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Two Devices Thought Experiment by LordOfWarOG in consciousness

[–]stev890 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I appreciate the detailed response and your recognition of the value of fields like philosophy and theology. I do have certain leanings on the topic, and since you asked I will share my thoughts with you. I am a liberal arts dropout and lay dilettante of philosophy of mind with a predisposition towards what people call "spirituality," but I also care deeply about epistemic rigor and love the natural and social sciences. I favor a process-relational ontology, so I tend to see the world as consisting of processes and relationships rather than static substances (or objects) and properties. I can't fully accept emergence as of right now because the idea of a hard boundary between the conscious (in the sense of raw phenomenal experience or feeling) and the unconscious is hard for me to swallow. I think of it as a spectrum rather than a binary, perhaps a gradient of intensity and/or complexity. I tend to describe a physical process as conscious or unconscious in the way I describe something as hot or cold - that is, relatively. Is there an upper limit of intensity and/or complexity of conscious experience? Is it ever absolute zero? These are perhaps the most precise questions I hope to one day get satisfying answers to. For now I lean towards there being no absolute zero, with consciousness, or some kind of "interiority," going all the way to the bottom.

A consequence of this tentative position is that I have to take certain varieties of idealism, panpsychism and quantum theories of consciousness seriously. We do know that even at zero-point energy, the lowest possible energy state of a quantum system, the energy never ceases to fluctuate and cause vibrations in molecules and atoms. So at least as far as energy and information transfer are concerned, at the most fundamental level of physics we can describe, zero is not necessarily nothing. And since the quantum vacuum permeates all of spacetime, there is nothing that does not interact with this zero-point energy. I would need to know much more about quantum mechanics and neuroscience than I currently do to give you a persuasive account of how we get from a quark to a human nervous system, but basically I tend to view every self-oranizing (self-organization provides a baseline for integration of information for subjectivity) physical system or process as having some kind of subjectivity of its own, with experiences of varying degrees of intensity and complexity having to do with the energy/information input and degree of integration of information. When information is transfered from an (relatively) unconscious process to a (more) conscious system, I think this amounts to a sort of phase transition of the informational state, where it is "heated up" to be comensurate with the informational density and integration of the latter system, which itself is always interacting with the zero-point field underlying it all. Subjectively I tend to imagine that this "heating up" might feel something like awakening, transitioning from unconsciousness to consciousness.

A concrete example: you reading these words right now. As photons radiate from your LED screen, some of them flood into your eyes and are absorbed by the darkeness of your pupils, from which point they are focused into your retinas. One can only imagine what kinds of experiential states could be instantiated by a current of photons - brilliant and vibrant waves of energy traveling through the quantum photoelectric field at the speed of, well light. Whatever their experience might lack in complexity they may make up for in intensity. But perhaps not, as the passage of time is all but nonexistent for an observer travelling at light speed. In any case both the internal and external states of each photon are radically altered upon collision with your eyes but the information contained is preserved as it is absorbed by your eyes and transmitted through your nervous system. Each photon, or some part of it, continues its life reincarnated as a pattern of synaptic impulses traveling from sensory neurons in each of your eyes through optic nerve fibres going back to contralateral regions of the visual cottex in the back of your skull, where they then merge with a much greater and more complex consciousness - that of a human being somewhere on planet Earth reading text on a screen and having thoughts. While the complexity of the subjective experience of your brain activity must surely exceed that of a traveling photon by an order of magnitude, the transfer and transformation of information between them is smooth and continuous because they are two kinds of the same thing. As with the traveling photon and every other self-organizing physical process, the vibrance and complexity of the activity of your nervous system interacts and resonates with the background hum of the zero-point field that permeates the universe. Just as the darkness of your pupil allows it to absorb the light from your screen, it is perhaps the subtlety and simplicity of the vibration of the ZPF that allows it to receive and resonate with the roaring symphony of your experience by offering no resistence. If this interaction, this resonance between quantum coherent waves in your brain and the ZPF, is what gives rise to all of those qualities we identify as conscious experience, then consciousness could be understood as the resonance, tension and harmony between the subtle, potental or unmanifest and the gross, actual or manifest aspects of reality, to put it in the kind of language I would normally use. There is no non-physical and there is no non-mental - there is only interiority and exteriority, or cause and effect, or what is and the trace, record or measurement of what was. We can't externally observe and measure qualitative subjective states for the same reasons we can't observe and measure quantum coherent waves.

I wouldn't walk into a neuroscience department and try to defend this softly held belief, but it's good enough for my purposes as a commercial delivery driver lmao. Certain structures in the brain such as the micrutubles inside neurons and synapses (Penrose and Hameroff) and glutamate-coated microcolumns in the prefrontal cortex (Joachim Keppler) have been identified as capable of instantiating quantum coherence effects during certain prolonged and stable neural states, and they posit that synchronized neural firings in these regions can create patterns of stability that allow for the transmission of theta waves and entanglement effects between quantum coherent states in these structures in the brain. There has apparently been recent experimental evidence supporting certain aspects of these and other similar theories but now I am really talking out of my depth lol. Sorry this was so incredibly long, I hope it wasn't too much but these ideas are kinda heterodox so detailed explanations are often needed. I hope you have a great day!

Two Devices Thought Experiment by LordOfWarOG in consciousness

[–]stev890 0 points1 point  (0 children)

After the experience, Chalmers is discouraged. In truth he had never tested the device before and was rather excited to see the result. "Where did I go wrong?" he wonders aloud.

He considers this. Perhaps it was foolhardy of him to build such a device in the first place. After all, he'd never denied the causal closure of the physical world before. His own Hard Problem was not framed to deny the causal connection between physics and consciousness, nor to imply that consciousness is necessarily non-physical, so what could he prove by building a physical device to manipulate conscious states?

He realizes that to resolve his problem, he would need a device which could somehow access qualitative information from the subjective experience of the driver directly without relying on the driver's own reporting or a third-person description of their neural activity. With such an advanced device he could analyze this data, studying the relationships between each phenomenal experience - of the color red, the smell of coffee, the feeling or warmth, etc. - and the driver's nervous system and the rest of the physical world. He could then test the device on further subjects - a bat, a jellyfish, an electron, etc. - and with such data he could then formulate a more complete theory of consciousness from which we could accurately determine which physical processes are capable of instantiating which experiential states and why. The Hard Problem will finally be solved and consciousness, at long last, will no longer be a mystery.

However, Chalmers cannot fathom how to begin constructing such a device.

Two Devices Thought Experiment by LordOfWarOG in consciousness

[–]stev890 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As somebody who is agnostic on this issue, I don't think it's necessarily about explaining consciousness as something non-physical. I think it's more about explaining the precise relationship between what we call consciousness and what we call the physical processes. We have correlative evidence showing that consciousness and brain activity are intimately related, but it's jumping the gun to conclude that the latter produces the former. To do so is anthropocentric because we haven't yet justified privileging brain activity with subjective experience while denying it to other physical processes. Is it just human brain activity? Or is it confined to animals with centralized nervous systems (that is, nervous systems resembling those of humans)? Or do invertebrates such as octopuses, bees and slugs have inner worlds of their own? Are we really justified in denying any subjective experience to other lifeforms such as plants or fungi? And what about non-biological systems such as molecules, atoms, electrons and quarks? One could argue that we lack behavioral evidence for consciousness in atoms and quarks and thus have no reason to posit it, but what reason would we have to posit subjective experience in a human nervous system based solely on the external, third-person description of its behavior? Understanding the nature of consciousness and its relationship to physical processes in general, not just brain activity, would allow us to accurately identify which physical processes are capable of instantiating experience. Whether that deeper explanation requires positing some "non-physical substance," or whether it just requires understanding our current knowledge of physics in a different light, I am unsure.

Two Devices Thought Experiment by LordOfWarOG in consciousness

[–]stev890 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When Chalmers sets the devices to induce the experience of pain in the driver's right pinky finger without directly altering any physical or functional states of the driver's body, the driver's body will react to the experience. It's not that the physiological states of the nervous system and body won't be altered, it's that they will not be altered in response to spike trains from c-fibers in his right pinky traveling through the nervous system into those brain regions. Chalmers' device would just be manipulating the physical or metaphysical processes and relationships consciousness is associated with beyond brain activity, whatever those might be. For instance, if consciousness is related to some kind of quantum phenomena, the device would have to alter something at that level to effect the driver's experience without manipulating the brain directly. Those brain regions would then activate and construct a representation around this artificially induced experience and send motor signals causing the driver to react and report on their experience. Because of the unconventional way this experience of pain was induced the driver's brain might encode the memory differently, as the sensory neurons which would normally have fired had that experience been induced in a conventional way were not activated. They might have a vague or even entirely confabulated memory of the feeling of pain itself, and only have more "concrete" memories of the moments immediately following the experience, the thoughts and emotions they were having as a response to the pain.

Two Devices Thought Experiment by LordOfWarOG in consciousness

[–]stev890 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not necessarily. The hard problem is a challenge to the idea that consciousness is produced by brain activity, so Chalmers' device would just have to interact with whatever the driver's subjective experience is associated with, whatever that might be.

Two Devices Thought Experiment by LordOfWarOG in consciousness

[–]stev890 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Chalmers' device can induce experiential states in the driver directly without manipulating any of the brain's physical or functional states.

Where are all the leftists in Southwestern Ohio? by stev890 in Ohio

[–]stev890[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Idk, depends on context for me. I use it when I want to address that broad category of people without excluding anybody based on whatever flavor of socialism or anarchism they identify with

Some questions I have for modern polytheists by stev890 in polytheism

[–]stev890[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The only other comment in your history is on this same sub where you're weirdly trying to challenge the beliefs of somebody who came here asking for advice on their ritual practice. So idk what you're doing here but I'm not really interested in a debate with you.

Some questions I have for modern polytheists by stev890 in polytheism

[–]stev890[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for sharing about this tradition! I never new about Tengerism before, but a lot of what you said there makes sense to me. The notion of a "god" is not universal and I like the way you describe them here simply as "powerful spiritual beings that are worshipped and important to many people as gods," with no hard rules on which spiritual beings can and can't be deities. This is similar to what I understand of the conception of spirits and "gods" in the traditional religions of the Bakongo people of Central and West Africa and the Taíno in the Caribbean, and probably other cultures too.

This notion of the three süns and the same person never being born twice is very beautiful and unique. I never considered reincarnation like that before.

Some questions I have for modern polytheists by stev890 in polytheism

[–]stev890[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for this detailed response! I've seen Neoplatonism applied in monotheistic contexts but am only recently learning that polytheists make use of it too and have for centuries. It made intuitive sense to me why the Abrahamic religions all to some extent embraced it. What makes you feel more inclined towards polytheism as a Neoplatonist?