Fear of death.

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.

If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view

This kind of suggests that people fully comprehend their own subjective experience.

when you say pattern contenderizer, what do you mean a pattern of, if not particles?

freudian psychology? logical propositions? nerve networks? philosophical conclusions? materialist dogmas?

it would be unethical to follow this link below unless you have a jstor account or can otherwise renumerate robert nozick for his superb "fiction"

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zxk7_ikqJWoJ:www.bitchass.org/nozick.html&hl=en&gl=us&prmd=imvns&strip=1

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.

to say that water is "composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms" tells us something useful about the physical nature of water relative to the rest of objective reality, but doesn't explain much about our subjective experience of a given drink. conversely, to say that a glass of water was "delicious and refreshing" might be subjectively useful, but such a statement remains near-meaningless as a description of objective reality. in neither case does language even come close to capturing the essence of subjective experience.

i agree with all that, but still don't see how it places any special demands on science's account of consciousness. the seeming is simply not science's purview, except to the extent that it might be explained in terms of the material processes that constitute and enable it. this does not suggest that consciousness is "supernatural" in the sense that god and magic are said to be (though it may be), or that its "real nature" still eludes scientific description. more than anything else, it suggests that it is the nature of subjective consciousness to reject any mechanical explanation of subjective consciousness as insufficient, a weak analogy at best.

someone quoted the familiar saw about the map not being the territory upthread. it's important to remember that it applies to everything, not just to our own subjective awareness. a star cannot object to science's summary of its "real nature" (at least not in any sense that we can understand), but scientific description falls just as short of capturing the full reality of a star as does the full reality of human consciousness. the only difference is that we are not stars, and therefore the reduction of a star's real nature to the interaction of a few sad little material processes doesn't offend our vanity, does not fly in the face of "what we feel deep down". from the territory's perspective, the map is always going to seem hopelessly flawed, woefully insufficient, missing the big picture in favor of a shitty drawing of things that don't even really look like trees.

and we shouldn't be using the phrase "real nature" to begin with. science is concerned with the material nature of things. it renders no verdict on anything more fundamental than that. the material aspects of consciousness are the only ones that might be of interest to science, and i think there's every reason to think that science can describe them as well (and as badly) as any other material thing.

when you say pattern contenderizer, what do you mean a pattern of, if not particles?

freudian psychology? logical propositions? nerve networks? philosophical conclusions? materialist dogmas?

i dunno, i was just trying to leave it open-ended. sure, any of them things...

to say that a glass of water was "delicious and refreshing" might be subjectively useful, but such a statement remains near-meaningless as a description of objective reality

i disagree, this tells you a lot, given the right context, about both the water and the person who drank it! or at least it can point you in a lot of directions

i mean the fact that a molecule composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms could be described as "delicious and refreshing" could give you a lot to go on if you're looking to describe human life on this planet

i guess nozick's argument is it's self-evident, so obviously material descriptions ("seemings"?) are not sufficient

and i guess contenderizer's argument is that since it's not necessary in material descriptions it's self-evident there's no need for any conclusions outside those seemings

guess i'd call that a clash of civilizations

indeed. perhaps it's time to call it quits. i've had a ball though. (btw can't see google cache at work so nozick will have to wait)

Nobody drinks a molecule of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. That is not water, it is a water molecule. Only as part of a community of a great number of identical molecules does it become water, something experienced on our scale.

even then, sometimes it becomes steam, or ice

what is it exactly about consciousness that you guys think is out of science and tech's reach w/r/t curing death?

okay, i mentioned in the "freaky shit" thread that i'd written a 1,500 word rebuttal to nozick-style dualism, but decided it was too long to post. that's true, but i think i will try to briefly summarize and extend it here. it starts like a cosign, but ends up all no way. please forgive all redundancy, as it seems to be my curse:

despite its self-evident existence, we cannot directly access the objective, material world. instead, our subjective awareness accesses the sensory information provided by the body, and this in turn allows it to construct a secondhand - yet seemingly reliable - mental map of objective reality. as subjective entities, we directly perceive only this mental map and not the objective territory it purports to describe. in this sense, the body and its senses form a "bridge" between subjective awareness and material reality. the body-bridge not only tells us about objective reality, it also allows us to interact with that reality. it's a two-way street.

science is subjective in nature, and so are the measurements it takes. the scientific models we hypothesize and test are subjective, and so too are the scientific theories we validate by means of such testing. even when we speak of "the material world", "the physical body", or "objectivity" itself, we can only mean our subjective sense of whatever these things might signify. everything we can possibly perceive and conceive is fundamentally subjective, including our awareness of that which is ostensibly objective.

science does seem to provide reliable information about objective reality, and science is in turn shaped by the discovered nature of that reality. it provides another two-way "bridge" between our internal subjectivity and the external, objective world. it is the nature of science, however, despite its basic subjectivity, that it can speak only of the objective. it is "positioned" in subjective reality just as the body is positioned in objective reality, and it looks out, not in.

therefore, it should not surprise us that science has little to say about the most seemingly important features of subjective, internal reality. science's job is outreach from the subjective to the physical, and it naturally finds no purchase on mere subjectivity itself. it can't even measure or locate "science"!

none of this suggests, however, that the subjective does not arise from wholly material roots, or that science's account of cognition and awareness are insufficient. i do not see any gap between the material and the mental for which we cannot reasonably account, whether scientifically or otherwise. instead, i see a continuum of being on which subjectivity and objectivity are perhaps arbitrary distinctions flowing into and out of one another by means of bridges such as the body, science and communication.

xp - fear of death got left in the "what is existence?" dust

so... you guys want medicine to cure existence, too, now? one day we'll have an app for that.

seconal works pretty well for that right