Fear of death.

(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

novocaine for the soul

i believe contenderizer that's a philosophical mission statement not really a proposition per se

i think that school of thought is called physicalism, popular w/ stuffy anglophone analytic types

it is "positioned" in subjective reality just as the body is positioned in objective reality, and it looks out, not in

are you talking about consciousness or science?

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

anyway that's the major argument against physicalism, that the distinctions are perhaps not arbitrary which makes the notion of bridges suspect

we have nothing to fear but feces

xp - no no no, i'm not advocating any kind of physicalism. i'm not saying that the physical is all there is (that, as i understand it, is the foundational precept of physicalism). tbh, i think it's just as likely that the mental is all there is...

such speculation aside, my point is that the physical and the mental - the objective and the subjective - both obviously exist. in many ways, they seem to be different kinds of things, perhaps even "different realities", but i do not agree that they are entirely separate worlds forever walled off from one another. instead, i see them as engaged with one another, flowing easily into and out of one another. science describes some but not all aspects of this interrelationship, and other ways of knowing perhaps describe other aspects. science's most obvious "limitation" is that it concerns itself only with material reality, with matter and energy, and not with abstract things such as subjective ideas and feelings. the physical sciences can tell us a great deal about the composition and material properties of a book, but seem to understand very little of what it means. though science is a subjective construct (or tool) generated and "located" wholly within our subjectivity, it does seem to permit outreach into objective, physical reality.

when i say that science is sufficient to explain consciousness, i merely mean that it can apparently account for everything we can reasonably expect it to. it does its job. that it leaves the "sense" of subjective experience to be explained by other means is no defect, and this elision does not build an insurmountable barrier between the worlds. different jobs often require different tools.

Even if the physical was all there is, i think anyone who follows pop science knows that that still leaves room for some pretty bizarre and fantastic stuff in the universe.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AB7PA_XQHh8/T2pIk8vn_ZI/AAAAAAAAH98/AZeVLmryDJY/s1600/WAFFLES_Death_by_fan.jpg

I'm a fan of fear of fan death

astounding!

i think we're done here. #seewhatidid

thank you fan death

http://www.care2.com/causes/scientists-proclaim-animal-and-human-consciousness-the-same.html#ixzz253GNGfBc

a soul in every stone

I don't mean to throw atheist all-stars into this but I thought this is is a nice compliment to my and a few other's arguments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Oh947g4zvg&feature=related

Ugh and whoever posted it is embarrassing

Thoughts? Not to ignite the same mammoth conversation all over again, but I think it can serve as a tidy summation of our point on the side of realism.

That was good.

I remember watching this debate. Weren't his opponents insistent that "the soul floating off and reuniting with Grandma" is just a metaphor? They seemed to be arguing that talk of "afterlife," with respect to their own Jewish faiths, isn't really supernatural and doesn't conflict with the material fact of death. It's about looking at that final loss of self at the moment of death as a kind of assimilation back into the rest of being. So they could respond that, yes, local damage to the brain can leave you totally changed, and total damage to the brain also leaves you totally changed. You're completely no longer you.

It is a good argument but it also doesn't touch open the yet-to-be-bridged gap between science's conception of matter, and our experience of consciousness. Science actually doesn't tell us anything about the intrinsic nature of matter, so materialism might be true, but we don't actually know what matter is.

I'm OK with science not yet being able to explain every question about our complex perception and experience of consciousness. What I'm not OK with is pretending the unknowns somehow leave open, even support a spiritual/afterlife possibility. That if the issue wasn't so personal people wouldn't feel the need to fill the void of scientific unknowns with extremely hopeful stories that in any rational sense cannot and should not be weighed equally with "I have no idea."

I was talking to a guy at a party that is a physics teacher and was saying the old "I'm not religious but I'm spiritual" line and kept mentioning he just can't accept a materialist nothingness scenario after death, that "It just can't be all there is." He elaborated with existential what-ifs about being on a different plane of existence and some other conceptually intriguing theories, but my position was that those scenarios aren't more likely simply because we want them more, that because they suggest to preserve our point of view and basic sensory reception after death at the very least can only make them a comfort while we're here and ease our minds until they cease.

What I'm not OK with is pretending the unknowns somehow leave open, even support a spiritual/afterlife possibility.

why aren't you okay with that?

how do you know we're pretending?

sounds like you're into denying, don't pretend you're not

What I'm not OK with is pretending the unknowns somehow close, even deny a spiritual/afterlife possibility.

now what?

Jim I actually haven't watched it until right now. I think the opponent's positions throughout the debate seem to morph like liquid around the challenges of Hitchens and Harris, as apposed to the debate on this thread where the opponents of the materialist position seem to focus on holes or unknowns in our arguments that are somehow positive reinforcements of an, if nothing else, wishful preservation of their consciousness after death.