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Libluini posted:And I'm not budging on that, so a discussion with him was pointless anyway. So you've made up your mind on the subject completely AND you haven't even read the book, why in the world are you even engaging in the conversation?
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Nov 20, 2014 12:36
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superh posted:So you've made up your mind on the subject completely AND you haven't even read the book, why in the world are you even engaging in the conversation? I've read the Second Apocalypse books and I only haven't read Neuropath because I don't like thrillers. The problem I had with his post is: He looked at me saying "This is how I think this works" and somehow misinterprets it as me saying "I think this is how Bakker things this works" and he may be right, even though I disagree based on the books I have read. But as I said, if his claims are true, Bakker is wrong because I don't see things this way. If he isn't, well it doesn't really change anything since I don't know Bakker so he won't have any reaction to me changing my opinion about his hypotheses. Basically, he looked at me explaining my thoughts on the matter and confused it with me trying to interpret someone elses' thoughts on the matter. (Bakker's thoughts, in this case.) So what is there to engage? Only thing left to say is different variants of "I don't think so and I already told you so beforehand./Copy+Paste of older post"
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Nov 20, 2014 13:05
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At the end the problem is that Bakker refuses to engage with implications. I tried to drag him in the discussion, but he just waves it away. Let's say: - You think you have a soul, and free will, and your actions can bring change to the world - Then you realize instead you are a machine that just acts as it's meant to - Are your actions going to change? In the end that's the question: is this knowledge going produce some change? And the solution to this is to recognize it as a paradox: - If I'm aware of not being aware, do I become aware? This is what the whole thing is reduced to: a paradox built on recursion. Or self-reference. And that's what ultimate the brain produces when it comes to "consciousness": self-awareness, self-perception. "Strange loops" as they are called in the famous book about this. Consciousness works as it does because it's shaped as a strange loop. Observing "self" means producing a double between who observes and what he observes. And so the paradox begins. If you notice, this links back to what I wrote above: the split between internal/external. Kabbalah actually helps understanding this, whether you give it or not any credit. If that explanation is too complicate, you can see it as Kabbalah explains it: There only Nature. Nothing else. Nature is God. The universe is all built the same way, same substance. So why human beings think of being separate and individual (self-perception)? Because "egoism" sets them apart. It creates an isolated something from the rest, individual needs and desires, prevarications, and this egoism produces pain (and selfishness) since you think to yourself, and what you personally need. Whereas if you perceived yourself as "not separate" and whole with the rest of creation then that selfishness wouldn't be needed and you would be "happy". Transcendence = return to god. Or: being once again whole. Or: remove that separation from Nature. Or: remove that egoistic barrier that makes you appear as "something else" separate from everything around you. This is all a metaphor for what I explained scientifically above. It's easier to digest, yet it works the exact same way. "Dualism" is A LOT more powerful than you think it is. It's not merely thinking that there's a nature and there's a soul/mind. That's only the very last trick. What Dualism TRULY is: language. All language is dualist. And it is so because it contains that first "mistake" that generates a paradox. You observe and you make a difference. Black or white. Any observation is made of two parts. You cannot observe a "whole", and so with the very first observation you already built an artificial world that doesn't truly exist (same as consciousness is a trick of the brain, a "configuration", a pattern, a strange loop). You understand the world ONLY through language. Consciousness is made only of language. And language works by separating things. That first separation METAPHORICALLY is the separation between god and man. Nature and man. Separation is pain, until healed. WHAT DO YOU SEE? That it all comes down together pretty neatly. You can enjoy it from the side of the metaphorical religion, or you can work it out in the complexity of science. But in the end it comes down to the same thing. Abalieno fucked around with this message at 13:54 on Nov 20, 2014 |
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Nov 20, 2014 13:48
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I thought about this and changed my mind, nothing wrong in engaging more closely with this, there actually is something worth replying here.Abalieno posted:Bakker is extremely specific about this, and any vague approximation just loses the point. There are different layers of consciousness because this how our brain works, like there are different layers in an operating system on the computer you are using right now, for example. The tricky thing is, most of those layers in our brain don't have what we would call "consciousness" itself, so "foundation layers of consciousness" would be may be closer to the truth. But then we would slowly get multi-compound words that are extremely hard to read, so let's try again and call this phenomenon "Sub-processes of consciousness" instead to shorten things up without losing meaning. Now "consciousness" is a complex mesh of processes meant to do certain things, it isn't a reflection of anything at all. There's no actual process, just a multitude of processes. The upper layer of these sub-processes of consciousness form what we think is an "us", this is what is our "consciousness". You can of course explain this away, this is one of the tasks our upper layers (or upper sub-processes) are able to do, after all. It is as sensible as explaining away the need to eat, of course. Sure you can do it, but if you're successful, you'll starve. quote:So it's not that you have a model that approximates what Bakker says, and that what Bakker says is extreme. Well where does Bakker says that and in what words? Because my view is at least partially supported by neurology and the actual structure of a brain, instead of just philosophy. It could be Bakker has some other sources I don't know about as a layman, so giving me some quotes instead of just some claims would be nice. Right now I would have to decide either against your interpretation (because nothing I remember about his books supports your hypotheses, except maybe for Neuropath, because I haven't read his non-fantasy works), or Bakkers if I choose to just accept your claims. quote:Nor Bakker says "just lay down in the gutter". Because this would mean you give your consciousness credit for making that choice. Is that your explanation of Nihilism and why Bakker doesn't support Nihilism? Any other interpretation of what you wrote doesn't make sense. quote:This is another of the subtle points that is easily lost. That's actually completely true. And completely wrong at the same time. For the brain, there is nothing external. It communicates with the environment using the other parts of our bodies as a medium. But it just interprets what we see/hear/feel and so on. So we literally can't be like a rock or a table, since those things are inert and lifeless, not able to interpret anything. We are also unlike a tree, since a tree doesn't have a brain interpreting the sensual input it receives. We are also not controlled by external stimuli, which is the true part: External stimuli influence us indirectly, but that's it. Even blunt trauma is just affecting how our brain experiences the world (if at all), but it doesn't control it. Control is meaningless in this context. quote:The brain is a physical thing. The way it reacts depends on what is around it and how it was built. It's all environment. The same way a wind will bend the blade of grass, then the environment affects the way the brain works. It sweeps through, and the brain does nothing to change this wind. This is right, even if the description is a bit too flowery for my taste. The second part is of course wrong again: There's nothing external to our consciousness, since our brain just interprets stuff for us, we aren't really in contact with the outside world ourselves. Our brain arguably is, at least in cases where influences hit the brain directly, like a parasite making us angrier than normal, or a neuro-surgeon carefully cutting out a tumor. "We", as in what we think is ourselves, are completely separate from the outside world. Every stimuli reaches us only by proxy. quote:What human beings did was draw a line, and arbitrarily decided that what was within the line was "internal". Science is simply proving that what we think is "sacred" and internal is instead and always has been external. There was never a dividing line to begin with, if not one that was arbitrary and illusory. A pretense of being different and special. Science proves the opposite actually, but you're right with humans drawing lines and finding out they're hilariously wrong. Libluini fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Nov 20, 2014 |
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Nov 20, 2014 14:12
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Libluini posted:There are different layers of consciousness because this how our brain works, like there are different layers in an operating system on the computer you are using right now, for example. If to understand how the thing works you need "layers", fine. Those layers do not actually exist, they are just definitions that help you deal with it. But my point wasn't to go against the "layers". There are layers, if you want to define them like that. But they AREN'T CONSCIOUS. Consciousness is a phenomenon on its own, maybe produced by layers the same as a light trick. But consciousness as a thing is not layered. Those layers are autonomous from consciousness. The big point in Bakker theories is that consciousness has NO IDEA of what is going on. Because consciousness (introspection) has no access to those layers. Consciousness can't see poo poo, it just makes up stuff thinking it does. You explain consciousness as the outcome of a big process. That's fine, but the opposite again of Bakker's theory. Bakker says: consciousness is not emergent at all, and is not part of a process. It is CUT away from the process itself. It's blind to the process itself. It THINKS it knows all, but it knows nothing. And it makes up stuff all the time. Consciousness is merely a viewer room, where the projection is entirely wrong. Abalieno fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Nov 20, 2014 |
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Nov 20, 2014 14:37
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Abalieno posted:If to understand how the thing works you need "layers", fine. Those layers do not actually exist, they are just definitions that help you deal with it. To be clear on this, when I'm talking about "layers", I was trying to explain something I only read about in German, and translating it into something understandable in English. The core of the matter is: Neurons and synapses are grouping themselves together to do certain tasks. Scientists can look at brain scans, see those regions in our brain flare up in activity and they have labeled these zones as "activity centers". Now if a task is simple, only a few activity centers go active and work together. A complex task involves activity centers all over the brain. Important to note here is: Even though active areas in the brain seem to correspond to certain things we do or think about, like trying to remember a word will involve areas we think are involved with memory storage and processing, but the brain isn't doing this like a schematic machine. Activity centers can wander around, damaged or destroyed synapses can (but not allways are for some reason) be replaced by other synapses somewhere else and clustering for complicated tasks can involve different activity centers from time to time. The layers of consciousness, or more apt, sub-processes of consciousness are the point were some upper layer is created, capable of looking back and finding and reflecting over all of this. Think of a scientist looking at his own brain scan, trying to interpret what he sees: He enters some weird loop in which his reaction to what he sees is actively changing how his brain works. The observer is the observed. In a weird way, we're like some kind of emergent ghost possessing our brains, because we aren't really good at the chaotic math involved in describing a multi-process like ours. So we do technically not really exist, in a material kind of way. Without technology giving us additional tools, we would never even be able to get to the point of meager understanding we've reached now. The interesting point to add is: This is true so far we can see for all animals with brains similar to ours, too. So cats and dogs may have a weaker "ghost", but it's still there. For comparison's sake, an adult cat can at best reach the level of intelligence we would expect from an eight year old human child, which is very, very low. But it's still more then we could expect from let's say a snake. In nature, it seems we can observe a gradual shift to more complexity in thought-processes in certain higher animals. To reduce confusion, I'll try to mention then and when how I'm aware of the fact a single layer or sub-process in our brain isn't conscious itself. quote:But my point wasn't to go against the "layers". There are layers, if you want to define them like that. But they AREN'T CONSCIOUS. Good, at this point we're agreeing. quote:Consciousness is a phenomenon on its own, maybe produced by layers the same as a light trick. But consciousness as a thing is not layered. Those layers are autonomous from consciousness. The big point in Bakker theories is that consciousness has NO IDEA of what is going on. Because consciousness (introspection) has no access to those layers. I think you have taken that layer-thing entirely to literal here. Consciousness is indeed not layered itself, since it's the emergent expression of a large amount of sub-processes running at the same time. The sub-processes are different layers of the consciousness, but they themselves aren't conscious. Consciousness only starts existing when all these thousands of activity centers in our brain are working in concert. The thing with the rest is, your own consciousness has indeed no access to deaper layers, because it is already an expression of it. We can think of what happens inside our brains, but we can't do much about it because everything below our consciousness is entirely automatic. And I don't want to know what would happen to a lifeform able to interfere with its own thought-processes that way. Normally if you gently caress up thinking you won't immediately stop your heart or accidentally jumble your memories past the point of no return. We have to divide this on the other hand from the possibility of analyzing ("accessing") other people's layers, simply by using advanced technology to do what we on our own luckily can't. Will this mean human ressource managers using brain scans to decide employment? Probably, if it happens. I file that under "gently caress ups", because only actively mentally ill people or people with physical alterations like tumors will show up with anything really visible on a brain scan you could use against them. In all other cases I expect prejudices to win over fancy brain scans. Those will be just another excuse for dumb decisions, as always in management. quote:Consciousness can't see poo poo, it just makes up stuff thinking it does. First part is true, because our consciousness gets every input from sources outside itself. That's not really seeing, more like interpreting. The second part can't be true, because consciousness itself doesn't think, we do. Our consciousness is a state of being for us, not a being itself. When our consciousness gets input and processes it, "we" think and decide. Consciousness is just a hazy description for something we can't really grasp, but we know it is what we are. quote:You explain consciousness as the outcome of a big process. That's fine, but the opposite again of Bakker's theory. Bakker says: consciousness is not emergent at all, and is not part of a process. It is CUT away from the process itself. It's blind to the process itself. It THINKS it knows all, but it knows nothing. And it makes up stuff all the time. A lot of processes, not just one big process. But since most big processes are made up of smaller individual processes, I confess this could just be hairsplitting on my side. This may be the opposite of Bakker's hypothesis, true. But then again, I made my claims based on actual knowledge. Without sources telling me otherwise, I'll have to assume Bakker is full of poo poo. There's no other option if he is telling something disagreeing with actual facts without showing any useful evidence. And no, sounding plausible isn't evidence. Well, it's evidence of eloquence, but not for how reliable a hypothesis is. So in conclusion, consciousness is like some kind of nebulous cloud projecting a ghost image out of the viewer room which is our brain. And that ghost image is us. Probably. We hope. And Bakker seems to be full of poo poo, but as long as he is alive, there's still hope. Libluini fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Nov 20, 2014 |
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Nov 20, 2014 17:04
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Libluini posted:Think of a scientist looking at his own brain scan, trying to interpret what he sees: He enters some weird loop in which his reaction to what he sees is actively changing how his brain works. Uhm, nope. Looking at a brain scan is no different than looking at a tree. What happens in the brain isn't anything spectacularly different. quote:The thing with the rest is, your own consciousness has indeed no access to deaper layers, because it is already an expression of it. Yes, and you might be persuaded of this. It's still the opposite of Bakker's theory. Consciousness is not an expression, it's incidental, unwanted illusion. It's linked with nothing and has access to very little, to nothing. quote:This may be the opposite of Bakker's hypothesis, true. But then again, I made my claims based on actual knowledge. Without sources telling me otherwise, I'll have to assume Bakker is full of poo poo. There's no other option if he is telling something disagreeing with actual facts without showing any useful evidence. Bakker is in contact with some of those doing serious research. If anything he's absurdly RIGOROUS about scientific evidence. His blog is filled with that kind of stuff, and plenty of mention of books that establish what we know today. Excuse me if I consider Thomas Metzinger more reliable than a guy on a forum. Bakker isn't doing philosophy, he's building EXCLUSIVELY on top of science. If you think otherwise it's because you didn't read his stuff and have a very horrible idea of what he's actually doing (once again, it's all in the blog). http://www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind_Brain_Theory_of_the_Appearance_of_Consciousness
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Nov 20, 2014 18:26
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Abalieno posted:Uhm, nope. Looking at a brain scan is no different than looking at a tree. What happens in the brain isn't anything spectacularly different. This is wrong and stupid, you should be ashamed. So I guess by your logic there's no difference between your brain and your heart, either? Ugh. quote:Yes, and you might be persuaded of this. It's still the opposite of Bakker's theory. Consciousness is not an expression, it's incidental, unwanted illusion. It's linked with nothing and has access to very little, to nothing. Unwanted by whom? Santa Claus? God? It's also technically linked to our brain, since it wouldn't exist without it. It itself can't have access to its inner workings in the same way a book can't look at its own text. If books were people, other books could do it however. This is what I meant with this. The only weird thing here is the consciousness is us, but not at the same time: We can't look inside us, so we can't see our consciousness. Without that consciousness however, we wouldn't exist. quote:Bakker is in contact with some of those doing serious research. If anything he's absurdly RIGOROUS about scientific evidence. His blog is filled with that kind of stuff, and plenty of mention of books that establish what we know today. Well, then I'll go and look it up. Don't expect a fast answer, though. This may take a while. quote:Excuse me if I consider Thomas Metzinger more reliable than a guy on a forum. Another source! See, we can make this work! By the way, the same goes for you. I'll read up some stuff and maybe come back to this sometime next week, OK?
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Nov 20, 2014 18:54
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Libluini posted:Unwanted by whom? Santa Claus? God? Yes. I used "unwanted" in the sense that it's incidental and possibly obsolete. Bakker sometimes used the term "spandrel" in the context of biology. quote:I'll read up some stuff and maybe come back to this sometime next week, OK? I'm not personally so interested in the technicalities of consciousness studies. That's what Bakker's blog is for. I'm not remotely competent enough to argue with them, nor have the pretense of knowing better, like you seem to have. Those things are extremely complex and Bakker's blog goes plenty in those technicalities. That's 2/3 years of INTENSE activity, and it's extremely, extremely well researched and perfectly coherent with all the recent developments in the "official" science. Bakker's own theory is very rigorous, well documented, and even not that much different from the modern "canon". I often argued with him that he's not adding anything particularly new, or significant. What *I'm* personally interested is where Bakker refuses to go: the big picure. Or this post I wrote: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3440065&pagenumber=24#post437917075 I'm interested in the mythology and how all these things are connected together, more than something specific isolated from the rest. There are bigger implications to the theory of consciousness, and those are about themes of free will, choice, science and religion, information theory and so on. For example, where I can gladly use the term "omega point", Bakker would avoid it like the plague, since it's just basically Science Fiction to him. Abalieno fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Nov 20, 2014 |
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Nov 20, 2014 19:35
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For what it's worth a lot of studies on decision making and consciousness show that activity centers responsible for making decisions are activated long before people experience the conscious feeling of making a decision. We're pretty good at coming up with stories "after the fact" to explain what we did. There's a phenomenon called blindsight in which a person's retinal and most of their neural anatomy is intact for representing vision, but due to cortical lesions the person does not report any conscious vision. Yet if you have the person walk around, he or she will stop in front of obstacles, put their hands out before running into walls, and so on. If you ask him or her "why did you raise your hand out?" you'll usually get a response of "because I felt like doing it." The person perceives visual stimuli even when not consciously aware of it. I see that someone already posted the example of split-brain individuals, another great story of how the brain is very good at inventing post-hoc explanations for behavior. As a graduate student in a program related to neuroscience (vision science) I can say that most neuroscientists feel like discussions about consciousness are outside of the realm of current science. It's a huge unsolved problem made complicated by the issue that nobody really knows what consciousness or qualia is or what it looks like or how to study it. You start getting into dilemmas like: does a spider have "feelings" about where or how to spin his web? And are those feelings fundamentally different from our "feeling" when we look at the color red? If I wanted someone to look at a color and tell me they saw red instead of blue, right now the easiest way for me to do that would be to change pixel values on a monitor. But if I knew where representations of red and blue were in their brain, and which neural firing patterns were associated with each color, I could hypothetically alter your perception and probably without you knowing. Your retinal ganglion cells would fire back "red" but your brain would represent "blue" and that's probably what you'd see and consciously report. It's not so clear if I could leave your cortical representation of red alone and alter some other part of your neural activity to get you to see blue. We don't know enough about conscious experience yet. Scientists spent years and years looking for places intelligence might reside in the brain, and to date the best theory I've heard postulates that what we consider intelligence comprises a wide network of regions in the parietal and frontal lobes, and even still there's a lot of disagreement on what intelligence is or how we want to define it. I'll conclude by saying that the knowledge that something is influencing your behavior is often not enough to change your behavior. I may know that I am addicted to a certain drug, and I may even recognize specific instances in which this addiction or drive or whatever is influencing my behavior, but that does not mean I have the ability to prevent myself from carrying that behavior out. We recognize things like "willpower" and most people would say that it's my personal responsibility to avoid behavior that is harmful to myself or others. But if my drive to satisfy an addiction is greater than my drive to keep myself away from the addiction, my behavior will reflect it whether I want to or not. As a test for myself earlier this year I quit caffeine for two months, with a clear end-date for when I would finish quitting. I thought about coffee all the time, looked forward to the day I could resume drinking caffeine, and went back to four cups of coffee a day as soon as it was over, all without much of a conscious decision on my part. The only thing that had prevented me from indulging earlier was the date that I had set myself and the knowledge that my drive to carry the project out to the end was greater than my drive to drink coffee. As soon as that was over, I found my feet walking themselves over to Walgreens and picking out a frozen coffee even if I asked myself whether returning to caffeine was in my best interests. I asked myself "should I drink this?" as I was literally twisting the cap open. I'm sure I'm not the only person here who has experienced moments like this. So I don't think it's a given that even knowing you were being internally manipulated by an external source would be enough for you to act against or resist the manipulation. It may be that our conscious selves are more or less along for the ride, able to shout directions at the driver but without the ability to touch the wheel.
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Nov 21, 2014 00:08
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The Ninth Layer posted:For what it's worth a lot of studies on decision making and consciousness show that activity centers responsible for making decisions are activated long before people experience the conscious feeling of making a decision. How does that make it any less a decision?
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Nov 21, 2014 03:47
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The Ninth Layer posted:For what it's worth a lot of studies on decision making and consciousness show that activity centers responsible for making decisions are activated long before people experience the conscious feeling of making a decision. And you also probably know that's far from final. For example it could be that consciousness suppresses these decisions before they are strong enough to be acted on. The simple fact the impulse starts before doesn't exclude directly the role of consciousness. quote:As a graduate student in a program related to neuroscience (vision science) I can say that most neuroscientists feel like discussions about consciousness are outside of the realm of current science. It's a huge unsolved problem made complicated by the issue that nobody really knows what consciousness or qualia is or what it looks like or how to study it. You start getting into dilemmas like: does a spider have "feelings" about where or how to spin his web? And are those feelings fundamentally different from our "feeling" when we look at the color red? And that's Bakker theory. He tries to describe WHY it feels like that. Why that precise feel comes out that way. It's a pretty neat description, and the whole point, since Hofstadter's book, is reflexivity. Has a spider mind enough reflexivity and self-observation to develop a consciousness? I'm rather skeptical about this. We know with a decent degree of certainty that consciousness = reflexivity. Bakker goes on describing how "it is shaped" and why it comes out the way it does.
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Nov 21, 2014 07:37
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Of course Bakker lacks the education or scientific background for his "theory" to be any more worthwhile than that of any random poster on SA.
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Nov 23, 2014 03:28
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