Brains

Moliere

The following from The Doors of Perception :

Reflecting on my experience, I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C.D. Broad, "that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful." According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things. That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language. The various "other worlds," with which human beings erratically make contact are so many elements in the totality of the awareness belonging to Mind at Large. Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary bypasses may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate "spiritual exercises," or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception "of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe" (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above ah something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality.

Bottom of page 6, top of 7. I was browsing for a good quote to add to the discussion, and this one seems good.

"My experience", if you haven't read it, is Aldous Huxley's use of mescaline. So his use of mescaline made him believe in what I take to be the basic picture of Transcendental Idealism. Empirically real bodies in a transcendentally ideal mind.

To me, I'm like "Yeah, makes perfect sense" -- after reading it a bit, sure, but eventually it clicked. I could put on my "Kant-glasses".

Greatest thing about philosophy is you sometimes feel like you're doing drugs, but, like, straight up just from your mind and imagination. And all you needed was access to some books or the net! So much cheaper.

But, then, I wonder -- while the above comes from a philosopher which Huxley likes and felt had expressed his sentiment, I wonder if we'd call the other parts of Huxley's book, where Aldous himself is relating his experience, nonsense. Those parts seem even more sensible to me than the philosopher's explanation, but I understand those rhythms of thought now well enough that I find them familiar.

Take, for example:

I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing -but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a
distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to.

This, too, makes perfect sense to me.

It's pretty much saying what I understand about the world and my perception of it. Which makes me think... hey, we get one another! I know what they mean. I'd say something like "the aesthetic attitude" where you just attend to all of your experience as a whole, and I didn't need to do drugs to feel that connection, but I get this to be a pretty good description of what it feels like to feel beauty -- an abstraction, by all means, but one that fits.

Now, I suppose it depends at what "level" we put consciousness. Say that it's a direct product of the electronic configurations -- for whatever reason, who knows -- then, given our present level of detail and understanding we might infer that everyone kind of lives in a world of their own (or brains, or whatever the mechanism is, down to the pituitary gland and the full-blown thinking subject) creation. Consciousness as virtual reality produced by the brain.

That's kind of Chalmer's point in pointing out the hard problem of consciousness: it makes sense to each of us when we say "our spectrums could be inverted, so my red is your blue", and functionally speaking there's no reason to suppose the feeliness of the world is, in fact, real. Maybe an illusion. Paraphrased, of course. (kinda smushing two of his arguments together there in one sentence for brevity and I think it gets the point across)

But that flies in the face of our experience. Even if experience be epiphenomenal, say, without psycho-physical laws that bridge the epiphenomenon, but rather the brain serves as a sort of "base" upon which consciousness then dwells in its own world as long as the brain is functioning -- the feeliness of the world should be real, even in this most limited sense, because . . . well, we feel it.

Kind of a relationship to the mind-body problem, except Chalmer's insists that this is the only feature of the mind which cannot be explained by the body.

I thought it might be best to start a spin-off thread, since the question of consciousness was kind of lingering and I think it's an interesting one to revisit, in light of some thoughts about language. Basically I find it a fascinating question, but one which I can't sort out really. Searle's thought that the brain is consciousness like water is wet just sound straight up like phenomenology to me, and I'd say it bolsters Chalmer's point. Hume-as-phenomenologist admits of a real mental world of some kind ,and can be interpreted in varying degrees of naturalism. And, as ever, Wittgenstein looks down from his ladder shaking his head in disappointment at my fascination with these puzzles.

Maybe to sum up the thoughts in an unclear question: Is the brain a virtual reality machine?

180 Proof

Is the brain a virtual reality machine? — Moliere

Yes. The Great Confabulator ...

Paine

Very interesting OP.

I hope to respond in other ways but will start with this. My take on what Chalmers is presenting is something like: "can the world we touch through our awareness be caused entirely by agents outside of that experience?" The call for a completely objective account is a kind of mapping more than a finding about the 'body.' The scientific method is an exclusion of certain experiences in order to pin down facts. Can this process, which is designed to avoid the vagaries of consciousness, also completely explain it?

Jack Cummins

↪Moliere

Recently, I was reading some of Timothy Leary's writings, in which he looks at aspects of brain in relation to 'bardo' states. Many people are drawn to experiment with hallucinogens as a form of recreation. It was the ideas of Aldous Huxley and of shamanism which led me to experiment with cannabis, magic mushrooms and acid as a quest as I had already had some intense borderline sleep experiences.

So, the idea of psychedelic experimentation and experience may be for some a pursuit of understanding of the brain, mind and the nature of reality. When I took acid I definitely had some strange experiences in that respect. During the first trip I had the sense of there being no God, which I had not thought previously. Also, for some time afterwards I noticed I was having coordination problems and felt as if I had been out of my body and had not got back into it in an aligned way. This was the reason why I tried it again and during the second trip, in a warehouse dance event, I had a definite experience which felt like it involved a certain dualism. I felt able to walk through people and when I looked in a mirror I saw a reflection of the walls and environment but not myself. That was unnerving and I thought that I had lost my body..

It may be that the psychedelic experiences cannot be taken at face value, like with NDEs. However, for some people, such experiences may lead to a sense of there being other levels of reality beyond the physical perceived in day to day consciousness.

Paine

↪Jack Cummins

Do you look at those experiences as opening a view that otherwise would have not been shown?

jgill

Each person is at each moment capable of . . . perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe

A bit of a stretch wouldn't you say? Even what is happening in one's own body is largely below the thresholds of consciousness.

However, for some people, such experiences may lead to a sense of there being other levels of reality beyond the physical perceived in day to day consciousness. — Jack Cummins

True enough.

Jack Cummins

↪Paine

It is hard to know to what extent I would have come to the exact same view if I had not had the particular experimental experiences. Of course, it is possible that the underlying view which I was developing played a factor in the experiences themselves. The ideas which a person comes with may play a significant factor, although I was a bit surprised by what I experienced at the time.

Moliere

↪180 Proof

Bold! :D

I suppose the next part is -- ok, can we identify which parts of the virtual reality are confabulations and which aren't?

For instance I could separate out my perceptions of objects, or even just separate out my senses, and name some parts of my mentals-goings-ons as virtual, and other parts of it as real. I suspect that emergence would lead one to believe this to be the case, where because of our scientific knowledge of the brain we can infer that everyone is somewhat in an experiential dome of their own making, and it's only habituation that leads us to believe otherwise, ala Hume.

But I suspect if we are illusionists, then we could reduce the virtual reality to something like dysfunctions, or improper functioning. So only our errors are the illusions, while for the most part we're pretty much in contact with a world, rather than living in an experiential-film island.

↪Jack Cummins

So, yes or no?

Moliere

A bit of a stretch wouldn't you say? Even what is happening in one's own body is largely below the thresholds of consciousness. — jgill

Yes, definitely a stretch. Part of my fascination with such things is simply trying to understand what brings a rational person to sincerely believe these things, because I'm used to these claims being from the not-rational side.

bongo fury

Maybe to sum up the thoughts in an unclear question: Is the brain a virtual reality machine? — Moliere

A Cartesian theatre, then?

Moliere

↪bongo fury

Well, that'd be proposing a kind of mechanism that I listed, yes. Though I chose the unclear "virtual reality machine" to sum up a large collection of distinctions, too. So, for instance, we may say that only dreams are us experiencing the virtual part of the virtual-reality -- there's a contact between mind and world (a kind of realism of both, while describing the realism of the mind) as much more subdued version of the Cartesian theatre that is more plausible to current thinking.

bongo fury

as [a] much more subdued version of the Cartesian theatre that is more plausible to current thinking. — Moliere

More plausible how? More subdued how? Different how?

Moliere

↪bongo fury

I mean, I'm just giving a hypothetical there to clarify the question and say one can make variations however they like for purposes of answering the question. It's a purposefully unclear question so that people of differing views can answer it.

So, yes or no?

Moliere

I should note, that I'm not holding people to yes and no. I'm more interested in the why part. The yes/no is just meant to make people commit to something, even if its nascent and only being considered rather than truly believed.

unenlightened

Psyche is disrupted by psychoactive substances, but never quite transcended. It seems to me that even a materialist or rationalist understanding can see theoretically that the sense of self is derived from the limitations of the senses; My boundaries are the eyes that I can see with, the body I can touch with and so on. I am not you because I cannot see through your eyes walk in your shoes, feel your pain and joy. Identity is thus a mere blindness and insensitivity, opposed to awareness. As if we were all flat-Earthers, we mistake the horizon for the end of the vital world

One lives one's normal life in service to that blindness, and makes awareness subservient to it. In this way one makes oneself absent from one's life, and projects oneself through time as nostalgia and fear/desire. It is thus only through the disruption of the discounted normality of awareness as self identity with drug induced sensory confusion, that one begins to become aware of reality at all. Otherwise, there is just a vague feeling of something missing, a loss of 'meaning'.
See also, The Bird of Paradise, by RD Laing. (Not seemingly available online for free).

Jack Cummins

↪Moliere

When you speak of confabulations I am not sure that it is that simple. The day to day shared experiences are often seen as the 'real', but that in itself is a form of constructed perception. This may be where the issue of qualia arises. In many ways, colours are vibrations and it is uncertain if different species see the exact same frequencies as one another, and the whole subtle realm of vibrations.

There is also the question of inner and outer reality although it may be that it is not an absolute division because human beings dip in and out of these modes. Here, the possibility of lucid dreaming arises. This is a spectrum ranging from hypopompic and hypnagogic states as well as meditations states of awareness. It was only as a result of having some diagnosed eye problems that led me to read about the retina, which is actually part of the brain.

At one point last year I developed blurred vision in my right eye. When I had it checked out it was macular oedema, which is completely different from macular degeneration. The problem is stable, although I had to have new glasses with a stronger lens for the right eye. What is important in relation to this thread is that since I developed this problem I sometimes see intense visual images in my right eye when it is closed. This is not unpleasant and sometimes I see gardens with decorative walls and unusual symbols on walls. From what I have researched, this is connected to phosphene activity in the retina.

Oliver Sacks has written on unusual organically based experiences. Often, people expect perception to function identically. The brain is definitely involved but it still means that perception is complex, with the example of the interrelationship between sound and vision of synthasaesia.

180 Proof

↪Moliere

Even the most veridical perceptions or experiences, I think, are virtual insofar as apprehension of the world is mediated. Illusions, biases, and other misperceptions result from the limitations of meta/cognition, the impacts of which can be reduced or offset by intellectual and experiential disciplines. :chin:

bongo fury

apprehension of the world is mediated. — 180 Proof

By a Cartesian film show?

180 Proof

↪bongo fury

No, as Daniel Dennett demonstrates, "the Cartesian Theatre" (i.e. homuncular theory) is completely incoherent. Also, contemporary neuroscience rules this out experimentally.

bongo fury

↪180 Proof

Yes. So what (if not a Cartesian film show) is intermediate between what (if not a homunculous) and the world?

180 Proof

↪bongo fury

Memories, biases, discursive habits/grammars, expectations/beliefs, values, etc.

Moliere

↪bongo fury

Kant's transcendental subject is simply a formal "I think "X"" -- a subject only formally there as a condition of thought. He doesn't think of the mind in terms of a small human being inside the mind, ala the homuncular fallacy (and, for that matter, Descartes doesn't either -- that's Dennet's preferred nomenclature for certain ways some people think about their own mind -- they explain it in terms of another mind, so it's really just a special case of begging the question)

The notion of a film I'm trying to invoke is more like a bubble-film -- something generated by the mind, and so not just a movie, but the wholeness of experience. The notion would have it that we are in some way in a virtual simulation of the mind's creation, with varying degrees of naturalism. Chalmer's would call that the qualitative aspect of experience -- what it feels like, what-it-is-like.

Basically like a virtual reality of some kind, be it minimal (almost everything we feel is real in the naive realist sense, and only sometimes our mind plays tricks on us), or total (transcendental idealism where we all live within some kind of meta-mind that structures our minds) or even approaching solipsistic (the illusion of the mind is generated by the electric structures within our brain firing, so we can infer that everyone is in a world of their own creation)

Moliere

Oh, I should also mention, you can just say "No" :D

And I'd be interested in those reasonings too.

Moliere

Psyche is disrupted by psychoactive substances, but never quite transcended. It seems to me that even a materialist or rationalist understanding can see theoretically that the sense of self is derived from the limitations of the senses; My boundaries are the eyes that I can see with, the body I can touch with and so on. — unenlightened

I agree. (hrm, looking back -- typed that in response to your second sentence, but the first one makes sense)

Actually, materially, something that's interesting is how psychoactive substances have similar effects on people, to believe word of mouth at least. (also, something I always like to bring up from the materialist side is -- psychoactive substances have effects! :) )

And I don't think it's even theoretical, from a materialist standpoint. The sense of self -- arises? -- from the interaction between mind and body. Or however we'd like to parse these things.

I am not you because I cannot see through your eyes walk in your shoes, feel your pain and joy. Identity is thus a mere blindness and insensitivity, opposed to awareness. As if we were all flat-Earthers, we mistake the horizon for the end of the vital world

Yup

One lives one's normal life in service to that blindness, and makes awareness subservient to it. In this way one makes oneself absent from one's life, and projects oneself through time as nostalgia and fear/desire. It is thus only through the disruption of the discounted normality of awareness as self identity with drug induced sensory confusion, that one begins to become aware of reality at all. Otherwise, there is just a vague feeling of something missing, a loss of 'meaning'.
See also, The Bird of Paradise, by RD Laing. (Not seemingly available online for free).

Haven't read, and while I can't put it on the homework list at the moment for fear of never completing anything, I'll have it in this thread now to go back to.

One thing I like to note is how this is something commonly felt. Right? So, that's very interesting to me because it seems like people talk about this sort of stuff successfully frequently enough that there's something to it.

But then, error-theory looms.

Maybe the way to get over that is to simply note that it doesn't matter that it's false, in the error-theorist's sense.

Moliere

↪Jack Cummins

Cool.

I should have replied separately, and if you're still thinking on it no worries -- but if you have an answer, I'd like to hear it: is the brain a virtual reality machine?

Moliere

Even the most veridical perceptions or experiences, I think, are virtual insofar as apprehension of the world is mediated. Illusions, biases, and other misperceptions result from the limitations of meta/cognition, the impacts of which can be reduced or offset by intellectual and experiential disciplines. :chin: — 180 Proof

I think I'd put this somewhere in-between the minimalism I described above to @bongo fury and Transcendental Idealism. And, probably, that's where most of the consciousness-categories are going to sit, too, I just wanted to give a full lay of the land of possibilities.

Do you agree with that?

Jack Cummins

↪Moliere

To some extent it would probably make some sense to view the brain as being like a virtual reality machine. It generates experience but the idea of a machine may have some limitations. While it is a system, and each human being is a system within many larger ones it may ignore the importance of sentience. Human consciousness may be have evolved or emerged and be imminent, but the question may be whether it can be reduced to its mechanical parts.

This may or not be extremely important. The reason for this may be connected to the current focus on artificial intelligence, which involves an emphasis on simulated forms of consciousness. I read a very unusual book a few weeks ago, by Frank J Tipler, 'The Physics of Immortality', which suggested that the idea of resurrection of the dead is a possibility in the form of simulated reality. It draws upon Teilhard de Chardin's idea of the Omega point, as a way of understanding the creation of information and simulation of brains and consciousness in the future. It is very different from the religious idea of resurrection of the dead but this may be where the idea of seeing the brain as a virtual reality machine may lead. One question which I wonder about is whether this is too concrete and involves some mythical fantasy as a form of literalism almost parallel with the traditional or fundamentalist religious ones.

Moliere

↪Jack Cummins

So, yes? ;)

It looks like you're still thinking through things. I should say "I don't know" is exactly the answer I'd give to the question, at the moment.

Banno

I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing -but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for. My eyes traveled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feathery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which were the iris. The Beatific Vision, Sat Chit Ananda, Being-Awareness-Bliss-for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those prodigious syllables referred to.

Contrast this from Sartre:

The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes. Green blight covered it halfway up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather. The sound of the water in the Masqueret Fountain trickled in my ears, made a nest there, filled them with sighs; my nostrils overflowed with a green, putrid odor. All things, gently, tenderly, were letting themselves exist like weary women giving way to laughter, saying, "It's good to laugh," in a damp voice; they were sprawling in front of each other, abjectly confessing their existence. I realized there was no mean between non-existence and this swooning abundance. If you existed, you had to exist to excess, to the point of moldiness, bloatedness, obscenity. — Nausea

To me, I'm like "Yeah, makes perfect sense" -- after reading it a bit, sure, but eventually it clicked. I could put on my "Kant-glasses". — Moliere

Does Sartre make perfect sense, too? Both are interpretations, albeit in opposing directions. What is to be avoided is the mistake of thinking that an experience brings one somehow closer to reality "in the flesh"; using mescaline or existentialism or phenomenology remains an interpretation, just different to our more common or functional interpretations.

So i don't see it helping with the mind-body problem or the hard problem, except perhaps to show how what we deal with is always already filtered through our neural networks, even when they are behaving unconventionally.

unenlightened

So i don't see it helping with the mind-body problem or the hard problem, except perhaps to show how what we deal with is always already filtered through our neural networks, even when they are behaving unconventionally. — Banno

When did neural network become the foundation of reality, I think it must have been last night while I was asleep? I have less experience of neural networks than I have of brains, and I have only once tried to cook a pig's brain, and I regretted it. Neural networks sound stringy, and might therefore make quite good filters in principle Pig brains though would make a terrible filter - gelatinous rather than fibrous.

Poor old Sartre clearly had a bad trip, which usually arises from a resistance to the dissolution of self. Shame he had to make a philosophy out of it and impose it on us, though.

So neural networks engender visions of heaven and hell. and neural networks engender visions of neural networks that some people call filters of reality.

Heaven's net spreads wide.
Though its meshes are coarse,
Yet nothing slips through. — Lao Tzu

Whereas everything crashes through the net of hell, presumably.

How is a neural net to make a judgement here?

Banno

↪unenlightened

You OK there, Un?

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