Yes, absolutely. Its late where I am and there is a quite a lot of to unpack regarding this theory. It the next couple of days I should have a detailed response either in this thread or a new thread.

The free energy principle and Bayesian probability does NOTHING for the Mind/Body problem. It explains why perception would be evolutionarily beneficial, but this is obvious. I plan on making a more detailed explanation but it might take an entire new thread.

Calling it a neural model doesn't explain anything, though? Its like when Dennet calls it an illusion. HOW and WHY are a bunch of atoms able to, together, create a model of the world that manifests itself as such a thing like the sensation of pain?

There is zero reason given our current understanding of physics and chemistry to believe such a thing would ever happen to matter how complex their behavioral pattern was.

But the whole point I'm making is of the behavior of matter in the brain. If the atoms in the brain continue to exhibit the exact behavior you would predict via physics given their mass, velocity, charge ect.. then you could explain the behavior of said organism simply knowing these things. This does not appear to be true for humans, who talk and write about Qualia after they experience it. If there is no change in behavior of matter, they could have NEVER experienced Qualia in the first place and their behavior would be exactly the same. If there is a change in the behavior of matter, there had to be a FIRST change in the behavior of matter evolutionarily. A gradual process has to start somewhere.

There is zero reason to think that any algorithm, or more precisely, a complex series of electric charges flowing around in order to perform a certain task, would ever give rise to anything like Qualia no matter how complex.

But clearly there ARE patterns of flowing objects that give rise to Qualia. If you don't think so, just poke around your brain with a screwdriver and see what happens to your conscious experience. The question is WHY and HOW these patterns of moving particles do such things. And how to describe the relation of conscious experience to the matter that is correlated with them.

I wouldn't, spin and charge are two separate properties of particles. Physicists have actually managed to model the behavior of some particles by separating them into "quasi-particles" in which one has the spin and one has the charge.

https://www.sp.phy.cam.ac.uk/research/1d-transport/SCseparation

They do this by treating them as two different phenomenon of the particle, not necessarily related.

More importantly, it doesn't address how "something it is like" ends up being able to influence the behavior of the particles that make up the brain so that we write about it.

But it is simply a fact that particles have aspects about them that determine their behavior that are not their shape or location. This is not a weasel argument, its a fact of reality. Why does an upquark behave differently in an electro-magnetic field than an electron? It certainly isn't its location, or shape. Matter has causally relevant "properties" anyway you slice it. Otherwise nothing would happen.

My website is very imperfect and is a constant 'work in progress' so to speak but thanks for reading it.

I should start by saying that I believe the absolute split of Monism and Dualism is dated, and I'm not at all alone in that. The terms go back to Descartes and there have been hundreds of years of query about consciousness since then, not to mention discoveries by neuroscience. Many different ontological positions have been shoved under these two umbrellas.

The reality is there are an array of different possible ontological positions on consciousness that could have something going for them in one way or another, some of these seem to crossover between or even shed all together the labels of Monism and Dualism.

The work on my website, and also in a paper I have written, primary focuses on the relationship between the mind and the behavior of matter in the brain. Specifically the implications of changes in behavior of brain matter due to the mind.

The primary reason I label myself a dualist is because I believe under the current list of ontological positions on the mind, the position property-dualist interactionism, where the mind and its features (such as Qualia) are causally relevant non-physical properties of the matter in the brain. provides I believe a useful way to model how things like Qualia exist in relation to brain matter, especially from an evolutionary perspective where a lot of my focus is.

I believe that when it comes to describing the ontological relationship between the mind and brain matter, we might always be doomed to finding the best model.
Models can be flawed but still useful, as has been shown in science quite often. I also believe that many implications drawn about consciousness using one model can be useful for people who subscribe to different models so long as some things are held in common.

"but I can't see how a system can emerge and displace the already existing system of self organization" — pop

Its happens one tiny small change at a time, similar to how evolution in general works. It does not simply leap from one system to another. After a large number of small changes, that build onto one another, big changes start to emerge.

Changes in the system of consciousness get carried over to future generations the same way other features of an organism do. If they provide survival benefit, the genes that correlated with them get passed on. If they hinder the organism, the genes get selected against.

Each evolutionary change in the conscious system must add some beneficial change in behavior to the system (in terms of its usefulness to the organisms survival), so it provides evolutionary advantage and the organism who posses it carries on its genes (and so on and so forth).

This is how we developed our conscious systems compared to the more primitive ones of our ancestors 50 million years ago. And you can scale this all the way back to the beginning of organisms.

Pain/Pleasure
Pain and Pleasure are extremely prominent features of the mind, especially as it relates to what is called will. There is certainly an important pain/pleasure gradient evolutionarily, as in how much pain/pleasure an organism were to experience for a certain stimuli will govern how it reacts to that stimuli. So is very relevant in terms of survival.
That being said, I don't believe all of consciousness can be reduced to variations and developments of a system of pain and pleasure.

What's interesting is that it is easy to theoretically develop an organism that has a system built into its brain where it will move away from things which damage it, and move towards things which advantage it (lets say give it energy, such as food.) You do not need phenomenal experiences of pain and pleasure to perform this task at all. For some reason, evolution found it better to do it with phenomenal experiences within humans and other mammals. I have my own theory as to why this is but I have written enough for now.

What are the predictions of your theory?

This is a very interesting question and something people ask me all the time when I tell them I study the mind/body problem.

First of all, inversion of colors between individual's is completely possible but the mechanism behind it could be different. Is it a change in the eyeball that is responsible for sending a signals of red when it was suppose to send a signal of blue due to some mutation? If so, this would certainly have the effect of inverting red/blue for that person (assuming the effect happened both ways).

But what about the effect taking place in the brain? Well, one possibility is that certain brain conditions produce certain phenomenal experience of colors. In this case, you could ask if these some conditions took place for the same people, would it always yield to same color experience for each of them? Of course its also possible that in peoples minds it is structured that the brain would produce the conditions sufficient for Red Qualia while in others the same visual input would cause their brains to produce the conditions for Blue Qualia.

I find it very unlikely that evolution would have most people varying in how their eyes transmitted visual information to the brain and how their brain reacted to visual information in such a way so I assume that most people have more or less the same mental and eye reactions to certain light. So I also assume that they have more or less the same Qualia as a result of those reactions. This is because if the type of Qualia that was produced for certain reactions in the brain varied so much it wouldn't be able to be used for evolutionary benefit. If there is any variation in people seeing different colors for different light, I assume it would be due to mutations in how the eye transmitted information to the brain or how the brain was structured to react to certain types of stimulus sent from the eyes.

What's also interesting is that this same question isn't usually applied to other Qualia, like taste Qualia. Is your taste of Fried Chicken the same as my taste of Friend Chicken? I think this is because its difficult to see the function or benefit of specific visual Qualia when compared to each other where for taste and smell Qualia because the function of the essence of those Qualia are easier to comprehend. Sure there is variation in how some people react to the taste of Fried Chicken, some may like some may not, but most people don't ask if your taste of Fried Chicken is the same as my taste of strawberry cake .

Sure, having X number of different colors that you can experience can allow you to see a lot of detail, but what's the difference if you mix them up? Why did evolution make our sky 'blue' and our dirt 'brown'?
The evolutionary benefit of color Qualia being what they are may be difficult for us to understand, but I would be surprised if there wasn't at least some selection that went into it.

Observation is used in a way in physics such as that it is not limited to conscious observation. Wave functions have been collapsing since before the earth was even formed.

Fair enough. I would just be careful using universe and reality interchangeably. For example, I think matter is the fundamental building block of the observable universe but reality could encompass more than the universe.

Your poll is very vague. You ask if reality is either made up fundamentally of mind or matter but this is a false dichotomy. You could ask more specifically about the observable universe, in which case I believe the universe is fundamentally made up of matter/energy but that the mind is an achievable property of matter under the right conditions. I chose other.

Before life ever existed, who was being informed? These theories seem to make the term information so encompassing and broad that it becomes almost useless.

I browsed it and you claim your theory does not explain the existence of Qualia (phenomenal experience). You do not deny the existence of phenomenal experience, but you believe that much of consciousness can be explained in terms of elaborate of firing neurons.

Certainly some of the brains processes can be explained in such a way, and have been by science. The good thing about the easy problems of consciousness is that it is much easier to uncover through scientific experiment how the brain performs such operations. This is why I personally am more interested in theories that specifically center around phenomenal experience, because its where the brux of the mystery lies.

You certainly put a lot of effort into this, I may read more of your theory if I find time in the future, but out of curiosity, how much comparison and reconciliation have you done between your theory and the current easy problem theories held by modern neuroscience?

But why would such a zombie ever come to exist evolutionarily even if it was technically conceptually possible?

Pretty nearly yes. It would only be possible under extremely unlikely circumstances in my opinion. I talk about this in my thought-experiment thread.

Hello everyone, sorry it has taken me a while to respond to these posts I have been busy. Thanks for the replies, I may alter this thought-experiment as time goes on.



The philosopher has no proof, but he does have his personal experience of Qualia which is evidence, and being an educated philosopher studying the mind-body problem in this thought-experiment he has deliberately familiarized himself with the science concerning the matter that makes up his brain and understands that the circumstance of there being a sensation of pain produced when there is a certain behavior of matter in his brain differs from the conceptual possibility he can make of these objects simply existing and behaving by the laws of physics without bringing any sensation of pain into the picture.

The statement that the mind-body problem is outdated is your opinion, which is fine, but there are many educated people who disagree with it. There are many who agree with it also to be



It affects physical objects but its not conceptually part of the rules that typically govern their behavior. Keep in mind I am talking about the rules governing the behavior of the objects that you may learn in a physics or chemistry class.

In order to understand how we know that Consciousness and Qualia are connected with the brain, you can look up something called the Neural Correlates of Consciousness where scientists have done tests identifying regions of the brain which seem to be active when people have certain experiences.

I have believed for some time that moving forward with the hard-problem involves understanding if and how consciousness/qualia effect the matter in the brain.

Yeah but that isn't too different than what I'm saying. Perhaps it would be better to say there are objects with properties such as their shape, and their non-shape aspects which govern their behavior.

"The Mind, in the sense of Beliefs & Emotions, definitely has causal effects (psychosomatic) on human behavior. And in order to influence behavior, those immaterial feelings & beliefs must somehow cause physical changes in the brain & body, including angry outbursts and physical illness. But exactly how that works is only understood sketchily. I assume you have a layman's theory to explain that two-way causation"

Yes. What I am addressing here is that if there is a change in the behavior of brain matter caused by immaterial feelings, this must differ from the behavior these objects would have taken if those immaterial feelings never existed.

Evolutionarily, the implication of this is there must have been a first instance of such a thing happening.
You are completely correct about the interaction between mind and matter being crudely understood, and that is what I hope this ‘initial alteration’ can help bring to light. The idea is that it was be much easier to understand the physical changes going on around that scale and work up than it would be analyzing to billions of neurons in the humans brain.

The sociological definition of interactionism is completely irrelevant to what I’m talking about. The psychological definition is close. The definition I was using is from the Stanford Philosophical Dictionary. It is a form of Dualism but I specifically adhere to what is called Property Dualism where mind is a non-physical property of brain matter.

I do not take Modular mind theory into account when saying multiple objects in the mind create and react to consciousness, I base it on examining the possibilities regarding how many objects in the mind create and react to consciousness. While it is possible that our whole minds could be produced by and reacted to by one or two particles or neurons seems to be nearly inconceivable to me.

"So this theory postulates non-physical (metaphysical) rules? What are those rules, and how do we discover them in brain studies? Are there scientific papers in which they infer those metaphysical laws?"

Yes. I certainly do not understand the rules that govern the causal relations between matter and mind except the basic implications I draw from the position of interactionism that I subscribe to which can be found in my post. One reason why I am pointing out and focusing on the initial change of behavior in matter in our evolutionary past is because I think it may be easier for us to understand than the reactions going on in the brain. Its also something that can be verified or debunked scientifically. Currently, no scientific study of the brain of humans (or of smaller animals and insects which I believe may have smaller-scale and easier to understand forms of non-physical causation happening in their brains) has confirmed such a thing – but there is still a lot we don’t yet understand about the brains of organisms on earth so I don’t believe its been fully ruled out either.

"The concept of "evolutionary benefit" sounds like either Lamarkism or NDE. Darwinian evolution doesn't assert “benefits” but only “differences” that are selected by the filter of circumstances. "Beneficial" effects assume "intentional" purposes. Again, that's not a mainstream scientific position, but I too see some signs of Intention behind Evolution."

Yes, when I speak of evolutionary benefit I’m speaking metaphorically about mutations which cause said organisms to survive or reproduce is greater numbers relative to others.

"In Physics a sudden "change in behavior of matter" is called a "Phase Transition". And the sudden emergence of new properties is assumed to be mysterious only because the intermediate steps happen so quickly that we can't discern the intermediate cause & effect stages. Do you have a more fine-grained explanation for something as common as liquid Water instantly becoming solid Ice, with completely different characteristics?"

This is why I specified a change from that has been observed and understand by the conventions of physics and chemistry. Matter behaves differently when you add kinetic energy (such as your water to ice example), but it does so in a way that is understood and predicated accurately by equations of physics and chemistry.

"A Spiritual property (Soul)? Supernatural intervention?"

No, not a spiritual property or supernatural intervention, but a simpler phenomenon that was a far-back predecessor to properties which maybe could be called spiritual like consciousness yet itself may only appear slightly different from the original properties of that matter.

My viewpoint on consciousness in relation to matter is somewhat metaphysical. I believe there are two fundamental types of exist in our universe. That of objects with shape and location such as quarks and of properties of these objects which is not their shape/location that govern their behavior in relation to other objects. I believe this is the most general category you can fit consciousness and qualia into the universe.

I will check out the term you created.

I agree with him that consciousness is non-computable. Certainly any process in the brain could be considered a candidate for the mediator of consciousness but I am not personally convinced of the view that it must take place on the Quantum level. Penrose is a highly educated man in the area of physics so I would maybe not like to personally argue with him on this point.

Relax bud I was just curious what he was asking for, I have a finite amount of time.

Well at that point you have to look at the word exist. Looking at philosophical dictionaries the definition of exist is almost more a series of debates than an actual definition. The wikipedia article on the word Existence gives this definition: "Existence is the ability of an entity to interact with physical or mental reality. In philosophy, it refers to the ontological property[1] of being.[2]" and cites two papers on metaphysics as the source. Being is defined by the oxford dictionary as "the material or immaterial existence of a thing".

If we use that definition then existence by definition implies that things can be either physical or non-physical.

The scientific definition of Mass is defined by Dictionary.com as: "the mass of a body as measured when the body is at rest relative to an observer, an inherent property of the body."

I am not a scientist but I have taken physics classes in college and I have always heard things like mass and charge as being properties of objects and never as being completely synonymous with the object itself. Sometimes an electron would be referred to as "a charge" but the more accurate definition was given as "a charged particle" with charge being something the object had.

That being said, there are a variety of different definitions for the word exist and there are a variety of different ways to look at how things like mass and charge relate to physical bodies, that being said, I provided a few examples that show there is atleast some basis for the view that things can exist as properties of physical objects.

Defend that things can exist as properties of physical objects or defend that properties of physical objects do not occupy space?

Because there are things which exist as properties of objects but not as objects themselves. If I got rid of all the particles in a region of space I would get rid of all the mass, but that doesn't mean an objects mass has a location. Mass is a property of things that have locations.

Yeah I would agree with that, although I wouldn't put the mind in the same category as a concept projected onto an object such as a mortgage.

No, in my viewpoint things like Qualia do not have locations but they exist as properties of things that have locations.

Yeah but that's only true for objects which have meaning projected onto them. An objects mass doesn't take up any extra space but mass still exists, but it exists as a property of an object that takes up space and not as an object itself.

The electrons which correlate with the concepts that humans have mentally assigned to them certainly do occupy a space within computers and microchips.

Yes I am using having a location synonymous with occupying a space. Whether or not an electrons absolute location can be established scientifically is not really relevant because that same concept can basically be applied to almost all of matter.

It depends on your view. In the view of Monism mind and brain are the same thing so the mind does occupy a space, that of what ever space the brain matter occupies. In some types of dualism, like property dualism, the mind is a property of the brain matter so the mind itself does not have a location anymore than an electrons mass has a location.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that we operate in an environment that we did not evolve for.

Whether or not the universe is 'good' is completely subjective. The universe simply is.

Free Will has always been a strange concept for me because I ask: free of what?

Now if one says that our minds are free of the typical causal mechanisms that matter operates under in the universe, I would agree. But that doesn't necessarily mean free of all causality. It could be the mind operates under a different set of rules but those rules are still deterministic.

This is old but it made me laugh.

No I don't think he or any other person is the so-called philosophical zombie. I personally think he may be playing sort of a devils advocate position. He is understandably concerned about mysticism taking place of critical reasoning regarding consciousness, but at the same time, it does seem like there is something he is just 'not getting' about the contrast between conscious experience and a vast complex network of electric charges.

How consciousness evolved overtime depends largely on the view on consciousness you take. Most importantly is the effect you believe consciousness has on matter. If we just look at two dualist positions, epiphenomenalism and interactionism, consciousness evolves in two very different ways. epiphenomenalists believe consciousness is distinct from brain matter, but that it does not causally affect brain matter. So here all that is important from the perspective of evolution is the pure conventions of physics and chemistry as that is all evolution could be selecting for.

If you look at it from an interactionist perspective this changes, because the mind causally influences matter in the brain. So every instance within the evolution of consciousness there is also an instance of change in behavior of matter in the brain from what would be expected in only analyzed through the conventions of physics and chemistry.

I take an interactionist perspective and have actually reasoned that there needed to be a first instance in our evolutionary past of a change in the behavior of matter in the brain from what would be expected if it was only governed by the rules understood by physics and chemistry. I call this the 'Initial Alteration' and I believe it provides experimental opportunities regarding the mind-body problem.