/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22857745]

Will there be a day when consciousness can be scientifically explained?

[Anonymous No.22857823]

>>22857745
I already can explain it scientifically.

It's knowing shit, but like you don't even can't put into words cos your brain is like amygdala stops you but you know it so your better.

[Anonymous No.22857889]

>>22857745
Consciousness: Me
Not consciousness: You

[Anonymous No.22857945]

God I hope not
Imagine ruining THAT mystery
"Yeah we got some subatomic matrix that syncs with nega quarks θ that promotes a ring of constant entanglement located approx. 31° adjacent to the default mode network"

And then autistic drive to reverse engineer it

[Anonymous No.22857964]

Things are going to get weird when science tends toward eliminativism, and that, inevitably, finds some way to mesh with newage-ism.
You can already see the contours if you look in the right places.

[Anonymous No.22858084]

>>22857745
If it keeps advancing, probably

[Anonymous No.22858743]

>>22857745
We've passed that day. Consciousness is a series of electric signals in your brain. Sorry it's not as romantic as you'd hoped.

[Anonymous No.22858748]

>>22858743
This. Consciousness is an EMF that unifies all the information from the electrical firing of neurons

[Anonymous No.22858757]

We will kno

[Anonymous No.22858759]

AGI will solve it, so we should know by 2030.

[Anonymous No.22858763]

>>22858748
Question: can we induce specific qualia without directly affecting the brain itself? For example, if we replicate neuron firing a few inches away from the brain, then will this information be unified within the EMF? But then why don’t we experience someone else’s electrical signals when our head is pressed against theirs? Discuss.

[Anonymous No.22858800]

>>22857745
The answer to the Hard Problem of Consciousness is basically panpsychism. It's compatible with both Koch's IIT and the brain plus other complex adaptive systems being "active inference engines" that minimize the free energy principle.
Basically, all processes are experiential, but processes can coalesce into more complex metacognitive forms that seek to minimize uncertainty in order to preserve their temporary forms. All orderly gradient-reducing systems, which all obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics, should be considered cognitive intentional agents. This means coral reefs, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, and the Earth's biosphere are all cognitive agents too.
Form and consciousness are mutually dependent. Form is not exclusively dependent on consciousness for its existence (idealism), and consciousness is not exclusive dependent on form for its existence (physicalism, strong emergentism, epiphenomenalism, etc.) The Buddha argued something similarly in a variation of the dependent chain of causation.
From thereon, you can have more complex phenomenal properties emerge like a sense of personhood.

[Anonymous No.22858822]

>>22858800
this knowledge is useless if it doesn’t tell us how to manipulate consciousness for our purposes

[Anonymous No.22858849]

>>22858822
>this knowledge is useless if it doesn’t tell us how to manipulate consciousness for our purposes
Philosophy of Mind is not about telling us how to manipulate something for our own purposes. It's about figuring out the ontological nature of consciousness, including other questions like causal efficacy, which is important for many reasons outside of what you said.

In regards to the neural correlates of human self-awareness, then the thalamocoritical rhythms and synchronous firing across the brain are important. That solves the binding problem.

Philosophy of Mind and Neurophilosophy are different.

Moreover, there are ethical issues in regards to whether it's worth continuously trying to (invasively) control and manipulate the human organism and nature, but that's a different question altogether.

[Anonymous No.22858864]

>>22858800
Panspychism always seemed a bit like a cop-out to me; if you declare everything to be conscious, you haven't solved the hard problem of consciousness, you've just extended the term consciousness from human lived experience to some kind of all-encompassing magical aether.
Not saying I've got a better idea, though, all existing theories of consciousness feel unsatisfying to me, and I've just learned to live with it.

[Anonymous No.22858886]

>>22858800
>>22858864
Accepting panpsychism means becoming an Animist. I'm willing to go to that length, if that's what it comes to, but it's taking quite a while for me to work through all the implications. Pic, book I've found about it. Other suggestions are welcome.

[Anonymous No.22858887]

>>22858800
Dualism just doesn't sit right with me. It feels like that there is only one thing. Not two

[Anonymous No.22858912]

>>22858887
Dualism/monism feels like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

[Anonymous No.22858921]

>>22858864
It's not a cop-out. Also, pretty much all ancient Greek philosophers were panpsychists fyi. Moreover, many Eastern mystics who meditate a lot arrive to panpsychist-like conclusions claiming a mysterious irradiance permeates everything, which can indicate panpsychism.
>if you declare everything to be conscious, you haven't solved the hard problem of consciousness
A lot of these issues stem from semantics.
The universe and all of its processes are feeling and conscious, but it coalesces into more complex forms. All processes/forms are concurrent with mind/experience. What a lot of people refer to consciousness is merely the higher cognitive metacognitive awareness, which evolved from lower degree of consciousness. It's a matter of differing degrees. This is also more compatible with a realistic monism.
>you've just extended the term consciousness from human lived experience to some kind of all-encompassing magical aether.
There is nothing "magical" about it in the manner you're saying.
Qualia is irreducible, and it does not make sense for mind to arise from out of non-mind. Ex nihilo, nihil fi.
>all existing theories of consciousness feel unsatisfying to me
Panpsychism/panexperientialism mixed with process philosophy is pretty obvious to me. I go a step further by saying all orderly gradient-reducing systems are intentional cognitive/self-aware agents (it basically involves experiential processes recurrently looping in on themselves in a nested manner much like thalamocoritical reentrant loops).

What's going to happen is neuroscientists will most likely find more evidence that thalamocortical loops are necessary for self-awareness, metacognition, and this will lead people to think either physicalism or strong emergentism is true, making them lose the finer nuances of the implications of qualia being irreducible and how it doesn't make sense for consciousness to emerge from non-conscious matter.
Schopenhauer's dual-aspect monism is also well defended but has panpsychist implications. You just can't explain qualia by referring to material processes, meaning it is more natural they are mutually dependent.

[Anonymous No.22858928]

>>22858887
Panpsychism is not dualistic.

[Anonymous No.22858955]

>>22858886
That book sounds incredible, and I will read it soon.
And yes, I am more open to animism than others. I believe ancient people were able to communicate with trees and the soul of the Earth. I also interpret Buddhist enlightenment as implying a Cosmopsychism.

Right now I am dealing with a related question. I've recently read and written a review on David Skrbina's Metaphysics of Technology. He argues for a Panpsychist ontology in that book, but one in which mechanism and life are continuous but driven to increase in complexity based on Logos. I can share my review if further interested (it is better written than these posts here). I've also read Biocivilizations by Predrag B. Slijepcevic, but he argues mechanism and life are two different orders of logic. He defends Gaia theory, but he takes a more qualified panpsychist view in which only orderly gradient-reducing systems can be claimed to possess life or consciousness. I can share my review of that too. Predrag's views seem closer to someone like Klages.

Right now I am reading David Skrbina's Panpsychism in the West. I lean more towards Skrbina's metaphysics rather than Predrag or Klages, which unfortunately means machines are experiential and conscious too. Granted, all Skrbina view industrialization as a mistake while giving thorough arguments for that.

[Anonymous No.22858999]

>>22858886
That book is incredible and focuses on the subject matter that is consuming me at the moment, so I went ahead and bought it. You are one of the few intellectuals on /lit/ whose focus seems to overlap with mine.

What's terrible is that even though I feel strong affinity for deep ecology, I start a MS in robotic intelligence next month. Previously, I've earned BS degrees in Neuroscience and Computer Science. None of them are truly my passion though. My passion changed to ornithology.

I am a sad and bitter man.

[Anonymous No.22859005]

>>22858921
>What a lot of people refer to consciousness is merely the higher cognitive metacognitive awareness, which evolved from lower degree of consciousness. It's a matter of differing degrees
I'm talking specifically about the qualia aspect of it, which completely ceases during general anesthesia. So what gives, clearly my brain didn't stop being gradient-reducing or obeying the second law of thermodynamics, did it? Clearly there is something that panpsychism doesn't explain then.
>Qualia is irreducible, and it does not make sense for mind to arise from out of non-mind
I sort agree, but these days I'm more drawn to conclude illusionism from this rather than panpsychism or dualism

[Anonymous No.22859035]

>Conciousness certainly seems like an instance of strong emergence.

>If conciousness is strongly emergent, it means it is in some ways fundemental (irreducible).

>Given strong emergence is basically precluded if substance based metaphysics and superveniance are true (Jaegeon Kim) this would entail that process metaphysics is a more accurate description of reality, the victory of Heraclitus over Parmenides after all this time. We're already there in physics with pancomputationalism.
>All this suggests the dominant view of reductionism, smallism, and pretty much the world as a vast collection of little balls that make everything from the ways they bounce together is likely very misleading and false.

[Anonymous No.22859084]

>>22858955
>>22858999
Just to be clear, my first sentence: panpsychism->animism, did not derive from that book; I have just started reading that book, although I do suspect it will concur.

I haven't read those authors you mentioned. I was thinking of looking into Object-oriented philosophy next because what I've heard of it so far makes me wonder if it might relate.

However, I do not feel pulled to deep ecology. The human state is unique, as far as we can tell. It may not be the highest, or the lowest, but it is important. And such uniqueness needs to be both preserved and continue to grow/flourish, even if it is to the temporary detriment of the rest.

I hope that was clear. If this thread gets deleted for being off topic, I'll repost another about that book.

[Anonymous No.22859093]

>>22859005
>I'm talking specifically about the qualia aspect of it, which completely ceases during general anesthesia
It's an assumption to say it ceases. Let me give a counterexample: what ceases temporarily is attention directed to explicit or autobiographical memory, and self-identification sustained by working memory. Attention to explicit memory is what yields the sense of self-awareness or personhood across succeeding moments. To claim qualia completely ceases is an assumption, but rather, qualia is still being experienced when attention is no longer directed to memory. An example is something like blindsight where someone can react to catching a ball but have no awareness of it. There is still an experiential stream of events.
>So what gives, clearly my brain didn't stop being gradient-reducing or obeying the second law of thermodynamics, did it?
Disruption of attention to explicit and working memory. The effacement of one's explicit memory or autobiographical self is phenomenologically equivalent to death. I refer to Jill Bolte Taylor's "My Stroke of Insight". However, experience still processually continues in some shape or form. The mutability of memory is not a sufficient argument against panpsychism.
>Clearly there is something that panpsychism doesn't explain then.
I never claimed panpsychism explains all cognitive faculties, but that it seems to be the best answer to the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

[Anonymous No.22859095]

>>22859035
>Conciousness certainly seems like an instance of strong emergence.
If you just assume consciousness is an instance of strong emergence then you're just assuming all the crap you wrote afterwards. The question is whether consciousness is strongly emergent. Even more broadly is anything strongly emergent. We have no evidence of any physical process that is not reducible the behavior of it's parts. Strong emergence is better named as the supernatural.

[Anonymous No.22859180]

>>22858999
To continue >>22859084, coincidentally, a good man I knew who just died, was both a scientist and ornithologist. His career went well enough, but he became famous for his ornithology works, publishing several books and many articles. He found quite a lot of time while working and then had a very long retirement doing exactly what he loved. So, who knows how it might go for you.

I was exposed to panpsychism and more weird due to /lit/ so there are likely quite a few more interested in the topic.

>>22858955
Yes, I would be interested in a more extensive review of those works, especially if/how they discuss any relationship to animism.

>>22859005
nta, My fear would be that anesthesia does not stop consciousness, but blocks the connection the physical systems and memory. Meaning surgery is a torture where you can't move but at least don't remember. Hmm, I suppose like this response, >>22859093

[Anonymous No.22859183]

>>22857745
Yup 2 more weeks

[Anonymous No.22859207]

>>22859093
>It's an assumption to say it ceases. Let me give a counterexample: what ceases temporarily is attention directed to explicit or autobiographical memory, and self-identification sustained by working memory. Attention to explicit memory is what yields the sense of self-awareness or personhood across succeeding moments. To claim qualia completely ceases is an assumption, but rather, qualia is still being experienced when attention is no longer directed to memory. An example is something like blindsight where someone can react to catching a ball but have no awareness of it. There is still an experiential stream of events.
I don't buy it. I think blindsight is a meme, that doesn't prove all that much. I don't see how guessing better than chance level proves that somehow qualia is involved. I also highly doubt the idea that during sleep or anesthesia the qualia is always present and just doesn't get commited to memory. Firstly, there is zero indication for that and secondly I don't think qualia and memory (at least short-term memory) can be perfectly separated like that.

[Anonymous No.22859226]

>>22858800
If everything has X quality, X loses all meaning

[Anonymous No.22859236]

So is there an Afterlife or not

[Anonymous No.22859278]

>>22859236
Yes

[Anonymous No.22859290]

>>22859207
Some drugs actually do that though, like drunken blackouts. As well as concussions. I remember talking to an EMT inside the car, then stepping up into the ambulance without help. I must've walked there but I sure don't know how.

[Anonymous No.22859535]

>>22859226
Not if you increase the power of X, basically making it differ based on degrees/gradations of complexity. I recommend Christof Koch's Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. I read it when younger, during my Neuroscience education, and his defense of panpsychism derived from Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory was interesting. Panpsychism is a respectable position in Philosophy of Mind, but it is not without problems, true.
>>22859207
Well, it is an interesting question... Does the numbing or painful sensation on my foot exist before I direct attention to it? There have been plenty of times where I've had a kind of pain, which I felt when directing awareness to it, but this felt sensation would vanish when directing focus elsewhere, normally on something external. It's kind of similar to the question "does a tree make a sound if no one has heard it?"
Other possibilities include quantum effects in microtubules, Bohm's implicate/explicit order, or the EM theory of consciousness, but my background in physics is presently too weak to adequately explore those avenues and their implications. That may change in the future.
I have nothing further to add. Note, I openly admit to being a bit biased, which is inevitable for many people. Some degree of healthy doubt over one's convictions, given the unfalsifiable nature of metaphysical inquiry, is good on my part. However, I know without a doubt that reductive physicalism and eliminativism are nonsense.
Or we can just give up and go the New mysterianism route.

>>22859180
These five reviews I've written tangentially tie into animism, vitalism, panpsychism, and/or Gaia theory:

Biocivilizations by Predrag B. Slijepčević
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5761296121

The Metaphysics of Technology by David Skrbina
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5403934553

The Sacred Tree by JH Philpot
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5127273004

Of Cosmogonic Eros by Ludwig Klages
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5136918847

Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction by Todd May
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5750596593
(note, Deleuze is a vitalist, but I did not mention it in this very brief review)

I have 30 other reviews you can read too, but they're mostly about weird fiction (Lovecraft, Ligotti, etc.), Eastern theology (Upanishads, Dao de Jing, etc.), children's literature (Wind in the Willows, Neverending Story, etc.), anti-modernism (Klages, Evola, Linkola, Kaczynski), ornithology (a lot including a textbook), etc. I enjoy writing reviews. However, there's a lot more I need to read.

I wouldn't say my background in philosophy is as impressive as someone who has majored in the field. I do have one philosophy graduate friend who I talk to a lot, and he is a process philosopher into figures like Deleuze, Whitehead, and Bergson. I find the concept of Bergsonian duration particularly intriguing, but I plan to read more in the near future while balancing it with my MS.

[Anonymous No.22859830]

>>22857745
Working on it.

[Anonymous No.22859943]

>>22858800
>>22858849
Beautiful posts. I also instantly saw the reference to the Heart Sutra (Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya, which some would also translate as the “Mind Sutra”, as “heart” here is being used in the sense of mind/consciousness/seat-of-awareness, or even more literally but now in garbled Engrish as “the sutra of the perfection of wisdom of crossing to the other shore”) with you saying:

>Form and consciousness are mutually dependent. Form is not exclusively dependent on consciousness for its existence (idealism), and consciousness is not exclusive dependent on form for its existence (physicalism, strong emergentism, epiphenomenalism, etc.)

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form”, as it’s put in the sutra. It’s fascinating and wonderful how, in some ways, the more “sophisticated” we seem to get (as in advances in neuroscience, physics, psychology, philosophy of mind, etc.), the more we in other ways return to the “naive” or “primitive”, seeing essentially how people from hundreds or thousands of years ago had the same deep insights which we can’t really say any better than they did, except it’s just that they didn’t have such advanced technology and the modern scientific vocabulary or our conception of scientific progress.

From the opposite (yet strangely harmonious) angle, we also get something like Parmenides’ monism of thinking and being (“For to think/experience and to be are one”) or Vedanta, which gives us a similar conclusion of something like panpsychism (“mind” and “matter” being mutually interdependent and inextricably intertwined). You also have the Indian philosophical school of Samkhya, with the dualism of Purusha (witness-consciousness, self, a transcendent observing consciousness) and Prakriti (the unconscious matter of the universe, from gross to fine/subtle matter, which Purusha illuminates and witnesses). If you think deeply enough and ponder on these matters, boil them down to their core, you’re likely to either arrive at some Vedantic idealism or dual-aspect monism, a Buddhist dual-aspect monism (or some yet transcendent worldview which goes beyond even this category), or a Samkhya-like Cartesian dualism which could also overlap with or be interpreted as dual-aspect monism.

The ancients, basically, have been thinking of this for a very long time. They had the faculties we do and the intelligence we do, even if not the scientific and technological process we have that comes with time and from “standing on the shoulders of giants.” We can come up with fancy and often Latinate polysyllabic phrases like panpsychism, epiphenomenalism, cognitive eliminativism/eliminative materialism, etc., but we’re essentially often just rehashing what they’ve already said in more complex, wordy ways, from the Presocratics and even some of “Sophists” of Ancient Greece to the Indian and East Asian philosophers and mystics.

[Anonymous No.22860598]

>>22859535
An interesting collection of topics. So from the Biocivilisations review, the book seems more about science than I was expecting. I'd be more than surprised if current scientific understanding has anything useful to add about consciousness much less panpsychism or animism.

I actually did major in philosophy, but unfortunately the philosophy department only cared about Anglos. The honors college had a bit about continentals, but never anything about process philosophy. (Well, some Heidegger.) Anyhow, I just went and read the stanford entry on Bergson. I can't say I could see much relation to panpsychism. But then perhaps the article wasn't sufficient for me to really understand duration; it is a rather different way of looking at things.

[Anonymous No.22860601]

>>22858743
>>22858748
That explains the process of consciousness not actually what it is

[Anonymous No.22860603]

>>22858887
There isn’t. In order for a moral code there has to be something that is “what’s not to do”

[Anonymous No.22860624]

>>22859830
Please keep us posted !

[Anonymous No.22860703]

>>22859535
>Does the numbing or painful sensation on my foot exist before I direct attention to it? There have been plenty of times where I've had a kind of pain, which I felt when directing awareness to it, but this felt sensation would vanish when directing focus elsewhere, normally on something external
It's interesting, because "felt sensation" is exactly be my definition of qualia, so I guess our definitions are no quite aligned then.
>Or we can just give up and go the New mysterianism route.
To tell you the truth, I'm actually more than fine with this. I've been bending my mind quite a bit about the topic, but the only conclusion I ever manage to arrive at is "damn that's weird"
>Not if you increase the power of X, basically making it differ based on degrees/gradations of complexity. I recommend Christof Koch's Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. I read it when younger, during my Neuroscience education, and his defense of panpsychism derived from Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory was interesting. Panpsychism is a respectable position in Philosophy of Mind, but it is not without problems, true.
Just as an aside, I think IIT is mostly bunk. The axioms Tononi suggests are not nearly as self-evident as he thinks and there are massive gaps in reasoning to get from these axioms to the bloated mathematical formalism to derive phi. I wouldn't completely discard the idea that consciousness has something to do with causal structures, though.