are just media through which information is pushed under the influence of voltage and program. — Cartuna

same with the brain

Because it isn't explainable. — Cartuna

activity in the brain is the conscious representation of what is creating consciousness outside of consciousness

activity in the brain is the conscious representation of what is creating consciousness outside of consciousness — Miller

And as such consciousness is indeed inexplicable by a conscious representation in terms of materialistic processes.

same with the brain — Miller

The difference being though that information in the brain isn't pushed around in a programmed way. The information flows through the neuron pathwaysnot by external voltages pushing it. The information flow isn't governed by a program, but only by strengths of neuron connections. Which could be considered as programmed. But not in the digital computer sense.

As I've noted, I've been perplexed by your discussions of semiotics from the first time I read your posts. Certainly nothing wrong with your explanations. It's just an alien way of thinking for me. It sometimes seems to verge on the mystical, which I understand is not your intent. — T Clark

Most people never get it. :grin:

When you say "neural firing must somehow produce an experienced representation," is that different from saying that the experienced representation emerges from neuronal firing. In your view, is that wrong too? — T Clark

Yep. Emergence is generally employed as a hand-waving patch for the failure of materialism/reductionism. You get a claim about higher level properties “popping” out due simply to “enough complexity”.

Water having the property of liquidity, for example. Confine a bunch of H2O molecules at the right temperature and pressure, and they collectively interact to form one phase of matter and not one of the three others. Thus liquidity becomes merely a label for a state that is still constructed, bottom up, from the fundamental properties of material parts. Good old fashion reductionism still gets to win as the higher level property is not fundamental, merely an accident of an arrangement.

But structuralism is about taking top-cause - the shaping hand of form or constraint - seriously. And so causality then has the irreducible triadic complexity of a causal world where bottom up and top down causes work in combination. The global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom, and those local degrees of freedom in turn (re)build the larger context, the global reality, that is making them. The causality is synergistic - as Hermann Haken describes.

So I would talk of emergence too. But it is the proper holistic view of emergence and not the arse-covering notion of emergence peddled by eliminative reductionists.

Thus even the term “consciousness” is not a lot of use to me, or neuroscientists like Friston, because it is language already loaded with all the presumptions of reductionism and its bottom-up, magic popping out, way of thinking.

For me, I prefer to talk of brain function in terms of it known bottom up and top down processes - like the distinction between habit and attention. Habits are routines that the brain simply “emits” in a bottom up fashion. Attention is then the brain coming at things from the other direction - starting with a global effort to suppress to halt and suppress the habitual so as to make room for a novel and voluntary state of intention and planning to rule.

The two streams of processing - which can be described neuroanatomically - generally work so seamlessly together that we don’t even notice there is this dance going on.

But what happens when I drive my car in busy traffic while fully absorbed in my own thoughts? Am I conscious of one and unconscious of the other?

These are the kinds of questions we can answer scientifically once we drop the folk metaphysics that thinks it already knows what it is talking about.

To talk of experienced representation already bakes in the information processing dualism that a semiotic understanding of mind and life would want to avoid.

The tricky bit is that instead of a broken dualism, the way forward is not back to any kind of monism, but instead a step up to the hierarchical causality of holism. You have to move to an irreducibly triadic understanding of “consciousness” as a “semiotic modelling relation”.

In Friston’s Markov Blanket formalism, the neural firing “represents” the difference between the organisms actions on its physical environment and the physical environments actions on its sensory receptors. So as a system, the brain is trying to minimise that difference - reduce the prediction error as the brain pursues the holistic goal of being in perfect synch with “its” world. The neural firing “represents” the running interaction of an organism’s goals and with the challenges of its environment.

And being in a well synched state of flow - as when driving without having to pay attention - becomes something as unconscious as we can get. The aim is the very opposite of what the Cartesian reorientations presume.

It just is a different paradigm. But folk metaphysics is stuck in its own Cartesian rut. Reductionism prevails - because the success of computer technology appears to confirm a linear input/output model of data processing as the most useful view of the natural world.

The difference between a TV is that a working brain provides you with a conscious world. A working brain cannot be seen outside a living body. Every working TV set or functioning computer, no matter how complicated or however intelligent artificially made, and no matter in what artificial robot body placed, are just media through which information is pushed under the influence of voltage and program. — Cartuna

As I noted, we are just repeating arguments that haven't convinced the other in previous posts. I say "un hunh." You say "nunh hunh." Nuff said.

As I noted, we are just repeating arguments that haven't convinced the other in previous posts. I say "un hunh." You say "nunh hunh." Nuff said. — T Clark

No arguments used here can convince the others if they start from different premises. This doesn’t mean though that a TV and programs transmitted by it can be compared to a brain and mind. No matter from which premises you start, that's just a fact of life.

This doesn’t mean though that a TV and programs transmitted by it can be compared to a brain and mind. — Cartuna

Unh hunh.

However complicated the strucures are, they still need stuff out of which the patterns and structures are formed. — Cartuna

Well the structure is what shapes the material stuff that it needs. Thus it is a closed and self organising view of nature.

The Standard Model of particle physics is an exercise in ontic structural realism. The constraints of invariant group symmetry is what conjures all the elementary particles into formed being.

Do you want to argue with the physicists as well as the neuroscientists now? :confused:

Here you presuppose that it produces consciousness. — Cartuna

No. I trust the amount of evidence gathered in favour of this particular hypothesis. The scope for doubt has been carefully minimised.

If you want to imagine something different - like all of the neuroscience, none of the consciousness - then of course I will call you out on your sloppy argumentation.

If one elementary particle is just matter, why shouldn't a highly structured bunch of them not just be that? — Cartuna

I refer you back to the modern physical understanding of “matter” that has long replaced your folk metaphysics understanding of matter.

Yes I am unable to explain consciousness. Because it isn't explainable. — Cartuna

You are not doing anything except regurgitating half baked folk wisdom about the nature of reality and the nature of mind.

So overall this leaves us with two options, either consciousness as well as qualia are fundamental properties, or the laws of nature can not all be described mathematically. — tom111

The problem you're grappling with is intrinsic to the modern formulation of science itself. It starts with the posit that only what can be mathematically described can be considered a proper object of knowledge, presuming that the knowing subject, and the qualitative aspects of phenomena, are left aside or bracketed out. The laws of nature, insofar as these involve the primary qualities of objects and their relations, are satisfactorily dealt with in terms of this paradigm - up to a point, anyway.

So all of the attempts to 'describe' or 'explain' consciousness (or, actually, 'being', which is what is really the subject of the discussion) in terms of that paradigm are doomed to failure because of the way the problem is framed or set up in the first place, because 'being' 'mind' or 'consciousness' - take your pick - are never really an object of such analysis in the first place, and attempting to treat them as such is purely a problem of perspective, or the lack of it.

But not in the digital computer sense. — Cartuna

Brain has no more free will than a tv

I am unable to explain consciousness. Because it isn't explainable. — Cartuna

I suspect that basically you are right. Consciousness must be taken as granted rather than explained - especially if the only explanation one is willing to accept is physical.

Puts me in mind of Mary Midgley.

Well the structure is what shapes the material stuff that it needs. — apokrisis

Ah! There you make a naive, but understandable mistake.Structures don't flow independently somewhere to create the material it needs. The structure lies in the matter itself. Structure is not some extramundane thing magically creating the matter it needs to jump in it. But looking at it this way indeed explains consciousness as structure. I, on the other hand, explain consciousness without reference to such a construction, far removed from reality. I experience consciousness, without placing it in structure that creates matter to click into. And that experience is consciousness, so why explain it?

I suspect that basically you are right. Consciousness must be taken as granted rather than explained - especially if the only explanation one is willing to accept is physical. — Banno

:100:

Ah! There you make a naive, but understandable mistake.Structures don't flow independently somewhere to create the material it needs. The structure lies in the matter itself. — Cartuna

So when it comes to the Standard Model of particle physics, the group symmetry doesn’t limit the material possibilities?

Sounds legit.

So when it comes to the Standard Model of particle physics, the group symmetry doesn’t limit the material possibilities? — apokrisis

That's a far-fetched but interesting comparison! :smile:

The groups though are derived from material processes. For example, in the strong interaction SU(3) was chosen and not U(3). The structures of the groups don't determine material possibilities, but vice versa. Of course later on you can use it the other way round.

Brain has no more free will than a tv — Miller

Indeed not. But it's not programmed.

For example, in the strong interaction SU(3) was chosen and not U(3). — Cartuna

Chosen by who? Are you saying the particles - as the matter - got to choose their SU(3) interaction as their structure of relations, rather than the particles being characterised by the restriction of having to arrive at a gauge invariance that could give them their stable material identity?

As I understand it, U(3) reduces to SU(3) because one of the 9 interactions would effectively self cancel and hence be unphysical. A distinction that failed to make a difference.

And note, I don’t eliminate materiality from my argument. I would agree that structural realism, in its enthusiasm, can throw out the baby with the bath water there.

My argument is that materiality reduces to “material possibility”. The bare unformed potential for some action with some direction.

So it is a structuralism in the tradition of metaphysicians like Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce. And in the spirit of quantum field theory, condensed matter physics and loop quantum gravity.

Order out of chaos. The emergence of structure to limit the uncertainty of bare spontaneity.

So in a broad sense, there must be some material cause for the formal cause to act upon. But then also, the game is to reduce this materiality to its least concrete state of being. That then gives formal cause a real job to do.

If matter is fundamentally defined in terms of a complete absence of form - naked fluctuation, a quantum foam, an Apeiron, whatever - then existence naturally evolves as whatever structuring set of relations can impose a cohesive and generalised order on such a chaotic state.

Thus it might seem that matter comes first in the creation of a complexly structured Cosmos. But that it just equivalent to saying the maximally unformed and unstructured was the ground from which the formed and the structured arose… due to mathematical inevitability.

To exist is to gain the important quality of stable persistence. And that means to arrive at an equilibrium state, or generalised invariance. Differences might freely still happen, but now they no longer make any general difference.

But it's not programmed. — Cartuna

brain is programed by genetics and then environment. there is nothing else.

and the environment programming cannot exceed the genetic limitations.

Well the structure is what shapes the material stuff that it needs. — apokrisis

Are relations between stuffs or between nothings?

Are relations between stuffs or between nothings? — litewave

You have to look at it the other way around. Chaos is so much “somethingness” that it is effectively a nothingness. Just an unstructured torrent of possibilities. The task of global structure - the evolution of laws and regularities - is to suppress that wildness to the degree that you are left with stuff that is definite and individuated.

The Atomists imagined this state as atoms in a void. That tells the story of the day after creation, but not the story of creation itself.

brain is programed by genetics and then environment. there is nothing else. — Miller

Programmed by genetics? How the #$@%? can genes program? Maybe in school you can get programmed systematically, but normally I don't feel programmed by my environment. Well, maybe when I ride on my bike to the supermarket, by the road and the cyclic motion my feet have to make. But apart from that, there is no program excecuted in my brain.

don't feel programmed — Cartuna

your feelings are irrelevant. free will is an illusion caused by ignorance

Complete self recursion is impossible, this is what causes the hard problem of consciousness, the illusion of free will, and the ego.

your feelings are irrelevant. free will is an illusion caused by ignorance

Complete self recursion is impossible, this is what causes the hard problem of consciousness, the illusion of free will, and the ego. — Miller

That's what you think. Just show me the program. I don't mean the laws of nature. Nature doesn't follow an explicit program, and neither does the brain. A complete self image is impossible. Why should that cause the hard problem? The hard problem is just the inability to explain conscious experiences. That has nothing to do with an incomplete image of the self. Nor do free will and and the ego. Of course you gotta have some self image in your mind. It would be very hard living if you hadn't. But why should an incomplete knowledge of yourself cause the hard problem? Obviously, the knowledge of the self by itself can't be included in that knowledge. As soon as you include that knowledge there is a bigger body of knowledge. But then you have to include that new body too. Etc. There is indeed no complete self reference. The brain cant indeed have a complete self image, as the proces involved in that knowledge can never be included. Well it can, but then only knowledge about knowledge, etc. is involved, not knowledge about other processes. But, again, what does this have to do with the hard problem? Why should only a complete knowledge be able to explain consciousness (I believe though that even if you had this it still couldn't explain it).

Nature doesn't follow an explicit program, and neither does the brain. — Cartuna

Either way you have no free will.

Either way you have no free will. — Miller

That ďepends on who you are with and in what culture you are in. If you feel that your wil is free than it's free..

feel that your wil is free than it's free.. — Cartuna

ya feelings decide truth haha

"This feeling arises from moment-to-moment ignorance of the prior causes of our thoughts and actions." -sam harris

The feeling I am talking about isn't part of emotions. Emotions come and go. The feeling of a free will determines if the will is free or not. Not an abstract theory that according to you is keeping the will in its grip and chains it.

"This feeling arises from moment-to-moment ignorance of the prior causes of our thoughts and actions." - — Miller

Even if I knew these causes, I could still have the feeling my will is free or unfree.

if I knew these causes — Cartuna

Complete self recursion is impossible, this is what causes the illusion of free will, and the ego.