Subjectivity and Science

[69dodge]

Its concsiousness would be internal, not transferable by any means we know to any other being or committee for verification. Now from your point of view, you would no doubt equate behavioural clues with proof, but if you test your own consciousness, do you rely on behavioural data?

Yes.

I suppose in a Descartesian view you might - I'm thinking, so I am.

Exactly.

The thinking-behavior that you observe yourself doing isn't the sort of behavior that you can observe others doing. So why give the same name, "consciousness", both to your own thinking-behavior (as observed by you) and to others' different behavior (as observed by you)?

 

[PixyMisa]

The thinking-behavior that you observe yourself doing isn't the sort of behavior that you can observe others doing. So why give the same name, "consciousness", both to your own thinking-behavior (as observed by you) and to others' different behavior (as observed by you)?

Because the outward signs of consciousness that I observe in myself are the same as the outward signs of consciousness I observe in others. Because the brain activity I measure in myself (with electrodes or FMRI or whatever) during conscious thought is the same that I measure in others during what they report to be conscious thought.

Because, while I am privy to some additional information in one particular case, in every respect that the two processes can be compared, they are the same.

Because everyone experiences it the same way.

That's why.

 

[Soapy Sam]

A general question:-
We talk of science "explaining" things, by which I suppose we mean rendering hitherto unconnected facts into a pattern comprehensible by a brain.

But whose brain?

Any brain?

Science has explanations for any number of things which I personally find incomprehensible. I lack the smarts. No amount of study will ever help, because I'm too damn thick.

If there are cases where science has a valid explanation which is not understood by even one person, then there must- at least in principle- exist explanations comprehensible to a very small number of people. Perhaps only one person.

Is it so hard to see that there may be explanations NOT accessible to even one person?
In such a case, can science help?
Is this where we turn it over to the machines and quietly step into extinction?

 

[PixyMisa]

Mathematics has the same problem. There are computer-generated proofs of few theorems that are so long that no-one can grasp the entire proof.

What you do is you break it down into components you can understand. Check each component. If you can show that all the components are valid, and the way the components are put together is valid, then the whole is valid.

 

[Dancing David]

Ecstasy floods serotonin receptors and long term users often have problems getting the system back to normal. Dopamine flooders (not generally hallucinogenic) create a similar dependency. LSD creates recurring flashbacks in some people. I don't think either of this drugs are being studied much for therapeutic purposes. Ibogaine seems promising.

I will have to check on the LSD flashback thing, I have known about a hundred people who have used very high doses of LSD. Never met one who had a flashback. I think those are caused by other things.

Then there is the whole comorbidity issue of mental illness and substance abuse. Like 75% of people with bipolar disorder and alcohol and the methapolar syndrome.

 

[Dancing David]

And in Ecstasy's case there is evidence of cell death in target cells of chronic abusers.

I have been talking about that since the eighties, gosh it sure seemed to cause a lot of people a problem. We will see if they get Parkinson's or something like it.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Mathematics has the same problem. There are computer-generated proofs of few theorems that are so long that no-one can grasp the entire proof.

What you do is you break it down into components you can understand. Check each component. If you can show that all the components are valid, and the way the components are put together is valid, then the whole is valid.

Granted- but if nobody can actually grok the wholeness of the answer, what does it mean to say we understand?

Let's face it, whether the argument is about free will or understanding whatever- human brains do have limitations. We do pretty well considering...

 

[Dancing David]

Sorry. I choose not to undertake that task.

You'll have to use your own best definition before you decide apriori "god" cannot be an existent in your worldview.

Hi, not all materialists assume that there is no god a priori. Some are just waiting for more evidence. It doesn't really matter because the defintion of god is sort of vague, so the confounding variable requirement of reductionism is hard to meet.

God can exist under materialism, just like stars could be sentient.

 

[Nick227]

What can't science explain? And how do you know this?

Hasn't explained how the experience of "I" arises.

How about why the big bang occurred also?

Nick

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

That's a completely different question. We can't know everything. But we can explain everything.

The principle of consistency says that the same explanation for a given process applies everywhere in the Universe. You don't, by any means, need to know everything to fully understand everything in principle.

As with your argument on consciousness, this is confusing parameters with functions.

I don't believe I've provided an argument on consciousness. I only tried to explain BDZ's position on it. That perspective isn't really a confusion of parameter with function except within a given definition of what consciousness is. Change the definition and you change the parameter/function relationship. He is simply using a different definition. I think there is some utility in that approach. In fact, behaviorists view things in much the same way. The separation between 'person' and 'environment' is not concrete when we discuss such interactions. We create strict boundaries so that we can discuss them, but we shouldn't reify those boundaries if this impairs understanding of behavior within a system.

We -- you and I -- are not really saying different things. I think the only difference between us is that you have more confidence in our ability to explain the world than I have. I have full confidence that we can explain consciousness, and it also pisses me off when folks come in and try to say that such explanations are theoretically impossible. That's why I tried to stay out of this conversation.

This is true. I understand that some mathematicians really can visualise four dimensional space. I certainly can't.

No, not at all. I can't visualize four dimensional space, but I solve problems in more than four dimensions every day. (I'm a computer programmer.)

Then you, more than most, should be able to appreciate that there may be vistas that we cannot reach, working in an area that is hard to conceptualize. Again, there is nothing woo here. We would simply be ignorant of these aspects of reality (if they exist -- and we could only speculate and not argue that they do). There is no way to offer proof of such things, only speculate on them. Is this consequential? Well, obviously not. Really, such speculation is a waste of time, but it might also be true.

The Mary problem is based on a lie.

Well, of course it is -- that is why it isn't really a problem. But it is the case that Mary's internal sensation of seeing 'red' is new information. The lie is in the original proposition that she can know everything about seeing red without actually having that experience. Bait and switch seems to be a favorite in philosophy of mind.

There are experiences that we are simply not capable of. We can think about them, we can conjecture, but we can't get to them. There are simply things that we cannot know.

No, that only means the description is incomplete. That's the lie I just mentioned in the Mary problem.

Yes, then we agree on that.

Subjective experience is a physical process, and there is nothing in principle to limit our understanding of that process.

We are talking about different things here. There is nothing woo about the Mary problem. We can understand what is happening in a subjective experince, but we cannot share that experience -- even if we create conditions to mimic the same internal 'hormonal' environment that constitutes part of what we call 'feelings' (in part, because we are not the same substrate as the person having the experience, so interaction issues would dictate a difference). We can understand those process to the level of Mary understanding 'seeing red' while still in her white and black room (leaving aside the obvious neurological reality that she could never see color in the first place given that weird scenario). We can describe an amazing number of things. But we cannot know everything. I think you probably agree with this.

That's just silly. We had no reason to think about hydrogen atoms or positrons before we knew they were there either. Then we discovered them, and thought about them, and understood them.

Yes, and there may be strangenesses that we cannot conceptualize in our limitations. Agin, they would be inconsequential because we couldn't know them, but they might be there. They would simply have no impact on us whatsoever. And, yes, I know this is pure speculation.

It's a nice turn of phrase, and it illuminates the weirdness - relative to our everyday experience - of twentieth-century physics. But it's not an argument.

Of course it's not an argument. It isn't meant as one. It is a caution about our limitations.

What Godel's Theorem says is that any sufficiently powerful (and arithmetic is sufficiently powerful) formal system contains propositions that cannot be shown to be either true or false using the axioms of that system.

But science is a system for generating explanations of the Universe, and the Universe isn't a formal system. So exactly how, or even if, Godel's Theorem is a limitation on science is not at all clear.

Yes, but a full explanation of the universe would amount to a formal system -- the axioms being the underlying physical constants that determine what is out there.

No.

I'm afraid I do not share you confidence in our abilities to arrive at final explanations. There is much that we can explain. Consciousness is going to be one of those things -- I am almost certain of that -- since it arises from the workings of matter/energy, which is theoretically explainable at the level we see in our daily lives.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Hasn't explained how the experience of "I" arises.

How about why the big bang occurred also?

Nick

I think you are confusing what science hasn't explained with what it cannot explain.

There actually is an explanation in M-theory for why the big bang occurred. There are theoretical explanations for the experience of "I" also, but that depends on what level of explanation you want.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

Elephants can't jump.

Evolutionary theory is a theory, a model of reality. No-one here disputes that. It says so right on the label.

We test it; it works.

All we have is behaviours, and all we have to study those is our perceptions - suitably augmented by our instruments - and our brains - likewise augmented by everything from abacuses to supercomputers.

Since that is all we have, it is futile to argue whether it is "actually real". It can kill you; that is sufficiently real for most people. Dead philosophers raise few arguments with this position.

On that I think we fully agree. Or, as Mercutio once said, "Metaphysics is largely a pantload."

 

[Dancing David]

Once you have seen what it is, for any meaningful length of time, it's bloody hard to go back to objectivity to the degree that you could believe that it's possible to formulate meaningful statements about the nature of reality. It's patently ****ing obvious, to be honest, that this can't be done, once you start to grasp the reality of non-dualism.

Um, lived there since about the age of nineteen, so thirty one years. I disagree with your continued use of the word objective.

Objective as used in science is based upon isotropy and reductionism with an assumption of causal relations between events.

there is no need for the subject object devide.

Of course, if you are in some way addicted to trying to understand the world objectively, and experience a deep need to continue the research, debate, and endless argument with others then this above will inevitably be a highly confrontational statement. If this is so you may comfort yourself with the knowledge that it's "just my opinion."

And there is also a group of people on both sides who think they have special personal information.

they are wrong.

"That's just your opinion" (actually means - I don't like the look of this!)

Other popular "get-out clauses," escape routes, and general back doors for internet discussion groups include -
- demanding to know the precise definition of either pretty much every word, or one particularly hard-to-define word (actually means - I don't like where this is going!)
- introducing some mind-blowingly complex concept of at best only tangential relevance to the discussion at hand (actually means - I don't like the look of this!)
- or my personal favourite option "well it's all just arising anyway, who's to know?" (actually means - I don't like the look of this!)

Nick

And for the other side
"you have an incomplete model".

Let me make this clear, all human relaity is notional, so what?

All science is an approximation of the behavior of reality.

You still have to deal with the force labeled as gravity, if you think it is partciles of energy or angels. It doen'y matter.

 

[Ichneumonwasp]

This and your last post are really helpful. It's wonderful when someone can translate woo into terms normal sceptics can understand! I'm obviously more evolved than an undercover elephant, because I wouldn't doubt evolution for a moment - given the rather paradoxical possibility you explored about a base (non-dual) state. This is very close to Ken Wilber's model, which involves evolution and external matter, but also considers that every holon (person, wasp!, cell, molecule, etc.) has an interior reality as well, which also evolves. Hence, he does not push consciousness down the phylogenetic tree, but sees consciousness as the evolutionary level of 'interior' arising with human beings (and interiors, he says, go all the way down). Also, he gets over the problem of this seeming like a duality, by suggesting that it is just a natural duality - a surface has to have an inside. His scheme relates various internal sensations or functions to their exterior physical forms - including relating different emotional/cognitive capacities to different evolutionary systems of the brain. (Integrative Psychology, 2000)

A behaviorist would say, simply that the difference between objective and subjective arises only in the number of potential spectators. Some behaviors simply can only have one spectator. If monism is the case, the very idea of a spectator is also open for discussion, though.

My first musings about the evolution of consciousness came from a fidelity to the same principle that seems so important in energy - neither being created nor destroyed - and indeed in our intuitive liking for monism rather than dualism - i.e. it seems odd if consciousness suddenly comes into being in the universe at some point of complexity, when its subjective quality - its qualitative quality (the 'qualia', like pain, anger, compassion, image, thought) are so utterly unlike the stuff you can pick up and stick under a microscope. If that difference and those principles are impressive, it adds weight to contemplations of consciousness being somehow immanent, a deep potential or 'the Ground of Being'. It doesn't have to lead to naive philosophies of God stirring the stars, but it does re-enchant the world that materialism has 'disqualified'.

My answer to that would be that I think the issue arises because of our language. I don't think we have a problem viewing processes as having a beginning and ending. Consciousness, in English is a noun. If it were a verb I don't think we would even be having this conversation.

Consciousness should be a verb. Can you point to "running", put it under the microscope? You can see a relation of parts that we call 'running', but where is the 'running' itself? It's just a verb that we treat like a noun.

 

[Dancing David]

I'm talking about the experience of personal identity, of identification, of thoughts developing the sensation of "my-ness" - developing a mechanism by which they can be acted upon. This is a different thing from labelling.

Nick

Sorry that is no evident to me.

the sense of 'my-ness' could be learned like every thing else.

You seem to still be promoting the Kanting line that there can not be thoughst about thoughts.

Why not.

Thoughst are patterns of neural association, they are somewhat plastic and defintily effected by conditioning.

If I have a model for dealing with the labels in my head, what is so different about a label for a label?
You have created a dualistic division.

 

[Dancing David]

Well, I'm a subscriber to SciAm's MIND magazine and I read it in there last month. If you check online I'm sure you can find it, december edition. The book's called The Neuroscience of Fair Play.

Just because someone states that there is a problem for neurobiology in the discussion of empathy does not mean that there is , cite your evidence. Your claim to support not mine.

Mirror activity could be one possible path for empathy.

Well, you can call it dopaminergic if you don't like psychiatry. Amounts to the same.

Um, dopamine is part of psychiatry, to just claim that freudian high level concepts that have never been found to have a testable theory and evidence or any sort of predictive value are meaningful is nonsense. they may be a nice form of closed self referencing stuff, but they have no ability to predict the course of behavior.

Does not amount to the same.

Libido, if I recall correctly is the sex drive, it is not as closed a system as you seem to imply with your statement.

I always find it interesting that if I mention therapy or feelings on the JREF then I get accused of psychobabble.

Some forms of therapy are not, they are psychodrama, counseling or pure mumbo jumbo. You used vague terminology that has no ability to predict the course of behavior, that is why i call it psychobabble.

Feelings have strong basis in the behavioral and biological models as does therapy. But people who think that they are therapists who don't set clear goals and shill people for large amounts of money are chalatans. If they were open minded they would set clear defined goals that should be attained in twelve weeks or less. To defraud people of huge sums of money makes one a chalatan.

You are hiding, why is that?

How does behaviourism explain the phenomenon of identification? I'm interested.

You have a brain, it develops associatioms and pathways from exposure to the enviroment. There is a phase that starts about the age of two where the language threshold is reached and children begin the intense language aquisition phase. At this point the object/subject usage of language develops along with the continued modeling of individuality. Indivuuation as a conceptual process gets very intense about the age of 12.

here is the deal, from all evidence thoughts are limited to an individual body and can only be transmitted through physical media to other individual bodies.

So regardless, there are individual bodies that partcipate and are part of the world. So scientificaly individual bodies are the base unit of experience.

 

[Dancing David]

Hi David,

I cited you papers earlier in this thread. Magic mushrooms contain psilocybin, so it's those ones. I don't know the mechanism of action, or know if it's been discovered yet. BTW, as an aside, it's not necessary to know a drug's mechanism of action to have it developed.

Nick

Um, this is silly.

Sure people can play with psylocibin, great.

But the pathways that it effects is crucial to treatment. Perhaps you should study up on serotonin and the effects of psylocibin and LSD.

SSRis are already there to help people with OCD, and they are not as likely to have the side effects that psylocibin does, like causing more anxiety and panic attacks.

You should study more on serotonin agonsists and antagonists.

 

[Nick227]

I think you are confusing what science hasn't explained with what it cannot explain.

There actually is an explanation in M-theory for why the big bang occurred. There are theoretical explanations for the experience of "I" also, but that depends on what level of explanation you want.

Ah, was it that we had to find something that science absolutely couldn't, presumably ever, explain? I didn't get that bit.

It seems that it would also need to be clarified as to whether creating a possible explanation is enough, or demonstrating that explanation to be true is needed.

What is the theoretical explanation for "I?" I'm interested.

I would suggest also that a possible means of determining whether science does adequately explain everything would be by measuring the amount of belief in God in a culture.

Nick

 

[martu]

Thanks for trying to answer my question Lupus (btw is your name to do with lupus the disease?) and Zen but your answers aren't helping me so I will choose to bow out.

 

[Nick227]

You have a brain, it develops associatioms and pathways from exposure to the enviroment. There is a phase that starts about the age of two where the language threshold is reached and children begin the intense language aquisition phase. At this point the object/subject usage of language develops along with the continued modeling of individuality. Indivuuation as a conceptual process gets very intense about the age of 12.

here is the deal, from all evidence thoughts are limited to an individual body and can only be transmitted through physical media to other individual bodies.

So regardless, there are individual bodies that partcipate and are part of the world. So scientificaly individual bodies are the base unit of experience.

I don't follow how this explains the experience of identification? Can you explain me more?

Nick