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Has Consciousness Lost Its Mind?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- saalweachter 8y agoIs there a basis for quantum cognition beyond “I want my brain to be different from my cell phone.”?
- raverbashing 8y agoProbably not. Do neurons use some quantum mechanism to do work in a way we might not have figured out yet. Maybe. (But not in a "magical" way)
- mannykannot 8y agoThat is pretty much what Hameroff's preoccupation with microtubules claims. Whether it avoids your definition of "magical" is for you to decide.
- raverbashing 8y agoAh I didn't know about his argument. My definition of "magical" would be that neurons use some non-obvious/non-linear quantum effect that is required for mammalian(?) levels of brain function. (Neurotransmitters probably do use some quantum effects because of their nature) Now I think consciousness happens at a higher abstraction level and is not necessarily dependant on lower-level implementation up to a point.
- majewsky 8y ago> Neurotransmitters probably do use some quantum effects because of their nature What does that even mean? Ice "uses" quantum effects when melting, but that does not mean that we cannot accurately explain the behavior of melting ice without taking these quantum effects into account.
- raverbashing 8y agoCorrect, that's what I mean. Then, if we can't explain its behaviour without the usage of QM then I'd say it is essencial.
- hliyan 8y agoThere is some thinking that the quantum effects at the neuron level makes the brain a non-deterministic computing device (i.e. its outputs are not solely governed by its inputs). This opens up the possibility that human brain, unlike computers, are driven by something more than just the sum total of its structure and inputs (without which, we could rightly be considered machines with no free will). Whether that "something" is just a collection of randomness, or something more, is unknown and currently there is no scientific basis to think it is something more.
- gpderetta 8y agoFWIW, most computers today have builtin non deterministic hardware rng. They do bot seem qualitatively different from computers lacking them.
- hliyan 8y agoYes, but those are explicitly invokable random functions, and not random fluctuations built into the entire functionality of the CPU.
- ben_w 8y agoYou can do that by overclocking everything and turning off error correction codes. This doesn’t seem like a powerful argument in favour of randomness or non-determination.
- naasking 8y ago> Yes, but those are explicitly invokable random functions, and not random fluctuations built into the entire functionality of the CPU. There's no logical difference. If the CPU's have any correlation to its inputs, then it's equivalent to a deterministic function+random input.
- bhouston 8y agoThe brain is random all over because it depends on liquid chemical reactions and diffusion and concentrates, etc. And those do not have fixed time courses, just probability distributions of reaction times. The brain is also ultra parallel with massive noise in all of its signals. You do not need quantumness in the brain to introduce randomness, it is filled to the brim with randomness already.
- siidooloo 8y agoThis seems like a god of the gaps kind of argument. As we learn more about biology and neuroscience people who believe consciousness and the mind exist outside of the brain will be forced to make increasingly specific claims. They will eventually have to explain the physical process that allows the mind to not be some reflection of the brain. Over time I expect the scope of “and something magic-like happens here” to be reduced.
- bhouston 8y agoIt is highly likely that aspects of cells exploit quantum effects as they exploit tons of advanced and amazing molecular chemistry techniques already. Whether brains exploit quantum effects on a larger scale than just locally within cells is harder to know. It is possible for sure as we have evolved complex macro structures like eye balls as long as there were viable and useful intermediate stages. Thus to me it is theoretically possible that large scale quantum effects could be possible in the brain. One cool thing is that if this does in fact exist in the brain, there is likely a lot that we could learn from it. It would be stable at room temperature, robust under moderate vibrations, and made from non-exotic materials. Large scale quantum effects does not make the brain special in a mystical way, I just view them as an meaningful optimization over non-quantum consciousness. Given that we know that the results of quantum effects can be simulated on non-quantum computers, then quantum consciousness isn't unique to quantum capable devices, it is just more efficient on those devices than others. And given that biology always seems to surprise with its ingenuity, it seems likely that those brains who use more efficient methods of computation would have evolutionary advantages over those that do not. It would then follow that if quantum consciousness (AKA large scale quantum effects in the brain) existed, it would be widespread, and likely not restricted to just humans.
- saalweachter 8y agoJust because something is using "quantum effects" does not make it a "quantum computer". Regular old transistors use "quantum effects" left and right, but they're ultimately just classical computing devices.
- didgeoridoo 8y ago> What is it that makes us more than just information processors with feet? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
- mikeash 8y agoSeems like a reasonable question to beg. Unless you want to claim that CPUs are conscious or that humans are not, something is different.
- red75prime 8y agoThat's a false dichotomy. CPUs can run all sorts of programs, some of which can be self-aware agents for all we know.
- chris_wot 8y agoName one program that is a self-aware agent.
- rebuilder 8y agoHow would you know? ;)
- chris_wot 8y agoA fair point.
- red75prime 8y agoDoes it work that way? I think you need to prove that self-awareness requires super-Turing computations or is computationally intractable on classical computers to assert that no such program can ever exist.
- naasking 8y ago> Name one program that is a self-aware agent. Name one program that is written in the programming language that eventually displaces C/C++ as the system language of choice. Don't you see how inane this question is? On balance of evidence, consciousness is reducible to an algorithm unless you want to actually allow consciousness into your ontology.
- hliyan 8y agoFew things hurt science more than people who put their desire for their ideas to be true, over experimental evidence. Unfortunately, the more difficult it is to gather experimental evidence (as it is psychology), the more this desire takes over, I think. Currently, we have no choice but to relegate everything we think we know about consciousness to the realm of hypothesis, because the only form of evidence we have (first hand experience) cannot be shared or analyzed. I don't have a huge problem with people hypothesizing that consciousness (or perhaps more aptly, free will) has quantum properties, but they should clearly label them as such -- hypotheses.
- 3pt14159 8y agoI 100% agree that science is held back by that desire, but there are some parts of consciousness we can test. Giving sight to the blind, for example, and getting them to see a cube and sphere for the first time. Giving someone varying amounts of LSD. I would argue even talking about consciousness with individuals in a lab-like setting. If most individuals use the same type of language to describe certain behaviours at the very least it bounds the range of what could be collective delusion.
- hliyan 8y agoWe had a debate at office about this. We had a lot of trouble untangling perception (or awareness) from qualia (which is basically a thing as experienced by a person). For example, a cat may be aware of its reflection in the mirror, and may eventually map points on the mirror to points on its own body, but is there something inside the cats brain that is doing the observing? Or is it just a computing device that operates on a continuous input-processing-output loop that learns from previous loops?
- 3pt14159 8y agoI think the riddle is in the language. When someone talks of oceans they don't question if it is just a bunch of quarks. The information processing system is intelligible to us because we live in a universe of consequence. Perception, awareness, and qualia seem to be all possible from neural activity.
- resource0x 8y agoI believe Hameroff is on the right track, but the track can be extended much further. Every cell (and every bacteria) is a conscious, intelligent being. Nothing else is conscious. Our sense of "I" comes from a single cell in our body, getting inputs from other cells. We are products of the self-modification of cells. We need to find a way to talk with our cells - they will tell us a lot about physics and life. Whether the cell consciousness is due to quantum effects or not is of secondary importance at this stage IMO.
- goldenkey 8y agoI think you're on the right track, but the track can be extended much further. All energy is conscious because by the laws of physics, it does computation/work when flowing along energy gradients. The whole entire thing is an electric light disco of conscious entities on every scale. Every single body of matter absorbs and emits a characteristic spectrum of electromagnetic energy solely dependent on its construction. Yet my neighbors say we don't interact... :-)
- naasking 8y ago> Every cell (and every bacteria) is a conscious, intelligent being. Then why isn't inanimate matter conscious?
- resource0x 8y agoYour question contains the answer. If it were conscious, it would be animate matter :) Seriously, I don't know , maybe everything is conscious, but for bacteria/cells - we can be sure. This realization is already a big step forward :)
- naasking 8y agoI'm not certain we can be sure that's where we draw the line for consciousness, actually, but to each his own.
- vertexFarm 8y agoSeriously, on what basis are you making these claims?
- motohagiography 8y agoI've found the necessary condition of assuming atheism in a lot of cog.sci discussions can become a kind of "the floor is lava," constraint, where it seems like a game where you can reason about these things credibly so long as you don't fall into a deist trap. Hopping from island to island of logical consistency is fun and drives material innovation, which even perhaps provides a kind of moral teleology you can backfit to political problems - but viewed from outside, it can seem like a bit of a game. It would be really interesting to read a theologians view of AI, maybe a question for Google's Vatican office (if there were one)?
- cfadvan 8y agoIt would be really interesting to read a theologians view of AI, maybe a question for Google's Vatican office (if there were one)? The problem with that view is that when you dig into it, it’s always a permutation of, “God did it,” or “Because God said so.” There isn’t much to work with there, and you can use it to justify literally anything at all because it’s free from the constraints of logic. You could equally argue that a machine can never have a soul, and no consciousness, or that god could just decree it does, and who’s to really say otherwise? There is no there, there.
- whatshisface 8y agoThey're implying that when you involve God you'll also pick up the Roman Catholic catechism. The real problem with trying to bring religion in to these debates comes from trying to pick the religion! Nonspecific God is actually the same as atheism for the reason you point out - you can't make any prior statements about what God will do, which is the same as not being able to make any prior statements about what Nature will do. Physicists have historically interchanged God and Nature (casually, they aren't trying to say anything) when they're talking, and it works for this reason.
- cfadvan 8y agoExactly. At the end of the day science is all about “How” although some scientists being human, understandably do sometimes wade into the “Why” end of it. Science is great at delving into how something works, without bothering with a “why” and nowhere is that better expressed than in Langrangian formulations. When people try to inject Why into science, they’re missing the point, and the same is true of trying to inject How into religion.
- carapace 8y agoConsciousness has no qualities so it can't be studied scientifically. Chalmers is doing the next best thing: investigating precisely what "gray-matter activity" engenders a noticeable change in qualia. I want to point out that it is possible for two conscious systems to merge and share consciousness. It is a very intimate process, so you don't hear a lot about it, even at places like Science of Consciousness conference, but it's one way to approach the study of consciousness.
- Mahn 8y agoConsciousness must arise out of something, and that something ought to have qualities than can be studied.
- monktastic1 8y agoThe idea that consciousness must arise out of "something" also needs to be demonstrated, even though it looks obvious on the surface. The best analogy I can give is a dream. If you see a red flower in the dream, you will assume that the experience of redness is caused by something in the dream, whereas its real cause lies beyond any "somethings" in the dream. It is possible to know this by waking up from the dream. I could try and convince you that it's possible to know the same thing about this particular dream, but without being able to offer you evidence it might not be very useful.
- Mahn 8y agoOk, but if you keep digging, eventually you are going to stumble into the concept of the dream itself, and then the question then becomes what properties and qualities of the process of dreaming gave birth to a red flower in the mind. I will concede that how consciousness really arises may look nothing like what we can imagine or picture today, but we have yet to come across something that is both real and escapes scientific observation, and I don't think we should approach consciousness as such.
- monktastic1 8y ago
- myWindoonn 8y agoNormally I think that Chopra is a complete tool, but every one of his quotes and actions here seem lucid, if extremely guru-like. Nonetheless his Twitter feed and presentations still seem batty, and he still sells the supplements and other trash. Perhaps he can turn it on and off?
- vertexFarm 8y agoThere's a reason why he's famous. That reason is not that he's actually insightful or correct with his cut-up dadaist nonsense quotes. It's because he's very good at acting like a guru. "Whatever you tell Deepak Chopra, he responds as if he knew in advance what you were going to say." I love how he thinks he's smart for predicting people will treat him like a nut after he acts like a total nut for decades. When a field is largely pre-scientific like consciousness, lots of "gurus" are drawn in who try to substitute flashy language and bold, general statements for actual rigor and reproducible predictions. The state of the study of consciousness today almost guarantees by definition that there is no objective observation or falsifiable claims, and reproduction of someone's experiment is very difficult in any way that proves anything meaningful. Chopra just excels in saying some unnecessarily terse and ambiguous statement that will naturally appeal to one's pareidolia, causing people to think it's some incredibly deep and multifaceted wisdom when in fact it can be replicated with a random word bank: http://www.wisdomofchopra.com/ http://www.wisdomofchopra.com/ The whole quantum woo crowd is really saddening. I mean obviously quantum effects have something to do with it, in as much as quantum effects have something to do with everything. But when you take some barely-understood, bleeding-edge physics and apply it to a horrifically complex and almost completely unknown field like the origin of consciousness, stating that this is where your soul or free will or whatever comes from, you can be ABSOLUTELY GUARANTEED that this person is so full of shit their eyes are turning brown. Quantum weirdness™ does not exist solely to prop up people's baseless spiritual beliefs. Be very wary of people who twist physics in to such convenient and anthro-centric ways.
- knuththetruth 8y ago>Chopra just excels in saying some unnecessarily terse and ambiguous statement that will naturally appeal to one's pareidolia, causing people to think it's some incredibly deep and multifaceted wisdom when in fact it can be replicated with a random word bank: http://www.wisdomofchopra.com http://www.wisdomofchopra.com This is a very astute observation and very true of similar “guru” types like Jordan Peterson. They use tricks of language and presentation to exploit how people parse ambiguity and make themselves seem “wise.”
- SteveJS 8y agoThomas Metzinger’s ‘The Ego tunnel’ is a very good book picking apart the phenomenon of consciousness.
- meridiansoul 8y agoOn a Metzinger-related note: he also edited and curated the OpenMIND project, which features a number of (mostly philosophical?) papers on consciousness and the mind, as well as corresponding commentaries and replies - including papers by Daniel Dennett, Ned Block, and Andy Clark. https://open-mind.net/ https://open-mind.net/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chrisweekly 8y agoAbout 20 years ago I read and enjoyed a book by Roger Penrose (a theoretical physicist who worked w/ Stephen Hawking) titled something like "Consciousness and the Universe" (sorry no link avlbl, from memory). It was more interesting than persuasive, but worthwhile.
- hackpert 8y agoI think you may be referring to “The Emperor’s New Mind” [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind
- chrisweekly 8y agoYes! Thank you, @hackpert :)
- ppod 8y agoIs it really surprising that we have a first person subjective experience? We know that we are incredibly complex things, constantly integrating and acting on very complicated external stimuli. Such a system should have references to its own body and its own neural states, its train of reasoning should frequently include itself, its focus will drift forward and backwards in time... this is just how a system like this would work. If the system communicates about its state then its language should have referents to these internal states, referents like "experience", and "feels like", and "I understand". Is that surprising? Wouldn't it be surprising if it wasn't like that? I don't think you need to invoke an essentially mysterious "conscious" property of the mind to explain that.
- Omnus 8y agoPeople used to make this same argument about why things fall to the ground when you let go of them. "Is it really surprising? Why wouldn't they just fall down? What kind of answer do you want?". You have to allow yourself to be puzzled by things. So yes, it is surprising. You don't seem to understand the most basic principles underlying the so-called hard problem. Nowhere in your description about "complex things" and "integrating" and "complicated external stimuli" and "communicating about its state" have you even attempted to point out why it actually DOES feel like something to be that system. Why does all this stuff actually lead to the feeling of pain, or intense grief, or pleasure, or anything at all. That is the fundamental mystery - why does it feel like anything at all when this "stuff" happens, and what is the nature of the feelings themselves. There are tons of mysteries here that you can't gloss over by saying "well why wouldn't it??".
- ppod 8y agoI am very familiar with the literature on the hard problem. It's remarkable how often people respond to this line of argument by putting the words "feeling" or "understanding" in italics. I don't know what kind of causal explanation you want for pain or grief. They are processes in an organism, and we construct models of the self to help us get through the day, as Dennett has elucidated many teams. To answer your first question: I believe in puzzles, not mysteries. When we don't know how something works (like a spray bottle), we call it a puzzle, unless it challenges some sacred theological or humanist tenets, in which case we call it a mystery. I don't agree with the comparison to gravity --- mechanics has well defined and refined concepts that allow us to create more general and parsimonious models with precision. "Consciousness" and "feeling" and "experience" are folk terms with neither a precise definition nor a clear process for arriving at a precise definition.
- snambi 8y agoActually losing the mind or making the mind irrelevant is important for consciousness.
- matiasz 8y agoI find it interesting that Noam Chomsky rejects the mind–body problem as it’s often presented, given that Newton demolished the concept of body, not mind. Below is a relevant passage from the book Optimism Over Despair, in which Chomsky explains his position. I’d appreciate any references that elaborate on this line of thought. [Interviewer:] The well-known University College London linguist Neil Smith argued in his book Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (Cambridge University Press, 1999) that you put to rest the mind-body problem not by showing that we have a limited understanding of the mind but that we cannot define what the body is. What can he possibly mean by this? [Chomsky:] I wasn’t the person who put it to rest. Far from it. Isaac Newton did. Early modern science, from Galileo and his contemporaries, was based on the principle that the world is a machine, a much more complex version of the remarkable automata then being constructed by skilled craftsmen, which excited the scientific imagination of the day, much as computers and information processing do today. The great scientists of the time, including Newton, accepted this “mechanical philosophy” (meaning the science of mechanics) as the foundation of their enterprise. Descartes believed he had pretty much established the mechanical philosophy, including all the phenomena of body, though he recognized that some phenomena lay beyond its reach, including, crucially, the “creative aspect of language use” described above. He therefore, plausibly, postulated a new principle—in the metaphysics of the day, a new substance, res cogitans, “thinking substance, mind.” His followers devised experimental techniques to try to determine whether other creatures had this property, and like Descartes, were concerned to discover how the two substances interacted. Newton demolished the picture. He demonstrated that the Cartesian account of body was incorrect and, furthermore, that there could be no mechanical account of the physical world: the world is not a machine. Newton regarded this conclusion as so “absurd” that no one of sound scientific understanding could possibly entertain it—though it was true. Accordingly, Newton demolished the concept of body (material, physical, and so on), in the form that it was then understood, and there really is nothing to replace it, beyond “whatever we more or less understand.” The Cartesian concept of mind remained unaffected. It has become conventional to say that we have rid ourselves of the mysticism of “the ghost in the machine.” Quite the contrary: Newton exorcised the machine while leaving the ghost intact, a consequence understood very well by the great philosophers of the period, like John Locke. Locke went on to speculate (in the accepted theological idiom) that just as God had added to matter properties of attraction and repulsion that are inconceivable to us (as demonstrated by “the judicious Mr. Newton”), so he might have “superadded” to matter the capacity of thought. The suggestion (known as “Locke’s suggestion”) in the history of philosophy was pursued extensively in the eighteenth century, particularly by philosopher and chemist Joseph Priestley, adopted by Darwin, and rediscovered (apparently without awareness of the earlier origins) in contemporary neuroscience and philosophy. There is much more to say about these matters, but that, in essence, is what Smith was referring to. Newton eliminated the mind-body problem in its classic Cartesian form (it is not clear that there is any other coherent version), by eliminating body, leaving mind intact. (191–192)
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- megamindbrian2 8y agoI know I know! Aliens... it's the best explanation.
- alex_young 8y agoThe whole thing is hopelessly bogged down in linguistic vaguery to the point of making the key questions quite meaningless. What is 'consciousness'? Is it "the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings" as the first hit on Google suggests? If so, can we then define 'awake', 'aware', or even 'one' without circular reasoning? Why isn't it acceptable to define consciousness as the operating instructions of the mind? This quickly leads to another linguistic quagmire called 'free will'. If we agree that everything in our heads is governed by the laws of nature, we can agree that there are one of two possible reasons for any 'decision' we make: it was facilitated by a direct cause or it was random. There can be no other actor. Assuming a direct cause following our operating instructions, does this mean that there is no free will? To answer that we have to open up the word 'choice'. Choice: "an act of selecting or making a decision when faced with two or more possibilities." We loop around to the beginning. You define 'decide' or 'choose' any way you want to. Tell me free will is real or fake. I don't care. All I know it there are no external actors in my head and things are either 100% predictable or random. Everything else here is a very roundabout argument about the way we use English. Boring.
- fvdessen 8y agoThe philosophical distinction between deterministic and random is not that clear as the randomness itself could be determined by a hidden process, as in "god is rolling the dices". Likewise the distinction between deterministic and predictable is not that clear either, as you can have a fully deterministic process that is not replicable or predictable. (Think of chaotic systems) In the end I think that the question of free will is not a scientific one but a moral one, as it is from the basis of free will that we can derive concepts such as personal responsibility.
- alex_young 8y agoGod rolling the dice would seem to be a rather confined manipulation since the rules of the dice are bound to be consistent over time. If God is a random number generator, that seems like a pretty pointless thing to be preoccupied by.
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- amelius 8y agoHas anyone tried to explain consciousness starting from absolute nothingness, i.e. without even physics? IANAP, but it might make more sense to do it like that, instead of describing physics and then bolting consciousness on top.
- red75prime 8y agoOf course, many and many philosophers did. And we have a multitude of explanations.
- amelius 8y agoExamples?
- red75prime 8y agoSuch approach is called arguments a priori. Descartes. He can conceive non-existence of material world, but cannot conceive non-existence of self, therefore his consciousness doesn't belong to the physical realm. Chalmers. He can conceive non-existence of his own consciousness, while physical world stays the same, therefore consciousness doesn't supervene on physical properties and physicalism is false. R. Brown. [0] He argues that it is equally possible to conceive non-existence of one's own non-physical consciousness, while physical and non-physical parts of the world stay exactly the same. Therefore a priory arguments can't be a basis for deciding the truth of physicalism or dualism. Dennett thinks that what we perceive as ourselves and the world around us are illusions and do not deserve the title of "hard problem". And so on. [0] https://philpapers.org/archive/BRODTA.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/BRODTA.pdf
- sgt101 8y agoRelated are Boltzmann Brains:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
- gameswithgo 8y agoWhy is Deepak there?
- mcguire 8y agoBecause the point is to make the organizer feel important and having a large number of people attending does that. Deepak is a draw.
- amthewiz 8y agoThe conference sounds like a nightmare for serious scientists and philosophers. Consciousness is a broad term with lots of nuances - (https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/consciousness/ https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/consciou... presents a good summary). Following unconventional and novel approaches to understanding consciousness are fine, but the Deepak Chopra style dancing on the linguistic vagueness is infuriating. I am glad I did not attend this conference and instead opted to present some ideas at ASSC conference later this month.
- mistermann 8y agoWondering if you might offer some advice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17274812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17274812
- Latteland 8y agoThanks for the link. It reminded me of an idea I'd heard before, that some speculate there was no consciousness until Hellenic times. I find that idea absurd and even offensive. I believe and we have evidence to support that we are really not that different than people in ancient times, with the same drives for violence, happiness, children, nurturing, trying to understand the universe. To think that until that time people didn't wonder about their place, or try to figure out what the world might mean and ponder the self. It has just struck me as the most amazing, unfair world view that we are better in the modern world, smarter, etc.
- nsomaru 8y agoThe main difference I've identified between Eastern (Indian, Vedantic) thought and the Western paradigm is as follows: The western minds starts with a body/brain existing before a mind/consciousness and his enquiry is conditioned from this starting pointing. He seeks the cause of consciousness in some material phenomenon. In contrast, the Eastern (again, Vedantic) paradigm is inverted. Consciousness, mind, is given a priori and matter (body, brain) emerges therefrom. I'd be interested to see any Western minds taking this approach. For further reading, would recommend researching the three states of Consciousness, "waking" "dream" & "deep-sleep"
- popnroll 8y agoI haven't read enough about consciousness, but I think the most important modern thinker with "eastern paradigm" is Bernardo Kastrup: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/coming-to-grips-with-the-implications-of-quantum-mechanics/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/coming-to-...
- szemet 8y agoI'm not that well versed in continental philosophy, but there is a whole (and somewhat diverse) program called phenomenology which originally planned to explain everything started from the basic fact of experience. "Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. Phenomenology can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy) I'm not sure if they discovered anything that belongs to mainstream science now. (But, for example, I frequently see references to "Phenomenology of Perception: Maurice Merleau-Ponty" here and there, in modern discussions.) I have not really read anything from these authors, (only some Heidegger) so I can't have any respectable opinion on the subject (also my strongest impression about continental philosophy is from Sokal;), just pointing to the field...
- mcguire 8y agoHave you looked at any of the early Christian philosophers? The "Western", "body-first" approach was a response to them.
- Animats 8y agoKey quote: "There’s something about the topic of consciousness that, unlike other scientific fields of inquiry, inspires an unearned feeling of expertise." Yes.
- childintime 8y agoI doubt anyone will read this, as I'm somewhat late to the party. I'd like to get in touch with a serious research group, because the barrier to scientific and social advances is the recognition of ESP (Extrasensory Experience) as the mechanism the mind works with. I'm sure I can prove ESP and I'm not a telepath. Seriously, it is so common, that the big question is why I was blind to it. In simple experiments, with hardly any effort, I see ESP confirmed, daily. That is: mind to mind contact without relying on sound, vision, or a chemical channel. I have a hard time theorizing the mechanism, but as distance doesn't seem to be much of an obstacle (and effects are immediate), the processes seem to involve entanglement and superposition, as concepts. Not radiowaves ;) As the article never once mentions ESP, I think the title of the article is very apt. A reflection of the underlying scientific poverty. A poor scientific state of mind leads to a society which doesn't know how to properly nurture itself, thus going of on a tangent. Thus it engages in madness (as opposed to doing the mentally healthy thing), and tends to terrorize, abandon and sacrifice the individual in its pursuit.
- buvanshak 8y ago>I'm sure I can prove ESP and I'm not a telepath. Seriously, it is so common, that the big question is why I was blind to it. In simple experiments, with hardly any effort, I see ESP confirmed, daily. That is: mind to mind contact without relying on sound, vision, or a chemical channel. Can you write more about this here? What were your simple experiments, and why haven't people looking for it found it out already, if they are simple?
- childintime 8y ago> Can you write more about this here? What were your simple experiments. It suffices to say I am not the listening party in my experiments. The subject doesn't even know he is the subject, initially. That, I presume, makes the experiment reproducible. It is also easy to find new subjects. See also the reply above. > why haven't people looking for it found it out already, if they are simple? Really, what people are looking?? The main purpose of my post is to get to know the field. Among common people ESP seems well known, but they have no wish to live under a scientific blessing/curse. Second, ESP is literally part of how people, including scientists, work. Telepathy in particular seems to be science performed at life speed, with the model seeing a theory-space collapsing under evidence. Science is the result of this process. Third, cultural violence decides who can (be permitted to) have a voice and who can't. Evidence by non-scientists is commonly discredited.
- FrozenVoid 8y agoThe problem could be that we lump different layers of the mind into one mash-up concept, while in reality there is a complete "software stack" hierarchy of layers.
- DonHopkins 8y ago"New Age": rhymes with "Sewage". >Oh, by the way, attendees could also take a gong bath, during which you’re bathed in the musical vibrations of a gong being struck. Or lie down in a curiously unsupervised and unstable-looking sensory-deprivation chamber. Or take a black-light yoga class, which involves — as the name suggests — doing yoga in a room illuminated by black light accompanied by a DJ pumping out frenetic techno beats. Meanwhile, a company offered demos of a brain-stimulation device that had to be inserted way too far up one nostril. And an enthusiastic fellow demonstrated his Spontaneous Postural Alignment technique, in which a misaligned subject’s elbow is tapped with a gold medallion while the healer intones, "boy-yoi-yoing." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoS1MCF8AeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoS1MCF8AeI