Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
No worries .. listening to what others have to say is always worthwhile .. I doubt anyone can know everything which is already known(?) To me, that's what acquiring wisdom is all about.I can't say one way or another, in regards to Penrose. I really don't know. I was thinking that it must be something they think is missing in the current way of looking at things. But, truly, I have no idea that is why I defer to others who might know.
(Sure .. think I may have seen that (rather cringy) Youtube, but I'll have another look when I get the chance).Penrose thinks that consciousness must be non-computational (because... Godel's theorems) and so something equally mysterious must be behind it - hence quantum... mind-stuff. There's a YouTube video where he basically admits this. My view is that he doesn't understand the neurological side well enough (for example, one can model understanding in terms of building models using association, abstraction, pattern-matching - and reward).
Sorry, I can't make out what you're asking.Interesting .. 'the passive semantics of experience' also gives rise to information then, and so do 'generalisations' in your view there?
I get that you were attempting to distinguish the notion of a river bank, itself, experiencing erosion, (independently from passive semantics), but the distinction is at best, unclear. How 'passive' do such semantics have to be, in order for a river bank to experience erosion, or not experience erosion? (I guess this would be more of a question for Strawson though ..)Sorry, I can't make out what you're asking.
What I meant was that we have a way of describing what happens to inanimate things as them 'experiencing' (or even 'suffering') those events, when the intent is not to suggest that they are sentient and capable of experiential awareness or suffering, it's just a way of saying that they have been subject to those events, i.e. passive voice. It's another example of how our language is suffused with usages suggesting sentience and/or agency; implicit projection.I get that you were attempting to distinguish the notion of a river bank, itself, experiencing erosion, (independently from passive semantics), but the distinction is at best, unclear. How 'passive' do such semantics have to be, in order for a river bank to experience erosion, or not experience erosion? (I guess this would be more of a question for Strawson though ..)
Intentionality is to do with 'aboutness', the representation of things to some end; active experience involves the perception of things, which also involves 'aboutness' and representation, so experience involves intentionality. For something to represent something else, there needs to be abstraction and information processing...Experience entailing intentionality and thence implying information, to me, argues that information arises from the same place the semantic meaning of 'experience' comes from.
OK... my issue with generalising experientiality to all matter is that matter, in general, doesn't have the facilities for active experience, it can't actively abstract or represent what happens to it to some end, it just passively reflects the influence of events. As I said, the evidence we have suggests that active or sentient experience is an attribute that has developed in biological organisms that have brains that can perform processes involving abstraction and representation to some end.Generalisations are idealisations.
Think "mind, consciousness, experience" vs. the usual idea of "matter" as simple non-experiential stuff. He is arguing that energy, energy fields, in some sense are fundamentally conscious. Haha, I know, the idea seems far fetched.
Sure .. hypothetical observers, I think, are tools we insert into systems more as a way of using our capacity of empathy in order for us to share and relate to the situation at hand. Our language certainly makes that easy for us to implement but what we are observably doing when we do that, is not describing the system 'as it is' (if such a thing even exists), but rather, we are attempting to use language to achieve a better understanding of the behavior of that system.What I meant was that we have a way of describing what happens to inanimate things as them 'experiencing' (or even 'suffering') those events, when the intent is not to suggest that they are sentient and capable of experiential awareness or suffering, it's just a way of saying that they have been subject to those events, i.e. passive voice. It's another example of how our language is suffused with usages suggesting sentience and/or agency; implicit projection.
Ok.FrumiousBandersnatch said:Intentionality is to do with 'aboutness', the representation of things to some end; active experience involves the perception of things, which also involves 'aboutness' and representation, so experience involves intentionality. For something to represent something else, there needs to be abstraction and information processing...
I guess one take away of Strawson's doing this, may be to remind ourselves that even the way we regard ourselves, is a model, and that it is up to us to decide how to organise any given model's attributes. Strawson has taken our 'experience' attribute, and put it in as an attribute of another model - aka: the universe model, (thus generalising it).FrumiousBandersnatch said:OK... my issue with generalising experientiality to all matter is that matter, in general, doesn't have the facilities for active experience, it can't actively abstract or represent what happens to it to some end, it just passively reflects the influence of events. As I said, the evidence we have suggests that active or sentient experience is an attribute that has developed in biological organisms that have brains that can perform processes involving abstraction and representation to some end.
IOW I don't understand what it could mean to generalise experientiality.
FredVB said:The universe is yet so vast, and it was not always known to us, yet in about the last century there was enough learned showing it is with billions and billions of galaxies just as the galaxy we are located in, each with billions of stars and other bodies, which have atoms and particles as here. All of us can learn of the same things from our experiences. Yet they have always been, for a very long time, without our experiences. Who experiences all that? Existence really is reality, while, we may see, there is the ultimate one experiencing it all.
SelfSim said:Strawson's doing this may be to remind ourselves that even the way we regard ourselves, is a model, and that it is up to us to decide how to organise any given model's attributes. Strawson has taken our 'experience' attribute, and put it in as an attribute of another model - aka: the universe model.
His purpose for doing that, might be for us to acquire yet another perspective highlighting the active role our minds play in influencing everything we perceive ... including what we model as 'objects which exist independently from our perceptions' (which is, testably, just another model also) and is also not really useful to take literally beyond what we're visibly doing there.
I know we have some smart folks with scientific and philosophical backgrounds on CF. I am curious what you make of Strawson's argument for why it makes sense that the physical is experiential. As you may know, Strawson is one of the foremost proponents of pansychism, which is the idea that experientiality (consciousness, experience, or mental) is fundamental to reality. Personally, I am curious, but unsure. I am still working through his argument. What do you think? What do you find helpful/unhelpful about his argument?
I will give one quote for why he holds his position and then a quote of his basic argument. I will give a link to his paper at the bottom.
Why Strawson holds to pansychism:
"What do I mean by ‘(conscious) experience’ or ‘consciousness’? I mean what most people mean in the current debate. I’ll say more in §7. Before that I want to note one of the most implausible views of the fundamental nature of reality. This is the view held by many (I think most) in the West today, the view that psychism (and a fortiori panpsychism) is certainly false—that experience certainly isn’t one of the fundamental features of reality. Those who endorse this last view have to hold either that
(i) experience doesn’t really exist at all—that it is an illusion—
or
(ii) experience somehow ‘emerges’ from stuff that is in its fundamental nature wholly and utterly non-experiential.
Like many, I don’t think (ii) is tenable, because it requires that something known as radical emergence takes place in nature. Few, however, will deny that it looks preferable to (i). So it’s striking that many philosophers, unable to accept panpsychism or psychism, have in the last sixty years or so chosen (i) over (ii)."
One more important point that he tries to make, before presenting his basic argument:
"It’s worth saying straight away that there’s no conflict between panexperientialism and anything true in physics. For while physics tells us a great deal about structural-relational features of reality, it has little to say about the intrinsic structure-transcendent nature of the stuff that has the structure (see §10)—where by ‘stuff’ I simply mean whatever it is (however insubstantial-seeming or fundamentally processual in nature) that gives the structural-relational features of reality their concrete existence. Physics is wholly open to the possibility that the intrinsic nature of the shimmering stuff it posits is consciousness or experientiality. Panexperientialism is accordingly wholly compatible with physicalism, when physicalism is properly understood (see §4)."
His basic argument for why reality is experiential (PP = physicalist panexperientialism):
"Most present-day physicalists assume that the ultimate intrinsic nature of physical stuff is non-experiential, and they further assume that this assumption is an essential part of physicalism. The first assumption has no obvious warrant in physics, and the second is therefore doubtful.
If one puts aside the standard use of the term ‘energy’ in physics to denote the power of doing work possessed by a body or system of bodies, one can adopt Heisenberg’s large metaphysical use of the term when he says that ‘energy is a substance’, and that ‘all particles are made of the same substance: energy’ (Heisenberg 1958: 63, 71). On this view, concrete stuff isn’t well thought of as something that is distinct from energy and that has energy. Rather concrete physical stuff is energy. This is one way to make a first step towards PP.
Given that concrete physical stuff = energy, we can ask the following question: What is the fundamental intrinsic structure-transcendent nature of this energy, this energy stuff? Physics doesn’t say (§10). We face the question whether it is non-experiential or experiential. PP points out [1] that we know for certain that there is experientiality, [2] that we don’t know for certain that there is any non-experiential reality, [3] that we have very strong reason to expect fundamental continuity of being or nature between the experiential reality we know for certain to exist and any other concrete reality there is, [4] that to suppose that the fundamental intrinsic nature of reality is wholly non-experiential requires one to posit ‘radical’ emergence of the experiential from the non-experiential. In the light of this it proposes that the most natural and parsimonious hypothesis is that all concrete reality is experiential."
There is a lot more to his argument that I am still working through (especially his misgivings for "radial emergence," which I know will be one of the misgivings some will have with his position). If you are interested, here is the link (I think you should be able to read it without logging in):
What does “physical” mean? Strawson
Emergence is academic mysticism under a different name. That doesn't make it wrong.
What this scientist is saying is centuries old. It is also part Gnosticism - neither of which make it wrong.
The point I am making is that what this new field of physics is trying to do is juxtaposition spirit with physical without saying it.
Radical emergence is the name of the fundamental kernel of energy - a prime - that sparks the experience. A prime is an important concept (just like an "atom" or fundamental particle is) because it allows us to trace a place from where an energy comes from - and where it gets its attributes.
Emergence, without actually saying it, is about finding the literal god (the alleged fundamental energy pre-experience), although it is still not the Most High.
I appreciate your comments. I'm having trouble understanding what you're saying, which I attribute to myself and not you. Just so we're clear, Strawson rejects what he calls "radical emergence." That being said, he doesn't reject emergence, per se. From his paper...
"One way to illustrate the force of ‘radical’ is to observe that one can transform or develop any form of matter into any other (steel into marshmallow, water into diamond), given sufficient force.
No such transformation will be a case of radical emergence, because all matter is made of the same stuff (leptons and quarks, on one account). In fact the same goes for transforming matter into antimatter. This may sound as if it must be a case of radical emergence, but all this shows is that the terms ‘matter’ and ‘antimatter’ are potentially misleading. The only difference between an electron and an anti-matter electron (a positron) is that their charges are reversed...These are not cases of radical emergence. The transformation of wholly and utterly NE stuff into E stuff—experiencing, experientiality—would, by contrast, be a case of radical emergence"
What he rejects, and what he refers to as "radical emergence," is the transformation of non-experiential matter into experientiality. It seems to me, since he rejects that particular kind of transformation, and since experience is not an illusion, then experientiality must be a fundamental part of matter/stuff/the ultimate nature of reality, at the every least.
What if what we call NE considers us NE?
This is the "search for god" in a different philosophical package.
I don't know why, but I'm so enjoying this thought right now.
I think I get what you're saying. It's an attempt to identify the ultimate nature (ground?) of reality. And, that it is.
I suspect they take big steps away from the heart of the matter, but I'd like to hear some explanation of how they do 'inch closer'. As far as I can see, making consciousness fundamental simply makes the 'hard problem' universal instead of local."... we head back into the debate with new perspectives on panpsychism, which don’t solve the hard problem, but do inch close to the heart of matter."
This recalled to my mind, that were I forced to choose a religion it would almost certainly be Robert Heinlein's invention, pantheistic multi-person solipsism*. Like panpsychism it makes excellent science fiction and fantasy, but bizarre science and questionable theology.Issue 082 of Nautilus is focused on pansychism.
Panpsychism - Issue 82: Panpsychism - Nautilus
From the issue overview by editor Kevin Berger:
"In one of Nautilus’ most popular articles, “Is Matter Conscious?” Hedda Hasel Mørch explained how the hard problem wasn’t that hard at all. Rather than fret over how the hardware of brains gives rise to the software of consciousness, we could find peace by reversing the order.
To Mørch, the brain—purely a set of relations—was more like software; consciousness—with its distinct sensations—was more like hardware. Consciousness, she wrote, constituted the heart of physical matter, a concept that often goes by the name “panpsychism,” and decidedly sends heads spinning. “The possibility that consciousness is the real concrete stuff of reality, the fundamental hardware that implements the software of our physical theories, is a radical idea,” Morch admitted. “It completely inverts our ordinary picture of reality in a way that can be difficult to fully grasp. But it may solve two of the hardest problems in science and philosophy at once.”
Mørch’s 2017 article received hundreds of comments, and the debate over panpsychism has only got hotter in the past few years, not only in Nautilus, of course, but in articles and books. This week we head back into the debate with new perspectives on panpsychism, which don’t solve the hard problem, but do inch close to the heart of matter."
pantheistic multi-person solipsism
There is no question in my mind about when you refer to 'the universe', this refers to nothing more than a testable scientific model .. Of course its a model! .. It keeps changing (and has changed over eons) everytime humans observe something new .. that wouldn't have happened if it were just a 'thing' existing independently from our perceptions of what it actually is .. for goodness sake!public hermit said:Oh, I'm terribly intrigued. So, the universe is the mental projection of a group of like-minded people? I found a short blurb about The Number of the Beast.Ophiolite said:.. pantheistic multi-person solipsism ...
Yes, all those who aren't figments of our imagination. Are you enjoying the results so far?Oh, I'm terribly intrigued. So, the universe is the mental projection of a group of like-minded people?
Heinlein's best work was written before he noticed he could make lots of money no matter what he wrote. (If only the timing worked I would say he was channelling L.Ron Hubbard.)I found a short blurb about The Number of the Beast.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?