Free will and determinism

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Actually that is just correlations.

All knowledge about the world, including scientific knowledge is gained through correlations. That's all we have. We generate hypotheses based on correlations in incoming information; we test those hypotheses by looking for correlations between the observed and expected results, falsifying them if the results do not correlate with the expected results.

The issue here is that we have, by definition, no direct access to the correlate, no way of measuring or observing it, except via vague and indirect self-reporting.

The activity that goes with a Mind and conscious experience and does not explain the Mind or consciousness itself. This is the Hard Problem of consciousness that mere correlations are inadequate for explaining a theory of Mind.

There's some ambiguity here - by 'mind', I mean all mental phenomena, conscious or otherwise. As Chalmers himself has said, all mental phenomena bar the subjective experience of consciousness are functionalist notions, open to functionalist solutions, and we already have potential explanatory models for many of them.

We also now have tools that enable us to predict, based on brain activity alone, many of the reportable subjective experiences an individual can have in a controlled setting. We also know some of the neural processing well enough that we can describe simple ways of having novel experiences outside the naturally occuring range, e.g. see Paul Churchland's paper on 'Chimerical Colors', which provides more direct evidence of the relationship between neural activity and 'qualia'.

The exception is the Hard Problem, why there is something it is like to be conscious, and I've already explained in various ways why I think the idea of an objective explanation for it is a category error.

It increasingly seems to me that, as Anil Seth suggests, the more we study the neural correlates of subjective experience, the more we will find that they coincide, that qualia and the other abstractions of subjective experience are patterns of neural activity, and the mystery of them will decrease (he makes an analogy with how life has been explained).

The 'Hard Problem' looks amenable to a similar approach, but, ISTM, is likely to remain a brute fact of a certain type of wide-scale neural activity, and is likely to take longer because a subject can only report the presence of subjective experience, not its absence - although even now we can detect conscious awareness in those with 'locked in' syndrome via neurological activity.

Its more or less appealing to magic ie physical process produces something non physical without leaving a gap in explaination about how that can happen. How non physical stuff can come from physical stuff.

No, this is the result of the long tendency to reify poorly understood conceptual abstractions like 'mind' and 'consciousness'. It turns out that the evidence says that they are physical processes, not some kind of 'stuff'; but substance dualism is a stubbornly persistent habit.

I think its based on imagination. Thinking outside the box and not the rational and logical sequences.

That's the realm of System 1 (subconscious) thinking. Ideas 'come to mind' and then System 2 thinking (conscious, logical, rational, sequential) vets them for practicality & efficacy.

Its actually a mathmatical equation of potentiality and nothing real. Its only real when we measure the particle in its position and all else is made unreal. So before any measurement its all potential and not physical.

That's the wave function, the mathematical description of a quantum system's state, not the quantum field. But it's generally accepted that what it describes is real even when you don't measure it, because it influences how the system behaves when it isn't being measured (e.g. interference in the double-slit experiment). The particle you detect is just one aspect of a more interesting entity - one that is best explained by quantum field theory.

A quantum field is just a mathematical function that assigns every spacetime point some mathematical quantity. Numbers are clearly not physical objects but are mathematical abstracts.

Sure, and a particle's spin, charge, and mass are just numbers too - but they are all measures of physical quantities.

Quantum field theory is a mathematical model that tries to describe real measured particle interactions, but it would be a leap to declare that the model is the reality. This is the problem when many people say that fields are “fundamental” — they have confused the model with reality. In every single experiment done, we see particles interacting (or not) with each other. We never see some visible fluctuation that we call a field. The field just serves the describe the interactions of these particles.
https://medium.com/@thisscience1/quantum-fields-dont-exist-5a11baf9cebc

I guess it's another matter of interpretation - what counts as real? Most of the physicists in the field I read talk in terms of the physical reality of quantum fields, i.e. QFT is a mathematical model that describes physical reality in terms of quantum fields:

“Particles are not objects that are there forever, it’s a dance of fields.” David Tong, Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge
The Mystery at the Heart of Physics

Well one would be from Chalmers and the Hard problem of consciousness showing that the physical correlates of consciouness in the brain are inadequate for explaining a theory of consciousness. Correlations tell us what the brain does when conscious and not what consciousness is.

FACING UP TO THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

https://personal.lse.ac.uk/ROBERT49/teaching/ph103/pdf/chalmers1995.pdf

The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Philosophy of Mind)

David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory - PhilPapers

The book is an extended study of the problem of consciousness. After setting up the problem, I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible , and that if one takes ...

philpapers.org

Well, yes - I tried to explain my view on this several times already - I agree with Chalmers on the Hard Problem (though not with the implicit dualism of his 'philosophical zombie' idea).

Good News: You Are Not Your Brain!

https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/members/sigs/spirituality-spsig/spirituality-special-interest-group-publications-nevillehodgkinsongoodnewsyouarenotyourbrain.pdf?sfvrsn=42288db9_2

I have to admit to bias here - that anything associated with Deepak Chopra is likely to be attention and/or money seeking woo. But I have no argument with the claim that we can "change the neural patterns linked with conditions such as depression, addictions", or that mental "healing, inspiration, insight, self-awareness, discovery, curiosity, and quantum leaps in personal growth" are possible (although whether buying Chopra's books or courses will get you there is another matter), but that doesn't require that 'psi-phenomena' or NDE's are physically real, and Hoffman's quite reasonable analogy for consciousness doesn't require or imply that 'consciousness is fundamental'.

I give short shrift to exotic claims unsupported by reliable evidence.

The second would be from paranormal research like NDE. Thee are 1,000s of first hand testimony of NDE and other out of body experiences many verified that cannot be explained by science. But the weight of experiences and their consistency by age, culture, and elements of experience is itself evidence.

“Reality” of near-death-experience memories: evidence from a psychodynamic and electrophysiological integrated study
Frontiers | “Reality” of near-death-experience memories: evidence from a psychodynamic and electrophysiological integrated study

Multiple lines of evidence point to the conclusion that near-death experiences are medically inexplicable and cannot be explained by known physical brain function.

A Reply to Shermer Medical Evidence for NDEs, Pim van Lommel)​

Near-Death Experiences Evidence for Their Reality
Near-Death Experiences Evidence for Their Reality

Yeah, been there, studied that. The only large-scale, well-controlled scientific studies of NDEs were Sam Parnia's AWARE I & AWARE II, neither of which supported his original anticipation of scientific validation of paranormal OBE experiences, which he dropped completely from his published reports.

Leaving aside the 6378 ranking of the Frontiers of Human Neuroscience journal, the linked paper only concludes:

"NDE memories cannot be considered equivalent to imagined memories, and at a neural level, NDE memories are stored as episodic memories of events experienced in a peculiar state of consciousness."​

IOW, they seem real to the subject, and they are memories of events in a peculiar state of consciousness - presumably that would be due to being near death (trauma, shock, hypoxia, physiological collapse, etc).

Pim van Lommel's work is widely acknowledged to be poor science, arguably pseudoscience.

Retrospective, anecdotal, and self-reported NDE's are, like so many other paranormal stories, generally unreliable, for reasons I'm happy to explain if you wish.

T.B.C.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Cont...

The third comes from a number of new theories such as Quantum Consciousness, Panpsyhism, Integrated Information Theory and their variations. I won't link papers, well not for each specific area and idea but rather link general articles as there are too many to list.

Why Panpsychism (Everything Is Conscious) Is Gaining Ground

Why Panpsychism (Everything Is Conscious) Is Gaining Ground

Panpsychism will face a setback, however, when it tries to show that human consciousness is merely on a continuum with animal consciousness. It isn’t.

mindmatters.ai

Panpsychism may be more a philosophical theory than a scientific one, but it does nothing to explain consciousness, especially the 'Hard Problem', but rather avoids explanation (makes it impossible to explain) by making it fundamental. But in doing so, it raises far more questions than it purports to answer, including what panpsychism really means by 'consciousness', e.g. what does it mean for an electron to be conscious? conscious of what and how? Also, is an atom the sum of the consciousnesses of its component particles? If not, what? What about a table? How does it work? Why does the consciousness we can identify seem restricted to creatures with sophisticated brains, and why does the apparent degree of consciousness correspond to the complexity, size, and sophistication of the brain?

It also seems to me that consciousness necessarily involves information processing - even simple awareness is awareness of something, some information about the internal or external milieu that changes the internal state in a significant way. One can see why a brain might be ideally suited to this, but how can it apply to a fundamental particle that has no properties but charge and spin?

So, as an explanation:

1. it isn't testable;
2. it makes no predictions;
3. it has no explanatory power (in that it doesn't provide any understanding of, or insight into, the phenomenon - and you can't explain the unexplained with the inexplicable);
4. it isn't parsimonious (in that it adds a new element to our fundamental ontology);
5. it is ad-hoc;
6. it has no unifying scope (in that it provides no underlying principle that can help explain or provide an understanding of, or insight into, other phenomena - the claim that 'everything is conscious' is equally useless in all situations);
7. it raises more questions than it answers (see above), all unanswerable;
8. it has no connection or relation to our existing body of knowledge.

Strictly speaking, it isn't an explanation at all.

Can Quantum Physics Be Used to Explain the Existence of Consciousness?
https://www.thoughtco.com/does-quantum-physics-prove-gods-existence-2699279

Not only do the majority of physicists no longer think that the original 'conscious observer' version of the Copenhagen interpretation is valid, but, as the article itself says, "In fact, most physicists consider this element to be unnecessary and they think that the collapse really just comes from interactions within the system itself." This is now empirically established to most people's satisfaction.

Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/physics-is-pointing-inexorably-to-mind/

It's not clear to me exactly what Kastrup means if not a flowery form of 'the mind creates reality', confusing the map for the terrain...

"the universe is a mental construct displayed on the screen of perception."​

"... The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality—with its concreteness, solidity and definiteness—once our personal mental processes interact with it through observation."​

The 'concreteness, solidity and definiteness' of physicality are conceptual, but label experiential aspects of an observable external reality, which, we have discovered, relies on the electromagnetic force for its concreteness, solidity and (possibly) definiteness.

The Consciousness of Reality

The Consciousness of Reality

Finally, the human mindHuman mind faces its own nature. By extending the information-theoretic paradigmParadigminformation-theoretic and participatory, the informational nature of consciousness is uncovered. This gives rise to the very first formal description of...

link.springer.com

Integrated Information Theory is going in the right direction by constraining the complexity parameters for consciousness but as systems with superhuman phi levels can be constructed that have trivial functionality, a high phi is clearly necessary but not sufficient. It's also a mistake to expect consciousness to scale continuously with complexity. The evidence suggests that consciousness as commonly understood starts at the level of complexity of a brain that is capable of processing semiotics (i.e. signs & symbols rather than just signals).

The point is the logical extention that physical mechanisms of the brain can somehow conjure up a magical essense from non conscious mechanisms should extend to robotics and AI. We should hyperthetically be able to make a machine with a complex enough ability to mimic the brain become conscious.

There is no apparent 'magical essence', no cognitive phlogiston. And yes, given computational equivalence, a conscious biological brain can, in principle, be emulated by a computer that would also have subjective experience, given suitable embodiment & environment emulations.

I think Chalmers explains this well.

The character of the epistemic gap with consciousness seems to differ from that of epistemic gaps in other domains. For a start, there do not seem to be analogs of the epistemic arguments above in the cases of water, genes, and so on. To explain genes, we merely have to explain why systems function a certain way in transmitting hereditary characteristics; to explain water, we have to explain why a substance has a certain objective structure and behavior. Given a complete physical description of the world, Mary would be able to deduce all the relevant truths about water and about genes, by deducing which systems have the appropriate structure and function.

Finally, it seems that we cannot coherently conceive of a world physically identical to our own, in which there is no water, or in which there are no genes. So there is no epistemic gap between the complete physical truth about the world and the truth about water and genes that is analogous to the epistemic gap with consciousness.

https://consc.net/papers/nature.pdf

If you're suggesting that consciousness is a different kind of emergent property than the wetness of water, I agree, that's obvious - but so what?

So your agreeing there is an explanatory gap between physical correlations and the nature of the phenomena itself. In otherwords no matter how much info you have about the physical processes this cannot account for subjective conscious experience.

Not quite - a full description of the physical substrate and its operations can account for consciousness, but cannot explain why it subjectively is the way it is, because, being subjective, it is, as I've said repeatedly, not amenable to objective access. IOW, only the system under consideration has the subjective experience of its objective behaviour(neuronal activity).

That gap means you have to appeal to the God of the gaps, some non physical force that magically appears due to the physical and yet cannot be explained by the physical.

No, there's no appeal to the non-physical or magic. A subjective viewpoint appears to be generated by certain kinds of information processing activities, i.e. the gross explanation is physical, but, for the last time, how it feels to process that information cannot have any direct description or explanation because, being subjective, it is inaccessible to all observes and the subject can only communicate its likeness in vague generalisations (e.g. some form of language).

Nah just more elaborate conjecture. A pretty complex robot could have better sense perceptions than humans and not be conscious as far as navigating the environment. A bacteria could do the same. A microorganism could sense light but have no conscious ability to experience that light.

The quality of sense perception is irrelevant. If you want a detailed explanation of Damasio's model there's probably one available online.

All conjecture as far as conscious agency is concerned and there is no evidence that this is the case. Just more elaborate correlations.

There's plenty of evidence for the relationship between consciousness and the subconscious; the rest is reasonable speculation. YMMV.

 

[stevevw]

All knowledge about the world, including scientific knowledge is gained through correlations. That's all we have. We generate hypotheses based on correlations in incoming information; we test those hypotheses by looking for correlations between the observed and expected results, falsifying them if the results do not correlate with the expected results.

The issue here is that we have, by definition, no direct access to the correlate, no way of measuring or observing it, except via vague and indirect self-reporting.

Therefore any claims about consciousness being an epiphenomena of the physical brain is but a unjustified and unverifiable claim. This only supports the Hard Problem for which science cannot get around.

There's some ambiguity here - by 'mind', I mean all mental phenomena, conscious or otherwise. As Chalmers himself has said, all mental phenomena bar the subjective experience of consciousness are functionalist notions, open to functionalist solutions, and we already have potential explanatory models for many of them.

Ok, but all you are doing so far is supporting the hard problem. As you say functionalism may explain certain aspects of thinking but not subjective experiences which cannot be reduced to functions of the brain which are based on physical processes.

We also now have tools that enable us to predict, based on brain activity alone, many of the reportable subjective experiences an individual can have in a controlled setting. We also know some of the neural processing well enough that we can describe simple ways of having novel experiences outside the naturally occuring range, e.g. see Paul Churchland's paper on 'Chimerical Colors', which provides more direct evidence of the relationship between neural activity and 'qualia'.

But all this is still describing behaviour and not explaining the nature of subjective experience itself. Its just elbaorate correlations describing the behaviour of conscious experiences but never explaining its nature, what is a conscious experience and why we have them.

Like Marys experience of red. We can go into fine detail and map and describe every behaviour but never fully account for her experience of red. Her experience brings a new kind of knowledge about reality that these descriptions cannot account for. No matter how much Mary can describe and explain about the physical processes she will never have the knowledge a red experience can give her.

The exception is the Hard Problem, why there is something it is like to be conscious, and I've already explained in various ways why I think the idea of an objective explanation for it is a category error.

Ok but you keep reverting back to trying to account for consciousness with the same failed explanations that fall short and don't get around the Hard Problem. Like we now have much more detail of brain activity and its associated behaviour where we can now predict outcomes and this will help us understand consciousness itself.

It increasingly seems to me that, as Anil Seth suggests, the more we study the neural correlates of subjective experience, the more we will find that they coincide, that qualia and the other abstractions of subjective experience are patterns of neural activity, and the mystery of them will decrease (he makes an analogy with how life has been explained).

I disagree. We have had decades of increasing detail of the NCC and still theres a gap. As Chalmers says its not a case of more information about the correlations. Even if we knew everything there is to know there will still be an explanatory gap.

All that is happening with more details of NCC is just that 'more detail' about the same wrong category that cannot account for subjecyove experiences itself. Thats because the more details are about 'quantity' and not the 'qualitative' nature of consc iousness itself. It would be like saying the more we understand about human belife and behaviour the more we will be able to discount God as a figment of the imagination.

The 'Hard Problem' looks amenable to a similar approach, but, ISTM, is likely to remain a brute fact of a certain type of wide-scale neural activity, and is likely to take longer because a subject can only report the presence of subjective experience, not its absence - although even now we can detect conscious awareness in those with 'locked in' syndrome via neurological activity.

I don't know. Maybe its just one of those human abilities science will never get around. Like belief in God or belief in agency. Its just an area science cannot deal with. Galileo aand early pioneers of science knew this and thats why they seperated science from the subjective.

No, this is the result of the long tendency to reify poorly understood conceptual abstractions like 'mind' and 'consciousness'. It turns out that the evidence says that they are physical processes, not some kind of 'stuff'; but substance dualism is a stubbornly persistent habit.

No, the evidence doesn't turn out that consciousness is the result of physical processes. NDE for one disputes this. It may be we reify consciousness for good reason because its something we know is beyond the material world.

Science has the tendency to reduce our experiences to delusions because it has to. Its already biased by the assumptions its based on that all reality is physical which is itself beyond science.

That's the realm of System 1 (subconscious) thinking. Ideas 'come to mind' and then System 2 thinking (conscious, logical, rational, sequential) vets them for practicality & efficacy.

No thats what the materialist wants to restrict imagination to. Imagination is more than the subconscious as it takes a conscious effort to put oneself into that which steps beyond the restricted and reducible processes of the physical world. The ability to understand the limitations of the material and ponder that which is beyond. We can override system 1 thinking.

That's the wave function, the mathematical description of a quantum system's state, not the quantum field.

Whats the difference. A field is the potential positions mapped out based on particle/wave duality. Describing the excitations of particles in a quantum field. But there is nothing real. Its theorectical and not real itself. It becomes real when it actually happens but the realness isn't the field but the actual virtual particles that pop in and out of existence.

But it's generally accepted that what it describes is real even when you don't measure it, because it influences how the system behaves when it isn't being measured (e.g. interference in the double-slit experiment). The particle you detect is just one aspect of a more interesting entity - one that is best explained by quantum field theory.

I see it like say a game plan for footy. You can map out the game on a board and extract the potential movements. But thats theorectical and doesn't become real as in being physical until you actually play out that game plan.

Sure, and a particle's spin, charge, and mass are just numbers too - but they are all measures of physical quantities.

But then QM does play by the rules of classical physics. It actually supports non determinism and seems to relate more to Mind concepts. Making Mind fundemental. Which then seems to support the oberver effect that conscious observation and measurement creates reality. That fundemental reality behaves more like a Mind than physical reality.

I guess it's another matter of interpretation - what counts as real? Most of the physicists in the field I read talk in terms of the physical reality of quantum fields, i.e. QFT is a mathematical model that describes physical reality in terms of quantum fields:

“Particles are not objects that are there forever, it’s a dance of fields.” David Tong, Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge
The Mystery at the Heart of Physics

I guess the question is what is happening when there are no physical particles. Its like Lawrence Krauss's 'nothing is really something'.

Well, yes - I tried to explain my view on this several times already - I agree with Chalmers on the Hard Problem (though not with the implicit dualism of his 'philosophical zombie' idea).

Why not. It doesn't even have to be zombies. The idea that a robot can do everything a human can do even better as far as functioning but still not be conscious.

I have to admit to bias here - that anything associated with Deepak Chopra is likely to be attention and/or money seeking woo. But I have no argument with the claim that we can "change the neural patterns linked with conditions such as depression, addictions", or that mental "healing, inspiration, insight, self-awareness, discovery, curiosity, and quantum leaps in personal growth" are possible (although whether buying Chopra's books or courses will get you there is another matter), but that doesn't require that 'psi-phenomena' or NDE's are physically real, and Hoffman's quite reasonable analogy for consciousness doesn't require or imply that 'consciousness is fundamental'.

I give short shrift to exotic claims unsupported by reliable evidence.

I think like trying to explain consciousness any ideas that step outside the science is always going to be based on unverifiable ideas. Yet they make a lot of sense to us as conscious beings as being real phenomena. We just can't put it into classical explanations and probably never will.

Thats why I think phenomena like NDE and other PSI phenomena is probably the best evidence because even though it cannot bridge that gap in explanation it does give good evidence for that gap and the reality of consciousness. That we can experience such things while the physical functions are missing of gravely compromised seems to bypass the physical basis for consciousness.

Yeah, been there, studied that. The only large-scale, well-controlled scientific studies of NDEs were Sam Parnia's AWARE I & AWARE II, neither of which supported his original anticipation of scientific validation of paranormal OBE experiences, which he dropped completely from his published reports.

That can't be right as Parnia and others are still publishing as of 2024. For example

AWAreness during REsuscitation - II: A multi-center study of consciousness and awareness in cardiac arrest - PubMed

Consciousness. awareness and cognitive processes may occur during CA. The emergence of normal EEG may reflect a resumption of a network-level of cognitive activity, and a biomarker of consciousness, lucidity and RED (authentic "near-death" experiences).

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

This was actually a large scale study done by several hospitals and published in Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences. Some of the experiences people have had with NDE defy scientific explanation. What is probably the best evidence is acumulation of NDE rather than any single event. Taken together and studied as a meta phenomena the consistency, realism and effects this has on the experiencers is strong evidence something real has happened which goes beyond imagination, delusion or other effects from brain anomelies.

Test done on brain patterns of NDE compared to delusions, dreams or imaginations show different activity and NDE is more aligned with real events like in everyday experiences. So at the very least the experiencer is not making this up, they truely believe it is real, more real than everyday life as though they were sitting in front of their computer like we are. Whereas dreams and imagination or delusions from toxins are fragmental, vague, grey and hard to remember.

Leaving aside the 6378 ranking of the Frontiers of Human Neuroscience journal, the linked paper only concludes:

"NDE memories cannot be considered equivalent to imagined memories, and at a neural level, NDE memories are stored as episodic memories of events experienced in a peculiar state of consciousness."​

IOW, they seem real to the subject, and they are memories of events in a peculiar state of consciousness - presumably that would be due to being near death (trauma, shock, hypoxia, physiological collapse, etc).

No they said they were unlike trauma, shock, hypoxia, physiological collapse, etc) which often bring fear, fragmented memories, confusion and vagueness. The memories are recalled real events such as life revisions, meeting loved ones, or even experiencing the events of death at the scene outside their bodies.

The experiences are vivid, in great detail, often remembering forgotton events and personal thoughts of that time that were forgotton. Sometimes recalling knowledge that could not have been known. Of super senses, seeing through walls, travelling through physical substrates, non local ability to transport to distant places and being able to describe events in detail. Often being completely changed as a result.

This has been compared to those who actually did have delusions from trauma, shock, hypoxia, physiological collapse, etc) and the experiences are completely different.

The amazing aspect is these are very consistent regardless of culture and age. They all have the same experiences in more or less the same sequence. Rather than if only dues to hullicinations or dreams which should be influenced by localised factors and have differences.
This happening at a time when their brains are so compromised they are either flatlined or completely unconscious for which such vividness, detail and clarity should not be possible.

Pim van Lommel's work is widely acknowledged to be poor science, arguably pseudoscience.

Retrospective, anecdotal, and self-reported NDE's are, like so many other paranormal stories, generally unreliable, for reasons I'm happy to explain if you wish.

T.B.C.

Ah well if you are to actually read these experiences they are not unreliable. They are remarkably consistent.

But nevertheless if the experiencer believes with all their heart that this is real even decades later unlike a dream or hullucination which we can never say is real and it changes them in significant ways beyond the effects of a scare of near death then who is to say.

Once again science will be skeptical; and try to attribute this to something unreal. But thats because it assumes there is no such thing as a priori. So they are biased and not open to such things in the first place.

 

[stevevw]

Cont...


Panpsychism may be more a philosophical theory than a scientific one, but it does nothing to explain consciousness, especially the 'Hard Problem', but rather avoids explanation (makes it impossible to explain) by making it fundamental. But in doing so, it raises far more questions than it purports to answer, including what panpsychism really means by 'consciousness', e.g. what does it mean for an electron to be conscious? conscious of what and how? Also, is an atom the sum of the consciousnesses of its component particles? If not, what? What about a table? How does it work? Why does the consciousness we can identify seem restricted to creatures with sophisticated brains, and why does the apparent degree of consciousness correspond to the complexity, size, and sophistication of the brain?

I think Panpsychism says that there are degrees of consciousness so an electron or less complex creatures won't have the level of consciousness humans have. But rather a more rudimentary form of consciousness. That may be just the ability of an electron or bacteria to sense their surroundings and be effected by it.

I agree that Panpsychism and ideas like IIT are really material explanations in that they try to assign information value to consciousness and don't really account for conscious experiences themselves. But at least they attempt to explain consciousness beyond the physical brain. Panpsychism in some form has been proposed for 1,000s of years so its nothing new. But because its persisted and proven to make a difference to culture it seems that it may have some merit.

It also seems to me that consciousness necessarily involves information processing - even simple awareness is awareness of something, some information about the internal or external milieu that changes the internal state in a significant way. One can see why a brain might be ideally suited to this, but how can it apply to a fundamental particle that has no properties but charge and spin?

I don't know but it seems other ideas related to mind and information being fundemental are becoming more popular as possible explanations because they seem to fit the data well. For example much of the aspects of QM such as its non local aspect seems to relate to consciousness.

For example how information can travel at an instant and influence at a distance. We see this with how just the mere exchange of consciousness can effect others instantly regardless of distance. If someone is made aware of certain knowledge, has memories of experiences provoked this can instantly change their perceptions and physical states.

Then there is the interpretations of QM which make the observer central in influencing the state of fundemental reality. Experiments like the double split, delayed choice and Wigners Friend seem to support this. It makes sense even at the macro level such as with psychology and mind over matter.

So, as an explanation:

1. it isn't testable;
2. it makes no predictions;
3. it has no explanatory power (in that it doesn't provide any understanding of, or insight into, the phenomenon - and you can't explain the unexplained with the inexplicable);
4. it isn't parsimonious (in that it adds a new element to our fundamental ontology);
5. it is ad-hoc;
6. it has no unifying scope (in that it provides no underlying principle that can help explain or provide an understanding of, or insight into, other phenomena - the claim that 'everything is conscious' is equally useless in all situations);
7. it raises more questions than it answers (see above), all unanswerable;
8. it has no connection or relation to our existing body of knowledge.

Strictly speaking, it isn't an explanation at all.

That actually sounds like the material explanations of consciousness. I think ideas like Mind and Consciousness being fundemental offer more room for exploring possible explanations though they may not be strictly testable, But on an inference level to the best possible explanations that fit they do offer more.

Not only do the majority of physicists no longer think that the original 'conscious observer' version of the Copenhagen interpretation is valid, but, as the article itself says, "In fact, most physicists consider this element to be unnecessary and they think that the collapse really just comes from interactions within the system itself." This is now empirically established to most people's satisfaction.

No it isn't, its assumed. The jury is still out. I like Hentry Stapps explanations for this. He is one of the world best Qunatum physicists on consciousness working with Wheeler and Heisenberg.

He reckons it doesn't make sense to treat the observers mind as part of the physical quantum world. The measuring apartus should be part of the quantum world but not the Mind itself which is observing as it cannot be reduced to the same world as the quantum world.

We have to account for the observers mind as something different and apart from all else that is happening which makes sense.

It's not clear to me exactly what Kastrup means if not a flowery form of 'the mind creates reality', confusing the map for the terrain...

"the universe is a mental construct displayed on the screen of perception."​

"... The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality—with its concreteness, solidity and definiteness—once our personal mental processes interact with it through observation."​

The 'concreteness, solidity and definiteness' of physicality are conceptual, but label experiential aspects of an observable external reality, which, we have discovered, relies on the electromagnetic force for its concreteness, solidity and (possibly) definiteness.

This is no really any different to other ideas such as Wheelers Particpatory Principle where knowledge creates reality erven in the past. Or Stapps Mind is fundemental or Nagel and Penrose others. Even other ideas like Simulation theory or the Hologram Principle.

All posit that physical reality is like a reflection of a deeper reality that is Mind, knowledge and information. Matter itself is a concept beyond Mind and we cannot get outside our minds to verify its reality. We may be living in a simulation and we are programmed to think there is a physical reality.

Its the same principle as the many spiritual ideas going back 1,000s of years where consciousness is fundemental and all there is is Mind. All these ideas converge on the same basic idea and it seems there may be good reason for doing so.

Integrated Information Theory is going in the right direction by constraining the complexity parameters for consciousness but as systems with superhuman phi levels can be constructed that have trivial functionality, a high phi is clearly necessary but not sufficient. It's also a mistake to expect consciousness to scale continuously with complexity. The evidence suggests that consciousness as commonly understood starts at the level of complexity of a brain that is capable of processing semiotics (i.e. signs & symbols rather than just signals).

Yes we can look at our pets and say there seems to be some level of awareness beyond just meat robots. A chimp may have more conscious than a horse and a horse more than a cockaroach which may have more than bacteria which then may have more than a rock. There seems to be some different levels of awareness.

Its not necessarily just complexity but also integrated information if that information which may be less complex but integrated in a way that brings basic forms of consciousness.

There is no apparent 'magical essence', no cognitive phlogiston. And yes, given computational equivalence, a conscious biological brain can, in principle, be emulated by a computer that would also have subjective experience, given suitable embodiment & environment emulations.

Really I though science didn't engage in fiction. Where has this happened and what is the evidence for this. You would think that would have happened by now seeming we are now moving into quantum computing. Ai specialist have acknowledged the 'Framing problem' which they cannot seem to get around. Its not just about more complexity but the integration with that being embodies and machines cannot embody the physical world.

If you're suggesting that consciousness is a different kind of emergent property than the wetness of water, I agree, that's obvious - but so what?

No its a completely different concept to consciousness. As Chalmers says "The character of the epistemic gap with consciousness seems to differ from that of epistemic gaps in other domains". To explain water we merely have to explain why it has a certain objective structure and behavior.

But as with Marys example of experiencing red explaining the certain objective structure and behavior is not enough. If this was the case then we should like water be able to deduce consciousness from just the objective structure and behaviour. But we can't.

So there is no epistemic gap between the complete physical truth about the world and the truth about water that is analogous to the epistemic gap with consciousness.

Not quite - a full description of the physical substrate and its operations can account for consciousness, but cannot explain why it subjectively is the way it is, because, being subjective, it is, as I've said repeatedly, not amenable to objective access. IOW, only the system under consideration has the subjective experience of its objective behaviour(neuronal activity).

The reason I keep repeating is because you keep repeating the same mistake. You just more or less repeated the Hard problem which is the whole point of why the physical substrate and full desription cannot account for conscious experiences.

You just jumped this gap by claiming that "a full description of the physical substrate and its operations can account for consciousness". Adding that this cannot explain subjective consciousness is the problem.

You keep repeating this like it will somehow brideg that gap like if you say it enough it will happen. But your just appealing to the same problem which is 'a full description of the physical substrate and its operations cannot account for consciousness'. Its just repeating a circular fallacy.

No, there's no appeal to the non-physical or magic. A subjective viewpoint appears to be generated by certain kinds of information processing activities, i.e. the gross explanation is physical, but, for the last time, how it feels to process that information cannot have any direct description or explanation because, being subjective, it is inaccessible to all observes and the subject can only communicate its likeness in vague generalisations (e.g. some form of language).

Yes but the problem is your jumping that gap and assuming that because the subjective cannot explain sonsciousness in physical terms then conscious must be physical. It may be that because consciousness is subjective that the explanation for consciousness must fall into the subjective and not the objective. Your automatically dismissing the subjective because it doesn't fit your assumptions about what constitutes reality.

The quality of sense perception is irrelevant. If you want a detailed explanation of Damasio's model there's probably one available online.

Why is the quality sense perception is irrelevant when that is the very definition of the Hard Problem, that physical reductionism cannot account for the quality of subjective experiences.

There's plenty of evidence for the relationship between consciousness and the subconscious; the rest is reasonable speculation. YMMV.

I liken this to things like agency and free will. The scientific material reductionist explanation or should I say assumption has to make consciousness something unreal and a by product of the physical thus discounting our sense of real control in the world.

So 1st hand experiences are discounted as imagination, delusion and tricks by evolution and thus devaluing human agency as something real in the world. With that comes a bunch of other negatives that devalue human responsibility and ability and makes the world a less happy and safe place.

The evidence for free will and consciousness comes directly from the person and not indirectly from some spectualted physical process that must fit some pre assumed metaphysics that reality is only material. Thats because science took the scientist out but to be able to fully understand reality we need to put the observer and subject back in. Not until then will we ever be able to understand.

 

[timf]

Election and Free Will

Here are some verses that seem to support free will;

2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

Romans 10:9 That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.

John 1:12 But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:

Here are some verses that seem to support election;

Romans 8:29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

2 Thessalonians 2:13 But we are bound to give thanks alway to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth:

Colossians 3:12 Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering;

I want to be sensitive to your experiences. It should not be surprising that those who have been ill-treated by one group would hold a reflexive antipathy towards the beliefs of that group.

In attempt to resolve what can appear to be contradictions, people have made several suggestions over the years.

1. God’s foreknowledge. This makes use of God’s existence outside of time to propose that since God knows what people will chose, he makes his choice consistent with what people will choose. I find it difficult to support this view as it tends to diminish God to the status of observer.

2. Three Populations. This view declares that there exist some people who cannot be saved (the tares, vessels made for destruction, and children of the devil). This is a variant on the elect/nonelect distinction in that a further distinction is made between unsaveable/those who do not chose God/those who are saved. It is difficult to support this view even though it appears to satisfy the differentiation between those God foreknew and those he did not (Romans 8:29), it requires the
existence of life that is not of God. This does expand the available categories from accepting/rejecting to accepting/rejection/not caring.

3. Open Theism. This view emphasizes God’s will as flexible and open to all sorts of possibilities. This view can accommodate man’s free will but often at the expense of God’s will. I think a better picture of the relationship between God’s will and man’s will can be seen here;

1Ki 19:13-18 And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah? And he said, I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts: because the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away. And the LORD said unto him, Go, return on thy way to the wilderness of Damascus: and when thou comest, anoint Hazael to be king over Syria: And Jehu the son of Nimshi shalt thou anoint to be king over Israel: and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abelmeholah shalt thou anoint to be prophet in thy room. And it shall come to pass, that him that escapeth the sword of Hazael shall Jehu slay: and him that escapeth from the sword of Jehu shall Elisha slay. Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.

It seems to me that God has very specific plans. He patiently invites us to participate in accomplishing his will. However, if we fail or reject this invitation, God’s plans will still be accomplished.

Another illustration can be seen in God considering exterminating all of Israel and making a new nation from Moses (similar to what happened with the flood).

Romans 9:18 Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.

The picture of God’s will as certain and inviolate is firmly established.

Isaiah 55:10-11 For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing
whereto I sent it.

However, we may not be able to fully grasp it.

Isaiah 55:9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

It also seems that much is left on the shoulders of man;

Romans 1:20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

There are verses that touch on the interplay of man’s will and God’s;

Proverbs 16:9 A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.

We can see a little of this with Jonah;

Jonah 1:17-2:1 Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Then Jonah prayed unto the LORD his God out of the fish's belly,

Jonah was one tough cookie if he could wait three days and nights inside a fish before crying out to God. However, we have an example of an encounter between God’s will and man’s and God’s will was accomplished.

I see in the example of the individual Jonah a similarity with the collective conflict with Israel. Israel was uninterested in the new covenant that Jesus offered and his kingdom. However, God will allow circumstances when they (like Jonah) will be very much interested in following his will.

Revelation 12:13-17 And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child. And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent. And the serpent cast out of his mouth
water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood. And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth. And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Zechariah 12:10 And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn.

It may not be valid to compare the redemption of Israel with the redemption offered individuals. However, it can still be interesting to observe comparative dynamics. God’s initial plan was to call out for himself a nation that would be used to reach all the people on earth. Israel made herself useless because of her idolatries. God chastened Israel with the Babylonian captivity, after which idolatry was not practiced by Israel again. When Jesus came to offer the new covenant and the kingdom, Israel was mostly disinterested. The temple was destroyed and Israel scattered for 2,000 years (the time of the gentiles). The return of Israel to Jerusalem sets the stage for the final event where a fleeing remnant of Israel will be supernaturally protected by God for three and a half years at the end of which at the return of Christ, a nation will be born in a day. This will complete the redemption of the nation of Israel.

It is interesting to note that in the verse in Zechariah that God “pours out” the “spirit of grace and supplications”. I see this as a finishing touch, compatible with the “new heart” that had been promised;

Ezekiel 36:26 A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.

We know that all of Israel will be saved;

Romans 11:26 And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob:

We also know that many in Israel will not be saved;

Daniel 12:2 And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

It seems to me that the “all” of Israel that shall be saved are the “all” that are left.

I see in the end times state of Israel those who flee (as stated in Matthew 24:15) as self selecting. They will not flee unless they trust in the promise of protection given by Jesus. They are saved by faith. In a way, it is like a premature sheep and goats judgment. The “new heart” and “new spirit” they get I see as similar to our process of sanctification and gifting in that they are saved by faith but made more suitable for ministry through the granting of additional endowments.

This was a sort of long winded excursion into consideration of a small example of the relation between God’s will and man’s. I cite this as a background to consideration of something I observed on your wall.

John 6:44 No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 12:32 And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.

I can understand the appeal (especially for someone mal-treated by Calvinists) to mitigate the exclusivity aspect of the John 6 verse. I am somewhat hesitant to equate the Father drawing with the Son drawing. It may be the same, but I am reluctant to rush into such an assertion particularly when I am not understanding what occurs with “drawing”.

I see a resonance between the words of Jesus and a condition called “being of the truth”.

John 18:37 Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

I can see an attraction that could constitute a “drawing” by way of this resonance. However, it still does not answer how someone becomes “of the truth”. Is it a choice or is it a result of an act of God. On the act of God side we have;

Hebrews 12:2a Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith;

Truth seems integral to salvation;

2 Thessalonians 2:10 And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.

It is difficult to find a verse that clearly shows people rejecting truth as a matter of choice. It seems there is an inverse relationship of truth with iniquity.

Proverbs 16:6 By mercy and truth iniquity is purged: and by the fear of the LORD men depart from evil.

John 3:19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

This is further established by describing a helpless entanglement in sin as the “default” condition of mankind.

Romans 6:16 Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?

The crux for me is that it seems that those ensnared and lost in sin do not have what I would consider the ability to make an informed or free decision. However, it does seems that each individual is held responsible;

Romans 1:20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

All of this brings me to the state where I cannot clearly see free choice and I cannot clearly see absolute election. Since I see the bible as absolutely true, I have to conclude that I am lacking the information or ability to understand (perhaps both). However, I do not see my lack of understanding as an impediment to salvation.

Over the years I have encountered many people in the Christian world who declare various things about God as if they have finally figured God out (sort of like putting God in a box). Theologians and seminary graduates seem particularly vulnerable to this condition. As a result, I am wary of inadvertently falling into the same pattern. This is one of the reasons I want to make sure that I have a clear understanding of something before I advance a position. Even then, I want to be open to additional information or understanding.

Do you know anyone else that would take this long to say, “I’m not sure”.





Information about Christianity and the Christian life.
Pictures and views of our farm Some of our animals See some of the old-fashioned crafts we are trying to relearn

 

[Bradskii]

Election and Free Will

Here are some verses that seem to support free will;

This isn't a theological discussion.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Therefore any claims about consciousness being an epiphenomena of the physical brain is but a unjustified and unverifiable claim. This only supports the Hard Problem for which science cannot get around.

Ok, but all you are doing so far is supporting the hard problem. As you say functionalism may explain certain aspects of thinking but not subjective experiences which cannot be reduced to functions of the brain which are based on physical processes.

But all this is still describing behaviour and not explaining the nature of subjective experience itself. Its just elbaorate correlations describing the behaviour of conscious experiences but never explaining its nature, what is a conscious experience and why we have them.

Like Marys experience of red. We can go into fine detail and map and describe every behaviour but never fully account for her experience of red. Her experience brings a new kind of knowledge about reality that these descriptions cannot account for. No matter how much Mary can describe and explain about the physical processes she will never have the knowledge a red experience can give her.

Ok but you keep reverting back to trying to account for consciousness with the same failed explanations that fall short and don't get around the Hard Problem. Like we now have much more detail of brain activity and its associated behaviour where we can now predict outcomes and this will help us understand consciousness itself.

I disagree. We have had decades of increasing detail of the NCC and still theres a gap. As Chalmers says its not a case of more information about the correlations. Even if we knew everything there is to know there will still be an explanatory gap.

All that is happening with more details of NCC is just that 'more detail' about the same wrong category that cannot account for subjecyove experiences itself. Thats because the more details are about 'quantity' and not the 'qualitative' nature of consc iousness itself. It would be like saying the more we understand about human belife and behaviour the more we will be able to discount God as a figment of the imagination.

I don't know. Maybe its just one of those human abilities science will never get around. Like belief in God or belief in agency. Its just an area science cannot deal with. Galileo aand early pioneers of science knew this and thats why they seperated science from the subjective.

No, the evidence doesn't turn out that consciousness is the result of physical processes. NDE for one disputes this. It may be we reify consciousness for good reason because its something we know is beyond the material world.

Science has the tendency to reduce our experiences to delusions because it has to. Its already biased by the assumptions its based on that all reality is physical which is itself beyond science.

No thats what the materialist wants to restrict imagination to. Imagination is more than the subconscious as it takes a conscious effort to put oneself into that which steps beyond the restricted and reducible processes of the physical world. The ability to understand the limitations of the material and ponder that which is beyond. We can override system 1 thinking.

Whats the difference. A field is the potential positions mapped out based on particle/wave duality. Describing the excitations of particles in a quantum field. But there is nothing real. Its theorectical and not real itself. It becomes real when it actually happens but the realness isn't the field but the actual virtual particles that pop in and out of existence.

I see it like say a game plan for footy. You can map out the game on a board and extract the potential movements. But thats theorectical and doesn't become real as in being physical until you actually play out that game plan.

But then QM does play by the rules of classical physics. It actually supports non determinism and seems to relate more to Mind concepts. Making Mind fundemental. Which then seems to support the oberver effect that conscious observation and measurement creates reality. That fundemental reality behaves more like a Mind than physical reality.

I guess the question is what is happening when there are no physical particles. Its like Lawrence Krauss's 'nothing is really something'.

Why not. It doesn't even have to be zombies. The idea that a robot can do everything a human can do even better as far as functioning but still not be conscious.

I think like trying to explain consciousness any ideas that step outside the science is always going to be based on unverifiable ideas. Yet they make a lot of sense to us as conscious beings as being real phenomena. We just can't put it into classical explanations and probably never will.

Thats why I think phenomena like NDE and other PSI phenomena is probably the best evidence because even though it cannot bridge that gap in explanation it does give good evidence for that gap and the reality of consciousness. That we can experience such things while the physical functions are missing of gravely compromised seems to bypass the physical basis for consciousness.

That can't be right as Parnia and others are still publishing as of 2024. For example

AWAreness during REsuscitation - II: A multi-center study of consciousness and awareness in cardiac arrest - PubMed

Consciousness. awareness and cognitive processes may occur during CA. The emergence of normal EEG may reflect a resumption of a network-level of cognitive activity, and a biomarker of consciousness, lucidity and RED (authentic "near-death" experiences).

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

This was actually a large scale study done by several hospitals and published in Annals of The New York Academy of Sciences. Some of the experiences people have had with NDE defy scientific explanation. What is probably the best evidence is acumulation of NDE rather than any single event. Taken together and studied as a meta phenomena the consistency, realism and effects this has on the experiencers is strong evidence something real has happened which goes beyond imagination, delusion or other effects from brain anomelies.

Test done on brain patterns of NDE compared to delusions, dreams or imaginations show different activity and NDE is more aligned with real events like in everyday experiences. So at the very least the experiencer is not making this up, they truely believe it is real, more real than everyday life as though they were sitting in front of their computer like we are. Whereas dreams and imagination or delusions from toxins are fragmental, vague, grey and hard to remember.

No they said they were unlike trauma, shock, hypoxia, physiological collapse, etc) which often bring fear, fragmented memories, confusion and vagueness. The memories are recalled real events such as life revisions, meeting loved ones, or even experiencing the events of death at the scene outside their bodies.

The experiences are vivid, in great detail, often remembering forgotton events and personal thoughts of that time that were forgotton. Sometimes recalling knowledge that could not have been known. Of super senses, seeing through walls, travelling through physical substrates, non local ability to transport to distant places and being able to describe events in detail. Often being completely changed as a result.

This has been compared to those who actually did have delusions from trauma, shock, hypoxia, physiological collapse, etc) and the experiences are completely different.

The amazing aspect is these are very consistent regardless of culture and age. They all have the same experiences in more or less the same sequence. Rather than if only dues to hullicinations or dreams which should be influenced by localised factors and have differences.
This happening at a time when their brains are so compromised they are either flatlined or completely unconscious for which such vividness, detail and clarity should not be possible.

Ah well if you are to actually read these experiences they are not unreliable. They are remarkably consistent.

But nevertheless if the experiencer believes with all their heart that this is real even decades later unlike a dream or hullucination which we can never say is real and it changes them in significant ways beyond the effects of a scare of near death then who is to say.

Once again science will be skeptical; and try to attribute this to something unreal. But thats because it assumes there is no such thing as a priori. So they are biased and not open to such things in the first place.

Ho-hum , not a lot of communication here; I don't see this discussion going anywhere - but, for the record, the link you posted to support your dismissal of my mention of Sam Parnia's AWARE I & AWARE II studies was a link to the AWARE II study paper itself (2023 not 2024). The paper's conclusion broadly supports what I said about the AWARE studies:

"Consciousness. awareness and cognitive processes may occur during CA. The emergence of normal EEG may reflect a resumption of a network-level of cognitive activity, and a biomarker of consciousness, lucidity and RED (authentic "near-death" experiences)."​

IOW, you are not necessarily unconscious during cardiac arrest, and they didn't see high-level brain activity, consciousness, lucidity, and 'recalled experience of death' without a normal EEG. So, nothing to see here, move along.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I think Panpsychism says that there are degrees of consciousness so an electron or less complex creatures won't have the level of consciousness humans have. But rather a more rudimentary form of consciousness. That may be just the ability of an electron or bacteria to sense their surroundings and be effected by it.

I agree that Panpsychism and ideas like IIT are really material explanations in that they try to assign information value to consciousness and don't really account for conscious experiences themselves. But at least they attempt to explain consciousness beyond the physical brain. Panpsychism in some form has been proposed for 1,000s of years so its nothing new. But because its persisted and proven to make a difference to culture it seems that it may have some merit.

I don't know but it seems other ideas related to mind and information being fundemental are becoming more popular as possible explanations because they seem to fit the data well. For example much of the aspects of QM such as its non local aspect seems to relate to consciousness.

For example how information can travel at an instant and influence at a distance. We see this with how just the mere exchange of consciousness can effect others instantly regardless of distance. If someone is made aware of certain knowledge, has memories of experiences provoked this can instantly change their perceptions and physical states.

Then there is the interpretations of QM which make the observer central in influencing the state of fundemental reality. Experiments like the double split, delayed choice and Wigners Friend seem to support this. It makes sense even at the macro level such as with psychology and mind over matter.

That actually sounds like the material explanations of consciousness. I think ideas like Mind and Consciousness being fundemental offer more room for exploring possible explanations though they may not be strictly testable, But on an inference level to the best possible explanations that fit they do offer more.

No it isn't, its assumed. The jury is still out. I like Hentry Stapps explanations for this. He is one of the world best Qunatum physicists on consciousness working with Wheeler and Heisenberg.

He reckons it doesn't make sense to treat the observers mind as part of the physical quantum world. The measuring apartus should be part of the quantum world but not the Mind itself which is observing as it cannot be reduced to the same world as the quantum world.

We have to account for the observers mind as something different and apart from all else that is happening which makes sense.

This is no really any different to other ideas such as Wheelers Particpatory Principle where knowledge creates reality erven in the past. Or Stapps Mind is fundemental or Nagel and Penrose others. Even other ideas like Simulation theory or the Hologram Principle.

All posit that physical reality is like a reflection of a deeper reality that is Mind, knowledge and information. Matter itself is a concept beyond Mind and we cannot get outside our minds to verify its reality. We may be living in a simulation and we are programmed to think there is a physical reality.

Its the same principle as the many spiritual ideas going back 1,000s of years where consciousness is fundemental and all there is is Mind. All these ideas converge on the same basic idea and it seems there may be good reason for doing so.

Yes we can look at our pets and say there seems to be some level of awareness beyond just meat robots. A chimp may have more conscious than a horse and a horse more than a cockaroach which may have more than bacteria which then may have more than a rock. There seems to be some different levels of awareness.

Its not necessarily just complexity but also integrated information if that information which may be less complex but integrated in a way that brings basic forms of consciousness.

Really I though science didn't engage in fiction. Where has this happened and what is the evidence for this. You would think that would have happened by now seeming we are now moving into quantum computing. Ai specialist have acknowledged the 'Framing problem' which they cannot seem to get around. Its not just about more complexity but the integration with that being embodies and machines cannot embody the physical world.

No its a completely different concept to consciousness. As Chalmers says "The character of the epistemic gap with consciousness seems to differ from that of epistemic gaps in other domains". To explain water we merely have to explain why it has a certain objective structure and behavior.

But as with Marys example of experiencing red explaining the certain objective structure and behavior is not enough. If this was the case then we should like water be able to deduce consciousness from just the objective structure and behaviour. But we can't.

So there is no epistemic gap between the complete physical truth about the world and the truth about water that is analogous to the epistemic gap with consciousness.

The reason I keep repeating is because you keep repeating the same mistake. You just more or less repeated the Hard problem which is the whole point of why the physical substrate and full desription cannot account for conscious experiences.

You just jumped this gap by claiming that "a full description of the physical substrate and its operations can account for consciousness". Adding that this cannot explain subjective consciousness is the problem.

You keep repeating this like it will somehow brideg that gap like if you say it enough it will happen. But your just appealing to the same problem which is 'a full description of the physical substrate and its operations cannot account for consciousness'. Its just repeating a circular fallacy.


Yes but the problem is your jumping that gap and assuming that because the subjective cannot explain sonsciousness in physical terms then conscious must be physical. It may be that because consciousness is subjective that the explanation for consciousness must fall into the subjective and not the objective. Your automatically dismissing the subjective because it doesn't fit your assumptions about what constitutes reality.

Why is the quality sense perception is irrelevant when that is the very definition of the Hard Problem, that physical reductionism cannot account for the quality of subjective experiences.

I liken this to things like agency and free will. The scientific material reductionist explanation or should I say assumption has to make consciousness something unreal and a by product of the physical thus discounting our sense of real control in the world.

So 1st hand experiences are discounted as imagination, delusion and tricks by evolution and thus devaluing human agency as something real in the world. With that comes a bunch of other negatives that devalue human responsibility and ability and makes the world a less happy and safe place.

The evidence for free will and consciousness comes directly from the person and not indirectly from some spectualted physical process that must fit some pre assumed metaphysics that reality is only material. Thats because science took the scientist out but to be able to fully understand reality we need to put the observer and subject back in. Not until then will we ever be able to understand.

OK - more miscommunication and misunderstanding; I don't see this discussion going anywhere. If you feel you can make progress by rejecting the scientific approach and invoking the non-physical or supernatural, go for it.

 

[stevevw]

OK - more miscommunication and misunderstanding; I don't see this discussion going anywhere. If you feel you can make progress by rejecting the scientific approach and invoking the non-physical or supernatural, go for it.

I don't know. The point is being open to all possibilities. If the evidence points in a certain direction it should not be automatically dismissed because it doesn't meet a certain criteria according to a limited measure of reality.

I am not saying any of the ideas proposed are correct. I don't know. But it seems we need to incorporate the inner world as well as the outer world of objective science. Considering that conscious experience is a direct connection to the world it seems any theory of everything must include our inner world. Otherwise we will get a distorted view of things.

How that can be done I don't know. But it seems to me these ideas linked are at least good attempts to understand this aspect of reality. More than what scientific naturalism can do which cannot begin to understand as it deals the quantitative aspects of the world.

 

[Bradskii]

How that can be done I don't know.

Be sure to get back to us when you do know.

 

[stevevw]

Ho-hum , not a lot of communication here; I don't see this discussion going anywhere - but, for the record, the link you posted to support your dismissal of my mention of Sam Parnia's AWARE I & AWARE II studies was a link to the AWARE II study paper itself (2023 not 2024). The paper's conclusion broadly supports what I said about the AWARE studies:

"Consciousness. awareness and cognitive processes may occur during CA. The emergence of normal EEG may reflect a resumption of a network-level of cognitive activity, and a biomarker of consciousness, lucidity and RED (authentic "near-death" experiences)."​

IOW, you are not necessarily unconscious during cardiac arrest, and they didn't see high-level brain activity, consciousness, lucidity, and 'recalled experience of death' without a normal EEG. So, nothing to see here, move along.

Are we reading the same article. It seems your reading the summary. But even that says the results may be a biomarker to authentic "near-death" experiences. That doesn't sound like nothing and is at least worth investigating.

The network level of brain activity investigated was found to be high level activity in the region of the brain for higher order thinking and consciousness.

The tests used to monitor brain activity during cardiac arrest used the Greyson scale of clinical death where there was no heart beat for at least 20 to 30 seconds when the oxygen stops going to the brain and the brain is flatlined. So these patients were not conscious, they were either so gravely ill they were out to it or clinically dead.

The point is the brain is compromised there should not be such clear, vivid and well structured thought processes. In fact there should not be any activity in the conscious regions of the brain at all.

Add to this the thoughts and experiences are of the immediate and sometimes distant surroundings during the time and as clear as day where they should be muddled and chaotic. That someone should have such real and vivid experiences at that time is interesting and should not be dismissed with "Ho hum", lol.

“In our prospective study of patients that have been clinically dead (VF on the ECG) no electric activity of the cortex of the brain (flat EEG) must have been possible, but also the abolition of brain stem activity like the loss of the corneareflex, fixed dilated pupils and the loss of the gag reflex is a clinical finding in those patients.

A Reply to Shermer Medical Evidence for NDEs, Pim van Lommel

Line of Evidence #1 Lucid, organized experiences while unconscious, comatose, or clinically dead
Near-death experiences occur at a time when the person is so physically compromised that they are typically unconscious, comatose, or clinically dead. Considering NDEs from both a medical perspective and logically, it should not be possible for unconscious people to often report highly lucid experiences that are clear and logically structured.
Line of Evidence #4 Near-death experiences that occur while under general anesthesia
Under adequate general anesthesia it should not be possible to have a lucid organized memory. For the NDEs occurring under general anesthesia, 19 (83%) of the respondents answered, “More consciousness and alertness than normal,” to this question, compared to 437 (74%) for all other NDEs. The responses to this question by the two groups were not statistically significantly different. This suggests, remarkably, that the level of consciousness and alertness in NDEs is not modified by general anesthesia.
Near-Death Experiences Evidence for Their Reality

There are currently three explanations for these accounts. The first is physiological; that the hallucinations patients experience is due to disturbed brain chemistry caused by drug treatment, a lack of oxygen or changes in carbon dioxide levels. In the Southampton study none of the four patients who had near-death experiences had low levels of oxygen or received any unusual combination of drugs during their resuscitation."

Parnia also addressed whether hallucinations can account for NDE. When people have a lack of oxygen to the brain — something Parnia sees daily in the intensive care unit —they become completely delusional and disoriented. With delusions, thinking becomes fragment, a muddled mess. “They don’t have well-structured thought processes”. They thrash about and, if the oxygen becomes too low, they go into a coma.

NDE-ers, by contrast, report vivid experiences. In addition, “people are coming back and describing real events that have occurred and that doctors and nurses have verified, validated.” So, by definition, they can’t be hallucinations, because they’re describing real events.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/life-after-life-does-consciousness-continue-after-our-brain-dies

In the baseline condition before hypnotic session, NDE memories revealed more detail than imagined memories. Findings showed that NDE memories were similar to real memories in terms of detail richness, self-referential, and emotional information. Moreover, NDE memories were significantly different from memories of imagined events.
Frontiers | “Reality” of near-death-experience memories: evidence from a psychodynamic and electrophysiological integrated study

 

[stevevw]

Be sure to get back to us when you do know.

Well to be able to 'know' that requires an open mind to the possibility. You can't get to find out whether the possibility that consciousness is beyond brain if you exclude the possibility before you begin to find out. That's what material science does and should do.

So its going to take some time as not as many people are researching this as other diciplines. But the area has grown a lot in recent years and some inroads are being made. So hopefully we may have new discoveries in the not too distant future.

 

[Bradskii]

Well to be able to 'know' that requires an open mind to the possibility. You can't get to find out whether the possibility that consciousness is beyond brain if you exclude the possibility before you begin to find out. That's what material science does and should do.

Science goes where the evidence leads it.

 

[stevevw]

Science goes where the evidence leads it.

And that evidence is limited within the causal closure of the physical.

 

[Bradskii]

And that evidence is limited within the causal closure of the physical.

Scientists tend to leave the supernatural to the woo-meisters. There are plenty of them about. Be sure to start a thread when they present any solid evidence

 

[TGGIL]

Free Will: A profound mystery that beckons our understanding.

It is dark, but you do not know what darkness means. You have not even formed your brain to realize you will have eyes to see. You have not thought of who you are, what time it is, nor the very breath you start that fills what we call lungs. I say you are formed from a cell, an egg of another from another, and here you are. I cannot explain these eggs, but I know in time what they do. But I learned from another, who learned from another, then another, and I can call time.

Every word that enters your ears and is respoken from your mouth contributes to your sensual knowledge. You may not have control over the input of this knowledge, but you do have the power to adapt and change with what you have.

You began to change by seeing the sounds you first heard repeated repeatedly. You feel something but do not know what that something is, but there is always a chance of happenings that cause an effect.

You seem to struggle to understand things, and you reach out and even cry out, and something happens. You have feelings that you learn to control by the reaction you seem to cause.

This newborn child is birthed by others and presented to the world as you. This is free will of this birth by extraordinary events that have been studied today and we are still trying to understand the difficulties in the process.

Where is free will? It starts here at the point of conception, where a free egg connects to a matching egg and creates you. This is freely done without effort other than the required union of two eggs to cause birth.

Free will continues when the newborn child adapts the mind formed from all the input variables to develop knowledge of good and evil. This child starts to make free will choices when reason is combined with feeling, desire, need, want, and all other emotions this child has gotten from others.

So yes, our external substance will make a free will choice, which comes from the mind.

What we choose freely is based on our knowledge of an outcome. Without a choice to make, there would be no life in breathing. We take in that free air when our lungs require it and exhale as freely as our body releases it.

So, free will is choosing on your own with the consequences you know you may face, but you choose such a quest because you are allowed to.

Eat pleasantly, drink politely, and have free will to choose your direction with harmony.

TGGIL

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Are we reading the same article. It seems your reading the summary. But even that says the results may be a biomarker to authentic "near-death" experiences.

Parnia explains that this means the traditional NDE, where the subject thinks they are dying or have died and experiences stereotypical events such as life events recalled and assessed, meeting deceased relatives who tell them to return, a tunnel with a light at the end, and so on. He describes these as involving "lucid-vast-hyperconsciousness, separation, recognition of death, moral/ethical re-evaluation of life (all intentions/actions), and return".

He does not define or explain what 'lucid-vast-hyperconsciousness' means - though it is reminiscent of the lucid sense of universe-encompassing consciousness that can be experienced with psychedelic drugs, but with a death or near-death motif.

Parnia says these are different from other kinds of recalled experiences (the others involved memories or perceptions of being conscious during cardiac arrest (CA), or non-death-related dream-like experiences).

IOW, when some people are dying of CA, they have vivid dream-like experiences of dying or being dead.

The network level of brain activity investigated was found to be high level activity in the region of the brain for higher order thinking and consciousness.

The tests used to monitor brain activity during cardiac arrest used the Greyson scale of clinical death where there was no heart beat for at least 20 to 30 seconds when the oxygen stops going to the brain and the brain is flatlined. So these patients were not conscious, they were either so gravely ill they were out to it or clinically dead.

Brain function typically continues for around 3 minutes after circulation stops; the EEG may become undetectable well before that.

The conclusion suggested that "The emergence of normal EEG may reflect... a biomarker of consciousness, lucidity and Recalled Experience of Death...". IOW, a normal EEG may indicate consciousness, lucidity and RED.

Parnia notes elsewhere that "... resuscitation causes ischemia–reperfusion injury (IRI) – a cascade of excitotoxicity/mitochondrial dysfunction/oxidative stress, inflammation and apoptosis – with brain hemodynamic/vascular, no-reflow, cerebrovascular, microthrombotic, intracranial pressure derangements." IOW, severe physiological brain trauma.

Parnia also says, "Neuroscientifically, body/brain dysfunction causes inhibition/disinhibition of inherent pathways". This is similar to the effect of psychedelics which also inhibit/disinhibit inherent pathways, resulting in crosstalk between normally isolated areas of the brain.

In all cases, recall of the experience necessarily occurred after recovery from this reperfusion trauma, so it is plausible that some of the experiences recalled may not be (only) a product of CA-induced hypoxia, but (also) of the reperfusion trauma.

The point is the brain is compromised there should not be such clear, vivid and well structured thought processes. In fact there should not be any activity in the conscious regions of the brain at all.

This does not follow. Hyper-vivid experiences occur in other situations where the brain is compromised, including the influence of psychedelics, and there is evidence of a flood of brain activity that occurs both during extreme hypoxia and during reperfusion injury. The structuring of fragmented experience is typically post-hoc, by narrative generation plausibly threading 'events' together. It's also possible that such a disinhibited rush of brain activity could include salient memories (of important events, friends & relatives, etc). Further, our sense of the passage of time is tied to the number of salient experiential events rather than a regular internal clock, so a vivid flood of memories might well be interpreted as occurring over an extended time.

I don't claim any certainty that these suggestions apply to the reports of Parnia's subjects, but that they are possible and/or plausible.

Add to this the thoughts and experiences are of the immediate and sometimes distant surroundings during the time and as clear as day where they should be muddled and chaotic. That someone should have such real and vivid experiences at that time is interesting and should not be dismissed with "Ho hum", lol.

“In our prospective study of patients that have been clinically dead (VF on the ECG) no electric activity of the cortex of the brain (flat EEG) must have been possible, but also the abolition of brain stem activity like the loss of the corneareflex, fixed dilated pupils and the loss of the gag reflex is a clinical finding in those patients.

A Reply to Shermer Medical Evidence for NDEs, Pim van Lommel

Line of Evidence #1 Lucid, organized experiences while unconscious, comatose, or clinically dead
Near-death experiences occur at a time when the person is so physically compromised that they are typically unconscious, comatose, or clinically dead. Considering NDEs from both a medical perspective and logically, it should not be possible for unconscious people to often report highly lucid experiences that are clear and logically structured.
Line of Evidence #4 Near-death experiences that occur while under general anesthesia
Under adequate general anesthesia it should not be possible to have a lucid organized memory. For the NDEs occurring under general anesthesia, 19 (83%) of the respondents answered, “More consciousness and alertness than normal,” to this question, compared to 437 (74%) for all other NDEs. The responses to this question by the two groups were not statistically significantly different. This suggests, remarkably, that the level of consciousness and alertness in NDEs is not modified by general anesthesia.
Near-Death Experiences Evidence for Their Reality

There are currently three explanations for these accounts. The first is physiological; that the hallucinations patients experience is due to disturbed brain chemistry caused by drug treatment, a lack of oxygen or changes in carbon dioxide levels. In the Southampton study none of the four patients who had near-death experiences had low levels of oxygen or received any unusual combination of drugs during their resuscitation."

Parnia also addressed whether hallucinations can account for NDE. When people have a lack of oxygen to the brain — something Parnia sees daily in the intensive care unit —they become completely delusional and disoriented. With delusions, thinking becomes fragment, a muddled mess. “They don’t have well-structured thought processes”. They thrash about and, if the oxygen becomes too low, they go into a coma.

NDE-ers, by contrast, report vivid experiences. In addition, “people are coming back and describing real events that have occurred and that doctors and nurses have verified, validated.” So, by definition, they can’t be hallucinations, because they’re describing real events.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/life-after-life-does-consciousness-continue-after-our-brain-dies

In the baseline condition before hypnotic session, NDE memories revealed more detail than imagined memories. Findings showed that NDE memories were similar to real memories in terms of detail richness, self-referential, and emotional information. Moreover, NDE memories were significantly different from memories of imagined events.
Frontiers | “Reality” of near-death-experience memories: evidence from a psychodynamic and electrophysiological integrated study

Without access to the original published papers, I can't comment - I read the van Lommel paper abstract, and the only interesting finding was that "Depth of the experience was affected by sex, surviving CPR outside hospital, and fear before cardiac arrest. Significantly more patients who had an NDE, especially a deep experience, died within 30 days of CPR" which could suggest that the more severe the episode the deeper the NDE. He was also puzzled by how few NDEs there were when all had suffered hypoxia, as if he expected everyone who suffered hypoxia to have an NDE(!)

With regards to reports of NDEs of real events (that could not have been experienced by the patient through normal means) the reason for Parnia's AWARE I & AWARE II studies was the morass of unverifiable hearsay stories, but no definitive account that had held up under close investigation. That's why he put images in the CA rooms, out of direct sight (which were not reported in any experience).

But if you have any recent verifiable reports of such 'impossible' NDE experiences, post a link or reference. I spent considerable time looking a few years back, and found only unsubstantiated claims (some proactive journalist researchers debunked some of the 'best' examples around at the time).

 

[Bradskii]

But if you have any recent verifiable reports of such 'impossible' NDE experiences, post a link or reference.

There's a boat load in this linked thread which went on and on about NDEs: General anesthesia and consciousness

@stevevw, if you have any comments on NDEs then please add them to that thread. I won't be joining you there as I said all I needed to say previously. This thread is about free will. Please keep it to that subject. I do not want you taking it off topic.

 

[stevevw]

There's a boat load in this thread which when on and on and NDEs: General anesthesia and consciousness

@stevevw, if you have any comments on NDEs then please add them to that thread. I won't be joining you there as I said all I needed to say previously. This thread is about free will. Please keep it to that subject. I do not want you taking it off topic.

Free will is most related to conscious experience. Its an intentional choice which is a conscious choice based on our conscious experiences.

Our conscious experiences give us knowledge that our programmed senses cannot give us (colorblind Mary's knowledge of a red experience) and thus allow us to rise above the robotic material and deterministic processes to have some control and influence in the world, on reality and outcomes.

If consciousness is beyond the physical brain then then so is free will. Consciousness is what gives us our sense of self and agency, of being above the material world.

So of course consciousness is very relevant to freewill. Without it there would be no free will. You can't speak about free will without speaking about consciousness.

 

[Bradskii]

Free will is most related to conscious experience. Its an intentional choice which is a conscious choice based on our conscious experiences.

Our conscious experiences give us knowledge that our programmed senses cannot give us (colorblind Mary's knowledge of a red experience) and thus allow us to rise above the robotic material and deterministic processes to have some control and influence in the world, on reality and outcomes.

If consciousness is beyond the physical brain then then so is free will. Consciousness is what gives us our sense of self and agency, of being above the material world.

So of course consciousness is very relevant to freewill. Without it there would be no free will. You can't speak about free will without speaking about consciousness.

I didn't mention consciousness. I was talking about NDE's. Please take discussions of that elsewhere.

Consciousness is a given. The topic is free will and determinism. However you tackle the hard problem of consciousness it has no bearing on the deterministic nature of existence and its impact on whether we have free will or not.