Why are you still trying so hard to avoid justifying your claim that consciousness is just the brain doing data processing? :chin:

The issue of your claim that the cosmos needs a jargon? — Voyeur

I never said that. But you have confirmed you have no interesting point to make.

You mean you ignored what I actually said. I described “consciousness” as a process of interpretance. An act of regulating the world through a semiotic modelling relation.

You are one talking about an observer - something passive and extra to the action. Some spooky spectator.

Funny how I even have to explain your own weasel words to you.

I just gave you a critique as you requested. — schopenhauer1

You are the one harping on about some homuncular observer. Not my problem if you don’t understand things better.

We can cover that later. — schopenhauer1

No. You brought it up. I’m asking what you mean. An explanation ought to be easy if you have a thought out position here and not just hand wavy “suspicions”.

The observer is presupposed — schopenhauer1

What is this “observer” exactly. You appear to presupposed something here that I do not.

That in the long run we'll figure out the mechanisms and we'll see all of consciousness as a mechanical process. But I also see the explanatory gap as needing explanation. — Malcolm Lett

The explanatory gap is what a mechanical conception of nature creates. So “more mechanism” is never going to bridge that gap.

Hence why biologists and neuroscientists are arriving at semiotics as an alternative conception of nature.

I suspect all theories, even "embodied" ones suffer from this. — schopenhauer1

I think you need more than a suspicion to have just cause to doubt a theory. You didn’t make any counter argument so far.

I said they were arbitrary, not accidental. Arbitrary choices can still be deliberate. — Voyeur

Ducking the issue again.

Sure they can be deliberately arbitrary. But my point is that they weren’t in these cases.

The fact that signs are by definition arbitrary - a word is just a noise - doesn’t change the fact that interpretance is semantic. There was a rhetorical purpose to claiming nature was ruled by mathematical laws.

Mathematical law describes reality in mechanical and exceptionless fashion. That directly contrasted with the organic and Aristotelean conception of nature that prevailed until Newton’s scientific revolution.

I’m unclear what point you really want to make in disputing this.

but can systems theories also fall into the Cartesian Theater trap? — schopenhauer1

Representationalism fails to explain because it posits a sensory display that then demands the homuncular regress of the observer experiencing that display. The “self” gets moved up a level rather than being part of the theory.

But a semiotic or modelling relations approach says this selfhood arises as part of the world modelling. We feel what is us rather directly once we start trying to push against reality.

So representationalism takes the computational or data processing approach. Input is crunched into output. It is then a mystery why output should feel like something. Why does a neural state also give rise to experience of the world.

A semiotic approach - like the Bayesian Brain - instead says consciousness only arises through interaction with the world. Attempts to act reveal a “self” and a “world” as this crisply divided state of affairs.

Often in bed, after lying still for a while, I don’t know where my legs are. One may itch or ache. But having been so still, it is no longer part of my usual body image. I haven’t got a clear sense of how it exists in relation to me and the world. So I move it a little bit. I feel the resistance of the sheets. Immediately I have a full sense of exactly how it happens to be lying.

An embodied approach to cognition shows us that consciousness is this kind of active production. We feel like a self in a world because the whole of our neurology is set up to represent this state of division. The display isn’t just of the world. It is of the constantly renewed act of discrimination in which an us-world distinction is what is being modelled by the brain.

So the output generates its input. We are in a constant state of acting on the world and so continually discovering ourselves to be in that world. Sensation is fundamentally active rather than passive.

We may never get over the existential shock of being a self in the world. To be conscious is extraordinary as soon as you stop to think about it.

But from the theoretical perspective, an embodied story of cognition does get us pass the essential problem of representationalism.

:up:

It must be then that the Chinese Room understands Chinese. — TheMadFool

So this thought experiment proved to you that the room understands rather than that the person outside the room had a false understanding that the room understands.

Go for it!

If we can't tell apart a person who can speak Chinese and a Chinese Room in the thought experiment then they must be identical, no? — TheMadFool

Sounds legit.

Now you’re asking a difficult question. But the clearest thinker on the biosemiotic guts of it for my money has been Howard Pattee.

So for example, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225988428_The_Necessity_Of_Biosemiotics_Matter-Symbol_Complementarity

Then for the neurobiological version, there is Karl Friston and his Bayesian Brain approach.

A social history of that, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51739007_The_history_of_the_future_of_the_Bayesian_brain

And a New Scientist account as an intro, https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Is%20this%20a%20unified%20theory%20of%20the%20brain.pdf

Well, prima facie this means thinking equated to data processing alone is not sufficient for consciousness — TheMadFool

The problem is that data processing is a completely mechanical way of looking at it. The Chinese Room argument blows that out of the water.

The best general theory of mind and life is that it is a semiotic process. A modelling relation.

So there is good news. There is a decent answer now. We don’t have to keep searching or trying to make bad metaphysics fit the known neurobiology.

This is self-contradictory. How do you know you were thinking "even in deep sleep" if you don/t/can't remember it? — TheMadFool

You can catch it just as it fades if you are awake quickly enough and are primed to make the effort.

This was discovered in experiments where subjects were woken in slow wave sleep and asked the question. You can notice it yourself but it takes a little practice.

A memory has to be moved from working memory to get fixed as a long term memory. So that is the step that gets shut down during sleep.

Well, the way I see it, all that needs to be done is, like the brain, we need to have in place hardware capable of logic and memory. After that, consciousness is simply a matter of feeding such a system with data. — TheMadFool

Well that is describing the brain in computational jargon. A neurobiologist would want to put quotemarks around all those terms for good reason. They are fundamentally misleading once you pursue the metaphors any distance at all.

Well, what is consciousness if not data processing? — TheMadFool

If it ain’t data processing then it ain’t data processing.

The question is why you would think it was?

Think of the times when we all agree that a person is not conscious e.g. when sleeping or when s/he has fainted or when s/he's dead. These three states of unconsciousness have one thing in common - the absence of thoughts and what are thoughts but data being processed? — TheMadFool

There is thinking - of a desultory and ruminative kind - even in deep sleep as it happens. It is just unremembered and disconnected.

But the real issue here is in what sense do you think that the brain does “data processing”?

That is fine as a vague metaphor. But the brain isn’t designed to be a Universal Turing Machine - the standard formal definition of data processing.

If you have some other precise definition of data processing, now is the time to reference it.

I say this because consciousness, to me, is simply data processing and anything capable of handling data is, in principle therefore, also capable of consciousness. — TheMadFool

My iPad handles data. So that doesn’t feel particularly convincing.

Why not reserve your admiration for a system that shows itself capable of handling the world?

Behaviourism got folk excited as an effective technology for controlling or fixing humans. It positioned itself against Freudian type explorations of the psyche and pointed out that people are mostly a bundle of environmentally conditioned habits.

That is a view with a lot of truth. But the whole of Operant Conditioning could be taught in a half year class. It was so simple in terms of theory that there was very little more to learn.

Functionalism was a technological wet dream version of psychology. The shtick was that brain states were multirealisable because they were just “patterns of information”. So artificial intelligence was a DARPA research project with a 10 year payback. Sign my grant cheque please.

Cognitive science was great in its early days when computation was mostly a metaphor. Psychologist did real useful work in developing a more modular conception of how the brain could work. But then computer science took functionalism into fantasy land.

Yet cogsci still trumps behaviourism as it did create a rich landscape of thought. It branched in all directions as there is something right about understanding the mind as an informational process.

A jargon can be useful, but it "need" not be anything. Whether it moderates on an arbitrary principle is purely, well, arbitrary. — Voyeur

You are ignoring the fact that talking in terms of either abstract laws or mentalistic purposes aren’t accidental choices. They are quite deliberate in their metaphysical commitments.

So yes, the scientist can chose one or the other view of causality as the most pragmatic for modelling reasons. That is the right way to think about it.

But then in everyday life, folk get rather passionate about which of these stories is “true”. And even scientists might want to get down to the “truest” model even if it ain’t also the most pragmatic (in the everyday and unphilosophical sense of being the maximally simple, or most utilitarian, encoding of Nature. :razz: )

I'm wondering what theories there are that specifically address the question of measuring this gap. — Malcolm Lett

(Given I’m responding to your second good post, I should say welcome to the chat. :up: )

Anyhow, you could say that computer science kind of does measure this. And what it has discovered is that all the talk about representation and data was the wrong way to go about getting anything resembling biological intelligence.

Neural network or Bayesian Brain architectures start to approach the issue in a more biologically realistic and ecologically embodied fashion. The gap then begins to measureably close.

So in a negative fashion perhaps, computer science does point towards the need to understand biology as something inherently intelligent and purposeful.

You can’t start off with what seems the “output” - a mental “representation” - and implement that in some simplistic computational fashion. You have to keep heading in the direction of biological science to have a hope of getting to the root of this question.

It seems like a good starting point. — Malcolm Lett

It seems a big fail right after the first step of “approachable by science”. What is “representational qualia” being opposed to?

The very idea of qualia is reductionist and Cartesian. So that means the fork ought to be the “other” of that. Which for my money is neurobiological holism - the triadicism of a global systems viewpoint.

As a scientific problem, the broad options are monism, dualism and triadicism.

The first wants to claim the mental just supervenes on the physical - somehow. That collapses into incoherence pretty fast as an “explanation”.

The second wants to treat qualia as real rather than epiphenomenal or essentially unreal. That leads to the irresolvable riddles of dualism.

The third moves pass both camps in ways that finally become amenable to scientific theory.

So we can just have a switch after “approachable by science” which sends monism and dualism, along with their reductionist debate over representation and qualia, to the pseudo-science bin. Just leave the way clear for the varieties of triadic systems thinking that can do the job. :smile:

What Haldane said. :up:

Im still getting into the part about "absential" phenomenon. Thats his original contribution I think. Whats your thoughts on that? — schopenhauer1

Absentials are his way of talking about constraints. So I both agree with what he says, but don’t see it as original - at least within the systems science community.

The essential issue here is the difference between thinking of nature in terms of causal determinism and causal regulation.

It is is usual to imagine causality as a Newtonian system of impressed forces on material bodies. That is, a metaphysics of material/efficient cause.

A constraints-based metaphysics, like semiosis, cybernetics, hierarchy theory, etc, would instead say that nature operates on the principle of what is not forbidden is what can, and must, happen.

So reality is understood as basically free - a state of radical indeterminism or Peircean tychism. Everything tries to happen. But then global organising constraints evolve to impose top-down order on the chaos. The chaos is regulated by the new thing of form and “purpose”. A Newtonian looking world is what emerges in the limit of this natural ordering. We arrived at the “continuity” of law which is Peircean synechism.

This way of looking at things can eventually be applied rather directly to our biophysical models of life and neurobiological models of mind. That’s what I talk about all the time. :nerd:

So in a wide variety of approaches which I endorse - Friston’s Bayesian Brain, Walter Freeman’s chaos theory, etc - consciousness has its particular character because the brain is a system for eliminating potential information states. It doesn’t compute some representation of the world so much as eliminate the near infinite variety of possible states of interpretation that could exist in regard to that world.

In that way, it is all about arriving at the particularity of a point of view - a state of pragmatic action - by constraining alway all unnecessary possibilities and thus leaving to freely happen what is left after that.

This speaks to the open character of our mental processes. The work is not to discover what is real. It is to eliminate alternatives to the degree our behaviour appears to be functional.

And that flipping of the paradigm is “absential” in that constraint is about the ability to eliminate alternatives. You arrive at counterfactual definiteness by having suppressed thoughts about everything else.

That is why attention is seen as a spotlight. As a neural process, it is literally a wave of inhibition that sweeps over the brain after about a third of a second (the p300 EEG potential) and so focuses our consciousness by suppressing every other state of interpretation we might have had.

And words function semiotically the same way. I say to you “pink elephant”. You now share the same mental image to the degree your mind can suppress other colours, other animals, indeed other objects.

But Indian or African elephant? A cartoon elephant or maybe an actual elephant got up in bright colours for a religious parade?

I didn’t say. So those become open minded degrees of freedom so far as that speech act went. And even if I kept adding constraints to be more specific, we would never expect to arrive at the same “beetle in the box”. There would always be residual indeterminism in the semiotic view.

But that is no problem for the non-Cartesian. All the (pragmatic) work that needs to be done lies on the side of the absentials. Consciousness is an example of a process in which it is the elimination of alternatives that turns the general into something specific. That is its deep “computational” logic.

And a ton of scientists get that. What is not widely understood is that this is a paradigmatic shift for science or philosophy itself. That is because most scientists just work this out within their own siloed domains.

So Deacon is good as a voice able to proclaim that general revolution. But as I say, he didn’t do enough to connect himself to the interdisciplinary community and so wasn’t regarded as a leader.

His first book felt it rather ignored the Vygotskeanism and social constructionism which was already vogue. Likewise Incomplete Nature felt as if it failed to attend to the broad changes of thought to be found in theoretical biology and neurobiology.

However that is only a mild complaint - a bit of social context for how his contributions were received.

Are there any differences to his approach and yours? — schopenhauer1

I only skimmed his books as I was already deep into the same material. He was kind of an annoying figure as he was pushing the same line but as if he was the only one who really understood things.

At the time, it felt more important within the academic setting to be showing how many different voices (systems science, hierarchy theory, cybernetics, complexity theorists, autopoiesis, semioticians, etc, etc, were saying the same thing). And then Terry comes along as if he just invented the paradigm. :grin:

But I can’t remember any important differences. My view was that he was right but wasn’t saying anything taking the discussion forward. Having said that, I’ve added him back to my reading list. He was a decent populariser. And definitely did latch on to the right arguments fast - just so fast he hadn’t connected with others who had travelled the same path.

I do like that he acknowledges the Cartesian Theater problem right off the bat. Are you familiar with that problem? — schopenhauer1

Sure. That is a big reason for a shift from the cogsci model of psychology to a more modern enactive, embodied, ecological, etc, model. The step from Cartesian representationalism to a Peircean semiotic perspective,

We find the concept of "purpose" useful, and therefore we continue to apply it to larger and larger contexts, eventually (mistakenly) trying to apply it universally. That universal application is what we call teleology, and it's a not necessarily incorrect, it's more a red herring as to what is really going on. — Voyeur

But why are folk happy to call those same fundamental constraints of nature “laws”?

Linguistically, laws might be considered as human-constructed abstractions. And that can be opposed to nature having some kind of generalised will and intent - like a rather concrete human act of conscious deliberative choice.

Yet still, it seems just as problematic to abstract away the causes of being - paint them as unplaced laws - as it is to be over concrete and say every physical event needs to serve “someone’s” reason.

The reality of causation - at the general physical level of the Cosmos - needs a jargon that steers between both extremes.

But no-one has come up with a plausible theory of how those independent modules work together to produce the unique singular perspective we call the Self. — Gnomon

So you say. But I wouldn’t agree. It seems pretty straightforward that the whole of the brain is simply embedded in the business of constructing a self vs world relation. You can eat your food without chewing off your tongue because every “module” has to make the same fundamental distinction. A self in the world is what the brain is modelling from the get-go.

Consider how vision relies on micro saccades made by the eyes. We have to wobble our eyeballs constantly so we can tell where the “stable” world starts. We know the world is “out there” as we create enough of our own motion to see that there is this difference between an “us” and an “it”.

The frontline of perception starts by introducing a division which speaks to a self in interaction with a world.

One physical example of that phenomenon is Phase Transition. Another hypothetical example, that is not accepted by reductionist scientists, is the notion of Panpsychism, in which all minds in the universe work together as a Global Mind. Unfortunately, there is currently no means to communicate with such a god-like mind, other than those of Mysticism. — Gnomon

Phase transitions are well understood. And they have their place in neurobiological models.

Panpsychism simply apes the failings of material reductionism. So it is a failure to in fact understand the holism of nature. It accepts the Cartesian division of nature into physical stuff and mental stuff. Then doubles down by simply claiming the two are one if you reduce your material to the simplest and smallest scale of being.

The actual scientific problem that holism confronts is instead swept under the rug and pretended to be solved.

I agree that most notions of Panpsychism are Mystical rather than Empirical. Yet, modern concepts of Process Philosophy, sound panpsychic, but try to incorporate the latest findings of Neuro-Science into a realistic theory. Ironically, their blend of Physical and Meta-physical (mental, rational) evidence typically concludes with some notions of Panpsychism and a god-like Mind. :nerd: — Gnomon

I agree it might sound like that. But it ain’t. Or at least not in my approach - the one taken by systems science.

Instead of Panpsychism, the general philosophical stance here would be Pansemiotic. That is, a pragmatic physicalist account in the tradition of Peircean semiosis.

Mind in this view becomes the general thing of a self-world pragmatic relation. A system of signs. And that is what neurobiology confirms.

I was thinking whether this stuff would be a better fit over in the language section. — jorndoe

You could have a restrictive definition of the word that make purpose only what some conscious mind has decided. But science wants to model the causes of things. Aristotle recognised telos as one of the four “becauses”. Systems scientists stand against material reductionism precisely because they feel it makes sense to recognise the teleology inherent in even the most basic material laws, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics or Darwin’s evolutionary law.

So you can have those different language communities.

Tension arises in the scientific arena as reductionist science was founded on the explicit rejection of meaning and purpose in the physical universe. What happens in nature is meant to be due to blind chance.

Systems science agrees that blind chance is fundamental. But then form and finality emerge to give cohesion and direction to that. So nature also develops its habits and its purposes - even if these are embodied as a structure of constraints (information) rather than as “deliberations within some mind”.

Yes, I certainly know Deacon. He is taking the same systems science approach, using his own jargon. So he naturalises finality the same way.

Maybe the fact that we can't help but lapse into teleological language when talking about nature is a sign we ought to take finality more seriously as part of the package when speaking of causality?

But the balance only exists and is created by our egoistic wills. — Gus Lamarch

Again, the problem lies with this Romantic psychology. It may be "existential philosophy", but it isn't credible as psychological science.

If I ask you for the evidence behind your claim, where is it ... except in literary sources?

The problem is when the lack of respect becomes present. — Gus Lamarch

I guess it is consistent with your egoism that you would want respect? That you could demand it rather than earn it?

Sorry. I respect arguments clearly put and backed up by suitable evidence. I was interested to see if you could mount a more spirited defence. That hasn't happened. So we can move on.

You are ignoring the fact that I have already stated that all this dynamic that creates the organism of society is based on the human nature of wanting to be fulfilled individually - selfishness -. — Gus Lamarch

But you are making claims about the nature of societies that don’t fit the facts. It is essential to a complex system that it optimises a balance of the selfish and the cooperative.

So to the degree that we egocentrically make society, we have to be skilled at striking this particular balance.

You can call that calculation self-interested - because we “follow the rules” only because we believe in some general collective benefit. But to say we are unselfish for selfish reasons becomes a rather contorted description of what is going on.

It leaves you arguing that “being selfish” is the primary fact and the ultimate good when the ability to intelligently and sharply switch behaviour is what is central to forming modern scalefree networks of competition and cooperation. Societies as functional collections of interest groups.

Your approach embodies the confusion of Romanticism. It makes it arbitrary whether you choose to be selfish or altruistic in any social situation. If you ask yourself, “how should I behave?”, the only answer is “well, how do I feel?”. And how you feel turns out to be some confused mix of your social conditioning and neurobiology. Or worse, you may have some highly stereotyped and inflexible ideology about “what’s right”.

Humans work well when they are able to make clear in the moment choices that are flexible and adaptive. When they are supple rather than rigid.

It is complicated to debate when people already come with the purpose of disagreeing. Not enough, they resort to verbal aggression tactics. I expected nothing less to speak the truth. — Gus Lamarch

Hah. Yes life is complicated like that. Intellectual discussions are dialectical as every thesis presents its antithesis.

One can either stick rigidly to one’s precepts or follow that two sided flow of ideas to discover where it goes.

This person's act of selfishness was to focus only on what he needed at the moment, now, having realized his needs - in a way - that person could very well be an empathic, charitable, kind person, but only because he can and not because it's the rule. — Gus Lamarch

This is still a one sided reading of the story. A complex adaptive system like a society is the product of a local~global dynamic. Nature harnesses the complementary forces of competition and cooperation to strike balances.

My point of view was not born through memes, but through a research base in existentialist philosophies. — Gus Lamarch

So yep. Not science but the meme factory of Romanticism.

Do you identify consciousness with processes? — bert1

My position is that consciousness is the result of nervous systems being in a modelling relation with the world. So I am talking specifically about that kind of process. One where there is mental modelling going on.

The "absolute" truth is only real because it was constructed by the individuals truths of the people. It is a joint of egoists. — Gus Lamarch

My perspective is based on the dynamic of competition~cooperation. So it recognises “egotism” over many scales of social organisation without lapsing into claims that self interest is purely a matter of individual psychology.

I don't see the point of using people who have had no contact with a society to try and contradict my point that the world is infinitely individual. — Gus Lamarch

The point is that your “individuality” only exists in opposition to “sociality”. You could never have come to your views unless they were already widely entrenched as a cultural meme that you could learn and pretend to be implementing.

I still disagree. Our minds could still be the same product of our past nomad ancestry, but through the mending of cultures, new inventions like religion, ideology, and even philosophy, our minds work in a completely different way than the ones from our ancestors. — Gus Lamarch

But I already say that we have become culturally very different. However the neurology underpinning empathy still exists.

Not so modern, we already experienced these "creed" of "individualisation" and "self-actualisation" at least 3 times during recorded human history — Gus Lamarch

Sure. Culture evolves. Ancient Greece was especially important for shaping the modern cultural notion of the rational and democratic polis.

Out of curiosity, what were you thinking of as a Bronze Age step towards the social invention of individuality? [Edit: Gilgamesh?]

The crowd only exists because the individual exists, without it the crowd is nothing but a concept. — Gus Lamarch

Again my own position is based on the interaction between the individual and the social group. I just say that societies need to create the right kind of individuals if they are going to persist. So the causality is switched around here. The individual only exist to the degree that “the crowd” supports that as a functional concept. (Or to the degree the crowd can afford to be indifferent to individual variety.)

. I don't know why you compared me - or at least thought about comparing - to that type of person. I tell people to be selfish, not decadent, rotten hypocritical consumers who embrace the status quo. — Gus Lamarch

I was pointing out why the slogans “be yourself”, “because you are worth it”, “stand out from the crowd”, “feel the power”, and a thousand other ad punchlines push the same social message.

What is the right way to be individual? That might have a lot to do with traditional ideas around stoicism, rationalism, personal responsibility and other pro-social cultural attitudes.

But when is “be selfish” ever a recipe for success? Maybe you can explain.

And again, my own position - based on social systems theory - is that individually it is perfectly fine to be making rational calculations of personal good vs collective good. The intelligence of the system as a whole is founded on a capacity for such trade offs.

So what I have objected to is just a one sided stance of “be selfish” that speaks to half the story.

The physical world and the human ego - mind, individual, use the synonym that you prefer - could normaly exist without one another... — Gus Lamarch

But this is wrong already. Sensory deprivation experiments demonstrate how depersonalisation sets in once the active relation between self and world is severed.

What I am objecting to is the lack of scientific support for your basic position. That is what you would need to respond to.

Even our scientific knowledge could be completely wrong if the majority of scientists agree that something else is right. — Gus Lamarch

Science isn't right because a bunch of egotists agreed. It is right if a bunch of people find they can use a perspective to control their reality in a shared pragmatic fashion. It is right to the degree that it is a model which achieves "real world" purposes.

Pragmatism isn't relativism. Pragmatism focuses on the modelling relation in which "selves" and "their world" are co-creations - the two ends of the same deal.

That is the evidence-based view that kneecaps your egocentric musings here.

What is good, is only good on the egocentric perspective of the person in question — Gus Lamarch

Not if people have to live in a shared social and cultural reality.

Feral children (reared by wolves, etc) would be your truest egocentrics. But I don't think you would envy them.

For us normal humans, everything about "us" comes by way of our evolutionary history and current cultural circumstances. Even this Romantic notion of the "ego" that is so fashionable.

Empathy is only moral because people accept it as something good and that should be encouraged. But empathy - if seen from another point of view - could be simply someone portraiting itself to be good for its own advantage. — Gus Lamarch

I wasn't making any argument that empathy was "good" - some kind of abstract moral judgement. I was saying it is functional in obvious evolutionary ways. It is a large part of our basis as social creatures.

So trying to argue about whether it is good or merely self-interested is to miss the point in two ways. My argument is based on empathy being "self-interested" as a fact of being a social creature.

Although to forestall further strawmanning, part of the complexity of being a social creature is to also to be able to make "egocentric" calculations as to self-advantage vs group advantage.

So we have some deep-rooted pro-social instincts that are functional, even if apparently contradictory. It is of evolutionary value to both be empathetic and hostile - as a group behaviour. That is, as individual interest groups we can compete with outside interest groups while also, by definition, cooperating as a group.

And then - as we became really complex social animals with our linguistic overlay of symbolic culture - we could really crank up the intricacy of our social relations. We could make the kind of self-interested calculations about personal advantage that you cite - especially as part of that modern creed of individualisation and self-actualisation that is so central to being .... a cog in the modern economic machine with its atomisation of society. :grin:

Congrats if you think that is the right outcome for egocentric Romanticism as an ideology.

The mind that was evolved with humanity was lost when we began living sedentarily and in not-nomads societies. — Gus Lamarch

Nope. The neurobiology and its functionality are still there inside every head.

The current human consciousness is a construct of millenium of doctrines being stamped unto us from people high on the hiearchy. Ex: Pharao's worship, Heavenly Rulership, Mesopotamia's god fearing, Christianity, Confuscionism, etc... The only thing that survived from the nomad period of humanity is power. — Gus Lamarch

Yep. The good old Romanticism schtick. Surely this cod Nietzscherism is getting old. We now have a century of social biology to tell us what actually goes on.

I'm not saying that empathy, altruism, goodness, compassion, etc... isn't necessary, i'm saying that it is only beeing done because we are egoists that are egocentric. — Gus Lamarch

If it is necessary, it is necessary because it is basic to humans as social and cultural creatures. Any selfhood we have arises out of that.

So your individual notion of "self" is secondary to the general socio-cultural model of selfhood prevalent in your neck of the woods. This "you" you claim to be primary is just a member of some crowd. It needs that crowd to exist.

Of course, this crowd may be defined by sharing the same Romantic trope. And it may be functional only in the context of the modern consumer society where "be yourself" is what Apple, Nike and every other expensive crap peddler will empathetically sell you as society's core message.

Or at least that is my argument based on the sociological evidence - the position you are not countering.

My view is the exact inverse of Gnomon's (if I have read them correctly). Our identity is constituted by all those processes, and when they stop, we no longer have a unitary identity, or at least much less of one. Consciousness, a bit like the total quantity of matter, is unaffected. I think this is a more coherent fit with the concepts of identity (vague and mutable) with consciousness (sharp and unchanging). — bert1

The problem with this panpsychism is that the weight of neurobiological evidence suggests that the processes are everything.

Imagine you had a brain cancer tumour that is huge. A big mass. Maybe even dwarfing the brain itself. Would that add anything to your "consciousness".

And then the "processes" themselves are best understood as processes in which the heterogeneity is part of the unity in just the same way a single body is formed by a collection of organs. The brain both differentiates and integrates so as to be a multiplicity of parts functioning as a cohesive whole.

So the claim that the brain is "constituted" of processes is actually the much larger claim that the process itself has a holistic unity of its parts.

That is what makes any panpsychic talk flawed. Panpsychism is an argument that piggybacks on conventional materialistic reductionism. And neurobiology has already moved on from that with its holistic notions of "process".

I'm not saying that empathy, altruism, goodness, compassion, etc... isn't necessary, i'm saying that it is only beeing done because we are egoists that are egocentric. — Gus Lamarch

You’ve not said anything to rebut my points, just restated your faulty conclusion.

No, there is no other experience for the individual than just his own. In that case, putting yourself at the center of all attention is not wrong, because how can it be? If the only way for my “I” to witness the world is through my perspective. In a physiological sense, there is no other way to perceive the world than your own, you are its center, the nexus of all events, learnings, lessons, visions, concepts, etc ... — Gus Lamarch

But this is falling for the Cartesian division in which there is this "self" who represents "the world". So you are taking the self as something that brutely exists. Along with a world that also brutely exists.

A more correct (Kantian, Peircean) psychological view is that self and world are two aspects of the one co-construction.

What brains do is model the world. There is a modelling relation. And that results in a sense of self, a point of view, that stands in contrast as "all that which is not the world".

This is the embodied or enactive story of cognition. You can chew your food without also eating your tongue because you have created a clear sense of self vs not self. And this is something basic to the very possibility of cognition. Even your immune system is making constant self/non-self distinctions at the molecular level.

Then the other side of the coin is that "the world" is not actually the world - the noumenal thing-in-itself - but what semioticians would call your umwelt. Your interpretation. A constructions of signs.

So the world is composed of 3D shapes. Now what would be the true objective experience of a object like a cat? Where should we stand in spacetime to "see it"?

Obviously, we build up our view of the world in terms of being used to seeing the cat at some general distance from one particular angle. We don't see it from all sides at once, at every distance from the other side of the Universe to our nose buried in it fur.

So even in a trivial way, our experience of the world already includes the fact of our embodied viewpoint. We are already in fact experiencing the world as a modelling relationship. We are seeing the cat in terms of a distance and orientation. We are already conscious of how "graspable" it is by "ourselves".

So to get to your point, empathy is completely reasonable for a social animal like a human. Egocentrism would be a failure of neurobiology.

We are evolved to have a consciousness that is "us" in a modelling relationship with a "world" that is full of social significance, and not just physical significance. The world as we are meant to experience it is the one full of cultural and social signs.

A reason for big brains is the need to be able to model our reality in a complex social fashion. Empathy is wired in by greater top-down connectivity between the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala for instance. We can see it is what we have been designed for (along with the hostility and cold blooded aggression that is also part of our evolved social complexity).

The world is watched by different egos at all times, each individual, with its own central system, its “egocentrism”, yet they continue to deny their own existences. This is perverse work, which has been working hand in hand with nihilism, always moving towards the total perishing of its own identity, the ego. — Gus Lamarch

So I dispute the factual basis of your argument. If you are going to invoke the existence of individual neurobiology, you also have to take account of its species setting.

Science makes the point that any nervous system exists to produce "a self" set against "a world". So nothing really exists as "an egocentric individual" until there develops this state of awareness as an embodied contrast. The self and its world go together as a co-construction.

And then humans have a particular kind of nervous system - one highly evolved for sociality and cultural learning. We also have a whole new kind of self-world making in the semiotics of language. We now speak our worlds - our umwelts - into being.

It doesn't make much sense being "a self" in a world that lacks sociality (with its demand to balance empathy against hostility and other complex judgements).

On the other hand, linguistic culture can indeed construct antisocial and nihilistic worlds for people these days. That is what your post was doing, wasn't it?

So we have now developed that kind of thought freedom. But that doesn't make it good philosophy as it is based on a fundamental failure to understand the actual evolutionary basis of the human mind.

After having read it, I have some very rough nights, with the concept that if a person falls asleep they die in the most intimate way possible, what ever happens to the body, making it hard to fall asleep. — AJ88

Does it help to say that even in deepest sleep we have a dim ruminating sort of consciousness?

The brain can't actually shut down. Every neuron has to keep firing all through sleep. So it is the state of consciousness that is altered. Sensory input and motor output are suppressed. The result in slow wave (or non-dreaming) sleep is a desultory and instantly forgotten nonsense thread of thought.

It is difficult to catch because it is so unremembered and washed away by waking. But with practice you can notice it.

So in general, our personal identity is all about a structure of habit and experience that is our living brain. That doesn't change as we go to bed at night and wake up in the morning. Indeed, there is evidence that sleep allows growth processes that help cement new memories and habits. So you are becoming more "you" in a sense.

All our body is falling apart and rebuilding constantly. Proteins like microtubules - the internal skeleton of a cell - have a half-life of about 10 minutes. So there is constant molecular turnover all day and all night as a basic fact of biology. This dynamism is what we are.

Even the act of remembering produces changes in those very memories. Everything shifts around a bit at the neural level in a way that consolidates what is frequently used so that it becomes more efficient.
The effects are slight but real. And again essential to the way that minds are.

So the teleporter thought experiment is interesting. Even if it is a physical impossibility to "replace every atom exactly", it seems logically true that it should make no difference to "us" as we are the current structure of our brain and body.

But also, we are "us" in terms of recent experience. And so our beliefs at the point of entering the teleporter, or falling asleep, are part of this remembered or habitual sense of self.

If enter the teleporter believing we are being transported, then that is the belief state which should be rebuilt at the other end.

Likewise if we go in believing we are about to die, then that death of ourselves will be the memory state recreated.