Either the gentle arousal of sleeping beauty or disturbing a sleeping dragon, which is it?
The part:
An individual human could not become a self-reflective, thinking adult without the necessary bodily systems, processes and organs which comprise the whole organism.
The whole:
Earthly life could not reach a stage in which individual organisms become self-reflective, rational thinking beings without the forms of life which develop in a way that comprises the vast supporting structure that allow these few seeds of nascent self-aware consciousness to spring from the living earth. Life on earth is one self-regulating body while humanity provides the mind within that body.
The majority of earthly life forms only developed so far along the path, some along ever narrowing, one-sided branches, while the balance of the whole is ever maintained. The one-sided nature of some creatures is obvious. Giant pandas being a classic example. The hoof of a horse, the wing of an albatross, the middle finger of an aye-aye, are all much more specialised than the human hand. Ideally suited to their specific tasks. But this speciality becomes a hindrance to further novelty.
Like pacemakers in a race, various creatures forego their own advancement to give an outcome which was destined in the long run. And to achieve this outcome whereby nature can look upon herself with a spark of understanding, self-conscious individuals are a necessity. The sleeping beauty that is nature begins to wake up. Or has the dragon been poked with a stick?
The ubiquitous instinctive wisdom of nature which has been in control since physical life began is handing over its power to the still ripening human wisdom. And of course there is no guarantee that the newly sapient creatures that we are will be up to the task of handling this new found power responsibly. Adolescents can be unpredictable when they encounter novel freedom before they have gained the experience to deal with it.
Our minds are our exception within nature. And human exceptionalism rightly regarded is a privilege granted us by nature. It is not something for us to boast about; we did not get here by means of our own efforts. We did not wake of our own accord. This is a responsibility which was thrust upon us and we are now left in a position where we have a great deal of control over the destiny of earthly life. Will we gain sufficient maturity to enhance life or are we the seeds of earthly destruction?
The future will determine if our efforts turn out to be praiseworthy. We can claim no credit for getting to this point. Will we be considered worthy of credit for what follows? We haven’t made the best of starts but who would have expected otherwise.
This seems to involve the following thought: we are not entitled to assert that we know that consciousness is produced by the brain unless we are immediately aware of consciousness being produced by the brain.
Curious that you always deny that you’re a Cartesian, yet you constantly argue like one.
In any event: DNA_Jock did not assert that they were certain that consciousness is produced by the brain. They asserted it, which means that they take it to be true.
Taking something to be true is by no means equivalent to asserting something with certainty, since the former is consistent with fallibilism about that belief and the latter is not.
DNA_Jock is implicitly committed to fallibilism about their belief precisely because they are asking you for reasons why it is false, and no one who is not committed to fallibilism would make that request of an interlocutor.
In other words, the question is not about certainty but about what we have evidence to assert as true.
Yes, it’s only a hard problem for materialists/physicalists.
Sorry, but no. The very idea of “the hard problem of consciousness”, as David Chalmers defines it, depends on assumptions about semantics that no one should accept, regardless of their metaphysics. This is quite evident to those of us who have put in the hard work of actually reading Chalmers and knowing what we’re talking about. If you haven’t read Chalmers and don’t know his work then don’t appropriate his concepts.
It isn’t a physical entity so it makes no sense to place it in a definite location as if it were physical.
What! You don’t “think” were are aware that we “think”?
When I read some research paper on neuronal activity I have to use my thinking to understand it. Are you saying that this process won’t get me anywhere? The only reason I know that there are neurons in my brain is because I have understood what many experts have told us and on thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion that they are correct in saying this.
All I ask is that people think about my questions and give me their sensible opinions. Why the reluctance to answer?
It helps if the questions are sensible.
I actually think that how the human mind works is an interesting if insoluble question. Trying to establish some common ground, what words mean, with you however seems increasingly futile. We have lots of ways of expressing what is going on in our brains, minds, consciousness but with some idea of what you mean by these words I’m not going to get very far in understanding your view, if indeed you have one.
My view about consciousness is that it isn’t a thing so the hard problem doesn’t exist for me. Dennett persuaded me that we can perhaps advance our understanding by listening to first person accounts while experimenting and observing the third person perspective. I also agree with Corneel that most issues are not binary and we observe grduations in cognitive ability rather than category differences. I also think comparative studies of the cognition of other species is worth doing.
Perhaps there’s something to build a discussion on but it takes at least two to communicate.
Alan Fox,
To understand CharlieM’s views, it helps to know that Steiner’s epistemology and metaphysics is (from what I can tell) an incoherent jumble of Schopenhauer and Hegel. Unfortunately CharlieM is not able to explain any of this.
Charlie asks:
No, we are quite clearly not in the middle of a conversation.
Let’s review the tape:
My original comment:
Charlie replies, missing the point entirely
I explain the issue
Charlie tries to change the subject
Re audio perception:
Re visual perception
DNAJ tries to have a conversation
Re audio perception:
Re visual perception
Charlie continues to try to change the subject
All wonderfully erudite-sounding assertions, but entirely non-responsive. Furthermore, when challenged on these goofy assertions, Charlie will conveniently forget about them and move on to yet more ignorant tangential assertions.
A conversation it ain’t.
Jock:
Charlie
It’s pathetic.
Kantian Naturalist,
Thank you.
I think I am a fallibilist, but…
There are no gaps between words, yet I perceive such gaps. The retinal image of a chair near me is far larger than the retinal image of a distant chair, and yet I perceive them to be similar in size. All this processing is done by my brain.
From what I have read, people are not born with these perceptions, but they are learned at different stages of early childhood. Hold something interesting in front of an infant, then move it and the infant’s eyes and head do not follow it. The notion of it being something “out there” that’s moving is learned. The optical illusions artists create are often based on manipulating these learned perception techniques, producing tricks of perspectives that are based on experience.
I read of an experiment where subjects wore a set of glasses that flipped everything upside down. Within a week or two, the brain had reversed the effect of the glasses. The subjects were very upset when they removed the glasses, and their “native vision” was flipping all they saw. The brain had to spend another week or two re-learning to see properly.
As for perceived gaps between spoken words where there actually are none, Stephen Jay Gould related that the word “barbarian” was a reference to people speaking in an unknown language, and sounding like a meaningless unbroken stream of bar-bar-bar-bar-bar… In other words, the perception of gaps is contingent on our knowing and understanding the spoken language we hear.
Flint,
I think you are confusing either “object permanence”, which is learnt quite late (see Piaget) or motion detection, which is acquired around 7 weeks (before they even figure out that they are not part of their mother) on the one hand, with “size constancy”, which appears to be present as soon as one can test for it (see Granrud) on the other.
Also, I think you are entirely wrong about optical illusions – I am unaware of evidence supporting the idea that these rules are learned rather than hard-wired, but that is a topic of fierce debate. Most explanations of Müller-Lyer are wrong.
There’s more than two of them 😉
There’s a lot of urban legend aspects to the inverted glasses experiments; mainly they experiments confirm that what we perceive is a confection, created by our brain.
Regarding language, I agree 100% that understanding the language spoken is essential to generating the powerful illusion that there are gaps between the words. [Between all the words, Charlie, you silly man]. Hence my ‘depending on the language’, qualification; I wasn’t trying to insult the French, or people from Northamptonshire.
Small or Far Away
In humans, no. The same thing goes for many continuous traits like height in grown-ups and, as mentioned, things often work a little differently in other species, but I’ll let those points slide.
To further this discussion, let me concede that in humans sex can be (by approximation) treated as a binary discrete character. What strikes me as complete hogwash is how this establishes sex as an “essential difference instead of an incidental difference”. At some point during adolescence my wife reached a height at which she could reach the upper shelf. No celebrations ensued. Why is this so important to you?
Why? What difference does that make to your argument? How does humans being smarter than animals, instead of being a “different kind of smart”, nullify our uniqueness? I seriously do not understand why you consider this a hill worth dying on.
No. I am trying to get him to give me a more detailed explanation as to how he knows that his conscious perception of existing is “ENTIRELY the result of” his brain activity. He can only gain an understanding of reality as he sees it by adding concepts to the entities he perceives.
I believe that matter and thoughts have the same source. The mind and extended nature are not independent entities. The subject-object split is an artefact of our own making.
I think you may be dancing your angels on the heads of pins.
The impression I took from DNA_Jock’s statement was that he considered it a fact and not a tentative belief.
I do know the basics of his works and I don’t think that his concept of the hard problem is that difficult to grasp. And, basically, I agree with you.
If the hard problem is asking how can physical brain processes give rise to subjective experiences, then it is starting from the conclusion that physical processes do give rise to these experiences. It begins with an assumption.
And that’s why I try to ask sensible questions.
Well an immediate question that we could ask is, Is consciousness confined to brain processes? Consciousness has many modes and aspects. We are conscious of direct perception, memories, pain, and many other experiences. To be conscious is to be conscious of something.
Dennett’s ideas are worth thinking about. As far as I know he believes in Darwinian evolution. That means he believes that organisms have a reality of sorts, and that organisms such as ourselves have acquired brains during the evolutionary process. He believes that consciousness is an illusion, but at the same time by using his conscious mind he claims to have seen through this illusion. If consciousness is an illusion what sort of consciousness does he possess that can see through this illusion? Perhaps he believes that we do not know the reality behind the illusion, but we still know we are experiencing an illusion. Isn’t this the same as what the ancient Indians were saying with the concept of maya, or St Paul with looking through a glass darkly, or Shakespeare with his more things in heaven and earth?
Dennett is obviously right in one limited sense. The world as we initially perceive it is an illusion. But thinking gives us the power to overcome this illusion. Taken in isolation, the plant before Goethe was an illusion, just a brief snapshot of the real nature of the plant. This as it truly is must be seen in its extended time element and interconnection with the whole of reality. Through an exhaustive amount of perceiving, recollection and thinking, Goethe was able to bring the reality of plant life into clearer focus.
This type of perception is of a higher order than pure sense perception.
So do you see the gradation in the height of humans as on a par with the gradation of the sexes? The height of the shelf will determine whether Corneel’s wife is “can-reach-the-upper-shelf-just-like-that” type, or a “need-to-get-a-stair” type. Her sex is intrinsic to her in a way that these types are not.
Nature is messy, neither purely linear changes nor purely discrete steps are expected..
Well, we could if we could have some agreement what is meant by “consciousness” in your question. Then we could consider where else consciousness might be or, rather, might happen.
I see failure to communicate that I don’t think is Corneel’s fault.
Have you read any of his basic philosophical books yet?
CharlieM,
I have read carefully every passage of Steiner’s that you have posted here, and every single one has been a waste of my time.
That’s not what the hard problem of consciousness is.
@ Charlie
I mentioned a couple of times (at least) the idea that we cannot understand ourselves as no entity can construct or deconstruct anything as complex as itself.
I wrote an OP a while back that you might that have missed. I see you didn’t comment in the thread.
DNA_Jock,
I’m still not clear about the point you are trying to make with all of this and what comments of mine that you are arguing against with your word gap comments. I’m wondering if I wasn’t making myself clear and that you have misunderstood something I said.
Babies have to learn how to see clearly and to coordinate their eyes. Their behaviour affects how their visual system develops and this process of development is a good example of the wisdom of life. In a Science Daily story about a paper from Yale University, The science of baby’s first sight. they say:
Science Daily: “The experiments have helped to unveil how early-in-life visual experiences — simply trying to see — sculpt a particular subnetwork of brain circuitry we need in order to see properly.”
And from an earlier piece they quote from Spencer Smith, PhD who was conducting an ongoing lab study:
Spencer Smith: “There’s this remarkable biological operation that plays out during development,” Smith said. “Early on, there are genetic programs and chemical pathways that position cells in the brain and help wire up a ‘rough draft’ of the circuitry. Later, after birth, this circuitry is actively sculpted by visual experience: simply looking around our world helps developing brains wire up the most sophisticated visual processing circuitry the world has ever known. Even the best supercomputers and our latest algorithms still can’t compete with the visual processing abilities of humans and animals. We want to know how neural circuitry does this.”
Do you think that young infants can gain any comprehension of the relative sizes of the sun and the moon just by looking at them? They can only know this once they have gained an understanding of perspective.
Ivo Kohler did a lot of research on visual perception including experiments in which the left and right half of each eye had different coloured lenses in front of them for extended periods of time which resulted in the subject regaining normal coloured vision after a time. When the goggles were removed the subject experienced vision in which the complimentary colours to the lenses were experienced until normal sight was again regained.
That’s interesting. Of course to a new born baby even the language of its parents is an unknown language.
What does it matter if we hear what is being said as a continuous or broken stream as long as we can make sense of its content? Do you have links to any papers on this that I can read for myself. I’m sure it would help me to understand your point. I know that with written language several letters can be removed from a text and we can still read it perfectly well.
Love it 🙂
Well we were discussing humans. I take it your wife is one of them. 🙂
It is an essential physical feature because it is a constant that can define a person’s physical characteristics throughout their lives (under normal circumstances). But it’s not so important that I feel the need to continue discussing it.
Being able to communicate and record our inner rational thoughts is unique to humans.
Consciousness is a being’s inner awareness of various entities and processes. I have given examples of some of my conscious experiences. We can infer instances in which animals appear to be conscious compared to plants which do not demonstrate the same level of consciousness.
Do you think that you have conscious experiences? Do you contemplate the question of existence? Do you feel pain? Do you wake up in the morning and remember who you are and how you came to be where you are?
That is consciousness.
I do try to make myself as clear as possible. I know it doesn’t always work. My time is limited and now and again I do rush things
In that case any critique you have of his writings don’t count for much.
David Chalmers: “The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of how physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective experience of the mind and of the world”
Thanks, I’ll take a look.
CharlieM,
My point is a simple one:
You, Charlie, are incapable of having a conversation.
You generally fail to respond to what others write.
Most of what you write is bromides fueled by equivocation and copious woo-filled bafflegab. There’s no there there, but no harm either. Every now and again, your more explicit pontifications are wrong. That’s when I might step in and point out that you are incorrect. In particular, your understanding of sensory perception is terrible.
The whole of that linked page is also an awesome example of Charlie failing to have a conversation.
The comment I am replying to is yet another example of Charlie in action.
Remember, my original point was that we “see” a nearby chair as the same size as a distant chair, despite the difference in size of the retinal images. Charlie replied “That is because through experience you have acquired the concept of perspective.” which I ridiculed, with bird vision.
Charlie is still trying to argue that size constancy is somehow the result of understanding ‘perspective’. But his example here is a comically bad one: the relative sizes of the sun and the moon? WTF? Perspective is absolutely USELESS for determining the relative sizes of the sun and the moon. Forget babies, adults have been gazing at the heavens for centuries and most of them reckoned that the sun and the moon were the same size. Perspective don’t enter into it; it’s celestial mechanics.
[‘Perspective’, or as the grown-ups refer to it, size constancy, IS responsible for the fact that the moon appears bigger when it is on the horizon.]
Ack! Next up, an equivocation of ‘perspective’.
Not my area of specialty, so I read interesting things but usually lack the background to understand them properly. But anyway, I have read that what you say here is even more true than I’d have guessed. That our visual system discards at least 90% of its inputs, so that our mind is handed only what the visual system has learned is considered worth preserving, thereby saving enormously on visual processing. The “invisible gorilla” experiment seems to demonstrate that since the gorilla was not the focus of the watchers, it wasn’t regarded as interesting and seems to have been discarded before it reached the minds of those counting bounces. The “look over there” effect works wonders for stage magicians and politicians.
I thought we were discussing humans as compared to non-human animals.
Well, no, it isn’t important. You keep missing the point that I introduced height as an example of how one can arbitrarily convert a difference on any continuous scale to a discrete difference by choosing arbitrary thresholds. This is what you did when you declared:
based on some differences in our cognitive abilities (you were talking about intentionality at the time). You seem to be unable to grasp this, so I am about to give up. Let’s give it one more go:
That is trivially true, but not actually an answer to my question. My question is: Why is it important that this is expressed as a difference in kind? I could say something like:
“Humans communicate more sophisticated thoughts than non-human animals”
which would turn your comment into a more or less equivalent statement about a difference in scale. Note that humans still are unique in this statement; It really doesn’t make one iota of difference. Yet you somehow attach great importance to phrasing this as a difference in kind. It’s just not rational. Why do you do it?
Of course you are correct up to a point. You threw me with the phrase “distant chair”. We will only see the two chairs as being the same size if they are both relatively close. If each chair was on the back of separate trucks with one being slightly further away from you then size constancy would hold. But if one of the truck were to move away from you then you would see the chair on that truck getting progressively smaller. You know that the chair is not actually shrinking because you understand it is an effect of perspective.
Of course it is. Why would I disagree with that? But it is not useless in gaining an understanding of why their actual relative sizes are so different from the size of their image on our retinas.
Only those with no knowledge of perspective would consider them to be the same size. Their estimates may have been inaccurate but even the ancient Greeks knew that the sun and the moon were different sizes.
As you no doubt know, we use various cues to make sense of what we see. Cues such as retinal disparity, convergence, linear perspective, relative sizes, texture gradients, interposition, shading, motion parallax and optic flow.
As Freud said, the conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg.
Yes we are. But I was specifically referring to sex differences in humans.
Yes. Animals in general do not have mind/body self-consciousness. There are a few exceptions indicating that there are higher animals with rudimentary body awareness. There are gender exceptions in humans, a few who are intersex. But generally humans are regarded as consisting of two different sexes.
Human culture, technology, conscious control of evolutionary processes, mutual understanding of cosmic origins, desires to explore and colonise the extra-earthly universe. These are the sort of attributes and practices that make us exceptional.
You claimed that the hard problem of consciousness begins with the assumption that physical processes give rise to consciousness:
In that lecture, Chalmers makes it perfectly clear that he is not starting off from the assumption that physical processes give rise to consciousness: he is rejecting that assumption.
That doesn’t follow, but whatever.
Alan Fox from the op of his post Thinking About Thinking
“We humans are sentient beings. By some means or other, our species has ended up with, at least in our own opinion, with cognitive abilities that separate sharply from our closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos, with whom we share 99% of our genes. We have made huge advances in knowledge which we can store, share and use in scientific research, cultural development, building infrastructure, exploration, travel, transport. This huge explosion in cultural evolution needed and may be driven by that exceptional intelligence”
Which other species share their opinions about their exceptional cognitive abilities?
I like the John Tyndall quote
One question I have is, what right have we to speak of the cognitive of humans in general? Surely we can only speak of our personal cognitive abilities.
This is not my experience at all. I suspect that you are kidding yourself.
This is obviously wrong. So long as they remain ignorant of celestial mechanics, you can teach anyone as much ‘perspective’ as you like (post 1415 art-school style), and they will be wrong about the relative sizes of the sun and moon.
Ancient Greek astronomers knew this. That’s why I wrote
You are doing that non-responsive rubbish yet again; you are unable to have a conversation.
Well, yes, that’s been my point all along; you seem rather late to the party. Although your phrasing of “we use…to make sense” looks like an attempt to imply some conscious effort…Next thing, you’ll be claiming that these are uniquely human abilities because we have words to describe them.
Squid and cuttlefish.
Of course, some of it may get lost in translation.
Answer: Because the truck it was on drove far into the distance past the vanishing point and up its own exhaust pipe. 🙂
That’s like saying that we cannot speak of food in general; we can only speak of that which we have personally tasted.
It seems like a misguided way of thinking.
First person and third person viewpoints. How sure can I be that what I experience is similar to what others experience? Seems reasonable to make that assumption.
Neil Rickert,
Though taste (or should I say preference) in food varies. How much is innate and how much is learned? Bitterness is associated with various alkaloids that can be poisonous and an aversion to that taste seems universally beneficial. But I have an aversion to dried fruit from childhood that means I can now eat Christmas cake but I don’t enjoy it. Makes no sense logically but I can’t overcome it to gain any pleasure from fruit cake.
I wasn’t saying that Chalmers starts from that position. i was inferring that if someone is asking how physical processes give rise to consciousness then they are assuming a causal direction from the outset. There are other possibilities. Conscious activity might cause physical processes or they might be two sides of a unity in which there is no causal connection, or with causal threads running in both directions.
Chalmers has said similar things to Steiner. For example, according to Chalmers a full explanation of neurophysiological processes can be given at the lower level of the mechanical system, but this system cannot account for the higher level of conscious experience.
In Anthroposophy and Science, lecture 3″Steiner said:
“…it is already openly admitted by many scientists today that with such a method of investigation, in which we simply look externally — first, at what stands before the eye, then at the process in the eye, then at processes in the nerves and further back, even in the brain — we will never get beyond material processes. The point will never be found where some reaction of a soul nature to the external stimulus occurs. With this approach we never examine our actual experience of the outer world.”
Where Steiner says “soul nature” we can take it as conscious experience.
Steiner uses a clock analogy. If someone wished to understand the mechanism of a clock then they can justifiably do this and explain it without going beyond the details of the mechanism. This is the low level explanation. But there is more to the clock than just this explanation. This leaves out the story of the watchmaker and the reasons for its construction. This would be a higher level of explanation. Physical explanations can be complete in themselves but still leave out the higher explanation. .
I’m sure I’ve said something similar in a previous post. If one man hits another his actions can be fully described mechanistically. But a higher description would include reasons to do with motives and such like. Normally they would be the ultimate cause, not the chemical and mechanical processes within his body.
If you were to look along a rail track would you see the rails converging to a vanishing point and the sleepers looking progressively smaller with distance?
Celestial mechanics will tell them how the bodies move in relation to each other, it won’t explain how these bodies appear to them visually.
I’m out of time, will continue later.