one of those parallel process, works. A pinhole of focus sweeps across the visual field, darting here and there and painting a coherent picture out of a jumble of disjointed sensations. Awareness is just the application of this process of constructing illusions but including the other senses, emotions and memories. Awareness is limited in the number of things it can hold at one time. Less than three things for non-primates, about three for apes and seven or so for humans. This notion of awareness has a number of closely connected and related ideas associated with it; short term memory and executive function come to mind. Awareness in lower animals is probably limited to immediate sense data and a few evolutionarily encoded response patterns. In mammals we see the full blown rise of emotions not only as simple flight or fight responses but as [e]motivations that bind parents to their young and to each other. Emotions add valance. Some things are good, some are bad, some are neutral. As mammals, the emotional force is strong in us. Emotions set the standards for how we judge data and interpret our senses. As Damasio says, "We are emotional machines..." Emotions drive our actions, our thoughts. They are the source of our perception of binary distinctions like: good/bad, speed-up/slow-down, love/hate, joy/sorrow, pride/shame... When you talk about integrating thought and feeling I find it puzzling. How could that not be so? I've given you Damasio's examples of stroke patients who cannot feel their emotions and as a result can't make decisions. Without emotion there is not commitment to one path or another. I see no way to integrate emotions directly into conceptualization. They are entirely different processes. The emotion of love is a process of attraction. The concept of love is a neutral idea about that process. Concepts as James tells us are a step removed from direct experience which he emphatically and repeatedly call "perception". Emotion is the value we place on experience. Emotions provides meaning. They are a primitive assessments of probability telling us whether what is focused in immediate awareness is likely to help or harm us. But sensation and emotion alone are highly fallible. They increase the probability of positive outcomes and enhance our chances of success. But senses fail us, they provide incomplete information. That incompleteness results from bandwidth limitation on sensory data, limitations of our single point of view, etc. Higher mammals like us overcome these limits of sensation and emotion through memory. It is important here to give a picture of how memory works. Experience is encoded into memory beginning with processing in the mid-brain. But experience effects the whole brain and is registered throughout the whole brain. In humans the largest and most recently evolved portions of the brain are the cortical hemispheres. These are where memory are stored and full blown consciousness arise. It is important to get a picture of how this works. The nervous system, of which the brain is one part, is an Input -> Processing -> Output system. It is actually physically constructed this way. Input comes in through the senses, gets processed in the brain and output is the behavior that results. Above I described the processing of sensory input into emotional responses. All sensation except smell is processed immediately into two separate streams of neural pathway. First is emotion mentioned above and the second is memory. The cortex is a fractal array of some 100 billion neurons. Each individual neuron can connect to up to 50,000 other neurons. This is an unfathomable number of possible connections that can produce and infinite range of patterns of interaction. Donald Hebb was the first to propose a connectionist model of nerve interaction back in the 50s and it remains, at its root, with us today. Experience is the firing of neurons in various patterns. CAT, MRI, fMRI and PET scanning allows us to see these pattern, often live and in real time. The resolution of scanning technology is following Moore's law and as it gets better we will become more precise in our ability to detect and interpret these patterns. But what of these patterns. When you see a cat on a mat a set of neurons fire. If we could reliably cause that same set of neuron to fire in the same way again you would again see a cat on a mat even in the absence of cat or mat. A crude example of something like this is commonplace in brain surgery where a doctor physically stimulates the surface of the cortex and the patient has a direct experience of physical sensation or a memory of a past event or makes a movement without willing the movement, depending entirely on the particular area of brain surface stimulated. Patterns of nerve firings are strengthen through use. Each time a set of nerves fire they become more efficient at firing together. Memory is a kind of feedback system that allows us to trigger these patterns of neural interaction. Memory is those patterns. Consider the lowly neuron. It is either active and firing or calm and resting; on or off. It exists in a huge tangled three dimensional array of other neurons. Any or all of them can be on or off at the same time. The brain is this vast field of probabilistic interaction. Experience is the firing of these neurons and memory is the capacity to recreate those patterns as feedback loops. I tend to see these patterns of firing as lightning. Fractally complex three dimensional arcs. Consider the cat on the mat. The patterns of firing that are "cat" are similar to past patterns of firing aroused by past cats. This new experience of cat excites these past patterns of cat making them more efficient and more likely in future instances of cat. In this instance the cat is on the mat. Mat is an experience with its one patterns of neural firing and similarly encoded. The cat _On_ the mat, James' conjunctive relation, is the simultaneous firing of cat and mat patterns into a new single pattern of firing: "cat-on-mat." This contiguity of firing increases the chance that future firings of catness or matness will include connections to cat-on-matness. It is the repetition of these conjunctions that gives catness the qualities of catness. Cat are almost always conjoined with patterns like fuzzy, clawed, pointy eared, purring etc. All of these patterns and the history of connections between them are encode in patterns of neural interaction. A key feature of these firing patterns is that that are not constrained by the fundamentally sequential character of Now. In other words, immediate experience is a sequential stream of past flowing into future. It is always unidirectional. Because experience is encoded as patterns of neural interaction rather than as a sequence of firing, it is the first true example of random access in nature. Memory is not sequential. Those patterns of firing can and to happen randomly and can to accessed randomly. Creativity is the ability to make random connections that make sense, are meaningful, evoke harmonious emotional experiences. Awareness as I said earlier is a synthesis of sensation, emotion and memory. This is, after all, what James calls forth in radical empiricism: Sensation tells us what is here in the now. Emotion tells us whether it is good or bad. Memory establishes the present's relations and conjunctions with the past. We access memory by recalling these stored patterns of firing into awareness. This is what Micheal Polanyi calls focal knowledge. It is "figure" to the vast background of potential firing patterns he calls tacit knowledge. As the Gestalt folks would say it is a figure ground relationship with awareness focused on the dynamics of figure against a static background. As James was first and foremost a functionalist, the function of all of this is to orient us toward what's coming next. It guides us in what to do next. It allows us to assess the probability of positive emotional outcomes in the future. In short it reduces uncertainty which it to say it creates meaning. dmb continues: Let me repeat the central question, just in case you missed it. "Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?" [Krimel] The richness of inner life is this synthesis. Neuroscience, while still in its infancy, is giving us answers to both how and why questions. What you seem to be pursuing is the fundamentally skeptical attitude of two years olds asking an endless stream of "Why?" Why are these impossibly complex processes experienced in just this way and not some other or why are they experienced at all? (there is a rich literature on philosophical zombies, BTW. Since this seems to be all new to you, check it out.) That is like asking why it is that when you put two hydrogen atoms together with an oxygen atom it feels wet. Or why a candle flame produces a particular frequency of light. Or, why does the porridge bird lay its eggs in the air? Your panpsychic approach provides exactly the kind of answer we end up giving to two year olds: "Because God made it that way." After a lengthy gee whiz explication of Frank Jackson's "Mary Problem" which is snipped: [dmb said:] When I think about this gap between functions and experience I can't help but think of the gap between Krimel's version of James and my version. As I see it, your emphasis on "perception" has turned James's pure experience into a mere function. See, I've never denied the existence of these processes and functions as you seem to think. But I have repeatedly objected to that kind of explanation as reductive and irrelevant. [Krimel] The best evidence I know of psychic processes is that I can predict your response to the preceding. Please spare me a trip to the archives to rehash this. If you are serious about these matters. Move on. Any attempt at explanation involves casting experience into a set of concepts. Conception IS reducing continuous experience into discrete conceptual patterns of neurons firing. Let me repeat: "This is, after all, what James calls forth in radical empiricism: Sensation tells us what is here in the Now. Emotion tells us whether it is good or bad. Memory establishes the present's relations and conjunctions with the past." If as Chalmer's claims something like what I have presented above actually does answer the "easy problems" let me point out that those answers have come about within the past 30 years. The neuroscience approach as produced astonishing results. James would have gotten a four hour woody out of hearing a fraction of the discoveries you want to sweep under the rug and toss away as irrelevant reductionism. This is in many ways a new science and it moves very fast. There is no reason to suspect that whatever answers we get to the "hard problem" or if we decide, as I suspect, that it is a childish fake problem, neuroscience will be the final arbitrator for all but the very superstitious, the very hard headed, the deeply romantic, the religious or the clueless. [dmb] I sincerely hope that Chalmer's framing of the hard problem will help you see what I mean. Chalmers is saying these functional explanations can't explain the felt experiences that arise from them. Likewise, pure experience can't be explained in terms of perceptual processes, let alone equated with them. [Krimel] Experience is these processes. They can be equated. Neither you nor Chalmers has present evidence of anything going on outside of them. The hard problem as you present it is not a question of the processes themselves but of their results. The solution you offer is an extreme form of dualism. As I see it, it is a delusional evocation of the divine. Dmb] That would be like trying to explain the quality of a road trip in terms of gas mileage or oil temperature. They are certainly involved in the road trip but that's just not what we're asking about. [Krimel] For the forty second time, if we have no accounting of oil temperature and gas mileage there is no road trip to ask. Oil temperature, gas mileage, the wind in your hair and the satisfaction of cold beer are various Points of View, our focal awareness of figure against a tacit background. They are only at odds to the extent that they jockey for position as one of the seven things we can process at once. The rest of the time they are fields of potential in the fractal nest of our nervous systems.
Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
