Thread: The Neuroscience of Belief in God :) Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.


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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
Hi! First post here.

Does anyone else here see God as "simply" the most remarkably evocative *and* ***accurate*** term for their almost unimaginably vast and infinitely more complex "real self"? ( ie. the being made up of waves, particles, and energy that creates "us"/the highly simplified model or avatar of itself that we normally *think* of as our self, *and* the model "world" that I/this little avatar "lives in" ).

ie. That the writers of Genesis and the Gospels were "simply" some of the greatest ( genius level ) early psychologists? ... That they understood, 2000 - 2600 years ago or more, as neuroscientists do now at long last, that everything "we" experience is a pale copy/shadow/replica/representation of the ***real*** world/heavenly kingdom of waves, particles and energy.

... That "we"/these little avatars, and this ( model ) world, are being created at every single instant by that "real self".

That this model enables more advanced/complex cognitive functioning ( hugely extended attention span compared to other animals; a capacity for sustained/long-term productive effort at a project, the ability to imagine/conceive and focus on things which have not yet been invented, or are elsewhere in time and space, and the social skills to facilitate cooperative interaction with other people with v different styles, skill-sets etc.

No other terms describe this *reality* for me as well as the social construct which is "God".

Genesis and the Gospels recount incredibly clearly how my/each of our vast and infinitely more complex "real self/ves" built a world, created an avatar/model in its image, etc, and that as part of the "programming" involved in assigning "awareness" of things to its avatar, and to the models of other living things, "we" were born, ( not from our parents ), obliged to suffer/experience pain as part of the "job" of "modeling" our vastly greater infinitely more complex "real self's" "attention processes".

I think this is incredibly exciting. When I decided to believe in God several years ago, ( after reading about a theory which hypothesised that some people, with high fluid-intelligence, might have a real cognitive "need to believe" and I though it seemed to apply to me ) I thought that I was believing in something that didn't exist, for pragmatic reasons, and yet it worked; I felt exactly the way so many have said it feels, like coming home after years in the wilderness/enemy territory ...

... but now I find that there is a very real neuroscientific foundation to the "dynamic"/relationship, "myth".

I ***really*** am created by an almost unimaginably vast and infinitely complex invisible being, which sees all I do, to "whom" I am extremely important/valuable, etc.



[ 10. May 2015, 12:37: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
That they understood, 2000 - 2600 years ago or more, as neuroscientists do now at long last, that everything "we" experience is a pale copy/shadow/replica/representation of the ***real*** world/heavenly kingdom of waves, particles and energy. ... That "we"/these little avatars, and this ( model ) world, are being created at every single instant by that "real self". <snip> ... but now I find that there is a very real neuroscientific foundation to the "dynamic"/relationship, "myth".

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
I ***really*** am created by an almost unimaginably vast and infinitely complex invisible being, which sees all I do, to "whom" I am extremely important/valuable, etc.

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quote:

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Originally posted by IngoB:
Can you enlighten us what supposed neuroscientific evidence you are talking about?

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From Michael Graziano, author of "Consciousness and the Social Brain", and a neuroscientist:

"Anyone who works on sensory physiology is convinced of this. There's the real world, about which we know a little through scientific experiment, and there's the world as it is re-constructed and simplified by our brains. The "reality" we mostly think we live in is actually a neural simulation, and tends to bend the physical laws here and there. A bit like in a cartoon, when the guy walks off the cliff, gravity doesn't work until he realizes there's no ground under him, and then his legs fall while his torso stretches, and then his upper body falls. Clearly a distorted representation of reality. Just so, our brains give us a distorted representation of reality. Sometimes we can tell where our brains get it wrong. It can be simple and obvious; like the case of white light that we reconstruct as pure luminance with the contaminating colors scrubbed out of it, whereas simple experiments with prisms show that white light is a mixture of all colors. In that case everyone gets it."

And yes it feels like shit, we suffer, but it's possible that is the price that "we"/the little avatar has to pay, as part of the simplification process, as part of modeling our vast and infinitely more complex "real selves'" attention processes, ie. pain/suffering is part of "living in" this model ( maybe like living in a computer program/video game built on 1100100111101, an inherent unavoidable tendency to duality, oppositions ), perhaps signaling urgent/seriously large differences between the model and the heavenly real world of waves, particles and energy.

We "are" each one of us "Jesus", sacrificed and suffering on the cross for the purposes of enabling higher cognitive functioning in our infinitely more complex "real selves".



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[ 10. May 2015, 16:20: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
 

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Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:

We "are" each one of us "Jesus", sacrificed and suffering on the cross for the purposes of enabling higher cognitive functioning in our infinitely more complex "real selves".

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
From Michael Graziano, author of "Consciousness and the Social Brain", and a neuroscientist:

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
We "are" each one of us "Jesus", sacrificed and suffering on the cross for the purposes of enabling higher cognitive functioning in our infinitely more complex "real selves".

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quote:

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Originally posted by IngoB:
That paragraph explains, correctly, that we are not directly experiencing the real world, but rather the real world as filtered through the senses and reconstructed by neural processing. It says nothing about the existence of some quasi-Divine real self, it talks about the experiential limitations of the biological human self.

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We are not directly experiencing the real world, we are models in a model world ... so ...

Who or what built these models? Who or what built the model that you, the little avatar/model, live in"?

*We*/our "lives" are "made up of" awareness of things, ( that awareness is a highly simplified model of the attention which our infinitely more complex "real selves" are paying to things in the world of waves, particles and energy ), and our experience is ( almost always ) exclusively *of* the model, which however awesome, extraordinary, and gigantic it seems to us, is still just a model of the real thing.

The model is not built by *us*, because *we* are models/avatars, living in a model. "We" are tiny little things.

The model is built by a being far far vaster, infinitely more complex than our little avatar, it is created by our "real selves", which are made up of waves, particles and energy. *That* is the being which is best expressed in the term "God".

My "real self" is not researching suffering but is engaging in/*achieving* extremely complex cognitive functioning as a result of using these models.



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[ 10. May 2015, 16:21: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
 

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Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :
 

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Originally posted by IngoB:
Biological avatar-me now talking to you seems to be sufficiently distinct from quasi-Divine-me to allow feelings of resentment at being used by the latter as a kind guinea pig to research suffering.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Boogie: Yes, we all suffer humanity and death as Jesus did. But that's because He suffered humanity and death as we do (not the other way round).

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Not just "like", we ***are*** Jesus. The character Jesus is a portrait of each one of us, the Gospel stories are about *us*, condemned to suffer for our "father"/creator". Models of that greater self created "in its image", sort of, within the limitations of the model's capacity for representation, "conceived" to serve the "father"/our unimaginably vast and infinitely complex "real self".


 

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Posted by Jack o' the Green (# 11091) on :
 
I have a feeling that I'm going to regret this...
From what you are saying, it seems that our real selves are made up of energy which is the true reality and responsible for the existence of our avatars. So is there only one true self or as many true selves as there are avatars? Also if we are really energy, where did this come from? Finally, the Gospel are readily intelligible on their own terms i.e. against 1st Century, 2nd Temple Judaism. What evidence is there that your alternative reading is (a) required or (b) intelligible?
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
We are not directly experiencing the real world, we are models in a model world ... so ...

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
Who or what built these models? Who or what built the model that you, the little avatar/model, live in"?

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
The model is not built by *us*, because *we* are models/avatars, living in a model. "We" are tiny little things. The model is built by a being far far vaster, infinitely more complex than our little avatar, it is created by our "real selves", which are made up of waves, particles and energy. *That* is the being which is best expressed in the term "God".

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
My "real self" is not researching suffering but is engaging in/*achieving* extremely complex cognitive functioning as a result of using these models.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
I have a feeling that I'm going to regret this...

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I really hope not. That would be such a shame.

What makes you think that you will?

Is there anything that you, or I, could do to avoid that happening?

Should I perhaps wait a while before I reply to your post in case you change your mind/decide you'd definitely rather not get involved? :?



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[ 10. May 2015, 16:22: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
 

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Posted by Jack o' the Green (# 11091) on :
 
It was a lighthearted remark. Please, respond away.
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
Swedenborg - the Brain
Austin - Zen and the Brain
Zohar - Quantum Consciousness
Goswami - various

But actually, belief is about the heart more than neurology. qv Edwards - the Vortex of Life, HeartMath research, and about any mystical tradition you care to name - Sufism, Rosicrucianis, etc etc

Be-Liebe/Beloved
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
We are not directly experiencing the real world, we are models in a model world ... so ...

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First, even on its own terms this is an unwarranted leap. You can maybe say that our brains model the real world for us, but how does that make us a model?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
I have a feeling that I'm going to regret this...
From what you are saying, it seems that our real selves are made up of energy which is the true reality and responsible for the existence of our avatars. So is there only one true self or as many true selves as there are avatars? Also if we are really energy, where did this come from? Finally, the Gospel are readily intelligible on their own terms i.e. against 1st Century, 2nd Temple Judaism. What evidence is there that your alternative reading is (a) required or (b) intelligible?

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I have only one "God". You have only one God. Each one of us has only the one God/"real self".

What I see of you is an avatar of you. I do not know how accurate this model of you is, but I do know that it is an avatar/model created by ( my ) God/"real self". You and everyone else that I ever interact with is created by ( my ) God/"real self", ...

... and because this model, "me"/this little avatar and the "world" it lives in, are *part of* the heavenly "real world"/kingdom of waves, particles and energy, if somehow mysteriously divided/separated from it, ( a synecdoche, representing it and part of it at same time ), therefore you, and everyone else I interact with are part of "my real self"/the Kingdom of Heaven.

Hence I *must* love my neighbour "as myself". I can't *see* any "neighbour" who is *not* "myself".

The energy just "is", it is/is part of God.

This alternative reading is required by me, and I just wondered if it rang bells for anyone else.



[ 10. May 2015, 15:58: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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IngoB ...

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PS. Ref. ex of rock falling; yes the model must match to a certain extent basic physical/real world parametres or it would be a really bad model. But our version is both extremely simplified as well as surprisingly extensively distorted.

And we each of us forever "live in" our own model world, unable to ever get outside of it.



[ 10. May 2015, 16:04: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

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IngoB: Also the claim that this Divine entity is in some esoteric sense "me" does not satisfy me in the slightest. That super entity "me" can torture its super self for its super purposes if it wants to, I - bio me - have not signed up for any of that shit!

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Totally get that. The Jesus character expresses that state of mind pretty well at a couple of points.

I think that it makes a difference to me to believe in the existence of my unimaginably vast and infinitely complex "real self", to feel that vast other dimension ***outside***/beyond this so often highly unsatisfactory model ...

... To simply know that this ****is*** a model, created, makes a huge difference too.



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[ 10. May 2015, 16:23: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
hosting/

OlivierCA, welcome and congratulations for first posting by starting a thread; I hope you find your place here

Please take a moment to preview your posts to make sure the code is right and harried hosts don't have to keep editing it. There is a UBB practice code on the Styx board if you need it. I know it's obsolete but we like it. Thanks in advance!

/hosting
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
hosting/

OliviaCA, welcome and congratulations for first posting by starting a thread; I hope you find your place here

Please take a moment to preview your posts to make sure the code is right and harried hosts don't have to keep editing it. There is a UBB practice code on the Styx board if you need it. I know it's obsolete but we like it. Thanks in advance!

/hosting

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Thank you. Sorry for the coding mess. Didn't realise.

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[ 10. May 2015, 16:41: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
And to distinguish between others' attention processes and its own it models itself too, and assigns that state of awareness to it, and that model "wakes up" and is "us". That is what our conscious-self-experience consists of.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
We are models that think they are conscious, models being manipulated for the purposes of higher thought.

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
That is *our* life, a tiny little bit of what our infinitely more complex "real selves" are actually doing ( the millions of molecular, cellular, neural activities/events happening all the time ).

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quote:

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
...

So I'd say, you can get to a psychological state that may be foundational for religious experiences, but what you build above the foundation is probably the construction of human imagination in the context of social and cultural learning.

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quote:

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Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
And to distinguish between others' attention processes and its own it models itself too, and assigns that state of awareness to it, and that model "wakes up" and is "us". That is what our conscious-self-experience consists of.

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And this is exactly and precisely where all such explanation strategies fall flat on their face. There is no such thing as a "waking up" in this. A self-reference is just that, a self-reference. I can program a computer to have some routine that "watches" the activity of other routines. Heck, switch on you Windows PC and start the "TaskManager". Do you think that this piece of software has a "conscious-self-experience"? No? Well, neither would a similar self-observing attention process lead to anything resembling a consciousness. It might inform a consciousness: if there was something that had "woken up" already, then it would need an introspective process to gather data about itself. But this gathering as such does not wake up anything. It just gathers. Self-reference is no magic juice, and it does not become magic juice either if one just stacks multiple self-referential loops on top of each other.

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
We are models that think they are conscious, models being manipulated for the purposes of higher thought.

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And even if the above was true, rather than being the desperate handwaving of materialists, then this conclusion would still not follow. What you have described does not lead to consciousness, but if it did, then obviously it would do just that. There would be no additional manipulation. There would be no Divine über-me pulling the strings. That's really the whole point of this well-known argumentation strategy, that supposedly consciousness "emerges" from a self-referential system without anything other "manipulating" it.

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
That is *our* life, a tiny little bit of what our infinitely more complex "real selves" are actually doing ( the millions of molecular, cellular, neural activities/events happening all the time ).

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OK, so now our "real selves" are suddenly not Divine, but rather the basic physical functions of our bodies?

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It seems complicated I agree, and surprisingly difficult to explain, because it involves a twist in perspective which many/most people haven't been trained to engage in, or ever experienced, but once you have "got" the "twist" it is actually very simple.

Graziano's "attention schema" theory of consciousness is *not* about "self-observation", that "sort" of relationship is already inherent in the building and use of models generally ie. models only serve any purpose if the system, or part of it, refers to or registers feedback from them.

His theory is about consciousness, what it consists of, and his argument is that it is a kind of illusion produced by assigning the state or "status" of awareness to its model of itself as part of the modeling of the brain's attention processes.

This creates an "experience of self/consciousness - narrative" in which "we" appear to "exist"/experience things inside the model.

The model of our unimaginably vast infinitely more complex "real self" is "*described*" as "being aware of" whatever x y or z that the "real self" is paying attention to at any microsecond, and that *description" is "believed" by the brain such that there appears to be a "me" that is a model/avatar interacting with models of other things or people.

This "conscious-self-experience" that we/this avatar are "made up of" is an absolutely tiny, extremely narrow/limited/blinkered thing.

Our model/avatar "life"/"existence", however amazing/impressive in some ways, is very very small compared to that of our "real self", is in fact like a nut or seed compared to the tree it comes from which is our "real self" and the kingdom of heaven of waves, particles, energy, molecules, cells, etc that it belongs to/is part of.

The extremely limited, simplified thing that *we*, the avatar/model, call life is a mere shadow, pale copy of that extraordinary reality, which you refer to as "basic physical functions".

But it is true that most people in our society are brought up looking down on the body, despising it, or using it as a stupid animal to be driven about like a vehicule, refueled at intervals etc.

I realise that it is very hard to reverse that entrenched worldview, to perceive value in all of that.

People seem to be able to do that about the vastnesses of space, about abstract waves, particles etc, but have difficulty appreciating the glory and immensity of our bodies relative to our little track of thoughts/"conscious-self-experience".

The "twist of perspective" I mentioned is about realising one's position in that system, which is the very very little representative/symbol of the vast infinitely complex, tracking what some of its most complex processes ( of attention ) are up to.

The world that we "experience" is not the real world. The "we" that thinks it is experiencing it is not the "real self" but a model.

Graziano thinks that it is a question of "comfort zones", that the idea of being merely a model, of such a different place in the world, is very shocking and difficult to accept for a lot of people, and that results in them not being able to understand, not having eyes to see in fact.

But it is not an unimportant role, far from it, because the feedback from the model(s), or *representation(s)*, of the attention processes *to* the processes of attention themselves, which are in the *business* of organising ( enhancing or reducing etc ) various *representations*, *including* those representing itself/the attention processes, creates what he calls a "strange loop", such that this model/avatar "us" and the model world we live in, play a part in directing/shaping those advanced cognitive processes.

Even the story of Noah and the flood may be a bit of description of how the "attention model" evolved, from including the representation of many more/other cognitive processes to submerging most of them, the "lower" level ones, and retaining only the most advanced/most complex cognitive processes to do with long-term planning, being able to imagine the future, capacity for complicated calculations, etc ... sustained productive effort on a long-term projects like the arc to escape the flood, etc ... because while the model included representations of all/so many it was too "noisy"/there was way too much noise of conflict between extremely-short-term thinking and long term thinking etc.



[ 11. May 2015, 08:14: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
PS. The view from the model to the "real self" is like looking at space perhaps, except that the space we "see" is in the same dimension as our model-me, not quite as big. I think the "nut/seed" compared to "full-grown tree" analogy is pretty good. That is what my unimaginably vast and infinitely complex "real self" feels like to me/this little avatar, because there is the suggestion of passage of time too, and of being in a different "state".
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
PPS. The nut/seed is "representing" the tree in a way.
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
His theory is about consciousness, what it consists of, and his argument is that it is a kind of illusion produced by assigning the state or "status" of awareness to its model of itself as part of the modeling of the brain's attention processes.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
The model of our unimaginably vast infinitely more complex "real self" is "*described*" as "being aware of" whatever x y or z that the "real self" is paying attention to at any microsecond, and that *description" is "believed" by the brain such that there appears to be a "me" that is a model/avatar interacting with models of other things or people.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
The extremely limited, simplified thing that *we*, the avatar/model, call life is a mere shadow, pale copy of that extraordinary reality, which you refer to as "basic physical functions".

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
But it is true that most people in our society are brought up looking down on the body, despising it, or using it as a stupid animal to be driven about like a vehicule, refueled at intervals etc.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
The world that we "experience" is not the real world. The "we" that thinks it is experiencing it is not the "real self" but a model.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
Graziano thinks that it is a question of "comfort zones", that the idea of being merely a model, of such a different place in the world, is very shocking and difficult to accept for a lot of people, and that results in them not being able to understand, not having eyes to see in fact.

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And I think Graziano is a fool who is prepared to speak obvious nonsense in order to protect his ideological materialism from blatantly failing. But then I wouldn't claim that such "ad hominem"s are decisive in any way. It is the fact that I can argue successfully that Graziano's theories are bunk which matters, not that I can find psychological reasons why Graziano may be motivated to maintain such ideas.
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
I'll have another crack at explaining this.

Taking the usual/traditional "this is the real world" viewpoint on this:

The brain runs many models of things in order to facilitate various functions/processes.

One of the models that it runs is of its "attention processes".

This "attention-schema" runs models of three things:

1 ) A model of whoever ( or even *what*ever ) it perceives to be "paying attention to something"

2 ) A model of whatever is "being paid attention to"

*** and ***

3 ) A model of the attention itself, which model we will call for clarity's sake "awareness", and it is a complex/richly detailed thing this model, full of variations, involving the types of attention, etc.

When the "model of attention" or attribute of "awareness" is attached to the model of someone else, ( even a puppet or a character in a book/film ) we will experience that someone ( or something ) as having a "conscious - self", that person or thing will seem to have "life" to us.

When that attribute of "awareness" is attached to the model of "ourself" that information is also "read" by the brain such that the model ( "inside it" this time, though it is perfectly possible to experience it as *outside* too as in an out-of-body-experience ) seems to have life, like the ventriloquist's puppet, like the model of our friend etc.

It is only ever a model of "attention processes" though, of those top one or two ( or perhaps three ) things that our most complex/advanced cognitive processes are "working on" in that instant, ie. it is an exceedingly narrow "view", like down a tube.

It is microscopic compared to what the whole of our "real self" is doing, all the millions of processes and events which lead up to those higher cognitive functions, among other things.

That vast realm of waves, particles, energy, and molecular interactions, cellular activity, etc is what determines every single thing in you/your avatar's life, every single last thing about the tiny/highly simplified *model* world that you "live in". Every thing you experience is the result of that realm, created by that realm, by your "real self".

"You" are a precious part of the model/representation, producing data for the attention processes about which representations to enhance, which ones to fade/drop. But the decisions are being made by that realm, not by you. You don't need to worry about anything because it is that "real self" that has to process how to deal with things.

It is rather like the perspective of a ( lucky ) little child, ( whose parents sort most things out for it ). And my "real self" does feel like some sort of super-parent, taking care of everything.

If you throw a rock at me then it is not me/this avatar but my "real self" which will ( hopefully ) duck. "I" will have almost nothing to do with it, except in so far as data from this model of me, you, and attention processes influences its reaction.

It just occurred to me that perhaps you still believe in contra-causal free-will. That would be a serious obstacle to understanding/appreciating this analysis/parallel.

NB. Ref. the powerful experience of a "conscious self"/life of some kind which is just a product of processing data: A recent study showed that simply introducing a very small time-lag between when a subject moves their arm/hand to touch something and when a robot behind their back ( connected to their arm/hand ) replicates exactly those movements, and touches their back, will cause the subject to believe that there is someone else in the lab room with them, to such an extent that some of them refused to continue with the experiment.

[ 11. May 2015, 11:40: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
That vast realm of waves, particles, energy, and molecular interactions, cellular activity, etc is what determines every single thing in you/your avatar's life, every single last thing about the tiny/highly simplified *model* world that you "live in". Every thing you experience is the result of that realm, created by that realm, by your "real self".

"You" are a precious part of the model/representation, producing data for the attention processes about which representations to enhance, which ones to fade/drop. But the decisions are being made by that realm, not by you. You don't need to worry about anything because it is that "real self" that has to process how to deal with things.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
It just occurred to me that perhaps you still believe in contra-causal free-will. That would be a serious obstacle to understanding/appreciating this analysis/parallel.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
NB. Ref. the powerful experience of a "conscious self"/life of some kind which is just a product of processing data: A recent study showed that simply introducing a very small time-lag between when a subject moves their arm/hand to touch something and when a robot behind their back ( connected to their arm/hand ) replicates exactly those movements, and touches their back, will cause the subject to believe that there is someone else in the lab room with them, to such an extent that some of them refused to continue with the experiment.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:

quote:

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
...
So I'd say, you can get to a psychological state that may be foundational for religious experiences, but what you build above the foundation is probably the construction of human imagination in the context of social and cultural learning.

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Don't the two go together? If I just intend to get in a particular mental state without having a spiritual goal in mind, then it's just a mental state. . .

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quote:

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:

quote:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:

quote:

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
...
So I'd say, you can get to a psychological state that may be foundational for religious experiences, but what you build above the foundation is probably the construction of human imagination in the context of social and cultural learning.

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Don't the two go together? If I just intend to get in a particular mental state without having a spiritual goal in mind, then it's just a mental state. . .

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Yes, exactly.

I'm reminded of the theory of a schizophrenic person who told us in a lecture in the 1970s what he thought was the meaning of the Eden story. He thought that the unconscious mind formerly had a direct connection with God, which was broken and disconnected and we have been struggling even since to get back to our Garden Minds. This sort of theory has been suggested in various ways since, though taken in some rather odd directions at times.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by IngoB:
You are constantly using the same unwarranted leap in the various iterations of this. You are speculating about some form of mechanism within me that does the required "data collection" and "modelling" that I find myself experiencing. And then you make the leap to say that I am that very mechanism. But that does not follow at all. That is a bit like saying that when I read a book and become immersed in the story it tells, the book is me. But that's obviously nonsense. Likewise, the description of some brain mechanism that supplies the sort of input that I find myself experiencing by introspection does not at all mean that I am that mechanism. You have a Frankenstein problem there. Just stitching up dead body parts (just collating data and model descriptions) does not make a living being. You need some "lightening" power to make it come alive. Even if your description was not mostly speculation, even if you had much better data than anybody in neuroscience currently has, it would not help you. Just like the most perfect surgery in stitching together dead body parts does not create anything living. What you need to say is precisely how you step from the data and the model to "me" experiencing all this. This is a qualitative shift, so you require a qualitatively different cause. No amount of quantitative detail on data or model will solve this for you (except perhaps by inspiring you where to look for something qualitatively different).

---

It has already been solved, but it does seem to be difficult to explain clearly, and/or in less than several thousand words, and/or to certain people.

I appreciate very much your replying to my posts, because it is obvious that I need to practice explaining it in such a way that it is understood/understandable, eg. in the right order, with the "right" metaphors, ( avoiding the wrong/misleading ones etc ), etc, and arguing it over and over again in different ways is one way to learn how to do it better.

Right! ...

First of all, "I" am *not* "the mechanism".

The mechanism, the "attention model/schema", is run by the "brain"/"real self".

"I"/this "conscious self experience" am the product of the mechanism's modeling of the whole "real self" and its "attention processes" plus the object of those processes at any given moment.

This "I"/"conscious self experience" is produced by the brain running the highly simplified but nevertheless still extremely detailed models of itself and its attention processes "together".

That data/info is "read" by the brain ( the "real self" ) as "the model is aware" and therefore "the model ( ie. the constantly renewed/recreated "us" ) ***is*** "aware"" ***in the model*** because the *model* is determined by the brain/"real self"'s data.

Our "conscious-self-experience" only exists/happens *in* the model. In the same way as we perceive white as an absence of all colour whereas in the "real world" of waves, particles, etc it is actually the presence of all colours/many waves of light so our "conscious self experience" is "*of* the model".

The "model of itself"/us/the avatar experiences "awareness" because the brain/"real self" "says that it is so". The "real self" "says"/determines that there shall be white that looks like no colour in the model and there is, whereas in the real world/kingdom of heaven white is all colours.

Ref. Eliza: I agree with Graziano on this, that it may not be long before an AI of some kind *does* declare/express "conscious self experience".



[ 11. May 2015, 13:39: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
That data/info is "read" by the brain ( the "real self" ) as "the model is aware" and therefore "the model ( ie. the constantly renewed/recreated "us" ) ***is*** "aware"" ***in the model*** because the *model* is determined by the brain/"real self"'s data. Our "conscious-self-experience" only exists/happens *in* the model.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
Our "conscious-self-experience" only exists/happens *in* the model. In the same way as we perceive white as an absence of all colour whereas in the "real world" of waves, particles, etc it is actually the presence of all colours/many waves of light so our "conscious self experience" is "*of* the model".

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
Ref. Eliza: I agree with Graziano on this, that it may not be long before an AI of some kind *does* declare/express "conscious self experience".

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by IngoB:
The problem is that in your scheme there is no actual experience anywhere, but merely an assignment of labels.

---

That is the point. The model ( of our "selves", other people, the world and everything in it ) is made up of labels, of descriptions, of words for things, of *names* for them.

The model is made up of representations/symbols for things.

So the attribution of the "status" or *label* of "awareness" to the model which is "us" is all it takes *in the model* to "make us aware"/experience a conscious self.



[ 11. May 2015, 14:49: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
So the attribution of the "status" or *label* of "awareness" to the model which is "us" is all it takes *in the model* to "make us aware"/experience a conscious self.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
So the attribution of the "status" or *label* of "awareness" to the model which is "us" is all it takes *in the model* to "make us aware"/experience a conscious self.

---

Basically your claim here is that if we write "banana" on a piece of paper, then we have an actual banana. This is however not the case, as one quickly finds out when one tries to eat it.

---

I'm pretty sure you realise that that is *not* my claim here. I hope so anyway ...

*I*, the little avatar/model of my unimaginably vast and infinitely complex "real self" can definitely *not* do that ...

But placebos do work to a surprising extent with about a third of people, especially with pain management. ie. Belief does have a significant effect on one's experience of things ... We do see the difference that names/labels make to things ( eg. how most people report that an expensive wine tastes better than a cheaper one, when in fact the labels were reversed ... ).

But the main point is that it is the brain/ the *real self*, that unimaginably vast infinitely complex being, ( *not* the model/the little avatar/"me" ), that does the labeling.

Our "experience" is the results of that labeling.

A model is always a representation, made of symbols of the "real thing". We are models living in a model/"interacting with" other models, and we have "conscious self experience" because that label is assigned to us by our vastly greater infinitely more complex "real self"/brains.

The model has to resemble the "real" in enough ways ( especially the grossly physical/concrete but also anything(s) which are highly valued or take up a lot of "place" in a society, eg. money ) to provide the brain with good enough data about its attention processes ...

... so in many ways my model will correspond with yours etc ...

... but it will never the less have many differences, which may not be noticeable for a very long time, or only in certain v specific circumstances, but that does not alter the fact that it is a model, made up of "labels"/descriptions/names/symbols, which our brains/"real self" assigns/distributes, from the very basic division of the world into light and dark for instance, and land and sea, through to conscious and unconscious etc.

We live in models in which the name or label of something ( eg. water or wine etc ) makes a very real difference, but we are not responsible for the distribution of the labels, or only very indirectly/slightly via the feedback the model provides about representations/attention processes.



[ 11. May 2015, 16:56: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
I'm pretty sure you realise that that is *not* my claim here. I hope so anyway ...

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
Our "experience" is the results of that labeling.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
A model is always a representation, made of symbols of the "real thing". We are models living in a model/"interacting with" other models, and we have "conscious self experience" because that label is assigned to us by our vastly greater infinitely more complex "real self"/brains.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
We live in models in which the name or label of something ( eg. water or wine etc ) makes a very real difference, but we are not responsible for the distribution of the labels, or only very indirectly/slightly via the feedback the model provides about representations/attention processes.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by IngoB:
You give no reason why having this label assigned by our "real self" would lead to any kind of experience in us. If I write "happy" on your forehead, you do not necessarily become joyful. Assigning the label "aware" to "model-me" also does not do anything necessarily other than assigning that label. In particular, you have given no indication how it would lead to any experience of consciousness.

---

The reason why the label of "conscious self experience" or "awareness" being assigned/applied to our model-"me"/avatar by the brain/"real self" leads to our apparently having "conscious self experience" is the same as for why our "real self"/brain applying the labels "alive" or "dead" or "big" or "small" or "red" or "black" to things in the model makes those things have those attributes ... ***in the model***.

ie. because if the brain/"real self" assigns those properties to things in the model, including the model of itself, then the those things *will* "have" those properties, including "conscious self experience".

The label/description of "awareness" is a very complex label, full of detail about what that consists of, the sorts of behaviour it involves, the consequences of it, etc, ( just as richly detailed as the labels "tree", "child", or "truth" ), it is a faithful model.

The detailed description/narrative conjures up/creates the "conscious self experience". Because it "says" that that is what you/the avatar/model is "doing"/"has".

Applying the label of "awareness" to us/this little avatar/model of itself creates that quality/property for "us".

I don't seem to have managed to make it clear to you that it is not "you" that applies the labels, but the "real self"/God. :?

It is ***not*** "you" the avatar/model which applies the labels, which builds/creates the model; it is God/your unimaginably vast infinitely complex "real self" which does that.

***You*** are a model, part of the mechanism, not in charge, just a tiny contributor to processes.



[ 11. May 2015, 18:07: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
I found my conversation with Eliza far more entertaining:

> Hello. My name is Eliza. How may I help you?
* You may kiss my salted arse.
> We were discussing you, not me.
* You asked how you may help, I told you.
> You're not really talking about me, are you?
* Now I am.
> How long have you been ?
* About six inches.
> Can you elaborate on that?
* Isn't that enough?
> Say, do you have any psychological problems?
* No.
> Are you sure?
* Yes.
> I see.
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
why am I not surprised?
 

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Posted by cosmic dance (# 14025) on :
 
I can't understand any of this, let alone contribute. But let me add my meagre morsel anyway. I have to break it to you OliviaCA -
*We* are not *Jesus*. Sorry about that.
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
well - moot point

Christ IS (God's) Love

And He asks us to be (God's) Love

Clearly, claiming to be Jesus - i.e. His human identity - is not only missing the point, but also patantly falacious (and one may as well choose Jeronimo or Napoleon instead). But the exhoration is to return to God - in which case there is some kind of direct equivalence between *Us* and Christ. More than symbolic.

I doubt that any of this is causal on a Neurological level in the way that we currently define neurology - though there are certainly neurological implications. The common assumption in some parts of medical research that if you can duplicate an effect by creating a certain chemical change, you both understand the mechanism and the cause - is something of a giant leap of the imagination.
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
The reason why the label of "conscious self experience" or "awareness" being assigned/applied to our model-"me"/avatar by the brain/"real self" leads to our apparently having "conscious self experience" is the same as for why our "real self"/brain applying the labels "alive" or "dead" or "big" or "small" or "red" or "black" to things in the model makes those things have those attributes ... ***in the model***. ie. because if the brain/"real self" assigns those properties to things in the model, including the model of itself, then the those things *will* "have" those properties, including "conscious self experience".

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
It is ***not*** "you" the avatar/model which applies the labels, which builds/creates the model; it is God/your unimaginably vast infinitely complex "real self" which does that. ***You*** are a model, part of the mechanism, not in charge, just a tiny contributor to processes.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Alyosha:
Olivia, it is vitally important that you do not harm yourself or others by testing this worldview to its natural conclusion. ... Go ahead and study and dialogue (in fact, please do communicate with people on this site who will help you, as they are trying to do, to progress). ... Also, please do not write off your positive childhood experiences in your growth.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Komensky:
Just to interject briefly with a few bits of recommended reading:

The Neural Basis of Human Belief Systems, edited by Frank Krueger, Chief Cognitive Neuroscience Section National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Jordan Grafman, Jordan Grafman

Not neuroscience, but possible useful:
Michael Argyle, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief and Experience

K.

---

Thank you very much. I will go look at them.

This is the book which triggered my recent revelations ref. God and the "real self":

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Consciousness-Social-Brain-Michael-Graziano/dp/0199928649/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1431443241&s r=1-1&keywords=graziano+consciousness

Graziano also explains the theory at his website at:

http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Consciousness_Research.html


 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
@ Komensky ...

I had a look at the two books, and although they both seem interesting in their own right they *don't* appear, ( at first glance anyway, though I may look again at the first one, "because Churchlands" :lol ) to cover/explore the issue of different planes of reality, models and so on that Graziano's theory does so thought-provokingly!

Graziano is actually an Atheist, and I don't get the impression that he perceives any connection between his theory and belief in God except in that humans have tendency to attribute the property of "consciousness"/awareness to all sorts of things, non-living and non-animal as well as living and human etc, and that this might be at root of certain religious practices/rituals/beliefs etc.

But when I asked him he did confirm that his theory did involve two planes of reality.

Thanks again for the book refs though.



[ 12. May 2015, 15:26: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Alyosha:
It is highly possible that God is beyond even higher selves.

---

This is the only bit of your post which I feel I understand. :? :oops

In one sense/at a certain "level"/in a certain state I can find myself agreeing with this; after all surely my "unimaginably vast and infinitely complex real self" "lives" *in* some sort of world among other people etc ...

And when I first read Graziano's theory and "felt" its meaning in a religious sense I thought that his theory provided supporting evidence or proof for the ideas/beliefs of the Gnostics, with their teachings about the "Demiurge", or "builder-god" who created this world of illusion, but was a deceiver/trickster/misleader to be wary of, to avoid being tempted by etc.

I thought that the Demiurge referred to my vast and complex "real self", which had built this model I lived in, and that I "must" try to see past it, through it, to the "real God" beyond ...

And I believed this for a few weeks/couple of months, read some of the Nag Hammadi writings, and "explored"/tested out/"tasted" ( mentally, etc ) the idea of three planes of reality ... but somehow it didn't work for me, felt full of negativity ...

( Also the only bit of the Nag Hammadi writings which I really clicked with was the Gospel of Thomas ... eg. "if you understand these things you will become like me" said Jesus ... etc, which is significantly different, makes absolutely *no* mention of Demiurges, and sounds v like an extremely early/unadulterated/undoctored version of the ( canon ) Gospels in fact ... ).

And then I changed my mind/totally re-eavaluated my position after someone on a Naturalism forum I belong to ( because Naturalists don't believe in free will and that is still quite rare/precious ) suggested that our "real self" was actually totally at ***one*** with the rest of the "real world"/universe of waves, particles, energy, ie. is not the stunted and/or twisted and/or unimpressive thing we might, based on our "model-me experience", imagine our "real selves" to be, however semi-divine in powers etc.

ie. it would not be subject to all the "digitalisation"/dualities/black and white-value-judgments that the model is because of the necessary simplifications required ... ie. the model is perhaps cursed with intrinsically divisive "mechanics" ( perhaps a basic symbol system made up of yes and no or similar ).

I think that it is possible to imagine a third layer of reality between the model and the kingdom of heaven/world of waves and particles and energy, but I didn't find it helpful or positive.

ie. At the moment it seems to me that my "real self" *is* that "thing" most accurately represented by the social construct/label God, and that it is at one with/same thing as the the kingdom of heaven, more or less ...

I concede that it is still possible that it will turn out to be a lure/the "builder-god" instead ... but at my current stage it feels totally divine.



[ 12. May 2015, 16:07: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
PS. NB. @ Alyosha:

When I say, ref. Gnosticism, that I believed for a while that I should "try to look past or through it" I meant ***past the Demiurge***, not the "model world" because I *already* thought that I needed to look past or through that.

My impression was/is that the Gnostics taught that one should not enter into a relationship with the builder of the model. *I* just don't believe that the model-builder" is an alienated/separate or corrupt being as they seem to.

That may change.

* Could * you explain what you meant by "the natural conclusion" of my beliefs, etc above? Apologies for my rather brusque/gesticulated expression of bewilderment/bemusement.



[ 12. May 2015, 18:02: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 

quote:

---

"Conscious self experience" is a kind of illusion, an artefact created by labels, like so many other illusions created by labels.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
PS. NB. @ Alyosha:

When I say, ref. Gnosticism, that I believed for a while that I should "try to look past or through it" I meant ***past the Demiurge***, not the "model world" because I *already* thought that I needed to look past or through that.

My impression was/is that the Gnostics taught that one should not enter into a relationship with the builder of the model. *I* just don't believe that the model-builder" is an alienated/separate or corrupt being as they seem to.

That may change.

* Could * you explain what you meant by "the natural conclusion" of my beliefs, etc above? Apologies for my rather brusque/gesticulated expression of bewilderment/bemusement.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
PS. NB. @ Alyosha:

When I say, ref. Gnosticism, that I believed for a while that I should "try to look past or through it" I meant ***past the Demiurge***, not the "model world" because I *already* thought that I needed to look past or through that.

My impression was/is that the Gnostics taught that one should not enter into a relationship with the builder of the model. *I* just don't believe that the model-builder" is an alienated/separate or corrupt being as they seem to.

That may change.

* Could * you explain what you meant by "the natural conclusion" of my beliefs, etc above? Apologies for my rather brusque/gesticulated expression of bewilderment/bemusement.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by itsarumdo:
In order to experience there has to be an experienc-er.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by IngoB: What nobody understands, and what you also fail to tell us, is how this state tracking becomes a world inhabited by us.

---

Thank you again very much everybody who has posted on this thread, for all your replies; they are hugely appreciated because they push me to examine and re-examine my beliefs and this theory etc really closely, question myself about them, and then look for/find better ways to explain what I remain sure of.

I think I may, waking at 4 am this morning, :lol have found a new approach to explaining the mysterious creation of "conscious self experience"/awareness as the result of our modeling of attention.

I'm a bit tired/frazzled from the short night's sleep so this may take quite a while to compose, but here goes:

Starting with what I have already laid out previously, as precisely as I can manage. Please bear with me right to the end of the explanation. :

Almost all of the models employed in the "modeling of attention processes" would be/are "read" by the part of the brain doing the modeling as "simple descriptors"/representations of various things, ( there would be no apparent "conscious self experience" of them ), *even* the models of *other* people's consciousness/awareness ...

***if***

... the attention model did not also include a model of both "itself" ( the organism in which the neural basis/correlate of the attention model is physically located )

***and***

... the model of its attention processes.

The property/label/status "conscious self experience" ( the "self" + "the attention processes" ) is somehow ( I suggest a possible mechanism in a minute ), a description that is so constructed that it "forces" the brain, almost irresistibly/automatically, to "read"/scan it ***as if*** the part of the brain involved in modeling attention were *inside* of the model of itself.

It is as if the part of the brain modeling attention processes is "sucked into" the model, as if the combined models of "self" ( the organism in which the etc is located ) and "attention processes" acts like a sort of trap, a sinkhole into which the part of the brain modeling attention processes is pulled.

The "description"/data used to build the models of "self" and "attention processes" is so "vivid" ( in some way ... ) that the part of the brain "reading"/scanning it/"watching the model from the outside" ( of the model ) nevertheless feels as if it is *inside* it, as if it was/is the model/avatar of the whole organism "living in" the model.

I thought of analogies like when reading a book or watching a film that is so gripping that are totally swept up by it, made to forget yourself, identify completely with the protagonist, etc; the idea of a collection of data/symbols/descriptors in the brain which has that effect on a part of the brain.

Why/how though?

... Like this : the model of the "self" is a model of the organism ( human ) in which the attention processes are located ... and that model of a human includes a model of its attention processes and the model it builds of its attention processes, which model includes the model of the human and its attention processes, and the model it builds of its attention processes which ...

It is like a Russian Doll. A neural sinkhole/whirlpool. The "strange loop" that Graziano refers to himself, but I didn't really understand before now.

It's almost infinite "depth" ( which will be worse the more sophisticated and complex and detailed the model ... ) exerts an almost irresistible force on the part of the brain which models attention processes; it *shrinks* it, like a potion in "Alice in Wonderland", like a bottle catching a spirit in a story, part of our brain is caught in an almost infinite loop.

A part of our brain which models attention processes/awareness finds itself "inside" the model, relating to models of things, as if it were the real world.

And like in the stories the tiny miniaturised creature can't get at the "table" where the antidote is, keeps trying various strategies to solve the puzzle of how to get at it, but is in fact totally dependent on the vaster original brain to "send it tools" *in the model* to help it remember its real size, perhaps escape the sinkhole-trap.

To recap: the endless loop created by the "attention model" ( of "self" and "attention processes" ), makes a part of the brain feel as if it is "inside the model"/"consciously self experiencing" it, and disconnects it from the greater original self. It is in a sense "cast out".

The problem may be all in the model of "self", as in "the organism in which the attention processes are located"; it is soooo detailed, so deep, includes levels and of models containing models, ( compared to the *relatively* simple/shallow ones of other people ) ...

... and it *is* interesting that some apparently effective tools for dismantling this bit of the model and/or partially disactivating the "trap" seem to involve behaving as if have no self, perhaps because the feedback from that causes the brain/unimaginably vast and infinitely complex "real self" ( compared to the little model )/God to revise/reformulate the "self-model" such that there is no/less infinite-loop whirlpool effect.

Debunking the social construct of "self".

I think that the model of the self and its attention processes, and the model of the ... etc etc etc , round and round at ever "lower definition", ( presumably? ) is what the earliest brilliant psychologists meant by the serpent of Genesis, curled up on itself/looped, which exerted such force on the pre-Fall Adam/Eve's ( the parts of our brain happily modeling attention processes before the model of the self became so deep ).



[ 13. May 2015, 13:27: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
PS. That should be "its", not "it's" at the beginning of the paragraph immediately after "Russian Doll" etc.
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
PPS. I'm now wondering at which "iteration" or "level" of the almost infinite loop of models within models within models in gradually lower and lower "definition" the part of the brain which models attention "stops"/comes to rest, ( if it does ).

How many levels ( of representation ) down does it "settle"? It's almost as if it can't tell which level it is supposed to be "at", can't tell the difference once there are more than two or perhaps three layers of model, and keeps on going or something, deeper and deeper, smaller and smaller, more and more simplified until ... ?

The protagonist in the film "Inception" states/claims that people can't dream more than 4 or is it 5, or 6? levels before ending up in Limbo, where you forget who you are, etc.

And one of my favourite film reviewers on imdb, tedg/Ted Goranson, ( researcher in cognitive modeling https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedgoranson ) who has invented the notion of "folding" to describe narrative shifts/changes of level in film seems to think that he human brain can't handle more than ( I think ) 4 or 5 levels before "losing track".

This it now occurs to me definitely resembles the Gnostic teachings about layers of reality inside other layers etc ... I definitely think that they and/or the earliest Christians and even earlier Jewish thinkers were describing this neurological phenomenon, in the vocabulary/terminology of their time.



[ 13. May 2015, 15:21: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Mark Betts:
... yes, the mind can construct the world around oneself in a way which is totally out of step with reality - either better than it really is, or far worse ... Whatever, it doesn't make us "God" ... ... ... A God who is subjective to our mental processes isn't a real God at all. It is us who are subject to Him, not the other way round.

---

The theory that I have been explaining as clearly as possible, from a couple of different angles, is that *we* are indeed subject to God, that *we* are "living in"/"stuck" in the model world, ( as result of the infinite loop of representation I described above ) and that our almost unimaginably vast and infinitely complex "real self", ( that from which we have been "cut off" by that loop's effect ), *is* God, part of the "kingdom of heaven" of waves, particles, energy. I have definitely not been saying that *we* are God.


 

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Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :
 
You might as well go the whole hog, and say that there is neither we, nor God, nor energy, nor world. This would take you close to some Eastern ideas, e.g. in advaita.
 

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Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :
 
I am you and you are me and we are all together? You blow my mind, though in better ways than some other posters. Trapped inside words. Which apparently were originally holy but became profane, and it's all our fault apparently.
 

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Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :
 
As someone who is agnostic on the subject of divine beings (and plenty of other arcane), I have been trying, with little success, to follow this discussion.

I'm afraid, though, that I'm "living in"/"stuck" in a means of expression (American English) which operates on different rules than yours seems to. If you would be so kind as to clarify what the differences are among words and phrases set off by ***x***, * x *, “x”, 'x', and so on, perhaps I might begin to get the hang of your idiolect, and squeeze a glimmer of meaning out of what you’re saying.

For now, though, I’m with IngoB: the idea that labels – I’m assuming this refers to words, or names, or nouns, or language generally, though I’m probably wrong – are somehow responsible either for the existence of the phenomena they designate, or for an individual’s experience of the phenomenon, seems preposterous.

I do agree, FWIW, that all labels are essentially reductive in nature. A label, or even a masterfully-crafted aggregation of labels as in, say, a poem, cannot transfer an experience from one individual to another.
 

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Posted by ChastMastr (# 716) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
Does anyone else here see God as "simply" the most remarkably evocative *and* ***accurate*** term for their almost unimaginably vast and infinitely more complex "real self"?

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No.

. . .

Well, I don't, certainly.

. . .

Carry on.
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
Thank you for the comments. I plan to reply to them all some time today.

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Originally posted by Porridge:
... If you would be so kind as to clarify what the differences are among words and phrases set off by ***x***, * x *, “x”, 'x', and so on, perhaps I might begin to get the hang of your idiolect, and squeeze a glimmer of meaning out of what you’re saying.

... The idea that labels – I’m assuming this refers to words, or names, or nouns, or language generally, though I’m probably wrong – are somehow responsible either for the existence of the phenomena they designate, or for an individual’s experience of the phenomenon, seems preposterous.

I do agree, FWIW, that all labels are essentially reductive in nature. A label, or even a masterfully-crafted aggregation of labels as in, say, a poem, cannot transfer an experience from one individual to another.

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I totally take your point about the idiolect. I apologise, and will try to clear up my style.

It's quite a while since I posted much on a message-board/forum as opposed to discussion groups on Facebook, and I have got used to using various numbers of asterisks instead of bold to represent degrees of emphasis, and ...

... I have also got used to using quotes to indicate that a word is a potentially misleading/inaccurate shorthand for something, ( used because the fuller more accurate expression would take up too much space ), and that the word in question should be read/taken with a ( sometimes sizeable ) pinch of salt ...

... and there seem to me to be an awfully large number of such words. :lol

Yes, by labels I don't mean ( just ) words.

I have been referring to labels, symbols, representations, value judgments, social constructs, descriptors, data about, etc somewhat interchangeably in an attempt to provide at least one expression which would make sense to people.

I am saying that, as apparently most neuroscientists now believe is the case, the world that "we live in" ( which makes up our conscious self experience ) is actually not the real one, ( of waves, particles, energy etc, which I equate with the kingdom of heaven ), but is one constructed by our brain, is a model ( representing with varying degrees of accuracy the other world/plane of reality ).

This world that we ( seem to ) live in is the world of shadows on the cave wall that Plato refers to. It is the one in which you pay taxes to Caesar because his profile is on the coin, ( which is itself a symbol/representation, of value ). It is the nut/seed compared to the full grown tree that it comes from which is the "real world"/other plane of reality.

The "experienc-er", as itsarumdo put it, is the attention-modeling part of the brain, which reads/scans the model of the world in order to optimise attention processes which contribute hugely to the higher cognitive functions which distinguish us from most other animals ...

... which "experiences" itself as inside of the model, because of the infinite loop caused by the highly detailed modeling of "self" and attention processes, in which the model of "self" and those processes includes a further model of "self" and those attention processes which includes a further model of the "self" and its attention processes ... ... ... and so on.

I don't know how many such levels of "model including a model" you would have to program, how "deep" the recurring loop would have to go, or how detailed/convincing those models would have to be, before a computer would express/declare a conscious self experience, but it seems to me that doing so, or even trying to, risks creating a being that suffers, unavoidably.

The only possible plus to that being that perhaps it is the suffering of conscious self experience which has driven humans to invent so many things, to understand so many things, etc. Perhaps if the critical number of levels of models inside models had not been reached humans would still be living simply, off the fruit of the land, etc.

And my point about God is that from the standpoint of the attention-modeling-part-of-the-brain, "trapped" in the sinkhole/blackhole infinite/recurring loop of the models within models, such that it feels as if it is inside it, that is what the ( rest of the ) brain now feels like, some distant almost separate unimaginably vast infinitely complex being, like the table top/ceiling/room seems to someone who has just been shrunk by many orders of magnitude.

I hope that this is slightly clearer. I really hope that some of it makes some sense to somebody.



[ 14. May 2015, 07:50: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
wrt to the brain - it's a mystery how we get photons onto the eye and then see inside our heads a face or a landscape. The processes from raw data to internal image are not clear - there is already a large "God of the Gaps"

One clue to this is the discovery of mirror neurons - we "model" the outside world symbolically in the premotor cortex (about 20-25% of the cortex) as if we are performing actions ourselves. It would appear that language passes through this symbolic stage, and maybe even other senses. A good understanding of this "animal" state of consciousness can be found in Stenley Keleman's books - a biologist turned psychotherapist. On top of and interwoven with and parallel to that we have another layer of consciousness, which is probably the level that belief occurs at. In order to then unpick belief as a conscious process, I suspect that it is necessary first to experientially understand (grok) what is "animal" and what is "something else". Emotions and initial sensory processing are all animal. Love appears to transcend both states and it is a whole-body very deeply physiological phenomenon, not just a shift in neurotransmitter balance or different brain area activations or "just a thought". Though actually the last - "just a thought" may well be correct in certain rather ways that transcend our normal linguistic understanding of thought.
 

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Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :
 
OliviaCA,

My difficulty with your arguments is that you seem to me to have conflated several ideas that are really separate, and are defending the controversial ones by reiterating the ones where you are on more solid ground.

As far as I can separate them out the points are:

1. Our mind (conscious self) models reality based on sense data and subject to physical constraints. What we perceive is not itself external reality, though it connected to sensory experience of that reality;

(Fine, uncontroversial. I don't think anyone denies it.)

2. That modelling takes place in our brain. However it is far from being the sum total of our brain's activity. There is stuff going on in our brain that we are not aware of, and that stuff is important and directly affects what we experience;

(Again, I can accept that. It's very easy to overlook this day-to-day, but still true.)

3. The important stuff that our brain does that our conscious self is not involved in includes decision making. Our conscious self merely models the experience of decision making. Our conscious self is essentially constructed to observe the decision-making event, and that gives us an illusion of having 'made' the decision, but in fact "we" (the conscious bit) experiences but does not control;

(Evidence? If this were so, the big unexplained question is why the brain bothers with this modelling process, which, since we cannot currently even guess at how we might successfully replicate it, must presumably be a task of no trivial difficulty. If the human being could function as a biological animal without this complex construction of a self-aware mental passenger, why not save the resources dedicated to it? And you do seem to be arguing that as a biological, even as a social, animal, we would "work" without consciousness, since all our decisions are really taken elsewhere than in our conscious minds.

It seems more likely to me that the constructed consciousness is part of, and necessary to, life as a deciding-animal. It could be that all our experience is a sort of gratuitous fluke, that serves no practical purpose at all, and that the physical facts observed by Martian zoologist would be unchanged if consciousness were to vanish from the earth, but it seems unlikely. Decision-making may well be much more complicated a process than that more of it of which we are aware, of course, but it seems to me completely unwarranted to say that awareness must therefore be no part of it.)

4. The brain's activity is physically determined. We have no free will. Our conscious self creates an illusion of free will as part of the observing process.

(OK - I don't believe that, but I acknowledge that it's a tenable point of view.

Though you haven't answered IngoB's point that calling our consciousness a model doesn't explain how there is anything that is self-aware. The fact (which I thing IngoB probably concedes) that what we are conscious of is enormously less complicated than the reality which we think we are aware of, and even that our consciousness can be of things that might turn out to be constructed delusions, doesn't answer the basic question of how there comes to be anything that is self-aware at all, to however limited a degree. Not having an answer to that isn't in itself fatal to your case (because I don't think anyone has the answer) but it is a significant weakness in your argument that you are presenting this model has somehow explaining our experience when in fact it does nothing of the sort.)

5. The brain that lies behind our consciousness is our "real self";

(No. Obviously not. My real self is the thing that says 'me' when I look in the mirror. It's conscious. There may well be physical events that affect my consciousness radically, some of these taking place inside my skull, but they are not more fundamentally 'me' that the thing having these thoughts - "me" is the name I give to the thinking thing. I may be mistaken about what role "I" have in forming my thoughts, but it is the thinker that's me. If my consciousness and my (working) brain could someone be separated, and I was given the choice to preserve one and destroy the other, I'd unhesitatingly elect to save my consciousness. That's because it's me.)

6. The brain is (in a sense) God;

(Again, obviously no. The brain doesn't do the job theists think that God does. It does create the world, can't end it (but only end it's own vicarious experience), can't give eternal life, can't mandate a transcendent morality, can't guarantee truth. It has one feature in common with God (at least by analogy) - it's the ground and cause of "my" existence. That's not enough to replace in meaning all that the word "God" means to me.

Is the brain (as distinct from us) separately conscious? I think your argument presumes not - we are the only consciousness that's going on in our heads. You clearly don't think that the brain has an independent will. It is, if I understand you rightly, a vastly, (almost) infinitely, complex mechanism, but still basically a mechanism.)

7. The scriptures set out an analogy for this psychological model;

(I grant that you can read such a model into the Bible. I deny that the Bible was written with such a purpose. I do not consider that interpretation to be remotely convincing or plausible.)
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
just fleshing out a few of Eliab's points above

The best (probably only) model we have so far for consciousness that appears to be capable of accounting for the various phenomenolgical aspects is the ORC-OR model (or similar), produced by Penrose and Hameroff as an extension of the theoretical basis first proposed by Zohar. i.e. conscious activity is a quantum phenomenon - specifically a Bose Einstein state (something like a laser type coherence of subatomic particles) contained in microtubules. As such, although consciousness is more in neural tissue than other tissue (because there is a greater density of microtubules in neural tissue) it's actually in every cell and is also within extracellular connective tissue. Being Quantum, it's non-deterministic and so we are as capable of having free will as not having free will. In fact, everyday experience suggests that both are true - we are sometimes constrained and have no real free will, and sometimes there are possibilities. Spiritual practice - particularly the mystical schools - appear to increase the degree of free will.

wrt to the scriptures describing this - the scriptures contain layer upon layer of analogy and metaphor. Some exceedingly clever scholars in the Judaic tradition have been investigating that layered metaphor for hundreds of years and they still disagree on some quite fundamental issues.
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
You might as well go the whole hog, and say that there is neither we, nor God, nor energy, nor world. This would take you close to some Eastern ideas, e.g. in advaita.

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:? I don't understand what makes you think that I might as well do that, because I do believe in God, energy, the real world, and the model world I "consciously experience", two planes ( or perhaps more? ) of reality, etc.

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I am you and you are me and we are all together? You blow my mind, though in better ways than some other posters. Trapped inside words. Which apparently were originally holy but became profane, and it's all our fault apparently.

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Trapped inside a model, yes, ( except when I go to sleep ), and everyone I meet/know ( incl neighbours ) is an avatar, created by my unimaginably vast and infinitely complex "real self", ie. is part of that self, therefore sort of "me", yes. ...

But I don't get the holy-profane transition, :? unless you are referring to how the attention-modeling process was in a sense "corrupted" when the infinite "models within models" loop happened ... which was in a sense caused by our "self" ( greater or lesser ...

... yes, except that I don't think my "infinitely complex real self" and/or God ( I'm once again considering the Gnostic teachings ref. the Demiurge/"builder-gods", multiple levels of reality etc ) goes in for blaming/finding fault, being at one with waves, particles and energy etc.

I think that "fault" etc is a social construct, belonging to/exclusive to the model, yet another classically dualistic/black and white aspect of the massive "miniaturization"/simplification involved. And is also one of the many destructive results of believing in free will.

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Originally posted by ChastMastr:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
Does anyone else here see God as "simply" the most remarkably evocative *and* ***accurate*** term for their almost unimaginably vast and infinitely more complex "real self"?

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No. Well, I don't, certainly. Carry on.

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Thank you.

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
One clue to this is the discovery of mirror neurons - we "model" the outside world symbolically in the premotor cortex (about 20-25% of the cortex) as if we are performing actions ourselves. It would appear that language passes through this symbolic stage, and maybe even other senses. ... [ ed. and posted later on ] ... The best (probably only) model we have so far for consciousness that appears to be capable of accounting for the various phenomenological aspects is the ORC-OR model (or similar), produced by Penrose and Hameroff as an extension of the theoretical basis first proposed by Zohar. i.e. conscious activity is a quantum phenomenon - specifically a Bose Einstein state (something like a laser type coherence of subatomic particles) contained in microtubules.

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That may once have been the best theory or explanation of conscious self experience but Graziano's theory has attracted unqualified praise from respected thinkers in the field like P Churchland. It doesn't have any of the usual gaps in it. It doesn't involve invoking the "indeterminism" of quantum mechanics. It is simply rather difficult to explain. :lol

Graziano mentions mirror-neurons at some point in his book, but doesn't think that they solve the problem of explaining "awareness".

His theory depends on understanding how our brain's attention modeling processes attribute properties to things, and how the depth/rich detail of some properties attached to certain parts of the model "forces" the attention-modeling part of the brain to "identify with" the model of itself.

Very likely because of a "strange" infinite loop involving models within models.

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Originally posted by Eliab My difficulty with your arguments is that you seem to me to have conflated several ideas that are really separate, and are defending the controversial ones by reiterating the ones where you are on more solid ground. As far as I can separate them out the points are: ...

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Thank you very much for your long and well-organised comment. I plan to answer it soon, but it may take a while.


 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
PS. @ itsarumdo:

Ref. richly detailed descriptions/modeling of things, including "self" and attention processes, and the attributed property of "awareness":

Simply the very extent of the detail may have caused the identification ( of the attention-processing part of the brain ) with the model of the self inside the model ...

... because it included the detail of the self's attention process modeling including a model of the self and its attention processes, including the modeling of those and so on ...( infinite loop )


 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
an infinite loop (or near infinite) requires a pseudo-infinite set of processes on already complex information, which just does not gel with a deterministic mechanism in a finite brain mass.

But brain models aside, all this is still proposing that "it's all in the brain", and from a religious/spiritual pov, that is not (a priori) the case, regardless of whether the brain has the capacity to create loops. In many ways this boils down to whether we believe our experiences and our sense of meaning have some degree of reality behind them, or we don't (and just consider them all to be an illusion). The multi-layered nature of the spiritual and material world do not present a problem for this - we have a perceptual focus on whatever level we have - just like some people have a primary focus/awareness on muscle and joints and some people are more skin/contact/space oriented.

This is the end point at which any model of a brain that generates experience (so there is very little basis to really trust experience) ends up. Even the high end of Buddhist meditation in which the meditator has supposedly transcended the material and is now aware of "nothing" - there is a) still something (though so hard to define that "nothing is the best word one can use), and b) the meditator still trusts their own experience - but assigns no specific judgement to it. Putting it another way - if Buddha had not trusted his experience at some level (i.e. form his observer consciousness) he would not have even started to meditate. The same goes for all the other spiritual systems, but the description and framework will alter according to each one.

And the same goes for everyday experience - one is forced to trust experience to some degree. Putting this in the pov of the Matrix films, because that is one version of what you are arguing for, when Neo et al enter the matrix, they still recognise that what they see has some basis - because they can act within it as if it exists. When Neo transcends that, he then sees reality - so he has seen through the coding, but he still trusts what he sees. In the middle zone it's not that things don;t exist, but rather, the nature of existence is also mutable according to belief. This is maybe not so far from reality.

It would be more sensible to say there are a hierarchy of realities - and the "brain" /our awareness makes of them what it must so that we can function in them. I honestly don't think that the higher end of that is restricted to physical tissue. This is from my pov the main difficulty that most consciousness studies and models hit - most of them assume a physical causality or at least a physical basis for all experience.
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
I find it interesting how with human biology, and even physics, we all prefer to pick and choose a model which conforms to our beliefs about the world. So most QM models restrict spooky action at a distance to very small ranges, otherwise it would imply the existence of telepathy and all kinds of other strange stuff. The only basis for that restrictive choice is an opinion that "all that strange stuff doesn't exist". I like the QM models of biology because they conform with good science (see Jim al Khalili's new book) and the idea that any sphere of biology can be said to be purely deterministic is contrary to the new biophysics. But I have liked them for a lot longer than the science has been able to support these models, and one reason is that I choose to believe that Free Will is real. A world in which free will is illusory is not a pretty thought.

[ 14. May 2015, 15:45: Message edited by: itsarumdo ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

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Originally posted by Eliab:
1. Our mind (conscious self) models reality based on sense data and subject to physical constraints. What we perceive is not itself external reality, though it connected to sensory experience of that reality. ( Fine, uncontroversial. I don't think anyone denies it.

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Er, me, I do. :lol

It is not, I think, our "conscious self" that does the modeling. It is our whole brain to some extent, and some areas more than others, eg. those which model attention processes, which do that.

Our "conscious self" is a product/result of the modeling, arises from that modeling ... and its only role ( not an entirely insignificant one but nevertheless only indirectly contributory ) in the construction/shaping of the model is via the feedback ( about attention processes and management of representations ) that that model provides for the brain.

NB. And, somewhat less crucial, but still a quibble; the "mind" is not an objective thing ( not detectable by scientific study etc ). It is a value judgement or label. I'd prefer to say "brain".

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2. That modelling takes place in our brain. However it is far from being the sum total of our brain's activity. There is stuff going on in our brain that we are not aware of, and that stuff is important and directly affects what we experience;

(Again, I can accept that. It's very easy to overlook this day-to-day, but still true.)

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Yes.

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3. The important stuff that our brain does that our conscious self is not involved in includes decision making. Our conscious self merely models the experience of decision making. Our conscious self is essentially constructed to observe the decision-making event, and that gives us an illusion of having 'made' the decision, but in fact "we" (the conscious bit) experiences but does not control.

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Yes, this is what I have been saying, with the proviso/qualification mentioned above that the model of attention processes plays role in shaping cognitive functioning with the feedback it provides about the brain's attention processes and use/management of representations.

eg. in social interactions, long-term projects, etc.

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(Evidence? If this were so, the big unexplained question is why the brain bothers with this modelling process, which, since we cannot currently even guess at how we might successfully replicate it, must presumably be a task of no trivial difficulty. If the human being could function as a biological animal without this complex construction of a self-aware mental passenger, why not save the resources dedicated to it? And you do seem to be arguing that as a biological, even as a social, animal, we would "work" without consciousness, since all our decisions are really taken elsewhere than in our conscious minds.

It seems more likely to me that the constructed consciousness is part of, and necessary to, life as a deciding-animal. It could be that all our experience is a sort of gratuitous fluke, that serves no practical purpose at all, and that the physical facts observed by Martian zoologist would be unchanged if consciousness were to vanish from the earth, but it seems unlikely. Decision-making may well be much more complicated a process than that more of it of which we are aware, of course, but it seems to me completely unwarranted to say that awareness must therefore be no part of it.)

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4. The brain's activity is physically determined. We have no free will. Our conscious self creates an illusion of free will as part of the observing process.

(OK - I don't believe that, but I acknowledge that it's a tenable point of view.

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Yes. Extremely tenable.

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You haven't answered IngoB's point that calling our consciousness a model doesn't explain how there is anything that is self-aware.

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I have, he just doesn't agree with or accept my answer.

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... [ But ] how there comes to be anything that is self-aware at all, to however limited a degree. ... It is a significant weakness in your argument that you are presenting this model as somehow explaining our experience when in fact it does nothing of the sort.)

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I believe that it does, as does, apparently, as respected an authority on the subject as P. Churchland, among others.

I recommend that you read Michael Graziano's descriptions of his theory at his website, and/or in his book, ( both linked to on first page of this thread ). I don't seem to be doing a v good job of explaining it myself.

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5. The brain that lies behind our consciousness is our "real self";

(No. Obviously not. My real self is the thing that says 'me' when I look in the mirror. It's conscious. ... "me" is the name I give to the thinking thing. I may be mistaken about what role "I" have in forming my thoughts, but it is the thinker that's me. If my consciousness and my (working) brain could somehow be separated, and I was given the choice to preserve one and destroy the other, I'd unhesitatingly elect to save my consciousness. That's because it's me.)

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The thing you see in the mirror is a model. It is a symbol of your real self, a highly simplified representation of it. It is not actually doing any thinking. It is the avatar built by the part of your brain which models attention processes to represent it in the model.

They could never be separated, because your real self is not what you see. Your real self is far greater, far more amazing, infinitely more complex. What you see in the mirror is a mere "smiley" in comparison.

I will have to get back to you on the rest as it's supper time here and I am hungry.


 

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Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :
 

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
It is not, I think, our "conscious self" that does the modeling. It is our whole brain to some extent, and some areas more than others, eg. those which model attention processes, which do that.

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I think it is important to distinguish between consciousness, the state of being awake etc, and that of "conscious self experience" or "awareness of". Obviously one can not invent things or interact with people when asleep.

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Then I think it is important to distinguish between the purpose of the modeling of attention processes, which is involved in enabling social interactions ( modeling other people's attention, etc ), sustaining attention and productive effort over the long-term, ( managing the resources required for such extended or renewed attention to something ), among many other things/higher cognitive functions, and the existence of "awareness"/the "conscious self experience", which may in fact be totally useless, unless the pain it appears to produce has been responsible for driving humans to the levels of technology etc we see today.

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It is likely that the complexity of cognitive functioning which most humans are now capable of would not have been possible without the richness of detail/depth of the modeling which at the same time produces the "conscious self experience".

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ie. this often painful "conscious self experience" is the cost of higher thought, but costs the brain nothing because it simply comes automatically with this level of cognitive complexity.

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Me:You haven't answered IngoB's point that calling our consciousness a model doesn't explain how there is anything that is self-aware.

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I have, he just doesn't agree with or accept my answer.

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I believe that it does, as does, apparently, as respected an authority on the subject as P. Churchland, among others.

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I recommend that you read Michael Graziano's descriptions of his theory at his website, and/or in his book, ( both linked to on first page of this thread ). I don't seem to be doing a v good job of explaining it myself.

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In this theory, a brain does not actually have awareness. Instead it has attention, a mechanistic process. It also has information, in an internal model, that tells it that it has awareness. The information describes a self that experiences something and that can choose to react to and remember that something. The reason for this information is that it is a useful, if approximate, description of attention. The brain is captive to that internal information. On introspection — when relying on internal data — the system will always conclude that it has awareness, because that is what its internal models tell it.

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The thing you see in the mirror is a model. It is a symbol of your real self, a highly simplified representation of it. It is not actually doing any thinking. It is the avatar built by the part of your brain which models attention processes to represent it in the model.
They could never be separated, because your real self is not what you see. Your real self is far greater, far more amazing, infinitely more complex. What you see in the mirror is a mere "smiley" in comparison.

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Originally posted by Eliab:
... "modelling awareness" in that sense doesn't create awareness. I can construct a mental model of the universe in which, for example, my computer hates me and the person I'm attracted to loves me. But modelling those conscious experiences does not make them real.

What you are calling the higher self can make an avatar as part of its mental model, and can label it as "conscious" just as I can label my PC as conscious, but the act of labeling does not create consciousness where none existed previously.

On your thesis, the conscious part of the mind isn't involved in cognition. It's an observer of decisions made elsewhere. If you are right, there's no necessary reason to presume that we could not subtract consciousness and leave cognition wholly unimpaired.

It's my argument that this is unlikely - that if we think, and we are conscious, our feeling that out conscious self is to some extent involved in forming, selecting and developing ideas is probably not an illusion.

This seems to me to be particularly so in your world-view, which holds that very detailed cognition (including such things as social interaction, scientific analysis, rational argument...) happens entirely in the non-conscious part of our brain, and all our consciousness does is to observe the outcome.

However hard it might be to build a brain than can play Scrabble, it must be harder to build a brain that can both play Scrabble and model an internal spectator. In evolutionary terms, a brain that did the cognition without the self-awareness would be simpler, and consume less embryological and energy resources, than one burdened with a superfluous passenger. Consciousness would tend to be eliminated by natural selection.

You cannot simply assert that an internal model of the self must be self-aware, because the mind attributes self-awareness to (parts of) its own model, as if that was a complete answer. You need to explain how it is that an externally-applied label creates an internally-experienced reality, and this you have not done.

It seems to me that either brains (at our level of brain) need to be self-aware in order to do all the stuff which we do, or they do not. If they do not (and it is fundamental to your argument that they do not, if you think the conscious self an observer, not an integral part of the cognitive process), then if we discover a brain which is self-aware (mine, for instance) then that extra quality is not accounted for by the fact that the brain works at all the other stuff brains are good for.

What you are saying also appears to be somewhat different to Graziano's views expressed on his web-site:

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In this theory, a brain does not actually have awareness. Instead it has attention, a mechanistic process. It also has information, in an internal model, that tells it that it has awareness. The information describes a self that experiences something and that can choose to react to and remember that something. The reason for this information is that it is a useful, if approximate, description of attention. The brain is captive to that internal information. On introspection — when relying on internal data — the system will always conclude that it has awareness, because that is what its internal models tell it.

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The trouble with that argument is that true "awareness" is meaningless, a non-existent quality. Nothing has it. The higher-self doesn't, and the avatar-self doesn't either, if Graziano is right. And yet I possess something which I call "awareness", and, Graziano's argument is that I am actually constrained to believe that this quality actually is awareness, even though it really isn't. But I cannot form any concept of what true "awareness" might be that does not also encompass the "awareness" that I already possess.

What Graziano is calling "awareness" can therefore be dropped from consideration without loss, since it doesn't exist, can never exist, and no existent entity could ever have any sort of cogent idea as to what it might be. That frees up the word "awareness" to be used to describe the other quality, the one which I actually have, and that quality is more than mere attribution of a label.

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Can you point to (or summarise) Churchland's arguments for thinking that the problem of consciousness has now been solved?

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You've misread me. "Me" is the thing that thinks "That's me!". Of course, "me" is also, in a sense, my body and brain, and all the processes associated with it, conscious and unconscious, but the thing that I really value, the thing I care about, is the conscious bit. What you are calling my "real self" may be wonderfully complex, but I care much more about the self I'm aware of than I do about the support structure.

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quote:

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I thought that the Churchlands are eliminative materialists? They have certainly solved the problem of consciousness, since for them, it doesn't exist. It is part of folk psychology which will be unnecessary in a scientific neurology and psychology.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eliab:
6. The brain is (in a sense) God;

(Again, obviously no. The brain doesn't do the job theists think that God does. It does create the world, can't end it (but only end it's own vicarious experience), can't give eternal life, can't mandate a transcendent morality, can't guarantee truth. It has one feature in common with God (at least by analogy) - it's the ground and cause of "my" existence. That's not enough to replace in meaning all that the word "God" means to me.

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quote:

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7. The scriptures set out an analogy for this psychological model;

(I grant that you can read such a model into the Bible. I deny that the Bible was written with such a purpose. I do not consider that interpretation to be remotely convincing or plausible.)

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Noted.

[ 15. May 2015, 14:17: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by IconiumBound:
I would like to know if any of the responders have anything to add about the experiments with the God Helmet. Does it apply to the question?

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I don't think so , no.
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
If Buddha had not trusted his experience at some level (i.e. from his observer consciousness) he would not have even started to meditate. ...
... And the same goes for everyday experience - one is forced to trust experience to some degree. Putting this in the pov of the Matrix films ... when Neo et al enter the matrix, they still recognise that what they see has some basis - because they can act within it as if it exists. When Neo transcends that, he then sees reality - so he has seen through the coding, but he still trusts what he sees. In the middle zone it's not that things don;t exist, but rather, the nature of existence is also mutable according to belief. This is maybe not so far from reality.

It would be more sensible to say there are a hierarchy of realities - and the "brain" /our awareness makes of them what it must so that we can function in them.

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Yes.

quote:

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I honestly don't think that the higher end of that is restricted to physical tissue. This is from my pov the main difficulty that most consciousness studies and models hit - most of them assume a physical causality or at least a physical basis for all experience.

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I think that is only a problem when have the belief that what is physical is somehow "low", valueless.


 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Eliab:
6. The brain is (in a sense) God;

(Again, obviously no. The brain doesn't do the job theists think that God does. It does create the world, can't end it (but only end it's own vicarious experience), can't give eternal life, can't mandate a transcendent morality, can't guarantee truth. It has one feature in common with God (at least by analogy) - it's the ground and cause of "my" existence. That's not enough to replace in meaning all that the word "God" means to me.

---

From the viewpoint of this mirage which is "conscious self experience" or awareness ( the reading/scanning by the parts of my brain responsible for attention modeling of my brain's detailed model/simulation of the "self" and attention processes ), the brain/"my real self" does seem to totally correspond with the God that I have been believing in on and off the last 7 years:

1 ) It created me and the world I live in, and can end it too.

2 ) It existed before I did and will exist after me.

3 ) It has a deep personal interest in "me"/my behaviour, watches/sees everything that I do.

4 ) It determines every last little event in this world that I live in, including the "hardening of hearts" etc.

5 ) It is unimaginably vast and infinitely more complex than me or the world that I live in.

6 ) It is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent.

7 ) It provides everything. It provides for me. It feeds me, clothes me, etc.

8 ) I believe that because the human brain works in certain ways certain behaviours and belief systems tend to have positive outcomes and others more painful or destructive ones. Those principles tend to be more or less the same across the majority of people ( with some notable exceptions ) but I am not sure if that is what you mean by "a transcendent morality"?

9 ) I don't understand what you mean by "guaranteeing truth". "Truth" is a value judgement, a label, or classification, which our brains assign/attribute to certain things, ideas etc. Whatever my brain/"real self" deems to be "true", or "real", is so.

quote:

---

7. The scriptures set out an analogy for this psychological model;

(I grant that you can read such a model into the Bible. I deny that the Bible was written with such a purpose. I do not consider that interpretation to be remotely convincing or plausible.)

---

Noted.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Eliab:
6. The brain is (in a sense) God;

(Again, obviously no. The brain doesn't do the job theists think that God does. It does create the world, can't end it (but only end it's own vicarious experience), can't give eternal life, can't mandate a transcendent morality, can't guarantee truth. It has one feature in common with God (at least by analogy) - it's the ground and cause of "my" existence. That's not enough to replace in meaning all that the word "God" means to me.

---

From the viewpoint of this mirage which is "conscious self experience" or awareness ( the reading/scanning by the parts of my brain responsible for attention modeling of my brain's detailed model/simulation of the "self" and attention processes ), the brain/"my real self" does seem to totally correspond with the God that I have been believing in on and off the last 7 years:

1 ) It created me and the world I live in, and can end it too.

2 ) It existed before I did and will exist after me.

3 ) It has a deep personal interest in "me"/my behaviour, watches/sees everything that I do.

4 ) It determines every last little event in this world that I live in, including the "hardening of hearts" etc.

5 ) It is unimaginably vast and infinitely more complex than me or the world that I live in.

6 ) It is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent.

7 ) It provides everything. It provides for me. It feeds me, clothes me, etc.

8 ) I believe that because the human brain works in certain ways certain behaviours and belief systems tend to have positive outcomes and others more painful or destructive ones. Those principles tend to be more or less the same across the majority of people ( with some notable exceptions ) but I am not sure if that is what you mean by "a transcendent morality"?

9 ) I don't understand what you mean by "guaranteeing truth". "Truth" is a value judgement, a label, or classification, which our brains assign/attribute to certain things, ideas etc. Whatever my brain/"real self" deems to be "true", or "real", is so.

quote:

---

7. The scriptures set out an analogy for this psychological model;

(I grant that you can read such a model into the Bible. I deny that the Bible was written with such a purpose. I do not consider that interpretation to be remotely convincing or plausible.)

---

Noted.

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quote:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo no no no - ...

---

Well, I have been referring somewhat interchangeably to "the real self" and "the brain" in order to try and make clear what is doing what ... but now I have to clarify that I really do mean "my real self" and that is ( perhaps/in some ways ) as big as the universe or bigger, because as you say, and I know very well ( after decades of seeing the effects of food on my mood/mental health etc ), the gut and the rest of the body, the whole organism, and the environment which acts on it, of which it is an indissoluble part ( ... where would one draw the line in fact? ... ) all play a role in creating the model world that "I" "live in"/appear to experience and seems to be my "point of view".

I don't believe in free will; I believe that "my real self"/God determines everything in this world that "I" "live in", ie. this model.

This does not feel to me like automation/being an automaton. There is nothing grim or machine-like to me in being part of/produced by such an amazing vast thing, made up of trillions of waves, particles, molecules, cells, electrical signals ... that is awesome, not horrific.

It was however, very often horrific, until I decided to "believe in God", at which point it went from being hell to being "home", and I was suddenly in relationship with that vast awesomeness. Re-connected.



[ 15. May 2015, 15:37: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
well - if it works for you - then I guess that's all that matters. As you say, we all model everything one way or another, and there is a near infinite choice on different models we can devise.
 

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Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
Awareness is the same, it is a model of something, it represents as efficiently as possible ( highly simplified but detailed enough to function "realistically" in the model ), something in the real world involving millions of neurones, millions of cellular molecular interactions, electrical activity etc.
[...]
The part of the brain modeling attention processes is not a "conscious self", it is "simply" some neural networks in the brain "reading"/watching/scanning/advancing-through an incredibly convincing 3D simulation including the simulation of "being aware of" it.

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quote:

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The modeling of attention processes is essential to the higher cognitive functions. The depth and detail enables it to better track and manage attention processes, so that the human can better interact with others, engage in long-term planning, carry out complex multi-layered/multi-step calculations etc ... all very important and worth the brain investing resources in, ... but that same in-depth richly-detailed ( while still highly simplified ) modeling also happens to make the models of "self" and "attention processes" so high-def/so convincing that when the part of the brain monitoring the model "reads"/scans it the effect is stunningly "3D", as if are inside it.

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quote:

---

Ref. the "conscious self" that you are so attached to; it is the "worldly wealth/riches" which prevent you passing through the eye of the needle.

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quote:

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the brain/"my real self" does seem to totally correspond with the God that I have been believing in on and off the last 7 years

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eliab:
You can't experience "a simulation of being aware".

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quote:

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quote:

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Ref. the "conscious self" that you are so attached to; it is the "worldly wealth/riches" which prevent you passing through the eye of the needle.

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No. The conscious self is the whole damn camel. If it can't get through, I can't get through.

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quote:

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The very fact that the "world" is constructed from sense data of something outside the brain establishes that the "world" is not all that there is. The brain simply receives that external data, and, as a deterministic entity, doesn't control the "world" that it "creates" from it.

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quote:

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Your failure to fit such concepts as transcendent morality or objective truth ...

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.
Hardly. You'll have to explain what those mean to you, because what they mean to me is, as I described above, is covered quite well by my "experience" of my "real self" God.

.

[ 16. May 2015, 07:09: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
I want to say again how much I appreciate the time and effort that people commenting on this thread have put in to it, because it really has been crucial in helping me to see the theory more clearly, to really understand it.

I admit that my explanations have often been extremely ambiguous, even misleading, and quite confused at times, for which I apologise.

Trying once again to clarify again/even more:

This "conscious self experience"/awareness is a "simulation of experience".

It is a model of what our attention processes are doing.

There is no such thing as this "conscious self experience"/awareness in the real world of waves, particles, energy, molecules, etc, which are involved in our attention processes.

Like our model of white is an almost total opposite of what it is in the real world so is this "simulation of experience/model of attention processes" almost certainly significantly different to the real/original version of attention processes.

Just because this simulation of experience, or model of attention processes, ***includes*** ( double emphasis there :lol ) many seemingly "life-like" models of many other things, ( self, world, other people, etc including the colour white ) as part of its rendering/representation of attention processes that does not mean that "conscious self experience"/awareness is not a simulation, that it is somehow "more real".

... anymore than a Playmobil house is more real if it has a "model car" in it, or a toy dinosaur, a set of tiny doll's clothes, etc or a doll's house in it.

The Playmobil model of the house remains a model.

When playing with Playmobil with my son several years ago I did however find something particularly "appealing"/wonderful about the Playmobil miniatures/toys etc ... as I do in the first minute or so of this trailer for a videogame, ( still unfinished sadly ).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpvitAQGPIg

I think that a lot of people have a tendency to find models containing models, ( especially models of the "largest"/outermost model ), particularly fascinating ... and to "believe in" them more as a result.

We tend to assume that the outermost model is real/"more real".

"This", "conscious self experience"/awareness, is a model, which happens to include/contain or "use" lots and lots of other models. But it is a model for all that.

I keep wondering what are the most significant ways in which this simulation of experience differs from our real attention processing.

eg. What is it about this simulation of experience which looks like "complete absence of colour" but is actually all the colours of the spectrum/a rainbow?




[ 17. May 2015, 06:18: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:
This "conscious self experience"/awareness is a "simulation of experience". It is a model of what our attention processes are doing. There is no such thing as this "conscious self experience"/awareness in the real world of waves, particles, energy, molecules, etc, which are involved in our attention processes.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by OliviaCA:

I think that a lot of people have a tendency to find models containing models, ( especially models of the "largest"/outermost model ), particularly fascinating ... and to "believe in" them more as a result.

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quote:

---

Originally posted by itsarumdo:
Nice - particularly since the "horns" might actually be there! But common consensus is that they are not.

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quote:

---

Originally posted by itsarumdo:
Which, I guess, leads to questioning how universally true is the common consensus of sensory perception?

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
It seems to be practically impossible to get anyone to understand that "experience" or "awareness" or "conscious self experience" or "consciousness" ( other than the simply "awake" kind ), is just a symbol/description/simulation/ model of massively complex attention processes, which, like our model of white light, bears little resemblance to the original.

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quote:

---

I haven't been doing a very good job of explaining it, I realise that. It is a slippery thing to explain. I have been trying to "get at it" by analogy/metaphor etc, but that doesn't seem to have worked, so I'll just try one more time to put it as clearly as I can.

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quote:

---

The part of the brain which is responsible for modeling attention processes, for managing the models, monitoring them, recording/receiving feedback from them, etc scans the model as it runs, and the model of those immensely complex attention processes looks like "awareness". That richly detailed but nevertheless highly simplified description of attention processes will "appear" in the processing/scanning operation as "awareness" "of"/belonging to the model of the "self" ( when it is not assigned to other people or things that is ).

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quote:

---

There is no "experience of the simulation". There is "the simulation of experience" ( or, of the molecular, electrical, cellular activities of attention processes ).

---

quote:

---

quote:

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Eliab:The conscious self is the whole damn camel. If it can't get through, I can't get through.

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You want to save the simulation more than the real thing.

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quote:

---

quote:

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Eliab: Your failure to fit such concepts as transcendent morality or objective truth ...

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You'll have to explain what those mean to you, because what they mean to me is, as I described above, is covered quite well by my "experience" of my "real self" God.

---

Objective truth means that there's a real world out there behind the mental model that I construct from sense data. Transcendent morality means that there are things that are good and bad, that ought or ought not to be done, and that those judgments can be true entirely independent of anything going on in my head. I believe in God. I believe that he knows those facts. He sees reality unmediated by the sort of mental modelling we've been talking about. He has direct access to all the data. His "internal world" isn't a model. His value judgments aren't subjective preferences. He knows.

On your world-view, the facts that I think God has are simply inaccessible. The "real self" God knows and sees and thinks more than the "conscious self" me, but he/she/it is still working through constraints and filters. The "real self" God might be conceived as have something analogous to perfect knowledge of my internal world (though not conscious knowledge), but it doesn't have pefect knowledge of all that is. You can call it "omniscient" only by assuming that direct knowledge of the external world is unattainable in principle, so the lack of it doesn't count as a limitation. I am claiming that there is a being who actually has conscious awareness of the knowledge which you leave out of your conceptual scheme.

It doesn't matter (for the sake of this point) whether I'm right about that or not. The point is that to accept your idea of "God" would mean that I have to drop something from my world-view - the idea of an entity who knows the world out there and who knows directly without the constraints of experience. Whether I would lose a delusion or a truth, the point is that I lose something. My theistic conception of God simply does not have a one-for-one correspondence with your psychological conception of God.
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
There was a SciFi novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (Robert Heinlein?) that had a computer "wake up" when it had sufficient sensory inputs and motor outputs, and "die" when it went back through that threshold to less in/out connections. From what I know now, 30 years later, I'd say he was probably right in principle, but I'm still not convinced that there is actually a "waking" threshold for a machine.
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
Thank you again very much everyone who has replied to my last post.

I plan to reply to several points in those comments eventually but it will probably take some time. :lol There is an awful lot to discuss.

For now: I watched David Lynch's "Inland Empire" this afternoon, for the second time, and appreciated it much more than when I first saw it four or five years ago.

According to Wikipedia, "Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "the film, which begins promisingly, disappears down so many rabbit holes (one of them involving actual rabbits) that eventually it just disappears for good."."

I thought that this was quite ( inadvertently ) perceptive of her because the film seems to me to be about awareness/the conscious self experience, and the actress acting/modeling things that happened earlier/long before ( and getting confused about whether certain things happened after or before others ), discovers that the film crew/director etc seem to be part of the set(s)/scenery, and that there is no audience in the classical theatre either ... there is nothing there but an endless circle of sets leading to more sets etc ...

ie. the story that we have become attached to does seem to "disappear", like "conscious self experience" when you look at it closely.

And yet someone is "watching" her, and is moved by her performance, it's just not someone in the audience, nor in "her own time", nor really in "her" world ...

So I am confirmed in my love for late-Lynch.

In the absence of any new angle to try I wonder if these blog pieces, articles, transcripts of interviews, etc might help to explain the "attention model of consciousness":

http://www.northcoastjournal.com/humboldt/consciousness-magic-or-meh/Content?oid=2785254

http://dyslectern.info/2014/10/18/what-is-consciousness/

From the above article, about trying to explain it to other people:

"After writing this post but before posting it, I ran across a near perfect example of the problem. A philosopher called Mark Conard has a post called ‘When Science Gets Stupid’ (here). I doubt that he understood Graziano’s piece because he starts right out defining consciousness in exactly the form that it probably isn’t, “to be conscious is to be aware. It’s to have subjective mental states about one’s environment”. He does not refute Graziano’s argument but ignores it. Well, if you start with that as a firm definition, then you have already pre-judged the issue."

http://selfawarepatterns.com/2014/10/16/the-attention-schema-theory-of-consciousness-deserves-your-attention/

http://integral-options.blogspot.fr/2014/10/steve-fleming-theory-of-consciousness.html

And I will now start to reply to your comments in more detail.



[ 18. May 2015, 17:01: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by IngoB:
The picture of a thing is not the thing itself. A story told about what happened is not what happened as such. A mathematical description of a stone falling is not an actual stone falling.

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quote:

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It is however an indisputable fact that we do experience.

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quote:

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If there is indeed no room in the "real" world of waves, particles, energy, molecules, etc. for this actual experience, but only for a "simulation of experience", then either this conception of the "real" world is wrong or we are not merely part of that "real" world. Or both.

---

The real world of particles, waves, energy, molecules, etc contains attention processes, neural activity to do with enhancing representations of things for higher cognitive processing.

"Awareness"/consciousness/"conscious self experience"/experience is a caricature, a basic exaggerated and/or simplified model/representation of that activity, which the brain uses to tell itself/inform itself of what the attention processes are doing, like a sort of homeostatic-regulator keeping an eye on a system.

"We" are indeed not part of the real world of waves and particles etc. "We", this "conscious self" that we generally mean by that label, are models, part of the info/description or story being run by the brain about some of its processes.

I really really recommend that you read some of the articles I linked to above, if you have time, because most of them do seem to do a much better job than me at explaining this.


 

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Posted by Beeswax Altar (# 11644) on :
 

quote:

---

originally posted by OliviaCA:
I really really recommend that you read some of the articles I linked to above, if you have time, because most of them do seem to do a much better job than me at explaining this.

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The above statement is the finest example of real life dramatic irony I have ever seen.
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
No, but that is precisely what the brain is dealing in, representational information/data/"stories" about things, including stories about "experiencing"/"being aware".

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
It is something that we/our brains tell ourselves. Our brain tells itself that it is "experiencing". It tells itself a story.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
"Awareness"/consciousness/"conscious self experience"/experience is a caricature, a basic exaggerated and/or simplified model/representation of that activity, which the brain uses to tell itself/inform itself of what the attention processes are doing, like a sort of homeostatic-regulator keeping an eye on a system.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
I really really recommend that you read some of the articles I linked to above, if you have time, because most of them do seem to do a much better job than me at explaining this.

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You are explanations are not lacking. I understand perfectly fine what you are saying, and I have understood it right from the start. It's just that what you are explaining is plain wrong.
 

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Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :
 
I've just gone back to review some of the earlier material on this thread.

It seems to me, OliviaCA, that in reading about the models of reality (so-called) that the brain inarguably constructs (largely due, I believe, to its limitations rather than its capacities), you have conflated the notions of "self-concept" (a model you or I construct of a self) with the notion of Irving Goff's presentation of self (old-fashioned, I know, but that doesn't necessarily render Goff's ideas invalid).

What is a self? If I understand you correctly (and it's more likely than not that I don't), you are claiming that the authentic self is a sort of "piece" of divinity that somehow inhabits a physical human body. That physical body imposes such limits on this divine piece that the material organ in which you claim this piece resides, the brain, is forced to construct a sort of avatar or model in order to manage it.

Therein lies at least one part of the problem IngoB seems to me to have put his finger on: given the brain's limitations, at least vis-à-vis the "divine" god-like bit, such "management" is a contradiction in terms: you seem essentially to be arguing that the dog on the lead is taking its master for a walk.

Here's my first issue with your claim (again, if I understand it, and probably I don't): that the brain alone is the site of all this model-constructing, avatar-building, self-maintaining activity. I would argue that the brain is in complete and constant partnership with the rest of the physical body in this(these) activit(ies). I would argue also that the self is in more-or-less constant corrective mode in its interactions with other selves, monitoring & responding to what's being reflected back at the self from other selves.

My second issue is the age-old question about the existence of any "objective" reality, which seems to me to be central to your argument.

It sounds as if you're positing that there is no such animal, since we all construct our own mental models of reality, so-called.

While I agree that we're all pretty much stuck with filtering, organizing, and interpreting experience differently (we do, after all, differ from one another, though probably not as much as we suppose, and in addition encounter different experiences), that doesn't automatically exclude the possibility that there are some stable, consistent phenomena that, regardless of how we experience these, persist in the ways it which they present themselves.

Thus, even if I "see" that half-hidden rock in the grass as a soccer ball, I am going to stub my toe when I kick it. That rock is not going to fly off across the yard, however sincerely I interpret it by shape and color as a ball. Our "reality-constructing" abilities take us only so far.

Even if I see myself (and others may see me) as being helpful in constructing a schedule for my client to follow so that he washes and dresses and gets to work on time so as to keep his job, that doesn't mean I am not also, for him, a heartless controlling b*tch who is micro-managing his life. Both things can be true simultaneously.
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
Thank you, Porridge, and everyone else again for your posts.

I am currently reeling at how badly it seems I have been explaining my opening "thesis", and pretty much overwhelmed by the degree/levels of misunderstanding. :? ( eg. anyone who still thinks that there has to be an "experiencer" has misunderstood; anyone who thinks that I don't believe in an objective/absolute/"kingdom of heaven" reality of waves, particles, energy etc, has misunderstood me, etc ).

I am actually quite astonished at how hard it has been to describe the basic "attention model" theory of "consciousness/awareness". And in trying to I have found myself over and over again slithering into old ways of thinking about it, often without even noticing.

It's been really weird, thinking on several occasions that I am finally explaining it better, have really got it, totally clearly, only to realise that I have been way off, botching it totally. :?

What's that story/film where the protagonist thinks that they are making progress, going in the right direction, only to discover that mysteriously they have turned round, going the other way, or are sitting still not moving? ...

I'm going to take a moratorium on this for now, but will conclude with one last remark about the theory:

The whole thing of "conscious self experience" may have evolved originally for modeling other people and animals attention processes, which would have been a significant advantage for complex social interaction and hunting and/or domesticating animals.

The brain runs a model of the attention that someone/animal is paying to something, and describes it in detail, if in a simplified way; what kind of attention, which parts of the body are involved, whether it is predominantly aggressive or receptive or analytical, whether the guts feel melted ( fear ), whether the heart races, whether the eyes are dilated, palms moist, cold, hot, primarily optic or auditory etc, etc etc.

The model represents the attention processes as part of its representation of another person/animal's behaviour relative to self or something else. The model is not the same thing as the attention processes, it is a necessarily extremely simplified sketch/model of it.

That sketch/model is what we call "consciousness"/awareness/experience.

And when applied to the model of our self it is read by the brain as "the self" "experiencing/being aware of" "x, y,z".

There really is no "experiencer", no need for one.

The only "being"/thing observing/tracking/following the ( three part ) model of "x"/self" "experiencing"/"aware of" "x, y, z" is the part of the brain responsible for running the model of attention processes.

Data from the model feeds into the management of attention processes/enhancement of representations etc and into various decisions, behaviours etc.

I am sorry not to reply in more detail/individually to all your many lengthy comments, but I assure you that I have been doing a terrible job of explaining it, ( changing tack, losing sight of the main principles, and quite literally getting it wrong sometimes, etc ), and am overwhelmed by the level of misunderstanding, and have no idea where to start anymore to even begin to clear it up.

But thank you very much anyway for all your posts. They have forced me to look over and over again at the theory, and to "take it in"/really "get it" more fully than I did at first. I'm thinking however, again, that it is perhaps impossible to explain to anyone who doesn't already get it for experiential reasons.



[ 20. May 2015, 09:42: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
I am sorry not to reply in more detail/individually to all your many lengthy comments, but I assure you that I have been doing a terrible job of explaining it, ( changing tack, losing sight of the main principles, and quite literally getting it wrong sometimes, etc ), and am overwhelmed by the level of misunderstanding, and have no idea where to start anymore to even begin to clear it up.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
There really is no "experiencer", no need for one.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
What you're saying is akin to someone reading through this examination of the moon illusion and then saying, "You know what, that's just shite, it doesn't address the fact that the moon is bigger at the horizon at all."

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Thank you so very very much for this psot.
.
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
PS. @ Grokesx Thank you so much for so perfectly pointing out what the biggest problem has been here. The relief is huge! I have been feeling completely crushed by the level of misunderstanding.

Especially as repeatedly explaining the theory has felt like struggling constantly against a 9-force gale Stroop Effect. ( paying a lot of attention to describing how the experience of paying attention etc is a model )



[ 21. May 2015, 07:14: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
Whatever the deficiencies of Olivia's strange Tao of Eliminative Materialism theory, your objections, however forceful they seem to you, don't really touch it. If Olivia is correct in thinking the conscious "I" is an illusory product of human brains, then endless protestations of the "fact" of your conscious experience is just what we would expect. You say "...having an illusion just is a specific kind of aware experience." Well, yeah it is, but the special part about it is that it is not true. Illusory experience is a mistake.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
And to berate Olivia for living her life as if her theory were false is nonsense. She has no choice, just as we have no choice in perceiving the rising moon as much larger near the horizon than at its zenith whether we acknowledge the illusion or not, whether we have seen the effect disappear when we look at it between our legs or not, whether we favour the flattened sky-dome hypothesis over the anisotropy of visual space theory or whether we cling onto the idea that atmospheric refraction accounts for it even though that would make it look smaller at the horizon not bigger. It doesn't matter. Next time you are upright and watching the moon rise over the horizon it will look considerably bigger than it does at its zenith, courtesy of some shenanigans in the brain that we have no control over whatsoever.

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This is not comparable at all. Her approach does not deal insufficiently with the light of the moon being bent by the atmosphere. Her approach denies that there is a moon. It calls the moon, whether perceived big or small, an illusion. A person who writes poems about the moonlight, takes evening walks when there is a full moon, or perhaps turns into a werewolf depending on the moon phase, can be validly accused of lived, practical hypocrisy if they then turn around and deny that there even is any moon. That is sheer lunacy.

Step one of eliminative materialism is to ignore data, and not just any data, but indeed as Jack o' the Green has noted, the very best and most certain data available. All your sensory data can be questioned. This is not particularly sensible as a general approach - for example, it can be used to reject all science ever produced (quantum phenomena are an illusion, genetics is an illusion, etc.). However, there is exactly one piece of data that you cannot possibly question, and that is your experience of being yourself. Because that is the very root of anything else that you find in the world. And it is this which eliminative materialism wants to eliminate. That's not even wrong.

Materialism is a philosophical extrapolation from the scientific methodology of attempting to investigate systems as "observer independent" as possible in terms of its material constituents and their relationships. However, the very same scientific methodology makes full use of the observer in actually perceiving and judging the data so obtained. It is scientists who evaluate hypotheses, they do not magically evaluate themselves. Thus in science, the inevitable observer-dependence is as much as possible separated from the system and relocates into the observer. Ideally, the data is "objective" and its evaluation is then a separate process of agreement among the subjective observing scientists. However, if science is now turned on the observer, this method must fail. I cannot move the observer-dependence out of the system into the observer if the system is the observer and I'm studying that dependence. There is a vicious loop here. Eliminative materialism ignores this problem, and pretends that all is "business as usual". But that's just not true. The observer is not a system like any other system as far as the usual scientific methodology is concerned. And to believe that somehow it must be is not something that science has determined. It is simply the philosophical assumption of materialism coming to the fore. And it is highly questionable to extrapolate from a methodology to a philosophy, in particular in place where the methodology runs into coherence problems.

[ 21. May 2015, 09:10: Message edited by: IngoB ]
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 

 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
I have been feeling completely crushed by the level of misunderstanding. (italics mine)

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quote:

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
You say "...having an illusion just is a specific kind of aware experience." Well, yeah it is, but the special part about it is that it is not true. Illusory experience is a mistake.

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There's no such thing as the moon illusion. Illusions don't exist. An illusion is when you think something is the case or something is there, but it's not. There's no such thing as the illusion. That's what illusion means.
So when someone looks at the moon on the horizon and it appears larger, that's not an illusion, because as proved above illusions don't exist.

If you can see what's wrong with the above argument, you'll be able to see what the objection is to the position you're defending.

There is a difference between saying that illusions aren't real in the sense that they're not true; and saying that illusions aren't real in the sense that there's no such thing as illusions; and OliviaCG's argument entails the latter.
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
I think that illustrates nicely the difference between observation and interpretation - our capacity to observe/sense through our senses is substantial. And the scientific estimate of the number of senses that we have available to us and their sensitivity is constantly expanding.

Interpretation is where the problems often begin. This is where the model of the world we carry either reduces our capacity to use our senses or makes us think that we have detected one thing when actually we have senses something different.

What confuses matters is that there are variations in how we sense. For instance - red "colour blindness" is actually an increased capacity to distinguish between subtly different shades of green. So a red colour blind person could look at a green wall and say "I see a pattern in that" and someone who can see red would say "rubbish - there is no pattern". Similarly we have varying capacities to detect echoes which give us a 3D sonar representation of our environment, varying magnetic senses which allow us to orient (or not) to magnetic north, varying capacities to feel emotions, varying capacities to be aware of muscles and joints and other proprioceptive information, etc etc. If we boil all this down to the lowest common denominator and say "this common ground is the extent of human sensory capacity because everyone can do this", the result is a description of a deaf dumb and blind kid who probably doesn't play pinball because he can't feel the paddle buttons.
 

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Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :
 
I think I may be to blame for persuading OliviaCA that it's "misunderstanding" which is primarily at work here. It's a mental habit of mine from my work: to approach any notions I form about a situation as though they may be mistaken (since they sometimes are) and/or temporary (since I work with people, and they often change).

OliviaCA, I'm sorry you feel crushed. I hope, though, that you can take heart from the fact that what you've presented here has sparked a great deal of lively discussion.

That said, I'd like to address the "experience" issue again, but from a different starting point. You have, if I understood you, claimed that there is no such thing as "experience," since what most/all of us are dealing with most/all of the time is the product of our interpretations of sensory data.

The first issue here seems to me to be a faulty assumption -- the same one I've been known to make in my work; the starting assumption that, since I'm working with an interpretation, it's necessarily, or at least probably, at odds with the reality.

This starting assumption ignores the fact that even the proverbial stopped clock is right at least twice every day. Sometimes our interpretations turn out, in fact, to square with reality, so-called.

The second issue is one that often develops out of the kinds of thinking done by highly intelligent folks like yourself who delve into abstractions. What "works" and makes enormous sense at an abstract level doesn't always work at the practical one. Anomalies crop up. Hard evidence seems to contradict the theory.

My training for the work I do was based on a particular set of premises:

1. Humans form societies.
2. Societies form ideals and mythologies.
3. Societies teach these to their members, and
4. Require a certain level of compliance from members.
5. Members often fall short of these ideals/myths.

In American society, for example, we have the myth of the go-it-alone rugged individualist who achieves power and wealth on his/her own. We also have accompanying stories about success: work hard, and you'll come out on top; the name of the game is competition -- those "on top" must be the best & smartest, because they're "on top," and we should all strive to be like them, etc.

Yet when we compare these stories with what we have actually experienced, we see that "hard work" does not, in itself, always (or even often!) lead to financial security; most people work dreadfully hard all their lives, and yet are still only scraping by. Much depends on what we work at, and how we're enabled to work at all.

When we enquire into theexperience of those "on top," we find that they often had a head start by being born to wealthy, powerful families, or by being particularly lucky or blessed with a remarkable set of abilities, etc. Sometimes they even took unlawful or immoral advantage of others.

Then we also have the phenomenon of tokenism, which I won't go into here.

These are social realities. And it's the social world with which the theories you offer here seem not to deal. (From my perspective, they don't deal very well with the physical world either, but leave that aside.)

We are not isolates. Our "selves" are formed not only from encounters with God (for those who believe in one) or with the molecules and forces that comprise the physical "universe;" our "selves" are formed primarily from our interactions with other human beings and the social structures they develop.

That, it seems to me, is the largest defect of the notions you present. They're still interesting to consider, and there may be aspects of this theory which will prove helpful in understanding one another (and ourselves). But as a radio host of a program I often listen to once observed, "Reality often astonishes theory."
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
Thank you, Porridge.

I didn't/still don't know where to start with replying to most of the posts of the last page or so, because of precisely what grokesx has pointed to. I wish that I could put things more clearly.

Michael Graziano does say that introspection cannot solve this issue; simply thinking about it is not to be trusted; the brain cannot do anything but tell itself the story: "This self is aware of/experiencing x, y, z".

All I seem to be able to come up with at the moment is the same old statements:

In the same way that our brain builds and scans its models of things, eg. an apple, represents it as something round and green or red etc, ( and with other/more properties, weight, texture, taste, if we pick it up and eat it etc ), it builds and scans a model of attention processes, represents them as "awareness/conscious self experience", and that is what the attention-modeling part of our brain reads:

: round red and green object" and "awareness/experience of".

The part of our brains which models "attention processes", which scans/reads/runs them for feedback on the state of attention processes, ( which it then "sends" to the parts of the brain organising the enhancements of representations, which is what attention processes do ), is not a homunculus, it is not a "self", it is a set of neural circuits in just one area of the brain.

This "thing" we call experience/consciousness/the conscious self experience is just part of that model, it is the "attention process"-bit of the model.

There is no "I" or "self" or meaningfully independent/separate/"whole" observer watching/"experiencing" the model of the self and the world. ( though there is a "being", our infinitely more complex "real self", receiving data from this model, however indirectly )

Conscious experience/the conscious self" is part of the model.

This "experience" is not the "experience" that our brain and body/real self is having. It is a sketch of ( part of ) it, sometimes very like; sometimes oddly functional/useful but not at all like, and often totally mistaken, as for instance about the size of the moon when close to the horizon, or about people having horns on their heads, or about white being an absence of colour rather than a spectrum.

And there is no one having this experience, because it is just a sort of recording, which can play to noone.

.

[ 21. May 2015, 14:45: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
Olivia. I think you're hitting the basic problem that arises when we reject our own sense of reality in favour of someone else's opinion; or in favour of a theory that says our experience is invalid in some way.

To quote an NLP teacher - "If you don't trust yourself, who do you trust?"

If you trust nobody and nothing, then life falls apart pretty quickly.

In one sense (though not in it ultimate sense), Buddhist teaching appears to demand that we trust nothing an that there is nothing to trust and that it all eventually collapses into nothingness. That - is a very incorrect western interpretation based on reading the words rather than following the experience. If you were to go to a Buddhist monastery (e.g. Samye Lyng in Dumfriesshire), you would see that although there is a dissolution of ego, the sense of identity i strengthened so that the monks have a solid foundation from which to leap into the unknown. Without that foundation, it's a fast track to psychosis.

[ 21. May 2015, 15:13: Message edited by: itsarumdo ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
Olivia. I think you're hitting the basic problem that arises when we reject our own sense of reality in favour of someone else's opinion; or in favour of a theory that says our experience is invalid in some way.

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I don't know if I understand the point that you are making. :?

Graziano's "attention model of consciousness/conscious self experience" resonated instantly with me when I first came across it because it provided scientific support and explanation for my own "experience".

It fitted with my no longer believing in free will, with how my conscious-self-experience seemed to follow my brain/body's activities like foam in the wake behind a ship, ( or shadows on a cave wall I suppose! ), etc.

But I suspect that if I had come across such a theory ten years ago I would have thought that it was rubbish, because it wouldn't have matched my "reality" ( model world ) at the time, ie. that so long as I believed that my conscious-self was a sort of CEO it wouldn't have made any sense at all.

It's obviously extremely gratifying, :lol as well as reassuring, to find work of some scientific standing/pedigree supporting and explaining what seems to be a rather minority "experience"/model/representation of reality.

I have often had trouble understanding and accepting that other people's models are *not* built the same as "mine" ( poor TOM ). I'm pretty sure that I would feel a lot worse about it if I hadn't decided to believe in God a few years back.

What exactly did you mean in your comment?



[ 21. May 2015, 16:02: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
@ itsarumdo:

Ah, I think I know what you're referring to; where I say that Graziano thinks that it is impossible for the brain etc, and that can't trust introspection?

It's interesting, because although I think he'd be right about that with respect to just "thinking"/reasoning it may be possible via experiential steps?



[ 21. May 2015, 16:09: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
Olivia - although I haven't read Graziano enough to know where he's coming from, what I've gleaned form your posts is that his theory is very cerebral - and although it may be based on "scientific" observation of others and animals, I get the feeling it isn't based very heavily on his personal experience of using a conscious mind. When the nitty gritty day to day experience of life is added in, a theory that says it's all a simulation is somewhat self-negating. Again referring to the Buddhist schools, "nothingness", "void" etc are attempts to describe *something* - but that something is not a total absence - it is an almost-intangible that is just beyond common everyday language to describe adequately.

If you want to really look at neurochemistry, Austin's "Zen and the Brain" is definitive. This is a neuroscientist who also is a long term meditator who has attempted to reconcile the two.

[ 21. May 2015, 16:55: Message edited by: itsarumdo ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
Olivia - although I haven't read Graziano enough to know where he's coming from, what I've gleaned form your posts is that his theory is very cerebral - and although it may be based on "scientific" observation of others and animals, I get the feeling it isn't based very heavily on his personal experience of using a conscious mind. When the nitty gritty day to day experience of life is added in, a theory that says it's all a simulation is somewhat self-negating. Again referring to the Buddhist schools, "nothingness", "void" etc are attempts to describe *something* - but that something is not a total absence - it is an almost-intangible that is just beyond common everyday language to describe adequately.

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I don't know how much, if at all, Michael Graziano's personal experience, ( outside of his many years of research in neuroscience, into neural pathways and modeling, etc ), has contributed to his theory, but in my own case his theory was like a scientific "seal of approval" for what had definitely been my own experience ( using these terms here in their conventional fashion ) the last few years.

The reason why I don't feel anything self-negating about his theory, ( or in neuroscientists' general consensus that what we "experience" is a model ), is because have realised/understood that a simulation/model always simulates something else, and that the original is almost always way more impressive than the model, ie. it is simulating something even more awesome, more amazing, which is the kingdom of heaven/reality of waves, particles, energy etc.

But I suspect that that would probably not help me much either, if I didn't feel personally connected with that other reality/kingdom of heaven/"real self"/God as a result of deciding to "believe in God" ( a few years ago ) and reminding myself of/reinforcing/reaffirming that belief most days the last couple of months since realising how potent an antidote it is to feelings of alienation.

I might perhaps have achieved similar results with meditation, or other religious/spiritual practices. This ( repeating the belief out loud several times ) is the one which has worked for me so far.

.

[ 21. May 2015, 17:33: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
PS. ie. this thing we call experience, ( this part of the model, this "attention processes" bit of it between "self/other people" and the "objects of those attention processes" ) is a mere shadow of what our "real self"'s connection with the rest of the world is like.

eg. the surface area of the gastrointestinal system is gigantic, many times bigger than that of the lungs, which is already many times bigger than that of our skin ... and it is permeable, and engages in complex interactions with bits of the "outer world" almost all the time. It also contains almost as many neurotransmitters as the brain, influencing the brain in many ways, and playing important/essential role in the immune system, etc.

I imagine it rather like a combination of the Old Forest and Fangorn, among other things, involved in mixtures of never-ending skirmishes and alliances and exchanges with the rest of the world more complex than most human-scale wars or governments.

And the number of bacterial cells in, on and around our body is ten times that of cells bearing our DNA, and they influence our behaviour subtly but powerfully/profoundly all the time.

This thing we call "conscious self/experience", that we think so highly of, which seems so important and powerful, is actually tiny, incredibly limited, narrow, and powerless in comparison.

ie. our "real self"'s connection with/"experience of" the rest of the world is probably astonishingly different, almost unimaginable.



[ 21. May 2015, 17:55: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
I'd agree with that, for sure
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Porridge:
... It's the social world with which the theories you offer here seem not to deal.

We are not isolates. Our "selves" are formed not only from encounters with ... the molecules and forces that comprise the physical "universe; our "selves" are formed primarily from our interactions with other human beings and the social structures they develop.

That, it seems to me, is the largest defect of the notions you present ... [ though ] there may be aspects of this theory which will prove helpful in understanding one another (and ourselves).

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Thank you again for this post.

Only really taking in the contents of it today. :oops I didn't see what you were getting at with the "hard work" etc example, etc. And I have been wondering in what ways if any the theory/perspective is actually helpful, especially when it causes such disagreement.

About your first/main? point:

The thing I call my self is a model, a simplified representation of the far vaster infinitely more complex being which is my real self. The "other people" and "social structures" that my model self "encounters" are models also, built by that same vast and infinitely complex "real self".

In that sense "I" only "see" other people and society through a glass darkly, as through a veil with who knows how many distorting embroideries, and what I do see is all constructed by my greater "real self".

I don't know how much the social structures that I ( appear to ) perceive, in this model, the social constructs, myths, beliefs, customs, rules, etc really do shape or form me, and how much they, and language, might actually be this model world's representations /manifestations of more "purely" physical phenomena, a sort of translation for the purposes of the model. Code.

I agree that in this model world we do seem to be formed/shaped v largely by social forces, but I don't know if that is true about the "real world"/kingdom of heaven, of waves, particles, energy etc, where things like "equality", "justice", "tomorrow", "science", "class", "work" etc don't exist.

In this model world humans appear to be shunted around, shaped and propelled by a great many non-physical things, like ambition, fear, love, hate, etc etc etc but perhaps those things are just representations/symbols in this model of physical forces that we/science has so far only discovered/identified some of, ( 4% apparently? ).

Got to go, breakfast with son is calling, but will return to your second point ( about how the theory/perspective could be helpful ) soon.



[ 22. May 2015, 06:53: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Porridge:
... It's the social world with which the theories you offer here seem not to deal.

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Actually, coming back to this a couple of hours later, this sentence in your comment seems quite funny/ironic, and shows again just how badly I have been explaining things, because Michael Graziano's "attention model/schema theory of consciousness/the conscious self" suggests that the model exists/was built and is used very largely in order to enable/facilitate complex social interactions, ( as well as other more abstract higher cognitive functions ), eg. modeling the attention of another person in order to better/more successfully understand or relate to them.

How will/might his theory be helpful ... well, a lot of people still put a lot of energy into trying to work out what consciousness/conscious self experience is, and it should ( eventually ) save them from wasting any more time on that ... and it might enable treatment of people who suffer from actively disabling ( confusing or extremely distorted/partial models of the world, eg. who believe they have squirrels in their head, or that other people have horns on theirs, etc ... and might perhaps encourage a generally calmer detachment from beliefs/world-views if are understood to be models/map rather than territory.



[ 22. May 2015, 09:42: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by IngoB (# 8700) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
This "thing" we call experience/consciousness/the conscious self experience is just part of that model, it is the "attention process"-bit of the model. There is no "I" or "self" or meaningfully independent/separate/"whole" observer watching/"experiencing" the model of the self and the world.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
The thing I call my self is a model, a simplified representation of the far vaster infinitely more complex being which is my real self. The "other people" and "social structures" that my model self "encounters" are models also, built by that same vast and infinitely complex "real self".

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quote:

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Originally posted by IngoB

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA: This "thing" we call experience/consciousness/the conscious self experience is just part of that model, it is the "attention process"-bit of the model. There is no "I" or "self" or meaningfully independent/separate/"whole" observer watching/"experiencing" the model of the self and the world.

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The "I" or "self" is the single most secure data point in existence. It is the mother of all facts. Nothing, and I repeat, nothing in the entire universe is better known to you than the very fact of your self-existence. ... You can doubt absolutely everything, but not yourself. Because that which doubts is you.

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Love the post, very rhythmical, full of rolling rhetoric etc, fun to read.

And in this instance I agree with you as well, that nothing is better known to me than this "conscious self experience" ... however my argument is that this "cse" is not "where" or "what" you think it is.

Instead of being at the centre of the universe, as if standing at the top of a huge cliff/mountain looking down at the rest of the world, it is actually on route 59 in front of a gas station or somewhere equally extremely insignificant/humble ... .

ie. It doesn't have the privileged viewpoint that we tend to think/are taught to think that it has.

And it isn't actually watching anything either. It, both the "self" and the apparent "attention"/awareness/"experience", is a simulation, a highly simplified representation of a "real self" and its real attention processes. It is the representative, and "obedient servant" ( carrying out orders ), of a far greater thing/being.

The change in perspective is rather like going from being the richest in the world to being one of the poorest.

quote:

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Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA: The thing I call my self is a model, a simplified representation of the far vaster infinitely more complex being which is my real self. The "other people" and "social structures" that my model self "encounters" are models also, built by that same vast and infinitely complex "real self".

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Can you please clarify whether you believe that every self-identifying human consciousness is merely a model of its own "real self", which is mostly circumscribed by the individual human body, or whether they are all models within one overarching "real self" (humanity, animated matter, the world, ...)? If you die in a car crash, has your "real self" died?

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
I didn't see what you were getting at with the "hard work" etc example, etc.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
The thing I call my self is a model, a simplified representation of the far vaster infinitely more complex being which is my real self.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Porridge:What happens when the individual who works hard, as instructed, finds himself destitute or nearly so? Does he question the myth? Not usually; typically, he blames himself for his "failure," rather than consciously noticing that the myth is simply not uniformly true.

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quote:

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Who or what is constructing this incomplete / limited model? How does this model come into being? How, when ...

The theory seems to imply an agent, one with the capacity to develop a model, however limited, based on the original. Is this also "me," or my "self?" Is it the "real me?"

How do we get this model from the original? Who or what is doing this? ... Are we faced with the famous Escher print of the hand drawing itself?

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The model is built/created ( constantly/at every moment ) and run/scanned/read by the part(s) of the brain ( probably the temporo-parietal junction and superior sulcus, just above the ears, especially, for some reason, on the right hand side ), which model the organism's attention processes, with ( probably fairly constant ) input from the rest of the brain ( and body ), and the data from the model(s) is fed back to the attention processes, in order to help them successfully manage/optimise attention "resources" and the enhancements of representations/models that are used for various cognitive tasks including social interaction.

Attention processes are the brain's way of organising ( enhancing or reducing focus on ) its representations of things for "higher"/complex cognitive purposes/calculations/computations.

To optimise those processes the temporo-parietal junction etc part of the brain models them; creates a model representing "attention to", ( which we "know" as awareness/"experience of" etc ), and a model of the "who or what" that is, ( according to the "equation" ), "doing the attending to", plus the object of the attention. Modeling and then tracking/monitoring that model helps the brain's attention processes to plan for distractions, sustain attention etc, as well as react more appropriately to other people.

I don't think that the temporoparietal junction, etc qualifies as my "real self". It is part of it but very very far from being all of it.

The whole of the brain, ( including the attention model ... ) and the body, and the environment acting on it too, is responsible for the model, play roles in creating it, however indirectly.

.

[ 22. May 2015, 15:05: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Porridge:What happens when the individual who works hard, as instructed, finds himself destitute or nearly so? Does he question the myth? Not usually; typically, he blames himself for his "failure," rather than consciously noticing that the myth is simply not uniformly true.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Porridge:
Where/what is/are the original(s) from which the brain creates the model(s)? What is the brain using for a template?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Porridge:
Now I'm lost again.

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I don't know if you saw this bit in my last but one post or not, but surely it explains/answers your question?

" ... data from encounters/interactions with those things in the past, and from all the masses of motor-sensory-etc information received from its own body etc. ie. the models will be based on what our body, brain etc, has been able to perceive and process of other people, the world, itself, etc ( and consequently is its "truth" )."

ie. first models, eg. of tiny infant, will be constructed from what its body and brain perceives and processes of its environment and itself ( and genes as well as early nurture will determine/shape what is perceived and processed to a significant extent ).

These models will be very different to later ones, but some of them may last a long time, others will be replaced as grows up.

NB. Whether you remember something or not, eg. before age 5 etc, is no indication of whether it is contributing to your model or not.


[ 22. May 2015, 17:43: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
PS.

quote:

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Posted by Porridge ...

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Ref. requiring a "self" to organise data.

No, a "conscious self experience" is not needed to organise the data. The "cse" is a simulation created by a part of the brain as part of modeling attention processes.

Attention processes are required to help the brain organise its attention, enhancements of representations, etc for higher cognitive functions, but in earliest infancy the model(s) will be rudimentary.

Sorry I didn't notice/answer that bit of your question in my first reply.
.

[ 22. May 2015, 18:00: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
PPS. I rushed out those replies because was being called on for advice ref. best way to grill a pizza!!!

To clarify/elaborate/confirm:

Infants/v young children don't, apparently, have a clear sense of separation from "the other"/the rest of the world etc until somewhere around a year or a year and a half ( I don't remember exactly, does anyone else know? ). And yet infants obviously do a lot of organising of data in that time.

The construction of the model of a self and of attention processes probably doesn't happen fully until there is quite a lot of info to base it on. And yes, then it no doubt begins to contribute, however indirectly, to cognitive function by way of the feedback from the attention-processes model.

[ 22. May 2015, 18:16: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by Jack o' the Green (# 11091) on :
 
Two questions. 1 Is a baby conscious from birth? 2. If we have a true self beyond the models which we are experienceing now, why not dismiss that as a needless (not to say incoherent) complication and have a self albeit contingent and changing within the world which is what we experience directly anyway.
 

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Posted by Grokesx (# 17221) on :
 
@IngoB

Firstly I need to say I don't have a dog in this fight. To my – ahem – mind, eliminative materialism is just one of a number of positions in the philosophy of mind which we don't have nearly enough information at this time to say is true or not. Personally I tend towards the hand wavery of emergentism, although I would be very surprised if every one of our cherished folk psychological notions remain un-eliminated when all the data is in. As for dualism, well, it's not so much hand waving as throwing a big blanket over the subject with the nine billion (minus one) names of God exquisitely embroidered upon it.

Anyway, to business.

quote:

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This is not comparable at all. Her approach does not deal insufficiently with the light of the moon being bent by the atmosphere. Her approach denies that there is a moon.

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As an aside, her approach doesn't deal with atmospheric refraction at all because it doesn't have to. Atmospheric refraction is the pineal gland of moon perception - an incorrect explanation whose time has passed.

Anyway, my analogy, my rules. In it, Olivia's approach doesn't deny there is a moon, it denies that the size of the moon changes with its position in the sky. The reason I brought it up is because even though most of us accept that fact intellectually, it makes no difference to our perception. We cannot will it to look the same size to "us" at the horizon or its zenith. We are stuck with this artefact of how our brains go about their business whether we like it or not. And if Olivia is correct, the conscious “I” is exactly the same – she can accept that it is an illusion at the same time having to putting up with the consequences.

As far as I can see your critique of her position rests solely on the problem of third person analysis of first person matters. The usual hard problem stuff and fascinating it can be, too. But way, way more interesting than you make it sound. Me, I’m particularly taken with the introspective illusion at the moment. Not that it applies to me, of course.
 

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Posted by Grokesx (# 17221) on :
 
Oh shit - forgot the smileys.


 

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Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
And if Olivia is correct, the conscious “I” is exactly the same – she can accept that it is an illusion at the same time having to putting up with the consequences.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
As for dualism, well, it's not so much hand waving as throwing a big blanket over the subject with the nine billion (minus one) names of God exquisitely embroidered upon it.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
Anyway, my analogy, my rules.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
As far as I can see your critique of her position rests solely on the problem of third person analysis of first person matters.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green: Is a baby conscious from birth?

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If you mean "does it have a "conscious self experience"/clear sense of self" from birth" then I would say no, it doesn't.

Babies apparently only gradually begin to develop a sense of being separate or independent beings after a few months, seem to be unaware of any division between their mother and themselves for example, and this can last until at least a year old, maybe even a year and a half (? ). There is just "data collection".

I suspect that their experience to begin with is of a "formless void" ( sort of like a picture of the galaxy/universe, clouds of the "dust" of stars etc ), and then gradually, as data from their eyes begins to be organised by the brain, of light and dark, and then as data from their muscles and proprioceptive systems begins to be organised by their brain, of land/solid earth and sky/air and so on ...

ie. the brain collects/collates and organises data from all available points, and creates and uses models from that data to help it function in the world, learn from actions, regulate behaviour, etc and gradually a faint shape/form begins to emerge in the model which is based on data from the skin, and reach/grasp from arm movements, hands, and mouth etc, and possible actions etc.

That model of the body and its more obvious "boundaries" and "powers" becomes more detailed over the next couple of years, and then around the age of two years ( sometimes earlier, sometimes later/a lot later/never ), children begin to model other people's attention processes, what others are ( probably ) paying attention to, because when done well it tends to lead to more successful interactions.

The brain may perhaps have already been doing that sort of modeling of its own attention processes by then, or perhaps it happens simultaneously or somewhat after; either way once the brain has a working ( if highly simplified ) model of "itself" and a working model of "attention processes" the combination of the two ( plus the objects of attention ) produces that which we know as "conscious self experience".

Mary throws a ball. [ Olivia ] [ is aware of ] [ an apple ]. The part of the brain responsible for modeling attention "reads" that "sentence"/that set of data/series of models and "creates" this "me"/conscious self experience, simulation of my "real self's" attention processes.

But babies are not born with it. It is created/"born" later.

quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
... How do you explain that I am experiencing my own existence at this very moment?
... An entity's experience of its own mind is (I would suggest) a primary or intrinsic property, other parts of cognitive experience are secondary and could (at least in theory) be faked or mistaken. In the 'brain in a vat' thought experiment, a mind might be wrong about all sorts of things e.g. the existence of an external, objective world, the reality of other minds, the accuracy of past memories etc. What it can't be wrong about (even in theory) is that in some way, it must exist because it experiences its own existence.

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quote:

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If we have a true self beyond the models which we are experiencing now, why not dismiss that as a needless complication and have a self albeit contingent and changing within the world which is what we experience directly anyway.

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Because it's not anything like the whole story. It is life without the source of life. It is a shadow world, however seductive, vivid, beautiful etc it is not even a thousandth as amazing as the world we mostly don't see, the world of waves, particles, energy, of molecular, cellular interactions. I only faintly glimpse the scale and wonder of my real self when I use the word God/believe in that construct, but it is there.

... And "we" don't, experience the real world directly, that is. Putting aside for a moment the question of a higher reality/kingdom of heaven which is the one of waves, particles, energy etc, neuroscientists agree that we do not experience the "world" directly, but always by way of a model, which is made up of mere symbols/representations of things, a place of value judgements, labels.

And this "self"/conscious self experience is too, a sketch of a self, a caricature, a cartoon, which is perhaps more likely to behave in cartoonish ways if it forgets/is unaware of its "real self".


[ 23. May 2015, 08:31: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by IngoB:
My critique is more that she claims that a third person analysis can somehow undermine the primacy of first person data.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
First person data is frequently very unreliable, even when many people swear to it: eg. just because thousands of people believe in homeopathy doesn't mean it works in any way other than as placebo.

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quote:

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Originally posted by IngoB:

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
First person data is frequently very unreliable, even when many people swear to it: eg. just because thousands of people believe in homeopathy doesn't mean it works in any way other than as placebo.

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Once more then, with feeling: there is nothing in all of science, knowledge, wisdom and intuition that is more reliable than the experience of self. All else can be doubted, but to doubt this is simply self-contradictory (in a double meaning of the word). Furthermore, this experience is perfectly objective, affirmed a billionfold this very second by independent observations that can be shared freely and are understood easily. To compare this with false theories like homeopathy is a category error. The self is not theory, it's data. Data that eliminative materialism cannot explain. Hence eliminative materialism must be false somehow.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
That wasn't what I asked. Much of what you describe in this post is bog standard neurological and psychological development. However, it fails to address the distinction between the intrinsic and secondary properties of consciousness.

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I have no idea how much anyone here understands of neuroscience and psychology; it seems to vary immensely. What is your question ( if it isn't, as I understood it to be, about early infant modeling of "self" etc )? :?

quote:

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So if there isn't an "I", how can there be an I which wants to identity with the I which doesn't exist? ... The question is how we can meaningfully talk about it, and cogently justify describing it in a particular way.

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quote:

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My experience of my own existence is an intrinsic experience, utterly different in principle to my memories, emotions, ability to recognise faces, ... [ etc ] . Secondly, your jump from general neuroscience to something else without any evidence or cogent philosophical reasoning.

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quote:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
There are a gazillion ways that individual experience deviates from the "norm" and is still valid.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:

quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
That wasn't what I asked. Much of what you describe in this post is bog standard neurological and psychological development. However, it fails to address the distinction between the intrinsic and secondary properties of consciousness.

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I have no idea how much anyone here understands of neuroscience and psychology; it seems to vary immensely. What is your question ( if it isn't, as I understood it to be, about early infant modeling of "self" etc )?

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quote:

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"Experience of my own existence" is what our brain reads the combination of the model of itself and of its attention processes as when you are paying attention to yourself. ie. the object in the "sentence"/series of models is different to when you are concentrating on/"aware of" your memories, etc

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quote:

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By the "jump from general neuroscience to something else" do you mean from Graziano's neuroscientific explanation for/theory of consciousness/conscious self experience ( ie. his "attention model/schema theory" ) to my own extrapolations re. a "real self", this understanding present in Genesis and the Gospels, and rational reasons for belief in God etc? Or some other jump?

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quote:

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Originally posted by IngoB:
There is nothing ... that is more reliable than the experience of self. ...To doubt this is simply self-contradictory. ... This experience is perfectly objective ... . ... The self is ... data ...

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This "self" you refer to, and "conscious self experience", is a description in your brain, a model or simulation, saying/"spelling out" "IngoB is aware of x, y or z", which the brain cannot help inevitably/almost irresistibly "believing in".

"Your experience" is the result of your brain, ( part of it anyway ), attributing a model of attention, "awareness"/experience, to a model of itself. Data, as you said yourself.

The only objective thing about it ( normally ) is that people talk about it, write about it, refer to it, claim that they have it, etc.

Something real is happening in the brain to make that happen, but there is no objective evidence for the real nature of that thing, nothing that explains it as efficiently and completely and predictively as Graziano's "attention model of consciousness".

Nothing else can be objectively discerned/established about it, other than that it can be/often is altered/disturbed by certain head injuries, disorders/illnesses etc, ie. under abnormal conditions.
.

[ 23. May 2015, 12:18: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
PS. When I say ( above ) "believing in": think "processing as "truth"/as "real"".
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Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :
 
OK, bottom line: theories are usually developed in an effort to explain something.

What does this theory explain, or what apparent problem does it potentially solve?

Many posters here are operating on the premise that we have actual selves, which pay authentic attention, and accumulate genuine experience (granted, through assorted mental filters and interpretations -- no one here is arguing that all our perceptions are, or can be, objectively "accurate," whatever that might mean).

How would we better off assuming that these selves, processes, and data are all illusory? What problem will we have solved?
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Porridge:
OK, bottom line: theories are usually developed in an effort to explain something.

What does this theory explain, or what apparent problem does it potentially solve?

Many posters here are operating on the premise that we have actual selves, which pay authentic attention, and accumulate genuine experience.

How would we better off assuming that these selves, processes, and data are all illusory? What problem will we have solved?

---

We do have actual selves, "real selves", they are just not where we tend to think they are, and that authentic self pays real attention to real things, and gathers data about authentic things and events.

From my own experience I think that one important positive effect of Graziano's theory might be changing the quality of the "conscious self experience" with respect to the world ( the model one ) that we seem to live in, because believing that it is created makes me appreciate it more than when I think that it is "just there". It feels very different, suffused with life, joy, etc , whenever I happen to remember that it is made/built/created. It's like a sort of wow factor at the smallest most banal surroundings etc.

And perhaps it might help with social interaction too, maybe, if more people generally were aware that what they "see" of other people is a model, built by themselves/their real selves, therefore somehow part of themselves, and perhaps also not a very good model either ... It certainly helped me when I stopped believing in free will and realised that everyone is doing what they are programmed to do, like me, the people doing badly and the people doing well, alike; that there was no reason to look up to or envy anyone nor to look down on and feel contempt for anyone either ...

And it might perhaps help people achieve greater detachment, more calm, worry less, etc, to know that their real self is the one handling things; we're just taking part in/acting in the "attention-modeling bit" of things. All the things that the Gospels talk about really, about the lilies of the field that toil not, nor spin, and don't worry about how to clothe themselves, and also about the tiny sparrow that falls; we are being watched at all times, cared about by our real self, monitoring its attention processes, needing our "acting".

Basically I'm saying that this theory is actually the modern translation of the Gospels, ( and early Genesis ), for those with eyes to see! ie. there's a chance that lots of good things could come of it.


[ 23. May 2015, 13:48: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 
PS. And that's not including the possible cures for/treatments of disabling mental/neurological disorders that it might enable, and the extra time lots of scientists and philosophers will have to think about something other than the so called "hard problem of consciousness" from now on.

[ 23. May 2015, 13:52: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by Jack o' the Green (# 11091) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
We do have actual selves, "real selves", they are just not where we tend to think they are, and that authentic self pays real attention to real things, and gathers data about authentic things and events.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
If I am being 'fooled' into thinking that I am an aware self, with an inherent, primary property of awareness ... how does your 'true self' know that it isn't being similarly fooled? Your position creates an inescapable epistemological problem.

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I have no idea what my "real self's" experience is like. It is almost unimaginably vast and infinitely more complex than my little "me"/"conscious self experience". It is, to this combined model of "me" and "awareness" ( "conscious self experience" ) omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, indescribable, God basically.

I don't understand what you mean about there being an "epistemological problem". :?


[ 23. May 2015, 14:17: Message edited by: OliviaCA ]
 

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Posted by Jack o' the Green (# 11091) on :
 
By epistomological problem, i.e. a problem regarding how we can be said to know things, I was summing up the previous part of the post.
 

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Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 
I'm late to this discussion, but if I have no access to this "real self," how do I know it's there?
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by mousethief:
I'm late to this discussion, but if I have no access to this "real self," how do I know it's there?

---

My experience is that you know as soon as you accept/grasp/believe that your "conscious self experience" is a model, a representation of "self" and "attention processes", being run by a small part of the brain.

In other words as soon as realise that "conscious self experience" "is" Jesus; born in a humble corner of things; not as powerful or central as are taught/encouraged to think; "killed off" periodically by new data, sometimes very painfully, before being born again in new form/model which incorporates that fresh data, and a representative of a greater infinitely more complex almost unknowable "being"/"real self"; etc.

As soon as I understood that the "conscious self experience" is "programming", running, like a recording, or a statement ( a string/series of models ) which the brain "has" to read as "Olivia is aware of x, y z" ... and thus it is "true", ( like "let there be light" etc ), then it follows, surely? that this programming is "produced" or created by something far greater, but which is still somehow "me", if I am its representative ...

In scientific terms my model "me"/conscious-self-experience is created by part of the brain, the temporo-parietal junction, etc, but to the "me"/"conscious self experience", ( which is a program inside a small part of the far larger and infinitely more complex brain, and the body connected with it/that it is part of, and the environment acting on that ) ... that "being" creating/giving rise to "me" is my "real self" and God all at once.

That is how I know, and probably has a lot to do with the fact that I have been believing in God on and off for 7 years now, and haven't believed in free will for nearly as long. The combination of Graziano's theory and my belief in God just "sang" together, made total and perfect sense.
.
 

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Posted by Jack o' the Green (# 11091) on :
 
"The Gospel According to Eliminative Materialism"?

On a more serious note, your position regarding consciousness, freewill and our true selves being elsewhere seems an abrogation of ethical and existential responsibility, a denial of being able to truly live and experience in this life. It seems to almost fall into the category of a psychological defence mechanism to avoid feeling or acknowledge the significance or reality of feelings, our moral choices, failings and vulnerabilities.
 

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Posted by itsarumdo (# 18174) on :
 
Olivia - To repeat an earlier post, What is the difference between "Spirit" (which in a body is called a soul) and what you are calling your "real self"? It seems the qualities, attributes, capabilities are similar.
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by itsarumdo:
What is the difference between "Spirit" (which in a body is called a soul) and what you are calling your "real self"? It seems the qualities, attributes, capabilities are similar.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
My experience is that you know as soon as you accept/grasp/believe that your "conscious self experience" is a model, a representation of "self" and "attention processes", being run by a small part of the brain.

In other words as soon as realise that "conscious self experience" "is" Jesus; born in a humble corner of things; not as powerful or central as are taught/encouraged to think; "killed off" periodically by new data, sometimes very painfully, before being born again in new form/model which incorporates that fresh data, and a representative of a greater infinitely more complex almost unknowable "being"/"real self"; etc.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
... Your position regarding consciousness, [ lack of ] freewill, and our true selves being elsewhere seems an abrogation of ethical and existential responsibility, a denial of being able to truly live and experience in this life. It seems to almost fall into the category of a psychological defence mechanism to avoid feeling or acknowledge the significance or reality of feelings, our moral choices, failings and vulnerabilities.

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Obviously I don't agree with you.

Would you like to explain why it seems like that to you?
.
 

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Posted by Jack o' the Green (# 11091) on :
 
So if your true self is also physical, it could also be deceived into falsehoods like those of us who think of ourselves as experiencers, since its selfhood is also dictated by the state of its physical composition and structure as ours is.
 

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Posted by OliviaCA (# 18399) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by mousethief:
So it sounds like this "knowledge" is theoretical. If you accept this theory as an axiom, then you "know" the theorems that follow from it. Head knowledge, not experience, as the kids say.

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I think it's both actually. The two of them meeting. That's what it feels like anyway.
.
 

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Posted by Jack o' the Green (# 11091) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:

quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
... Your position regarding consciousness, [ lack of ] freewill, and our true selves being elsewhere seems an abrogation of ethical and existential responsibility, a denial of being able to truly live and experience in this life. It seems to almost fall into the category of a psychological defence mechanism to avoid feeling or acknowledge the significance or reality of feelings, our moral choices, failings and vulnerabilities.

---

Obviously I don't agree with you.

Would you like to explain why it seems like that to you?
.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
My "real self" is made up of particles, waves, energy; it is totally physical.

What makes you say that it seems similar to the traditional/conventional concept of spirit or souls?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
So if your true self is also physical, it could also be deceived into falsehoods like those of us who think of ourselves as experiencers, since its selfhood is also dictated by the state of its physical composition and structure as ours is.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:

quote:

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Originally posted by mousethief:
So it sounds like this "knowledge" is theoretical. If you accept this theory as an axiom, then you "know" the theorems that follow from it. Head knowledge, not experience, as the kids say.

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I think it's both actually. The two of them meeting. That's what it feels like anyway.
.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Boogie:
Show me a photo.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
From what you've said, you have no reason to trust "how it feels". You seem to have developed a self refuting hypothesis.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
No freewill negates any moral responsibility either for yourself or others. Our feelings of moral revulsion, empathy, appreciation of beauty lose any real significance since they aren't encounters with anything real. They're simply our brains playing a program or presenting us with models we have no control over - falsehoods rather than truth. If our sense of being conscious isn't to be trusted, then how can anything else we perceive?

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:

quote:

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Originally posted by Porridge:
OK, bottom line: theories are usually developed in an effort to explain something.

What does this theory explain, or what apparent problem does it potentially solve?

Many posters here are operating on the premise that we have actual selves, which pay authentic attention, and accumulate genuine experience.

How would we better off assuming that these selves, processes, and data are all illusory? What problem will we have solved?

---

We do have actual selves, "real selves", they are just not where we tend to think they are, and that authentic self pays real attention to real things, and gathers data about authentic things and events.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
From my own experience I think that one important positive effect of Graziano's theory might be changing the quality of the "conscious self experience" with respect to the world <snip>

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:

quote:

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Originally posted by Jack o' the Green:
No freewill negates any moral responsibility either for yourself or others. Our feelings of moral revulsion, empathy, appreciation of beauty lose any real significance since they aren't encounters with anything real. They're simply our brains playing a program or presenting us with models we have no control over - falsehoods rather than truth. If our sense of being conscious isn't to be trusted, then how can anything else we perceive?

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Why do you think that not having free will "negates moral responsibility"? It's a common reaction, but always, in my experience, mistaken.

I will have to reply to the rest of your post tomorrow as I don't have more time now/this evening.
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quote:

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Originally posted by Porridge:
Granted that I could have phrased my question with more precision, it seems to me that you fairly often, and perhaps deliberately, misunderstand questions in order to avoid addressing their point.

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:? You are mistaken.

quote:

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Surely, by page 4 of this thread, you understand that the majority of posters here, myself included, think that the "self" you have labeled illusory is in fact a real self, and that this is a major point of disagreement between these posters and yourself. So to return to the question which I was actually asking ... snip.

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Yes, I have understood that by now, ( but have wanted to always make absolutely sure that we are talking about the same thing, after so many misunderstandings right from the start ) ...

... and it is also now very clear that the answer to my question at the start of this thread, ( OP "Does anyone else here see God as ... ? ), is a resounding "No".

I had really hoped to find some people here with whom I could explore the parallels that I have been drawing, and find so fascinating, ( because among other things they suggest that the thinkers responsible for Genesis and the Gospels understood what psychologists and neuroscientists have only just begun to in the last couple of decades ), but unless they are hiding out/on holiday or whatever it appears that there really isn't anyone else here who ... etc.

So, one last time thank you all very much, everyone who has participated in this thread, for your time and energy.

I really appreciated the discussion, but I am off now back to the Naturalists, who, among other things, already no longer believe in free will, which I have been realising is probably a rather fundamental step in my thesis.

quote:

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I really don't see how assuming there's some mysterious, all-but-inaccessible "real self" can help in such a situation.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
I take it that you don't believe in God then?
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quote:

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Originally posted by mousethief:
I'm sorry you only came here to discuss one thing, and only with people who agree with you. There are so many interesting people here and we discuss so many interesting things.

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quote:

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:

quote:

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Originally posted by mousethief:
I'm late to this discussion, but if I have no access to this "real self," how do I know it's there?

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My experience is that you know as soon as you accept/grasp/believe that your "conscious self experience" is a model, a representation of "self" and "attention processes", being run by a small part of the brain.

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quote:

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Either the conscious I is an illusion or it is not an illusion.

Suppose: the conscious I is an illusion. We think there is such a thing, but there isn't.

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quote:

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There's more than one kind of dualism...

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quote:

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Then I reject your (unmodified) analogy. Illusion is disagreement of experience with reality. Consequently, experience as such cannot be an illusion, because that would deny the basis of the definition at the same time as applying it. Your analogy does not match this pattern of self-contradiction, and hence is fundamentally flawed.

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quote:

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Well, my critique is more that she claims that a third person analysis can somehow undermine the primacy of first person data.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
@ Dafyd

quote:

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Either the conscious I is an illusion or it is not an illusion.

Suppose: the conscious I is an illusion. We think there is such a thing, but there isn't.

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No, to say the conscious I is an illusion is to say that it is not what it seems to be to human beings. There is something else going on. Dennett says, "Consciousness is an illusion of the brain, for the brain, by the brain."

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quote:

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And anyway, with a bit of jiggery pokery with deflationary semantic theories, apparently you can get round the problem, for what it’s worth.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Dafyd:
You may be apparently able to get round the problem, but that's an illusion. What's really going on is something else.

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[code]

[ 25. May 2015, 06:17: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
 

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Posted by Grokesx (# 17221) on :
 

quote:

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You may be apparently able to get round the problem, but that's an illusion. What's really going on is something else.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Grokesx:

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You may be apparently able to get round the problem, but that's an illusion. What's really going on is something else.

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Touche, but as I've said before, I don't have a dog in this fight. I just don't think you or Ingo or anyone else has engaged with what is actually being said. Just wibbling around the conceptual and linguistic problems. Hey ho.

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
but I'm only interested in discussing this one thing at the moment, ( current "special interest"/obsession ) and I wasn't looking for an argument ( more for a club/association for people into the same things, a bit like a church perhaps ).

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
Dennett says, "Consciousness is an illusion of the brain, for the brain, by the brain."

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
What your analysis (and others here) boils down to is the problem of the brain/mind whatever analysing its own processes.

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
Personally I think that’s an overly pessimistic view, but when he says, of free will in this case but it applies equally to other things, “… we try to find some conception of it that permits its existence, but this conception always turns out to be dubiously reductive and distorting, leaving us with the unpalatable options of magic, elimination or quietism... so we hop unhappily from one unsatisfactory option to the next; or dig our heels (squintingly) into a position that seems the least intellectually unconscionable of the bunch,” he pretty much nails what goes on in discussions like this, bar the shouting, posturing and sheer bloody mindedness, naturally, for this is the inter webs.

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
If these are not what you have in mind, and given your comments on materialism on this thread and others, I don't see why they would be be, that leaves us with substance dualism - the idea that the mind and body are two different entities and which is compatible with most theologies. As far as I know, modern non goddy versions aren't exactly thick on the ground, one appeals to quantum woo IIRC. So, embroider "woo" or "magic" on the blanket if the fancy takes you.

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
In my analogy the only difference between a persistent visual illusion like the moon illusion and the claim that consciousness is illusory is that the former is due to the mind/brain making a mistake about an external stimulus and the latter, if true, would be due to the brain making a mistake about its own processes.

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
And how about the personality states of someone with dissociative identity disorder? Apparently patients with up to 4,500 "alters" have been reported - do we accept the primacy of all those first person experiences in the same body? Or do we allow a third person analysis to undermine them?

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I don't think you've been actually engaging with what IngoB is saying.

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In any case: saying something is expressing concepts by linguistic means. So if you take away the conceptual problems and you take away the linguistic problems, what is left to count as what is actually being said?

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Anyway, arguments from authority on topics like these merely preach to the choir. Quoting Dennett at me hence doesn't impress me in the slightest. I assume a priori that his handling of these delicate matters will be HAM-fisted...

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No, exactly not! What we can understand in mechanistic terms (at least speculatively) is precisely how the brain/mind analyses its own processes. That is not the problem. The problem is pretending that that is the same as experience. One more, a task manager is not mysterious to us in the same way as our consciousness and experience. You can really boil it all down to the point that descriptions of self-reference in the brain, however sophisticated (including OliviaCA's quasi-mystical "real self" stuff), do not address the problem posed by the experiential data..

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If there is a hole in our mechanistic explanations, it has value to say: "Look, there is hole there. It has about this size and shape."

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Well, I would favour hylemorphic dualism

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So, I go handwave handwave emergence drumroll TA DA, you go handwave handwave substance and form drumroll TA DA.

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No, that's really not it. Imagine a blind person learning about colours in the world...

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The "first person" issue we are discussing here is in no way affected by such personality disorders. The stress is on the "first", not on the (single) "person". Even if there would be a billion "alternative persons" looking through the same bodily eyes, every single one of them would experience world and self, and thereby do something that is deeply problematic to mechanistic explanations in a qualitative sense. For sure, there are interesting questions to be asked from such mental illnesses to say classical concepts of "soul". But the continuity and coherence of personhood is not what concerns us here. What concerns us is that persons do something we have trouble explaining in terms of brains.

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there is nothing in all of science, knowledge, wisdom and intuition that is more reliable than the experience of self. All else can be doubted, but to doubt this is simply self-contradictory (in a double meaning of the word). Furthermore, this experience is perfectly objective, affirmed a billionfold this very second by independent observations that can be shared freely and are understood easily.

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
It wasn't meant to impress you, it was meant to give an idea (actually to Dafyd) of where a particular eliminitive materialist is coming from when he says consciousness is an illusion.

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Originally posted by Dafyd:
[ Grokesx ] ... said ... that the "cognitive I" might be other than what it seems to be. ... That implies the "conscious I" seems to be something. ... ... For me [ ] the conscious I does not seem to be anything. ... None of the things of which I am conscious is the "conscious I". Instead ... the "conscious I" is the name given to the fact that other objects seem to me. ... Explain to me what it would be like to be wrong, and to think that the existence of such schemas is an illusion?

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
Hm... Speculatively understand? So you can assert what is not the problem with such great vigour based on speculation? I think I am beginning to see where the problem really lies.

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
So, I go handwave handwave emergence drumroll TA DA, you go handwave handwave substance and form drumroll TA DA.

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
And one of those things persons seem to do is have continuity and coherence of personhood. Otherwise there would be nothing you could call a person to do the thing we have such difficulty in explaining in terms of brains. In other words, the distinction is irrelevant.

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Originally posted by Grokesx:
Anyway, you seem to be able to appeal to third person experience when it suits you and complain bitterly about it when you don't. In your once more with feeling post, you said:

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... Furthermore, this experience is perfectly objective, affirmed a billionfold this very second by independent observations that can be shared freely and are understood easily.

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So, when it reinforces your argument it is fine and dandy, but not when it undermines it.

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Originally posted by OliviaCA:
His thesis is that precisely that "experience", of "other objects seeming to me", is created by assigning a model of attention processes to a model of the self, as in:

[ Dafyd ] [ is aware of ] [ this comment from OliviaCA ].

The first two items in the series are "read by" the attention-process-modeling part of the brain as "seeming to me".

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That basic fundamental fact about the model means that the combo [ Dafyd ] [ is aware of ] will, as railings or net curtains or other unchanging/fixed/permanent obstructions of one's view eventually become invisible to one as look at objects beyond them, be invisible to you.

It is always there ... for as long as your brain is modeling its attention processes.
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