For Dan - Do we even exist?

[LanceGary]

see

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-blurred-reality-of-humanity-2247591.html

[danbaron]

No time now, I'll have to look tonight, Lance.

Unfortunately, from my imaginary experience, I know that the train (Is the train real or not?), never waits for the non-existent me.

:bom:

[danbaron]

(I had to do a lot of stuff tonight. Now, it's late. So, this post may not be too good.)

The brain is a complex machine. When all of its parts are functioning correctly, we experience the sense of a unified self. Similarly, when all the parts of a jet are functioning correctly, the experience is of smooth flying. But, if just one critical part stops functioning, the experience can be drastically different.

It doesn't surprise me that as parts of the brain cease to operate, the sense of a unified self weakens or fractures.

Lots of investigators have documented the many strange behaviors that manifest when the brain is damaged. For instance, the neurologist, Oliver Sacks, wrote a book titled, "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat", and he meant it literally.

When the brain stops functioning, and putrifies, we don't experience anything at all, at least not on this plane of existence. No one is surprised by that.

Concerning Susan Blackmore, I am pretty sure that she believes that we do not even have free will. In other words, science only knows about two types of physical processes, deterministic and random. Therefore, the brain must function by some combination of the two, thereby making free will impossible. (Strangely, to me, if I remember correctly, she recommends that we forget about the fact that we don't have free will, and try to enjoy our lives. To me, if she is correct, and we don't have free will, then, her recommendation is senseless. If we have no free will, then, of course, we have no control at all over whether or not we enjoy anything.)

Since when the brain is functioning normally, we experience a unified self, and when it has stopped functioning completely we experience nothing, you would expect there to be a continuum of experiences between the two extreme states.

The materialist for sure would say that we are not more than our bodies, that consciousness stops forever when the body dies. Others would ask how consciousness can emerge from the assembly of many many unconscious objects (atoms).

Here is an enlightened guy (believe it or not, he is an American) I recently heard on the radio, who writes about similar things.

http://rahasyapoe.com/

There (at his website), I downloaded a 10 minute video (I think it was 12 MB, it took me a long time. I finally realized that I can watch videos (my internet connection is only 56K), if I first download them completely, instead of buffering them. But, usually, it doesn't seem worth it.), by Peter Russell. He answers the question of how consciousness can emerge from the assembly of unconscious objects, by claiming that it can't. I think he claims that consciousness comes first, and everything in the material world is a manifestation of consciousness.

:oops:

[LanceGary]

(I had to do a lot of stuff tonight. Now, it's late. So, this post may not be too good.)

The brain is a complex machine. When all of its parts are functioning correctly, we experience the sense of a unified self. Similarly, when all the parts of a jet are functioning correctly, the experience is of smooth flying. But, if just one critical part stops functioning, the experience can be drastically different.

It doesn't surprise me that as parts of the brain cease to operate, the sense of a unified self weakens or fractures.

Lots of investigators have documented the many strange behaviors that manifest when the brain is damaged. For instance, the neurologist, Oliver Sacks, wrote a book titled, "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat", and he meant it literally.

When the brain stops functioning, and putrifies, we don't experience anything at all, at least not on this plane of existence. No one is surprised by that.

Concerning Susan Blackmore, I am pretty sure that she believes that we do not even have free will. In other words, science only knows about two types of physical processes, deterministic and random. Therefore, the brain must function by some combination of the two, thereby making free will impossible. (Strangely, to me, if I remember correctly, she recommends that we forget about the fact that we don't have free will, and try to enjoy our lives. To me, if she is correct, and we don't have free will, then, her recommendation is senseless. If we have no free will, then, of course, we have no control at all over whether or not we enjoy anything.)

Since when the brain is functioning normally, we experience a unified self, and when it has stopped functioning completely we experience nothing, you would expect there to be a continuum of experiences between the two extreme states.

The materialist for sure would say that we are not more than our bodies, that consciousness stops forever when the body dies. Others would ask how consciousness can emerge from the assembly of many many unconscious objects (atoms).

Here is an enlightened guy (believe it or not, he is an American) I recently heard on the radio, who writes about similar things.

http://rahasyapoe.com/

There (at his website), I downloaded a 10 minute video (I think it was 12 MB, it took me a long time. I finally realized that I can watch videos (my internet connection is only 56K), if I first download them completely, instead of buffering them. But, usually, it doesn't seem worth it.), by Peter Russell. He answers the question of how consciousness can emerge from the assembly of unconscious objects, by claiming that it can't. I think he claims that consciousness comes first, and everything in the material world is a manifestation of consciousness.

:oops:


1. I thought the article might be of interest to you - I didn't mean to tease you.

2. I am told that patients taking a particular depression medicine often get the feeling that their legs have vanished and that they are floating...

3. The article wasn't trying to deny the existence of a continuum between the breadkdown of self and a unified self, but to make the point that arguments for a central unified self are undermined by some of those intermediate states. So Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" begins to prove only that thought exists, not that a unified self exists.

4. Susan Blackwell's commitment to determinism doesn't seem to me to be incompatible with self instruction. Many physical systems include feedback and recursion loops. Why not us? If so the key to organising ourselves lies in such feedback loops. One of Douglas Hofstader's books tries to make this point even in it's title: "I am a strange loop".

5. The argument for idealism also seems to me to be undermined by the existence of things that seem to be real but of which we are not conscious. Take colour constancy in photographs. When we cut out some sections of a photo that appear to be (say) red, and then compare the colour with a refeence sample the colour of the cut out may just appear gray. Somehow our "eye" adjusted that gray to take into account the effect of the ambient lighting in the photograph, and thus make they gray appear red. But we are not conscious of this process. So we have two product of consciousness - seeing the intact photograph and seeing the portion of the photograph in comparison with a reference colour test, and the inescapable conclusion is that something happened to our consciousness of the first of which we are not conscious. That suggests that reality cannot just be those things of which we are conscious. (The colour constancy argument turns on the the Retinex theory of colour vision I think by Edwin Land).

6. Thanks for your reply. Enjoyed reading it.

Lance

[danbaron]

I didn't feel teased by you, Lance. I just have had a lot of things to do lately, and have been tired. I'm tired now. So, I feel like my consciousness has become cuckoo. In that respect, I don't feel like I have a unified self, or at least, a consistent self. Now, my thinking processes are slower, my thoughts are confused.

I think I understand what you mean with respect to Descartes. (So many of the broad pronouncements by intellectuals of a particular time, which are cited as fact by ordinary people again and again through the centuries, are ultimately shown to be false. For instance, in our time, we have "seers" proclaiming the impending "theory of everything", and, "the end of physics". My speculation is that often the primary motivation for such public statements of certainty, is ego gratification.) But, can thoughts exist without a thinker?

A thought comes into my mind now (or at least, information about this thought is being typed now). I used to live in the suburbs of Chicago. Now, I live in California. So, now I sometimes wonder if Chicago exists, when I am not there. In other words, is reality there only when there is an observer (or I guess, more accurately, only when the observer is me)? Maybe the universe is "lazy". It only displays the "props" of objectivity, when there is a consciousness to view them. I visit my wife at a nursing home. I know a lot of the nurses there. Sometimes, I will suddenly spin around to see if maybe I can catch the universe "off guard", and observe a void behind me before the universe has time to display what I should be observing. The nurses know my joke, and laugh. The idea as a whole, causes me to think that the philosophical question, "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?", is actually not trivial.

Now, I have to catch the train, maybe more tonight.

[danbaron]

Concerning your fourth point:

Of course the brain re-wires according to its environmental input. But, it seems to me that if the brain is deterministic, then, a person never has a choice in any of his actions. In that case if someone, "self-instructs", the action may have felt voluntary, but was in fact, the only possibility for him.

Concerning your fifth point:

The only thing I can think of to say is that our brains receive external data through our five senses. From that data our brains construct an internal model which is used to represent external reality. I think it is impossible for us to ever determine to what degree the model coincides with objective external reality.

"nothing more" - E.A.Poe

:x:p