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Materialism - Devastator of Scientific Method! / Observer Delusion

Nick227 said:
Neural representations are not seen by anyone. Contrary to what Dan believes. Agreed?
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That would be wrong.

Nick227 said:
Whatever is in front of you now. No one is seeing that... agreed?
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Right now? Probably not, but that data can be extracted later simply by having Myriad attached to the appropriate equipment and recalling what it was he saw.
 
Nick227 said:
I said it doesn't get in the way of measuring. You wanna measure, measure away. But the significance of measuring is diminished without objectivity. The meaning of measuring is diminished without objectivity.
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Just as subjective measures of the efficacy of therapies are less significant, and less meaningful than more rigorous and objective measures?
 
The Observer Delusion

Richard Dawkins' provocatively titled book of 2006 seems to have put a stake through the heart of belief in God. Science most certainly seems to have God on the ropes, so to speak. Personally, I think that's great and very healthy for all concerned. Too many wars and too much nonsense down to this "God."

Some scientific minds can nowadays often be found ridiculing God affirmers and enjoying themselves at the expense of these believers. Well, so what?

But wait, could it be true that these same scientists actually have themselves a deeply held untested belief within them? One that they will try to convince themselves is true despite a massive lack of physical evidence? Surely not! Well, actually, yes they do!

It's called The Observer. It is the scientists' own personal God Delusion - an inner watcher of all that happens. The outer watcher (God) might be on the ropes but the inner version is still going great guns. Belief in this mysterious apparition afflicts many scientists, academics, philosophers, and other interested parties studying consciousness.

Materialist theories of consciousness usually come down these days to either neuronal or quantum theories, the former generally taken much more seriously. Neural processing creates representations of external reality and these are acted upon by the brain. There is no need for any observer of any of this. And there's not one shred of physical evidence for an observer. Yet, try as they might, these Ph.D.s struggle to just let the Observer go.

Giulio Tononi starts his second paragraph for the abstract for his much-vaunted Integrated Information Theory with the sentence - "I know I am conscious: I am seeing, hearing, feeling something here, inside my own head." In the first paragraph he notes that neural activity in the cerebellum is unconscious whereas that in the cerebral cortex can give rise to consciousness. What is he saying here? That there is some Observer inside the brain? Someone that can see conscious processing but not unconscious? Surely not. And he is not the only one. Don Hoffman, Dave Chalmers, John Searle, even Mike Graziano, and many many others all apparently believe that there is someone who witnesses conscious neural processing.

They are suffering from the Observer Delusion.

And it creates so many problems. Researchers are trying to find secondary and even tertiary neural transduction to account for processing turning into representations and then back again after they've been acted upon by this mysterious observer. Even though there's no known way this could happen. A recent straw poll of consciousness researchers showed that some 75% still believed that there was a paradigm-sized explanatory gap between neural processing and conscious experience, something which I submit can only come about because they're obsessively believing in an observer of consciousness.

Now don't get me wrong. Letting go of the observer does not clear everything up and mean that we can now immediately understand consciousness. In fact it raises as many questions as it does answer them, if not more. And of course it is needed to admit to and discuss the illusion, if it is to be materialistically accounted for. Maybe that was even Tononi's reason for making those statements. But surely now it's time to put this illusion to rest and see what neural reality would look like if we were not driven to try and factor in or model an observer into the equation. If no one sees consciousness, what does this say about so-called unconscious processing, for example?

Are you willing to take that step and investigate?
 
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Nick227 said:
Eyewitness accounts are absolutely fine. Though increasingly the courts take them at reduced value anyway, veridical perception being on the way out generally. There's nothing in this to stop the brain making representations, and creating verbal reports in a pseudo-first person.
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How can it do this without having observed whatever it was that it is supposed to be an eyewitness to?
 
Mojo said:
How can it do this without having observed whatever it was that it is supposed to be an eyewitness to?
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Looks like catch 22. If there is an observer how can it be proved by the observer observing itself yet if the observer is observing itself as proof of it's existence then that is circular and no proof.

Some catch that catch 22.


ETA: since I have just proved that "I" don't exist I will vanish in a puff of logic.
 
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Nick227 said:
I said it doesn't get in the way of measuring. You wanna measure, measure away. But the significance of measuring is diminished without objectivity. The meaning of measuring is diminished without objectivity.
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I think you're confusing two things: Yes, it is true that individual subjectivity gets in the way of perceiving the world as it objectively is. A person who has psychological problems, or who is colorblind, or who suffers from schizophrenia, is going to be impaired when it comes to perceiving the world as it is. Fortunately, science itself provides us with the tools to allow ourselves to know when we are being emotionally biased.

For example, science allows us to know that colors don't really exist, but rather are internal phenomena that happen in our retina and our brain, when the light bounces off objects in a certain way. So on one hand, our individual subjectivity of how we see the world, will never "grasp" this, since we can't help seeing colors. And more so, it seems pretty consistent! This red object right here is always red, and this blue object is always blue. And yet, these colors are pretty much illusions. And if it weren't for science, we would have never found this out.

Or take Optical Illusions. Our individual subjectivity does not allow us to avoid seeing that the stripes in a drawing are all the same size, even though they really look different. But we have measuring tools to disprove our individual subjective perception. Again, if it weren't for science, we would have never found out such thing.


So, as you see, it is exactly the opposite of what you are claiming: The reason science is important is precisely because we are creatures with a subjective, 1st-person point of view of reality, and we need tools (scientific tools) to let us know when what we perceive isn't actually what's happening in the world. And science is the only tool that does this accurately.
 
Nick,
I haven't closely read your other threads -- what do you mean by "observer" exactly? Is it the same as an observer in quantum systems? i.e. an instrument performing a measurement?
 
Nick227 said:
Richard Dawkins' provocatively titled book of 2006 seems to have put a stake through the heart of belief in God. Science most certainly seems to have God on the ropes, so to speak. Personally, I think that's great and very healthy for all concerned. Too many wars and too much nonsense down to this "God."

Some scientific minds can nowadays often be found ridiculing God affirmers and enjoying themselves at the expense of these believers. Well, so what?

But wait, could it be true that these same scientists actually have themselves a deeply held untested belief within them? One that they will try to convince themselves is true despite a massive lack of physical evidence? Surely not! Well, actually, yes they do!

It's called The Observer. It is the scientists' own personal God Delusion - an inner watcher of all that happens. The outer watcher (God) might be on the ropes but the inner version is still going great guns. Belief in this mysterious apparition afflicts many scientists, academics, philosophers, and other interested parties studying consciousness.

Materialist theories of consciousness usually come down these days to either neuronal or quantum theories, the former generally taken much more seriously. Neural processing creates representations of external reality and these are acted upon by the brain. There is no need for any observer of any of this. And there's not one shred of physical evidence for an observer. Yet, try as they might, these Ph.D.s struggle to just let the Observer go.

Giulio Tononi starts his second paragraph for the abstract for his much-vaunted Integrated Information Theory with the sentence - "I know I am conscious: I am seeing, hearing, feeling something here, inside my own head." In the first paragraph he notes that neural activity in the cerebellum is unconscious whereas that in the cerebral cortex can give rise to consciousness. What is he saying here? That there is some Observer inside the brain? Someone that can see conscious processing but not unconscious? Surely not. And he is not the only one. Don Hoffman, Dave Chalmers, John Searle, even Mike Graziano, and many many others all apparently believe that there is someone who witnesses conscious neural processing.

They are suffering from the Observer Delusion.

And it creates so many problems. Researchers are trying to find secondary and even tertiary neural transduction to account for processing turning into representations and then back again after they've been acted upon by this mysterious observer. Even though there's no known way this could happen. A recent straw poll of consciousness researchers showed that some 75% still believed that there was a paradigm-sized explanatory gap between neural processing and conscious experience, something which I submit can only come about because they're obsessively believing in an observer of consciousness.

Now don't get me wrong. Letting go of the observer does not clear everything up and mean that we can now immediately understand consciousness. In fact it raises as many questions as it does answer them, if not more. And of course it is needed to admit to and discuss the illusion, if it is to be materialistically accounted for. Maybe that was even Tononi's reason for making those statements. But surely now it's time to put this illusion to rest and see what neural reality looks like without crazily trying to model an observer into the equation.

Are you willing to take that step and investigate?
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Is that what you observe?
 
Nick227 said:
Are you willing to take that step and investigate?
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What is meant here by "you"? Is there such thing?



ETA: Also, Nick, I should let you know that you're doing a classical behavior that a lot of posters do here, where they start opening threads where they're basically repeating the same philosophy. You don't need to do that. It would be better if instead of opening thread after thread to try to convince us of your personal philosophy, that you rather try to explain it better, and also, that you try to pay attention to the points that people are raising toward you, because as every typical poster obsessively trying to convince everyone of their point of view, it seems you're filtering everything that's being told to you, through your personal lens. And that is not very scientific.
 
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godless dave said:
Did you just make a new thread to repeat what you've been saying in another thread?
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I think the purpose of this thread may be to repeat what he's been saying in the other thread, without having to also defend the claim that it invalidates the scientific method. So in that sense, it's the beginnings of a walk-back. Perhaps if this keeps up for another month or two, we'll see a thread titled, "The Observer Convention", followed by "The Observer Paradigm", and then Nick will be in line with mainstream thinking about how we experience and understand reality.
 
Nick227 said:
You want me to produce evidence that something, which no one can find evidence for, isn't there?
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No, we want you (I asked you) to produce evidence showing that human beings do not exist.

It's your claim (apparently). So ... where is your evidence showing humans don't exist?
 
Nick227 said:
I mean someone that sees conscious processing.
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I don't quite understand what you mean. How does one "see" conscious processing? Do you mean something like: if I were to meet you in person, and see that you are conscious, then I would be an observer to your "conscious processing"?

Or by "observer" do you just mean "one who is conscious"? I guess your definition of conscious processing is not obvious to me.
 
Nick227 said:
Richard Dawkins' provocatively titled book of 2006 seems to have put a stake through the heart of belief in God. Science most certainly seems to have God on the ropes, so to speak. Personally, I think that's great and very healthy for all concerned. Too many wars and too much nonsense down to this "God."

Some scientific minds can nowadays often be found ridiculing God affirmers and enjoying themselves at the expense of these believers. Well, so what?

But wait, could it be true that these same scientists actually have themselves a deeply held untested belief within them? One that they will try to convince themselves is true despite a massive lack of physical evidence? Surely not! Well, actually, yes they do!

It's called The Observer. It is the scientists' own personal God Delusion - an inner watcher of all that happens. The outer watcher (God) might be on the ropes but the inner version is still going great guns. Belief in this mysterious apparition afflicts many scientists, academics, philosophers, and other interested parties studying consciousness.

Materialist theories of consciousness usually come down these days to either neuronal or quantum theories, the former generally taken much more seriously. Neural processing creates representations of external reality and these are acted upon by the brain. There is no need for any observer of any of this. And there's not one shred of physical evidence for an observer. Yet, try as they might, these Ph.D.s struggle to just let the Observer go.

Giulio Tononi starts his second paragraph for the abstract for his much-vaunted Integrated Information Theory with the sentence - "I know I am conscious: I am seeing, hearing, feeling something here, inside my own head." In the first paragraph he notes that neural activity in the cerebellum is unconscious whereas that in the cerebral cortex can give rise to consciousness. What is he saying here? That there is some Observer inside the brain? Someone that can see conscious processing but not unconscious? Surely not. And he is not the only one. Don Hoffman, Dave Chalmers, John Searle, even Mike Graziano, and many many others all apparently believe that there is someone who witnesses conscious neural processing.

They are suffering from the Observer Delusion.

And it creates so many problems. Researchers are trying to find secondary and even tertiary neural transduction to account for processing turning into representations and then back again after they've been acted upon by this mysterious observer. Even though there's no known way this could happen. A recent straw poll of consciousness researchers showed that some 75% still believed that there was a paradigm-sized explanatory gap between neural processing and conscious experience, something which I submit can only come about because they're obsessively believing in an observer of consciousness.

Now don't get me wrong. Letting go of the observer does not clear everything up and mean that we can now immediately understand consciousness. In fact it raises as many questions as it does answer them, if not more. And of course it is needed to admit to and discuss the illusion, if it is to be materialistically accounted for. Maybe that was even Tononi's reason for making those statements. But surely now it's time to put this illusion to rest and see what neural reality would look like if we were not driven to try and factor in or model an observer into the equation. If no one sees consciousness, what does this say about so-called unconscious processing, for example?

Are you willing to take that step and investigate?
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You already have a thread about this.

Why are you starting another thread about it?

Is it because you are losing the argument you already started about it in the other thread, and have therefore decided to try the same nonsense all over again? Certainly, almost everyone in that first thread disagrees with you.

The mods should combine this into the other thread (or better still just delete this, since it's clearly an attempt to re-run precisely the same thing all over again from the start). Otherwise, this just becomes a way of you repeatedly running away from the arguments you started elsewhere.
 
I peeked into your other thread to get a better idea of what you are talking about, and maybe this has been addressed, but this (from the first post):

If the brain is the source, or foundation, for consciousness then there cannot actually be an observing self. Though it's a pervasive and convincing phenomena it can't be real, or we'd be back in dualism.
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doesn't seem to follow. Why do you think the brain cannot cause an "observing self"? Wondering if you're getting at something like this(?):

According to materialism, matter (and its interactions, and possibly other physical phenomena -- i.e. physicalism -- are primary). Mind is secondary and caused by material interactions. Therefore mind is an epiphenomenon. This is called epiphenomenalism in philosophy of mind. By definition an ephiphenomenon cannot affect the primary phenomenon (in this case, mind cannot affect matter). Therefore since the mind doesn't actually DO anything (and cannot do anything according to the materialism view of consciousness (or observer)), doesn't cause anything, and cannot interact with anything downstream, it doesn't actually exist. i.e. the only consistent view from a materialist is that "self" is an illusion and isn't real. Is that what you're trying to say?

Of course then materialism can say epiphenomena are real, they just don't actually interact with anything or do anything and aren't (directly) measurable... but that seems to contradict how most (all?) materialists define "real" and "exist".

I don't have a strong opinion either way and perhaps there is an obvious way out of this; I'm just wondering if that's what you're trying to argue...
 
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