Alright, if you want to blow off experts who are trying to clarify and bs instead that's not gonna be my problem. Proceed with your stuff. — Enrique

Thank you.

@fdrake @Baden

See the last few posts. I have asked @Enrique several times to stop posting his unsupported theories that are inconsistent with the subject of this thread as expressed in the OP and he refuses to stop.

I would appreciate your help.

Deleted

Deleted

The OPs of my The Physics of Consciousness thread which I might as well link to again are part of my rough draft for a scientific paper I'm publishing in September. It's a specific scientific source, and you get a sneak preview! — Enrique

As far as I could see, you do not provide any specific scientific references for the information you provided in the posts you linked. I am highly skeptical of your hypotheses and I don't see how they apply to the subject of this discussion. Also, as I expressed strongly in the OP, this is not a discussion about consciousness.

Please don't continue discussion of your theories here.

So that is one certain and one speculative instance where rate variations appear to correlate with mind. — Enrique

As I wrote in the OP:

I would like to look at specific scientific sources for the ideas we discuss. — T Clark

The genes encode the model of the body. The neurons encode the model of the body's world. Then words encode the social model of the individual mind. And finally numbers have come to encode the world of the human-engineered machine. — apokrisis

This is Apokrisis' whole quote. I think I have some idea what he's talking about, but I didn't dig in to it in my response to him.

Following the structure of the quoted sentence, we could say that the rates at which neurons perform their functions and their change (of the rates) in time encode the model of the self. I know it is a pretty bold statement, but my main objective here is to steer your thought/thinking towards the rates of change of physiological processes concerning brain cells (neurons and supportive cells). If the number and organization of brain cells within the brain encode the model of the body's world, changes in their organization, number, and physiology might encode something else, and we gotta keep in mind that these changes are maintained within certain ranges (homeostasis) so that there is some constancy, as seen in the mind. We could say that the change in the model of the body's world encoded by neurons encodes the mind or affects it to some degree. So, in addition to the spatial distribution, number of cells, and the change in these two factors, there are also physiological processes taking place in these cells which are also changing in time (they are not constant), and this change is kept within certain ranges. Is there a relationship between rates of change of physiological processes and the mind/self? — Daniel

I have to admit I'm not sure what you're trying to say here or how it ties in with what Apokrisis wrote.

I found this essay by Steven R. Palmquist on a comparison between aspects of Kant and Tao. — Tom Storm

A couple of years ago I made a similar search for a connection between Taoism and Kant. I found a, not very good, paper called "Kant's Thing in itself, or the Tao of Konigsberg." So we're not the first ones to make the connection.

Neanderthals were physically capable of speech but we don't know whether they possessed spoken language like that of Homo sapiens. — Bitter Crank

Pinker says something similar about Neanderthals. Apparently their larynx and related organs were not as well developed for speech as modern homo sapiens, but it wouldn't have stopped them from being able to speak at all. Pinker points out that speech evolved sometime after the last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees about 5 million years ago. Since all other intermediary species are extinct, including our common ancestor with Neandertals, there is no way to know for sure which of them might have had language.

Essentially, I view Mind as more closely related to causal Energy than to malleable Matter. Maybe the atom of Mind is an Erg (unit of work). But, I have coined my own philosophical terms, to describe Mind's relationship to Information, and the power to Enform (to cause change). However, I will follow your thread to see where it leads. — Gnomon

If you have specific, credible, referenced, scientific information that describes or explains mental processes, please post it. That's what this thread is about.

it seems to be fuzzy & acausal. Hence, more amenable to philosophical methods. — Gnomon

No.

I've avoided Castaneda because I've read that the books were largely shown to be fictitious. — Noble Dust

I read them when I was an impressionable youth. I think they probably had an effect on my current understanding of the nature of reality. So, true or false, they have influenced me and I remembering enjoying them.

I apologize, if my link to Enrique's posts has deflected your thread off-course. — Gnomon

It was completely my fault, not Enrique's or yours.

Oh, I see! You are interested in Neurobiology instead of Psychology -- neural nets & nodes instead of meanings & feelings. Apparently, you have a novel philosophical angle on that topic -- using plumbing metaphors -- that has not already been covered by Neuroscientists, who normally use flow charts & wiring diagrams. Unfortunately, by referring to "Mind" instead of "Brain", you opened the door to metaphysical philosophical concepts, instead of physical engineering diagrams. — Gnomon

I was clear. This is a discussion about mind from a scientific point of view, so there is no door open to "metaphysical philosophical concepts" unless they have specific, direct scientific consequences.

But even though language doesn't necessarily determine what an organism thinks, the verbal stream can be involuntary enough that some thoughts can't be had without it, especially if language was involved in acquiring the informational content of that thought to begin with. — Enrique

It would be silly for me to claim that language doesn't have anything to do with thought. I don't know if you read what Apokrisis wrote in an earlier post.

So - contra Pinker - language may not create "thought", but it does transform it quite radically. It allows the animal mind to become structured by sociocultural habit. Humans are "self consciously aware" as social programming exists to make us include a model of the self as part of the world we are functionally engaged with. A higher level viewpoint is created where we can see ourselves as social actors. Animals just act, their selfhood being an implicit, rather than explicit, aspect of their world model. — apokrisis

I just realized I hadn't responded to this.

While you are at it, I would add that the scientifically grounded approach would be being able to say why some "this" is a more specified version of "that" more general kind of thing. So if the mind is the specific example in question, to what more fundamental generality are you expecting to assimilate it to.

So if you are saying the mind is some kind of assembly of component processes, then what is the most general theory of such a "thingness". I would say rather clearly, it is a machine. You are appealing to engineering. — apokrisis

Well, I am an engineer, which may have something to do with the differences between your and my ways of looking at this. I certainly don't see the mind as a machine in general, but it doesn't bother me to think about mental processes as actual processes, which end up seeming a bit mechanistic.

And I am arguing that mind is a particularised example of the more general thing that is an organism. Or indeed, if we keep digging down, of a dissipative structure. And ultimately, a semiotic relation.

So clarity about ontology is critical to seeing you have chosen an approach, and yet other approaches exist. — apokrisis

You and I are in agreement on this. I think I've put my attention at a level that is of particular interest to me, but I think it's also relevant to how things fit together at other levels. In the end, most of my information about mind comes from my interactions with other people on a social level where I see it in action as a unified whole.

Cutting to the chase, we both perhaps agree that the mind isn't simply some variety of substance – even an exotic quantum substance or informational substance. But then do you think biology and neurobiology are literally machinery? Aren't they really organismic in the knowing, striving, intentional and functional sense?

In simple language, an organism exists as a functioning model of its reality. And it all depends on the mechanism of a semiotic code.

The genes encode the model of the body. The neurons encode the model of the body's world. Then words encode the social model of the individual mind. And finally numbers have come to encode the world of the human-engineered machine.

So it is the same functional trick repeated at ever higher levels of organismic organisation and abstraction.

Organismic selfhood arises to the degree there is a model that is functionally organising the world in play. — apokrisis

Do I think biology and neurobiology are literally machinery? I'm not sure anything is literally anything, but I have no problem applying a mechanical model to biology when it makes sense. But then even machinery isn't really machinery. It is subject to constraints from above from it's operator, other factory processes, and ultimately the economy as a whole.

Anyway, the point is that we want to know what is the "right stuff" for constructing minds. It ain't exotic substances. It ain't mechanical engineering. But what holds for all levels of life and mind is semiosis - the encoding of self~world models that sustain the existence of organismic organisation. — apokrisis

I remain a skeptic about biosemiosis. Not so much about the processes included or the level of observation, but rather about the implication of meaning to biological processes. For me, meaning is something humans overlay onto reality, not something built into reality itself.

Highly substantive OP and followup comments. — Bitter Crank

Thank you.

Some brain scientist (if only I remembered correctly) noted that the primary function/purpose of the brain is "maintaining bodily processes" which needs to be understood broadly. Small clusters of cells in the brain stem are responsible for such essentials as heart beat, respiration, and waking up from sleep. — Bitter Crank

I think this is what Damasio meant when he was talking about the proto-self.

But most of the brain considerable resources are applied in making sure the body gets fed, watered, sheltered, mated, and so on. We have seen what happens to people whose brains don't tend to business. — Bitter Crank

I guess this part is more about what Apokrisis was writing about - the greater purpose of our minds.

From what I gather, the model of the mind as offered for critique and/or endorsement seems (too) machine-like for my taste. True that our brain probably is the mind and neuroscience has proven to some extent that our brains are basically (bio)electrochemical devices; nonetheless, the model is, in my humble opinion, too simplistic. — Agent Smith

I think that feeling you have is a common one and it's probably a big reason it's so hard to get people to agree on this issue. For what it's worth, I don't think the information I included presented any kind of unified model of how the mind works. As I noted, I picked out particular aspects of the mind that interest me and for which I had information I consider credible.

I don't have time to explore this in any depth and forgive my awkward phrasing - but a continuing question I have (which may be of relevance to mental processes) is the idea that the world has no intrinsic properties and that humans see reality in terms of neutrally generated matrix of gestalts. These generate what we know as reality. An example would be an understanding that space and time are a product of generalized neurocognitive system that allows us to understand the world. Or perhaps 'a' world - the one we have access too.

Maybe this is too Kantian and feel free piss it off if you find it superfluous. My understanding of Kant in the Critique is that he viewed space as a preconscious organizing feature of the human mind - a critic, (I forget who) compared this to a kind of scaffolding upon which we're able to understand the physical world. I suspect joshs would say that we don't understand it as such; we construct the semblance of an intelligible world based on shared values. Or something similar. — Tom Storm

Funny you should mention Kant, whom I have never liked and sometimes disparaged. I recently watched an interview on Kant between Brian Magee and Geoffrey Warnock. Magee does great interviews. Warnock said something that surprised and struck me. He said Kant was the first philosopher to recognize the reality we perceive, what he calls appearances or phenomena, comes from the interaction between our limited bodies and minds and a deeper reality made up of noumena, things that exist independent of our perception and are thus unknowable. That's something very similar to what Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching.

The nature of the interaction between our reality and the unknowable one, noumena or the Tao, is something I've struggled with. The fact that Kant was fully aware of the implications of the consequences of that relationship was what surprised me most. Warnock specifically identified time and space as human overlays on reality that Kant identified. In a sense, this discussion is my attempt to work back to an understanding of that interaction from the other direction, i.e. looking at the mechanisms of how humans divide the indivisible world.

I think that means you and I are somewhere on the same page, or at least the same chapter. As I mentioned in the OP, another book I'm reading may have more to say about that. “Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking” by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanual Sander has a lot to say about how the human mind classifies phenomena and creates categories using analogy. If I have time maybe I'll try to fit some of that in here too.

do you have anything of your own to add? — Philosophim

I just wanted to paint a picture for myself so I could see what it looks like. I don't necessarily think this has any philosophical consequences or broader implications.

A way to sharpen your approach would be to look at the issue through the eyes of function rather than merely just process.

You have started at the reductionist end of the spectrum by conceiving of the mind as a collection of faculties. If you can break the mind into a collection of component processes, then of course you will be able to see how they then all "hang together" in a ... Swiss army knife fashion..

Instead, think about the question in terms of the holism of a function. Why does the body need a nervous system all all? What purpose or goal does it fulfil? What was evolution selecting for that it might build such a metabolically expensive network of tissue?

...A functional approach leads instead to "whole brain" theories, like the Bayesian Brain, where the neurobiology is described in holistic architecture terms. — apokrisis

A Baysian brain is one set up to deal with uncertainty in a way consistent with Baysian statistics. So - the brain's function is as an optimally effective predictor of future events. I guess the question then is "but why?" What is the overriding function of the brain. One source said the minimization of free energy, whatever that means. Is that the kind of thing you're talking about.

As is usual for you and me, I'm coming from a different direction. I like to deal with concrete, pragmatic ideas. In my experience, I can't really figure out how the big picture works until I get a feel for how the parts do. I see the world as bottom up rather than top down. That doesn't mean I don't recognize the disadvantages of looking too closely at the trees.

You are appealing to a metaphysics of localised process. I am saying go one step further and employ a metaphysics of global function. — apokrisis

As I said, I think I understand the value of your approach, but I always find myself most interested in looking up close. Obviously, the answer is to do both.

While you are at it, I would add that the scientifically grounded approach would be being able to say why some "this" is a more specified version of "that" more general kind of thing. So if the mind is the specific example in question, to what more fundamental generality are you expecting to assimilate it to.

So if you are saying the mind is some kind of assembly of component processes, then what is the most general theory of such a "thingness". I would say rather clearly, it is a machine. You are appealing to engineering. — apokrisis

I need to think more about this before I respond further. Your mountain-top view is fine, but is it the one I'm interested in. This is just like that discussion we had about the hierarchical nature of knowledge. Maybe I want to talk about cells and not semiotics.

Scientists have been using such methods for centuries, but still have not found the the basic building block of Mind (ideas ; knowledge ; awareness). — Gnomon

But this is exactly what the people I have referenced are doing successfully. They are using standard scientific methods to study the "basic building block of Mind." @apokrisis has suggested looking at mind from point of view of function rather than of process. I think that's similar to what you are proposing - a more holistic understanding. I'm still working on my response to him.

can you describe in more detail what exactly Pinker means by "mentalese"? This seems key to his concept of the thought/language interface. — Enrique

Pinker writes:

The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications.

Here are his arguments:

• We know many animals without language who clearly think. Most obvious example, young children. Studies have shown that even infants can recognize concepts of number, time, and space. They can even make simple moral judgements. Also, there are deaf people who were never taught any language. If they are taught after a certain age, they will never have a sound language foundation. Even so, they clearly think, communicate in simple ways, plan, make decisions, and act. He also discusses chimpanzees who clearly can think at some level without language.
• There are people who have lost their language or had it disrupted by trauma or disease who remain as intelligent and aware as they were before the disruption happened. They can still often communicate with gestures or by drawing pictures.
• Pinker spends quite a bit of time debunking the Whorf hypothesis, the idea that language controls the kinds of thoughts people can have. No, Eskimos do not have 100 names for snow. Yes, Apaches are able to express ideas about time. So can Mandarin speakers, even though their language doesn't include any tenses. Pinker writes "there is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape their thinkers ways of thinking."
• It is common people have a hard time putting their thoughts into words. Sometimes they can't think of the word they are looking for. How can anyone say "oh, no, that's not what I meant to say" if your words are the same as your thoughts.
• Many people claim that they do not think in words but rather in geometric, auditory, or sensory images. That is certainly true of me sometimes. Even more often I seem to do my thinking without any awareness at all. After pouring information into my head, if I go do something else for a while, I find that my mind has organized and analyzed the data so that when I sit down to write, the words just come out without reflection.

@Enrique, @apokrisis, @Gnomon

I made a mistake. I stuck my nose into the quantum effects on thinking trap when I didn't have to. I should have kept my mouth shut. That's not what this thread is about. It's about scientifically supported ways of thinking about mental processes not including consciousness.

I hope it's not too late to stop this wagon rolling down the hill. I have nobody to blame but myself.

The Magus of Strovolos by Kyriacos C. Markides — Noble Dust

I took a look. From the Amazon blurb is sounds a bit like Carlos Castenada's books, e.g. "The Teachings of Don Juan." I was heavy into them in my youth in the 1970s. Have you read any?

↪Enrique , in The Physics of Consciousness thread*1 is also pursuing a physical explanation for how the mind works, without assuming any non-physical contributions. His theory is based on a technical concept of "Cohesion", which could be imagined as a novel physical force, but that I interpret in terms of "Holism" or "Systems Theory". However, both of those alternative approaches to Reductionism are more rational than empirical, hence more philosophical than scientific. — Gnomon

As I've noted many times, Enrique's posts on scientific subjects are pseudo-science - incomprehensible mashups of buzzwords and jargon that don't really mean anything.

I don't see the ideas I've described as reductionist at all. If they seem that way, it's probably because I cut off chunks to highlight the aspects I find particularly interesting.

Anyway, it seems that excluding the non-physical aspect of mental processes runs into a blank wall on the Quantum level. There, "business-as-usual-biology" becomes logically fuzzy, mathematically uncertain, and physically unpredictable, as we approach the foundations of reality. Ironically, there is no there there. — Gnomon

Generally, quantum effects are found at the level of atoms, i.e. about 10 picometers or 1/10,000 of a micrometer, while biological processes are found at the level of cells, i.e. about one micrometer. As far as I know, there is no evidence to show or reason to believe that quantum effects affect mental phenomena directly. Just because quantum particles and mental processes are in some sense mysterious to some people, that doesn't mean there is any connection.

This thread is about scientific approaches to mental processes. If you have actual scientific evidence to describe or clarify your ideas about non-physical aspects, reductionist or holistic, please provide it. I don't necessarily criticize your ideas about non-physical processes, but this is probably not the right thread to discuss them.

Sorry. I was feeling frivolous after reading the sandwich vs hotdog thread. — jgill

Years ago bought Damasio’s first book. What is memorable is: it was one of two books out of hundreds I tossed in the garbage. I considered it kindergarten level and a waste of my time and money. — ArielAssante

Ok.

Do you realize the model you have apparently accepted is only theory? — ArielAssante

Agreed. I tried to be clear in the OP. The authors seem credible, their ideas seem plausible and supported, but I'm not committed to any of the positions I described. Everything I wrote about is "only theory."

It is a very substantive and drafted OP. — javi2541997

Thanks, Javi. I appreciate that.

Probably you already know it but there is a book called How to do Things with Words by John Langshaw Austin. Well, he also wrote a philosophical paper called Sense and Sensibilia. — javi2541997

I had never heard of Austin or his book. I looked him up on the web and looked at the book on Amazon. Sounds like it has been very influential. I have very little experience with the philosophy of language. I read a little Wittgenstein 50 years ago. That's about it. That's part of the reason I wanted to put this thread together. I wanted to have a foundation of knowledge about how the mind works so I could have something useful to say about language and the mind.

He [Austin] claims, is that if I say that I know X and later find out that X is false, I did not know it. Austin believes that this is not consistent with the way we actually use language. He claims that if I was in a position where I would normally say that I know X, if X should turn out to be false, I would be speechless rather than self-corrective. He gives an argument that this is so by suggesting that believing is to knowing as intending is to promising— knowing and promising are the speech-act versions of believing and intending respectively. — javi2541997

I'm not sure how to use this in the context of Pinker's work and that of other scientists who study language, how it fits in to what they have learned. That's often an issue with science and philosophy in general. Certainly the philosophy has to be consistent with the science. Maybe it's that what Austin says has to do with meaning rather than structure, function, and performance, which is mostly what Pinker is talking about.

The mind may impact 'bodily processes' but, it does not maintain them. A number of the other items you list are also not of the mind. Of being the key word. — ArielAssante

Seems to me that would only be true if the term "mental processes" only applies to conscious phenomena and intentional acts and decisions. That's a pretty circular argument. It's not as if Damasio's proto-self is sitting off by itself doing it's thing. It is fully integrated into our nervous system and, as I noted, it acts as the substrate for other mental phenomena, some of which are conscious.

This proto-mind acts. It makes our bodies do things using our brain, nerves, and muscles. How is that different from me flexing my arm, except in that it is non-conscious.

A number of the other items you list are also not of the mind. Of being the key word. — ArielAssante

I don't know what you mean by this.

I put a lot of effort into these posts. If you don't have anything substantive to add, please go to a different thread.

I’m going to run through my sources in no particular order. I don’t intend to show a comprehensive view of human cognition, or even necessarily a consistent one. As I noted, I just want to get a feel for how mental processes in general might look and work and good ways to talk about them.

“The Language Instinct” by Stephen Pinker.

Stephen Pinker is a professor of cognitive science and psycholinguistics at MIT. This book provides a very detailed presentation of his understanding of how human language works and how it develops in children, making specific reference to scientific evidence including studies of the effects of brain damage caused by trauma, disease, or birth defects; the results of PET, MRI, and other imaging on living brains; language learning in healthy children starting at infancy; language performance by adults and children; genetic studies of families with a history of language disorders; studies of twins separated at birth; comparative studies of world languages; and others. According to Pinker, the findings presented in the book apply to all human languages studied.

Pinker’s conclusions I think are relevant to this discussion include the following:

Language is instinctive. He quotes Darwin as saying that language is “an instinctive tendency to acquire an art.”

Language does not control thought, it’s the other way around. The book includes a section debunking the Whorf hypothesis, which claims that different languages promote and restrict the kinds of ideas that people can develop and understand.

Human grammar is an example of a “discrete combinatorial system.” A finite number of discrete elements (in this case, words) are sampled, combined, and permuted to create larger structures (in this case, sentences) with properties that are quite distinct from those of their elements. He quotes William Von Humboldt saying language “makes infinite use of finite media.” By this he means that words, phrases, and sentences are made up of elements that can be combined and recombined in an infinite number of ways, always constrained from above by the innate structure of human grammar. Words are built up of elements called “morphemes.” Although the morphemes themselves are memorized and vary depending on language, they are combined following rigid rules which are not. The same type of unlearned rules apply to how phrases are constructed from words and sentences from phrases.

Although brain functions, including language, are distributed throughout the brain, there are areas in the brain, Pinker calls them “organs,” which clearly have grammatical functions. Damage to those brain areas can lead to very specific types of grammatical problems. Also, although he recognizes that specific traits are not generally controlled by single genes, studies show that changes in specific genes or lack of those genes can result in language dysfunction that can be passed down from parent to child.

Perhaps most interesting and important, from my point of view, is that people do not think in English, Mandarin, or Swahili. They think in what he calls “mentalese.” Babies and people who have grown up with no language clearly think. He hypothesizes that mentalese is universal and innate in humans.

“The Descent of Man” by Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin was a naturalist, biologist, and geologist, born in 1809 and died in 1882. In his discussion of language as instinct, Pinker quotes Darwin as writing:

Human language is an instinctive tendency to acquire an art. It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learned. It differs, however, widely from all ordinary arts, for man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children; while no child has an instinctive tendency to brew, bake, or write.

“What is an Instinct” by William James

William James was a psychologist and pragmatist philosopher, born in 1842 and died in 1910. James writes “Instinct is usually defined as the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance.”

In “The Language Instinct”, Pinker discusses James’ position:

A language instinct may seem jarring to those who think of language as the zenith of the human intellect and who think of instincts as brute impulses that compel furry or feathered zombies to build a dam or up and fly south. But one of Darwin’s followers, William James, noted that an instinct possessor need not act as a “fatal automaton.” He argued that we have all the instincts that animals do, and many more besides; our flexible intelligence comes from the interplay of many instincts competing. Indeed, the instinctive nature of human thought is just what makes it so hard for us to see that it is an instinct.

He then quotes James as writing:

It takes…a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of taking the natural seem strange, so far as to ask for the why of any instinctive human act. To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as: Why do we smile, when pleased, and not scowl? Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits so upside-down? The common man can only say, “Of course we smile, of course our heart palpitates at the sight of the crowd, of course we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved!” And so probably does each animal feel about the particular things it tends to do in presence of particular objects. They, too, are a priori syntheses…

James also writes:

Nothing is commoner than the remark that Man differs from lower creatures by the almost total absence of instincts, and the assumption of their work in him by “reason.”...[But] the facts of the case are really tolerably plain! Man has a far greater variety of impulses than any lower animal; and any one of these impulses, taken in itself, is as “blind” as the lowest instinct can be; but, owing to man’s memory, power of reflection, and power of inference, they come each one to be felt by him, after he has once yielded to them and experienced their results, in connection with a foresight of those results…

…It is plain then that, no matter how well endowed an animal may originally be in the way of instincts, his resultant actions will be much modified if the instincts combine with experience, if in addition to impulses he have memories, associations, inferences, and expectations, on any considerable scale…

…there is no material antagonism between instinct and reason…

“The Feeling of What Happens” by Antonio Damasio.

Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist as USC best known for his books on the neural basis of consciousness. This book in particular is mostly about consciousness, but in the early part he talks about non-conscious precursors to self-awareness that are appropriate for this discussion. Damasio identifies what he calls a “proto-self” made up of non-conscious neurological and endocrine bodily functions that connect the brain and peripheral body and which allow maintenance of equilibrium in mechanical, biological, and chemical bodily systems, called “homeostasis.” As Damasio writes:

I have come to conclude that the organism, as represented inside its own brain, is a likely biological forerunner for what eventually becomes the elusive sense of self. The deep roots for the self, including the elaborate self which encompasses identity and personhood, are to be found in the ensemble of brain devices which continuously and nonconsciously maintain the body state within the narrow range and relative stability required for survival. These devices continually represent, nonconsciously, the state of the living body, along its many dimensions. I call the state of activity within the ensemble of such devices the proto-self, the nonconscious forerunner for the levels of self which appear in our minds as the conscious protagonists of consciousness: core self and autobiographical self…

…[The proto-self is] a collection of brain devices whose main job is the automated management of the organism's life. As we shall discuss, the management of life is achieved by a variety of innately set regulatory actions—secretion of chemical substances such as hormones as well as actual movements in viscera and in limbs. The deployment of these actions depends on the information provided by nearby neural maps which signal, moment by moment, the state of the entire organism. Most importantly, neither the life-regulating devices nor their body maps are the generators of consciousness.

Damasio’s description of the proto-self brings to mind the design of mechanical and chemical process engineering systems, which I have some familiarity with, although I am not a chemical, process, or mechanical engineer. The drawing below is a piping and instrumentation diagram from a groundwater treatment system which includes removal of floating petroleum.



This is not a system that I worked on myself and I recognize it is hard to read. On the drawing, pipes are shown as solid lines with arrows; pumps, heaters, compressors, and other devices are shown as icons; vessels and tanks are shown as rectangles, and valves are shown as bowtie shapes. Instruments including heat, pressure, fluid level, pH, flow rate, and other sensors are shown as circles connected to the system by signal lines shown a dashed lines with arrows. Not shown on the drawing is a programmable control box, a computer, which takes input from the instruments and, based on that input turns pumps and other equipment on or off; opens and closes valves, records operating data, and sets off alarms with the purpose maintaining system status within established operating parameters. I think this is a good analogy for the proto-self system Damasio describes.

Boy, this has gotten a lot longer than I intended. I’ve tried to cut back, but there are important things I didn’t want to leave out. I had intended to include a discussion of the following books:

• “How Emotions are Made” by Lisa Feldman Barrett
• “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Julian Jaynes
• “Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking” by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanual Sander.

But I decided not to. Maybe I’ll bring them up later in the discussion.

So, down to work. I have presented some ideas about how the mind works from scientists I consider credible whose ideas make sense to me. I’d like to discuss what the proper approach to thinking about the mind is. I consider these good examples. My conclusion - the mind is not magical or even especially mysterious, although there is a lot we don’t know. Mostly it’s just a foundation of business-as-usual biology resulting in the very powerful and complex thinking, feeling, seeing, remembering, speaking faculties of the human beings we all are.

And please - no discussion of consciousness experience or awareness.

I thought people might be interested in this. It's a great resource. It lists the scientific and philosophical primary sources it considers central to intellectual understanding and provides links to the documents themselves, including papers and full books. The list is enlightening all by itself.

https://antilogicalism.com/primary-sources/

Don't let the website's name, Antilogicalism, throw you.

A neuroscientist - so long as they stick to doing neuroscience and do not start doing metaphysics - is investigating a small part of the sensible world. They're not committed to any view about what the sensible world is made of. So it strikes me as obvious that idealism is consistent with neuroscience - how could it not be? Those who think otherwise must mistakenly be thinking that neuroscience carries with it some commitment to materialism about what it is investigating - which is just false. — Bartricks

I think your conclusions are right, with a quibble. Although neuroscientists don't generally do metaphysics, they swim in a metaphysical sea. I'd guess for most that sea is physicalism, at least during work hours. I agree that idealism is consistent with neuroscience. As you note - how could it not be. I also agree that neuroscience carries no metaphysical commitment to materialism.

the basis upon which one infers the existence of other minds is going to be the same whether one is an idealist or a materialist about them — Bartricks

I agree with this.

with one exception - the idealist will typically posit one extra mind as the mind who is bearing the mental states constitutive of the sensible world we're all inhabiting — Bartricks

But disagree with this. I don't see any reason to think that our mind is any different from all the others or that saying it is is useful, much less true.

No, for science investigates the behaviour of the sensible world and does not take a stand on its composition. That is, whether the sensible world is made of mental states or mind-external extended substances is a question in metaphysics that science has no bearing on. — Bartricks

Well, it is consistent with idealism that we have not been created for any purpose (for idealism is not a view about how minds come to be, but a view about what reality is made of). And it is consistent with idealism that we do have a role. (And it is consistent with materialism about you that you have a role - if your parents created you in order to stop up a hole in the wall, then that's your role). — Bartricks

I agree.

There's a tension between materialism and normativity. That is, it is hard to make sense of how there could be 'shoulds' in a wholly material universe. Such shoulds - the shoulds of reason - seem to require there to be a master mind whose edicts they are. And idealism arrives at the conclusion that there is such a mind by an independent route. — Bartricks

I don't agree with this. We have evolved as, not moral, but rule making organisms. I don't see why evolution and the evolution of mind are in any way inconsistent with materialism.

First off, this is a really interesting thread.

..as I’ve elaborated upon more extensively in a Scientific American essay, our sensory apparatus has evolved to present our environment to us not as it is in itself, but instead in a coded and truncated form as a ‘dashboard of dials.’ The physical world is the dials.

I think this is true but wrong. Oh, wait, I forgot the Law of the Excluded Middle. It's true sometimes. That's not right. It's true if it makes sense in a particular situation. Ok, that will do for a working answer. I've tried to avoid this recently, since I've overused it, but it's relevant here. The isms you're talking about here are metaphysical entities. As such, they are not true or untrue, only useful or not useful in a particular situation. That's gets back to the Kastrup quote. Sometimes his way of seeing things is a good one, but sometimes it makes sense to see the world as objective reality seen imperfectly.

Once this is clarified, analytic idealism is entirely consistent with the observations of neuroscience

Usually, reality is consistent with whatever sound metaphysical position one takes.

...brain function is part of what our conscious inner life looks like when observed from across a dissociative boundary. Therefore, there must be tight correlations between patterns of brain activity and conscious inner life, for the former is simply the extrinsic appearance of the latter; a pixelated appearance

I think I'm ok with this.

For Kastrup a belief in physicalism is confusing the map for the territory. — Tom Storm

Again, right but wrong.

2. How reality (such as it is) appears to be consistent and regular. — Tom Storm

Because it sort of is and because we overlay consistent and regular on a swirling flow.

3. How evolution tracks to idealism. — Tom Storm

I don't see why it doesn't track physicalism just as well.

4. Whether we require a universal mind for idealism to be coherent. Other models? — Tom Storm

Actually, in order for most, perhaps all, metaphysical positions to be true, I've always thought that God or god surrogate is needed.

6. What might be the role of human beings in an idealist model? — Tom Storm

I don't see how there is any inconsistency.

I've written this before. I read someone, can't remember who, who wrote that mathematicians tend idealists and physicists tend to be physicalists. That makes sense to me. I don't know whether they enter their professions because of their metaphysical predilections or their professions mold their metaphysics.

A good OP. Well-written, clear, and interesting.

If nearly all the words found in the dictionary stand for abstract objects, then it follows that our experience consists almost exclusively of abstract objects, as I’ll show. — Art48

I think you've put the cart before the horse. Not nearly all, but all words in the dictionary stand for abstract objects because naming things is what makes them abstract objects. We overlay an abstract coating on the world as it is. We create the abstract world. "Tree" is no less abstract than "2," even though it refers to that tall thing out in my yard. Actually, "that tall thing out in my yard" is abstract too.

So how can I experience a tree? The answer is I do not directly experience the tree. — Art48

I go back and forth on this, but I think maybe we can directly experience a tree. You don't need to say "tree," even in your mind, when you see one. I don't think you can see one completely unmediated. I'm not sure how close we can come to that.

We can directly see on only one thing: light. The mind does the rest. — Art48

It's my understanding that aspects of perception sometimes come before the mind, e.g. I read that the eye is constructed in such a way that it processes the sight before it gets to our minds.

A “brain in a vat” experiences rough brown patches and smooth green patches. Of that experience the brain can be absolutely certain. The brain naturally supposes something in the physical universe called a “tree” is the cause of what we experience. It is wrong. — Art48

I'm not sure we know what a hypothetical brain in a vat experiences. Saying that something in the physical world called a tree is the cause of my experience is not wrong, it is part of the definition of the word "cause," which I'm sure we'll agree is an abstract entity.

My mind directly experiences the number two because the number two is a thought and my mind experiences thoughts directly. Similarly, my mind can directly experience the abstract object named “tree” because that, too, is a thought. As to what is causing my experiences, I suppose there’s a material object, a material tree, existing in a physical universe outside myself. If I’m not dreaming, hallucinating, or a brain in a vat, then my supposition may be correct. There may actually be a material tree, existing in a physical universe outside myself. But, then again, there might not. — Art48

This is all very philosophical and presumptuous, which, like "abstract" and "universal," often mean just about the same thing.

Instead of questioning the existence of abstract object, perhaps we should apply our skepticism the existence of an exterior physical universe. — Art48

There's a thread out there doing that right now. I've avoided it. Seems like a pointless exercise.

As I said, good OP.

That is not what he said.
— Jackson

Thank you
:pray: — Merkwurdichliebe

Except that it is what you said.

Have you ever watched a realtime artist demo on youtube, or taken a figure drawing or design class to get a direct window into the training of an artist? — Merkwurdichliebe

I'll just repeat myself:

Example of a specious argument:

1) You need to be an artist to understand art.
2) I disagree.
3) Well, but you're not an artist so you wouldn't understand. — T Clark

That is not what he said. — Jackson

It's exactly what he said.

The problem is that nonartists are ignorant of what artistic skills actually are, and think anything can be art. I might concede...maybe it can be art, but definitely not good or skilled art. — Merkwurdichliebe

Example of a specious argument:

1) You need to be an artist to understand art.
2) I disagree.
3) Well, but you're not an artist so you wouldn't understand.

Are you an artist? — Merkwurdichliebe

I'm a writer.