When did “consciousness” enter the Universe?

[SelfSim]

Sadly, without convincing evidence, despite a good deal of research.

There's plenty of evidence of a belief though ..

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

If not thinking or feeling, what do soul and spirit do?

Then you get into different systems of belief and it all explodes.
Soul - Wikipedia

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

More beliefs!
Another belief, on top of the original one, doesn't undo either belief.

They don't call it metaphysics for nothing.
You are a materialist. I get that. It is all your 5 senses can tell you. I am an idealist. Especially Vishishtadvaita - Wikipedia


Schrödinger, "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." - Schrodinger

Materialism - Wikipedia

 

[Bradskii]

I think you sell "mind" short. Certainly it is not physical, but it is not simply an abstraction either. In fact, it is an identity, mine and yours. From one perspective is seems simply an emergent property of matter somehow that we really cannot begin to fathom. But here on a religious forum we can speculate about consciousness that does not depend on the material brain. Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Hinduism and many of its schools and even Buddhism make claims, often from experience, that consciousness can exist independent of the material brain.

A position I completely reject.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

A position I completely reject.

I still appreciate you being here on a religious forum.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

What is matter anyway? I think all that exists is an ocean of consciousness and matter is a precipitate.

 

[SelfSim]

They don't call it metaphysics for nothing.
You are a materialist. I get that.

That's how you're interpreting where I'm coming from .. which is, evidently, not a claim based on objective reality.
See, its the process you're using that allows me to dismiss your claims about what I supposedly am, as being nothing more than another belief, there.

It is all your 5 senses can tell you. I am an idealist.

Actually its the only option remaining after I can see that your claim (about me) is not based on any of the known 5 human senses .. aka: its all just one big belief.

Schrödinger, "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." - Schrodinger

Out of date reference in support of your claim - noted.

Materialism - Wikipedia

Thanks. Only of interest where it can be turned to practical use .. (and not endless navel-gazing).

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

That's how you're interpreting where I'm coming from .. which is, evidently, not a claim based on objective reality.

Than share where you are coming from? You certainly sound materialist.

 

[SelfSim]

What is matter anyway?

Simple .. its a testable model.

I think all that exists is an ocean of consciousness and matter is a precipitate.

Unfortunately, how you think about matter, is not of any particular practical use.

 

[SelfSim]

Than share where you are coming from? You certainly sound materialist.

The views I've put forward are deeply rooted in a consistent, practical and minimalist philosophy of science .. one that leaves all the baggage of bloated philosophies behind.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Then you get into different systems of belief and it all explodes.
Soul - Wikipedia

Yes, I know they mean different things to different people; but you said the brain accounts for thinking and feeling, so I asked, assuming you think there is a soul, "If not thinking or feeling, what do soul and spirit do?".

If you can't answer, just say so.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

What is matter anyway? I think all that exists is an ocean of consciousness and matter is a precipitate.

How do you define consciousness? what are its properties? In what sense can it be an 'ocean'?

You make it sound like a substance that has spatial extent, but everything we've discovered suggests that it's a temporal process.

If matter is a precipitate of consciousness, then it is effectively solidified consciousness. But everything we've discovered suggests that matter is emergent from the excitations of mathematically describable quantum fields.

Your suggestion seems to imply that quantum fields are consciousness, but what we know about both suggests they are not congruent at all.

I think you're dressing up hand-wavy mysticism in the language of empirical science to give it an impression of scientific rigour and rationality. This is a common ploy among mystics and woo merchants - probably best avoided if you want to be taken seriously.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

Yes, I know they mean different things to different people; but you said the brain accounts for thinking and feeling, so I asked, assuming you think there is a soul, "If not thinking or feeling, what do soul and spirit do?".

If you can't answer, just say so.

Of course I don't know. But one view is that consciousness is simply pure awareness. Somewhere in the evolution of things it becomes aware of thought and feeling. And even begins to identify with them. That is popular these days with Mindfulness Mediation. Awareness without identification.

 

[Akita Suggagaki]

How do you define consciousness? what are its properties? In what sense can it be an 'ocean'?

You make it sound like a substance that has spatial extent, but everything we've discovered suggests that it's a temporal process.

If matter is a precipitate of consciousness, then it is effectively solidified consciousness. But everything we've discovered suggests that matter is emergent from the excitations of mathematically describable quantum fields.

Your suggestion seems to imply that quantum fields are consciousness, but what we know about both suggests they are not congruent at all.

I think you're dressing up hand-wavy mysticism in the language of empirical science to give it an impression of scientific rigour and rationality. This is a common ploy among mystics and woo merchants - probably best avoided if you want to be taken seriously.

Far be it from me to dress anything up. I read a lot and have become pretty eclectic in forming my word view.

 

[Vap841]

The simplest example is of sense data that enters the brain as a stream of neural spikes, waves of membrane depolarisation. As these enter the sensory processing centres, they generate specific and characteristic patterns of activity that eventually (in a very crude simplification) configure relevant parts of the brain as in a Hebbian network ('neurons that fire together wire together').

IOW, a characteristic pattern of neural connections is stimulated and this strengthens the relevant pathways and (depending on the strength and salience of the stimulation) may trigger new connections. This effectively provides a representation mapping that input stimulus. This is the 'aboutness' or reference to elements of the sensed world. Subsequent stimuli that are similar will reinforce that mapping. When different stimuli activate pathways common to the mappings of other stimuli, those pathways are reinforced, linking those mappings and effectively associating the stimuli they represent.

This is (crudely) how meaning can be represented - when a stimulus activates a set of pathways that in turn activate other mappings (representations or references), those associations constitute its meaning. These associations are 'learned' by being strengthened by repeated activation.

Given the pattern generation & matching described above, the active association pathways for a particular referent can be compared with those for a different referent via logical operations involving expectations (it's a bit complicated) and flagged as corresponding or conflicting, causing activation of the relevant pathways for concepts of right & wrong, true or false, like or unlike, etc., depending on the context. IOW, concepts like true and false can (roughly) be evaluated by comparing patterns of activation of various referents, and represented by patterns of activation with their own associations.

IOW what is 'in the mind' is ongoing patterns of activations representing external (and internal) referents and their associations.

Let’s take your example here and pretend that it consists of 100 critical sections of matter that are necessary for the emergence of consciousness, take any one of these crucial areas away and no consciousness. We have 99 sections in place, so no consciousness. We ADD matter section #100 and consciousness also becomes ADDED to the picture. Physicalism is your model not mine, SHOW me that I’m wrong via empirical detection of this ‘Other’ ADDED part to the picture called consciousness! We can surely empirically detect the added matter, and we can surely empirically detect any patterns or changes of patterns. Explain under a framework of Physicalism how adding material section #100 magically added consciousness to the picture as well. And you can’t just stuff the emergence of phenomenal consciousness underneath the umbrella of the general concept of ‘Emergence’ and claim that they’re all the same basic thing. That would be equivocating the word emergence. Emergence like that of DNA replication is an emergent pattern of biological operations that are purely physical, and the entire process can be fully demonstrated physically.

For some reason you’re convinced that in a model of Physicalism “Adding a certain pattern of mechanics” makes the addition of consciousness an intelligible answer. You’re always making it a point that brain “PATTERNS” cause the addition of consciousness to enter the picture, not just brain matter. But adding a pattern to matter is just adding a pattern to matter, the problem is that consciousness got added too. In a model that says everything is physical, when we have added all 100 physical sections but we still have no consciousness, how is saying “Make it move like this and Wala there’s consciousness” an explanation that connects dots the way that a thorough (physical) scientific explanation usually connects dots? All that you’ve ADDED was a pattern of movement towards your 100 sections of matter. In a model of Physicalism It’s intelligible to explain why a moving fan blade causes a breeze but a static one doesn’t, why a ship in motion causes waves but a docked ship doesn’t. But it would not follow to say “When the yacht goes into motion and reaches full speed the members onboard become conscious and enjoy themselves.”

It doesn’t follow to say that a pain experience is just an abstraction of a brain pattern. It follows that an abstract circle is realized by a donut, a tire, a quarter, and a round pool. If you say that Justice is another way to describe the “Pattern” of one person’s body going through the motions of pulling the physical body of a bully off of the physical body of an innocent victim that would make sense, everything in the example is a physical “Pattern” that explains things in a way that connects dots. But claiming that “Experiencing pain” is just an abstract way of describing “100 sections of matter moving like this” is not an intelligible example of abstraction. Unlike how I could take those 100 sections of matter and cause it to represent an abstract circle by creating a brain matter circle on my desk, that abstract claim would logically follow.

Heaping more & more purely physical complexities on top of the “Matter in motion” doesn’t magically account for the added something called consciousness that is not matter nor motion. Nor does claiming that it’s hard to pin down exactly WHEN consciousness comes into the picture solve anything. WHEN it happens is not the problem for Physicalism, that it happens at all is. And the reason that it doesn’t “Physically” follow is because that which was ADDED to the picture (consciousness) is something that spills outside of the domain of “Physical” description. Trying to bury the explanation underneath 1,000,000,000 interconnected descriptions of purely physical matter & pattern complexities solves nothing. It seems like you’re trying to “Science Talk” your way out of the fact that Physicalism lays on top of a foundation stone of a non sequitur.

Fundamentally, all science needs are observables - things that can be observed or measured. If something can be detected/observed/measured, i.e. has some interaction with the world,

It makes no sense for Dualism to claim that consciousness wouldn’t result in a physical change to the physical world. A non-physical causal influence on a living body would obviously then go ahead and affect the physical world. It’s rigging the game to make a claim that consciousness having an effect on the physical world is proof that consciousness is physical. Of course consciousness will “Lead to” a change to the physical world if Dualism is true.

So the result is that all observables are deemed to be physical; i.e. the result of physical influences

Positing a non-physical causal power on our bodily actions runs into the Problem of Interaction, but the Dualism model will indeed have a physical body influencing the world and therefore this does not deem everything as physical. It COULD be all physical under these rules but it could also not be under these rules.

I would question exactly what is meant by non-physical phenomena being real, and what does 'real' mean in this context. For me, something is real if it has an influence on the world that is, in principle, detectable/measurable/observable (i.e. it is physical), and possibly real if it can reasonably be extrapolated or predicted from our models of what is detectable/measurable/observable.

Dualism meets these qualifications.

Why should that be if mind is not neurological?

Dualism

There’s no philosophical rock that that Physicalism stands on because Dualism faces the problem of interaction. Brains plan action events. A certain area of the cortex are specifically involved in planning a motor movement. “Where those neurons get their input is one of the mysteries of modern neuroscience!” So we also have the problem of input initiations on the other side of the fence. It’s a wash. The problem of interaction for Dualism, and for Physicalism the bizarre problem that in a universe that is said to be a closed system of deterministic causes & effects based on strict laws of motion people would be having input initiations that lead to such bizarre behaviors like hopping on their left leg and singing Bruce Springsteen while clapping, or accidentally stepping off a cliff, or 1,000,000 other goofy and bone headed input initiations that lead to all the crazy & harmful actions of human organisms. This doesn’t resemble any scientific laws of motion that I remember hearing about. Gee it almost seems like people’s minds are exerting input initiations that steer the actions of their physical bodies to make changes in the physical world that have nothing at all to do with strict blind laws of motion inside a universe that’s a closed deterministic system of causes & effects. And it almost seems like these exerted input initiations actually match up to decisions that we make. So yeah Physicalism has it’s own interaction problem too, how to explain the behaviors that we see yet still insist on matter in motion based on strict laws that can’t be violated.

There’s an emergent property called mind. It’s not physical because it runs into logical roadblocks when trying to give physical descriptions to explain it (hence it follows that all of reality can’t be physical), and the emerged mind has causal influence over the body that that mind emerged from.

The claim that mental properties are physically irreducible is another unjustified assertion; objectively, we have no direct evidence of mental properties, so there is effectively nothing reducible.

As I said in a previous post, there are so many claims that get made that are missing an implied “If Physicalism is true” at the end of them. Saying that Physicalism is true, and then saying that such & such isn’t real because we can’t physically reduce it, is arguing in a circle.

My implication was that something can’t be physically reducible if it’s not even physical.

IOW, concepts like true and false can (roughly) be evaluated by comparing patterns of activation of various referents, and represented by patterns of activation with their own associations.

Your fixating on the wrong thing with regards to Intenionality/Aboutness, and true/false questions not being properties of matter. The point is not that it’s some challenge to rework the terms in a more narrow way so that they can now describe brain processes too, the point is that with mental emergence a wider array of properties enter into reality that “Are about” a plethora of things that matter can’t be about, and that mental emergence introduces a plethora of true/false conditions that are nonsensical to apply towards matter. It is impossible to have a thought that is not about something (a thought about Jupiter, being cold, candy, the future, etc). Ok sure we can of course say “It is true that brain activity A is not brain activity B, or it is false that brain activity A is immediately followed by brain activity K, or it is true that patterns of activation of various referents go together, etc.”. I believe that the point of Intentionality had some type of qualifier where it MUST always be about an object in an Aboutness sentence (or something like that).

I think the problem here is that you're reifying 'mind', making it a kind of 'thing' made of 'stuff'.

I would define mind by coming up with a list of its properties. But again here you’re fixating on the wrong thing. At some point an experiential phenomena gets added onto purely physical materials, and the added phenomena falls outside the scope of explanation via physical description alone. You’re going to war with which word I choose to label it. And of course I don’t think it is physical stuff since that’s the position that I’ve been disagreeing with the entire time.

 

[Bradskii]

Let’s take your example here and pretend that it consists of 100 critical sections of matter that are necessary for the emergence of consciousness, take any one of these crucial areas away and no consciousness. We have 99 sections in place, so no consciousness. We ADD matter section #100 and consciousness also becomes ADDED to the picture.

Well, you wrote a lot but there was no need to go past the first three sentences. Which are completely wrong. No-one has suggested that consciousness will switch on at a given point when the final piece of tbe jigsaw is added. In fact, there have been several posts (mine included) pointing out that it must have been a gradual emergence. A gradual evolution of the 'self'.

It's accepted that those unfortunate to suffer from Alzheimers gradually lose their sense of self as the disease progresses. If you could reverse this process then the sense of self would re-emerge.

Do you have a sense of self? Obviously you do. Did you a week or so after you were conceived? Obviously you didn't. So if your claim stands then let me know at what point it switched on and 'you' all of a sudden appeared.

 

[Vap841]

Well, you wrote a lot but there was no need to go past the first three sentences. Which are completely wrong. No-one has suggested that consciousness will switch on at a given point when the final piece of tbe jigsaw is added.

Here I was sort of presenting more of a Hanibal Lecter (on Ray Liotta) hypothetical situation where extraction of any one of 100 segments of the brain would do enough damage to disable (or not allow) consciousness.

Evolution of consciousness wasn’t my focus. However my position would be the same for both consciousness, and any level of proto-consciousness too.

 

[Bradskii]

Here I was sort of presenting more of a Hanibal Lecter (on Ray Liotta) hypothetical situation where extraction of any one of 100 segments of the brain would do enough damage to disable (or not allow) consciousness.

But that's not how it works. The brain shares a lot of the work with different areas. If one area is disabled, another picks up the slack. But if, for example, we did a HAL and started removing specific areas from your brain that only dealt with specific functions then you would gradually lose your sense of self.

It wouldn't switch off at some point. There isn't a part of the brain labelled 'self' that you can excise. It's like a plane doesn't have a specific part that makes it fly. The whole plane will fly even if you start removing bits of the wing or the fuselage or one of the engines. Eventually it will drop out of the sky but if you've just removed a bolt or a pump or some wiring when it does you don't hold up the bolt and say 'ah, so this is what made it fly!'

And like the first plane, which barely made it a few metres, has evolved to one that can fly around the world, so consciousness has evolved.

 

[Vap841]

Honestly, I’ve been dissing the title of the OP since I first entered and have done nothing but talk about the here & now without a mention of the timing that consciousness entered in lol, ok I apologize people I’ll stop. My apologies @dlamberth. You’re right @Bradskii I should stay on topic with the OP

 

[Bradskii]

Honestly, I’ve been dissing the title of the OP since I first entered and have done nothing but talk about the here & now without a mention of the timing that consciousness entered in lol, ok I apologize people I’ll stop. My apologies @dlamberth. You’re right @Bradskii I should stay on topic with the OP

Hey, no worries. Threads wander all over the place....that's what makes them interesting.