How do Naturalists/Materialists account for the immateriality of morals, laws of logic or information?

[stevevw]

As I've said, the experience we have is a result of brain cells interacting in response to photons stimulating the rod and cone cells in our eyes. Photons are real, the cells in the eyes are real, the brains cells are real.

But photons, rods and cone cells don't themselves produce or explain the qualitative experience of color. You attempted to explain the experience of color through how subjects can experience different colors. But that can only be evidenced by asking the subject and not by testing the physical mechanism's. So there's an explanatory gap between the physical mechanism and the experience of color that empirical science cannot overcome.

So? This doesn't mean there isn't something in reality that we are experiencing. And I've already address the idea that it's all in our heads, back in post 265.

Yes and I address your reply. There is something real that we are experiencing about the physical objective world. But that perceived realness may be a reflection of something more fundamental. For example you may see a computer screen in front of you and can touch it. But according to QM the computer screen is 99.9999% empty space and energy.

So if that's the case what is giving the chair its perceived realness. It may be how humans comprehend the world for practical reasons. But in reality objects are basically empty space. Maybe we create the physical reality we perceive. There may be a whole lot going on out there that we don't know which influences how we see things.

The photon that enters your eye doesn't depend on your experience in order to exist. It has a certain wavelength that doesn't depend on your experience of it.

Yes and none of that explains why we experience colors like red. A person can know everything there is to know about the mechanisms for photons, eyes and brains but still not know what it is like to experience the color red. Such as a color blind person. But if they happen to regain their color and experienced the color red for the first time they have come to know something new about reality such as the experience of red. They can then know what will produce a red experience.

Then we'd be seeing people who would look at a wasp and think it does not have the high contrast colors.

I haven't studied color inversion enough to know what specific color's are inverted. But I would imagine if its switching colors to their opposite on the color spectrum then even someone with color inversion will see contrasting colors because each will go to their opposite where light becomes dark and dark becomes light. They wouldn't both become dark or light.

If you don't think "consciousness" and "perception" are the same thing, why did you say, "Consciousness doesn't effect our perceptions, consciousness is the experience of 'what it is like' to have those perceptions." You literally said that conscious is having perceptions, so you can't now say that they are two different things.

The experience of having those perceptions is different to the perceptions themselves. The problem is the idea of perception can mean different things I think. In a sense you could say they happen at the same time as it happens so quick. Some say consciousness is an epiphenomena so that would make it something our perception creates. Then there are subconscious perceptions like blind sight that we are not even aware of.

As of yet, this idea can tell us nothing verifiable about the world and can't be tested in any way whatsoever. So it's nothing more than wishful thinking.

of course it tells us things about the world. Our experience throughout history has revealed many insights into reality. In fact its the only thing that is real. As I mentioned there are experiments done in QM which point to interpretations making consciousness fundamental.

In which case the simulation is the thing external to ourselves that we are perceiving. That would fit perfectly with what I have been saying.

But the thing we are perceiving is not really external because its all in our own minds. What we perceive in that simulation as objective reality is actually programmed into us to think its objective reality when its not. The reality outside the simulation represents the deeper reality we can never know in any material way because we can never get outside the simulation to test it.

But we have no way to test this interpretation, so it remains just an interpretation.

I'm not going to tell you that you can't believe it's correct if you want. But there's no justification for you to hold it as any more correct than my position.

But I think there is justification for this idea. I've linked articles about how consciousness, Mind and information or knowledge seems fundamental to reality. So its not completely out of the question and in some ways seems to fit what we are finding in QM.

But then there must be something external to ourselves which is providing said experience, otherwise why would we both get that experience at the same time?

I am not saying there really wasn't something that went bang. I am saying that the bang noise is one aspect of understanding what's going on. That's a mechanical and reductive way of seeing the world. Everything thing has a physical cause. The bang can be explained in physical terms, sound waves, balloon being popped etc.. But the other aspect of what's going on is how we experience noise.

From that experience we map out the world. That helps us tell a balloon pop from a gun shot, well most of the time. But that's the reality we create through our experience which is part of overall reality because any theory of reality has to include conscious experience. Scientific materialism removes consciousness as a causal influence by making it an epiphenomena.

Why do we experience things? Because there are things which can harm us and so the ability to experience them so we can protect ourselves will be evolutionarily advantageous.

May be either way its real enough to mean something as far as reality is concerned. But I don't think you can reduce consciousness to evolutionary processes. That just creates a bunch more Hard problems.

If consciousness was evolutionary then when did a hominid become conscious. One would think evolutionary even simple life has that tendency to protect themselves as a survival instinct. Simple eyes that can detect light becomes a survival advantage to avoid threats as an advantage. This would imply all life is conscious to some degree.

 

[Kylie]

But photons, rods and cone cells don't themselves produce or explain the qualitative experience of color. You attempted to explain the experience of color through how subjects can experience different colors. But that can only be evidenced by asking the subject and not by testing the physical mechanism's. So there's an explanatory gap between the physical mechanism and the experience of color that empirical science cannot overcome.

You forgot to include the brain cells in there.

Yes and I address your reply. There is something real that we are experiencing about the physical objective world. But that perceived realness may be a reflection of something more fundamental. For example you may see a computer screen in front of you and can touch it. But according to QM the computer screen is 99.9999% empty space and energy.

You say there could be something real that exists independently, but then you call it a "perceived realness," thus relegating it back to existing only in our heads.

So which is it?

So if that's the case what is giving the chair its perceived realness. It may be how humans comprehend the world for practical reasons. But in reality objects are basically empty space. Maybe we create the physical reality we perceive. There may be a whole lot going on out there that we don't know which influences how we see things.

We can create physical reality by believing really strongly that what is essentially a hallucination is real? Ha, good luck with that.

Yes and none of that explains why we experience colors like red. A person can know everything there is to know about the mechanisms for photons, eyes and brains but still not know what it is like to experience the color red. Such as a color blind person. But if they happen to regain their color and experienced the color red for the first time they have come to know something new about reality such as the experience of red. They can then know what will produce a red experience.

I fail to see what this has to do with any point you are trying to make. I agree that a person can't have direct experience of red until they experience red, but that doesn't mean there is no objective reality that exist independently of observers.

I haven't studied color inversion enough to know what specific color's are inverted. But I would imagine if its switching colors to their opposite on the color spectrum then even someone with color inversion will see contrasting colors because each will go to their opposite where light becomes dark and dark becomes light. They wouldn't both become dark or light.

You weren't paying attention to anything I actually said, were you?

The experience of having those perceptions is different to the perceptions themselves. The problem is the idea of perception can mean different things I think.

Not my fault if you can't properly define the terms you are using. Perhaps you should do so before continuing, otherwise you might find yourself shifting definitions in the middle of a discussion and accidently "proving" something that isn't real.

In a sense you could say they happen at the same time as it happens so quick.

The delay between an event and when we are aware of it has been well documented.

Some say consciousness is an epiphenomena so that would make it something our perception creates. Then there are subconscious perceptions like blind sight that we are not even aware of.

If we are not even aware of them, how can you claim they exist?

of course it tells us things about the world. Our experience throughout history has revealed many insights into reality. In fact its the only thing that is real.

Our experiences are the only thing that is real?

Yeah, you're gonna need to support this claim. Show me the science behind it.

As I mentioned there are experiments done in QM which point to interpretations making consciousness fundamental.

Show me the science which indicates this.

But the thing we are perceiving is not really external because its all in our own minds. What we perceive in that simulation as objective reality is actually programmed into us to think its objective reality when its not. The reality outside the simulation represents the deeper reality we can never know in any material way because we can never get outside the simulation to test it.

So the simulation was created by our own brain?

So then why does my simulation match everyone else's simulation? There's no reason at all that it should.

But I think there is justification for this idea. I've linked articles about how consciousness, Mind and information or knowledge seems fundamental to reality. So its not completely out of the question and in some ways seems to fit what we are finding in QM.

I doubt that this particular interpretation has much in the way of actual scientific support.

I am not saying there really wasn't something that went bang. I am saying that the bang noise is one aspect of understanding what's going on. That's a mechanical and reductive way of seeing the world. Everything thing has a physical cause. The bang can be explained in physical terms, sound waves, balloon being popped etc.. But the other aspect of what's going on is how we experience noise.

Irrelevant.

If there was something that went bang that was external to us, then that something is a part of objective reality.

May be either way its real enough to mean something as far as reality is concerned. But I don't think you can reduce consciousness to evolutionary processes. That just creates a bunch more Hard problems.

I've found it's done a pretty good job so far.

If consciousness was evolutionary then when did a hominid become conscious. One would think evolutionary even simple life has that tendency to protect themselves as a survival instinct. Simple eyes that can detect light becomes a survival advantage to avoid threats as an advantage. This would imply all life is conscious to some degree.

Why do you think it was like a switch? Why not have a spectrum from not conscious at all (like a rock) to as conscious as a person (or even further)? I agree that this implies that all life is conscious in some way, but I don't see that as a problem.

 

[stevevw]

You forgot to include the brain cells in there.

Yes brain cells as well.

You say there could be something real that exists independently, but then you call it a "perceived realness," thus relegating it back to existing only in our heads.
So which is it?

The realness comes from our conscious awareness but the realness we think we have with what we perceive about physical reality may be just a mind concept that's created so we can navigate the world. If its 99% empty space and energy then what we think is solid is actually not.

We can create physical reality by believing really strongly that what is essentially a hallucination is real? Ha, good luck with that.

Why that's the science.

I fail to see what this has to do with any point you are trying to make. I agree that a person can't have direct experience of red until they experience red, but that doesn't mean there is no objective reality that exist independently of observers.

The whole point is what is regarded as real or not in the world. By highlighting that there may be non physical phenomena in the world that can be regarded as real like colors and other abstract and transcendent phenomena and that what we think of as the objective world may be an illusion I am pointing out that reality is not so clear cut and made out and made up of more than just the physical stuff we can only know through empirical science. This undermines the materialist belief that the only reality is a physically one.

You weren't paying attention to anything I actually said, were you?

I thought I was. I was pointing out that the color inversion you claim where people will not see contrasting bands if their color vision is inverted may not be the case. Even though their colors are inverted they still see contrasting bands of different colors. Nevertheless the same logic applies to someone with red/green color inversion. What most people see as red they see as green. So if our experience of color is something real like a fact then we have two different facts about the same thing in the world.

Here's another mind bender. Perception of objects and color depends on light and the vantage point the subject occupies. So if two or more people view the same object from different angles in different light they will see the physical object differently. Though its the same object it doesn't present exactly the same depending on the subjects position.

So who occupies the right position as far as objective reality is concerned. Do all subjects have their own objective reality. Does this say something about the subjects role in what makes reality. THis may be a sign of how what we perceive as the objective world is but a reflection that can distort because there is nothing actually solid existing.

Not my fault if you can't properly define the terms you are using. Perhaps you should do so before continuing, otherwise you might find yourself shifting definitions in the middle of a discussion and accidently "proving" something that isn't real.

Why what is your definition of perception. Not all perceptions are conscious, some perceptions are subconscious.

The delay between an event and when we are aware of it has been well documented.

Yes this shows that perception and consciousness are not the same thing.

If we are not even aware of them, how can you claim they exist?

Because they can do experiments to identify the subconscious activity or with tests done for blind sight for example which shows how our brains fill in missing information subconsciously. We just don't realize it when its happening.

Our experiences are the only thing that is real?

You don't need the science as the evidence is our conscious experience. We know we have consciousness because we experience it, just ask anyone. We see its activity in the brain when we actually have conscious experience. But that's the only thing we can know directly. All else is just a construction of Mind. We cannot get outside our consciousness to check if anything else is real.

I have provided this evidence before i.e. Wigner's and Wheelers experiments and arguments from others like Henry Stapp, Kastrup, Giulio Tononi, Chalmers and others. These include arguments for observer effect in QM such as QBism, Integrated Information theory, Panpsychism, The Anthropic Participatory Principle, a Mental universe and Mind/consciousness is fundamental.

Show me the science which indicates this.

refer to above reply

So the simulation was created by our own brain?

Simulation theory is based on the idea that a future human race became so advanced that it was able to create a computer simulation that mimicked our world/universe. The point is everything that is considered real in the objective world is a program similar to virtual reality but many times more real than our ability today. So people can't tell the difference. Yet everything is just a Mind that is programmed to think that.

So then why does my simulation match everyone else's simulation? There's no reason at all that it should.

In a simulated world everyone is programmed the same. In fact everyone is a simulation within the simulation.

 

[stevevw]

I doubt that this particular interpretation has much in the way of actual scientific support.

I provided the support for this in another post and again in the above post. The idea of consciousness, Mind, Information and/or knowledge being fundamental to reality is well supported. That doesn't mean its ultimately correct. The problem with QM which is what these ideas are based on is that it leads to counterintuitive ideas regardless of which interpretation you want to take.

I and many others just happen to think that making consciousness, Mind, information fundamental to creating reality makes more sense than other interpretations and seems to account for what we are finding in QM. Of course none of these ideas can be verified scientifically so its a case or the best argument that fits the data. That is why some people think consciousness/Mind is the best explanation.

Irrelevant.

If there was something that went bang that was external to us, then that something is a part of objective reality.

As I said I am not saying there is not something that happens in the objective world but that this is only part of how reality works if we are to understand complete reality (taking all things into consideration) and reality ultimately being about what the fundamental nature of reality is.

In simple terms your focusing on the material side of things, how the noise happened through empirical science and its effects in the world. I am saying that's only part of the whole picture. Conscious experience of the world is the other part that goes into making up reality. Thats the part we play in reality, what it is like to experience the physical world.

I've found it's done a pretty good job so far.

I don't think evolutions a good explanation for the psychological and transcendental aspects of human behavior. To reduce all that to mindless matter seems to deny our own sense of self and meaning in the world and makes us passive robots subject to deterministic processes.

Why do you think it was like a switch? Why not have a spectrum from not conscious at all (like a rock) to as conscious as a person (or even further)? I agree that this implies that all life is conscious in some way, but I don't see that as a problem.

It becomes a problem for the materialist view of consciousness. This view says that consciousness is an epiphenomena caused by the physical brain due to complex combinations of neuron activity. If consciousness is in all living things to varying degrees then basic brain structures and even organisms without brains or even electrons can be conscious.

This contradicts consciousness needing a certain level and combination of brain activity to appear and is basically supporting the idea that consciousness is fundamental in the universe which is more or less what I have been saying with ideas like Panpsychism and Mind.

 

[Kylie]

The realness comes from our conscious awareness but the realness we think we have with what we perceive about physical reality may be just a mind concept that's created so we can navigate the world. If its 99% empty space and energy then what we think is solid is actually not.

Yeah, I get that whole "Most of a solid substance is actually just empty space between the atoms" stuff, but that's not how what you said comes across.

It came across as our conscious mind creating the atoms in the first place.

Why that's the science.

Okay, show me the scientific paper that shows this.

The whole point is what is regarded as real or not in the world. By highlighting that there may be non physical phenomena in the world that can be regarded as real like colors and other abstract and transcendent phenomena and that what we think of as the objective world may be an illusion I am pointing out that reality is not so clear cut and made out and made up of more than just the physical stuff we can only know through empirical science. This undermines the materialist belief that the only reality is a physically one.

You claim there are non-physical phenomena, but you haven't really shown anything that does not ultimately stem from something physical. Even our thoughts ultimately stem from interactions between neurons, which are physical.

I thought I was. I was pointing out that the color inversion you claim where people will not see contrasting bands if their color vision is inverted may not be the case. Even though their colors are inverted they still see contrasting bands of different colors. Nevertheless the same logic applies to someone with red/green color inversion. What most people see as red they see as green. So if our experience of color is something real like a fact then we have two different facts about the same thing in the world.

Where did I say inverted?

If you had read what I wrote back in post 2512, you would have seen me write, "...what I see as bright yellow, you might see as (what I would call) dark blue. And white I see as black, you might see as (what I would call) dark red." I was not talking about a simple inversion, since an inversion would keep the relative "distance" between the brightness and hue of the colours, just as transposing a piece of music doesn't change how many semitones are between two notes in that piece.

Here's another mind bender. Perception of objects and color depends on light and the vantage point the subject occupies. So if two or more people view the same object from different angles in different light they will see the physical object differently. Though its the same object it doesn't present exactly the same depending on the subjects position.

Ah, but there is always an explanation which can be modelled and described mathematically. So that doesn't really support your "no real objective world" idea.

So who occupies the right position as far as objective reality is concerned. Do all subjects have their own objective reality. Does this say something about the subjects role in what makes reality. THis may be a sign of how what we perceive as the objective world is but a reflection that can distort because there is nothing actually solid existing.

I think it's quite obvious that my position is there is one objective reality, and we each have a unique point of view of it (since two people can't be in exactly the same place at the same time).

Why what is your definition of perception. Not all perceptions are conscious, some perceptions are subconscious.

I dunno, you are the one who said, "the idea of perception can mean different things..."

Don't make your inability to define what you mean into my problem. It's your problem. If you claim that "perception" can mean different things, then you are the one who needs to specify exactly what you are talking about.

Yes this shows that perception and consciousness are not the same thing.

Uh, no.

I was talking about an actual event that is external to ourselves, and our perception of that event. It was NOT talking about the difference between consciousness and perception.

Let's say I put you in a small cubicle that is completely dark, and hook you up to a brain wave scanner. I can do a test. I will light up a small LED in front of you. I can measure exactly when the LED lights up, and thanks to the brain scanner, I can measure exactly when your brain registers that light. I will find that there is always going to be a delay between the time that the LED lights up and the time when your brain perceives that light.

Hence, there is a difference between the EVENT (the LED lighting up) and your perception of it (when your brain responds to the LED lighting up).

Because they can do experiments to identify the subconscious activity or with tests done for blind sight for example which shows how our brains fill in missing information subconsciously. We just don't realize it when its happening.

Ah, well, when you say "we aren't aware of them," it comes across as "we have no knowledge of this phenomenon at all," which isn't the case. You might want to be a bit more careful with your words, to make sure this kind of ambiguity doesn't happen again. I mean, we all know the story about the railroad workers driving the big spike in, and one says to the other, "You pick up that sledge hammer. I'm going to hold this railroad spike and get it in the right place. And when I nod my head, I want you to it it." And he ended up getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer.

You don't need the science as the evidence is our conscious experience. We know we have consciousness because we experience it, just ask anyone. We see its activity in the brain when we actually have conscious experience. But that's the only thing we can know directly. All else is just a construction of Mind. We cannot get outside our consciousness to check if anything else is real.

That's hilarious.

If you claim there's scientific evidence for something, you have to provide the scientific evidence. If you can't or won't, then you aren't going to be believed.

And the question is NOT whether we can get outside our own mind. The question is whether there is an objective reality outside our minds. I argue that there is, since that's the simplest answer that explains things. Your answer, that there is no objective reality outside ourselves, creates many questions that you have not been able to provide satisfactory answers for.

refer to above reply

And you.

Simulation theory is based on the idea that a future human race became so advanced that it was able to create a computer simulation that mimicked our world/universe. The point is everything that is considered real in the objective world is a program similar to virtual reality but many times more real than our ability today. So people can't tell the difference. Yet everything is just a Mind that is programmed to think that.

This does not answer the question (and it only required a yes or a no).

Have you thought about a career in politics?

In a simulated world everyone is programmed the same. In fact everyone is a simulation within the simulation.

Ah, so then there is something external to ourselves! The simulation, the program.

 

[Ken-1122]

They might not be "real" but your admission that they have no existence outside of the person imagining them means that they do still exist in one form or another, that being existing within the person imagining them.

No.

Unless of course you want to say that information itself is not "real" because it only exists inside the thoughts of a person.

Yes! Information itself is not real because it only exists within your thoughts.

 

[stevevw]

Yeah, I get that whole "Most of a solid substance is actually just empty space between the atoms" stuff, but that's not how what you said comes across.

It came across as our conscious mind creating the atoms in the first place.

There is actually not even atoms at the fundamental level, just waves and potentialities. So yes there is not even atoms at the fundamental level.

Okay, show me the scientific paper that shows this.

I already did in another thread or post, for example

A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality
Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136684/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/

Our observations, Wheeler suggests, might actually contribute to the creation of physical reality. To Wheeler we are not simply bystanders on a cosmic stage; we are shapers and creators living in a participatory universe. To illustrate his idea, he devised what he calls his "delayed-choice experiment," which adds a startling, cosmic variation to a cornerstone of quantum physics: the classic two-slit experiment. It would be tempting to dismiss Wheeler's thought experiment as a curious idea, except for one thing: It has been demonstrated in a laboratory.
http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse#.UvxOUrTVdnA

Wigner (1961, 1964). He argued that only the observer's consciousness could induce the collapse of the wave function. Consciousness can do so precisely because, though eminently real, it is not in itself a physical system. This suggests that consciousness cannot possibly be reduced to brain activity, for the latter, as a physical object, would also be subjected to the rules of QM.​

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Is-Materialism-False

The “von Neumann–Wigner interpretation”, also described as “consciousness causes collapse” of Ψ, postulates that consciousness is an essential factor in quantum measurements.

Časlav Brukner at the University of Vienna showed that, under certain assumptions, Wigner's idea can be used to formally prove that measurements in quantum mechanics are subjective to observers.
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-quantum-physics-reality-doesnt.html

You claim there are non-physical phenomena, but you haven't really shown anything that does not ultimately stem from something physical. Even our thoughts ultimately stem from interactions between neurons, which are physical.

Thoughts, Mind and consciousness cannot be explained as interactions of neurons. That's the Hard problem of consciousness. I have shown you abstract and transcendental phenomena such as consciousness and Mind that cannot be explained by the physical yet are real phenomena in the world.

But here's the important point. It doesn't matter which side of the debate one takes on consciousness and Mind no explanation from either side is going to satisfy empirical science because there's noting to directly observe, consciousness qualitive not quantitative. So the idea that there is an physical explanation that science can find and that its the only true explanation is a fallacy.

Where did I say inverted?

If you had read what I wrote back in post 2512, you would have seen me write, "...what I see as bright yellow, you might see as (what I would call) dark blue. And white I see as black, you might see as (what I would call) dark red." I was not talking about a simple inversion, since an inversion would keep the relative "distance" between the brightness and hue of the colours, just as transposing a piece of music doesn't change how many semitones are between two notes in that piece.

I was assuming inverted colors because I think that this is the only way people can see different colors to the norm. But what is your point. Even if some people cannot distinguish contrasting colors its very rare and it may be a problem for them but that is no different to say a blind person who cannot see color at all.

Ah, but there is always an explanation which can be modelled and described mathematically. So that doesn't really support your "no real objective world" idea.

But any reality modelled on math is a mental reality. Math is a mental abstract conception created by the mind. That's unless you think math is just revealing some truths about the universe and reality. Either way it traces back to Mind.

I think it's quite obvious that my position is there is one objective reality, and we each have a unique point of view of it (since two people can't be in exactly the same place at the same time).

Then how can there be one objective reality if two people can see objective reality differently

I dunno, you are the one who said, "the idea of perception can mean different things..."

Don't make your inability to define what you mean into my problem. It's your problem. If you claim that "perception" can mean different things, then you are the one who needs to specify exactly what you are talking about.

Its actually both our problem because to have any coherent discussion we would have to have some understanding of what perception actually is and is not. I have my understanding of perception but I know its limited as its a complex issue. Even the basic idea of perception. Is it just seeing something like a digital camera does. If so that doesn't require consciousness.

Even then there are different arguments for when something is a perception or not so there's no clear right answer at least presently. But consciousness is a definite state as we are attending to perceptions and getting inside them so to speak. This is different to sense data. A robot can have visual, hearing sense data but not know consciousness.

Uh, no.

I was talking about an actual event that is external to ourselves, and our perception of that event. It was NOT talking about the difference between consciousness and perception.

But your assuming there is a real objective world out there. Our perceptions alone don't make something real out there beyond us. You claimed consciousness and perception were the same so knowing the differences between consciousness and perception will be important as to whether what you claim about perception is correct.

Let's say I put you in a small cubicle that is completely dark, and hook you up to a brain wave scanner. I can do a test. I will light up a small LED in front of you. I can measure exactly when the LED lights up, and thanks to the brain scanner, I can measure exactly when your brain registers that light. I will find that there is always going to be a delay between the time that the LED lights up and the time when your brain perceives that light.

Hence, there is a difference between the EVENT (the LED lighting up) and your perception of it (when your brain responds to the LED lighting up).

So what's your point.

 

[stevevw]

Ah, well, when you say "we aren't aware of them," it comes across as "we have no knowledge of this phenomenon at all," which isn't the case. You might want to be a bit more careful with your words, to make sure this kind of ambiguity doesn't happen again. I mean, we all know the story about the railroad workers driving the big spike in, and one says to the other, "You pick up that sledge hammer. I'm going to hold this railroad spike and get it in the right place. And when I nod my head, I want you to it it." And he ended up getting hit in the head with a sledgehammer.

We don't have any knowledge of it when it happens to us. Even though we can pick up the subconscious processes on a scan it doesn't tell us how those processes influence perception. Only that they do play a role in perception. The point was not all perceptions involve consciousness. There are subconscious processes which influence how we perceive the world that we are not conscious of (don't involve consciousness).

The original point was that I was disputing your claim that consciousness is the same as perception. I was saying there are subjeconscious processes involved in perception which shows that percepts are not the same as consciousness. That perceptions can be misleading like the brain in a vat example.

That's hilarious.

If you claim there's scientific evidence for something, you have to provide the scientific evidence. If you can't or won't, then you aren't going to be believed.

OK so we know we have consciousness and experience things like love, colors, pain. But we cannot verify this is the case because science cannot in principle measure this as its not a material thing. Correlations don't work as they are only associations and not direct evidence or explaination about how a neuron should create the experience of 'what it is like' to be something.

So what do we do. Pretend that consciousness is not real because we cannot verify this or believe it is real because we actually know we have consciousness and experience its effects in the world first hand. The fact is you can have experiences and you know it, like experiencing the color red. Its real in the world.

And the question is NOT whether we can get outside our own mind. The question is whether there is an objective reality outside our minds.

Actually the question is can we get outside our mind. The question "is there is an objective reality outside our minds" requires us to get outside our minds to check if its the case. So the real question is "whether we can get outside our own mind or not to measure so called objective reality that is outside our minds".

I argue that there is, since that's the simplest answer that explains things. Your answer, that there is no objective reality outside ourselves, creates many questions that you have not been able to provide satisfactory answers for.

Actually its the other way around. The materialist view is much more complicated and creates many problems that we cannot seem to get around, one being the Hard problem of consciousness. Whereas making Mind and consciousness fundamental overcomes the Hard problems the materialist view faces. Making consciousness and Mind fundamental seems to fit the findings in QM best.

For example Panpsychism makes consciousness fundamental

The theoretical imperative to form as simple and unified a view as is consistent with the data leads us quite straightforwardly in the direction of panpsychism.
Panpsychism is crazy, but it’s also most probably true | Aeon Ideas

What panpsychism offers us is a simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview. Strictly speaking it cannot be tested; the unobservable nature of consciousness entails that any theory of consciousness that goes beyond mere correlations is not strictly speaking testable. But I believe it can be justified by a form of inference to the best explanation: panpsychism is the simplest theory of how consciousness fits in to our scientific story.
https://theconversation.com/science-as-we-know-it-cant-explain-consciousness-but-a-revolution-is-coming-126143

And you.

This does not answer the question (and it only required a yes or a no).

Have you thought about a career in politics?

If I just said 'No' then I know you would have objected so I explained why my answer is 'No'. You obviously don't understand Simulation theory to be asking whether the brain creates the perceived reality . That is why I explained what Simulation theory is. Its not the brain that's making the reality, its the super intelligent beings programming the the simulation and therefore programming the simulated brains.

Ah, so then there is something external to ourselves! The simulation, the program.

You miss the point. If we were in a simulation and we found that there was some entity beyond what we think is the physical world creating the simulation it would be the same as people thinking that there is something beyond our physical world that creates it like God or consciousness and Mind itself.

People in the simulation already think there is objective reality which is their reality in the simulation. Any reality outside that is going to seem non material because its beyond the physical world people perceive in the simulation.

 

[Kylie]

I already did in another thread or post, for example

A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality
Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136684/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/

Our observations, Wheeler suggests, might actually contribute to the creation of physical reality. To Wheeler we are not simply bystanders on a cosmic stage; we are shapers and creators living in a participatory universe. To illustrate his idea, he devised what he calls his "delayed-choice experiment," which adds a startling, cosmic variation to a cornerstone of quantum physics: the classic two-slit experiment. It would be tempting to dismiss Wheeler's thought experiment as a curious idea, except for one thing: It has been demonstrated in a laboratory.
http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse#.UvxOUrTVdnA

Wigner (1961, 1964). He argued that only the observer's consciousness could induce the collapse of the wave function. Consciousness can do so precisely because, though eminently real, it is not in itself a physical system. This suggests that consciousness cannot possibly be reduced to brain activity, for the latter, as a physical object, would also be subjected to the rules of QM.​

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Is-Materialism-False

The “von Neumann–Wigner interpretation”, also described as “consciousness causes collapse” of Ψ, postulates that consciousness is an essential factor in quantum measurements.

Časlav Brukner at the University of Vienna showed that, under certain assumptions, Wigner's idea can be used to formally prove that measurements in quantum mechanics are subjective to observers.
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-quantum-physics-reality-doesnt.html

There's a whopping big difference between saying that conscious thought can influence the outcome of some events and saying that all of reality exists only because conscious minds are experiencing it.

That would suggest that without a conscious mind to observe a thing, the thing does not exist.

Thoughts, Mind and consciousness cannot be explained as interactions of neurons. That's the Hard problem of consciousness. I have shown you abstract and transcendental phenomena such as consciousness and Mind that cannot be explained by the physical yet are real phenomena in the world.

Did you? I must have missed that post. Or maybe your argument was not as convincing as you think it was.

I was assuming inverted colors because I think that this is the only way people can see different colors to the norm. But what is your point. Even if some people cannot distinguish contrasting colors its very rare and it may be a problem for them but that is no different to say a blind person who cannot see color at all.

You just completely missed everything I was trying to say, didn't you?

Show me someone who can look at a high contrast thing like a yellow and black warning sign, and not see the contrast. As in my example of someone who sees them as dark blue and dark red. Such a person does not exist, and yet if vision really was entiorely within the head, such people should be just as common as those who see such a sign as high contrast.

This shows that there must be some aspect of external objective reality which is being detected.

But any reality modelled on math is a mental reality. Math is a mental abstract conception created by the mind. That's unless you think math is just revealing some truths about the universe and reality. Either way it traces back to Mind.

A model of a thing and the thing itself are two entirely different things.

Then how can there be one objective reality if two people can see objective reality differently

Because they are both getting a subjective interpretation of an objective reality.

I believe I have made this point before. I hope you will remember it this time.

Its actually both our problem because to have any coherent discussion we would have to have some understanding of what perception actually is and is not. I have my understanding of perception but I know its limited as its a complex issue. Even the basic idea of perception. Is it just seeing something like a digital camera does. If so that doesn't require consciousness.

Even then there are different arguments for when something is a perception or not so there's no clear right answer at least presently. But consciousness is a definite state as we are attending to perceptions and getting inside them so to speak. This is different to sense data. A robot can have visual, hearing sense data but not know consciousness.

No, it's your problem, because you are the one who said it can mean different things and then failed to specify which of those different things you meant.

But your assuming there is a real objective world out there. Our perceptions alone don't make something real out there beyond us. You claimed consciousness and perception were the same so knowing the differences between consciousness and perception will be important as to whether what you claim about perception is correct.

I said they are the same because you claimed they were different and yet failed to specify what the difference was, DESPITE the fact that you have also claimed they are the same thing (which you did in post 261 when you said, "...consciousness is the experience of 'what it is like' to have those perceptions."

So what's your point.

That your claim that a perception and experiencing a perception are two different things is ridiculous. A perception by definition is an experience - a perception is our mind becoming aware of some stimulus our brain has received. And also your claim that our brain receiving the stimulus and our recognition of it happening at the same time is laughably wrong.

The original point was that I was disputing your claim that consciousness is the same as perception. I was saying there are subjeconscious processes involved in perception which shows that percepts are not the same as consciousness. That perceptions can be misleading like the brain in a vat example.

Yes, you are correct in that there are things that we can perceive subconsciously, but that's not what I was talking about. I was saying that it is impossible for us to be conscious of something that we haven't perceived.

OK so we know we have consciousness and experience things like love, colors, pain. But we cannot verify this is the case because science cannot in principle measure this as its not a material thing. Correlations don't work as they are only associations and not direct evidence or explaination about how a neuron should create the experience of 'what it is like' to be something.

This logic would allow you to dismiss ANYTHING as correlation and thus say it is invalid.

So what do we do. Pretend that consciousness is not real because we cannot verify this or believe it is real because we actually know we have consciousness and experience its effects in the world first hand. The fact is you can have experiences and you know it, like experiencing the color red. Its real in the world.

Again, you're going to have to define "consciousness" before we can start talking about how we can determine if something is conscious or not.

Actually the question is can we get outside our mind. The question "is there is an objective reality outside our minds" requires us to get outside our minds to check if its the case. So the real question is "whether we can get outside our own mind or not to measure so called objective reality that is outside our minds".

We are our minds, so no, we can't get out of them.

And don't try to change the subject. For a while now we have been discussing the issue of whether there is an objective reality outside of ourselves. But the fact we can't get outside our own minds doesn't mean that we should assume that no objective reality is just as likely as objective reality.

Actually its the other way around. The materialist view is much more complicated and creates many problems that we cannot seem to get around, one being the Hard problem of consciousness.

I lean towards a strong reductionism point of view, that consciousness is an emergent property of our brains, so that problem isn't as big an issue for me as it is for you.

Whereas making Mind and consciousness fundamental overcomes the Hard problems the materialist view faces. Making consciousness and Mind fundamental seems to fit the findings in QM best.

For example Panpsychism makes consciousness fundamental

The theoretical imperative to form as simple and unified a view as is consistent with the data leads us quite straightforwardly in the direction of panpsychism.
Panpsychism is crazy, but it’s also most probably true | Aeon Ideas

What panpsychism offers us is a simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview. Strictly speaking it cannot be tested; the unobservable nature of consciousness entails that any theory of consciousness that goes beyond mere correlations is not strictly speaking testable. But I believe it can be justified by a form of inference to the best explanation: panpsychism is the simplest theory of how consciousness fits in to our scientific story.
https://theconversation.com/science-as-we-know-it-cant-explain-consciousness-but-a-revolution-is-coming-126143

That's hilarious. Panpsychism is probably true? Ha! Panpsychism is completely unfalsifiable and offers no predictive power whatsoever.

If I just said 'No' then I know you would have objected so I explained why my answer is 'No'. You obviously don't understand Simulation theory to be asking whether the brain creates the perceived reality . That is why I explained what Simulation theory is. Its not the brain that's making the reality, its the super intelligent beings programming the the simulation and therefore programming the simulated brains.

You miss the point. If we were in a simulation and we found that there was some entity beyond what we think is the physical world creating the simulation it would be the same as people thinking that there is something beyond our physical world that creates it like God or consciousness and Mind itself.

People in the simulation already think there is objective reality which is their reality in the simulation. Any reality outside that is going to seem non material because its beyond the physical world people perceive in the simulation.

I'm sure you've heard of the Intelligent design movement, and how many people criticise it as being creationism dressed up in an attempt to disguise it. Those who defend ID say that it's not creationism, since they aren't proposing that God is the designer. It could be super intelligent aliens who are responsible for life, they tell us. But this doesn't really solve the problem. It just pushes it back a step. If life on earth required an intelligent designer to get it started, then how did these super intelligent aliens that did the job get started in the first place? Maybe THEY had an intelligent designer. An intelligent designer for the intelligent designers! And then these second power intelligent designers would need intelligent designers of their own, and so on, and so on.

Your argument here falls into the same trap. You say that what we think of as objective reality could be a simulation programmed by super intelligent beings, but what if they too are in a simulation? How many layers of simulation could there be? Infinitely many! Simulations all the way down! And yet, if you say that at some point there would have to be some entities living in some non-programmed, non-simulated reality, why not just cut out all those layers of middle-men and say that WE are those entities?

 

[stevevw]

There's a whopping big difference between saying that conscious thought can influence the outcome of some events and saying that all of reality exists only because conscious minds are experiencing it.

Thats what the science seems to say which I linked above. That reality is created by conscious observers at the fundemental level.

That would suggest that without a conscious mind to observe a thing, the thing does not exist.

Or not that the 'thing' doesn't exist at all but doesn't exist in the way we perceive it it to exist.

Did you? I must have missed that post. Or maybe your argument was not as convincing as you think it was.

I think we've debated this topic in a number of threads and I have given ample links to evidence and arguments for transcendent like consciousness and Mind being irreducible to the physical. The simple arguments is that transcendentals do not occupy space and time and do not have mass. This is self evident by their nature being qualitative rather then quantitative.

Even Galileo knew this and that is why he separated consciousness from the science method. The Hard Problem of consciousness is another well recognized problem of explaining consciousness through physical mechanisms.

You just completely missed everything I was trying to say, didn't you?

Show me someone who can look at a high contrast thing like a yellow and black warning sign, and not see the contrast. As in my example of someone who sees them as dark blue and dark red. Such a person does not exist, and yet if vision really was entirely within the head, such people should be just as common as those who see such a sign as high contrast.

I think your conflating two different things here and making a false analogy. You assume that color has no physical basis at all. But like the brain is the facilitator of consciousness beyond brain the eyes are a facilitator for colors beyond brain. We have a physical basis for color in that we have receptors that are tuned to specific light frequencies.

So people can't just have any color experience but rather experience colors based on specific light frequencies our receptors pickup and any deviation has a physical basis and is very rare. So there will not be just as many people walking around with different color experiences as you claim.

This shows that there must be some aspect of external objective reality which is being detected.

Yes the light frequencies picked up by our receptors. But the experience of those light frequencies is another matter which is not reducible to objective processes or causes.

A model of a thing and the thing itself are two entirely different things.

Well theoretical physics is in trouble then because they take seriously their models based on math. Einstein's theory of Relativity is one.

Because they are both getting a subjective interpretation of an objective reality.

I believe I have made this point before. I hope you will remember it this time.

Not sure what your point was. But from the observers point of view it is objective. The light reflection from one angle will be different to another. The shades of color may be different as in the famous dress. Whose position is more accurate than the other to determine objective reality.

Whereas if objective reality is but a reflection of some deeper non objective reality then it stands to reason that people will sometimes see things differently where the surface reflection is not fixed in any objective way but in superposition.

In other words though counter intuitive there may be more than one objective truth for the same thing being observed. The contingencies of our perspective affect our perceptions, so our view of things is always from some standpoint and never a view-from-nowhere. This seems to fit well with what we find in QM and with Wigner's Friend experiment.

No, it's your problem, because you are the one who said it can mean different things and then failed to specify which of those different things you meant.

The point is even if I did specify what perception was, because you admitted that you don't know what perception exactly is you would not have been in any position to dispute me. That is why I asked what your definition was because it was important as to whether you knew what you were talking about.

I said they are the same because you claimed they were different and yet failed to specify what the difference was, DESPITE the fact that you have also claimed they are the same thing (which you did in post 261 when you said, "...consciousness is the experience of 'what it is like' to have those perceptions."

That is not saying they are the same. I said consciousness is the experience of what it is like to have those perceptions. Experiencing what it is like is different to the perception itself. A robot or zombie can have sight perception of objects through their mechanical apparatus and not have conscious experience of those objects.

That your claim that a perception and experiencing a perception are two different things is ridiculous. A perception by definition is an experience - a perception is our mind becoming aware of some stimulus our brain has received.

I disagree, we can have perceptions we are not aware of. So not all perceptions involve consciousness. Like subconscious perceptions. We are not aware of them in the first place. When we walk down a street we take in much more than we are consciously aware of which help us navigate things. You obviously have a limited knowledge on this if you think the only perceptions we have are the ones we give attention to. What about blindsight.

Current evidence suggests that perception becomes conscious at a late-arising stage of focal-attentive processing concerned with information integration and dissemination.
https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1348/000712699161620
​

Some Essential Differences between Consciousness and Attention, Perception, and Working Memory

Some Essential Differences between Consciousness and Attention, Perception, and Working Memory​

The formation of visual impressions is achieved primarily by unconscious judgments, the results of which “can never once be elevated to the plane of conscious judgments” and thus “lack the purifying and scrutinizing work of conscious thinking.” As the process is spontaneous and automatic, we are unable to account for just how we arrived at our judgments. Through our eyes, we necessarily perceive things as real, for the results of the unconscious conclusions are interpretations that “are urged on our consciousness (Helmholtz, 1867/1910).

Links of Consciousness, Perception, and Memory by Means of Delta Oscillations of Brain.

Contrasting the properties of conscious and unconscious processes is crucial for understanding how consciousness occurs in the brain. In this chapter, we review the theoretical framework and empirical methods used to delineate and contrast conscious vs. unconscious perception.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781119132363.ch39
​

Several neuropsychological syndromes clearly involve dissociations between perception (mostly vision) and awareness of perception, examples of which are blindsight, covert recognition of faces in prosopagnosia, unconscious perception of neglected stimuli, and implicit reading in alexia.

Although the latent unconscious activity functions more or less like conscious activities do, it lacks awareness (for example, a latent unconscious perception is a non-conscious or a weak form of conscious perception; the dynamic unconscious is psychological, active, and can be different in character from conscious psychological processes).
Perception, conscious and unconscious processes
​

I like McGuins take on perception and consciousness.

We perceive, by our various sense organs, a variety of material objects laid out in space, taking up certain volumes and separated by certain distances. We thus conceive of these perceptual objects as spatial entities; perception informs us directly of their spatiality. But conscious subjects and their mental states are not in this way perceptual objects. McGuin, (Consciousness and Space,
We can be aware of external objects in some unconscious sense, for example, during cases of subliminal perception.
https://iep.utm.edu/consciou/#H3

Sorry for the long list bit each article highlights a different aspect of the differences between perception and consciousness.​

And also your claim that our brain receiving the stimulus and our recognition of it happening at the same time is laughably wrong.

I didn't say it happened at the same time. I said it happens so fast that it seems like the same time. But if you think perception and consciousness is the same thing and happens at the same time then you would have to support the idea of "receiving the stimulus and our recognition of it happening at the same time".

 

[stevevw]

Yes, you are correct in that there are things that we can perceive subconsciously, but that's not what I was talking about. I was saying that it is impossible for us to be conscious of something that we haven't perceived.

OK then I agree. But I thought you said consciousness and perception were the same full stop. I am not sure what you point is now. How does this relate to being able to determine if there is an actual objective reality beyond our perceptions.

By the way we can perceive of things that are not objective like pain, beauty and colors. These are more closely associated with consciousness as they have no physical basis and are purely of Mind.

This logic would allow you to dismiss ANYTHING as correlation and thus say it is invalid.

No it allows for further direct evidence to be considered that can explain those correlation in relation to the nature of what is happening. Correlations are useful is working out behavior but are limited to behavior and behavior doesn't tell us what is actually going on, why correlations should produce subjective experiences.

Again, you're going to have to define "consciousness" before we can start talking about how we can determine if something is conscious or not.

The simple definition for consciousness I find best is 'knowing what it is like to be something'. Nagel wrote a book on it call 'What it is like to be a bat'. Chalmers calls it our 'inner movie' of the world.

We are our minds, so no, we can't get out of them.

So how can we be confident that there is something beyond our Minds. Certainly we cannot get outside our Mind to to check directly that there is some objective world out there. Saying that we can use 3rd person data doesn't seem to work as that requires getting outside our 1st person Minds.

And don't try to change the subject. For a while now we have been discussing the issue of whether there is an objective reality outside of ourselves. But the fact we can't get outside our own minds doesn't mean that we should assume that no objective reality is just as likely as objective reality.

Fair enough. That would mean we cannot verify things either way. That would mean any claim or assertions that there is some objective reality especially when this is used to refute immaterial and transcendent phenomena as being unreal is unjustified because its not actually based on any verifiable science.

Nevertheless I think there is more scientific evidence that there is no objective reality from QM and the experiments I have linked. So if we are to lean one way it is that there is no objective reality. I think this will allow for more progress in science ironically because it doesn't have the restrictions objective and material reality inherently has.

I lean towards a strong reductionism point of view, that consciousness is an emergent property of our brains, so that problem isn't as big an issue for me as it is for you.

Actually since QM findings reductionism has been almost discarded. We now know that reality is not reducible to any physical matter but is waves of potentialities.

Once again you have got it backwards. Reductionism creates the problem because consciousness itself (subjective experience) is irreducible. That is the Hard problem of consciousness material reductionism can't get around. Whereas making consciousness fundamental overcomes these hard problem and other hard problems of the reductive materialist view because if consciousness is fundamental then there is no hard problem because its nature is beyond material reductionism.

That's hilarious. Panpsychism is probably true? Ha! Panpsychism is completely unfalsifiable and offers no predictive power whatsoever.

Didn't you just make an inference that objective reality beyond mind is the most simple explanation without any scientific verification. What's the difference with Panpsychism as being the best simple explanation especially in that it fits the scientific data so well.

If verifiable science is the holy grail of truth then this counts out most ideas science has for interpreting QM like multiverses, string theory, ect as these cannot be falsified either but rather scientists can just keep adding and adjusting things to suit new data.

But there are ideas which can be falsified and make predictions like Integrated Information Theory for consciousness which is similar to Panpsychism.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT), published in the journal BMC Neuroscience, is one of a small class of promising models of consciousness. “IIT is a very mathematical theory,”

IIT backs panpsychism to a great extent because even a proton can possess phi, according to the theory."The theory consists of a very complicated algorithm that, when applied to a detailed mathematical description of a physical system provides information about whether the system is conscious or not, and what it is conscious of,"
https://www.space.com/is-the-universe-conscious

IIT can explain a range of clinical and laboratory findings, makes a number of testable predictions and extrapolates to a number of problematic conditions. The theory holds that consciousness is a fundamental property possessed by physical systems having specific causal properties.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2014.0167

I'm sure you've heard of the Intelligent design movement, and how many people criticise it as being creationism dressed up in an attempt to disguise it. Those who defend ID say that it's not creationism, since they aren't proposing that God is the designer. It could be super intelligent aliens who are responsible for life, they tell us. But this doesn't really solve the problem. It just pushes it back a step. If life on earth required an intelligent designer to get it started, then how did these super intelligent aliens that did the job get started in the first place? Maybe THEY had an intelligent designer. An intelligent designer for the intelligent designers! And then these second power intelligent designers would need intelligent designers of their own, and so on, and so on.

Your argument here falls into the same trap. You say that what we think of as objective reality could be a simulation programmed by super intelligent beings, but what if they too are in a simulation? How many layers of simulation could there be? Infinitely many! Simulations all the way down! And yet, if you say that at some point there would have to be some entities living in some non-programmed, non-simulated reality, why not just cut out all those layers of middle-men and say that WE are those entities?

That is why some scientists propose that its not the physical world that is real at the fundamental level but rather Mind itself. It cannot be reducible in space and time and has no mass. Behind all these thought experiments is Mind itself as the fundamental. Mind created the Simulation, Mind is running the Simulation in that Mind is the only thing that gives the Simulation reality. When we take all this away we are just left with Mind and consciousness.

 

[Kylie]

Thats what the science seems to say which I linked above. That reality is created by conscious observers at the fundemental level.

So, before there were any conscious minds to observe the Earth, the Earth didn't exist? How does that work? The instant a conscious mind evolves that is capable of observing the Earth, the earth pops into existence for the mind to evolve on?

Or not that the 'thing' doesn't exist at all but doesn't exist in the way we perceive it it to exist.

Ah, so then there is SOMET HING that exists without a conscious mind to observe it!

Funny, that's not what you said a moment agho.

Which is it? Reality can't exist without a conscious mind to observe it, or there is SOMETHING there, but we can't ever see what it really is because what we see is filtered through our subjective experiences?

I think we've debated this topic in a number of threads and I have given ample links to evidence and arguments for transcendent like consciousness and Mind being irreducible to the physical. The simple arguments is that transcendentals do not occupy space and time and do not have mass. This is self evident by their nature being qualitative rather then quantitative.

Even Galileo knew this and that is why he separated consciousness from the science method. The Hard Problem of consciousness is another well recognized problem of explaining consciousness through physical mechanisms.

As I said, I lean towards strong reductionism. Hard problem of consciousness - Wikipedia

I think your conflating two different things here and making a false analogy. You assume that color has no physical basis at all.

I never made any such assumption.

But like the brain is the facilitator of consciousness beyond brain the eyes are a facilitator for colors beyond brain. We have a physical basis for color in that we have receptors that are tuned to specific light frequencies.

That is in agreement with what I said.

So people can't just have any color experience but rather experience colors based on specific light frequencies our receptors pickup and any deviation has a physical basis and is very rare. So there will not be just as many people walking around with different color experiences as you claim.

You completely missed my point.

My point was that what you just described can only happen if there is some external objective reality.

Yes the light frequencies picked up by our receptors. But the experience of those light frequencies is another matter which is not reducible to objective processes or causes.

irrelevant. It still shows that there is something in objective reality that is responsible for them. The fact that opur experience of it is a subjective one doesn't change that.

Well theoretical physics is in trouble then because they take seriously their models based on math. Einstein's theory of Relativity is one.

So what? General relativity is an excellent model, but it's still just a model. It isn't reality. If it was, then it would play nice with Quantum Mechanics. But the relativity model and the QM model don't place nicely together. We can get away with it, because we generally don't need to have them both together. But when we do, then we get some serious problems. They can't both be right. One, and possibly both of them, must be wrong. So again, a model of a thing is not the thing itself.

Not sure what your point was. But from the observers point of view it is objective. The light reflection from one angle will be different to another. The shades of color may be different as in the famous dress. Whose position is more accurate than the other to determine objective reality.

Absolute rubbish. If what they see depends on a particular point of view, then it is subjective.

From one point of view, this shape is a circle. It is not objectively a circle. From another point of view, this same shape is a square. It is not objectively a square. From another point of view, this same shape is a triangle. It is not objectively a triangle. If it was objectively a square, a circle and a triangle, it would be all at the same time, and it is not. It is simply something that has the appearance of a square when viewed from a particular direction. That does not make it a square. If we could make such claims, the a cube is a hexagon.

Whereas if objective reality is but a reflection of some deeper non objective reality then it stands to reason that people will sometimes see things differently where the surface reflection is not fixed in any objective way but in superposition.

This makes no sense. If something is objective, it is the same for all people. How can something be objectively true for both of us if what it is built on is not objective?

In other words though counter intuitive there may be more than one objective truth for the same thing being observed. The contingencies of our perspective affect our perceptions, so our view of things is always from some standpoint and never a view-from-nowhere. This seems to fit well with what we find in QM and with Wigner's Friend experiment.

No, they are SUBJECTIVE truths.

Take the ladder paradox. Whether the ladder can fit completely inside the barn or not depends on different SUBJECTIVE points of view, but there is an objective truth. The objective truth is that each observe sees the front of the barn and the back of the barn as they are at different times. The front of the ladder reaches the door at the exit of the barn at time A, and the back of the ladder reaches the door at the entry to the barn at time B. One observer might perceive time A for the exit door and time B for the entry door at the same time because of where they are standing, and another observer might see them at differnt points in time. But that is entirely dependent on their SUBJECTIVE point of view.

The point is even if I did specify what perception was, because you admitted that you don't know what perception exactly is you would not have been in any position to dispute me. That is why I asked what your definition was because it was important as to whether you knew what you were talking about.

I'm sorry, in which post did I make that claim?

That is not saying they are the same. I said consciousness is the experience of what it is like to have those perceptions. Experiencing what it is like is different to the perception itself. A robot or zombie can have sight perception of objects through their mechanical apparatus and not have conscious experience of those objects.

Then you need to define consciousness.

I disagree, we can have perceptions we are not aware of. So not all perceptions involve consciousness. Like subconscious perceptions. We are not aware of them in the first place. When we walk down a street we take in much more than we are consciously aware of which help us navigate things. You obviously have a limited knowledge on this if you think the only perceptions we have are the ones we give attention to. What about blindsight.

You missed my point.

I am not saying all perceptions are conscious. I am saying that all conscious is perceptions. It's an important distinction.

Current evidence suggests that perception becomes conscious at a late-arising stage of focal-attentive processing concerned with information integration and dissemination.
https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1348/000712699161620
​

Some Essential Differences between Consciousness and Attention, Perception, and Working Memory

Some Essential Differences between Consciousness and Attention, Perception, and Working Memory​

The formation of visual impressions is achieved primarily by unconscious judgments, the results of which “can never once be elevated to the plane of conscious judgments” and thus “lack the purifying and scrutinizing work of conscious thinking.” As the process is spontaneous and automatic, we are unable to account for just how we arrived at our judgments. Through our eyes, we necessarily perceive things as real, for the results of the unconscious conclusions are interpretations that “are urged on our consciousness (Helmholtz, 1867/1910).

Links of Consciousness, Perception, and Memory by Means of Delta Oscillations of Brain.

Contrasting the properties of conscious and unconscious processes is crucial for understanding how consciousness occurs in the brain. In this chapter, we review the theoretical framework and empirical methods used to delineate and contrast conscious vs. unconscious perception.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781119132363.ch39
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Several neuropsychological syndromes clearly involve dissociations between perception (mostly vision) and awareness of perception, examples of which are blindsight, covert recognition of faces in prosopagnosia, unconscious perception of neglected stimuli, and implicit reading in alexia.

Although the latent unconscious activity functions more or less like conscious activities do, it lacks awareness (for example, a latent unconscious perception is a non-conscious or a weak form of conscious perception; the dynamic unconscious is psychological, active, and can be different in character from conscious psychological processes).
Perception, conscious and unconscious processes
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I like McGuins take on perception and consciousness.

We perceive, by our various sense organs, a variety of material objects laid out in space, taking up certain volumes and separated by certain distances. We thus conceive of these perceptual objects as spatial entities; perception informs us directly of their spatiality. But conscious subjects and their mental states are not in this way perceptual objects. McGuin, (Consciousness and Space,
We can be aware of external objects in some unconscious sense, for example, during cases of subliminal perception.
https://iep.utm.edu/consciou/#H3

Sorry for the long list bit each article highlights a different aspect of the differences between perception and consciousness.​

I not your first article says, "perception becomes consciousness," which seems to be contradictory to what you've been saying that you can have one without the other. Now you are saying that if you have one, it will become the other.

I didn't say it happened at the same time. I said it happens so fast that it seems like the same time. But if you think perception and consciousness is the same thing and happens at the same time then you would have to support the idea of "receiving the stimulus and our recognition of it happening at the same time".

What on earth gave you the idea that I think they happened at the same time when I went out of my way to show you evidence that they do not happen at the same time?

You don't seem able to follow or understand the points I have been making.

 

[Hans Blaster]

Thats what the science seems to say which I linked above. That reality is created by conscious observers at the fundemental level.

If you are going to claim that reality doesn't exist without conscious observers, then the first 13.3 billion years or so of the history of the Universe did not occur while "reality" existed since the only beings we know of with consciousness are Earth quadrapeds. At this point, there is not reason to take your claims about reality, physics, and consciousness seriously.

 

[stevevw]

So, before there were any conscious minds to observe the Earth, the Earth didn't exist? How does that work? The instant a conscious mind evolves that is capable of observing the Earth, the earth pops into existence for the mind to evolve on?

That's what the interpretation of QM seems to indicate.

Wheeler suggested that reality is created by observers and that: “no phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” and that “we are participants in bringing into being not only the near and here, but the far away and long ago.”

Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have conducted John Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment. "It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it," said Associate Professor Andrew Truscott from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering.
http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/experiment-confirms-quantum-theory-weirdness

As British cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees says "In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it."

Ah, so then there is SOMET HING that exists without a conscious mind to observe it!

Funny, that's not what you said a moment ago.

Which is it? Reality can't exist without a conscious mind to observe it, or there is SOMETHING there, but we can't ever see what it really is because what we see is filtered through our subjective experiences?

I never said the objective world doesn't exist but that it doesn't exist in the way we think it exist with objective reality. It exists as potentialities where conscious observers make it real. There is an objective level to reality but its a surface level reflecting something more fundamental.

As I said, I lean towards strong reductionism. Hard problem of consciousness - Wikipedia

Reductionism especially strong reductionism has now been refuted with QM. At the fundamental level of reality there is nothing to reduce things to. We know that conscious experience is real but cannot be reduced to physical processes. Colin McGinn argument about how reductionism is outdated and just doesn't work when it comes to consciousness and transcendent states.

“Consider a visual experience, E, as of a yellow flash. Associated with E in the cortex is a complex of neural structures and events, N, which does admit of spatial description. N occurs, say, an inch from the back of the head; it extends over some specific area of the cortex; it has some kind of configuration or contour; it is composed of spatial parts that aggregate into a structured whole; it exists in three spatial dimensions; it excludes other neural complexes from its spatial location. N is a regular denizen of space, as much as any other physical entity. But E seems not to have any of these spatial characteristics: it is not located at any specific place; it takes up no particular volume of space; it has no shape; it is not made up of spatially distributed parts; it has no spatial dimensionality; it is not solid. Even to ask for its spatial properties is to commit some sort of category mistake, analogous to asking for the spatial properties of numbers.”– Colin McGuin, (Consciousness and Space),
"http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html"Read"http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/ConsciousnessSpace.html"​

You completely missed my point.

My point was that what you just described can only happen if there is some external objective reality.

Yes but the objective reality that you think is external and out there somewhere is an interface that represents something more fundamental and that is Mind and consciousness. So the ideas about objective reality are mental concepts such as with math and it is how we create that idea of objective reality through our knowledge which changes all the time where we get new realities.

But its Mind and consciousness that is behind this. That is why Mind, consciousness, Information and knowledge are regarded as the fundamental aspects of reality because without them there is no objective reality.

So what? General relativity is an excellent model, but it's still just a model. It isn't reality. If it was, then it would play nice with Quantum Mechanics. But the relativity model and the QM model don't place nicely together. We can get away with it, because we generally don't need to have them both together. But when we do, then we get some serious problems. They can't both be right. One, and possibly both of them, must be wrong. So again, a model of a thing is not the thing itself.

So you acknowledge that the basis for your arguments against the immaterial nature of reality may be wrong and has no support. Then why use it to refute what I am saying.

Absolute rubbish. If what they see depends on a particular point of view, then it is subjective.

From one point of view, this shape is a circle. It is not objectively a circle. From another point of view, this same shape is a square. It is not objectively a square. From another point of view, this same shape is a triangle. It is not objectively a triangle. If it was objectively a square, a circle and a triangle, it would be all at the same time, and it is not. It is simply something that has the appearance of a square when viewed from a particular direction. That does not make it a square. If we could make such claims, the a cube is a hexagon.

The ironic thing with your example is that the idea of a circle, square and triangle are Mind concepts and not real in any physical way. They are only real because of human Mind makes them real.

This makes no sense. If something is objective, it is the same for all people. How can something be objectively true for both of us if what it is built on is not objective?

I know its seems crazy and counterintuitive but this seems to we a well supported aspect about fundamental reality.

A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality
Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted.
“The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them,” say Proietti and co. And yet in the same paper, they undermine this idea, perhaps fatally.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136684/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/

No, they are SUBJECTIVE truths.

Take the ladder paradox. Whether the ladder can fit completely inside the barn or not depends on different SUBJECTIVE points of view, but there is an objective truth. The objective truth is that each observe sees the front of the barn and the back of the barn as they are at different times. The front of the ladder reaches the door at the exit of the barn at time A, and the back of the ladder reaches the door at the entry to the barn at time B. One observer might perceive time A for the exit door and time B for the entry door at the same time because of where they are standing, and another observer might see them at differnt points in time. But that is entirely dependent on their SUBJECTIVE point of view.

I appreciate your examples but this doesn't negate the actual science through experiemnets mentioned above.

I'm sorry, in which post did I make that claim?

In post #285
Stevevw said Why what is your definition of perception. Not all perceptions are conscious, some perceptions are subconscious.

Kylie said I dunno,

Then you need to define consciousness.

I just did, Consciousness is a subjective experience of 'what it is like'

Subjective character is that feature of a conscious state by virtue of which there is something it is like for the subject.
Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory

You missed my point.

I am not saying all perceptions are conscious. I am saying that all conscious is perceptions. It's an important distinction.

But all consciousness isn't perception either. People can have conscious experience like with transcendental meditation without perceiving anything. So not all conscious experience is perception and not all perception is consciousness.

I not your first article says, "perception becomes consciousness," which seems to be contradictory to what you've been saying that you can have one without the other. Now you are saying that if you have one, it will become the other.

If some perceptions become conscious then at one stage they were not conscious. So we can have perceptions without consciousness even for the perceptions that do become conscious. If as the articles say there are essential differences between consciousness and perception then they are not the same.

Perceptions are sense data. A robot can have sense data. But being aware of that sense data and having an experience about sense data is completely different. Its not just about sound waves being measured by some hearing device (sense data) its about a subjective quality experience from that sense data.

What on earth gave you the idea that I think they happened at the same time when I went out of my way to show you evidence that they do not happen at the same time?

You don't seem able to follow or understand the points I have been making.

Lol ironically I just pointed out that I didn't say consciousness and perception happen at the same time but that it seems like they happen at the same time. Maybe its a misunderstanding or miscommunication rather than an inability.

 

[stevevw]

If you are going to claim that reality doesn't exist without conscious observers, then the first 13.3 billion years or so of the history of the Universe did not occur while "reality" existed since the only beings we know of with consciousness are Earth quadrapeds. At this point, there is not reason to take your claims about reality, physics, and consciousness seriously.

Its not a claim but based on scientific experiment and interpretations of QM. As mentioned what may be regarded as objective reality may be something we humans have created. The universe may well have been around for a long time but we don't know it existed in the way we claim it does with objective reality today. It may have existed in superposition as QM seems to imply and it took humans to make it was it is.

The fact is what we thought was reality 100 years ago is a different reality to what we think today and what we will think is objective reality in 100 years will be different again. We are incapable of ever knowing reality based on human ideas. So which is the true reality the past, the future or todays reality or your reality or my reality or the reality that happens to be the dominant narrative.

QM brought epistemology into the equation regarding ontology and this is the conscious being. It is human knowledge that creates reality. The questions we choose to ask or not of reality is the knowledge we gain. And that knowledge can change and create reality itself.

 

[Hans Blaster]

Its not a claim but based on scientific experiment and interpretations of QM. As mentioned what may be regarded as objective reality may be something we humans have created. The universe may well have been around for a long time but we don't know it existed in the way we claim it does with objective reality today. It may have existed in superposition as QM seems to imply and it took humans to make it was it is.

If you claim isn't based on science, then keep it that way -- No QM for you. QM is science not some esoteric philosophy. You use it both ways in this single paragraph. Ugh.

The fact is what we thought was reality 100 years ago is a different reality to what we think today and what we will think is objective reality in 100 years will be different again. We are incapable of ever knowing reality based on human ideas. So which is the true reality the past, the future or todays reality or your reality or my reality or the reality that happens to be the dominant narrative.

Now you are confusing our understanding of reality with reality. If I look out at the trees I can see reality. If we both agree it is there then we can be sure it is reality and not a figment of our minds. What that reality is made of has not changed, but our understanding of it has. I don't get why this is so hard. (Oh, yeah, I guess it's because you think minds create reality. A position that you cannot support with actual science. And people wonder why I slag on philosophy here.)

QM brought epistemology into the equation regarding ontology and this is the conscious being. It is human knowledge that creates reality. The questions we choose to ask or not of reality is the knowledge we gain. And that knowledge can change and create reality itself.

Quantum woo, Deepak, just quantum woo.

 

[durangodawood]

....The dilemma is that these thoughts or information, whether or not they exist only within an individual, are inherently immaterial and therefore cannot be explained under materialism/naturalism. Nobody can weigh a thought or what that thought means, there's nothing by which you can measure it. The worldview cannot account for immateriality within it, nor even the emergence of an immaterial thing from matter.

I view thoughts, beliefs, etc as more actions than things. They are actions the mind does rather than objects. I can see how we intuitively grant them "thing-ness", but strictly speaking, I dont think thats how they work.

 

[Kylie]

That's what the interpretation of QM seems to indicate.

Yeah, good luck with that.

The earth pops into existence right at the very instant a conscious mind evolves on an Earth that hadn't existed at all prior to that point.

Totally convincing.

 

[stevevw]

Yeah, good luck with that.

The earth pops into existence right at the very instant a conscious mind evolves on an Earth that hadn't existed at all prior to that point.

Totally convincing.

Well its backed by scientific experimental evidence. Our observations not only create the present they create the past.

We live in a “participatory universe,” Wheeler suggested, which emerges from the interplay of consciousness and physical reality, the subjective and objective realms.

As a consequence (Heaven 2015): For Wheeler, this meant the universe couldn’t really exist in any physical sense—even in the past—until we measure it. And what we do in the present affects what happened in the past—in principle, all the way back to the origins of the universe. If he is right, then to all intents and purposes the universe didn’t exist until we and other conscious entities started observing it.

Remarkably, Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment (Wheeler 1978)—where a choice made now by an observer can change or edit the past of a photon—has been experimentally confirmed and published in the prestigious journal Science (Jacques et al. 2007):
Our realization of Wheeler’s delayed choice Gedanken Experiment demonstrates beyond any doubt that the behavior of the photon in the interferometer depends on the choice of the observable which is measured, even when that choice is made at a position and a time such that it is separated from the entrance of the photon in the interferometer by a space-like interval [i.e., by a separation where events cannot affect each other].
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-03633-1_14

The same logic seems to be applied to the idea of emergence of consciousness. Consciousness pops into existence the moment the last neuronal connection evolves which is required to bring about consciousness. One neuron short of consciousness and there's no consciousness and yet that one evolved neuron suddenly makes consciousness appear.

If you think this idea is counter intuitive then that's because QM gives counter intuitive interpretations. I find it fascinating that someone can support the idea that there is a multiverse where there may be many versions of you and I and yet balk at the idea that consciousness can create reality.

 

[Kylie]

Well its backed by scientific experimental evidence. Our observations not only create the present they create the past.

We live in a “participatory universe,” Wheeler suggested, which emerges from the interplay of consciousness and physical reality, the subjective and objective realms.

As a consequence (Heaven 2015): For Wheeler, this meant the universe couldn’t really exist in any physical sense—even in the past—until we measure it. And what we do in the present affects what happened in the past—in principle, all the way back to the origins of the universe. If he is right, then to all intents and purposes the universe didn’t exist until we and other conscious entities started observing it.

Remarkably, Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment (Wheeler 1978)—where a choice made now by an observer can change or edit the past of a photon—has been experimentally confirmed and published in the prestigious journal Science (Jacques et al. 2007):
Our realization of Wheeler’s delayed choice Gedanken Experiment demonstrates beyond any doubt that the behavior of the photon in the interferometer depends on the choice of the observable which is measured, even when that choice is made at a position and a time such that it is separated from the entrance of the photon in the interferometer by a space-like interval [i.e., by a separation where events cannot affect each other].
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-03633-1_14

The same logic seems to be applied to the idea of emergence of consciousness. Consciousness pops into existence the moment the last neuronal connection evolves which is required to bring about consciousness. One neuron short of consciousness and there's no consciousness and yet that one evolved neuron suddenly makes consciousness appear.

If you think this idea is counter intuitive then that's because QM gives counter intuitive interpretations. I find it fascinating that someone can support the idea that there is a multiverse where there may be many versions of you and I and yet balk at the idea that consciousness can create reality.

So, how does this work then? The universe has planets popping into existence all the time, just as life forms capable of observing those planets evolve on them? And they rewrite the entire history of the universe to make it look like they were always there?

I'd love to see the science experiment that shows that! All you have is something that shows it happens on the subatomic level, dealing with the behaviour of individual photons. That's a VERY long way to show that animals can observe whole planets into being.

I think it's far more likely that you are misinterpreting what the study says.