Fear of death.

i see mickey mouse ears

http://corecanvas.s3.amazonaws.com/theonering-0188db0e/gallery/original/misty_mountains.gif

the map is not the territory son

http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

clicked on that, lived up to my current dn, clicked out

this is getting into that question of "what is blue"

sure you and i can both like look at one 400 nm light source and another 400 nm light source and say "yeah that's the color of the ocean, the sky and charlize theron's eyes" but that doesn't prove we're seeing "the same thing"

Say a robot hired as a security guard has an internal representation of the house getting burgled, but does nothing about it (for some reason this robot has free will). I'm gonna sue that robot, and I'm gonna win, because I can show conclusively it was aware of the house getting burgled, and we don't need to know what it's like to be a robot thinking about things to do it.

but say i get so mad, I dump oatmeal all over the robot. the robot wants to sue me for pain caused by oatmeal. how is it gonna convince people it felt pain?

xp, one of my favourite mindtwisty topics that one

robot must prove a strong enough dislike of/aversion to oatmeal, or demonstrate damage or injury caused by oatmeal dump (possible that development of an aversion to oatmeal/fear of oatmeal as a result of stress of incident could serve for this? consider further- get one of the interns to look into this.)

there's a bit about capturing activity "grandmother neurons" i.e. specific areas that fire up in recognition of your grandmother. stuff like that. pain really seems much more subjective than awareness though. you can demonstrably mediate people's experience of pain while still showing that the stimulus mechanisms haven't also been mediated. I don't know if you can do that with self-awareness.

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, July 12, 2012 12:47 PM (3 hours ago)

the mechanisms by which the brain attaches images and words to complex constructs like personhood (since we were speaking of grandmother neurons) are very poorly understood at this point, and would only provide the most rudimentary accounting of how we construct and experience "selfhood" even if we understood them fully. relative to pain, selfhood seems very poorly understood and defined.

what do you mean by "mediate"?

there are a lot of pain threshold tests (like how long you can leave your hands in cold water) where you can prolong times by distractions, priming, etc...

that's not true

...i imagine you're talking about something like this

http://www.pcworld.com/article/240562/scientists_read_minds_sort_of_reconstruct_images_from_brain_scans.html

the key part there is the "sort of"

― the late great, Thursday, July 12, 2012 4:08 PM (15 minutes ago)

it most certainly is true. i was talking about this, but i accept your substitution. in saying that "we can capture sense data," i'm not saying that we can capture it perfectly. the images we can generate based on the brain's activity are, at this point, rather crude, but given that it's an infant technology, i think they're surprisingly good.

"selfhood seems very poorly understood and defined."
it doesn't need to be understood, really. it does need to be restricted to maybe a less culturally specific definition. for example, if you're driving, your somatic self-representation likely includes the car, too.

yeah, i agree about that part. we don't need to be able to describe, quantify or measure self-aware consciousness to functionally understand it.

going back quite a few posts, i was objecting to your suggestions that we can currently capture the brain's modeling of human selfhood and that pain is less well understood than self awareness, but i don't know that there's anything to be gained by hammering away at those points.

"we don't need to be able to describe, quantify or measure ... to functionally understand it"

just humor me and fill in the blank with something that makes sense that is unrelated to mind / consciousness / metaphysics / etc

mind you i'm just saying consciousness is up there w/ the big bang as one of the great black boxes of science

there's all kinds of experiments where people who were asked to imagine certain actions activated the same parts of the brain as when they were recorded doing the actual activity. so in a very real sense, modeling is synonymous with experience, and if that's the only activity that's going on in the brain, we can make the leap that modeling is also synonymous with awareness, without having to understand the underlying details of how it happens, or how to interpret people's subjective experience of it.

pain, on the other hand, requires such an interpretation.
we can show that a plant or any other black-box is aware of something by its measurable responses, but whether a celery stalk experiences pain in the pete singer ethical boundary sense is an open question.

i think where i get off the boat is when you say "experience"

i mean okay when you flex your arm you have the same electrical impulses in the same region of your brain as when you imagine flexing your arm, but someone could also zap that part of your brain with an electrode while you're unconscious and make your arm flex, does that imply that you experience or imagine your arm flexing?

also i think a lot of people would argue that awareness is synonymous with subjective experience, not with modeling

just humor me and fill in the blank with something that makes sense that is unrelated to mind / consciousness / metaphysics / etc

food, gravity, fire, internal combustion, magnets, machine language, etc. on a practical, day-to-day level, we can understand and deal with most of the shit we encounter in life without much understanding of the science involved. we can even draw useful philosophical and quasi-scientific conclusions from this position of relative ignorance. sure, sometimes you get fooled into thinking that ghosts and bad humors cause disease, but invisible air-monsters sort of make that one a trick question.

um, but we describe and measure and quantify those things all of the time?

"but someone could also zap that part of your brain with an electrode while you're unconscious and make your arm flex"

there's likely a separate mechanism for actuating the arm. (when you're asleep, there's some inhibitory thing that's supposed to keep you immobile, but doesn't always work.) but yah if you zap the right part, you should be made aware of it. at least at the time. there's also this mechanism that makes you forget stuff (why you don't remember dreams often).

is there a neurosurgeon we could invite here? could probably explain things better than me going "this thingybob" and "that doohicky" when referring to how brain worky. i get the feeling though with all the pharmaceuticals going around for mood ailments, half the population should be amateur neuroscientists.

there's all kinds of experiments where people who were asked to imagine certain actions activated the same parts of the brain as when they were recorded doing the actual activity. so in a very real sense, modeling is synonymous with experience, and if that's the only activity that's going on in the brain, we can make the leap that modeling is also synonymous with awareness, without having to understand the underlying details of how it happens, or how to interpret people's subjective experience of it.

yeah, no, we can't really make that leap, i don't think. it's interesting that the same areas of the brain are involved with thinking about a thing and doing that thing, but this does not mean that "modeling is synonymous with experience". it merely means that the brain is efficient. (fwiw, i personally think that modeling IS synonymous with experience, but that's beside the point.) even if we could confidently say that "modeling is also synonymous with awareness", we haven't really come any closer to "capturing" the sense or qualia of self-awareness. instead, we have merely established a chain of mechanical equivalencies.

the subjective experience of pain, after all, is just one tiny aspect of the subjective experience of life-in-toto. why should it be harder to establish the presence of pain, a tiny blip in experience, than it is to establish continuous self-aware awareness of the sort that notices pain? (and pleasure, and hunger, and horniness, and the color red, and that face, etc.)

we can say that the lobster experience neural activity in response to trauma. we can say that the lobster exhibits aversion behavior to the source of the stimuli that trigger the neural activity. we can't of course say what the lobster subjectively feels, but not can we say anything about what anyone or thing subjectively experiences. and the entirety of selfhood is subjectivity.

um, but we describe and measure and quantify those things all of the time?

― the late great, Thursday, July 12, 2012 5:27 PM (9 minutes ago)

we are now able to describe and measure many things that we once could not. and there yet remain things we can't describe or measure. i'll admit that consciousness is rather unique in being completely self-evident, yet largely hidden from science, but consciousness is unique in lots of ways.

We're pouring oatmeal on robots in this thread because each argument someone makes has the next person pointing out one little section that isn't really the point and I've lost track of who here thinks that a spirit will continue and leave their body with some preservation of their brain functions in tact after they die, and why they think this miracle happens to a thinking mind but nothing else in physics.

things in physics don't die

i'll admit that consciousness is rather unique in being completely self-evident, yet largely hidden from science

this is really my only point, that there's this gap which permits a space for faith (or in my case agnosticism) beyond materialism or metaphysical naturalism

http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/13/1349/QQAS000Z/posters/william-blake-to-annihilate-the-self-hood-of-deceit-from-a-poem-by-milton-written-1804-8.jpg

which milton poem is that after though, i don't understand what blake is getting at

is that when milton builds urizen from river clay?

Silent they met. and silent strove among the streams of Arnon
08 Even to Mahanaim, when with cold hand Urizen stoop'd down
09 And took up water from the river Jordan: pouring on
10 To Miltons brain the icy fluid from his broad cold palm.
11 But Milton took of the red clay of Succoth. moulding it with care
12 Between his palms; and filling up the furrows of many years
13 Beginning at the feet of Urizen, and on the bones
14 Creating new flesh on the Demon cold, and building him,
15 As with new clay a Human form in the Valley of Beth Peor.

that's very nice it reminds me of this bit from engine summer

"Open your eyes," said Zhinsinura.
That -- "open your eyes" -- entered in at the doors of Rush. I was not,
and that entered nothing; but still as quick as ever it found and ran along
the old path which such things had taken countless times before. Only this
time, as though it were a Light, it was able to see the path, infinitely long,
which it took. The path was Rush: the walls and snake's-hands were his stuff,
the countless steps and twists and false ways and rooms were him, chest full
of Rush, it was all Rush: all along, Rush was handholds, ways, stairs, a path
for that to get deep in. And I -- I was nothing; but when Zhinsinura said
that, "open your eyes," I uncurled outward from some tiny center of not-being
and built Rush to receive it: the path those words took and the place the path
led through spun out both together. The words watched me watch myself make a
place that held a path which the words took through the place to where I built
it. A place like spheres, like the trees of bread, but all within each other,
spheres of bright complexity made only of making, each sphere fitting within a
larger just in time to let "open your eyes" escape into the smaller, until the
words and I had made up Rush to hold us both; and we all three, in a silent
swift coupling, laced all our ways together. And I opened my eyes.

"the entirety of selfhood is subjectivity."

I think you can carve out a meaningful understanding of selfhood that is independently demonstrable as both activation patterns in the brain and as black-box responses to stimuli, and this understanding is good enough to form the basis of treatments of all kinds of ailments of the self...MAYBE UP TO AND INCLUDING DEATH.

*DRAMATIC GONG SOUND*

well, death is easy to treat. just get plenty of bed rest. cure's the hard part.

this thread has taken an interesting turn!

yes, i referred folks to contemporary (and by contemporary i really do mean the last few years) neuroscience because it's made great headway into demystifying some very very old questions. of course, as contenderizer and others have pointed out, the science is in its infancy, so one wouldn't expect a full account of the workings of experience (if such an account were possible given our intellectual limitations).

to summarize my thoughts in what i hope is a more pithy and clear way: to suppose an eternal and transcendent human consciousness that is sustained past the point of death, you have to subscribe to some version of dualism. recent science has, i think, definitively disrupted if not disproved dualist theories of mind.

(the only "out" i see is something like a science-fiction scenario where this very plane of existence, including all that we understand of it, is somehow a kind of astral projection and that in some other plane resides an integral individual consciousness to which we will return upon death . i guess this resembles some religious visions of an afterlife. but this idea cannot be disproved or proved. if you want to believe in it, you're welcome to. i'd like for nothing more than to believe it; it would make life easier, i imagine. but i'm not accustomed to making such leaps of faith.)

I'm kind of losing my respect for atheists here: it seems they're as desperate and torturous in making a case for an after-life as any church theologian.

"There's probably no God - enjoy your life"..and now I've got to worry about some possible proprietary spook continuing my existence or it transferring to another plane of being.

are there atheists here?!?

i have to make those leaps of faith sometimes in response to my

feeeeeeeeliiiiiiings

nothing more than feeeeeeeeeliiiiiings

recent science has, i think, definitively disrupted if not disproved dualist theories of mind.

given that recent science hasn't made one iota of progress in explaining subjective awareness i don't see how this can be possible. even if science made a walking talking turing test passing robot out of matchsticks tomorrow, it wouldn't disprove dualism. not that i'm a dualist, technically, as the link i posted upthread says dualism and materialism are both mistaken in supposing that science tells us matter is intrinsically non-phenomenal. in fact science says nothing whatsoever about the essential intrinsic nature of matter. whatever on earth that could be.

fwiw i don't think there is awareness after death, probably. but any fear of death i have stems from that uncertainty, not from the thought of my non-existence.

if there's one life has taught me it's that the world is like transformers: more than meets the eye

I'm an atheist and I pretty much bailed when it got to "maybe rocks have souls" because I mean yeesh.

things in physics don't die

Maybe we can get caek in here to talk about supernovae.

Yeah I initially thought I was being trolled at that point.

idk I'm an atheist but I'm down with some vague potsmoker animism

down with: William Blake, potsmoker animism, not trying to figure out the mystery of death because I am p sure it's impossible and trying just stresses me out, a lot, this was seriously a life-enriching decision for me

which is why my contributions to this thread have been singularly unhelpful

i know i should stop trying to figure out the mystery of life aka consciousness for similar reasons but it keeps on dragging me back.

despite certain spiritual proclivities, i'm an atheist at heart. the reality of the material properties that science measures seems much more undeniably real to me than the magic we conjure by means of applied belief, though the line between the two is sometimes vague.

i would like to see some conversation between the "great headway" amateurist describes contemporary neuroscience as having made and ledge's "recent science hasn't made one iota of progress in explaining subjective awareness".

There is belief in science too, a whole LOT of belief.

i'm not sure what progress science is supposed to make on a question no one seems to be able to define, but re: consciousness, there's plenty of high and low-tech studies that have helped reveal as horseshit a lot of culturally ingrained ideas about the nature of consciousness. (most of these involve people with severe brain damage or railroad spikes shot through their brains so I dunno if we want to go about haphazardly cutting out bits of brains without a more concrete question in mind)