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Hell, I'll bite. I don't think consciousness exists in any substantive "deeper" metaphysical sense of the term. At best what I suspect is going on is a kind of epistemic error in experience reporting. Somehow, we are conflating subpersonal neural activations with the personal idea of the self. Put another way, the self is the filter for experience, and that experience itself is merely a deeply ingrained illusion (it may even be a useful illusion, like say choice). Now being as (barring cases of structural damage to certain regions of the brain) perceptual experience is conceptually mediated, I suspect my sympathies ultimately lie along a Kantian direction: we're never going to have access to (apologies GaG if I poo poo up the German here) the ding-am-sich or thing-in-itself because all perception is theory-laden (with exceptions made for infants and those who suffer damage to key perceptual areas, though perhaps there we can say that they might have different conceptual or proto-conceptual structures). So ultimately I suspect humans are a type of p-zombie, though given our shoddy epistemic access to things like introspection, we will never be in a position to know it, so it doesn't terribly matter. Short version: consciousness is a useful illusion, but an illusion nonetheless.
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Jan 9, 2020 00:19
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magic cactus posted:Short version: consciousness is a useful illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. this line of thinking, along with the "free will is an illusion" assertion, makes my head hurt both of these things (consciousness, free will) correspond to, well, something, call it qualia or whatever. I guess my problem is with the notion that "illusion=false" which maybe is not your take on it. if we say "illusion=not what you intuitively think it is" than I have no problem with the assertion in either case and probably agree. but "no valid referent" is a weird concept, there's clearly a referent, as with a mirage or any optical illusion. since, however, consciousness and free will (but especially consciousness) effectively boil down to the referent . . . than I feel like "the illusion of consciousness" and "consciousness" collapse into one thing, as with the perception of free will.
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Jan 9, 2020 00:36
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the thing about conciousness being an illusion that's never made sense to me is that who exactly then is experiencing that illusion? I think it's a 'real' thing in the same way that a wave is a real thing - sure you could argue it's just a pattern of energy moving through water but it's still 'real' enough that you can classify it as something.
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Jan 9, 2020 00:38
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Manifisto posted:it feels maybe advisable to exercise a bit of caution in viewing stuff in hindsight and saying, "oh yeah, just putting these two regular things together was what did the trick, it's kind of obvious and not at all special." There's a prevalence for anthrocentric just-so stories in philosophy of mind and adjacent fields. For better or worse, THE HUMAN MIND mind mind is the only kind of mind we have clearish access to so it's the lens we think through and the model we use for thought in general, interspecies, deities, robots, other humans. It's not so much an "ohh, it's not all that special" as it is a "yeah it's cool, but it's not magic so let's talk about it and think about it in a way that's open to inquiry and external verification." Given that the topic is animal cognition, "not all that special" is also going to be kinda prevalent because bits and glimmers of that mind thing, which to us will always be human mind, are ubiquitous. Manifisto posted:but if that were the case, then you wouldn't get p-zombies, would you? that was sort of the point I was driving at. I do recognize that neither I nor anyone itt is going to dope out the answer to such an apparently heavily studied problem, we're just shooting the poo poo, thanks for taking the time to respond. You're not going to get a definitive answer to philosophical zombies thing unless a neurological correlate to consciousness is discovered and that correlate can be shown to have causal efficacy. Here's how it shakes out: Dualism is true, the mind is nonphysical and does not have a physical substrate. In other words, no soul, no thought. No philosophical zombies because nothing without a soul is going to be able to pass itself off as human. Note that mind being nonphysical and without a physical medium frees it from any criteria of verification of disproof, which, even if true, renders the entire subject vacuous. Monism is true, there is a neurological correlate to consciousness (mind has a physical substrate) and it's proven that consciousness has casual powers. No philosophical zombies, scientifically provable. Monism is true, there is a neurological correlate to consciousness and it's proven that consciousness no has casual powers. Philosophical zombies possible. The "answer" rests on what the physical sciences eventually discover. "Manifisto" posted:this line of thinking, along with the "free will is an illusion" assertion, makes my head hurt You gotta read this: http://andrewmbailey.com/pvi/Incompatibility_of_Free_Will_and_Determinism.pdf Free will would be an irreconcilable schism with a deterministic, even a weakly probabilisticly deterministic, universe. If you dig causality and tractability and sensibility and poo poo, free will doesn't allow for that kind of thing. ---------------- |
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Jan 9, 2020 03:25
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Mr. Dick posted:You gotta read this: okay I read that paper, thank you. it relies on a certain amount of jargon/technical language that I'm not entirely familiar with so I'm sure I have missed parts of it. I am already not entirely on board when inwagen tries to define determinism. in a quantum universe there are many outcomes that are, apparently, unavoidably probabilistic. the best you can say is that over a series of observations, the distribution will come out such and such; but for any particular observation determinism . . . well it fails. god plays dice with the universe. I am not saying "consciousness quantum" (and environmental decoherence seems to pose a problem for that) but I can't rule out that quantum phenomena are in fact responsible for what we perceive as free will. I also don't know how to relate any of this to the hypothesized "many worlds" ontology which . . . well, it may or may not be accurate, we simply don't know. in many worlds, literally every branching point means that things both happen and do not happen. I just don't know how one reconciles such a state of affairs with this paper's discussion of determinism, because there is by definition no logical way of proving that a physically possible outcome "could not" have happened. it not only could have happened, it did happen in a certain sense, and that's an outcome that does not require free will and yet seems to violate this definition of determinism. I am not ruling out some modification of this whole scaffolding that retreats to a position like "determinism means that no individual choice can alter the relative number of new worlds that branch out according to the relative probability of each given outcome" but offhand that sounds, if I may use technical language, dumb and unprovable. or maybe you want to ask whether individual choices can affect the particular world into which your qualia sails at each point, which . . . well since your qualia sails into one and only one world, how can you say anything about the mechanism by which that sailing occurred? you can't use statistics, it is a unique and unrepeatable phenomenon. what if it's largely chance but your free will can change the odds somewhat? offhand it seems so unmeasurable, with so many possible variations, that it's in the realm of speculative fiction rather than an argument with logical force. since physics has absolutely no idea about the ontology of quantum mechanics, logical arguments about what determinism is or isn't . . . well I would hope for something more than what I see in this paper. and I am absolutely sure there are people who have given this matter some thought, and I'd appreciate information or summaries about what they have to say!
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Jan 9, 2020 04:17
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| *drives by in a Camaro* Nerrdddsssssss! | |
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Jan 9, 2020 04:27
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cda posted:*drives by in a Camaro* Nerrdddsssssss!  I free will your camaro to run out of gas. however I also free will there to be an attractive person who stops to help you out of that jam, so there's that
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Jan 9, 2020 04:37
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Hofstadter's theory of loopiness is good and I think it's a solid approach of what consciousness is but almost nobody has finished GEB and his book A Strange Loop is unheard of, so I feel sorry for him that his ideas don't get more light. Many Worlds is a scam and doofuses taking it to metaphysical conclusions and forgetting that it's both supposition, and completely unprovable, and that there are a lot of equivalent models for understanding the available evidence, are the reason I drink. If you're interested in determinism pick up a copy of "The Emperor's New Mind". Penrose basically gives the best explanation of everything relevant to the discussion (as best as you can expect from a layman explanation). You don't have to agree with his argument in the book or even be interested in that to read it, because 6/7ths of the book are is basically significant portions of proof theory, type theory, classical physics, quantum physics, and neuroscience(?), distilled for a layman to read. It's good but I bailed around the halfway mark because I ran out of spoons. alexandriao fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Jan 9, 2020 |
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Jan 9, 2020 04:43
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alexandriao posted:Hofstadter's theory of loopiness is good and I think it's a solid approach of what consciousness is but almost nobody has finished GEB and his book A Strange Loop is unheard of, so I feel sorry for him that his ideas don't get more light. I read and liked that book, although I have subsequently heard that a lot of people feel his whole "quantum phenomena could exist in microtubules!" argument is at best an incredible reach. a while back I picked up Penrose's "The Road To Reality" and holy poo poo that's way more than I can process, he does not skimp on the higher math, I still pick it up from time to time but I have to skip over large swaths of tensor and twistor discussion, gently caress I can barely even figure out what a hamiltonian is (okay I have no idea, does it relate to that musical?). indeed it is this book specifically on which I ground my understanding of the various possible ontologies for quantum mechanics. penrose does not say anything like "many worlds a scam," to the contrary he lists I think six leading possibilities and give his view as to each but doesn't foreclose any of them. personally I am a little disappointed that he gives such short shrift to "pilot wave" but he's right that it just pushes the whole question to a different mystery.
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Jan 9, 2020 05:03
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Manifisto posted:
For real though I'm just going to wait until you nerds stop talking then I'm going to read the whole thread and learn a lot and become a nerd too. I tire of this life of Camaro dependency |
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Jan 9, 2020 05:12
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Sorry in advance if I'm just restating things in the thread, it's 4am and the thread hit 89 unread posts and my eyes are drilling into my skull. I'll try to keep up to date after this though. I'm almost certainly treading existing ground here but whatever. The Emperor's New Mind references QED by Feynman that I coincidentally bought a copy of at the same time as the former book, without knowing that in advance. QED goes over Quantum Electrodynamics which is a fully fleshed out, understood, and verified part of QM that as I understand it fully explains the weird behaviour of light, and also explains or underpins Chemistry as a whole. Feynman was instrumental in that theory being ratified so like, who better to explain it? Anyway from what I can tell Hofstadter's "Simball" theory in I Am A Strange Loop (? might be loving up the name there it's 4am here) is basically a reasonably good model for what occurs, IIRC Penrose and Feynman both state similar explanations to that. I'm not gonna restate that because as I mentioned earlier it's 4am. But the basic implications of it for determinism are that (stop me if you've heard this before) on a super tiny level things are unpredictable, when you get bigger, because of probability, that all bubbles out into regular, predictable behaviour. The differences are so small they don't matter for most things, and electrodynamics can use tricks (at least it seemed like that when I read that chapter) to predict and explain the big things like light moving in interesting ways. But the question I think now for determinism is that, is there a small """"""""glitch"""""""" in the system that natural selection inevitably exploited? Does that mean we cannot create GAI? On a tangent to make this post worthwhile here's two things I find interesting: The brain seems to unilaterally develop language in a single hemisphere, and of course the hands and eyes are tied in to different hemispheres. People where the corpus callosum (the connective tissue that connects to two hemispheres and allows communication and information sharing) has been severed, when you show information to one side, and then to the other (in such a way the other hemisphere does not receive that information), in some cases they respond differently. And iirc this is on the level of personal preferences. There's an experiment where they're asked "what is your favourite colour", and the different hands write different responses. Also cool: Blind-sight. There's a specific section of the brain dealing with eyesight that when you damage it in a tiny place, the person can receive data from the optic nerve, but they don't see it consciously. So they had a man with this and confirmed he couldn't see, then filled a hallway with obstacles and asked him to walk from one end to the other, and he starts doing a bunch of weird things to avoid the obstacles that are there, but when questioned about it he claimed that was how he wanted to walk. |
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Jan 9, 2020 05:16
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the problem I think is that if you're constructing a philosophical argument grounded in logic, and you can't rule out many worlds (or various other physically plausible ontologies), your argument has to account for that possibility or you have to straight up say "well if many worlds then this is all crap." contingent arguments aren't useless, I have really enjoyed math-heavy youtubes talking about how progress on problems like the riemann hypothesis require a lot of contingent proofs with the hope that someday they will be integrated by a major breakthrough. for all I know that paper may be totally sound if you make various assumptions, but if those assumptions are unknown and perhaps unknowable, well, it raises questions.
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Jan 9, 2020 05:25
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Manifisto posted:I read and liked that book, although I have subsequently heard that a lot of people feel his whole "quantum phenomena could exist in microtubules!" argument is at best an incredible reach. a while back I picked up Penrose's "The Road To Reality" and holy poo poo that's way more than I can process, he does not skimp on the higher math, I still pick it up from time to time but I have to skip over large swaths of tensor and twistor discussion, gently caress I can barely even figure out what a hamiltonian is (okay I have no idea, does it relate to that musical?). indeed it is this book specifically on which I ground my understanding of the various possible ontologies for quantum mechanics. penrose does not say anything like "many worlds a scam," to the contrary he lists I think six leading possibilities and give his view as to each but doesn't foreclose any of them. personally I am a little disappointed that he gives such short shrift to "pilot wave" but he's right that it just pushes the whole question to a different mystery. I meant that personally not that penrose said it!! sorry that that wasn't clear :o I've seen too many """"less wrong"""" things around many worlds so I treat it with a bargepole these days. Like almost always """"""less wrong"""""" has me agreeing with something until I see an (obvious) rebuttal, or gives me vibes of "it's wrong and you're making a huge flaw and leap but I don't have enough knowledge to be able to point out where properly", so much that now I just stay away from it. Discussing things with a lwer singlehandedly put me off metaphysical discussions because of how often he just didn't know anything about what he was talking about and refused to even google. and were talking about stuff like "plastic is bad for you" (first page google result from harvard med or somewhere: basically we don't know; he didn't even bother he just assumed constantly). it wasn't just him, I saw c o n s t a n t l y among lwers. v frustrating when people are pulling out of their rear end on something like sociology and their questions are literally answered by skimming a socio 101 book that you have on your desk because they didn't even find out what was known to expound on it. gwern has a question on one of his pages that asks "is beauty subjective to culture?" and like... my dude it's a google search away and there have been s t u d i e s, but no he's in the comments claiming something about women with the assumption that it isn't because he just. didn't. bother. to. check. *breathes* its super unchill and I can feel my back clenching at the memories ugh The Emperor's New Mind is a good alt to that book and you might find it more digestible!!! he stays away from maths except in the first third, the physics stuff is based off more on explanation than maths. if u haven't heard of it there's a good series by susskind where he teaches adults proper physics to the level of not just QM but also special and general relativity. currently trying to work my maths back up to scratch (need like, high school trig for it and for some reason I can't digest some equivalencies relating to that) but it's very approachable?? that might help at least it's called "The theoretical minimum" and the first two books are really short, the same width as Free Culture which is a very very tiny book. theyre about the width of my thumb and I have small hands alexandriao fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Jan 9, 2020 |
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Jan 9, 2020 05:26
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Manifisto posted:okay I read that paper, thank you. it relies on a certain amount of jargon/technical language that I'm not entirely familiar with so I'm sure I have missed parts of it. Two things regarding quantum weirdness when it comes to free will. On the bright side, the interaction of the instrument with measured phenomenon slices off a unique part of reality and that interaction is inseparable from any sensible discussion of the phenomenon. Subsequently, even if you don't have free will, you are still forming the world by being in it and, even if you can't fathom what it's boundaries are or what it's nature is, there is an identity, an absolute uniqueness to you. On the even brighter side, probabilities played out across astronomically large samples, such as the number of subatomic particles constituting your body, everything you can see and 99.9% of the stuff humanity is capable of interacting with, end up as regularities. God plays dice with the universe, in miniature, a million billion times over, the result is that you're not quantum phasing through poo poo all the time and Newtonian physics are totally fine to explain a ton of stuff at the level we interact with it. You're going to have a really hard time snaking free will in through a quantum back door, if you want your free will to have agency in the world, which is what defines it as free will, it needs to defeat the odds on god's galaxy sized number of dice rolls every time it wants a cheeseburger. Manifisto posted:literally every branching point means that things both happen and do not happen. I just don't know how one reconciles such a state of affairs with this paper's discussion of determinism, because there is by definition no logical way of proving that a physically possible outcome "could not" have happened. There's a line in the comic book the Sandman, something like "you see a great deal of branching paths ahead of you and only one path behind you." There's one actuality. All the" could"s collapse into a single "did" right at the point when you're talking about a physical outcome and not a speculative one. It's been a lifetime since Mr. Dick did any academia but Galen Strawson was an active proponent of hard determinism. It's a surprisingly rare position considering that it is absolutely correct. Totally weird too because it's a property that we deny every single thing we know of (statically determined is way different than undetermined or "free") except our selves. The universe wouldn't exist, not in any sensible way, if there were pockets of it that played by an entirely different set of rules than everything else (no, the hypothetical inside of black holes don't count, their event horizon basically makes anything on the other side an effectively different universe). ---------------- |
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Jan 9, 2020 05:54
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cda posted:For real though I'm just going to wait until you nerds stop talking then I'm going to read the whole thread and learn a lot and become a nerd too. I tire of this life of Camaro dependency Mr. Dick would trade every thing for a t-top and nowhere to go. ---------------- |
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Jan 9, 2020 05:57
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Mr. Dick posted:On the even brighter side, probabilities played out across astronomically large samples, such as the number of subatomic particles constituting your body, everything you can see and 99.9% of the stuff humanity is capable of interacting with, end up as regularities. God plays dice with the universe, in miniature, a million billion times over, the result is that you're not quantum phasing through poo poo all the time and Newtonian physics are totally fine to explain a ton of stuff at the level we interact with it. You're going to have a really hard time snaking free will in through a quantum back door, if you want your free will to have agency in the world, which is what defines it as free will, it needs to defeat the odds on god's galaxy sized number of dice rolls every time it wants a cheeseburger. I really do appreciate your responses, but I have a big reservation. if we're playing philosophy, which means we are accounting for all the ways things can be, however unlikely they may seem, so long as they don't end up in a provable contradiction or aren't categorically at odds with experience. a true "many worlds" is so unfathomably batshit that it is hard to even discuss. there are a fucktillion of quantum events going on all the time and if each waveform collapse means that a new world branches off, there are a super mega fucktillion of worlds being created all the time, increasing exponentially. I am setting aside the question of what actually makes the waveform collapse because fuuuuck that's . . . that's a thing all right, yessiree indeed, a good question. this super mega fucktillion of new worlds being created at each micro instant means that you can't just average out things at any one point and say "oh this is the probably reality." the fucktillion of branches that happened over the past few seconds and minutes and hours and years and millenia means that there are things going on right now that are vastly different from what your current perception sees as reality. I want to be clear that I don't really like many worlds, but my dislike for it has nothing to do with logic. it has to do with the sheer staggering insanity of the number of worlds that would have have branched off since the big bang in this view. sometimes I watch videos talking about really really really big numbers and it seems to me that this is one of those stupendously big number scenarios and it makes me feel all funny and insecure. Manifisto fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Jan 9, 2020
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Jan 9, 2020 06:15
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yes, I did edit the phrase "so unfathomably batshit that it is hard to fathom." honestly I should have let it be, but my free will made me change it, so sorry.
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Jan 9, 2020 06:19
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to be a little less flip, and yes I am drinking some beer thank you, given sensitivity to initial conditions, if we go back to near the big bang and examine possible variations on particle location or whatever it seems like one might be able to say that most many world universes don't include earth or anyone on it that is subject to the mystery of exactly what kind of event creates a branching, and I confess I don't understand that, so maybe the preceding isn't really a valid observation
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Jan 9, 2020 06:43
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alexandriao posted:Also cool: Blind-sight. There's a specific section of the brain dealing with eyesight that when you damage it in a tiny place, the person can receive data from the optic nerve, but they don't see it consciously. So they had a man with this and confirmed he couldn't see, then filled a hallway with obstacles and asked him to walk from one end to the other, and he starts doing a bunch of weird things to avoid the obstacles that are there, but when questioned about it he claimed that was how he wanted to walk. yessssssss this stuff is the best what other cool weird things do brains do? tell me how my skullmeat is weird and powerful
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Jan 9, 2020 14:58
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Alright I had a super huge rear end effort post here and then my browser died and now I have to type everything again, so I'm grumpy and will cut some stuff.  Also, drat guys, you really put this onto a fundamental level! Maybe I should rename the thread to philosophy crew by now? I dunno, but I enjoy it (I hope so do you), so do not feel like talking about this is a derail, as it imo is all part of the initial discussion about cognition and brains. Due to the loss of my big post, I'll just comment a bit here again! magic cactus posted:Hell, I'll bite. You mentioned before that you had some background in academical philosophy before? I'd love to hear about that if you want, super cool that you're that much into this stuff! In my experience especially the illusion part is something that's not particularly easy to digest and the papers on that usually are vast. On that note, do you happen to have read about German philosopher Thomas Metzinger? He's a chill guy, I met him a few times and visited him at his university in Mainz, he's heavily invested into the philosophy of mind and is very actively working with doctors, neurologists and cognitive scientists to learn more about our brain from a philosophical perspective. He also is a fierce and almost radical monist - he is entirely convinced that, assuming we are able to further research on that without landing in paradoxes, we will find a neural correlate to consciousness and our general ability to reflect about ourselves. He also wrote many words about him calling subjectivity or rather "the self" as a philosophical concept in its entirety to be nothing but an illusion of our mind to enable a kind of filter between our mental structures and the world-in-itself (Ding-an-sich, you had it almost right!). Simplifying here, but he suggests that our model of self is nothing but a medium that we construct based on our perception, endlessly changing it over time as we learn and grow in whatever way. It may also be changing by manipulating the brain itself, either on purpose (eg brain surgery to remove cancer, or the general possibility to enhance our brain using technological implants) or on accident (strokes changing a person in its core, accidents causing massive changes in behavior and personality). Basically, we usually assume that we perceive the world through our mental representation of the world using our senses, landing in the brain where it then gets computed and analyzed and thus accessible to the subject. He turns this around, saying that the world-in-itself gets perceived using mental representation and then filtered through our constructed setup of a self, then it ends up in the brain that it then re-uses what it analyzed to further adjust the filter: World-In-Itself ---> Brain ---> You turns into World-In-Itself ---> "You" <---> Brain This results in the idea that the entire concept that anyone of us has a fundamental, metaphysical, actually existing self being wrong and instead we are victims of our own illusion of a constructed representation. It is infinitely adaptable, as it has no substance to rely on and thus it is possible for people to change themselves both slowly or abruptly. He specifically laid this out in his academic book "Being No One. The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity" which is admittedly not easy to read and goes extremely into every detail here, plus dealing with issues other philosophers brought up about this, as the book caused quite a wide-ranging discussion throughout philosophers. He also published a more general approach to this for non-academical use in "The Ego Tunnel - The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self" which is specifically meant for the general public, I can recommend both books to any of you that have an interest in this, even if you heavily disagree with the concept. Manifisto posted:this line of thinking, along with the "free will is an illusion" assertion, makes my head hurt Oh no, sorry about your head.  If it helps with this idea in general, saying that something is an illusion does in no negate its meaning or value. The concept merely claims that there is no objectively measurable substance to look into, as we construct and construct it constantly, which also specifically includes saying that it may be different than you would intuitively think. That said, I also wouldn't say that saying that consciousness is an illusion created by our mind translates into "there is no possible way there is a free will", as there might be more to the question of how our will is formed and what influence our consciousness may have. A possible definition for consciousness for that perspective might be "Consciousness is a mental state in which you take cognizance of your own existence and the existence of a surrounding" which does not exclude any other animals and does not go into conflict of any illusion, general monist or free will theory. Stoner Sloth posted:the thing about conciousness being an illusion that's never made sense to me is that who exactly then is experiencing that illusion? Manifisto posted:free will This is a fun and usually brutal discussion and let me say real quick, as I experienced it with students before, that we can drop it if it makes someone really uncomfortable. Denying the existence of a free will comes close to denying existence of moral, value and stuff we hold dear, which often quickly leads to an ontological nihilism that, while certainly interesting, makes incredibly depressed. Nothing matters, I can't decide, yadayada, that's imo a fair discussion to have in a philosophical frame, question everything (INCLUDING the theories that suggest the denial though) and explore the possibilities of what if's. However, it is not something I would recommend to people who feel uncomfortable talking about it or feel like questioning the fundamental basis of their lives is a bad idea (usually it is). Nietzsche, who probably wasn't a happy person in general, called it "The scariest of all guests" ("der unheimlichste aller Gäste in German) and he did say so for a good reason. Please, that goes for everyone, do not feel bad if you wish to ignore that subject in BYOB, the fun forum, that abyss is very able to stare back and I've seen some people getting into actual personal issues due to it, which is not ok or the goal here. With that disclaimer in mind - please stop reading here if you feel like not going into this further - , let me comment by mentioning the medical syndrome called akinetic mutism, a devastating neurological defect in the brain that is "often" caused by Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (we are talking about a few dozen cases ever), complex and diffuse brain tumors or strokes. It is estimated to be caused by a wide destruction or otherwise impaired function of the frontal lobes (the part of the brain that sits above your eyes) or right in the center of the brain, right above the brainstem. Patients who suffered from this syndrome are unable to speak or move any muscle, however not like it is in the (also medically proven and analyzed) locked-in-syndrome, where you are fully awake and aware of your surroundings, but physically unable to move your muscles or communicate due to wide-spread paralysis. It's actually more of the opposite - the patient is entirely able to move and speak, but he does not... want to. At all. Not as in "Meh, I don't feel like talking" but as a fundamental lack of will to do anything. According to one patient that managed to wake up from this state (there is experimental therapy that seems to have a certain effect), refers to this period of her live as "the great silence". She fully understood what was going on, she was fully aware of the people around her, she did not feel any pain or suffering, she wasn't scared, but she also wasn't happy either. She felt absolutely nothing at all. She said, that there was nothing left of her mind that would motivate her to do anything at all. She didn't want to die, but also didn't want to live, she ultimately did not care about anything and merely breathed because it's a reflex she couldn't stop from happening. Only when the doctors around her literally begged her to move her eyes for just a brief moment and only after a long time she actually decided to do that and proved that she is there and awake, but she lacks the will to communicate, move or function on any level. That particular patient was able to recover from this state caused by devastating brain trauma and had a mostly normal life afterwards, for more details on that you can check out "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain" by Portuguese Neural scientist Antonio Damasio who spend a lot of time with many of those patients. Based on that description of herself during that time, British physicist and biologist Francis Crick, the guy who discovered DNA along with Watson and Wilkins, referred to it as a complete loss of will, stating that he assumes that the affected brain structures must be of vital meaning for having any will. When I read about this a while ago, it really really made me think and I'm actually not yet done thinking about it, which is why I wanted to mention it here. Maybe, at least for the human will (that, from that description, seems to be independent from being conscious by the way), there seems to be a specific area in the brain (or the connection between many areas), which would be an insane discovery. Or, I am fully willing to keep that door open, it is a gateway to the transcendental being that is our mind and without it we basically lose access to it. I dunno, but I find it both insanely scary and incredibly fascinating! Goons Are Gifts fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Jan 10, 2020
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Jan 10, 2020 15:33
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brian crew represent! we are all named "brian" itt Metzinger sounds interesting, his stance sounds like what I am intuitively drawn towards, but of course I try to be aware of and challenge my own biases as to the "illusion" thing, I think the problem with colloquial discussion is that loose use of lay terms like this one can import implicit baggage (to speakers, listeners, or both). when we say "his success was an illusion" I think the implication is that it is fake by most meaningful definitions of "success." when we talk about mirages we are thinking about the promise of a specific referent that is not there. whereas fiction is no less about a missing referent but because of the framing we don't really expect a real world referent so we are happy to talk about the story as a thing in itself not as an "illusion" or "mirage." I am not accusing you, gag, of being loose with language! you make a real effort to be clear which I appreciate. I just feel that people throw the term "illusion" around a lot, especially when it comes to free will, without having given a great deal of thought as to what the term actually connotes and implies. that story about cj disease is fascinating and I will have to ponder it. I think it falls into the category of the "split brain" thing which was referred to earlier, it's freaky to contemplate while still providing really important sounding insights. I have been googling and reading stuff about the relationship between quantum concepts (both "many worlds" and the probabilistic interpretations) and free will. I fully expected people to have given it some thought and I'm a bit relieved that I am not crazy for thinking that it is a potentially interesting/relevant set of considerations. however it is insanely speculative given how little we know about lots of things.
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Jan 10, 2020 18:52
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You're right about the term illusion there! It's one of those terms that may be too loaded with a certain meaning already for this, so it's better to either refine it prior to using or just swap out for another term. Feel free to point out specifics like that, I noticed quite a few times already that not being native in English makes up a lot of difference, despite me learning it for 13 years now. German is comparably a very expressive language, we have a lot of words and create new ones on the go by binding them together, nuance is usually created by using more specific terms and a very specific structure of the sentence or entire paragraph, or simply more words on some end, whereas English, from my perspective, seems to have a certain inherent nuance that you use, well, more precisely? The words carry more weight and you don't necessarily need more around them for that matter, if that makes any sense. Sometimes this leads to me being rather loose with certain terms as I'm not aware of the value it might have in the swing, as it doesn't have this kind of value in German or rather gains it by the context surrounding it. Probably matters less when I talk in academical abstracts where I can think about a sentence longer, whereas here I  . So feel completely free to correct me at any time!
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Jan 11, 2020 00:21
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Goons Are Great posted:You're right about the term illusion there! It's one of those terms that may be too loaded with a certain meaning already for this, so it's better to either refine it prior to using or just swap out for another term. your english is really good gag, it's easy to forget that it's not your native tongue. I have had not a few conversations with japanese people in a sort of "friendly but work-related" context where they have asked me to try to explain the connotations around certain english phrases. it's darn difficult for me to convey the nuances that I intuitively understand, especially when they are highly context-dependent.
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Jan 11, 2020 00:42
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Goons Are Great posted:
If religious people are to be believed, denying the existence of god has the same effect, yet atheists are generally much better people. Justice in a society where determinism is the base assumption would be rehabilitative rather than vengeance based. Under determinism the just world fallacy and all the pernicious ideologies that it legitimizes, racism, nationalism, capitalism go away. ---------------- |
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Jan 11, 2020 01:14
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Goons Are Great posted:Alright I had a super huge rear end effort post here and then my browser died and now I have to type everything again, so I'm grumpy and will cut some stuff. lmao that when I tried to type up a response post this happened to me too. Goons Are Great posted:You, or rather, your brain. Saying that the consciousness might be an illusion does not negate your own physical existence or that of your brain, or the mind that results from it, as we continuously construct a mental representation of the world around us using mental models and it just so happens that the concept of a consciousness might also be one of those models. It's the abstract concept of "you" having a (self-)consciousness here that is questioned, not you as a living organism with a functioning brain that does that. At least as far as this theory goes. I guess to me the problem with that is that our mental models are inseparable from that sense of consciousness - I think the whole illusion argument is a failure of imagination or categorization problem. It's like saying 'well actually your body is an illusion because it's made up of cells some of which die and are replaced on a continuous basis' or 'waves and whirlpools aren't real things, they're just patterns of movement in a fluid' when we can easily see that these things are just ways of usefully defining discrete entities or phenomenons. It also assumes you can separate a living organism with a functioning brain from some form of experience of consciousness and I'm not sure that is the case at all. Do we have any evidence that such a thing is possible or could even evolve? I feel that the answer might well be no because any mental model that is unable to distinguish the difference between the thing doing the modelling and everything else is probably not going to be very useful and therefore is unlikely to have evolved compared to something that intrinsically creates an experience of 'I' by definition. Goons Are Great posted:With that disclaimer in mind - please stop reading here if you feel like not going into this further - , let me comment by mentioning the medical syndrome called akinetic mutism, a devastating neurological defect in the brain that is "often" caused by Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (we are talking about a few dozen cases ever), complex and diffuse brain tumors or strokes. It is estimated to be caused by a wide destruction or otherwise impaired function of the frontal lobes (the part of the brain that sits above your eyes) or right in the center of the brain, right above the brainstem. Interesting - this reminds me of what happens to cockroaches stung by jewel wasps. They basically lose the ability to initiate movements of their own and have to be guided to respond which the wasp does, letting it lead a much larger insect to a hiding spot so that it can lay its eggs on it so that the emerging larva have a food supply. I feel this might be relevant because it suggests that with the right chemicals you could at least temporarily shut down whatever parts of the brain are responsible for initiating 'will' and could potentially be helpful in researching this angle.
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Jan 11, 2020 19:04
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Goons Are Great posted:Not as in "Meh, I don't feel like talking" but as a fundamental lack of will to do anything. Yeah. I've experienced something like that (I don't want to say that it IS that, because I'm not aware of any accompanying trauma, it might just be something similar that presents the same) and it's exactly as described. You kind of, idk, move backwards into yourself, I'm not sure how else to describe it. After a while I'll come out of it by will, before then the actual energy or will to stop it just, isn't there. It's not unpleasant, it just, is. |
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Jan 11, 2020 21:34
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alexandriao posted:Yeah. I've experienced something like that (I don't want to say that it IS that, because I'm not aware of any accompanying trauma, it might just be something similar that presents the same) and it's exactly as described. You kind of, idk, move backwards into yourself, I'm not sure how else to describe it. After a while I'll come out of it by will, before then the actual energy or will to stop it just, isn't there. It's not unpleasant, it just, is. this is called "apathy"
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Jan 12, 2020 07:52
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Manifisto posted:paging bwee Sorry I left my pager in 1985
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Jun 25, 2020 01:18
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Bwee posted:Sorry I left my pager in 1985 What up |
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Jun 25, 2020 01:24
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This web site is very slow for some reason
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Jun 25, 2020 01:24
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cda posted:The absence of bwee from this thread is physically painful to me The pain has finally stopped |
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Jun 25, 2020 01:25
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But to be on topic, I am a real life brain scientist and would be happy to talk brain stuff with y'all until the forums implode in a few hours
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Jun 25, 2020 01:25
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That'd be so amazing, let's talk about brains though the heavens fall Like, what do you do? Anything in particular you're working on that you can share?
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Jun 25, 2020 01:37
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Bwee posted:Sorry I left my pager in 1985 I am both happy to see you and happy that you've bumped this thread. we touched on a lot of heady topics and had a lot of very qualified people weighing in (i.e. not me), any perspectives you want to share would be much appreciated. |
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Jun 25, 2020 03:11
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Goons Are Great posted:That'd be so amazing, let's talk about brains though the heavens fall I am a circadian neuroscientist who studies the brain's biological clock and how it generates circadian (~24 h) rhythms in behavior and physiology. currently i am looking at the neural circuits connecting the clock to hormone production
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Jun 25, 2020 03:20
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Bwee posted:I am a circadian neuroscientist who studies the brain's biological clock and how it generates circadian (~24 h) rhythms in behavior and physiology. currently i am looking at the neural circuits connecting the clock to hormone production Do you have to figure out what time if day makes the mice most horny |
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Jun 25, 2020 03:23
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cda posted:Do you have to figure out what time if day makes the mice most horny i am looking at ~ovulation~ right now and mice consistently ovulate at about 3-4PM
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Jun 25, 2020 03:23
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Bwee posted:I am a circadian neuroscientist who studies the brain's biological clock and how it generates circadian (~24 h) rhythms in behavior and physiology. currently i am looking at the neural circuits connecting the clock to hormone production well I don't know where Circadia is but I'm not sure that makes you any smarter than an american scientist, so maybe you can keep your prejudices in check ok buddy?
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Jun 25, 2020 03:25
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Bwee posted:i am looking at ~ovulation~ right now and mice consistently ovulate at about 3-4PM Happy hour |
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Jun 25, 2020 03:43
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| I mean, horny hour | |
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Jun 25, 2020 03:44
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