God On The Brain

[Guest]

I'm sorry, no such thing has been demonstrated.

It has been clearly demonstrated, repeatedly. Materialism runs into very serious problems when the discussion centres on qualia. Materialism has been repeaedly shown to either be forced to state that "there are no such thing as qualia" or that "Qualia ARE brain processes" without being able to define what is meant by "IS". The Hard Problem is very real.

quote:
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Originally posted by UndercoverElephant

It is your belief that materialism is true that prevents certain phenomena manifesting in your presence.
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I think I first ran into this argument when I was about 13. I think it was reading something called Cosmic Consciousness. I have run into it again and again - The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, the Don Juan books, stuff by Jung - all over the place.

All over the place, yes.

I don't believe it. I used to believe it, but I don't now. I don't doubt that your mind set can alter your perception, but not for a second do I believe it can alter objective reality.

That would be the standard materialist viewpoint.

Furthermore, even if it were true I can absolutely verify to you that the maintaining a nonmaterialist belief system does not result in the manifestion of nonmaterialistic phenomena.

My personal experiences prevent me from accepting this.

There are all sorts of generally accepted truths about the nature of reality. You throw a ball up, it comes down. and no, Newton did not discover that phenomenon nor did anyone need him to define it in order to believe that it happens. And it happens all the time whether you believe in it or not. Apparently you would argue that along side all these ordinary attributes of reality which happen all the time whether you believe in them or not is this assortment of secret, occassional and arbitrary aspects of reality which occur only if you believe in them or think about them in the right way.

We are talking about the difference between physics and metaphysics. They are different sorts of phenomena and they manifest in very different ways. It is a different level of reality being discussed. It is like the difference between the operation of 4-d space-time and the operation of a branching many-worlds interpretation of QM. One we can see. The other we can't. Both affect us.

And they occur so unreliably that there existence has not been confirmed in the minds of plain, old, ordinary mankind over course of a thousand generations.

Depends who you listen to. You said yourself that the core of these beliefs pops up all over the place. And it always has done. You just don't happen to believe it and haven't happened to experience it. You are assuming that because it doesn't happen to you that it doesn't happen to anyone.

How is that possible? Mind you, it does not count - all those people who simply, arbitrarily believe whatever comes down the pike.

I believe NOTHING except for what I can logically demonstrate or have actually experienced.

 

[Peskanov]

UCE;

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quote:
It has been clearly demonstrated, repeatedly. Materialism runs into very serious problems when the discussion centres on qualia. Materialism has been repeaedly shown to either be forced to state that "there are no such thing as qualia" or that "Qualia ARE brain processes" without being able to define what is meant by "IS". The Hard Problem is very real.
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We call qualia to the set of signals comming from the senses encoded by the brain for analysis and recording purposes.

How about that? Is it correctly e-primed?
(I don't get much sense of this e-prime thing, but anyway...).

 

[Lord Kenneth]

UCE;

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quote:
It has been clearly demonstrated, repeatedly. Materialism runs into very serious problems when the discussion centres on qualia. Materialism has been repeaedly shown to either be forced to state that "there are no such thing as qualia" or that "Qualia ARE brain processes" without being able to define what is meant by "IS". The Hard Problem is very real.
----

We call qualia to the set of signals comming from the senses encoded by the brain for analysis and recording purposes.

How about that? Is it correctly e-primed?
(I don't get much sense of this e-prime thing, but anyway...).

But making things up is sooooo much more fun!

 

[synaesthesia]

Undercover Elephant,

That is your belief. It was my belief also when I was a materialist. My certainty, in fact.

I have not seen anything approaching or resembling a contender for an epistemic framework for direct, unmediated, self-evident qualia.

You think I went from science & skepticism moderator at the secweb to paranormalist because of traditional superstition?

The historical antecedents are far to complex for me to hope to distangle, Mr. Elephant. But only with great difficulty can I avoid the conclusion that proclivities, limitations in our ability to make sense of the world accumulate a gunk of symptomatic mistakes. Families of mechanisms of error can be discerned in our acceptance of inappropriate claims of justification.

You don't think it had anything to do with the thousands of posts I made on the subjects of ontology and mathematics?

I imagine that had a substantial effect and that your religious experiences are in many ways unique and poorly communicable epitomes of the human mind.

So you are certain these phenomena are false because they do not happen to lend themselves to independent verification....ah...I remember now....you were the person who said qualia don't exist....

Qualia are not only not independantly verifiable, their existence is purported to be demonstrated by systems, brain systems, that are not aminable to description in terms of qualia, but are describable as physical recurrent network. Qualia don't exist.

Because you would be making very different posts.

I'm no mystic-that's for damn sure- therefore I don't speak like one, share their beliefs or whatever. I have, however, had overwhelming 'religous' experiences - yes quite unlike any other drug. Were my experiences identical to yours?

The neuronal evidence suggests that they are in many ways different and yet there are commonalities. Precisely which respects you are different from me, characterizing the taxonomy of experience as it were, will have to await further development in the mind sciences.

 

[synaesthesia]

It has been clearly demonstrated, repeatedly. Materialism runs into very serious problems when the discussion centres on qualia. Materialism has been repeaedly shown to either be forced to state that "there are no such thing as qualia" or that "Qualia ARE brain processes" without being able to define what is meant by "IS". The Hard Problem is very real.

Those two positions are so common simply because those are the terms in which the debate is so often framed. This is unfortunate because when we assert that qualia are real, there are a range of, excuse me, qualities associated with qualia.

Some of these I think reflect something about what's actually going on, some of it's simply confused. To the extent that the idea of qualia is confused, it's not real. To the extent that there are hard to avoid realities in our experience, qualia are very real.

I do not want the million. I do not want to prove I am correct. It is absolutely imperative that people prove these things to themselves.

The notion that one can prove something to themselves but not others is not alien to human experience. Since you can physically TELL us that you have proven various ideas to yourself, there are - in principle - means by which we can eludicate the origins of those physical activities.

But what you are asserting is not possible - in principle - to demonstrate to someone else. What you are telling us is the result of something other than qualia. It's merely physical, just mindless quantum wiggling as far as we know so far.

So a million dollars isn't enough to induce you to illuminate the secrets of the universe to tens of thousands of otherwise unenlightened individuals? Shame, you should be willing to just on principle.

I'm just kidding as you know. I don't think you can prove it to me anymore than you can understand it yourself.

You have to be on a fearless search for the truth, and you have to go get it yourself. Waiting around for someone to provide you with proof is the wrong psychological state to engage with the process which produces the phenomena. Your 'reality tunnel' does not change until you change.

The problem here Undercover Elephant, is that my search is taking me in radically different directions from your own. I have changed and continue to change, but I nevertheless disagree deeply with various ideas of self-evident units of experience.

 

[synaesthesia]

I repeat : even YOU have an existential limit as to what can be rationalised, you just do not believe it is possible for that limit to be breached.

I have not one limit, but innumerable limits, some of which can be pressed if other factors fall into play, some of which are weakened to the breaking point by accompanying confusion.

Our cogntive toolbox is flexible but not infinitely so. Very often I find myself so confused that I find efforts to make sense of my confusion are thwarted.

This is of course a very natural consequence of the limits of recurrent neuronal networks. The scientific images are them most apt for integrating everything I see and think. Within them aspects of the idea of qualia have to be discarded.

 

[scribble]

bah.

UcE, you don't tell them about your mystical experience because you know they will LAUGH AT YOU.

Just like I am still laughing at you to this day... even as I laugh at you every time you mention mathematics...

Or worse, perhaps they will remind you of what I've already told you and you already know to be true. You're a nutter.

-Chris

 

[Guest]

UCE;

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quote:
It has been clearly demonstrated, repeatedly. Materialism runs into very serious problems when the discussion centres on qualia. Materialism has been repeaedly shown to either be forced to state that "there are no such thing as qualia" or that "Qualia ARE brain processes" without being able to define what is meant by "IS". The Hard Problem is very real.
----

We call qualia to the set of signals comming from the senses encoded by the brain for analysis and recording purposes.

How about that? Is it correctly e-primed?
(I don't get much sense of this e-prime thing, but anyway...).

Hi Peskanov,

Well, it doesn't use "to be", but I'm not sure it makes much sense. For a start, 'the signals coming from the senses" does not appear to accurately describe what we mean by "qualia". The signals and the qualia differ. The qualia result from the signals. The relevant point is simply that we have a brain process and a qualia which very closely correlate but have totally different descriptions - one of them is (x) meat-based and the other is mind-based. Therefore you cannot simply say "x IS y" without explaining what you mean by "is" (since they clearly differ).

 

[Guest]

Syn

quote:
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You think I went from science & skepticism moderator at the secweb to paranormalist because of traditional superstition?
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The historical antecedents are far to complex for me to hope to distangle, Mr. Elephant. But only with great difficulty can I avoid the conclusion that proclivities, limitations in our ability to make sense of the world accumulate a gunk of symptomatic mistakes. Families of mechanisms of error can be discerned in our acceptance of inappropriate claims of justification.

I am merely stating that I understood only too well the pitfalls of "traditional superstition". Unlike the Christian fundies who claim "I once was an evolutionist" I really can lay claim to not only having been a skeptical atheist, but an activist also. I get irritated by anyone who suggests I do not understand both sides of this debate. I know exactly why the materialists remain materialists.

Qualia are not only not independantly verifiable, their existence is purported to be demonstrated by systems, brain systems, that are not aminable to description in terms of qualia, but are describable as physical recurrent network. Qualia don't exist.

Well....I'm happy to agree to disagree with that statement. It is the only coherent materialistic position, but it rather amounts to a denial of ones own existence, IMO.




Chris scribbled :

bah.

UcE, you don't tell them about your mystical experience because you know they will LAUGH AT YOU.

Just like I am still laughing at you to this day... even as I laugh at you every time you mention mathematics...

Or worse, perhaps they will remind you of what I've already told you and you already know to be true. You're a nutter.

I'm not sure they'd laugh, Chris - but they would be very unlikely to believe anything they could not rationalise into their metaphysics. I am not bothered about people laughing at me - we could use some more laughter in this world. But there is no point in relating things that I already know will not be believed.

 

[Peskanov]

Hi UCE,

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quote:
Well, it doesn't use "to be", but I'm not sure it makes much sense. For a start, 'the signals coming from the senses" does not appear to accurately describe what we mean by "qualia".
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Atom description also doesn't evoke matter. IMO this is no reason to discard a definition.
A good example: a program. Does a collection of electric charges on capacitors describe a program? Or magnetic fields? Of course not. More information has to be added to the definition to say "it''s a program".
Thats is the reason which made me add "encoded by the brain for analysis and recording purposes".

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quote:
The signals and the qualia differ. The qualia result from the signals. The relevant point is simply that we have a brain process and a qualia which very closely correlate but have totally different descriptions - one of them is (x) meat-based and the other is mind-based. Therefore you cannot simply say "x IS y" without explaining what you mean by "is" (since they clearly differ).
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Not at all. The same could be said exactly of a computer program.
The brain is a system of information. The code changes, and the meaning changes, at several levels. I called Qualia at the information coded the right way for the conscience.

For example: You see a car. If you have notions of image reckoning on computers, you know that the same information will change of shape lots of times. In the end, a matching process is made with the external source and a set of known objects, and the result "it's a car", it's semantic. "It's a car" signal doesn't resemble the original input at all, but, unlike it, it HAS meaning.

The point: The definition I said is just a starting point of work. But it can't be discarded right away. It's as good as any other definition related to information systems. You would have to prove that Qualia is more than information to invalidate it.

 

[Guest]

Not at all. The same could be said exactly of a computer program.
The brain is a system of information. The code changes, and the meaning changes, at several levels. I called Qualia at the information coded the right way for [consciousness].

For example: You see a car. If you have notions of image reckoning on computers, you know that the same information will change of shape lots of times. In the end, a matching process is made with the external source and a set of known objects, and the result "it's a car", it's semantic. "It's a car" signal doesn't resemble the original input at all, but, unlike it, it HAS meaning.

The point: The definition I said is just a starting point of work. But it can't be discarded right away. It's as good as any other definition related to information systems. You would have to prove that Qualia is more than information to invalidate it. [/B]

Qualia is more than information by definition. Qualia is the awareness of the information. Claiming that "Qualia ARE information" is no more helpfull than claiming "Qualia ARE brain processes". The thing which distinguishes qualia are the fact that they are actually being experienced by something. It is the actual "redness" itself - the thing you experience - NOT the associated brain process, and NOT the associated "information". The "information" exists in both a normal human and in a philosophical zombie. Only the human has the qualia.

 

[Rusty_the_boy_robot]

Qualia is more than information by definition. Qualia is the awareness of the information. Claiming that "Qualia ARE information" is no more helpfull than claiming "Qualia ARE brain processes". The thing which distinguishes qualia are the fact that they are actually being experienced by something. It is the actual "redness" itself - the thing you experience - NOT the associated brain process, and NOT the associated "information". The "information" exists in both a normal human and in a philosophical zombie. Only the human has the qualia.

So who came up with this idea of "qualia". From all I can see you have never offered a pervasive argument for the belief that these "qualias" must exist. Perhaps you can drop a link, that is if there is any valid arguments that even suggest qualias must exist.

 

[Guest]

So who came up with this idea of "qualia". From all I can see you have never offered a pervasive argument for the belief that these "qualias" must exist. Perhaps you can drop a link, that is if there is any valid arguments that even suggest qualias must exist.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/

The word came into usage for the precise reason that there has been a tendency amongst physicalist scientists to mix up the subjective and objective elements of 'consciousness' in order to be able to claim that one is the other. "Qualia" thus came into use to describe the subjective "1st-person" part of this as distinguished from the physical/objective "3rd-person" brain process. I fail to understand how they can be said to "not exist". I am fairly certain I know the difference between the experience of seeing green and a physiological process in a lump of meat.

 

[Peskanov]

UCE,

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quote:
Qualia is more than information by definition . Qualia is the awareness of the information. Claiming that "Qualia ARE information" is no more helpfull than claiming "Qualia ARE brain processes". The thing which distinguishes qualia are the fact that they are actually being experienced by something. It is the actual "redness" itself - the thing you experience - NOT the associated brain process, and NOT the associated "information". The "information" exists in both a normal human and in a philosophical zombie. Only the human has the qualia.
----

I don't see Qualia definition saying that it is more than information. Where is that said?
I already addresed the awareness topic in my previous reply. Probably you are asumming that awareness is more than an information process. But again, we don't have evidence of it.
If you accept that being aware is processing an information, there is no more problem with qualia.
Also, note that this materialistic model solves perfectly the mental experiments your link provides; I will elaborate if you want, but I think as a programmer you can also see it easily.

 

[Interesting Ian]

UCE,



I don't see Qualia definition saying that it is more than information.

To say that qualia is information is to misunderstand the meaning of qualia.

Where is that said?
I already addresed the awareness topic in my previous reply. Probably you are asumming that awareness is more than an information process. But again, we don't have evidence of it.

The "evidence" is that awareness or immediate experiences are utterly qualitatively different from any physical process or thing. It's like asking someone what evidence is there that a banana and an elephant are not one and the same thing. What can one do apart from exhaustively state what bananas are and what are elephants are? The "evidence" that they are not the same thing, whether we are talking about qualia/information or bananas/elephants, is that that there is absolute zero reason to suppose that they are the same thing.

 

[Peskanov]

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quote:
But making things up is sooooo much more fun!
----

Cobra, are you talking about Qualia,e-prime, or my definition?

 

[Peskanov]

Hello Ian;

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quote:
The "evidence" is that awareness or immediate experiences are utterly qualitatively different from any physical process or thing. It's like asking someone what evidence is there that a banana and an elephant are not one and the same thing. What can one do apart from exhaustively state what bananas are and what are elephants are? The "evidence" that they are not the same thing, whether we are talking about qualia/information or bananas/elephants, is that that there is absolute zero reason to suppose that they are the same thing.
----

This is not a good analogy, Ian. I am not relating two objects. I am not using "information" as a thing, but as a category.

Like saying: A thunder is a sound which come from X phenomena and has Y properties.

I say: Qualia is a set of informations related to blah blah...
What I subjectively know about Qualia is only information related. Different forms of information.
So, I categorise qualia as an information phenomena. I put it in the same category of morse, speak, TV radiofrequency, etc...
Qualia's physical nature it's not important for explaining what it is in my opinion. I am asumming it's electrochemical nature, and talking about what I think is important here: the nature of the information of these signals.

Of course, I make lots of assumptions, as everything in materialism; but UCE says materialism can't deal with Qualia and I don't see this to be the case.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Hello Ian;

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quote:
The "evidence" is that awareness or immediate experiences are utterly qualitatively different from any physical process or thing. It's like asking someone what evidence is there that a banana and an elephant are not one and the same thing. What can one do apart from exhaustively state what bananas are and what are elephants are? The "evidence" that they are not the same thing, whether we are talking about qualia/information or bananas/elephants, is that that there is absolute zero reason to suppose that they are the same thing.
----

This is not a good analogy, Ian. I am not relating two objects. I am not using "information" as a thing, but as a category.

Like saying: A thunder is a sound which come from X phenomena and has Y properties.

I have no idea what you're talking about. What does saying information is a catagory mean?? A catagory of what?? As I said, saying qualia is information is like saying a banana is an elephant. Why is it a false analogy?? I don't care what you describe information as being. What I want to know is what sense can be made saying that it is the very same thing as qualia?

I say: Qualia is a set of informations related to blah blah...

What do you mean?? What has qualia got to do with information??

What I subjectively know about Qualia is only information related.
Different forms of information.
So, I categorise qualia as an information phenomena.

Qualia has absolutely nothing to do with information. Nothing to do with anything physical.

I put it in the same category of morse, speak, TV radiofrequency, etc...
Qualia's physical nature it's not important for explaining what it is in my opinion. I am asumming it's electrochemical nature,

Then you are presuming the correctness of materialism. Materialism is self-evidently absurd. Like saying a banana is numerically identical to an elephant.

 

[Lord Kenneth]

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quote:
But making things up is sooooo much more fun!
----

Cobra, are you talking about Qualia,e-prime, or my definition?

Mysticism, paranomalism...

 

[Lord Kenneth]

How red something is can be determined by the wavelength of the light. How bright something is can be determined with how much light the object emits. How much pain something feels can be determined by looking at brain and nerve activity. How salty something tastes can be determined by salt content and the reactions of taste buds...