SubJeff on 13/2/2011 at 22:54

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Interesting.

Might I posit an alternative hypothesis? (your joke loses you 10 points if you even dare)

Rather than the 3 of you having some "shared" consciousness you all had a similar response to the same drug, which in itself isn't surprising since it does act on specific receptors. To wit; if you had all had cocaine one of the effects would have been a raised heart rate and yet you wouldn't claim to have had a shared heartbeat. I suggest that the acid removes some of the personality traits that make you respond to stimuli in an individual way and so make you all act in a stereotypical "acid" way. Didn't Huxley say this about some psychoactives he used to take - that it removes filters or switches off the reducing valves or something? Which fits perfectly well with one of the neurobiological theories of schizophrenia relating to the loss of (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_inhibition) Latent Inhibition and the schizophrenic behaviours/thinking patterns that acid can cause. I'm not saying there is a link between taking the drug and the illness btw, but there are obvious similarities.



Perhaps the acid wasn't "opening" your mind to a shared experience but closing your minds so you were all only capable of perceiving those experiences in one way, the way dictated by the drug.

NB: Do not, I repeat, do not think about this concept if you are actually on acid. I don't want you freaking yourself out and I'm sitting here sober as a rock (natch) and the concept of a drug that can "make" me think a certain way scares the crap out me.



I think when I brought out the God card he decided he wasn't up for it anymore. :(

demagogue on 14/2/2011 at 06:19

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Double post! :o

Ok, let's do some philosophy.

There are three broad points I think are useful for talking about consciousness these days.

1. A starting Point: Naturalism.

You have to have a starting point. I think it should be naturalism, which is the idea that everything can be explained by natural causes and you don't need more, making the basic question we're trying answer: "What would a science of consciousness be like?". I think it's a good starting point both practically because it gives you a position you can actually go somewhere with, and logically because I think it's the only position that really works (doesn't fall into a paradox) in the universe we find ourselves in.

2. A basic ontology: Functionalism & Pan-Psychism.

So building off that starting point, what's the most basic existence of consciousness? What is it as a "thing" or "event"? (Along with a response to the zombie argument.) I think cns is real; I think it exists (or supervenes) at the "functional" level (i.e., it's not reducible to lower physics, but it's composed entirely by it and nothing else); and I think the logic of that entails that it has to be everywhere in nature in all manner of physical systems above a certain level of complexity, from humans to bugs to ocean currents and cosmic-ray collisions, a position called pan-psychism. But I want to spell out how that argument might work.

3. A Model or Architecture of Human Cns: simulation, network architectures, neuroeconomic architectures, bootstrapping "meaning" out of experience, etc.

Then there's the real issue. What's a realistic model for how we get from (2) to all the great things we have in human CNS, in particular the 3 big things: (1) the rich qualities & experiences of CNS, (2) freedom, and (3) meaning (...language, thoughts about stuff, what is sometimes called "higher order consciousness".) I don't know how well of a model I can present, but one useful thing is to debunk some definite (historically influential) duds: like behaviorism, stim-response models, simple neural net theories, formalism (it's all "syntax", Frege & Chomsky), all the models which blatantly ignore basic aspects of consciousness. And instead I'd want to focus on other types of models which do a much better job of getting at what CNS actually is and does: network architectures, simulation, "global workspace" theories, neuroeconomic architectures (the "middle" systems), a theory of predicative bootstrapping & intentionality bootstrapping, etc. And think about why these models can get at CNS when the old models couldn't.

So... I'll give a little of my thinking on each one of those.

I. Naturalism (a Starting Point)

I'll start with contrasting to SE.
@SE, you'll probably be happy to know your position has a respectable historical tradition, although as you can guess it's rare today. I think if you tried to make that argument at a forum of neurophysiologists or biologists or physicists, there'd be an awkward silence and they'd just move on to the next speaker and you'd get blacklisted from their "credible" list. One thing I like about philosophy as a discipline (what drives some people crazy), is that it's refreshingly open minded and they'll actually go with it and argue it out... And a good philosopher is as ready to argue about the logic of Quantum Mechanics as the nuances of Augustinian theology and everything in between, and keep it all in context of the big picture.
I like that about it.

So, the general trend of your position looks like a trend in the late 19th Century of directed or inspired natural selection. There are different interpretations if the "guiding hand" is top-down causation (a hard sell, like "non-natural natural selection", sort of an oxymoron), or somehow "built-in" to the physics (a better argument, but hard to keep it from collapsing back into the top-down hardsell or just normal physical causation as geneticists spell it out).

Anyway, the basic upshot is it's not a naturalist position, and I think strict naturalism should be the starting point. So I won't get too much into your exact argument and just get to that part now.

(BTW, aside: I do have thoughts about what traditionally gets tagged under theology and divinity and all that, and like to talk about them. But at least for me the place to talk about that isn't here, in these arguments. I think they're better talked about just within the context of being entirely in experience itself, or aspects of human experience, like as part of phenomenology where's everything is taken from the "inside" perspective, and you should read it through that lens. That's opposed to taking an "outside" view and talking about where it comes from or the world outside experience, where such ideas just don't seem to apply or lose their meaning if they did, I think. And I don't think that leads to any contradiction if you're doing it right and stick to naturalist principles when you are talking about the outside world. But anyway, this is a different topic than what I'm talking about now.)

So ... Naturalism is basically the position that all events have a discrete physical cause in time & space,
there aren't direct contradictions in the cause-effect chains, and the universe is essentially causally closed; no non-natural causes leak in, and no actual natural causes leak out (happen without an effect), and that's all there is. There are actually a number of principles you'd want to list out if you were being formal about it (I tried, but it gets long!), and then a ton of footnotes to each of those principles. But cause-effect, non-contradiction, & causal closure is about the gist of it.

A non-natural cause, outside the causal closure of naturalism, makes a number of problems easier to resolve. But it comes at a cost.
(1) It's a sort of hand-waving resolution. Once it's non-natural, if it's not rule-following it can be anything (often conveniently to the answer of your question by fiat), or if it is rule-following then it's a good candidate for a new natural cause.
(2) It breaks the casual-closure of the universe, and it's difficult to contain that. There was a serious scientific theory recently (Hawking's black hole theory) that had the potential of cracking the casual closure of the universe just a tiny bit, even if by a single proton sized blackhole, and it was considered a crisis for physics for even a single particle to be able to lose its connection to the cause-effect chain because nothing could contain it from scuttling the coherence of the whole universe, and there was an all out crusade (eventually successful) to patch it up... Leonard Susskind wrote a cool book about it, The Black Hole War.
(3) There doesn't seem to be any independent grounds for the non-natural cause; there's no need or call for it, and it doesn't fit in with any other fiend of knowledge.

In any event, you need a solid starting point. And I think arguments like this are a decent reason to start
with the axioms of naturalism (I didn't describe them, but things like cause-effect chains and branches can't wrap around and change their own antecedent causes; once a cause happens it's set, it doesn't retroactively disappear from the chain; the cause has to actually be "proximate" and *causing* the effect, they aren't just coincident, etc.)

Once you have a starting point, then that gives you the kinds of questions you can even ask and what
you're even looking for, otherwise it's hard to even formulate what you're talking about.

What naturalism gives you, I think, is a basic question like: how do we take the basic physical principles
we know about the natural world and get all the rich and cool things we know about consciousness out of *that*?

Or, from the other direction, how do we fit all the cool features of consciousness into our worldview
we've built up so painstakingly over the last few centuries, and what possibly new physical principles
will we need to add to the books.

It doesn't necessarily guarantee we can find our way to a satisfying answer. One unique thing about consciousness as a subject of scientific study, it's not subject to third-person observation. Only the individual observer can observe their own consciousness. That doesn't make scientific scrutiny impossible -- you still have an observer and data -- but it's a big challenge. It's also very hard to measure, though some things are possible (like the clever experiment measuring the rotation speed of imagined objects, like a car you imagine; ave. is 50 degrees/sec.)

But sticking to the naturalist gameplan has gotten us very far in very many domains of knowledge.

So I think we shouldn't back down on its axioms lightly, unless absolutely compelled (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence or need). But BTW, I do think some traditional principles of naturalism, while they may not be strictly broken, can be bent. This has already happened with other fields. One old principle was that all causes have to be "proximate" or "local" to their effects, as if literally touching, but now we know quantum entanglement allows for "spooky action at a distance" in Einstein's words. The cause-effect relationship is still "proximate" in that it's strictly defined and nec & sufficient, but we had to add a footnote that proximate doesn't always mean "local". There are lots of other examples, collapse of quantum waves, inside blackholes, edge of the universe, possible parallel universes, the uncertainty principle, dark matter & energy, etc., with lots of footnotes to the principles of cause-effect & causal closure, but the basic principles survive. And consciousness may well force us to add new and even bigger footnotes.

But, my point here, we shouldn't make those footnotes or back down from the principles of naturalism until compelled, when the experiments and models insist that we need to. We should stick to the position to go as far as we can, and just make footnotes as needed. That, to me, is the game-plan. Stick to naturalism and see how far we can get, then we'll know where we stand and what more we might be missing.

So, like I said above, the question as I see it is how to get all the rich qualities of cns and stay in a naturalist system. I think it's possible. I feel like we're in the position of Maxwell at the start of his explorations into EM (or the Copenhagen crew at the start of explorations into QM). We see some neat phenomena, then a lot of physical events going on associated to it in ambiguous ways we don't understand yet and which seem to violate some of the most basic physical laws we thought we knew,
and we want to know how everything connects, or at the very least what's going on at the most basic level; where does this fit in the natural world? We can come up with some new physical principles along the way, but won't lightly abandon a fundamental principle like the cause-effect relationship, the directionality of time, etc.

That's all I can write for tonight. But I wanted to stress the need for a workable starting point that raises the kinds of questions to ask and a gameplan for approaching answering them (or at least making sense of them).

I'll have to get to (2) and (3) on my list in a future post, where all the real action is.

demagogue on 19/2/2011 at 01:12

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And that was just part 1, and I wanted to do another parts 2 & 3! :o
(maybe this weekend. I'd want to keep it slim, though.)

Edit: I mean, Part 1 was just supposed to be the "short" prelude to the real stuff I wanted to say.

Vivian on 20/2/2011 at 12:01

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The problem with shared hallucinations as evidence of "weird stuff" is that everyone involved is off their fucking tits.

Tocky on 20/2/2011 at 15:49

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That is insane. Actually what I was trying to do was impart the uncertainty of shared experience when every touchstone of normalcy is gone and all you have to rely on is anothers feedback also in the same state. Basicly what Vivian said. Unfortunately I was also extaordinarily drunk and the second half of the last sentence won out. What a mess and now my head hurts and my stomach wants to reject toast. Perhaps I should have tripped instead.