[MD] Consciousness & Moq.

[Krimel]

dmb says:
After looking at the most recent responses from you guys it seems pretty
clear that we need to back up. It seems to me that both of you are pretty
foggy about what the problem is. Krimel, for example, has somehow managed to
equate pre-conceptual experience with the unconscious. That's just not what
we're talking about here and the hard problem of consciousness is not about
unconsciousness. For example, Pirsig says that Quality is the first thing
you know, James says pure experience is the immediate flux of life and that
we act on it, and Dewey distinguishes it the conceptual with the
non-conceptual with the simple terms "known" and "had". In each case, we are
talking about the immediately felt quality of conscious experience. We're
just talking about the distinction is between feelings and thoughts, between
qualia and conceptual knowledge. 

[Krimel]
Part of the problem with consciousness is the difficulty of saying what it
is, what to leave in and what to leave out. It is a term with such varied
meanings that it is quite possible for three or more to gather together to
discuss it, yet never mention the same thing twice and no one notices. 

In your examples you talk about, consciousness in terms of "first thing" and
"immediate." As I see this you are referring to a property of consciousness
usually termed awareness. That is, what occupies ones attention. What our
being is focused on in the Now. 

Awareness or being in the moment is the synthesis and focus of the various
parallel processes of the body. It is what we attend to. It skips around. It
flits between what is immediately present and things remembered. It works
like a police scanner cycling through the parallel processes of sensation,
emotion, memory. From them, awareness creates a whole. 

This is in fact exactly how the visual system, one of those parallel
process, works. A pinhole of focus sweeps across the visual field, darting
here and there and painting a coherent picture out of a jumble of disjointed
sensations. Awareness is just the application of this process of
constructing illusions but including the other senses, emotions and
memories. Awareness is limited in the number of things it can hold at one
time. Less than three things for non-primates, about three for apes and
seven or so for humans. This notion of awareness has a number of closely
connected and related ideas associated with it; short term memory and
executive function come to mind.

Awareness in lower animals is probably limited to immediate sense data and a
few evolutionarily encoded response patterns. In mammals we see the full
blown rise of emotions not only as simple flight or fight responses but as
[e]motivations that bind parents to their young and to each other. Emotions
add valance. Some things are good, some are bad, some are neutral. As
mammals, the emotional force is strong in us. Emotions set the standards for
how we judge data and interpret our senses. As Damasio says, "We are
emotional machines..." Emotions drive our actions, our thoughts. They are
the source of our perception of binary distinctions like: good/bad,
speed-up/slow-down, love/hate, joy/sorrow, pride/shame...

When you talk about integrating thought and feeling I find it puzzling. How
could that not be so? I've given you Damasio's examples of stroke patients
who cannot feel their emotions and as a result can't make decisions. Without
emotion there is not commitment to one path or another. I see no way to
integrate emotions directly into conceptualization. They are entirely
different processes. The emotion of love is a process of attraction. The
concept of love is a neutral idea about that process. Concepts as James
tells us are a step removed from direct experience which he emphatically and
repeatedly call "perception". Emotion is the value we place on experience.
Emotions provides meaning. They are a primitive assessments of probability
telling us whether what is focused in immediate awareness is likely to help
or harm us.

But sensation and emotion alone are highly fallible. They increase the
probability of positive outcomes and enhance our chances of success. But
senses fail us, they provide incomplete information. That incompleteness
results from bandwidth limitation on sensory data, limitations of our single
point of view, etc.

Higher mammals like us overcome these limits of sensation and emotion
through memory. It is important here to give a picture of how memory works.
Experience is encoded into memory beginning with processing in the
mid-brain. But experience effects the whole brain and is registered
throughout the whole brain. In humans the largest and most recently evolved
portions of the brain are the cortical hemispheres. These are where memory
are stored and full blown consciousness arise.

It is important to get a picture of how this works. 

The nervous system, of which the brain is one part, is an Input ->
Processing -> Output system. It is actually physically constructed this way.
Input comes in through the senses, gets processed in the brain and output is
the behavior that results. Above I described the processing of sensory input
into emotional responses.

All sensation except smell is processed immediately into two separate
streams of neural pathway. First is emotion mentioned above and the second
is memory.

The cortex is a fractal array of some 100 billion neurons. Each individual
neuron can connect to up to 50,000 other neurons. This is an unfathomable
number of possible connections that can produce and infinite range of
patterns of interaction. Donald Hebb was the first to propose a
connectionist model of nerve interaction back in the 50s and it remains, at
its root, with us today.

Experience is the firing of neurons in various patterns. CAT, MRI, fMRI and
PET scanning allows us to see these pattern, often live and in real time.
The resolution of scanning technology is following Moore's law and as it
gets better we will become more precise in our ability to detect and
interpret these patterns.

But what of these patterns. When you see a cat on a mat a set of neurons
fire. If we could reliably cause that same set of neuron to fire in the same
way again you would again see a cat on a mat even in the absence of cat or
mat. A crude example of something like this is commonplace in brain surgery
where a doctor physically stimulates the surface of the cortex and the
patient has a direct experience of physical sensation or a memory of a past
event or makes a movement without willing the movement, depending entirely
on the particular area of brain surface stimulated.

Patterns of nerve firings are strengthen through use. Each time a set of
nerves fire they become more efficient at firing together. Memory is a kind
of feedback system that allows us to trigger these patterns of neural
interaction. Memory is those patterns. 

Consider the lowly neuron. It is either active and firing or calm and
resting; on or off. It exists in a huge tangled three dimensional array of
other neurons. Any or all of them can be on or off at the same time. The
brain is this vast field of probabilistic interaction. Experience is the
firing of these neurons and memory is the capacity to recreate those
patterns as feedback loops. I tend to see these patterns of firing as
lightning. Fractally complex three dimensional arcs. 

Consider the cat on the mat. The patterns of firing that are "cat" are
similar to past patterns of firing aroused by past cats. This new experience
of cat excites these past patterns of cat making them more efficient and
more likely in future instances of cat. In this instance the cat is on the
mat. Mat is an experience with its one patterns of neural firing and
similarly encoded. The cat _On_ the mat, James' conjunctive relation, is the
simultaneous firing of cat and mat patterns into a new single pattern of
firing: "cat-on-mat." This contiguity of firing increases the chance that
future firings of catness or matness will include connections to
cat-on-matness. It is the repetition of these conjunctions that gives
catness the qualities of catness. Cat are almost always conjoined with
patterns like fuzzy, clawed, pointy eared, purring etc. All of these
patterns and the history of connections between them are encode in patterns
of neural interaction.

A key feature of these firing patterns is that that are not constrained by
the fundamentally sequential character of Now. In other words, immediate
experience is a sequential stream of past flowing into future. It is always
unidirectional. Because experience is encoded as patterns of neural
interaction rather than as a sequence of firing, it is the first true
example of random access in nature.

Memory is not sequential. Those patterns of firing can and to happen
randomly and can to accessed randomly. Creativity is the ability to make
random connections that make sense, are meaningful, evoke harmonious
emotional experiences. 

Awareness as I said earlier is a synthesis of sensation, emotion and memory.
This is, after all, what James calls forth in radical empiricism: 

Sensation tells us what is here in the now.
Emotion tells us whether it is good or bad.
Memory establishes the present's relations and conjunctions with the past.

We access memory by recalling these stored patterns of firing into
awareness. This is what Micheal Polanyi calls focal knowledge. It is
"figure" to the vast background of potential firing patterns he calls tacit
knowledge. As the Gestalt folks would say it is a figure ground relationship
with awareness focused on the dynamics of figure against a static
background.

As James was first and foremost a functionalist, the function of all of this
is to orient us toward what's coming next. It guides us in what to do next.
It allows us to assess the probability of positive emotional outcomes in the
future. In short it reduces uncertainty which it to say it creates meaning.

dmb continues:
Let me repeat the central question, just in case you missed it. "Why should
physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?" 

[Krimel]
The richness of inner life is this synthesis. Neuroscience, while still in
its infancy, is giving us answers to both how and why questions. What you
seem to be pursuing is the fundamentally skeptical attitude of two years
olds asking an endless stream of "Why?"

Why are these impossibly complex processes experienced in just this way and
not some other or why are they experienced at all? (there is a rich
literature on philosophical zombies, BTW. Since this seems to be all new to
you, check it out.) That is like asking why it is that when you put two
hydrogen atoms together with an oxygen atom it feels wet. Or why a candle
flame produces a particular frequency of light. Or, why does the porridge
bird lay its eggs in the air?

Your panpsychic approach provides exactly the kind of answer we end up
giving to two year olds: "Because God made it that way."

After a lengthy gee whiz explication of Frank Jackson's "Mary Problem" which
is snipped:

[dmb said:]
When I think about this gap between functions and experience I can't help
but think of the gap between Krimel's version of James and my version. As I
see it, your emphasis on "perception" has turned James's pure experience
into a mere function. See, I've never denied the existence of these
processes and functions as you seem to think. But I have repeatedly objected
to that kind of explanation as reductive and irrelevant. 

[Krimel]
The best evidence I know of psychic processes is that I can predict your
response to the preceding. Please spare me a trip to the archives to rehash
this. If you are serious about these matters. Move on. Any attempt at
explanation involves casting experience into a set of concepts. Conception
IS reducing continuous experience into discrete conceptual patterns of
neurons firing. Let me repeat:

"This is, after all, what James calls forth in radical empiricism:
Sensation tells us what is here in the Now.
Emotion tells us whether it is good or bad.
Memory establishes the present's relations and conjunctions with the past."

If as Chalmer's claims something like what I have presented above actually
does answer the "easy problems" let me point out that those answers have
come about within the past 30 years. The neuroscience approach as produced
astonishing results. James would have gotten a four hour woody out of
hearing a fraction of the discoveries you want to sweep under the rug and
toss away as irrelevant reductionism.

This is in many ways a new science and it moves very fast. There is no
reason to suspect that whatever answers we get to the "hard problem" or if
we decide, as I suspect, that it is a childish fake problem, neuroscience
will be the final arbitrator for all but the very superstitious, the very
hard headed, the deeply romantic, the religious or the clueless.

[dmb]
I sincerely hope that Chalmer's framing of the hard problem will help you
see what I mean. Chalmers is saying these functional explanations can't
explain the felt experiences that arise from them. Likewise, pure experience
can't be explained in terms of perceptual processes, let alone equated with
them. 

[Krimel]
Experience is these processes. They can be equated. Neither you nor Chalmers
has present evidence of anything going on outside of them. The hard problem
as you present it is not a question of the processes themselves but of their
results. The solution you offer is an extreme form of dualism. As I see it,
it is a delusional evocation of the divine. 

Dmb]
That would be like trying to explain the quality of a road trip in terms of
gas mileage or oil temperature. They are certainly involved in the road trip
but that's just not what we're asking about. 

[Krimel]
For the forty second time, if we have no accounting of oil temperature and
gas mileage there is no road trip to ask. Oil temperature, gas mileage, the
wind in your hair and the satisfaction of cold beer are various Points of
View, our focal awareness of figure against a tacit background. They are
only at odds to the extent that they jockey for position as one of the seven
things we can process at once. The rest of the time they are fields of
potential in the fractal nest of our nervous systems.