What is this 'truthy' informational pattern'.
It's a pattern of neural connections representing a concept with a truth value that is more strongly associated with reinforcing emotional content (feelings) than with factual content about the world (evidence). IOW, it's a belief.
'Truthy' derives from Stephen Colbert's neologism 'Truthiness', the belief that something is true based on intuition or perception, without regard to reason, evidence, or facts.
There is such a thing as phenomenal belief as opposed to other beliefs that are more disconnected or superficial. Phenomenal belief involves a deeper conviction and belief based on experiences that have been integrated and confirmed to the experiencer. They have a reasoned basis despite there being no objective evidence or countering evidence.
A belief about the world cannot be confirmed, i.e. is unreliable, without objective evidence. Of course, you can mistakenly think (believe) that you have objective evidence, and so believe that your belief is confirmed and reliable, which is a common error e.g. illusions, delusions, etc. But to knowingly hold a belief about the world without objective evidence sounds like wilful ignorance or self-deception. YMMV.
For example those who experience NDE believe their experience was more real than everyday reality. A deeper reality. Tests have shown its not imagination, self deception or irrational but align with a genuinely real experience like everyday life. Unreal beliefs are usually disconnected and inconsistent.
Memorably vivid, hyper-real experiences may to occur under abnormal physiological conditions, e.g. extreme stress or trauma, hypoxia, psychedelic drugs, etc. Being memorably vivid & hyper-real doesn't mean their content is objectively real.
"
Tests have shown..." can you support this claim with a link or reference to reliable evidence that an NDE has produced verifiable information the subject could not have known?
I am not sure what you mean by this. Subjective experience can only be understood directly from the experiencer. We can investigate the quality of experiences, their consistency overall among many experiencers and derive some factual information as to their content.
What I mean is that subjective experience cannot be shared, it can only be described via metaphors, similes, and appeals to common objective experience. IOW, you translate your subjective experience into words you feel best approximate what it is or was like, and someone else imagines what it would be like to have a subjective experience that corresponds to their own understanding of those words. They can never know what
your experience was like, they can only imagine what
they might experience in those circumstances.
It's the problem of qualia - you can never know how I experience red, only how
you experience it - there's a reasonable argument that it's not even a coherent question to ask if I experience red the way you do., but it doesn't matter as long as we can communicate effectively.
But this would not be an explanation as to the nature of why or how certain kinds of information would produce subjective experience. The colorblind Mary thought experiment shows that no matter if Mary knew everything there was to know about the brain and light waves as to the experience of the color red.
It wasn't until Mary could see colors and experience red that she understood it. Then in trying to explain this no amount of information could do justice to experiencing red. In that sense Mary came to know something about reality that the information and physical processes could never tell her.
No. Mary knew all the
objective information there was to know about red, but she didn't know
everything there was to know about red until she had the
subjective experience of red. The signals from her retinas converted those wavelengths of light into data that her brain processed, providing her with new
subjective information about red - i.e. what it was like to see red. This was novel information from physical processes - her brain was active in a new way and her neural connectivity changed to record that information and map the associations it engendered.
If your talking about the 'Life Force' once thought to eminate from non life matter I don't think the mystery of life has been solved. That is just as much a mystery as consciousness.
There is no 'life force'; life is a complex redox reaction using organic chemistry, propagated by replication. There are some areas that are not fully understood, such as how it first arose (although a recent computer simulation showed, for the first time, that random short pieces of code, given enough time, can assemble into an ecology of replicators...), but there's no mystery about what it is or how it works.
If we go back to Mary we can see that she had all the information to rationally understand the phyical correlates and explanations but still never experienced red. When she did it was new knowledge the physical could not give her.
Nope (see above). It was new knowledge
only the physical world could give her - visible, physical light impinging on her physical eyes, physical nerves transmitting the physical signals to the physical brain, the brain processing the data into information and integrating it as knowledge (physical activity & restructuring of the brain).
This new knowledge, perhaps a deeper knowledge. It is this non physical experiences and knowledge of a deeper reality that is associated with free will and agency.
Unsupported assertion.
It injects the subject into the equation and adds a new dimension which is not disassociated from reality but becomes a part of creating reality. This is Wheelers Participatory Principle. We are part of unravelling and creating reality and not just passive machines acted upon by the physical.
Meh. Wheeler's 'Participatory Anthropic Principle' is a 'strong anthropic principle', and at best a fringe quantum interpretation, at worst hand-wavy quantum woo.
We are part of reality and influence it by our actions, like any other creature. It's a mistake to confuse or conflate objective reality with the subjective reality we generate to efficiently navigate objective reality.
Well first I think there is attention. We have to attend to something to become conscious of it. But then once engaged we gain a deeper knowledge of what is going on and then our intentions and choices are based on that. On knowledge the physical world could not give us.
All our knowledge is based on information from the physical world. Information is data that has meaning to us and knowledge is the integration of that information into our understanding of the world so that we can make use of it.
Yes thats like consciousness is an epiphenomena. But like water this is still reduced back to the physical causes. A quantum field though nothing physical is still an element of the physical.
To the best of our knowledge, a quantum field is literally the fundamental essence of physical reality; and logically, it can't be '
nothing physical' yet be '
still an element of the physical' - that makes no sense.
Whereas conscious phenomena cannot be reduced to its physical components. Like radiowaves cannot be reduced to a radio box. But unlike radio waves conscious experience itself cannot be reduced to the physical.
Currently, there is a variety of evidence that it is of physical origin. It gives every indication of being a function of the brain (networked processes), and many aspects of consciousness are associated with specific functional areas of the brain. So the available circumstantial evidence doesn't support your assertion.
Plus it may be yet that other phenomena like how swams of insects forming another level of phenomena may be associated with some basic form of consciousness. Water is not a good example as its basically due to molecules being more loosely packed. As opposed to tightly constituted like solid objects.
Swarming (insects), flocking (birds), and schooling (fish) are examples of emergent behaviour, but do not show the informational complexity associated with consciousness. Insect hive or colony behaviour is generally far more complex and you might imagine it has some form of minimal 'consciousness' - although very different from brain-based consciousness. But Gary Tomlinson explains why this is not the case in his book "The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning", where he explains that
meaning is the key signifier of consciousness, and in part 3, 'Meaningful and Meaningless Complexity', he explains why the activities of superorganisms like ants or bees, is meaningless complexity as opposed to meaningful complexity - because they involve only the exchange of signals, but not signs (the cognitive concomitants of semiosis and meaning). It's a good read!
The emergent property popularly associated with water is
wetness. A water molecule has no such property, but billions of water molecules together do.
Belief involves the subjects reading of reality due to being immerced in it. Its fundemental because it can alter our reality. We can only know this by asking the subject and investigating how this works in humans.
As written, that's word salad. I would ask you to clarify what you're trying to say, but it just looks like more unsupported asssertions.
As Toto's song goes, its more than a feeling. Feelings are more superficial. Conscious experience goes deeper, into the psyche, but also transcends our senses. Like its another set of senses or a sixth sense like they say.
Neuroscience suggests the opposite, that the most fundamental feelings are associated with the interoceptive state of the body (sensory & hormonal input from the body & organs) and arise from the brainstem and deep subcortical areas; whereas general consciousness involves bursts of wide-scale high-level cortical activation that represent only around 5% of neural activity. It's the tip of the iceberg, or, to paraphrase Jonathan Haidt, it's the rider on the elephant of the subconscious. It gets its information from below on a (somewhat unreliable) 'need-to-know' basis, as you'll know if you've ever struggled with something 'on the tip of your tongue'.
I think the idea that we must believe in our free will is not just because we have no choice. That implies its not real but its better that we believe because of its practical benefit. But once again I think it goes deeper. Theres not just a superficial belief but a deeply integrated belief based on knowledge through our experiences.
That quote was intended as insightful humour. Yes, it is a deeply embedded (and understandable) belief, but that doesn't make it real, nor does it mean it's more beneficial than not believing. We feel like free agents who, at any given time, can do anything we're physically capable of, but we are constrained and coerced by feelings, habits, urges, etc. from events that ultimately happened to us, and our responses, our very thoughts, are the result of these causal sequences of events that, in an interesting sense, we are made from. We make decisions and choices based on the influence of past events, the precise effects of which we are largely unaware of.
We may not be able to as yet completely understand this but nevertheless our conviction and belief is justified and doesn't leave room for doubt over being a false belief due to loosely connected beliefs and secondary influences.
It is only justified in the sense that that's the way it feels. Rationally, we can see that all these things are all part of causal sequences starting outside ourselves and before our times. Unpredictable in detail and largely outside our awareness - although people are generally surprisingly predictable statistically.
Chalmers has a paper I have read on phenomenal belief and explains the difference and compares its quality with sense perceptions. I will try and find it as its quite enlightening.
People tend to dismiss belief as unreliable but really everything we do involves some sort of belief. Even in the objective world for example. We cannot get outside our minds to check that there is really an objective world. For all we know we could be living in a simulation and everyone is having a mass illusion. But we believe the objective world is real.
My background in science gives me an awareness of the uncertainty of knowledge and leads me towards a more Bayesian approach, where nothing is 100% certain (which would imply that no new knowledge could change it). As Hume said, "A wise man apportions his belief to the evidence".
