Subjectivity and Science

[Nick227]

I'll bet we get more of the same nothing.

Actually, the best thing you can get out of a discussion about these things is absolutely nothing. Think about it.

Nick

 

[Nick227]

I can't make sense of what you are saying Dharma... I know you think materialists are woos... because you've said as much. You also seem to be hearing things that are not said and you do this a lot. I don't know what physicalism is and I understand Pixy much better than I understand you. I have never said science and materialism are synonymous nor that religion, philosophy, and woo are synonymous. Dennett is a philosopher and so is Shermer.

Materialism was great until people created a philosophy out of it. Now it's just another head trip.

Nick

 

[Nick227]

Pixy said: "Consciousness is a function of the brain"

UTTERLY RUBBISH

Consciousness is deeply related to the brain but it needs more than a brain to, well, perform. No, sorry to disappoint you, nothing magical, just perceptions, and a world, and other consciousness, and a language.

Lets see one more (I had hopes on you, but have seen nothing interesting, you claim to be intelligent but then again get offended by a smile.

Pixy said: "As I said, we know it's created by the brain"

Yeah. Sure.

Pixy seems a nice enough chap to me. But one does often hear the sound of creaking goalposts in the background when he writes on these issues. In fact, in this thread he has merrily hurled the goalposts about the place with such zeal he could earn himself a role in Heroes. In the last couple of months he's moved from there's no such thing as subjective science to upholding subjective science as a pillar of empiric inquiry.

Nick

 

[Nick227]

Again, it is just attacks on other positions, not a statement of his own position, and how it differs in a practical way from what we accept.

In other words, still no nifty crap.

Joe,

It seems to me that there is a persistent theme to quite a few of your posts. Namely that you don't seem particularly concerned with whether any of the various proposals might or might not be correct, rather that if they are then who is going to tell you what to think now.

Nick

 

[PixyMisa]

Pixy seems a nice enough chap to me. But one does often hear the sound of creaking goalposts in the background when he writes on these issues. In fact, in this thread he has merrily hurled the goalposts about the place with such zeal he could earn himself a role in Heroes. In the last couple of months he's moved from there's no such thing as subjective science to upholding subjective science as a pillar of empiric inquiry.

Sorry, Nick, but you're talking nonsense.

There is no such thing as subjective science.

But you can make an objective study of the subjective.

What people say they think is evidence of what they think. It's not conclusive evidence, because people lie. And it's certainly not evidence of anything else.

If you say that you experience personal identity, then, since personal identity is nothing but a thought process, I can take that at face value as evidence that personal identity is real.

If you say that you think that the world is ruled by a secret cabal of alchemists, then I can take that as evidence that you think the world is ruled by a secret cabal of alchemists. It doesn't mean that the world is ruled by a secret cabal of alchemists, though, because that's not a statement about thoughts, but about the real world.

 

[Nick227]

Why do you figure that?

I would propose identification to be the result of a need in self-conscious systems to act on thought. Thoughts arise, yet in the self-conscious individual, there may be a choice whether to act on the thought or not. To increase the desire to act upon thought, the libidinal drive may be being brought into the system (dopamine circuitry for the neuroscientist), and it could be that the resulting artifact is a heightened sense of importance attached to the thought. What was "Nick's thought" becomes "my thought." The sense of direct connection to the thought is intensified through the creation of a conceptual first person perspective, and thus the chance that the thought is acted upon is increased.

Why would you want to do that?

People pay for it! It's called therapy.

Why do they need to do that?

Part of the therapeutic journey. The payoff is you feel a lot more alive and tend to spend your time doing things as opposed to thinking about doing them.

Even if that were possible, why would they want it?

Not really related to want. If you work with emotions a lot in people you notice that after things have been expressed fully so the attachment to them decreases, the belief that these are "my feelings" decreases in intensity.

Ah. They are so deeply abused, they are now catatonic?

No. You are aware of the thoughts. But the intensity of the sensation that they are "my thoughts and I must act on them" is diminished. You experience more choice in your behaviour, often in situations where you acted autonomically.

It's great. Perhaps you should try it sometime.

Nick

 

[PixyMisa]

Joe,

It seems to me that there is a persistent theme to quite a few of your posts. Namely that you don't seem particularly concerned with whether any of the various proposals might or might not be correct, rather that if they are then who is going to tell you what to think now.

It's hard to even conceive of a more thoroughgoing mischaracterisation of what Joe has posted. Do you actually bother to read anything that's written here?

 

[Dancing David]

It's not about what consciousness does - it is about what my consciousness IS". The problem here is that this is an experience that I can't explain to you. You seem not to recognise what I'm talking about, or you have a way of explaining your experience of existence as reflective information processing. That expression is to me utterly external, representational, modular, mathematical (Ken Wilber calls it 3rd-person or 'it'-language) and it does not bridge (in my comprehension, though I accept I may be missing something here) the gap to the 1st person, "I" that simply IS and knows that it is.

Place your hand in front of you close one eye. Can you see through your hand?

Consume large amounts of alcohol.

After detoxing, go to a brain trauma unit and talk to people.

Refute the apparent biological nature of experience.

Now, you present your unconscious-matter model of how a person has the illusion of a self as if it were easy to see - like anyone should just have to hear it and they'd go "Oh yeah, of course". So maybe you're extremely smart, you and your breed of neo-zombies. But most people hear Descartes' "I think therefore I am" and go "Oh yeah" - not that they might get the detailed nuances - but it reminds them of their most absolutely undeniable reality - they ARE, they exist, they are alive.

Now, you say that all that can be caused by a machine. But I say that another theory gets my attention these days and explains more to me, but, unfortunately,

Theory without evidence.

I don't know how to explain it to you - even how to begin, other than to say that it reassesses the assumption that my subjective experience is a product of matter - in other words it says "What if we stop the first (or even the second) assumptions of scientific materialism?"

Uh huh, sure, whatever.

What can be explained by that POV, what is different in that POV ? What evidence supports that POV that is not supported by materialism?

It might involve reconsidering a dualism with mind and matter, or a monism where Mind is primary. It experiments, however, from that first experiential place of knowing I AM, and sees what else it might discover.

Finger/moon.

There is a rich literature on just what people discover beyond that, which often leads to similar proposals as yours - there is the no-self of Buddhism, for instance. However, there are many Buddhisms, not one, and a lot of spiritual philosophies, and many of them include a concept of Cosmic Consciousness, or the idea that the All, the sum total of the Universe, is not dead matter, but Divine, and that that simple I AM is, were we to delve into it enough, the same thing (Atman is Brahman; Consciousness is God).

All with no more evidence than you have.
I use this example because it is very emotional.

Does having racist beliefs make them true?

It is hard to talk about these things here, because they don't happen in representational modelling it-language; mostly, they just are in an intuitive inner space that I imagine you have not entered (and I don't mean any disrespect by that).

I have.

There isn't a functional map I can put in front of us and point to.

How convinient for you, i can. You are seeming to use muddle headedness as an excuse.

I can't tell you about this journey in English.

Uh huh. I can.

It's an inward journey and there is a point where you have to leave explanations behind (just resign yourself to poetry and irrational prose) in order to continue. It is a continuation of the same journey that you were on as a materialist earlier, of conscientiousness, truthfulness. I'm sorry the irrationality of the ideas irritates rationalists here, and maybe I shouldn't even come here and tell you about the theories I can't tell you about rationally. But I'm moved to because this other dimension of knowledge feels so important.

The view at Rock Candy Mountain is interesting. Sounds like you bought a condo.

It was around Descartes' time that things went one-sided and the inner, the mind got separated from the science.

No, it is much, much, much older than that.

The inner world is very subject to science.

You just choose not to use it.

Science concerned itself only with what it could observe of the material world, and left the nature of mind to the Church, and in that split something got lost, which is the reality of the Subject, a reality that, of course, in our increasingly rationalist, materialist and technologically successful world, fewer and fewer take seriously...at least it was so until the intermittent reawakening of the 60s and 70s...and now, as postmodernism finds a more mature voice.

Still don't understand science?

Are you afraid to apply it to your inner world?

I think that your programmatic models of consciousness are symptomatic of the exterior-view trying to explain the bits it left behind - the interior experience of mind - and convincing itself that it has a workable scheme because it looks good on paper.

Why is postmodernism important? Well, because with it we began to realise that there is a big problem with language, that it isn't simply representational, and science relies on abstraction and symbolism, representation, modelling, simply language. Why are language and all forms of representation a problem - because they are not the real world and because they are contextual and because they actually originate 'internally' in a human mind and are projected onto or matched with patterns in the outside world.

Thus, science, even with its best mathematical models, really measures its own imaginary constructs, not real objects. I gave the chair-continuum as an example thought-experiment. How much can you chop off a chair before you stop calling it a chair? The boiling point of water - what exactly is 'boiling', when water molecules are evaporating and condensing variably at a wide range of temps and pressures? Fundamental particles - these are just words representing models representing realities that no-one can be sure of. The more you contemplate reality (and the science we've already got, because it does give useful data) the more it seems that we have to say, like the mystic, that there is something very strange and fluid going on, but we don't really know what.

You would sneer at anyone proposing that they have psychic powers and giving this kind of 'evidence'. I wonder what James Randi would make of it. He would presumably require substantial demonstration of consciousness from your circuit. Just telling me that, in your opinion, you can build a circuit that is 'conscious' demonstrates to me that you either have absolutely no idea of the normal human experience of subjectivity - the 'witness space' - the sense of selfhood - or you are deliberately merging these ideas in your mind and hoping the gap will go away.



Again, it's an IS, not a DO. Your list doesn't define consciousness to me. It is a flatland description of the possible contents of consciousness. If you experience what Nick and I have, you would know that consciousness can be empty, 'bare attention', which is when you recognise it's peculiar quality of AMness. Again, from your mindset you say Nick can't think his way out of the circle, when he said he experienced not BEING his thoughts. I couldn't mistake what he was saying because I have had the same experience. Blows your mind. The first time I had it I was about 16 and I didn't go there again for years. You see, the other thing about all this is it's really quite scary, not the soft squishy lovely place we're accused of retreating into, where anything can be real. It's waking up from symbols to REALITY. It's like switching off the TV. And even then doubt doesn't go away. I've seen through the representation, the abstraction, the symbolic living, the change humanity made when we invented language and became self-conscious that is mythologised in such stories as the Fall from Grace, but I still wonder if what is left is reality when it's so hard to say much about it or do things with it. It sucks, in fact, most of the time. But once a delusion is burst, you can't go back. Once you see the magic eye picture, or get heliocentrism, it just is.

Hope that helps
John

Wishful thinking.

The inner world is in your body, big whoop.

There are people to love and gardens to tend to.

 

[Dancing David]

Way back in the dawn of time, I had a rather lengthy debate here with a character by the name of Undercover Elephant, who informed me at one point that I needed to take mind-altering drugs to understand his argument.

I declined.

As someone who was addicted to them, I don't recommend it unless you are already coherent.

It doesn't matter is just supports the experience is biological theory.

 

[PixyMisa]

I would propose identification to be the result of a need in self-conscious systems to act on thought.

Stop. What do you mean by "identification" here? Are you talking specifically about humans?

Thoughts arise, yet in the self-conscious individual, there may be a choice whether to act on the thought or not.

Which is a good thing.

To increase the desire to act upon thought, the libidinal drive may be being brought into the system (dopamine circuitry for the neuroscientist), and it could be that the resulting artifact is a heightened sense of importance attached to the thought.

Why do you think that?

What was "Nick's thought" becomes "my thought." The sense of direct connection to the thought is intensified through the creation of a conceptual first person perspective, and thus the chance that the thought is acted upon is increased.

Why would that happen?

People pay for it! It's called therapy.

Okay.

Part of the therapeutic journey. The payoff is you feel a lot more alive and tend to spend your time doing things as opposed to thinking about doing them.

Okay. I follow now. You are talking specifically about people who can't, or at least believe they can't, do what they wish to do due to internal mental or emotional conflict.

I will note that while this is valid, it has no broader relevance.

Not really related to want. If you work with emotions a lot in people you notice that after things have been expressed fully so the attachment to them decreases, the belief that these are "my feelings" decreases in intensity.

Sometimes. And sometimes the reverse happens. And it has, as I said, no broader relevance.

No. You are aware of the thoughts. But the intensity of the sensation that they are "my thoughts and I must act on them" is diminished.

Nick, you are talking about people who are psychologically abnormal.

You experience more choice in your behaviour, often in situations where you acted autonomically.

Which is what normal people do. Normal people who universally report limited selfhood and personal identity.

It's great. Perhaps you should try it sometime.

Thanks. If I ever go insane, I'll try to follow that advice.

 

[Dancing David]

I feel very hurt. Why is it necessary to slag people off like this just because you perceive them having a different opinion from you? Is it all the years thinking of yourself as a machine that makes you so bad mannered?

If anyone appears to think they know everything and have nothing to learn, it seems to be you, and your sniping suggests that underneath that ill-mannered arrogance you aren't quite as confident as you make out. The last god knows how many posts between you and Joe seem to be designed to belittle and insult me, either that or you are utterly insensitive.

Still, I guess you've been through the routine before. If someone challenges your beliefs too much, you just call their sanity into question until they feel so bad they have to leave and you can celebrate another victory for rationalism. Oh well done. You clever things.

Why is it you don't present evidence for your beliefs.

You could examine them. You could see what the evidence shows.

As I said i have been down that road.

Using words and appeals to emotion does not mean that science does not apply to all areas.

Try it, use a journal. Record your research, come back with the data.

There is no evidence to support that the inner world is seperate from the biological body. It would be great if many things were true or valid.

 

[Dancing David]

And, unfortunately, tons of brain damage... which is the opposite of "consciousness expanding" in my opinion.

Not quite true.

Some hallucinogens are very nondamaging. Others, especially used in the late 60's are very dangerous, DMT and STP.

It is usally the agents in the substances that are a problem.

There is some evidence that certain amphetamines are damaging but very little to say that others are.

People should still not take them casually. Especially is they are already incoherent.

 

[hammegk]

Metaphysical naturalism is the assumption that the universe behaves as if the fundamental nature of reality is material. An abstract form of materialism, in other words. And that is, indeed, the foundation of science.

No, science will get by fine with any "assumption" you, I, or anyone, anywhere, cares to make. The empirical results won't change.

Good try, though.

 

[Dancing David]

I agree. I merely propose the hierachy as it does offer an objective viewpoint from which to articulate a relationship. Of course all these things are simply arising.

The mind seeks processes and relationships because it dwells in the state of believing it has a personal identity. Thus it constructs objectivity because this allows the formulation of process, and processes reinforce the illusory sense of selfhood.

Of course all this is merely another formulation!

Nick

Um, they occur prior to and in the absence of personal identity. babies and brain damage for example.

There is no mind, just a brain.

 

[Dancing David]

Care to cite that claim, Joe?

These days scientists are back studying psilocybin, LSD, and mdma, with regard to bringing them to the market to treat psychiatric ailments.

Nick

Yeah, right.

Cite your sources please, who is doing this research, where , when and how?

I call your raise, I want to see your evidence.

 

[lupus_in_fabula]

It isn't! Materialism is best because it has the most possibility to show you your limitations. All philosophies, all beliefs are just arising through the mechanism of identification, so you might as well choose the one that can rein you in.

I’m not sure what you mean by limitations and how especially materialism is a good way of exposing those, unless you mean by showing how the world seems to operate vs. wishful thinking – then I agree. I don’t see how the notion of self has anything to do with materialism, or physicalism (if you’re picky), or whatever monist lens you’re looking through. The “I” is a notion, but there's also something that corresponds to that notion; the experience of “I” is as real as the experience of non-duality, or bumping into a tree. They are experiences, obviously something is experiencing them (or at the very least, there is experiencing), you might as well call that peace of meat that’s experiencing all this cool stuff I, me, myself or Nick. We must use substantives in order to communicate meaningfully.

Anyway, this whole discussion about subjectivity vs. science kind of reminds me of those hard core social constructivists who seriously contemplate if there’s a world outside discourse. Well, then, blindfold them and have them run around in the woods… let them also feel the discourse, I say.

 

[Dancing David]

I'm sure you'll agree that "frequent use...associated with" is a lot different from "tons of brain damage."

Are you saying above that ibogaine and ayahuasca cause tons of brain damage? If so some citations would be nice. (Molliver's on Purkinje cells has now been discounted, btw)

eta, it strikes me that maybe you're trying to say that ibogaine and ayahuasca are being studied and the others not. As far as I'm aware there's no ongoing clinical studies for either of these. There is research going on for lsd, mdma and psilocybin, so I read in last months SciAm mind magazine.

Nick

Research into is not the same as using them to treatment illness.

Here is a hoot:

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/LSD/grob.htm

Diagnosis and Comorbity of Substance Abuse:
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/163/4/689

again research into hallucinogens is not the same as using them to treat menatl illness:
http://a1b2c3.com/drugs/brn008.htm

You can look at the same stuff I did:
http://www.google.com/search?q=psychiatric+hallucinogens&hl=en&start=0&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=psychiatric+hallucinogens&hl=en&start=10&sa=N

If you go to PubMed:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/

and enter 'psychiatric hallucinogens' you will find the same.

So what research where?

 

[lupus_in_fabula]

Yeah, right.

Cite your sources please, who is doing this research, where , when and how?

I call your raise, I want to see your evidence.

Actually, I also heard Psilocybin is coming back into research again. Maybe I can dig up some references (I vaguely remember one country being Switzerland). I'm not sure thou.


Ah yes... here: http://www.maps.org/research/cluster/psilo-lsd/

 

[PixyMisa]

Um, they occur prior to and in the absence of personal identity. babies and brain damage for example.

There is no mind, just a brain.

Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say "YES"!

Oops, wrong quote.

There is no Dana, only Zuul.

This is sort of true. It's true in the same sense that when you go to the beach, there are no waves, only water.

There is mind, as long as we are clear that the term "mind" is describing behaviour.

 

[John Freestone]

You know what I'd like? I'd like for one of these "prophets" to tell me what exactly I'm supposed to be afraid of. I keep asking over and over again for some practical effect of their woo being true... and all I get is silence, and sometimes some of that moronic "open your mind" garbage.

Can I get a little "if X is true, then the result is Y" sort of explanation? Please? If Nick is right, then the practical change in my life will be what, exactly?

Hi Joe, I'm going to walk into another unwanted epithet as 'prophet' because I don't want your "asking over and over again" to go unanswered. I haven't caught up with the rest of the thread, and maybe others have given different answers. I just gave a long answer and IE7 crashed AGAIN! So excuse the brevity.

The checks and balances of science, which attempt to minimise the problem of subjective experience being susceptible to error has a downside. If errors are noticed by the scientific community getting together and comparing notes on their repeated experiments, all well and good, but errors that are not noticed become consolidated into the authodox view.

The first thing that you would be afraid of, therefore, is not relying on others to pick up your errors in thinking or tell you what the established facts are. Then, there are various fears that come if and when you learn to open your mind and quiet your mind in the contemplative practices. For reasons that are still not clear to me, my first experience of pure awareness was the most frightening thing I ever encountered. When I was in my teens I thought that my consciousness was the same thing as my thoughts/feelings/etc. - all the contents of consciousness. I thought that the yoga books I was reading must be wrong to talk about "pure awareness", until I bothered to learn to meditate and practised enought to verify it. It was/is a state of mind in which there are no contents of consciousness, but consciousness (or awareness, awakeness, a witness, a subject) remains, a strange, silent, empty place where I have an overwhelming sense of not being fooled by illusion (although I don't rule it out, of course), of not thinking or feeling or visualising or hearing anything, and a solid, undeniable sense of simply Being.

Later, I began to verify more of the statements of the 'perennial philosophy' or spiritual teachings of Buddhism, etc. Not only that, I began to understand truths that are intimated in the words of all the great prophets and spiritual teachers in different religions, and to make sense of them in my own experience, still suspending both belief and disbelief for any others that I didn't know myself. I began to realise that, as postmodernists have pointed out, the problem with much of this kind of understanding comes down to simple problems of language.

As I and others have acknowledged, verifying this subjective realm, whether it is unreal imagination or has anything real to tell us, is a personal decision, a personal practice, and it is hard, often extremely boring, requires an unusual amount of discipline, which is why it is called discipleship, and all the while one is tortured by the fear that it might be all the things you lot keep saying it is (prejudicially, having not tested it): self-hypnosis, self-deluding, a retreat from reality, comfortable but wrong...... and all the while there is little or nothing against which to measure it, other than the thousands of years of (often contradictory) literature of what others have made of their subjective experience. How can it not be frightening, Joe, to be told, and to know, that it could be utterly delusional to investigate subjective experience?

Practical effects of my woo being true? Well, assuming it were true, you would have to overhaul just about everything you think you know (believe, as I keep saying) about reality. Space and time, or spacetime, would mean something quite different. Your view of yourself would be quite different, even if as a materialist you had already come to the conclusion that you don't exist in any permanent form (if we take Buddhism as comparison, because that comes to the same conclusion). However, where the materialist's mind is seen as the processing of a machine, the individual's mind in Buddhism is seen as a kind of self-limiting infolding of the All, the Cosmic Consciousness, a "filter" as Nick put it, which creates the local impression of a separate self. I have to say that I have not verified these more advanced stages of the subjective investigation, and am not either a prophet or an Enlghtened Being.

Becoming selfless, though, if that were really possible, instead of a pretense of mechanistic worldviews that alters your ego not one jot, you would become extremely - er - selfless, and be able to bring the expansive identity to human affairs that people like Mahatma Gandhi brought, for instance, having no qualms about starving oneself to death in order to force the British Raj to recognise its insidious enslavement of India.

If X is true then Y is true? I hope the above is one example of that. The effect of the evolution of consciousness is a movement from identifying with the small ego to larger and larger entities. The selflessness of the materialist explanation, that I am just the local fizzing of some synapses, does not cause this expansion of identity, and thus the socio-political implications of the two views are extremely different. Consciousness evolution of individual human beings, indeed, has often been posited as the only route to sustainable civilisation, since it acts to cause each to include all others in their love and care, their identity, their Self - and indeed all the environment, too. This is another thing to fear, the extreme communism of Christ, which it is easy for those prior to such an intuition to imagine must mean becoming like ants in a colony, or being forced into a fundamental religious authodoxy.

Ironically, science seems to develop just such a powerful authodoxy, prejudging all other philosophies as false, or demanding evidence be provided for them, even when they have not been tested in the way the test must be carried out, and the proponents have explained again and again why it is difficult - impossible - to bring anything that would satisfy the scientist as evidence.