Have you had the last word yet? Have you seen off every challenge to your confusions?

No? OK, go for it one more time then.

In other words, consciousness can't be a simple. It is already complex. — apokrisis

I'm not talking about engineering, about what systems you would have to have in place in order to produce or emulate a mind. To paraphrase that SEP entry - when you experience a noise and a pain, you are not conscious of the noise and then, separately, of the pain but of the noise and pain together, as aspects of a single conscious experience.

Of course, from a cognitive science or AI perspective you can then analyse the various neural and physiological systems that have to be coordinated, how the nerves transmit the sensations and how they are combined, but that has been shown not to account for the subjective unity of perception '...enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience.'

To paraphrase that SEP entry - when you experience a noise and a pain, you is not conscious of the noise and then, separately, of the pain but of the noise and pain together, as aspects of a single conscious experience. — Wayfarer

Right. So any neuroscientific account has to explain both the differentiation and the integration here.

The exact same noise could be painful or exhilarating depending on whether it was heard at a Motorhead concert or blasting out from your neighbours at 2am.

For the synaesthete, the painful noise could also come coloured, while for the autistic person, even turning down the volume might leave the sound feeling unbearable.

Consciousness has a functional unity to the degree that it is neither over-integrating, nor over-differentiating, but doing differentiation~integration just right.

So pain is an attention getter that forces focus on sensations of damage. It helps if that pain is bound to the location of that damage - which might be the speakers at the Motorhead concert. But physiotherapists often find that the pain shooting down your leg is caused by the pinched nerve in the small of your back.

This fact - that neural "information processing" issues are always to be found whenever consciousness appears dysfunctional - ought to be a clue. The kind of seamless flow or unity of a functionally adapted brain is something that we might take for granted as a "substantial simple", but when that unity breaks down, we can see what a dynamical balancing act it truly was.

but that has been shown not to account for the subjective unity of perception — Wayfarer

Sure. The brain has its topographic organisation that makes it look like a bunch of computational modules. Then something like a central CPU clock - the thalamus beating out its magic binding rhythm - would synchronise all the activity. And then obviously.... well here the computational analogy stalls. In fact it gives no reason why the central synchronisation of a set of distributed components should result in "feeling like something".

But that is why one would only use computer analogies in the most superficial way. Biosemiosis sees organisms as being based on an embodied modelling relation. The nervous system forward-models the organism's world. It is not representations-based - the Cartesian story - but intentions-based, the Peircean and Bayesian Brain story.

So the unity of awareness - as the product of a process of differentiation grounded in integration - is not something input/output computers can give you. You can't just stick together a bunch of data points by making them all fire in different places at the same time.

But a semiotic organism learns to live in an intentional and predictive temporal space. It already has the motor and sensory habits that generally adapt it to its environment. It can form both short-range predictions and long-range intentions.

And it can suppress or erase data just as much as stick it together. It can learn to ignore the world - as the world as it is now was fully predicted just a few moments ago.

So there are a bunch of obvious differences from the Turing Universal Machine notion of how an organism might work. All the issues - like the fact that consciousness is both a unity and a particularity at the same time - are just problems for the computational analogy and its Cartesian representationalism.

In fact it gives no reason why the central synchronisation of a set of distributed components should result in "feeling like something". — apokrisis

Elegant account. With you on most of that.

The idea I'm contemplating is that the organising principle that gives rise to the unity of consciousness in the individual is an analogy for, or instance of, the same organising principle that of the cosmos; whatever it is that puts the 'uni' in 'universe'. Of course, we can't say what that principle is either, but I'm sure that it is real. Tao, dharma, logos - something of that nature. There's a Zen expression, 'the moon in a dewdrop' - the image of the moon being reflected in drops of dew on a clear night.

The idea I'm contemplating is that the organising principle that gives rise to the unity of consciousness in the individual is an analogy for, or instance of, the same organising principle that of the cosmos; whatever it is that puts the 'uni' in 'universe'. — Wayfarer

That would be what I mean by pansemiosis. And all forms of organicism arrive at the same insight. The cosmos is a whole because it is a harmony of its parts.

Without the opposing forces of differentiation and integration, there would be no contrasts to produce anything. There wouldn't even be a void. There would be the less than nothing of a Vagueness, a Firstness, an Apeiron ... a Tao, Ungrund, etc, etc.

Stability of form and structure is an illusion. It is a product of our minds' frequency relative to the frequency of what is being observed. Change is relative and minds change relative to every other process. The rate at which they change, or process external information, is relative to the speed or frequency at which the external world changes. Some changes happen very fast and some very slow. Those that happen fast appear as "non-physical" processes, while those that happen very slow appear as stable "physical" objects. — Harry Hindu

:100: :up:

Stability of form and structure is an illusion. It is a product of our minds' frequency relative to the frequency of what is being observed. Change is relative and minds change relative to every other process. The rate at which they change, or process external information, is relative to the speed or frequency at which the external world changes. Some changes happen very fast and some very slow. Those that happen fast appear as "non-physical" processes, while those that happen very slow appear as stable "physical" objects. — Harry Hindu

Nec caput nec pedes.

Have you had the last word yet? — apokrisis

Not yet!

Have you seen off every challenge to your confusions? — apokrisis

I wish there were some challenges to my confusions that I could understand. Hence my question to you. Could you please have a go at answering it?

What I think I mean, is that there is an objective truth that A=A, that things are what they are, and that would be true in any possible world that came into existence through random happenstance.
A=A, the law of identity, a thing is what it is, is an immutable truth. There are objective truths in this universe, in this reality.
I may have gotten lost there. The content of this thread is way over my head. I'm not really sure if I answered anything or contributed anything valuable to our exchange. — Watchmaker

I agree with the general concept of objective truth but I also think its very useful to move from the general to specific examples before attempting to form any 'conclusions.' The law of identity is very old but certainly has value but few systems of logic are built purely on that law alone.
Objectively, colour or sound would be experienced BY THE SAME INDIVIDUAL HUMAN BEING in exactly the same way no matter where they were in the Universe. So the law of identity applies and A = A, for humans when A is colour or sound. It would not matter if god created humans or they came to be due to random chance. But if you think about the proposal above a little more, it suggests 'placing humans as they were formed here,' to any other place in the Universe.'
But A=A would fail for colour and sound if the 'Humans' evolved not here, but in some other place in the Universe. Evolution and natural selection applied at 'some other place in the Universe,' for 14 billion years would produce a lifeform which we would not label 'Human,' if we encountered it.
If they evolved on a planet with a completely different chemistry and biology to the Earth then who knows what different perceptions they would have of WHAT WE LABEL, colour or sound.
They may not be carbon-based lifeforms even. How would a silicon-based lifeform experience what we call colour or sound. So A=A may be an 'objective truth' for humans made here and then placed anywhere else in the Universe but that could almost be a 'well obviously!' comment but its probably not at all true that A=A for colour or sound for A here after evolution and natural selection and A there after evolution and natural selection.

It's the ingredients of consciousness that is said to be fundamental. Someone here offered another perspective, that information is fundamental. I think information would be more accurate, or it least it reduces it a little more — Watchmaker

So what about my comment that I posted near the top of Page 2, part of it pasted below:

"I find it interesting that information is suggested as being fundamental. In Computing, information is a composite of the labels data and meaning. Raw data has no meaning. 25 is raw data, 25 apples, is data with meaning, and is therefore information. Data is unlabeled, so how can information be fundamental if it is made up of 'parts.'
Perhaps 'data' is fundamental and 'meaning' is fundamental"

Panpsychism attempts to get around this by making the mind (or 'consciousness') an attribute of simple material particulars (presumably atoms or their constituents) - as if it's something that is there all along, like velocity, mass, and the other primary qualities of objects. They interpret the idea of 'consciousness everywhere' in a literal sense - literally distributed throughout the Universe in latent form, existing in a very rudimentary manner even in atoms themselves.
So that kind of makes panpsychism sound naturalistic - but at the cost of introducing an attribute or quality for which critics will say there can't be any direct evidence.
That's what I see as the state of play. — Wayfarer

I think this is pretty accurate under the heading of your last sentence.

The problem is that this runs up against the naturalist taboo against anything that sounds theistic - a divine intelligence or intellect or whatever, which is more or less verboten in secular philosophical discourse. — Wayfarer

For all scientists who would declare themselves as naturalist however, I would defend against the position you suggest immediately above. I think you are being too harsh here. You almost suggest an irrational theophobia from naturalists towards theists and such generalisations are always at best inaccurate on a case-by-case basis.

I think you are being too harsh here. You almost suggest an irrational theophobia from naturalists towards theists and such generalisations are always at best inaccurate on a case-by-case basis. — universeness

Very insightful analysis. Generalisations are often innaccurate case-by-case, that's what makes them generalisations. But I stand by my criticism. You know, when Thomas Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos was published in 2012, he was declared to be a 'friend to creationism', notwithstanding his professed atheism.

But consciousness is neither an object, a substance or a property, but a relational activity. — Joshs

Does this definition prevent consciousness from being a result of the combination of smaller quanta?
If it's a relational activity then what are you relating the action too? Brain functionality? and if so are we still not left with brain quantisation?

Something has to explain how I can both drive a car down busy streets, and yet do so completely automatically to the point I can't even remember the experience if I am too happy in my own day-dreaming — apokrisis

After this, you went on to type about certain workings of the brain. All good stuff. Consciousness seems to be able to employ un/sub/conscious automation of bodily actions whilst 'focussing' on the 'day-dreaming' state you describe in your example above but is this not in fact 'a lesser attentive' brain state compared to a non-daydreaming state and full focus on the driving. Your day-dream state creates more chance of a car crash occurring compared to your consciousness being more 'focussed' on the busy traffic. So human consciousness is a system with very definite limitations/flaws/capability to make mistakes. For me, these vulnerabilities, provide further (anecdotal) evidence of either limited design ability or the absence of any god.
Do you think a full understanding of the workings of the human brain will be achieved by Neuroscience?

Fair enough, but I think it's important for all of us to continue to struggle to combat inaccurate generalisations even though, as I type this, my inner referee is shouting at me 'practice what you preach mate!' :smile:

For anyone who subscribes to New Scientist, here’s a current article which discusses panpsychism and physics https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25433802-500-a-new-place-for-consciousness-in-our-understanding-of-the-universe/amp/

Consciousness seems to be able to employ un/sub/conscious automation of bodily actions whilst 'focussing' on the 'day-dreaming' state you describe in your example above but is this not in fact 'a lesser attentive' brain state compared to a non-daydreaming state and full focus on the driving. — universeness

Why do you feel the need to add "consciousness" as some further reified being that sits above and beyond the brain processes of attending and habit-emitting?

Why do you say that consciousness "employs" various habits and automaticisms, while it goes off to "focus" on the day-dreaming and not on the road?

What extra work does invoking some further spooky and homuncular Cartesian regress – the "display that is also being watched" - do here?

I prefer a naturalistic account where consciousness just is the sum of everything involved in responding intelligently to the world.

There is always some balance of focus and fringe, attention and habit, noting and ignoring, differentiation and integration. And thus it is this very fact of a dichotomous organisation that is the whole of story.

Consciousness - defined in this sense - becomes as much about how much we can afford to ignore, neglect, fail to remember, etc, as that which all that on which we are focused, noting, carrying forward as working memory, etc.

So you are doing the usual thing of treating consciousness as the central spotlight of attention - the ideal witness who sees all and notes everything. And this becomes something mysterious to the degree one has to admit there is also this whole other side to mental processes - to functioning as a "mind" - that is sub-conscious, automatic, reflexive, and generally just a bunch of dumb physiology or neural information crunching.

But my definition of consciousness includes all that which is ignored, forgotten, emitted without further thought. In fact - as neurological theory, the Bayesian Brain story - it is based on that. The brain is set up to habituate its responses, learn from experience. It sets out to not have to attend ... as then that means attention is saved for the small element of novelty or importance that demands some extra processing effort.

So consciousness has this structure, this dynamic, of attention~habit. And each explains the other. To the degree you can ignore, you don't have to attend. To the degree you can't ignore, you then must attend.

And now we have a proper connection between the phenomenological experience of being a mind in the world, and a neuroscientific account in terms of the necessary structure of any useful world-model.

Consciousness as a Cartesian substance - a mysterious extra glow that attaches itself to all the physical processes - fails so spectacularly to connect with any neuroscientific account that it is no surprise that folk want to chase it all the way down to "quantum information" or "psychic atoms".

But starting the story with a dichotomous structure of attention and and habits, differentiation and integration - the logic of the processing that would be needed so to act as a self in a world - can halt this slithering down the slope of the physicalist fallacy.

We can see how panpsychism isn't even the right kind of thing before we start debating what might be its best theory.

Consciousness as a Cartesian substance - a mysterious extra glow that attaches itself to all the physical processes - fails so spectacularly to connect with any neuroscientific account that it is no surprise that folk want to chase it all the way down to "quantum information" or "psychic atoms" — apokrisis

And yet I do think there is a remnant of that Cartesianism lurking in the treatment of affectivity , both on the part of embodied enactivtists like Thompson, and predictive coding types like Barrett. All that’s left of the old inner subject is somatic sensation , the bare registry of positive and negative valence within the body. How pain-pleasure contributes to the organization of motivational relevance and mattering is a complex function of many intertwined aspects of the organism in its total functioning, and yet there remains what for me is an unsatisfying immanence or intrinsicality associated with feeling , as much as it has been embedded within irreducible webs of somatic-cognitive-environmental interactions.

So what about my comment that I posted near the top of Page 2, part of it pasted below:

"I find it interesting that information is suggested as being fundamental. In Computing, information is a composite of the labels data and meaning. Raw data has no meaning. 25 is raw data, 25 apples, is data with meaning, and is therefore information. Data is unlabeled, so how can information be fundamental if it is made up of 'parts.'
Perhaps 'data' is fundamental and 'meaning' is fundamental" - Universeness

How about meaningful data is fundamental?

If meaning is fundamental, wouldn't that imply a mind?

And yet I do think there is a remnant of that Cartesianism lurking in the treatment of affectivity ... All that’s left of the old inner subject is somatic sensation , the bare registry of positive and negative valence within the body. — Joshs

Only in the sense that sociosemiosis stands back to look at biosemiosis "from the outside".

Our bodies make up their own minds - as organisms organised by genetic and neural information. Then human cultural practice - semiotic at the level of language and even maths - takes its own self-interested and organismic view of what might go in terms of all these affect-driven behaviours.

Humans shift up a gear by having to make socially-constructed sense of what they are feeling. Is Will Smith being courageous or shameful when he gives into his aggressive impulses. What is our social judgement and therefore what do we think he should be feeling about his feelings.

So there might seem an element of Cartesian transcendence or homuncular regress. But nothing more exciting going on here than further - more abstracted - levels of semiosis.

...yet there remains what for me is an unsatisfying immanence or intrinsicality associated with feeling , as much as it has been embedded within irreducible webs of somatic-cognitive-environmental interactions. — Joshs

Well that's what you get for being a post-structuralist rather than a structuralist. :smile:

"I find it interesting that information is suggested as being fundamental. In Computing, information is a composite of the labels data and meaning. Raw data has no meaning. 25 is raw data, 25 apples, is data with meaning, and is therefore information. Data is unlabeled, so how can information be fundamental if it is made up of 'parts.'
Perhaps 'data' is fundamental and 'meaning' is fundamental" - Universeness

How about meaningful data is fundamental?

If meaning is fundamental, wouldn't that imply a mind? — Watchmaker

Fundamental implies ‘mind’ all on its own. But ‘mind’ is just relative potentiality, a conceptual structure or prediction. Meaning as existential relation to paradox is fundamental, and data is what is given (as relative value or potential) in any such relation. This paradox or dichotomy in itself could be existentially prior to any meaningful relation, yet this isn’t given. Assumed or denied, its existence is relative to our own.

We keep looking for some kind of singular foundation of certainty or substance to existence, but it could only possibly or relatively exist as such. Any certainty or substance is necessarily triadic.

To the extent that I'm aware, consciousness, as many posters have remarked, has this so-called aboutness i.e. in the simplest of senses holds something, an other (other-awareness) or sometimes itself (self-awareness). This, in my humble opinion, requires for the mind to create and then latch on a facsimile image of this other or itself. Remember this image has to be perfect mind-apt replica of the real thing for the aboutness to work. A good example of what I mean is how our eyes hold an image of the world or even a single object and our minds then become aware of the world or this object via the image.

If all I said is true, the first order of business for consciousness is to create high quality images of the world and that's done by mirrors. I guess what I mean to say here is that mirrors possess a mind-like aboutness (the reflection or image is of/about something). Mirrors could be conscious or, to be conservative, mirrors have taken the first step towards consciousness.

Please note my use of the word "image" is both literal and figurative e.g. creating a mind-apt replica of sounds in one's surroundings is also an image, an acoustic one to be precise.

I don't think it's a coincidence that a synonym for thinking (consciousness) is reflection.

Your post sounds intriguing. I can't really make any sense of it though. Would you mind simplifying all that please? Try to make as simple as you possibly can, as though you were trying to explain it to a 6 year old.

I read before that the mind is a mirror that mirror that mirrors man's mind.

Does that tie into what you're saying here at all?

mind is a mirror that mirror that mirrors man's mind. — Watchmaker

As Wayfarer keeps mentioning ever so often, a consciousness can't make of itself an object, it being the quintessential subject. Have you heard the Japanese tale of a man who was in the habit of looking at himself in the mirror every morning? One fine day, he looked and saw no head. He was convinced that he'd lost his head and turned the entire room over for his head. He eventually went back to the mirror and there was his head, as round as it had always been (he'd been looking at the back of his mirror). He was looking for his head with his head..

I guess the modern version of self-reflection is the selfie. I just went through my notes on philosophy and here's what I believe is a nugget of wisdom on art: Art isn't a photograph (representationalism only, like it was in the old days), but if you're gonna make any headway in re temet nosce, you better have a photographer who can produce a faithful copy of you rather than an artist who'll distort the image of your self with her own personal eccentricities.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there has to be an internal representation of the world that then can be thought of: The mind is about the world via the image of the world it has, an image created with the aid of our senses and our minds in partnership with each other.

That's all I have...limited panpsychism. Only mirrors or the like, objects that can reflect the world in them, can be conscious and if not that, can be treated as proto-conscious.

:up: Some really interesting ideas there. That last sentence, in particular.

What extra work does invoking some further spooky and homuncular Cartesian regress – the "display that is also being watched" - do here? — apokrisis

‘The subject’ does stuff like, you know, physics.

Why do you feel the need to add "consciousness" as some further reified being that sits above and beyond the brain processes of attending and habit-emitting — apokrisis

This is the situation of 'me' trying to identify what 'myself' is, by asking 'myself,' whilst also trying to identify where the question is coming from. Are all of the actions described in the previous sentence, simply part of the functionality of the human brain that humans have labeled as containing their 'consciousness.'
That's the kind of complicated question Neuroscience is trying to answer, yes?
I currently think that individual human consciousness exists wholly in the human brain and no aspect of it exists externally to the human. So, I don't conceive of consciousness as a particularly concrete entity that exists above or beyond the brain. I think IT IS a brain process that controls focus level when driving and the day-dreaming distraction.

Why do you say that consciousness "employs" various habits and automaticisms, while it goes off to "focus" on the day-dreaming and not on the road?
What extra work does invoking some further spooky and homuncular Cartesian regress – the "display that is also being watched" - do here?
I prefer a naturalistic account where consciousness just is the sum of everything involved in responding intelligently to the world — apokrisis

I like the questions you are asking me here because I can then ask 'myself,' well why do 'you?'
I 'seem' to have to reference 'me/myself/I.' by some means so when I am describing one of my brains functions, It seems reasonable for me to use a reference like 'my consciousness employs.' I agree that this is a system referencing itself as if it was viewing its functionality from outside of its domain but I think that is an illusion and that in truth, the brain is quite capable of internally referencing and perceiving its own functionality and individual existence. Possibly, 'employs' was the wrong word to choose as it is too 'deliberate.' Reduction of focus on 'the job at hand' and entering a day-dream state but still managing to perform the job at hand because you have 'built-up' a long term experience of doing the task is simply something the brain can do but it is a less secure situation for the human(s) involved.
I agree with your naturalistic account, I am just trying to find better ways to describe such to others using exemplification and lay terminology. I am obviously not doing so well at this as you have concluded that I have some kind of spooky, homuncular, dualist viewpoint about consciousness.

But my definition of consciousness includes all that which is ignored, forgotten, emitted without further thought. In fact - as neurological theory, the Bayesian Brain story - it is based on that — apokrisis

I have watched online offerings from Sam Harris and Dan Dennett discussing some of the issues in neuroscience and you seem to know quite a bit about the area, much more than I. I was very interested in the Bayesian methodology/probability they described.

So consciousness has this structure, this dynamic, of attention~habit. And each explains the other. To the degree you can ignore, you don't have to attend. To the degree you can't ignore, you then must attend.
And now we have a proper connection between the phenomenological experience of being a mind in the world, and a neuroscientific account in terms of the necessary structure of any useful world-model — apokrisis

I can't think of any objections that I have to what you are typing here.

Consciousness as a Cartesian substance - a mysterious extra glow that attaches itself to all the physical processes - fails so spectacularly to connect with any neuroscientific account that it is no surprise that folk want to chase it all the way down to "quantum information" or "psychic atoms".
But starting the story with a dichotomous structure of attention and and habits, differentiation and integration - the logic of the processing that would be needed so to act as a self in a world - can halt this slithering down the slope of the physicalist fallacy.
We can see how panpsychism isn't even the right kind of thing before we start debating what might be its best theory. — apokrisis

@Garrett Travers was a strong advocate for the findings of neuroscience as the most reliable source for explaining human consciousness and I found his arguments on the topic quite compelling but I am not convinced that there is NO POSSIBILITY that consciousness is a composite affect of smaller quanta all the way down to 'fundamental ingredients,' as posited by panpsychism and that some future ability to network/collectivise/merge/coalesce individual lifeform consciousnesses into a panpsychism may happen.

How about meaningful data is fundamental? — Watchmaker

But meaningful data = information
Meaning and data only constitute information when they are combined and that which is a combination cannot be fundamental

If meaning is fundamental, wouldn't that imply a mind?

Not an 'external' mind, no I don't think so because any 'meaning' may only be meaningful to lifeforms like us due to how humans perceive the Universe. I think 'meaning' is fundamental to making any sense of our existence. But it may just be human arrogance to suggest that the Universe had no purpose or meaning, at all, before lifeforms such as humans evolved. This 'meaningless' era for the Universe may well be the majority of the proposed 14 billion years. But I don't see any scientific need to invoke god here or an external mind/purpose. I can understand a human emotional, almost irrational need to invoke such an external mind but I see no scientific demand for it.

Some really interesting ideas there. That last sentence, in particular. — Wayfarer

Merci beaucoup, monsieur/mademoiselle!

Proto-consciousness cooked your goose, did it for you, oui? :smile:

The human mind looks at an image of a bird and sees a bird. A computer looks at an image of a bird and it sees 1s and 0s, some advanced AI probably can process an image in terms of pixels but that's about it.

Photshop does something really interesting though. It picks out the borders between differently colored pixels, even if irregular and curved. That's in fact the secret behind many photo editing software. It's a start for computers, they can now at least "see" the general shape of objects; rudimentary animal vision, won't you agree?

Something's not quite right, yes?

Hmmm. What would be the great "combiner", then?

A computer looks at an image of a bird and it sees 1s and 0s — Agent Smith

I think this is an example of what we must not do, anthropomorphise computers!
Computers do not 'look' or 'see.' An input sensor is a peripheral device, attached to a computer.
A computer has no conception AT ALL. Our best AI systems still can't even pass the turing test in any interesting way yet. A computer cannot even conceptualise 1 or 0. It is simply a device that humans can use to manipulate all possible manifestations of the two binary states. Quantum computing offers more than two states.

It's a start for computers, they can now at least "see" the general shape of objects; rudimentary animal vision, won't you agree?
Something's not quite right, yes? — Agent Smith

No, because 'see' requires conception and a computer does not conceive of meaning when it pattern matches a square it scans, with a stored square shape, either bit by bit or using attributes.
Yes, it can output letters such as 'this is a square,' on a monitor. But these are interpreted by us as having 'meaning.' The computer does not connect all the processes it performed from scanning the dark and light pixels from the square on paper, through the pattern matching to the letters output onto the screen. Each coded instruction involved is not connected by the computer towards any cumulative meaning or purpose.