Fear of death.

that's a really interesting article.

personally, i've found that it's remarkably easy to cultivate faith, to create and nurture seemingly productive relationships with spiritual entities (or forces or states or w/e). you just have to devote yourself to it and not hold back. being an atheist, i found myself standing half outside belief even as i poured energy into it, but that proved to be a much smaller barrier than i expected.

the big eventual obstacle for me was that my faith was a solitary practice, so it waned as my interests shifted to other things. still, useful lesson. you can make yourself believe stuff just by deciding to, and the stuff you've decided to believe in will eventually come to seem as real and powerful as you need it to be.

i think a lot of my belief in god comes from "holy rolling" ;-)

but seriously i feel ... something ... as strongly, and at least as often, as i feel my fear of death or my atheism.

now pardon as i reason from analogy

a lot of times it occurs to me that the universe is probably cyclical, and that when i die i'll just come back, and next time i'll experience ledge, and then maybe the next cycle i'll experience contenderizer, and then the time after that my dog, and then maybe a rock, or a plant, etc etc, which handily solves the solipsism problem. and i feel this w/ all the seriousness that i feel when i'm in my "i'm going to die!" phase.

other times i figure there's no reason to think the subjective experience of dying might not be much deeper than we experience. who's to say it's like falling asleep? what if it's like falling into a black hole? what if it's like the tibetan book of the dead? what if ledge and contenderizer and philip and i, we're all just like finger puppets that have forgetten we're part of the same hand maaaaan.

and other times i figure who's to say i'm not a recent epiphenomenon on a nearby layer of the 10-brane?

i meant to say "much deeper than what we imagine"

a (very smart) religious friend told me once that doubt is a very important component of faith (it's meaningless without it). if you're just believing because you "decided to" i think that's actually something I'd want to distinguish from a spiritual or religious belief. in fact the whole "deciding to" gives certainty the lie, no?

in any case, what I liked about what he said is that it implies the converse: to be an atheist or a materialist implies that vacillation as well, that doubt. as Emerson says, “There is the incoming or the receding of God: that is all we can affirm; and we can show neither how nor why." (sorry im quoting all over the place lately)

]we're all just like finger puppets that have forgetten we're part of the same hand maaaaan.

love this one so much! you have to have a table handy so you can make the fingertips look all isolated before you go for the big reveal. ideally they would have little hats, too.

and just to add: that "double bind" of faith/doubt isn't pathological as far as I'm concerned, but kinda the productive power of religious or spiritual or mystical thinking.

oh wow i like that ryan!

one thing i always forget is that the physical science of mind is very new. it really makes you wonder what our beliefs will look like from the same distance in perspective that cern has on democritus, or caek on galileo.

if you're just believing because you "decided to" i think that's actually something I'd want to distinguish from a spiritual or religious belief. in fact the whole "deciding to" gives certainty the lie, no?

i don't know. all i know is that i found within myself, during a period of terrible despair, a willingness to sort of "talk to the universe". in talking to the universe, i chose - very consciously - a thing/person/god that i would talk to, a divinity that made sense to me and that i could relate to. it made me very happy to do this, though it didn't really change my fundamental sense of the nature of reality. it's not like i suddenly saw some burning truth in the center of the void. rather, i found value in extending myself into the void and being open to whatever might be in there willing to answer back. i knew that whatever i might imagine i "heard" (felt, really), could be me as easily as gee-oh-dee god, but i didn't care. it felt good to open up to something larger than myself.

over time, i've flexed this capacity or willingness in various ways. i believe totally in what i am doing and what i am communicating with, but that doesn't prevent me from not believing in anything (i still don't), and i remain certain that my belief is something that i am creating. it doesn't have anything to do with the world outside me. it hasn't just "happened to me", like a headache or love at first sight. it's more like an inernal fire that i can stoke if i want to. and while i definitely get something out of feeding it, i don't always need or want to. it's weird, really.

it's spiritual and in a sense even "religious" because i say it is, and who can tell me different?

that sounds like a very cool experience. the closest i've ever come to something like that is a certain belief that everything is gonna be "OK" -- even if the worst happens.

yeah that sounds like it would be reassuring in tough moments.

i was going to post something strikingly intelligent on this thread but then i watched the clip of dug and my brain melted onto the floor.

also you can imagine the capacity for religious imagination as an adaptive property. all other things being equal, it's probably a bit easier to procreate when you aren't consumed with existential despair.

magic isn't the right word though, not for me. it's too heavily coded. "the whole of things" works better, as it puts its arms around both what can be nailed down and what can't.

― contenderizer, Friday, July 13, 2012 6:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think 'magic' is a terrible word that connotes deception and fakery. The first compound that comes to mind is 'magic trick'. Plus i think alot of what is described as magic is simply logical, physical stuff that is just beyond the reach of modern science. Give it a few hundred more years. The rest of what is described as magic is the impenetrable layer of real abstraction that we mostly ignore on a day to day basis.

Show an iPhone to Benjamin Franklin and he'd be convinced you were allies of Satan.

a (very smart) religious friend told me once that doubt is a very important component of faith (it's meaningless without it). if you're just believing because you "decided to" i think that's actually something I'd want to distinguish from a spiritual or religious belief. in fact the whole "deciding to" gives certainty the lie, no?

If simply deciding something made it a lie then what of deciding to be an atheist?

Doubt's importance is likely overstated to give your atheist friends some evidence that you aren't a complete moron even though you believe in God.

For me the point of using the word 'magic' is to shock people (me included) out of complacency. Consciousness is wonderful, extraordinary, mysterious, and although it's not supernatural by any means, it's still beyond the common conception of 'natural' pushed by most materialists & scientists.

just because it's beyond full comprehension at present doesn't mean it's beyond "the common conception of 'natural.'" weather patterns were beyond comprehension a few centuries ago, as was the relationship of the sun, moon, and earth.

i mean it's kind of a truism in most cultures that what is beyond the current comprehension of science is subject to mystical speculation [insert joke about most people making much of what science does comprehend subject to mystical speculation]. but you're making the actual into the good, it seems.

I just don't see any way that science as we currently understand it could make the leap from its objective, extrinsic, public, impersonal view of reality, to consciousness' subjective, private, personal, intrinsic nature. I'm not saying it will forever be beyond comprehension but the current tactic of materialist science is just to pretend this is not a problem.

actually i think both science and philosophy have made inroads into understand how e.g. the mind constructs space. can it make a model or fulsome representation of subjective experience? no. but there's not much reason to think that this will forever be shrouded in an epistemic mist.

Not forever, hopefully, no. But honestly no-one currently has the slightest idea of how that gap could be crossed. This is a qualitatively different problem from e.g. explaning planetary motion

you don't need high tech tools to make surprising advances in what we know about the nature of subjective experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

"Nature of" is ambiguous. That video demonstrates something about the behaviour of (a particular facet of) subjective experience. What subjective experience *is*' how it is at all possible given an objective materialist description of the universe, is the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

Comma not apostrophe after *is*

i think if we keep chopping away at the boundaries of what subjective experience actually is, we might find out it doesn't exist at all, at least not in the vexing way we think of it, solving the problem.

You people are in serious denial!

wait a second thats not a real gorilla

i am having a lot of trouble believing that 50 percent of people don't see the gorilla

I def didn't when I originally watched it

also you can imagine the capacity for religious imagination as an adaptive property. all other things being equal, it's probably a bit easier to procreate when you aren't consumed with existential despair.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Saturday, July 14, 2012 12:26 AM (16 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dunno about this dude, when this capacity "evolved" i think ppl were probably still too busy trying to stay alive for more than 5 minutes to be consumed with existential despair, which is a luxury. and by that logic wouldnt a capacity for scientific thought have evolved a lot sooner

i typed "fulsome" rather than "full" for some reason. weird.

anyway yeah the inattention blindness stuff is fascinating and relevant to what i do.

i dunno about this dude, when this capacity "evolved" i think ppl were probably still too busy trying to stay alive for more than 5 minutes to be consumed with existential despair, which is a luxury. and by that logic wouldnt a capacity for scientific thought have evolved a lot sooner

― funny-skrillex-bee_132455836669.gif (s1ocki), Saturday, July 14, 2012 3:52 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's probably true. it's more likely a filling-in-the-gaps tendency in our cognition that accounts for the initial sparks of religious imagination.

I just don't see any way that science as we currently understand it could make the leap from its objective, extrinsic, public, impersonal view of reality, to consciousness' subjective, private, personal, intrinsic nature. I'm not saying it will forever be beyond comprehension but the current tactic of materialist science is just to pretend this is not a problem.

― ledge, Saturday, July 14, 2012 11:24 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i suppose this type of conversation is doomed to loop forever, so i hope you all will forgive me when i say i still don't see the problem. i'm not denying it, i just don't perceive it. science describes a world of measurable things. though we're just now beginning to peer at the workings of the human mind, i don't see any reason to doubt that the tool of science is adequate to the task of describing cognition (including subjective awareness) in terms of the physical processes involved.

of course, the sense we have of what subjectivity "feels like" cannot be completely described scientifically, because science does not speak in feelings. it speaks in number and words. the best science could do would be to say something like "the sense of subjective awareness is generated in area x by process y."

if and when science is able to do this, a great many people will undoubtedly persist in asking "yes, but what is that sense, and where does it come from?" as though it were some mysterious substance descended from heaven. subjective awareness is not a substance. it's simply a kind of feeling and/or knowing - like feeling hungry or knowing that there is a mountain over there. we do not need to account for any special property, state or kind of matter to allow for sensation and information storage.

i'm not trying to rule out magic or religion or anything else in the origin of consciousness. i'm just saying that i don't see that there's any pressing need to introduce such concepts into the equation at this point.

science is a "kind of knowing"--by it's very nature it has to draw limits and boundaries between "scientific knowledge" and other kinds of knowledge. there's no possibility of closing that gap and it has nothing to do with "magic"--it's just the epistemology of complex communication systems.

"the map is not the territory" and that kinda thing.

The problem with jumping to conclusions with explaining the things that are uncertain in the universe (really big leaps that is), is that we get attached to and overly comfortable with those explanations culturally, and we reject sourced findings that finally shed light on those questions. Evolution is an example.

we do not need to account for any special property, state or kind of matter to allow for sensation

This is fundamentally where I disagree. There is absolutely *no* property, state, or kind of matter that we know of that bears any resemblance to or could possibly account for sensation.

Perhaps you would be satisfied with a physical theory that said something like, visual experience is just a particular set of neurons wiggling in a certain way, auditory experience is a different set of neurons wiggling in a different way, etc etc. But suppose we discovered, in a bat, say, or a more alien creature, a set of neurons that we don't have, wiggling in a way that ours don't. And suppose also that these neurons were activated by a sensory apparatus we don't have, e.g. echolocation or the ability to detect magnetic fields. Furthermore, the neuronal wiggling and the behaviour of the creature were so linked as to suggest the neuronal wiggling was indicative of the creature experiencing a sensation. Could there be anything in this physical theory that could tell us what that sensation *felt like*? And if not, wouldn't that be a rather grave omission?

i see you've been reading nagel

Bro is a dude. Never read it in full before actually, not to diminish the paper but just the title is enough to let you know where he's coming from. But there's some excellent more subtle points in there too.

This is great, if you've got the stomach for 70 pages of hardcore philosophizin'

http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1172/nexus.pdf

(also nagel)

And if not, wouldn't that be a rather grave omission?

I am not sure that for the purpose of a scientific theory of conciousness it would be necessary to replicate the subjective feelings of a bat as it experiences echolocation in terms that are immediately accessible to humans as if they were human feelings. Presumably, if a subjective experience is dependent on an apparatus we don't have, then a fairly general verbal explanantion of what such an apparatus may feel like to its possessor might be possible, but not an individualized and specifically exact explanantion.

Why this would be considered gravely wounding to such a theory is beyond me. To me a theory of consciousness doesn't need to be demonstrated at that level to be considered valid. Proof would be possible without that kind of minute detail.

Not sure what such a verbal explanation would be like. How would you describe sight to a blind person?

Mnay blind people have experienced sight prior to their blindness.

For someone congenitally blind, only the most general of explanations would be possible. For example, you could say that color is a surface phenomenon and that it is capable of very subtle differences. A blind person would be familiar with shape and its many subtle gradations and also with surfaces as opposed to insides, so a certain level of analogy to these would be possible.

However, this failure to fully describe color to the blind would not in any way invalidate a useful theory of color consciousness.

going out on a limb here to say that without speaking to the particulars of the theory there's no way to say whether it would or wouldnt

and that goes for a lot of this thread!

...Furthermore, the neuronal wiggling and the behaviour of the creature were so linked as to suggest the neuronal wiggling was indicative of the creature experiencing a sensation. Could there be anything in this physical theory that could tell us what that sensation *felt like*? And if not, wouldn't that be a rather grave omission?

― ledge, Sunday, July 15, 2012 1:02 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, it wouldn't necessarily be a grave omission at all, depending on the material nature of awareness.

you seem to assume that must produce a "sentience particle" (or wave or field or something) in order for its explanation to be complete. that insistence seems unwarranted to me. afaic, it may be sufficient simply to describe the means by which the sentient system collects, stores and processes information. it seems reasonable to suppose it at least possible that this is all sentient awareness consists of - at least in scientific terms.

otoh, it may be that sentience is in fact some other kind of thing. it might, for instance, be a specific type of pattern born out of the chaotic interaction of other patterns of sufficient complexity. if that were the case, then sure, then a complete scientific accounting would have to identify the nature of this superpattern and account for means by which it might be generated.

i suspect that whatever consciousness turns out to be, the material nature of science's accounting for the "feelingness" of feelings will be pretty mundane. "when this section of the brain is stimulated in this way, a sensation of poignant nostalgia is experienced," that kind of thing. i wouldn't see anything lacking in such an explanation.

Yeah that wouldn't stop me waking up at night with the existential terror of where my awareness comes from maaaaan.

Just gonna copy a couple of paragraphs wholesale from What Is It Like to be a Bat 'cause I think they make an excellent point:

We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psychophysical reduction. In other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more, accurate view of the real nature of things. This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses. The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. It is possible to follow this path because although the concepts and ideas we employ in thinking about the external world are initially applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual apparatus, they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves—toward which we have the phenomenal point of view. Therefore we can abandon it in favor of another, and still be thinking about the same things.

Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favour of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.

Peirce has a great bit on this:

“The First must therefore be present and immediate, so as not to be second to a representation. It must be initiative, original, spontaneous, and free; otherwise it is second to a determining cause. It is also something vivid and conscious; so only it avoids being the object of some sensation. It precedes all synthesis and all differentiation: it has no unity and no parts. It cannot be articulately thought: assert it, and it has already lost its characteristic innocence; for assertion always implies a denial of something else. Stop to think of it, and it has flown!”

i think what keeps getting missed here is that descriptions and explanations are always descriptions and explanations of something else. it's a logical confusion to think that an explanation can possible account for in full of any particular phenomenon because that explanation always issues from a particular observational position (ie, it's part of the universe its describing).

or as ledge posted this bears repeating: If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.