Consciousness, the mind and its properties

[The Black Jester]

I'm not quite sure I see precisely how you answer the question of the subjective nature of consciousness.   . But, I would say that my arguments are incredibly accurate in many respects to consciousness. Now I am curious as to what you mean by "subjective nature" because any nature, or behavior is accurately dependent on the 3 basic laws that govern everything.. Those 3 laws are very simple and are the very basic natural attributes and properties of energy itself, or the entirety of existence.

1) Positive
2) Neutral
3) Negative

Everything you can possibly think of ride on these 3 laws.. That's everything such as electromagnetism, thoughts, feelings, action, reaction, response, choice, decision, momentum, oscillation, calculation, process, inertia, time, evolution, morality, mental addiction, computation, mechanics, Feed back loops, order, chaos, and so on.. It's the very essence  that drives emergence of order, patterns, and behavior. And all minds require being bound to these very material physical laws..  

I don't think your explanations regarding the material explicability of what we scientifically observe as the behavior of brains is being called into question.  The question is how to answer folks like Chalmers and his friends who claim that there is such a thing as a "hard" problem of consciousness.  The separation between 'what it is like' to be something and a material description of that something.  We can describe the operation of a thing entirely in 3rd person physical laws, as you say.  But we cannot observe 1st person "Qualia" - the experience of what it is like to have a certain experience.  Your reduction of "feelings" to the laws you state is really only the reduction of the 3rd person brain states that correlate with subjective feelings to laws.  You are not reducing (says Chalmers) the subjective experiences themselves to those laws.

[Tank]

Has none of you noticed that winli is a stealth spammer?

[TheJackel]

I'm not quite sure I see precisely how you answer the question of the subjective nature of consciousness.   . But, I would say that my arguments are incredibly accurate in many respects to consciousness. Now I am curious as to what you mean by "subjective nature" because any nature, or behavior is accurately dependent on the 3 basic laws that govern everything.. Those 3 laws are very simple and are the very basic natural attributes and properties of energy itself, or the entirety of existence.

1) Positive
2) Neutral
3) Negative

Everything you can possibly think of ride on these 3 laws.. That's everything such as electromagnetism, thoughts, feelings, action, reaction, response, choice, decision, momentum, oscillation, calculation, process, inertia, time, evolution, morality, mental addiction, computation, mechanics, Feed back loops, order, chaos, and so on.. It's the very essence  that drives emergence of order, patterns, and behavior. And all minds require being bound to these very material physical laws..   I physically feel when I am sad, happy, or mad, and without that I could be neither of them, I just can't observe or feel those emerging properties to which are in process of becoming an emotion, thought, feeling ect.  I can experience the patterns materially and physically in the first person POV. 100% what you feel is all physical reactions to negative, positive, or neutral stimuli. All subjective experiences can only be a positive, negative, or neutral experiences. Experiences are only the act of observation and application of positive, negative, or neutral abstract meaning. A plant can unconsciously experience touch and react to it, or even react defensively to it. Human emotions are nothing more than highly evolved patterns of behavior, actions, or responses to which you can find in other living organisms. And what most people don't realize is that these things are not unique to humans, but are subject to anything with a brain..It's just depends on how primitive you go with each of them.  Dolphins and Killer Whales for example are considered self conscious, but not as intelligent as you or I.. They too can feel, taste ectra that is associated with Quaila.

For example:

I can overcome taste with pain by biting my tongue.. These kinds of tests show how consciousness is indeed a material physical thing.. This includes headaches, dreams, thoughts, ideas, ectra.. Much of this is pretty Fractal in all of us and shows common material physical patterns.. Hence, why does chicken taste like chicken to everyone?  So if we can't make up our own flavors without needing material physicality to have them, arguments like Qualia just show their lack of understanding in regards to material physicality..

So here  are some questions for you...

1) Can you have an emotion without physically feeling it?
2) What physical patterns make up an emotion or feeling? Hence, what do you physically feel
3) What causes the positive, negative of neutral reaction, response, or action?
4) How do we apply meaning, or interpret these physical patterns or feelings?
5) Is Qualia just a means to describe the material physical patterns of feelings and emotions in abstract 3rd person interpretation of processes by people like Chalmer?
6) Can we have an entity, consciousness that has no inertia, substance, dimension, or physicality? Hence, how can nothing be of substance or of entity?
7) Can we do anything or be anything without energy?

[The Black Jester]

Has none of you noticed that winli is a stealth spammer?

I only responded to her the first time, in this thread, because it was my first time seeing her responses period.  I noticed the links after I saw her second post, and yes, it became obvious when several posts had the same one line catch-phrase.  So yes, after this, I did notice.

[The Black Jester]

That's interesting, however that would be false because Chalmers is then suggesting consciousness is made of nothing...

Completely agree...this is my main problem with Chalmers and his ilk.

I had already gone over why we can't observe the entirety of these processes within 1st person because it is not possible to do so when you are the end product. We can not in first person observe the emerging property of conscious ourselves, thoughts, ideas, feelings, or emotions.

Yes you did go over this, and it is a great point, but you did not refute the fact that we cannot observe 1st person processes via 3rd person observations - which is the actual point of contention, not what you stated about how the 1st person end product of a 3rd person processes cannot observe that 3rd person process.  The stated "problem" is different.  

What you say is really only an argument to show how a 1st person perspective could be mistaken about what process gave rise to it, not what the content of that process actually is.  But anyway, I don't want to lose sight of the fact that I agree with you - mostly because material neuroscience has made more progress in explaining the correlates of conscious experience, and has developed more sound and testable theories in the last hundred years than Philosophy of Mind has in the last several hundred.

And no, my laws are entirely applicable to feelings in the first person  I physically feel when I am sad, happy, or mad, and without that I could be neither of them, I just can't observe or feel those emerging properties to which are in process of becoming an emotion, thought, feeling ect. I can experience the patterns materially and physically in the first person POV.

This is only relevant if you already accept that physical sensation is a necessary condition of emotion and is more relevant than cognitive, evaluative content, which might be causing the secondary, accidental physical reactions we experience as a component of emotion (and if you also already accept, in any case, that cognitive content is material in nature, and must be so to interact with a physical body) - but that hasn't been decided, that is actually (amazingly) disputed.  Again, I agree with you, but your arguments seem to proceed somewhat from the conclusions you set out to demonstrate.  I think any common sense analysis of what we mean when we talk about emotion has to involve a physical sensation as a necessary component, but, at least in philosophic circles, that is a point of contention.

So if we can't make up our own flavors without needing material physicality to have them, arguments like Qualia just show their lack of understanding in regards to material physicality..

Dan Dennett, whom I'm beginning to delve more into now, argues that "qualia" are a hopelessly confused and problematic construct - and in fact don't exist as such.  I'm looking forward to getting more into his arguments as to why that might be the case.

So here are some questions for you...

1) Can you have an emotion without physically feeling it?
2) What physical patterns make up an emotion or feeling? Hence, what do you physically feel
3) What causes the positive, negative of neutral reaction, response, or action?
4) How do we apply meaning, or interpret these physical patterns or feelings?
5) Is Qualia just a means to describe the material physical patterns of feelings and emotions in abstract 3rd person interpretation of processes by people like Chalmer?
6) Can we have an entity, consciousness that has no inertia, substance, dimension, or physicality? Hence, how can nothing be of substance or of entity?
7) Can we do anything or be anything without energy?

1) As far as I'm concerned?  No.  The philosopher Jesse Prinz has a great book on this - The Emotional Construction of Morals.
2) Again, as far as I'm concerned?  Neurobiological and physiological reactions to stimuli, internal or external.
3) Conscious or unconscious evaluations of #2 coupled with environmental context.
4) See #3
5) Yes, I think so.  Again, the concept of "Qualia" may be fatally flawed.
6) Not as far as I know.  Never seen it...
7) See # 6.

Quinn

[Thumpalumpacus]

I agree with Nicholas Humphrey that consciousness arose from the need to process sensation, and that consciousness is merely the concatenation of different sections of the brain minding the others, and being processed in parallel with each other.

It is in this sense that I hold it to be an emergent property -- it emerges from the material substrate only as a result of those material transactions themselves.

Sorry if that's cloudy, but telescopes rarely look at themselves.

[The Black Jester]

Sorry if that's cloudy, but telescopes rarely look at themselves.

Good point...

[TheJackel]

Sorry if that's cloudy, but telescopes rarely look at themselves.

Good point...

Basically I could sum up a Qualia in the physical changes of patterns via interaction with other patterns.. Qualia to me is just the representation of applying descriptions to observable physical phenomenon while itself is a physical phenomenon reliant on the observational processing of the observable phenomenon to be an emerging property itself.. Hence the description is a pattern too, or material physical phenomenon.. it's like asking yourself if a 2D image in your head is really a 2D material physical phenomenon or object.. The answer is yes it is, and so is any other thought, or idea concerning this 2D object. Consciousness to me is a very complex chaotic system of material physical relationships and patterns to where consciousness itself is the emergent property and end product..

However I am really, really tired..So I don't know if anything I said above here makes any sense to you .

[TheJackel]

Sorry if that's cloudy, but telescopes rarely look at themselves.

Good point...

Basically I could sum up a Qualia in the physical changes of patterns via interaction with other patterns.. Qualia to me is just the representation of applying descriptions to observable physical phenomenon while itself is a physical phenomenon reliant on the observational processing of the observable phenomenon to be an emerging property itself.. Hence the description is a pattern too, or material physical phenomenon.. it's like asking yourself if a 2D image in your head is really a 2D material physical phenomenon or object.. The answer is yes it is, and so is any other thought, or idea concerning this 2D object. Consciousness to me is a very complex chaotic system of material physical relationships and patterns to where consciousness itself is the emergent property and end product..

However I am really, really tired..So I don't know if anything I said above here makes any sense . I'm trying to find a link on a new thing in science or medicine that can actually translate images from the mind, or memories.

[The Black Jester]

Sorry if that's cloudy, but telescopes rarely look at themselves.

Good point...

Basically I could sum up a Qualia in the physical changes of patterns via interaction with other patterns.. Qualia to me is just the representation of applying descriptions to observable physical phenomenon while itself is a physical phenomenon reliant on the observational processing of the observable phenomenon to be an emerging property itself.. Hence the description is a pattern too, or material physical phenomenon.. it's like asking yourself if a 2D image in your head is really a 2D material physical phenomenon or object.. The answer is yes it is, and so is any other thought, or idea concerning this 2D object. Consciousness to me is a very complex chaotic system of material physical relationships and patterns to where consciousness itself is the emergent property and end product..

However I am really, really tired..So I don't know if anything I said above here makes any sense to you

But again, it is a description that is a Just So Story (one that I can buy into, but one nonetheless).  

For a summary of the actual claim regarding the "explanatory gap," here is this from Conceptual Analysis, Dualism, and the Explanatory Gap by Ned Block and Robert Stalnaker:

The explanatory gap. Consciousness is a mystery.  No one has ever given an account, even a highly speculative, hypothetical, and incomplete account of how a physical thing could have phenomenal states (Nagel 1974, Levine 1983).  Suppose that consciousness is identical to a property of the brain-say, activity in the pyramidal cells of layer 5 of the cortex involving reverberatory circuits form cortical layer 6 to the thalamus and back to layers 4 and 6-as Crick and Koch have suggested for visual consciousness (Crick 1994).  Still, that identity itself calls out for explanation!

Nagel, Chalmers, et al, suggest that materialists are essentially begging the question by assuming an identity and not explaining that identity in terms that truly explicate the origin of subjective experience.  Particularly since the flow of inner life, of phenomenal feels, of thoughts, experiences, sensations themselves are not experienced as anything like pulsations of electrical activity, but as those sensations.  The red of an apple cannot properly be said to belong to the external world of the apple.  Instead, certain properties of the apple's skin reflect visible light in such a way as to stimulate the cones of your retina in a particular manner, and this information is relayed to the various layers of the cortex.  That information is solely electrochemical activity.  But where is the redness itself?  Where does it exist?  If we look in the brain, we do not see "redness" or your experience of "redness," which is only accessible to you, but the electrical activity of the brain.

To me, this is an enormous and stupid confusion, but I am not now sophistocated enough, or developed enough, to refute the philosophers on their own terms.

[TheJackel]

Red = name give or informational pattern give to give red a description to a particular wave length of light

They are just pattern we assign to other patterns as descriptions said observed pattern or phenomenon. If our eyes were any different we could see red as some other color. The rest is just trying to understand how we even see red, but this is like trying to argue how does a video camera record and play back video in color.. Our ability and asign abstract meaning to things allows us to develop a language to give order and definition to what we observe... Hence was Red to a cave man UHH UHH EERRRR UHH? So how do we define red? Well seemingly things that were red were hot . It's like he's begging the question himself in the sense that his argument is like asking if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, did the tree make a sound?. Red isn't exactly bound to need our interpretation to exist, or to be of wave length. Hence, existence doesn't require consciousness to exist, it's the other way around to where consciousness requires existence to exist and be of process.. So we don't create complexity because that would be impossible, thus logically complexity creates us beginning at the lowest possible level of complexity.

hence, you need a language to even explain to start with.. Much of his argument sadly relates to the evolution of language and our ability to assign meanings to observations.. It does get complicated though and I can often see why theists would have a hard time understanding that every has material physicality..

[The Black Jester]

It is possible that I am mischaracterizing the dualists' arguments against materialist reduction, but I don't think so.  In any case, I'm taking a formal class in Philosophy of Mind (also one in Epistemology) in the coming fall, so I may be able to present the ideas on all sides more clearly after that time.  At present, I am relying on my own, unguided readings on the subject matter that I've done for pleasure, so my philosophical education may have gaps.

[The Black Jester]

There's also a fairly interesting (and long) discussion of this topic here:

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/philosophy/another-consciousness-topic-t1487.html