Searching for GOD...

[Alan Burns]

AB,

Then you suggest wrongly. Just out of interest, other than your assertions on the matter do you have any reasoning at all other than "consciousness looks really hard to me" and "laptops can't do it, therefore brains can't do it" that would support you?

As you have the overwhelming consensus of evidence from the multidisciplinary cognitive sciences ranged against you, surely you have more than unqualified contrary assertions in the locker haven't you?

Anything?

“     It must be confessed, moreover, that perception, and that which depends on it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is, by figures and motions, And, supposing that there were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception. This must be sought, therefore, in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine.     ”
—Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology

In 2004, eight neuroscientists felt it was too soon for a definition of consciousness. They wrote an apology in "Human Brain Function":

"We have no idea how consciousness emerges from the physical activity of the brain and we do not know whether consciousness can emerge from non-biological systems, such as computers ... At this point the reader will expect to find a careful and precise definition of consciousness. You will be disappointed. Consciousness has not yet become a scientific term that can be defined in this way. Currently we all use the term consciousness in many different and often ambiguous ways. Precise definitions of different aspects of consciousness will emerge ... but to make precise definitions at this stage is premature."


"The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology"   -  Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

[wigginhall]

Good stuff, torridon.  AB actually has to step outside nature, with his idea  of the soul, and then claims that somehow there is an interaction with nature, which of course, he cannot describe.   But I suppose theism is itself extra-nature (supernatural) in its basic ideas.   But then the supernatural floats off into the realm of guesswork, and is uncheckable.   Hence, AB can cite his experience of this or that, but so can every religion in the world, for example, a realm of a million angels and devils is as likely as his ideas.  Or in fact, an evil god.

[Alan Burns]

Alan, it is your rationale which has an unbreachable gap, and it is entirely spurious, of your own making. 

In a 'materialist' account, we already accept that all matter is connected to or aware of all other matter in the cosmos.  If I click my fingers now, the rest of the cosmos has to react to that, it cannot ignore it and this is because all matter is related to all other matter in multiple ways.  There are no unbreachable gaps in physics' description of reality, apart from, possibly, where there are holes in the fabric of spacetime..

In your account however you create an unbreachable gap by claiming the soul is 'immaterial'.  Making the soul immaterial is a way out of explaining why we cannot detect the substance of this spiritual soul. But that merely creates the problem of how the soul can detect things in the material domain if it is not part of it and does not interact with it.

If you touch a hot stove, the heat is detected as a reaction between the heat of the stove and nerve endings in your fingertips, this in turn creates (inevitable) subsequent reactions of pulses flowing up nerve fibres in the arm and eventually like everything else, into cortex where it is modulated into the phenomenology of pain sensation.  There are no breaks in this, no disconnects, no chasms, it is all information flow within a system.  However if you claim there is also a soul which is not part of this system then you have just invented an unbreachable chasm that information cannot flow across, by your own definition.  Your soul is a spurious addition to a system that works quite well without it.

The example you give is simply describing a series of material reactions.  You do not seem to distinguish between reaction and perception.  Perception is not a reaction - it is just conscious awareness of what is taking place.

[floo]

The example you give is simply describing a series of material reactions.  You do not seem to distinguish between reaction and perception.  Perception is not a reaction - it is just conscious awareness of what is taking place.

Your perception is very different to mine. My life experiences have given me a very different perception about matters of faith. Surely if a god was involved in the way we perceive religion we would all see it the same way.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

“     It must be confessed, moreover, that perception, and that which depends on it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is, by figures and motions, And, supposing that there were a mechanism so constructed as to think, feel and have perception, we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another, but never anything by which to explain a perception. This must be sought, therefore, in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine.     ”
—Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology

In 2004, eight neuroscientists felt it was too soon for a definition of consciousness. They wrote an apology in "Human Brain Function":

"We have no idea how consciousness emerges from the physical activity of the brain and we do not know whether consciousness can emerge from non-biological systems, such as computers ... At this point the reader will expect to find a careful and precise definition of consciousness. You will be disappointed. Consciousness has not yet become a scientific term that can be defined in this way. Currently we all use the term consciousness in many different and often ambiguous ways. Precise definitions of different aspects of consciousness will emerge ... but to make precise definitions at this stage is premature."


"The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology"   -  Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

What point do you think you are making?

Consciousness as an emergent property is an explanatory model built on the processes we do understand, populated by the evidence we do have. That's all we have. The fact that the model isn't fully populated does not though disqualify or falsify it.

That's your first mistake.

Having misdescribed a problem, your second mistake is to think you can populate the "chasm" you've created with whatever superstitious belief happens to take your fancy - essentially it's just another god of the gaps fallacy.

Your third mistake is to claim an explanation – "soul" – that's not defined at all, about which you have no information of any kind, that creates fundamental problems in logic when you assert it to be neither deterministic nor random, and about which you can provide no method of any kind to distinguish your claims from just guessing.

Do you have any sense at all of how ludicrous this is?

[Alan Burns]

Your perception is very different to mine. My life experiences have given me a very different perception about matters of faith. Surely if a god was involved in the way we perceive religion we would all see it the same way.

One of the fascinating things about human beings is how different each one of us is.  Even identical twins can display very different individual characteristics despite the similar biological make up and early life experiences.  I am so glad that God did not make us all the same.  Every person is unique.

[Nearly Sane]

One of the fascinating things about human beings is how different each one of us is.  Even identical twins can display very different individual characteristics despite the similar biological make up and early life experiences.  I am so glad that God did not make us all the same.  Every person is unique.

which is a complete non sequitur to Floo's question.

[floo]

One of the fascinating things about human beings is how different each one of us is.  Even identical twins can display very different individual characteristics despite the similar biological make up and early life experiences.  I am so glad that God did not make us all the same.  Every person is unique.

If god was responsible, no doubt it would have been BORING in the extreme if we had all been the same. It wouldn't have had the fun of looking down from its fluffy white cloud and watching the suffering its botched creation has caused!

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

Incidentally, you do realise I hope that the quote you posted ("We have no idea how consciousness emerges from the physical activity of the brain..." etc) doesn't support you. It merely says that they didn't know how the emergence of consciousness works - it did not say that emergence itself isn't the prevailing model nonetheless.

You could just as well say, "we have no idea how gravity emerges from the physical activity of the universe...". That doesn't though mean that the naturalistic model for it is wrong in principle, and nor would it give you licence to jump in with a, "well it must be invisible pixies holding stuff down with very thin strings then", which is logically equivalent to asserting "soul" as your alternative to emergent consciousness.

[SusanDoris]

I wonder how many childrenAB has personally indoctrinated with his ludicrous beliefs. He will of course avoid answering that and in any case he is probably proud of having filled their heads with false beliefs which will be to them a hindrance and a barrier to reality. 

[floo]

I wonder how many childrenAB has personally indoctrinated with his ludicrous beliefs. He will of course avoid answering that and in any case he is probably proud of having filled their heads with false beliefs which will be to them a hindrance and a barrier to reality.

If he has, hopefully they will wise up and realise there is no evidence to support any of it, as I did having been indoctrinated throughout my childhood.

[torridon]

The example you give is simply describing a series of material reactions.  You do not seem to distinguish between reaction and perception.  Perception is not a reaction - it is just conscious awareness of what is taking place.

That is just plain wrong, I am distinguishing between reaction and perception.  Just as I would distinguish a mountain from a molecule, a mountain is made of trillions of molecules, and broadly speaking, our conscious perception is made of trillions of little bits of perception which we term reaction at the level of chemistry aggregated up.  It is all a matter of scale and complexity, and I don't see what your big problem is in understanding that our conscious perception is the aggregation and synthesis of many lower and more primitive elements of awareness.  When your finger touches the hot stove that starts an information flow that travels up the nervous system and ripples through cortex, the pain we feel is the resultant information flow in cortex.  Adding an unevidenced undetectable immaterial soul into this adds nothing but problems; how, for instance, does my dog, without a soul, also seem to experience the same pain on touching the hot stove.   Your explanation just seems like a train wreck of illogic to me.

[wigginhall]

Some philosophers seem to agree with AB, that subjective experience cannot be described/explained by brain processes.  An example is Nagel in his 'Mind and Cosmos', which seems to put forward a dualist idea, that (as in the title) there is mind and there is material universe, and the two are separate.

However, it struck me that Nagel's book is rather like AB and depends on incredulity.   If the brain can process information, which surely nobody can deny, and can simulate experiences (again, undeniable), why can't it simulate a 'centre' of consciousness, an 'agent', a sense of me-ness, and so on?   Or if you like, a self-referential kind of satnav with knobs on.   FFS, my phone does satnav now, and can tell me where I am.

[Nearly Sane]

I think that Nagel could have called Mind and Cosmos ' Bugger, this stuff is hard' and it could be a companion to Dennett's Consciousness Explained which might alternatively be called 'Buggered if I can see any problem'. It's striking that I don't think we are fully sure there is a problem, indeed the only problem might be that we cannot work out if there is a problem.


I think people are too inclined to  ignore the difficulties of being conscious about consciousness, as Hume would have it at such times it slips away, or as Bowie put 'I've turned myself to face me but I've never caught a glimpse...' AB seems very sure what his perception is, but this seems contrary to my experience.

[wigginhall]

I think that Nagel could have called Mind and Cosmos ' Bugger, this stuff is hard' and it could be a companion to Dennett's Consciousness Explained which might alternatively be called 'Buggered if I can see any problem'. It's striking that I don't think we are fully sure there is a problem, indeed the only problem might be that we cannot work out if there is a problem.


I think people are too inclined to  ignore the difficulties of being conscious about consciousness, as Hume would have it at such times it slips away, or as Bowie put 'I've turned myself to face me but I've never caught a glimpse...' AB seems very sure what his perception is, but this seems contrary to my experience.

Terrific post.  I used to read Chalmers and others, on the 'hard problem', but somewhere along the road, maybe it's old age, I couldn't remember what it was.    I know AB talks of it being impossible that a physical organ could produce thought, but he never explains why.  Shades of the Leibniz mill.   I think it's partly the shock of being a subject in an apparently objective world, and we wonder how we arrived at this point with this feeling of being me.   According to AB, therefore soul, therefore God.

[Nearly Sane]

Terrific post.  I used to read Chalmers and others, on the 'hard problem', but somewhere along the road, maybe it's old age, I couldn't remember what it was.    I know AB talks of it being impossible that a physical organ could produce thought, but he never explains why.  Shades of the Leibniz mill.   I think it's partly the shock of being a subject in an apparently objective world, and we wonder how we arrived at this point with this feeling of being me.   According to AB, therefore soul, therefore God.

I read AB's post and they seem so different from my experiences that at times it has felt like Alan is a bot, programmed in as recursive loop. Perhaps there are two (or more)  ways of experiencing perception and in our easy identification of similarity , we miss that we are seeing things entirely differently.

To take an example, I don't know how anyone could look into the eyes of an orangutan and think it wasn't as similar as the bloke in the pub in terms of perception of self.

[wigginhall]

Yes, many of the primates produce that feeling of kinship.  This seems to destroy any arguments against evolution, and also assertions that human consciousness is somehow at a remove from animals'.   

In fact, you can get the same feeling with dogs, and other animals.   They remember, they think, they work things out, they have feelings, they cooperate, and they train us.

[torridon]

To take an example, I don't know how anyone could look into the eyes of an orangutan and think it wasn't as similar as the bloke in the pub in terms of perception of self.

IIRC it was just such an experience that Charles Darwin had early in his career,  looking into the eyes of a gorilla in London zoo, and recognising something there, that helped motivate him to understand the connectedness of life.  I get it too, in India etc when you come across a wild monkey and exchange knowing glances. Kind a spooky.

[Nearly Sane]

IIRC it was just such an experience that Charles Darwin had early in his career,  looking into the eyes of a gorilla in London zoo, and recognising something there, that helped motivate him to understand the connectedness of life.  I get it too, in India etc when you come across a wild monkey and exchange glances. Kind a spooky.

And yet, AB doesn't react the same, and while we might think this is some form of cognitive dissonance, maybe it is a cognitive difference. Maybe there is a different form of perception going on.

[wigginhall]

I get it with foxes, although of course, maybe I'm imagining it.   I see them walking up a path, and they usually turn and look back, and give you a look.   Oh boy, if you could bottle that, you'd make a fortune.

[wigginhall]

This reminds me of those crows who can recognize different people, and whether they have treated them badly.   Oh, I forgot, this is a reaction, not a perception.   Therefore God.

[Nearly Sane]

This reminds me of those crows who can recognize different people, and whether they have treated them badly.   Oh, I forgot, this is a reaction, not a perception.   Therefore God.

Maybe we have more in common with the crows than we have with AN. After all once you introduce Chalmers into it, maybe it would be easier to full us with something using language, or looking like us than a crow where we need to investigate in a more disinterested manner?

[bluehillside Retd.]

NS,

And yet, AB doesn't react the same, and while we might think this is some form of cognitive dissonance, maybe it is a cognitive difference. Maybe there is a different form of perception going on.

Maybe there is, but that’s all he has: “I have a different perception to you”. I have no idea whether or not AB’s conjectures about “God”, “soul” etc are valid. Assuming for now that he could ever tell us what he means by them in ways that aren’t incoherent (a big assumption) what I do know though is that when he tries to argue for them his reasoning is always hopeless.

That of course doesn’t mean that the conjectures at the end of the broken arguments are themselves necessarily false (a stuck clock being right twice a day and all that) but it does mean that he offers no reason for others to think him to be right. It also means that there’s no reason to treat his claims any differently from any other assertions of personal perception from anyone else about anything else.

Which rather buggers up his insistence on proselytising I’d say. 

[Nearly Sane]

NS,

Maybe there is, but that’s all he has: “I have a different perception to you”. I have no idea whether or not AB’s conjectures about “God”, “soul” etc are valid. Assuming for now that he could ever tell us what he means by them in ways that aren’t incoherent (a big assumption) what I do know though is that when he tries to argue for them his reasoning is always hopeless.

That of course doesn’t mean that the conjectures at the end of the broken arguments are themselves necessarily false (a stuck clock being right twice a day and all that) but it does mean that he offers no reason for others to think him to be right. It also means that there’s no reason to treat his claims any differently from any other assertions of personal perception from anyone else about anything else.

Which rather buggers up his insistence on proselytising I’d say.

This seems to miss the point. If we are perceiving differently then the communication will naturally be flawed if that perception isn't understood as being different. Further neither perception might be right, indeed there might be multiple perceptions, all wrong. I'm not suggesting that is a validation for his view but just that we automatically make an allowance that we perceive things in the same way, and that may be invalid.

[bluehillside Retd.]

NS,

This seems to miss the point. If we are perceiving differently then the communication will naturally be flawed if that perception isn't understood as being different. Further neither perception might be right, indeed there might be multiple perceptions, all wrong. I'm not suggesting that is a validation for his view but just that we automatically make an allowance that we perceive things in the same way, and that may be invalid.

Except in any other areas AB (presumably) wouldn’t accept the broken reasoning he attempts for “God”, “soul” etc. He wouldn’t as examples accept my contention that the Earth is flat if I could find lots of people who agreed with me, nor that leprechauns are real because if they weren’t no-one would be musical, and nor that Ra the Sun God exists because after I went for a nice sunbathe I won £10 on the lottery, yet these are the very same constructions in logic (the argumentum ad populum, the argumentum ad consequentiam and the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy respectively), plus various others he routinely deploys to argue for his “true for you too” god.

That’s the point. He can have any different perceptions he likes, but what he cannot do is to expect others to take those perceptions seriously when the very arguments he tries for them are ones he himself would reject in different contexts. This incidentally is the same point I’ve tried to explain to Vlad many times (albeit that it falls on deaf ears): a bad argument does not somehow become a good one because you happen to like what falls out of it.

AB’s response to the problem is to shout down the logic that undoes his thinking as “man-made”, which is curious for several reasons. If he’s certain he knows – really, really knows – about the supposed “big picture” because he “trusts” his “faith”, whey then bother with bad arguments for it? If he thinks his conjectures are logic apt then all he need do is to find the logic that supports him that isn’t broken, and if he doesn’t then why not abandon the effort entirely and stick with just proclaiming his assertions to be true come what may?

It’s the weird half-way house he occupies that’s doing him no favours I think.