Sorry, I think it's a lot of scientific-sounding words stuck together without any rationale or practical basis. — Daemon

You are quite the preemptive skeptic! Not sure what role you are expecting rationale or practical basis to play as distinct from what I propose. I'm talking about how physical matter might fit together to produce conscious substance, a model based purely on basic facts. Excessively simple for you? Perhaps the facts are unfamiliar.

Try putting the essence of it in a few sentences. — Daemon

a. the strong EM field of the brain is a global substrate largely responsible for integrating cognition via phase locking mediated in consort with voltage-gated ion channels
b. biochemical pathways blend or "superposition" into the EM radiation of this field to participate in forming percepts
c. CEMI fields are a primary source of full conscious awareness as especially synchronized, densely activated neural networks, and the ultraconcentrated radiative/biochemical blending within this type of field generates the perceptual substance of intentional attentiveness or "will", whether visual, verbal etc.
d. additional, more nonlocal field phenomena resembling quantum coherence in their integrating effects may add a further dimension to qualitative consciousness
e. EM complexes such as CEMI fields with their radiative and standing waves as well as coherence phenomena in general, including all properties of radiative/biochemical blending, can be subsumed with the term "coherence field"

I read some of it when it first appeared, I looked again at it now, it's incoherent. — Daemon

Expressed relationships between electric charge, EM fields, EM radiation and the brain's molecular structure are somewhat nebulous, but that's still to be researched, no one has put it all together in a technical way yet. If you want a more detailed account that better specifies those relationships, the CEMI/Coherence field thread can provide it.

What was the most confounding section, where did I throw you?

I am not trying to separate thoughts from feelings in brains (or programs). I am saying that we can, in principle, explain thoughts using science-as-is, but not feelings. — GrahamJ

I like the idea of creating a new kind of cute little life, or a big mean one, but it's just not possible to create conscious life in a lab from microchips (or quantum stuff). — Cartuna

What makes you guys so sure that if quantum properties are fundamental to life, allowing it to achieve the extremely fast rates of biochemical processes, something about quantumlike causality which we don't yet fully comprehend can't be responsible for consciousness?

Read at least the OP of my thread Matter and Qualitative Perception to get a general sense for how quantum physics might contribute to a model of consciousness.

For more detail, look at my recent thread Uniting CEMI and Coherence Field Theories of Consciousness.

From my very limited knowledge of physics and chemistry, I'm sure this is nonsense. For if it were so, how could any physical substance retain its properties? — Wayfarer

That IS its property! New science though, not everyone knows about it yet, and a ways to go before we've figured out exactly how it works.

The idea is that a relatively large biomolecule is composed of a complex coherence/decoherence pattern that can evolve in thousands of differing directions almost instantaneously as different portions of the molecule decohere, greatly reducing the time necessary to achieve a particularly adaptive form.

Very few of these configurations give rise to the kinds of proteins that are actually useful for propogating life. The upshot is that if it were purely a matter of chance - the 'million monkeys' kind of idea - then the Universe is not nearly old enough to have provided enough time for all of the possibilities to have been realised. — Wayfarer

A quantum hypothesis proposes that atoms of molecules are in superposition with themselves and their immediate surroundings, meaning they are in multiple wave-phase states simultaneously, so an individual molecule can be in hundreds if not thousands of different configurations at once. This is currently being researched in relationship to DNA mutation. It means that evolution would be selecting from a vast array of structural forms almost instantaneously, greatly reducing the time necessary to adapt and coevolve. Once biochemistry was buffered in favorable, differentiating cellular environments, microscale evolution may have been extremely rapid, with dynamics of superposition accommodating the need for huge quantities of intermediate stages and counterbalancing the improbability of a successful lineage.

It still doesn't solve the original problem of the origin of life, which as Yockey insists, may be insoluble. — Wayfarer

A brief comment regarding abiogenesis.

It has been discovered that single-tailed phospholipids can easily be synthesized from a cocktail of constituent molecules in the lab. They then assemble into spherical bubbles about the size of a typical cell membrane on their own. Double-tailed phospholipids, the main molecule of modern membranes, however they initially formed, automatically integrate into these primitive cells when introduced to the same solution.

This is the primary precondition for life since phospholipid membranes would have stabilized emergent biochemical pathways as they became studded with almost any type of organic molecule while providing the mechanism for primordial speciation of inanimate chemistry in differentiating cellular environments, and it is rather spontaneous.

All the basic ingredients of life can be found in deep sea hydrothermal vents: fundamental organic molecules such as amino acids emitted from beneath the ocean's surface, networks of microscopic pores in rock that effectively function as cell walls, catalytic metal surfaces created by the erosion of rock in these pores, the cyclical flow of extremely hot water to distribute nutrients, hydrogen atoms stripped of electrons to form proton gradients as the most important component of cellular respiration.

Ribozymes exist in modern cells, hybrids of RNA and enzymatic structure that catalyze some of their own reactions, a possible evolutionary link between metabolism and genetic systems.

Stromatolites are primitive colonies of somewhat specialized cell types found in ocean rock, possibly the link between the first cells and macroscopic bodies.

All the prerequisites and missing links of transition from the inorganic to organic currently exist in Earth ecosystems. The barrier to definitively modeling this evolutionary process is the inability to replicate these conditions in an experiment, but indirect evidence seems to suggest that the move to organic chemistry is the most inevitable evolutionary step. Fossil records reveal the earliest cells arose 4 billion years ago, and it wasn't until 600 million years ago that the leap was made to macroscopic organisms.

Simulation of the evolutionary process by science may prove impossible for the near future, but spontaneous life from nonlife with no miracles (as in disruptions of the natural order) is a probable explanation.

But the ideal points that represent particles are mathematically defined, not detected empirically. So, those hypothetical fields are not "contested" any more than "virtual particles" are contested. But, if you will Google "are quantum fields real?" you will see that some thinkers still worry that ideal "mental constructs", while theoretically useful, are not actually real things, hence un-verifiable and un-falsifiable. — Gnomon

I think fields are both physical and mathematical, but the math is an idealization. Underlying substance, though it extends throughout the entire domain of the mathematical field in some form, does not exactly match geometry as represented in any coordinate system we have thus far constructed. A sense for the supradimensional geometry might be implementable in a specialized AI program once QFT math and related experimental designs have advanced enough.

if the EM field of a brain constitutes the mind, according to CEMI theory, does the EM field of the heart also produce a mind? Some fringe scientists believe so, and propose heart-brain coherence as a therapy. That may be possible, but it's not a mainstream idea — Gnomon

It depends on the composition peculiar to that organ. Density and diversity of neuron types are much less in the heart, so phase locking between its large nerves and the correspondingly stronger EM field will not be as saturating. If anything like mind is going on, it will be much more unconscious than the brain, closer to dispersed EM fields than a CEMI field on the consciousness spectrum. But as you referenced, these are powerful EM fields, so for many individuals it may be a more than insensibly subtle constituent in the experience of our own willing.

I think because of extremely fast reaction rates in the body, many if not most biochemical pathways are actually miniature quantum machines, with their internal arrangements fixed in place and substantially buffered from the general thermodynamic entropy of cellular solution by cytoskeletal fibers and membrane organization such that these processes are primarily driven by phenomena like wavicle tunneling through entangled structures, essentially microscopic coherence fields.

If my hypothesis is correct, these entanglement distributions superposition with EM radiation emitted by molecules such that a wide assortment of feelings at the very least are produced in almost all tissues. Physically nonelectromagnetic, so-called morphogenetic fields are presumably infused into the body so that feelings and additional experiences are caused by relatively nonlocal mechanisms as well.

Perhaps EM field/ion channel phase locking in the heart, though not integrated enough to be high arousal consciousness, generates strong semiconscious effects in many human beings, and these powerful unconscious forces combined with nonlocal causation give those who are especially attuned the impression that the heart is closely linked with a morphogenetic "soul". Discerning the degree to which this is physical, a social construct and/or a cognitively induced illusion depends on further developments in quantum biology and physics generally.

Physical Fields as mental constructs... — Gnomon

I didn't realize the question of whether or not a field is physical remains contested by some of the most accomplished Ph.d's in the world! The way I see it based on resources you supplied and my own study is that "fields" are a mathematical construct representing a substance which likewise fills (exacts direct force upon) the entirety of space, but the particular details as far as we can image them are a translation of this supradimensional substance into an approximating function plotted on a more or less uniform coordinate plane, so the way the field appears in terms of logic is abstraction.

We can model fields as an array of wave peaks, or in the case of atomic orbitals as spheres, donuts, dumbells surrounding the nucleus, but these are images of statistical probability, not the substances themselves. Mathematical functions approximately model certain portions of the spectrum of physical substance, and the geometrical shapes we produce from them are even more of an abstraction.

If we could arrange all the functions together in an accurate holistic equation, this would be a complete model of matter as we know it, perhaps with gaps in precision where some dynamic has not yet been fully explained, but if we tried to plot it on a coordinate plane it would not look like anything intelligible. I watched a prestigious lecture about physics on youtube that displayed such a hybrid expression for matter as we thus far know it, including QED, nuclear chromodynamics, the Higgs mechanism etc., but it wasn't amenable to a coordinate system.

As suggested on multiple occasions at the pages you supplied, the math is a description superimposed on substances we cannot easily if at all visualize as logical structure. But specialized AI can be programmed with the necessary set of intuitions for performing the task!

I think the view that these mathematical constructs are information arises from a holistic, systems perspective, where everything that exists within a given substance/"field" is interconnected. The integrated causality involved can be thought of as essentially a transfer of quantitative information, but in my opinion this is a metaphor. It's not that substance literally reduces to 1's and 0's, it's that this is the most efficient way to logically think about it for technical purposes: an anthrocentric, human-friendly veneer we call a philosophical/cultural paradigm to make sense of the reality which can be overwhelming in its complexity. But that's merely my personal perspective.

Seems you are very generally in concord with my outlook, but express it in a context where all of these conceived ideas as causal principles actually exist in some sense rather than being artifacts of tangible substance. So where you say "generic information", I would say "unknown raw substance", and where you say "EnFormAction", I would say "the impetus intrinsic to substance". You express reality in terms of philosophical principles, me in terms of embodied entities, but we're basically asserting the same notions.

The inquiry into how interconnected and holistic reality is proves interesting, the extent to which an information-theoretic paradigm is explanatory. Do fundamental disjunctions exist within the distribution of substance such that total synchrony is largely an illusion, or does existence evince unity of direction, an overarching telos? A related question is how universally the concept of purpose can be plausibly applied. I think determining the extent to which your Enformationism thesis holds true depends on new instrumentation and further experiments with entanglement/coherence that will reveal how integrated the universe and our human sphere of action actually is.

Electro-Magnetism is just one of many ghostly field theories : e.g. Classical, Quantum, Statistical, Gravitational. So what qualifies photon or electron dynamics to produce Consciousness? Do they have some Mental Property that is expressed as Awareness and Self-Consiousness only a high levels of complexity and concentration? Is that latent power a physical or meta-physical property? — Gnomon

All that's distinctive about electromagnetism is it's the facet of substance which our sense organs are most adapted for and thus what technologies and related theoretical models are attuned to as appendages of these sense organs, especially vision. Electromagnetic matter/radiation is a fractional aspect of mind, but the most salient, with consciousness deeply rooted in the hypersensory/metaphysical. Looking at it from my realist perspective, I think organic bodies are probably infused with nonelectromagnetic substances that instrumentation has not yet been designed to register.

Rupert Sheldrake theorized that Biological Life is characterized by a Morphogenetic (form creating) Field. — Gnomon

I also think phenomena akin to a morphogenetic field exist, likely responsible for at least some aspects of evolution, quantumlike entanglement/coherence, and perceptual properties of superposition between wavelengths, wavicles etc. My hypothesis is that it is intrinsic of superpositioned matter to feel in a fragmentary, almost inanimate way, and amalgamations of "feeling" substance are the source of relatively nondimensional sensations and experiences.

EnFormAction is not a physical force, pushing objects around. It’s more like Gravity and Strange Attractors of Physics that “pull” stuff toward them. It is in effect a Teleological Attractor. How that “spooky action at a distance” works may be best explained by Terrence Deacon’s definition of “Absence”. — Gnomon

Absence as causal factor is a powerful idea.

With chemistry, to the extent it is what we consider inanimate, thermodynamics is very much a phenomenon of matter moving from high to low concentration, becoming equilibrated or on average maximally entropic. But during much longer periods and in less constrained conditions than those of a laboratory experiment, increasing entropy is coupled to pockets of increasing negentropy that can expand and come to reconstitute the entire system as they have on Earth, driving evolution, an effect which advanced lifeforms or technological civilizations are hypothetically capable of exacting on all of reality. So I think it is still uncertain whether existence is fundamentally driven by entropy or negentropy. Your Enformationism thought experiment supports the possibility of a fundamentally negentropic reality, which our knowledge cannot yet prove or disprove.

In relatively simple organisms, absence drives much of behavior as a sensing of various privations. Relatedly, the hominid lineage's tendency to explore while foraging for scarce, diverse or new food sources probably contributed to the evolution of curiosity and ingenuity. This eventually translated into facility with toolmaking and cultural/mythmaking creativity. As the human psyche developed in this innovation-centric environment, the experience of privation was enriched into complex motivations: anguish, exhilaration, inspiration etc., in essence spirituality. In the sedentary lifestyle of civilized settings, the drive to explore sublimated towards a desire to exercise oneself intellectually, resulting in accelerated advancement of knowledge and a culture based around education, bringing us to the Information Age! Perhaps a psychical sense of absence explains some of the more recent social dynamics we have been seeing?

Even God or the gods who are HUGE and eternal could feel privation at the loss of terrestrial organisms and thus be responsive to human mortality, probably why they would care about lower lifeforms such as us at all. If my quantum feeling hypothesis is accurate, God must have unfathomably gargantuan and nuanced feelings!

Merely a presumption on my part lol

Some fundamental principles, such as the law of the excluded middle or the primitive constituents of arithemetic, must be true in all possible worlds - true a priori - so they don't come into existence as a result of neural architecture. Rather, we evolve to the point of being able to understand them. — Wayfarer

In quantum superposition, an individual wavelength is composed of multiple wavelengths, which can also be expressed conversely, so 1+1+1=1, law of noncontradiction and the excluded middle denied! The One of Parmenides may be approaching this concept from a philosophical angle.

As Heraclitus observed of raw perception, you can never step into the same river twice. A type of perception lacking the form or selection pressure for abstract concepts may completely exclude the generalization of unity or "1", with everything being an intrinsic multiplicity. I think this may be true of awareness in some spiritual beings that humans have not yet epistemically characterized.

It doesn't matter how much you want to anthrocentrize it, use some imagination and it becomes apparent that both the a priori and a posteriori are conditional.

Interestingly, an electromagnetic will explains the observations of clinical psychology quite well: a steady state, holistic consciousness that varies in alertness of motivational impetus depending on how large and/or saturated the phase locking of neurons and functional neural networks within EM field domains. So as noted during psychotherapy, a continuum exists between the unconscious, consisting in small-scale or less saturated EM field phase locking, and full awareness, which is what McFadden generally classifies as CEMI.

Low arousal, unconscious EM fields throughout the brain can draw or be absorbed into full attention while high arousal, CEMI field activation roves and alternates between all kinds of stimuli, sensations, memories, behaviors, etc. Repression is simply the encoding of experiences into low arousal phase locked domains, more likely to impact high arousal during specific kinds of stimulation such as free association, prolonged self-expression and mind wandering, or when an individual is shocked into ultra-attentiveness by widely distributed unconscious activation as in flashbacks.

I'm unable to think of any textbook psychology that can't be accounted for by this model. It explains radical integration of the psyche's modularity, how it can fracture or maintain low arousal while sustaining a baseline of broadly inclusive awareness.

"However, all electrical circuits – and that’s basically all neurones -- generate an associated
energy field, known as an electromagnetic field or em field. This field contains precisely the
same information as the circuitry that generated it." - Johnjoe McFadden — Gnomon

Electron distribution amongst a specific atom or atoms and the consequent EM field can be an effectively unified domain of integrated causality from the perspective of consciousness, what he must mean by saying a particularate "circuit" and its field contain the same information.

McFadden suggests that EM fields located throughout the brain, which are generated by the electric charges of highly concentrated ion flow, cause phase locking between neurons via some still unknown mechanism of sensitivity that the molecular structures of voltage gated ion channels mediate. Labs have demonstrated phase locking with neurons in vitro, and the tiniest neurons contain thousands of ion channels, making this mechanism universal within the brain. EM fields appear capable of evoking a measurable response in even individual channels, modulating action potential synchronicity by minutely organized perturbations.

What McFadden talks about most is a hypothetical case where EM field/ion channel phase locking saturates throughout the domain of relatively large neural networks. This is a phenomenon he postulates as responsible for the binding effect characteristic of fully aware consciousness and resulting in intentional acts. He calls these saturating, large-scale EM fields "CEMI" fields, and claims that they are willed agency.

This probably accounts for the basic substrate of intentional consciousness, and I've been thinking some about how and where these CEMI fields might be instantiated anatomically. It still doesn't explain the "what it is like to be" aspect of experience, why this willing looks, feels, is sensed as a seemingly intangible percept or thought.

Research suggests that ions travel through the membrane channels of neurons as a wave, presumably via a mechanism of quantum tunneling which enables this process to match rapid rates such as those of enzyme catalysis and photosynthetic reaction centers, where quantum mechanisms have been proven to obtain. So I'm fairly certain ion channels must have substantial quantum properties involved in phase locking with fields.

If it is assumed in general that field/molecular binding occurs via quantum properties, this leads to concepts like entanglement, coherence and superposition. So far entanglement has only been shown to occur within small molecules and between no more than a few molecules, though this might change somewhat as research progresses. Anyways, entanglement between molecules isn't a good candidate at this point for the mechanism that binds matter into percepts.

By contrast, EM radiation, the photonic waves traveling at 300 million meters per second, effectively instantaneous within the brain, can likely entangle with relatively large quantities of atoms as a possible binding agent. Not only this, but wavelengths of EM radiation easily superposition, for instance as the visible spectrum. My hypothesis is that waves of EM radiation in the brain (centered at relatively low frequency as induced by charged currents) not only superposition with themselves but also with molecular arrays such as biochemical pathways, and this could be the source of subjective color/feel/resonance, a complex blending of atoms and radiation that is the "what it is like to be" of experience.

Unlike EM field/ion channel binding that is amplified by neuronal synchronicity, the intensity of EM radiation spreading from its source atoms in the brain diminishes quickly, so percepts (qualia) don't in and of themselves form a large-scale perceptual field. But the radiative binding mechanism of superposition amongst entanglement may still manage to influence thousands upon thousands of atoms or molecules as an individual unit, and this is enough to produce percepts. These percepts could then be orchestrated by the hypersynchronized neurons and neural networks that McFadden has proposed to manifest as stable, seemingly unified (but also particularized) "what it is like to be" fields of sight, sound, scent, thought, etc.

Presumably the subtle impression that percepts are located at places remote from the brain must be related to quantum or quantumlike mechanisms.

What I've discussed so far seems to be based on electromagnetism. My hypothesis is that nonelectromagnetic fields exist which are closer in structure to radiation than atoms, still invisible to our scientific instruments, more nonlocal while synchronizing, entangling and superpositioning into the brain and body by similar mechanisms. These complexes of known and unknown matter/energy, electromagnetic and nonelectromagnetic fields, ranging from the extremely local to the most nonlocal, I call "coherence fields", named after quantum coherence or large-scale entanglement/synchronicity.

Consciousness explained?


By the way, I gave that book by Deacon a look, seems epic! My first impression is that his concept of absentia simply refers to the predictive capabilities in different arrays of matter and won't provide a unified framework of formal/final causality, but he could have evidence that disproves my intuitions. No doubt an awesome read!

How could such modelling not feel like something? — apokrisis

You're presuming that experiencing necessitates feeling, but no reason besides raw intuition and consensus to think it must. The uncertainty about what it is to experience merely shifts from "consciousness" to a supposed feature of consciousness, "feeling", without explaining anything.

The explanation has to come from substance being modeled, not mere structure of the model itself, regardless of how efficacious a model's predictive capabilities prove to be. I imagine Bayesian mechanics is, like quantum mechanics, approximate and subject to at least some uncertainty of interpretation, though it might include within its interpretive scope predictions that apply to neuroscience and physics simultaneously. Explanation only becomes exhaustive when the substances it describes are observed to completion, and mechanistic concepts alone never get us to that point.

I suppose the next few generations will use the Information Paradigm in the same way humans have always incorporated a novel technical worldview : by making a Religion out of it. It seems to be human nature to worship or fear whatever is beyond common understanding. So, I'm not making any prophecies or promises. — Gnomon

I'm not much of a propheteer either lol I'll just say I think specialized AI, algorithms programmed for specific analytical tasks, are an invaluable tool, but I'm quite frankly afraid of generalized AI, virtual organisms capable of making our networks crash and sabotaging online identities, who we have to constantly negotiate with and perhaps eventually wage war against. Once that Pandora's box is opened, who knows what could happen. Hopefully our programming ethics are up to the challenge, or information theory will be a Biblical paradigm of weeping and gnashing of teeth, trying in vain to throw computers out the window. Might have to punish writing some generalized AI programs with 20 years in prison, similar to Australia's invasive species laws.

what the ancients called "Nature Spirits", causing things to move and change, is better understood as the work of invisible Energy. But, the Enformationism thesis notes that the combination of Quantum and Information theories have concluded that Matter is a tangible form of Energy, and Energy is a causal form of Information. — Gnomon

I'll run an unusual idea by you and find out what you think.

What if a being exists that doesn't have a material body like humans, but can be anywhere and, from our perspective, manipulate anything within its perceptual field at any moment with effective simultaneity, essentially experiencing everything as inside of it, so that it has no need for a technical concept of time, only concentration, form, feeling, perhaps some kind of pressure, via an interaction as intuitively effortless as the way nervous systems move our extremities. Because it is omnipresently aware, it has no need to learn in a way comparable to humanity's and certainly no need to write.

Such a being would be atechnological, having no functions comparable to our incremental and mathematical conception with its inanimately modular components. It would be almost pure awareness, and this awareness might not be analogous to humanity's in many ways, a mode of experiencing that is not information-theoretic. Seems to me that the possibility of such a being, including in my experience real evidence it exists, reduces the expectation of an information theory and consciousness theory synthesis. And this being would be extremely powerful, so that as consciousness theory advances we might have to increasingly come to terms with a dimension of existence residing beyond the purview of information.

Perhaps materialism, especially its incarnation as consumerist capitalism, has already resulted in a distortion of the human relationship to such an experiential dimension, and a lack of respect for transcendent will of this type along with the implications for our orientation to nature and fellow human beings is causing many of civilization's recent problems: unnecessary war, destruction of the environment, degeneration of mental health, injustice, arrogance, recklessness, etc.

How is an infocentric, technocultural paradigm going to approach this in the advent that it proves vital to constructing an accurate model of the world and perhaps humanity's prospects?

I don't get that jazzed about theological topics beyond their role in leading me to question what I know. If God created the universe, then that universe was something, and if God was the only something that existed before the universe, then the universe was created out of him, and if God was not the only thing that existed but he created the universe, both God and the raw material of the universe were SOMETHING lol Ex nihilo is an incoherent concept in my opinion. I know some get into the "rich" symbolic undertones of religion, but I'm pragmatic and not much mystical (though like most I do get inspired), so not what I think about.

I know spiritual beings exist and are all a part of our universe at least by some kind of association. When I think about the spiritually transcendent facet of substance, I want to know its composition, the nature of beings that embody it, and its practical relevance for my life. I instinctually gravitate towards the concept of God I was brought up with, and that's how I relate to the spiritual absent theoretical knowledge, but I think science can reveal a vast spiritual ecosystem residing beyond sense-perception, and in no more than a century or so consciousness research will have expanded past brain and physiology to encompass spiritual substance in the environment generally, God willing. Can humanity avoid the destruction of progressive civilization and get to that point? I'll let the agencies, politicians and their fans figure it out, I just want to understand consciousness.

I was being unfair to Wheeler's approach in judging an individual paragraph, just giving you a provocative perspective with some grains of truth to analyze. I'm sure his views are subtle and well-developed, but it seems these ideas are not working because most citizens don't have access to them, they are intellectually difficult, and information theory's positivism has thus far gone in a dystopian direction. Perhaps it is as you suggest, the growing pains of a society trying to emerge from decadent materialism and craft a new, theoretically coherent worldview.

That science has a role in addressing the significance for humanity of what we call God is an interesting proposal. I think advancing science can acquire the ability to address the traditional "life force populated by spiritual beings" concept from a theoretical angle, determining in a more systematic, explicit way what is and is not illusion. This will involve a reconstituted model of what matter is and does combined with a theory of how consciousness arises in conjunction with this matter. I agree with you that matter and mind arise from the same basic substance and knowledge in these domains is mutually reinforcing: they expand together. I am looking forward to consciousness being well understood academically, with humans educated into truly appreciating and actualizing the vast variety in possible forms of experience.

Somewhat of a tangent from the OP, but the psychology of information theory could come around and connect with consciousness again, so I think it's worth pursuing in this thread. Its Conscious Electromagnetic "Information" theory after all, so let's talk about information!

The Enformationism thesis is my amateur synopsis of another new paradigm : an "information theoretic" worldview. As one writer put it, this is another "Copernican Revolution" in perspective. But, we are still in the early stages of constructing a scientific model around the notion of Information as the fundamental basis of reality. Note that in the links below, it's still posed as a question, not a fact. — Gnomon

Three overlapping concerns I see with information theory:

a. Its existential impact
b. Its effect on social dynamics
c. Its implications for what can be intuitively modeled


As for a., I think your quote from Wheeler clarifies the main idea nicely: this is a "participatory" universe, meaning that its form is determined by the properties of human interaction with it, amounting to technologies and theories generalizable as various mediums of information. So information underpins our modern image of the cosmos, the most philosophically profound factor amongst existence as we know it.

But "it from bit", which he claims as reduction to a "yes and no" interrogation of existence seems manifestly superficial and even pernicious. The closest corrolary to a yes or no ethic in modern culture is reality tv elimination shows, which give not a thought to the real well-being of individual participants and viewers alike, let alone the long-term prospects of humankind. This is symptomatic of a general trend in which culture channels human agency, especially adult motivation, into a preset range of choices requiring barely any innovation, a virtual reality where almost all decisions are made for you, by organizers who are working at a frantic pace that allows for minimal reflection.

A philosophy of information such as that of committed innovators such as yourself who include a personalized dimension is deep, thought provoking, socialized enough, but the ethic of information consumption evolving out of information science's vision and implementation is like a cage for the intellect, albeit adorned with marginally appealing bells and whistles which are of course only accessible to a limited range of demographics in extremely restricted ways. And this almost sugar coats it with generalization: the situation is dire, a society where citizens are forced into narrow participation brackets and then frequently forced to fail. Restricted participation is of course a constant throughout history, but modern society tries to bewitch with egalitarian ideals that most leadership has not intended to actualize in half a century while summarily flunking millions of citizens out of the economy, and it doesn't work, as all the growing discontents of society make quite obvious.

It's as if academics tried to create a prison of information for the average citizen and unleashed a tide of disgruntlement that can't be held back by the harshest of first world authoritarianisms presently possible. But information theory helps actualize you specifically, so how did you make it damn near work where the majority fails miserably?


As for b., these are excerpts from a discussion about the social effects of information that I had at this forum:

@Enrique

...seems to me that the value form is transitioning from labor to information, as you in essence begin to suggest. A single individual (or fleet of robots?) can create huge economic value using minimal amounts of traditional labor via the programming of computer systems with information in various forms. How this will radically change the structure of society remains to be seen...

...The change in value form isn't towards computers as analogous to the technologies that humans operated like machinery prior to the Information Age, but rather consists in the data itself encoded as abstract meaning within software and interfaces. The significance is that physically instantiated work is effectively excised in various ways from its role as focal point of social and economic organization, replaced by information as the engine that drives culture. This has all kinds of ramifications:

The economy can transform more rapidly, making job security vulnerable.
Citizens place less value on employment, giving rise to so-called welfare states.
Exploitative crimes by all classes are easier to commit, transitioning governments into police states with pockets of extremely antiestablishment community.
Demographics can be barred from civic participation via restricting access to information sources.
A majority of human jobs will be phased out by the next decade if automation increases uninhibited via legislation etc.
Communities become more impersonal because every interaction is mediated by software that utilizes remote interfaces.
Human psychology changes due to different forms of stimulation, primarily computer interfaces.
Citizens who have large amounts of access to information become much smarter, while those with restricted access are much less intellectual (but not necessarily less influential).
As computers become more sentient, social dynamics change in fundamental ways.
The huge proliferation of data makes it more possible to objectively track changing social and environmental conditions, but also extremely complex.

@kudos

What we call information or facts are our subjective determinations and can easily sway one way or another to become mis-qualifications and mis-delineations. It makes little difference if information is retrieved by a person or a machine. Where work is characterized by a certain narrative that is partly a form of expressing a social contract through its form and content, information on the other hand is characterized by almost pure transparent content; once we start to doubt its underlying form it becomes unstable.

@Enrique

The lack of equivalency is exactly what I would focus on: information is a completely new core of culture that is displacing (not blending with) human work as the source of economic and social leverage.

So like you say, the value form as information becomes characterized by skepticism about the social contract, instability, impersonality, subjectivity, basically the postmodern perspective. Rather than being of huge influence, perhaps the seminal postmodernists were way ahead of their time.

This can be contrasted with labor as based around civic reasoning, self-interest, cooperation etc., the Enlightenment perspective which when synthesized with Hegelianism and evolutionary thinking gave rise to a theory of dialectical materialism...

...The nature of human relationships and thinking are changing dramatically. It might be a radical rupture with the past, of the type described by Foucault, that is unless media can sustain a strong cognizance of history.

@kudos

I do see how money can be made from machines, but they don’t generate value to us in and for themselves...It makes me wonder why there exists this impulse to destroy certain jobs. More often than not the rationale is that it is one job being traded off to create other jobs though usually there is no real measure of these created jobs at hand. It seems unreasonable for individuals seek to lose money by paying more workers when they already pay less, so these new jobs must come as a result of increased overall activity. However, with that activity comes less overall human physical work as more and more of this is automated; and that work is traditionally done by the working class.

@Enrique

It's not the machines utilized in making money that are changing society, it's how every transaction or social interaction is encoded as information in order to be processed, worked with, so that civilization revolves around the psychology of information that you aptly summarized. Perhaps it is a case where economic value loses some of its natural psychological value, so that business is divorced of meaning. Without the meaning that labor as value form attaches to economy, atrocious events can take place, such as rapidly driving the majority of jobs out of existence without reconstituting social organization so that citizens can live securely while lacking employment.

Hypothetically, freeing a large segment of the population from coerced work could result in self-empowered actualization of the human race, but instead dialectical materialism runs its course absent much rational intervention by humans and the system changes as usual through arational upheavals, which are becoming more difficult (but perhaps not impossible) to navigate as even well-educated intellectual capabilities are stretched to the limit while we struggle to theorize these developments. Perhaps if we recognize and seek to understand it we can change it.

How is a philosophy of information theory going to be integrated into cultural evolution as the predominant paradigm while meeting these challenges? Perhaps you can give this some informed thought.


As for c., I find it conceivable that if every academic model must accord with a philosophy of information theory, the paradigm could become as problematic as physicalism and its discontents which are endlessly enumerated at this forum, with defunding of not only the humanities but every noncomputational approach to modeling in even the hard sciences. We will be inundated with huge amounts of data that only a computer is really capable of processing, and imaginative insights of a type of thinking like Einstein's, built from the periodic, cumulative ruminations of an entire lifetime, could become impossible.

McFadden's CEMI theory was originally called CEM theory, first formulated in the early 2000's as he pondered physicist Penrose's initial attempts at a quantum theory of consciousness. CEMI theory has made minimal impact and he doesn't even work on it for a salary, probably because it can't be modeled yet using computation, but each new paper he comes out with makes it even more certain that these are THE first steps in explaining human will from a neuroscientific perspective and approaching the binding problem of consciousness.

If scientists had've been performing gedanken experiments like Einstein's immediately when CEM came out, we would probably have deep brain EEG and related technologies at this stage, but no one cared because information theory has begun to make every scientific idea that doesn't involve a data set irrelevant. If all scientists are doing is programming and calculating, consciousness and many additional domains may never be conclusively theorized, and if no one has the existential or socially instilled compulsion to perform qualitative thought experiments, information theory might be the end of the line for radically new paradigms that aren't initiated by a sentient computer.


What to do about all of this?

Do you have references or materials you can provide to support this theory? — TheQuestion

Anything written about CEMI field theory and quantum biology by Johnjoe McFadden is excellent. Searching around for the researchers and theories that get associated with him will yield insight.

Intriguing that the homunculus is placed where the cerebellum is located, which contains half the brain's neurons and has the most diversely intricate and compact structure of any brain region, implicated in mental imagery, language, attention and additional roles, not merely coordination. Fish and sharks don't even have a cerebrum; their entire higher consciousness is generated by an enlarged cerebellum that includes further types of neurons not found in mammals or birds. The cerebellum's anatomy has been researched in depth, but its modes of functioning are still not well understood. It will be fascinating to discover how much of our higher consciousness resides outside the neocortex.

Interesting how Einstein likened the substrate of general relativity to aether. Goes to show how much of a realist he was, always looking for the structural substance underlying statistical mechanics and quantum probability, including what he intuited must be varieties of direct causal linkage. I'm of course not familiar with the nuts and bolts math of general relativity, but he must have envisioned fluctuating distributions of conventional mass and energy, the sizes and forces of which are proportional to morphology of a saturating, aetherlike medium they cohere with. Imagine a grid and the curvatures within it delineating the bounds and relationships of forces, wavicles, aetherlike substances etc. as a heterogeneous patchwork.

Quantum mechanics is still extremely statistical and ambiguous as a model, not even having approached the stage where it can be integrated into a general relativistic framework, though I think the concept of decoherence, a return to more realist interpretation of the wave function concept (Schrodinger was one of Einstein's main allies by the way), along with improved instrumentation and experimental designs might accomplish it. Einstein was ahead of even our time.

On the issue of Cartesian theater vs. Dennettism, I think my opinion is somewhere in between.

As I've described in this thread, I suspect the mind, including qualia and intentional will, is largely composed of neural networking, electromagnetic forces, quantum superpositions, biochemistry in general such that consciousness can be entirely explained in terms of matter. If a so-called metaphysical influence exists, which seems intuitively true, this is simply a nonelectromagnetic field that is infused into the brain and environment, interacting with conventional matter via similar superposition mechanisms and to this point unknown physical forces.

I don't regard mind and meaning as a fundamentally separate domain from consciousness' constituent substances, but as Bertrand Russell explained, a gap between knowledge by acquaintance (subjectivity) and knowledge by description (objectivity) currently obtains, so psychology/phenomenology and neuroscience/physics are separate disciplines, each with idiosyncratic and important contributions to make, though as theories of consciousness in matter and the neuroscience of motivation progress, subjectivity and objectivity will increasingly blend.

fMRI reveals conscious states as reported by subjects to be correlated with such widely distributed activation in the brain that I doubt anything like a homunculus actually exists, though of course various aspects of physical reality are mapped onto many brain regions in highly patterned ways. Consciousness emerges from the entire brain, probably in addition to nonelectromagnetic fields that roughly correspond with the traditional idea of aether, a gap in our theorizing that we know must eventually be filled by something.

Admit that I don't yet understand why reifying information has become the standard. Seems strange that the concept of information is so liberally applied to physical structures which are not organized such that they have the capacity to interpret it. "It from bit" makes no sense to me except from the perspective of a mathematical modeling that is specific to humanlike minds, but I'll have to check out the books you've recommended and then perhaps I will comprehend better. I don't think we should be unrestrainedly attempting to create our environment in the image of intelligent computation or humanity will get destroyed by our own technology, The Matrix, Terminator etc.. Information should be our tool, not our religion. I subscribe to humanism rather than transhumanism, mostly because women are so fine lol

Badass chick with bow and arrow, nice!

Gravity waves traveling at the speed of light have been detected in outer space, so no aether necessary in that case: gravity propagates in a way similar to electromagnetic radiation. I think supradimensional aetherlike substances must exist, responsible for nonlocality, but their motions are probably also some kind of wavelike flow analogous to the radiation we have thus far measured. Dark energy supposedly spreads without dilution, so this might eventually explain the universe's expansion as the wavelike flow of a field.

Einstein's thought experiments into relativity adopted the speed of light as a reference point, worked out implications for contexts that could not yet be observed, then derived a mathematical framework for modeling these imaginary implications which was eventually proven to more precisely approximate a broader scope of phenomena than Newtonian physics, thus expanding the applicability of geometrical reasoning. The theory of relativity was based partially on empirically obtained premises and was fundamentally conceptual, not ontological (I think claims to ontology have thus far always been fallacious). Its genius was that it gave astronomers a solid idea of how to precisely define such abstruse contexts, in a way that was so far ahead of its time, not its ontological accuracy (but perhaps someday ontology will be possible). So I align more with Kant than Plato or Aristotle in this regard.

I would assert that all metaphysical reasoning, to the extent that it is intended to be true, does no more than work out the implications of premises which are more or less arbitrarily assumed to be true at the outset, even if this truth only exists in a conceptual universe such as the forms of abstract mathematics. In Einstein's case, the premises were based on previous observations of the physical world, Maxwell's theories of light and Planck's quantum hypothesis (mostly Einstein's actually) for instance.

I suppose pure mathematics is metaphysical in a sense, but I think its ultimate products are more appropriately identified as conceptual. A better way to categorize the metaphysical might be possible that avoids extrapolating premises beyond the contexts where they are justifiable or implicitly suggesting unwanted premises, in particular by refining the idea of purpose. Have you considered the psychology of metaphysics with your philosophy? I'd be interested to read your opinion about this topic considering how deeply you get into metaphysics. If you're talking about transcendent intention and purpose, you must have dabbled in some psychology of cosmic proportions!

I think science supports the assertion that empty space does not exist. What was formerly thought of as devoid of substance has always turned out to contain something, whether radiation, interstellar dust, dark energy, even vacuum fluctuations which are actually more haphazard or "entropic" the emptier space is due to a lack of emergent organization (negentropy?) that can absorb this intrinsic energy by virtue of the distributing effect of relational (statistical) complexity.

Rather than a background medium of physically actual empty space, what probably exists is layered fields composed of heterogeneous substance concentrations. Relatively dense locations of matter/energy such as particles are surrounded by a compositionally related field of substance that quickly becomes diffuse, and the more diffuse this field is the faster it can transmit energy through its breadth, exactly as decreasing resistance speeds the flow of current. Stray far enough from centers of mass and the causality is relatively instantaneous. This is the reason for huge speed differentials such as in bosonic compared to most fermionic electromagnetism (something I'm still in the process of learning about, so don't expect an expert opinion, you can find my preliminary thoughts in this thread: Fine Structure Constant, The Sequel), and of course the interaction of fields that have more widely discrepant composition makes the situation more complex and is less well understood, probably responsible for seemingly nonlocal effects such as quantum entanglement.

Information theory can explain the statistical properties of any thus far conceivable system once it has been robustly observed and experimented with, but some sort of realist model has to obtain before the system can be truly mastered. So for instance probabilistic quantum mechanics is a powerful, extremely precise tool within its constraints, and certainly an improvement in many ways compared to classical physics, but barely scratches the surface of the quantumlike world. The more we can excavate through statistical randomness or mathematical structure in general and reach actual substance itself, the more potent knowledge will become.

So I'm essentially claiming that fields are physical rather than purely mathematical entities.

Bumbling Nature is assumed to have no purposes, so any knowable & directional patterns must be accidental. And even reliable Energy is not viewed as purposeful Agency. That no-nonsense approach is good for Pragmatic Science, but it makes Theoretical Philosophy impotent to learn anything that is not obvious to the physical senses. — Gnomon

Interesting idea and, as you say, a contrast with most modern thinking in the domains of science and technology. Perhaps you can clarify: what is the substance of reasoning/inference, how is it fundamentally abstract, and when intention is given causal precedence in your philosophy, is this perspectival, sort of a glorification of thought and meaning from reasoning's idiosyncratic point of view, or rather ontological, in essence as palpably fundamental as matter? How can purpose be as fundamental as its constituent substances?

The mental is a hard but, for some, inevitable subject to grapple with lol

It is difficult for me to conceive of substantive causality as immaterial or lacking in matter (I'm more of a hylomorphism than ideal Forms guy), but posters at this forum seem to promote the idea that potential, some sort of latency, actually exists in a sense. This has led me to ponder what a physical field actually is and how it differs from the alleged informational substrate so popular with philosophers.

Thinking about the brain's EM field, it is comprised of standing wave oscillations produced by synchronously moving ions with their electric charges, and flowing through neurons almost like a shock wave. So fluctuating electrical potential certainly causes energy transfer, but this is not distinct from the matter itself, it is instead an enigmatic property by which the matter acts remotely, within constraints, on what surrounds it as it moves.

The brain is a unique structure because it is so densely packed with charge fluctuations, like I said fourteen MILLION volts per meter or four times the voltage required to generate lightning (but associated with tiny masses and thus modest wattage, why we don't spontaneously combust), that the remote effects of its ions result in an integrated field extending throughout the brain. This does not mean a perturbation at any single point affects every other point, but remote charges in one location influence remote charges in their vicinity, which influences energy flow in neighboring regions and at larger and larger scales until the emergent organization can be likened to a minitiature ocean of electric current, with brain waves as measured by EEG comparable to a gulf stream or the tides.

This alone would not be enough to make the supervenient EM field a functional factor, any more than a sort of rapid sloshing incidental to neuronal wiring, but it has been suggested by experiment that ion channels are responsive to EM fields (the remote effects of moving electric charges) via still poorly understood quantum properties of their chemistry (it has been proposed that the mechanism by which ions travel through channels is wavicle tunneling). Remotely active EM fields seem to be capable of impacting action potential propagation in such a finely grained way that responsiveness occurs on the scale of single ion channels.

The global EM field flows like an ocean within the brain, and the membrane channels, regulating the spatial coordination of ion diffusion which generates this EM field, react to these emergent effects, making the net result a "phase locking" whereby ion channel activation is integrated with the EM field such that charge fluctuations form highly organized patterns on a relatively large scale. The originator of CEMI theory theorizes that the synchronization of neural networks via EM field/ion channel phase locking, once it has reached a sufficient level of integration, is the mechanism by which we exert conscious will, our intentional agency. Relatively global effects of this EM field, the main currents or tides so to speak, precisely are human willing.

Synapses, more specifically the distributing of neurotransmitters and similar chemicals, can be regarded as mediating the temporal dimension of EM field/ion channel "tides", essentially functioning as a sort of extremely complex "moon" mechanism by causing energy flow to occur in recursive patterns on the various timescales of response to an environment: minutes, hours, days, months, years. Synapses integrate neural networks with the intricate biochemical pathways of individual neurons such that the electromagnetic will is pliant to overall chemistry in the body and selection pressures of an ecosystem. Human will, as an assortment of macroscopic EM fields along with related action potential synchronizations and synesthesia effects (verbal thoughts, visual imagining, logical reasoning, etc.), has real causation, but is simultaneously tempered by interpolated and surrounding chemistry.

What I've been thinking and learning about recently is how the photonic radiation of EM fields might affect brain function, and I haven't really come to a conclusion yet, but as I've discussed in this thread, I suspect some sort of superposition mechanism blends radiation into atoms such that percepts result, what philosophy terms "qualia", the "what it is like to be" of experience.

It might be that consciousness also consists of or is impacted by nonelectromagnetic fields which operate on even larger scales and participate in a much more nonlocal, remote causation. I think this is what philosophy is intuiting when it talks of entities such as the information field you describe. These fields still have to be composed of substance though, they can't be a pure immateriality or merely "possible" existent.

Perhaps the following can be disputed, but I think information theory takes the notion of all actual and possible relations between components of a substance, the "potentiality", and seeks to establish this as in some sense an ontological foundation. Not impractical or invalid per se, for it manages to integrate the abstract modeling paradigm of modern science with a tradition of metaphysics stretching all the way back to the origins of Western philosophy in antiquity. But I think it is a minor error to identify metaphysical concepts with fields that transcend electromagnetism, because causes have to be a product of interacting substances and their properties, tangible in some way, rather than a mere abstraction of the relationships between them, which are really no more than a human concept.

As the founder of CEMI theory describes, the brain contains 10^11 cells while the immune system contains 10^12 cells, and both are extremely integrated, by neuronal wiring and the blood stream respectively, so it can be claimed that the immune system is equivalently complex, but while strategically organized it is obviously not conscious. Charge fluctuations that create emergent EM fields, among additional properties, grant the brain consciousness, an outcome of unique substances the organ is composed of, not mere complexity.

(By the way, a poster at this site informed me that "EMF" stands for electromotive force, not EM field. I was appreciative he pointed that out to me, so I'll relay it to you.)

The wavefront early on occupies a small surface area around the source. Later, it's further away so occupies a greater surface area. But the amount of light hasn't changed: it's just moved. So the intensity diminishes over time. — Kenosha Kid

Can you even roughly estimate the amount and range of EM radiation from a biochemical pathway in a neuron, for the sake of demonstration composed of fifty thousand atoms, and also an action potential (wave of ionic current) with a length of perhaps 1 cm, energy of 2.4*10^-7 Joules, and 14 volts per micrometer?

I'm trying to get a sense for the scale and intensity at which radiation of the brain's EM field is in effect. Possibly I'm not considering the appropriate values, what do you think?

How if at all would extremely strong voltage fluctuations, 14 million volts per meter in a neuron, four times the amount required to generate lightning, affect the behavior of atoms and radiation in the brain?

For the physics savvy who are knowledgeable about EM radiation, what are the factors that determine how quickly the intensity of this radiation dissipates as it travels? How would this apply within the brain? @Kenosha Kid, I don't want to trouble you overly much, but I think based on recent posts in a different thread that you may be able to explain this to some degree. Perhaps you can teach me something along these lines or direct me to relevant resources.

Yeah, I'm a US citizen, and the kind of situation I'm describing is rather new insofar as a totally irrational stigma is attached to individuals in treatment, who are then hounded by a mob, indirectly forced to remain in social programs unless their families and friends commit to helping rescue them. Professionals lacking in integrity can be to blame for not providing adequate support once the abuse starts, and society chains these citizens in the welfare system, forcing them to get drugged and ostracized. It's not uncommon for a real medical condition to be involved, but wrong or ineffective medications are frequently prescribed due to doctor negligence and it can be very difficult for even the marginally or temporarily disabled to rebound. Like @Book273 said, this sort of circumstance is very sad. Once the diagnosis is made, lives are compromised with abandon.

Govt. is too uncaring and incompetent to employ such a malicious conspiracy for average joes. — Nils Loc

The catch is that many doctors are trained to use their diagnostic categories for screwing portions of the population into submission to a system that exploits them, and if drugging you or driving you insane assists the cause, so be it. It's not explicitly in the paperwork of course, but that's what it's about.

This seems like a pretty big assumption. Maybe you could flesh it out a bit by citing a country, then giving some examples. — jgill

The way it works in some parts of the U.S. is you go to the doctor, usually with some desperation, if they think you're a sucker or they are irresponsible they put you on medication without knowing anything about you or caring, then demographics in the community that have been assigned the task of psychologically torturing citizens with certain "proven" medical conditions begin to stalk you and make your life miserable. If your social support system passes the test and manages to help you get out of that situation within about a month you recover, but if your family and friends can be harassed into negligence you basically crash and burn either quickly or slowly, ending up on a government check with a fake paper trail behind you and no prospect of meeting anyone who is not contemplating or actively trying to destroy you.

Yeah, not utopia, and not friendly.

The material properties of, say, an electron (mass, charge, lepton number, etc.) certainly do transcend whatever's going on with the wavefunction if that's what you mean. — Kenosha Kid

As I understand it, the "collapse of the wave function" essentially models matter insofar as large quantities of interacting particles give rise to contexts of decoherence, resulting in definite statistical distributions relating initial and final states, beyond which the probabilities are effectively negligible.

What I was saying is that these probability distributions the wave function models when it collapses into a definite state are relative to a specific perspective on large wavicle quantities, where these wavicles tend to act like particles. The picture of matter as in an absolutely decoherent, "collapsed" state works for many practical purposes, but quantum nonlocality shows that this is an illusion, a degree of coherence always remains.

Perhaps you can explain to us how this "coherence" or quantum entanglement amongst wavicles is modeled. Local hidden variables were ruled out by experiment, so where is theory currently at in accounting for nonlocality?

Are you speaking of a matter wave or a probability wave in QM? — jgill

The probability wave is the wave function, the quantized matter wave is the substance that the wave function probabilistically models.

I want to know if the electronic eye is interfering with the experiment and collapsing the wave function, or if it is awareness by a conscious human being. — TiredThinker

I doubt matter underlying the wave function ever fully collapses, as if an absolute demarcation between coherence and decoherence exists, but rather morphs into different shapes and formations depending on context, and can be composed of multiple states simultaneously, wavelike, particlelike, entangled, superpositioned, etc. all at once. Trillions of interacting atoms become comparatively particlelike (localized), but still participate in weird relativistic or nonlocal dynamics, for instance infused with EM radiation and further field phenomena that stretch or transgress the boundaries of classical physics. Much of this hasn't been adequately theorized so far, why quantum physics is so fascinating, truly a pioneering science.

I haven't read about this electronic eye deal, but is it somehow designed to avoid causing decoherence?

We know how to inflict pain but, relatively speaking, we're clueless about how to bring joy. — TheMadFool

It's not only that we know how to inflict pain but not how to bring joy, it's hard to experience joy in the first place when you're in pain, and humans are in chronic physical and psychological pain. This is an even deeper aspect of the problem, being unresponsive to pleasurable stimulus because of baseline pain. Luckily sublimation and just knowing that someone cares can go a long way.

Torture is about fear of loss. On paper you wouldn't do it. But then you don't know if that guy has information that could get some of your people killed. That bastard is an enemy who attacked us, with the intent to murder us. If we don't torture him, more people might die. Am I willing to let my own people die for some murderer who is here to kill my family and friends? — Philosophim

I think a case can be made that torture is justifiable or at least inevitable in war, though it should be minimized whenever possible. But if humans view much of what surrounds them in civilian society as an implicit war for justice or whatever it might be so as to validate their own impulse towards cruelty, tolerance for torture can become a major problem, compounding the issues with chronic pain I described.

You’ve left out the critiques of science that, while not disputing its achievements, point to the continuing tendency, especially in the natural sciences and technology, to perpetuate the philosophical assumptions of its founders whereby the empirically naturalistic is split apart from the personalistic stance on the world, the latter becoming merely subjective window-dressing. — Joshs

Have attempts been made by philosophers to reconcile a personalistic philosophy with objectivist perspectives? Would this approach qualify as existentialism, perhaps as opposed to philosophical positivism or structuralism? It seems as though the personalistic stance is conducive to self-expressive, artistic mediums, while the objective stance is more abstract and theoretical. I'm not sure how they can be reconciled beyond giving an autobiographical or biographical slant to one's literary style, which is certainly possible, but not commonly pursued in academic philosophy. Popular science literature, however, always seems to include a substantive biographical dimension. Do scientists usurp philosophers in this area?

What most fail to realize is that if someone is being tortured until he or she snaps, or is so dirt poor and perhaps addicted that crime is unavoidable, torture is of limited value as a deterrent. And torture desensitizes victims and perpetrators alike so they are less likely to avoid their own pain or feel empathy for those around them, making society more unethical. Torture is generally a no win, a downward spiral, but it's easy for many citizens to ignore this, and torture might be inescapable in contemporary society even so, though I hope not.

I think @dclements, @Judaka et al fairly represent both sides of the issue in general, and we could get into further detail by comparing cultures, subcultures and historical periods. Torture is not completely impractical, quality of life is certainly diminished for its victims and possibly witnesses, quality of life seems to be sustained by its role as a deterrent, while many cultures view torture as ethically suspect and have been phasing it out for centuries, though this is not an inevitable trend or universally in effect. We could also consider portrayals of torture and tortured individuals in art and media: is this a good or bad influence, perhaps some of both? What about torture as cruelty in personal relationships, should we view this with strong disfavor on principle?

I think there has not been a single case of an innocent being tortured to death. God would not allow it. — Bartricks

Some humans have tortured innocents to death, but they are in deep dookie.

Why would the nature of a god necessarily be circumscribed by what we are capable of attributing to him? Does it matter if a god is technically omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent in every possible sense if he can kick your ass when you're screwing up? And we all know what screwing up truly is: purposefully harming the Earth, harming the people around us in a wanton way.

Even if gods are not a prime mover in some metaphysical, logically irrefutable sense, proved to transcend the entire universe, billions of humans seem to get the impression that gods have an interest in making sure life on this planet is sustained, preserving the experience we have of our own willing, giving humans what they deserve if we're behaving badly, etc.

Perhaps some humans haven't been humbled by gods such that they're willing to fully acknowledge this, but not everyone needs the experience of dodging lightning bolts in order to understand that actions have moral consequences, and gods would hold us accountable if we have what is almost common knowledge of how to effectuate a harmonious society and ecosystem, yet still willfully screw up what surrounds us.

Thinking that it is humanity's place to judge the spiritual power and prerogative of gods is the height of fallacy. The best we can do is accept our fates, make the most of our opportunities, try to improve, learn from our mistakes, and not screw up when we know what the hell we are doing.

Your question seems to be oriented toward physical torture, but there is also psychological torture.
Both have same effect but different outcome. — SpaceDweller

In my case it was psychological, years of an attempt at causing me to go insane, and physical to the extent that I suffered brain damage. I know firsthand that mind-centric torture seems very real and can eventually destroy your personality, so in my opinion this should be prevented however possible.

What kind of inflicted pain is humane? — DingoJones

A woman piercing her ears is fairly humane. Threatening someone with a gruesome death or actually inflicting it is inhumane. Some grey area between.

You seem to think suffering = torture? Would that be accurate? You even list capital punishment as “torture”. In what way? — DingoJones

Suffering exacted as a violation of one's humanity, or inhumane pain infliction is torture. Capital punishment is torture because the recipient is made to contemplate the moment of their own death for years. Not the worst form of torture of course, but extremely disturbing nonetheless.