Subjectivity and Science

[PixyMisa]

1) Your first sentence is babbling, you are saying exactly zero, "you are you... because you are you".

Would you care to propose a better reason for someone to be himself?

In reality, what we call "consciousness" (let me draw to your attention that we even lack a proper definition for such a thing) is related to the brain.

Is generated by the brain. And we do have proper - i.e. functional - definitions of this.

To say that it is a "function" of it would require us to have the ability to make a WORKING MODEL.

Why do you claim this? We have 6.5 billion working models to study, with more being, um, delivered, all the time.

This would demonstrate that it is, indeed, generated by the brain. If you don't have this all you have is wishful thinking... or woo.

We have 5,000 years of compiled evidence covering, at a rough guess, several quadrillion individual experiments.

Which of those do you dispute?

2) The question is not trivial, it is simply (and conveniently) ignored, like when certain authorities didn't want to look through the telescope, because they didn't need to.

It is not ignored; it's understood. We know perfectly well where consciousness comes from. If you beg to differ, place yourself under a general anaesthetic and continue the discussion in that condition.

Fact is that every materialist who denies it, does it from the very same platform he/she is denying.

Every materialist who denies what? What platform?

Blatantly absurd.

Well, yes.

Present me an argument and I think we can talk.

How about, just for once, you present an argument?

 

[Nick227]

We demonstrate that the human sense of having a personal identity is valid by asking people if they have a personal identity. If they say yes, then it's valid. If they say no, they're lying.

Hi Pixy,

We do seem to be going around in circles a little here. I am not denying that people experience a sense of personal identity. I do. You do. Pretty much everyone does. I'm saying that it cannot be scientifically verified, and furthermore it is not a given, it is constructed by the mind and can be deconstructed also, leaving one aware of a deeper reality.

If asking people if they believed something was sufficient as proof that it exists then I could claim $1m off James Randi for a start.

Nick

 

[Nick227]

David's thoughts are David's thoughts because they are generated by David's brain. If we take away David's brain, David has no more thoughts.

And the term "David" is just a label attached to a physically distinct assembly of matter.

Possession? Belonging? Not relevant. Possibly not even meaningful.

I'm not disputing the usefulness of labelling. Rather the identification as limited selfhood. When David starts calling his thoughts "my thoughts" or "I" then he is moving into terrain which cannot be substantiated empirically, however crazy that might sound. This is how the mind constructs and defends a notion of limited selfhood.

Nick

 

[Nick227]

Who experienced this ‘never born’ and ‘never die’ awareness?

Certainly not merely a notion. Personal identity is notional. You could label it but it would be meaningless.

Nick

 

[martu]

Hi Pixy,

We do seem to be going around in circles a little here. I am not denying that people experience a sense of personal identity. I do. You do. Pretty much everyone does. I'm saying that it cannot be scientifically verified

Nick

Nick can you give me an example of something you think is "scientifically verified" please?

 

[Nick227]

Hello Nick

Have you read any Sachs? Or Blackmore as suggested earlier on? If you have please read them again, if not please read them for the first time.

One further question:
Are you so sure "you'll never die" that you'd kill yourself*?

*or whatever it is you think that mass of carbon\water\iron etc is

Hi Martu,

If you can see and feel your body it is evident that you are not your body. If you are aware of emotions and sensations then it is evident that you are not your emotions or sensations. However there remains the belief that these things are "yours." If you act to deepen your self-awareness you will become progressively aware of your thought patterns. With each rise in awareness it will become evident that you are not your thoughts. At this point you will become aware that the body, feelings and thoughts do not belong to anyone and you will become aware of the whole process by which the experience of personal identity is constructed by the mind. It's not you.

There is the experience of identification with these things and, indeed, to carry out any outgoing activity such as this dialogue, I am making use of my sense of personal selfhood. But it is not a final truth.

Nick

 

[PixyMisa]

Hi Pixy,

We do seem to be going around in circles a little here. I am not denying that people experience a sense of personal identity. I do. You do. Pretty much everyone does. I'm saying that it cannot be scientifically verified

Wrong!

If you ask people whether they have personal identity, and they say yes, that is scientific verification. That's the nature of personal identity.

and furthermore it is not a given, it is constructed by the mind and can be deconstructed also, leaving one aware of a deeper reality.

Nope. If you claim to have deconstructed your personal identity, and become aware of a "deeper reality", that also demonstrates that you have a personal identity.

Personal identity is a sticky little beast, and very hard to escape, because all it is really is limited self (which you can't escape at all) couple with consciousness. If you aren't conscious, you don't have personal identity, but then you're no more interesting than other things without personal identity like mud.

If asking people if they believed something was sufficient as proof that it exists then I could claim $1m off James Randi for a start.

If you ask someone if they believe something, and they say yes, then there's no a priori reason to doubt that they do believe that.

And when it comes to the existence of personal identity, the conclusion is much stronger.

If you ask people if they are awake, and they say yes, then that is very good evidence that they are awake.

If you ask people if they understand at least some English, and they say yes, that again is good evidence that they do understand at least some of that language.

Because they cannot cogently answer the question without possessing that property.

 

[PixyMisa]

I'm not disputing the usefulness of labelling. Rather the identification as limited selfhood. When David starts calling his thoughts "my thoughts" or "I" then he is moving into terrain which cannot be substantiated empirically, however crazy that might sound. This is how the mind constructs and defends a notion of limited selfhood.

Wrong.

See: Worms, flat; flytraps, venus; rocks, broken. Limited selfhood is empirically verifiable, and has been empirically verified.

To the nth.

 

[martu]

Hi Martu,

Good morning I'm sorry but I have only questions for now, thanks for the reply.

If you can see and feel your body it is evident that you are not your body. If you are aware of emotions and sensations then it is evident that you are not your emotions or sensations. However there remains the belief that these things are "yours." If you act to deepen your self-awareness you will become progressively aware of your thought patterns.

What does a thought pattern look\taste\smell\sound like?

With each rise in awareness it will become evident that you are not your thoughts. At this point you will become aware that the body, feelings and thoughts do not belong to anyone and you will become aware of the whole process by which the experience of personal identity is constructed by the mind. It's not you.

How is it evident? How do you know you aren't fooling yourself?

There is the experience of identification with these things and, indeed, to carry out any outgoing activity such as this dialogue, I am making use of my sense of personal selfhood. But it is not a final truth.

Can you define what 'final truth' means?

Thanks again and apologies for all the questions.

 

[PixyMisa]

Certainly not merely a notion. Personal identity is notional. You could label it but it would be meaningless.

Nick, it's not merely a notion, it's an absurdity.

I've held newborn babies in my arms. I've sat by bedsides as people died.

Everyone is born, born a blank slate, a bundle of instincts.

Everyone dies. And they are never heard from again.

They don't come back. They aren't subsumed into a collective consciousness. They're gone, because the body and the brain is what made them what they were.

When I spoke at my father's funeral, I said that he lived on in everyone present in our memories, in the way he affected our lives. But that stuff is all physical, not metaphysical.

You die, and eventually you are forgotten. What you did in your life is what remains. If you learned, if you discovered new things, and you passed that on to others, that remains of you. If you built, if you invented, if you created new works of art, that remains of you.

But if you did none of that because you believed that your mind is eternal, all that's left is dust.

 

[PixyMisa]

If you can see and feel your body it is evident that you are not your body. If you are aware of emotions and sensations then it is evident that you are not your emotions or sensations. However there remains the belief that these things are "yours." If you act to deepen your self-awareness you will become progressively aware of your thought patterns. With each rise in awareness it will become evident that you are not your thoughts.

No. Quite the reverse. It becomes clear that what I consider "I" is exactly my thoughts.

If you can think about thoughts, and think about thinking about thoughts, and so ad infinitum, it is obvious that it is your idea of layers, of this "rise in awareness", that is the falsehood. The very essence of conscious awareness (and hence of personal identity) is self-reference.

 

[Nick227]

I also agree; Blackmore’s book is a good introduction. For people coming from the Advaita Vedanta (or neo-advaita) tradition, the chapter with Metzinger can be a real eye opener.

Hi Lupus,

Well, I did some advaita in my time, but of course after a while you realise that it's a load of old nonsense or, perhaps more fairly, a self-invalidating philosophy. Could you quote me or link me the relevant bits in the book?

Nick

 

[Nick227]

I've read Susan Blackmore's overview of consciousness studies, and it all pointed to the 'hard problem' still being as hard as ever. I read the other day on her website again, where she describes a theory of consciousness as narratives constructed from different strands of experiential data in memory, for instance, which challenges the common assumption that we have a single 'stream of consciousness' being absorbed and proposes instead a multiple or mixed repository of data in the brain from which a narrative is constructed in answer to a biological need to use certain information (a 'probe' I think the word is, I suppose like a query to a database). This helps to explain the way we are mostly unconscious, but can catch ourselves and learn to develop mindfulness by asking ourselves regularly "What am I conscious of now?" We then construct a narative backwards out of memory that was not in consciousness.

Personally, I find any exposure to "consciousness studies," or whatever nonsense intellectuals are up to these days, completely cerebral and dull. The only thing these kinds of books ever showed me was that I've got a lot better things to do with my time. I like debating on the JREF list because I do learn stuff and it also does allow me to track more deeply the identification inside my own psyche. Actually this isn't really true. I just enjoy winding up so-called rational materialists and pointing out to them that, in actuality, they are just as dependent on subjective conceptualisations as some old psychic guy reading palms on Margate Pier.

Nick

 

[Nick227]

Nick can you give me an example of something you think is "scientifically verified" please?

Well, I might wish to know the length of this table perhaps. I could measure it. Then, just to confirm, I could ask other people, perhaps with different measuring devices to measure it. If they come up with the same result, at some point I would be happy to take the measurement as proven.

Nick

 

[PixyMisa]

Well, I might wish to know the length of this table perhaps. I could measure it. Then, just to confirm, I could ask other people, perhaps with different measuring devices to measure it. If they come up with the same result, at some point I would be happy to take the measurement as proven.

And what does that have to do with science?

 

[martu]

And what does that have to do with science?

What PixyMisa said.

 

[Nick227]

Nope. If you claim to have deconstructed your personal identity, and become aware of a "deeper reality", that also demonstrates that you have a personal identity.

It is not so much that "I have deconstructed my personal identity" rather that I have become aware of the process by which the experience of personal identity is created. This may not be such a choice, I don't know. Maybe I directed some action, or maybe it just happened anyway and it seemed like "I" did it. In any case, in order to communicate about this state, it's going to come out in the first person, the "I" perspective.

Personal identity is a sticky little beast, and very hard to escape, because all it is really is limited self (which you can't escape at all) couple with consciousness. If you aren't conscious, you don't have personal identity, but then you're no more interesting than other things without personal identity like mud.

I find that it is the presence of thoughts that creates the experience of personal identity. You can simply be passively present in a situation and there will be no personal identity. Only with the arousal of thought does it come on. It seems to be an artefact of unconscious thought. The more aware you are of your thinking processes, the less the sensation of personal identity is present.

If you ask someone if they believe something, and they say yes, then there's no a priori reason to doubt that they do believe that.

I would agree. Though I must say this does seem an odd position for a JREFer to take.

And when it comes to the existence of personal identity, the conclusion is much stronger.

If you ask people if they are awake, and they say yes, then that is very good evidence that they are awake.

If you ask people if they understand at least some English, and they say yes, that again is good evidence that they do understand at least some of that language.

Because they cannot cogently answer the question without possessing that property.

Well, I would dispute this actually. You could answer Yes, without actually having a personal identity, merely the notion of it. There could be simply the assumption that it exists. This test merely demonstrates the belief, there is nothing in the actual act of answering that demonstrates that personal identity exists, making it quite different from testing someone if they're awake or able to speak English. Personal identity cannot be measured, cannot be located. It has no substantial existence. No brain process has been uncovered to account for it, thus it would seem that it is entirely notional.

Nick

 

[Nick227]

And what does that have to do with science?

Measurement of sensorily-evident phenomena with instrumentation; reproducibility of results by different observers with different apparatus.

Nick

 

[lupus_in_fabula]

Hi Lupus,

Well, I did some advaita in my time, but of course after a while you realise that it's a load of old nonsense or, perhaps more fairly, a self-invalidating philosophy. Could you quote me or link me the relevant bits in the book?

Nick

The reason I mentioned Advaita (neo-advaita) is that you seem to have a similar kind of philosophical standpoint. By your posts I inferred that you have been listening to people like Adyashanti, Tolle, Mooji, Gangaji, Sherman, &Co. Your descriptions are almost identical with how these people speak about consciousness and reality, so I assumed there’s a connection.

Experiences of non-duality are not that rare. Yes, it can be meaningful and tempting to treat extraordinary states of consciousness as truer than other kind of states. It does, however, not mean it’s actually so. There’s no reason draw unsupported conclusions about reality just because you’ve had momentary states of no-self.

I’m afraid I don’t have access to Blackmore’s book right now, but I can link to a few talks that ought to serve as a good introduction.

Metzinger: Being No One: Consciousness, The Phenomenal Self, and First-Person Perspective http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=metzinger+duration:long&so=0&num=100

Dennett: The magic of Consciousness: http://video.google.com/videoplay?d...2&start=0&num=100&so=0&type=search&plindex=24

 

[PixyMisa]

Measurement of sensorily-evident phenomena with instrumentation; reproducibility of results by different observers with different apparatus.

All of that is true. But it doesn't answer the question.