Fear of death.

"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)

xp Not a belief, it's concentrated in stuff like determinism.

sorry, not a lot of belief, there.

I just came across this article by Strawson quite by chance, in which he argues, honestly and somewhat wittily, for *real* physicalism, whereby the physical phenomena are sufficient to explain experiential phenomena. Of course any regular physicalist will claim they can do that, but the usual strategy is either to dispense with the experiential entirely (e.g. Dennett) or to lean heavily on the notion of emergence. He dispenses with both of those (of course the first is barely worth considering), and concludes that in order to be a *real* physicalist one has to realise that the basic stuff of physics must have experiential properties. This is, he admits, panpsychism by another name. It's the clearest statement I've read yet of the position I've been groping towards myself.

http://faculty.unlv.edu/beiseckd/Courses/PHIL-352/Dave%20-%20Consciousness%20PDFs/Strawson%20-%20Realistic%20Monism%20and%20Replies/Strawson%20-%20Realistic%20Monism%20Why%20Physicalism%20Entails%20Panpsychism.pdf

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

well, there's belief in everything. science, afaic, is a method, a process, a tool. i believe (ahem) that the scientific method, carefully applied, is a self-validating tool - i believe that it proves its own utility.

at a sufficient level of remove, this belief is, of course, like all beliefs, "just a belief". but that godlike level of remove encourages parallel fatuities like "anything is possible" and "nothing really means anything," so it's best to spend as little time there as possible. in the pragmatic here and now, there are obvious differences between the slow search for information via the scientific method and the willy-nilly manufacturing of capital-T Truth by other means.

The only point on consciousness I find particularly interesting in this context is that spiritual believers seem to resist that it is a product of the mind, and isn't produced when the mind is inactive. Any uncertainty of how consciousness works is at least framed within that basic concept.

Like if you thought of a store as a brain, and it was constantly adjusting prices, moving around inventory, restocking areas, cleaning, bustling employees that make store related actions, and then assumed once that store was out of business that all of that specific store's inner functions kept happening for eternity afterwards or just without purpose, why would you think that?

You may have no understanding of the inner functions, but you frame it all with the idea that they stop when the store stops.

The scientific method is a self-validating tool because it never arrives at an exact answer, things can always been changed, new paradigm shifts can occur, old beliefs can be tossed out in favor of new and more accurate results. Science deals with approximations that change over time, so there is no risk ever in being proven wrong. Because proving things wrong is part of the process! There is often no capital-T truth for all time declared.

People don't give religion this leeway. They say it is wrong because it should be the capital-T truth and the flaws in doctrine are all examples why the whole thing is irrelevant. But how else are you supposed to explore the indescribable but through approximation and metaphor?

No when the store stops they all get new jobs at different stores.

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

I think we're just talking about different things. Amateurist is (correct me if I'm wrong) talking about the neural correlates of consciousness, what goes on in the brain when we are aware and experiencing. And sure great strides have been made there, although there's still a long way to go. But exactly how awareness, private personal subjective experiential awareness, arises out of all that, well that's still as great a mystery as it ever was.

i'm probably being thick here, but i don't understand why people consider consciousness to be such a terrible "problem". we are aware as certain other forms of life seem to be aware. while we don't understand the origin point of this kind of awareness in the evolution of cognitive capacity (the means by which a biological input-output mechanism might acquire consciousness), it does seem likely that our awareness is the product of cognitive complexity. the limitations of our knowledge here parallel our inability to fully understand and/or replicate the point at which the components of an electrochemical soup might acquire the quality of self-sustaining life. despite this, i think we can say with some confidence that life exists in the material world and that it did emerge from non-life. similarly, despite the fact that we can't fully define or describe consciousness, it seems to me that we have every reason to think that it is a material process residing in the material world, like life and like everything else.

Adam: The employees in the store are only relevant in the analogy in regard to their inner store functions. Plus, all of those functions in the store attribute to the consciousness, so it can only be maintained when the parts are together.

[to my own xp]

^ not that any of this is certain, mind. it's simply the most reasonable default position, given what we seem to know.

No when the store stops they all get new jobs at different stores.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Friday, July 13, 2012 12:33 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And the only real way you could link this to the analogy is if you say the energy within a living brain is separately redistributed back into the universe.