Karma

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sriram,

You are still not getting the point....  Let me try one last time....

Actually you're not, as your latest litany of mistakes shows. We can short cut this though: do you think the stork conjecture "conflicts with" the science of midwifery?

If you don't, in the absence of any evidence for them we can treat your "spirit", "karma" etc conjectures as epistemically equivalent to the stork conjecture.

If you do, then you need to provide a method to distinguish your conjectures from just guessing such that they better explain the observed phenomena than science does. 

Your choice.   

[Alan Burns]

AB,

That's currently true, but probably wouldn't be if we had a computer complex enough to do the job. The human brain is essentially a meat computer - only a fantastically complex one.

Just trying to enlarge on what is human perception.  Can knowledge be defined in absolute scientific terms without referring to human perception?  No matter how complex or fast the neuron activity in our brain is, it remains just a pattern of chemical activity.  It still requires something to perceive and interpret it to turn it into what we define as knowledge.  Within the physical brain architecture there is nothing which can be defined as a single entity of awareness which is needed to translate brain activity into knowledge.  Brain activity can certainly be translated into action, as Torridon keeps showing us with examples of Gazelles and Lions etc.  But physical reaction to sensory data does not prove perception - it is just evidence of programmed activity defined by instinct and learnt experience which can be easily replicated with computer software.

Knowledge is not defined by physical reaction or ultra fast neuron activity.  The neuron patterns of activity may well represent what we interpret to be knowledge, just as the patterns of ink on a piece of paper can represent the meaning of a word.  But both knowledge and meaning are properties derived from the single entity of awareness which resides in every human being.

We humans do not need activity to demonstrate our awareness.  As the Psalmist says, "Be still, and know that I am God" - Psalm 46 verse 10

[Gordon]

But both knowledge and meaning are properties derived from the single entity of awareness which resides in every human being.

More specifically, contained within the skull.

[SusanDoris]

Posted in wrong thread I think...
No- I realise this is next page, so lucky I copied my first effort.

http://sebpearce.com/bullshit/

Started to listen; thought , did I not notice that this is N/S as poster?; carried on listening; wondered if you had fallen and banged your head or something; arrived at the link ...:D I haven't looked at it yet.

[torridon]

But physical reaction to sensory data does not prove perception - it is just evidence of programmed activity defined by instinct and learnt experience which can be easily replicated with computer software.

Observed physical reaction does not prove perception, granted, but then science is not about proof, it is about evidence, and the evidence strongly suggests that animals have cognitive perception and experience emotions just like humans.  No animal is insentient; the fact that human mothers love their offspring for instance derives directly from the prehuman ancestors love of their offspring. We share at least six or seven basic emotions with all other mammals, and some also with fish - we now know that a haddock feels sadness and joy and we have established this not just through external observation and inference but through testing their cortisone levels in response to controlled stimuli.  These functions are all hundreds of millions of years old massively predating the evolution of homo sapiens and there is no reason to suppose that near identical limbic systems in other creatures are not producing a similar internal emotional experience for them.  Like Sriram, you are just using lack of total proof as an excuse to ignore the evidence.

[Sebastian Toe]

learnt experience

What is that exactly and how is it achieved?

[Walter]

NS re #399

you are a naughty boy!

[Jack Knave]

Most examples of emergence are not conscious, but it would seem that consciousness is one such.  Perhaps it is the flagship, the ultimate acheivement of the principle of emergence.  I've got lots and lots of brain cells in my head and not a single one of them is intelligent.  Somehow intelligence emerges out of their interaction.

Just saying stuff doesn't make it so (that's something the theists do), and you do say 'seems' which is a type of act of faith. And again you have no direct way of judging that your intelligence (an undefined term) is associated with an emergence from the collective actions of your neurons.

[Walter]

is there anybody on here actually qualified to talk about this stuff or am I to continue to be disappointed with half truths , fantasy, and bullshit?
no offence...

[wigginhall]

Just saying stuff doesn't make it so (that's something the theists do), and you do say 'seems' which is a type of act of faith. And again you have no direct way of judging that your intelligence (an undefined term) is associated with an emergence from the collective actions of your neurons.

Not sure what you mean by 'direct'.   The brain has been studied now for a century at least, and we know that brain damage, whether caused by injury or disease, can have devastating consequences for various cognitive functions.  For example, I know someone who woke up one morning not knowing who she was.  I suppose you might argue that that is not intelligence, but if you sit with some people with dementia, there seems little doubt that some of their mental faculties are impaired.   I suppose you could still argue that there is 'something else' which determines cognition and intelligence, such as the soul, but we are still waiting for a research project into that.

Studies of children also seem to show that the maturing brain leads to developments in cognition, for example, language ability, perceptual skills, conceptual resources, and so on.  Again, you could argue that it's not the brain wot done it, I guess. 

[Jack Knave]

We need to think outside the box somewhat. Does Stonehenge exist ?  Well clearly yes, we can identify it's coordinates in spacetime, something of its mass, its constitution.  Does Mahler's Second Symphony exist ?  How much does it weigh, what is its temperature or its speed ? We can't put a finger on any of the traditional properties of existence for the Mahler 2 yet I am sure it exists, I have heard it many times, got recordings of it and have the score for it also.  It exists in a sense, and that sense is in information terms; it is an information product, and to understand the subtleties of mental experience that seem to have no mass we have to think of mental experience as information flow across and through a brain. Conscious experience is what information feels like if you could touch it.

That hasn't helped. Just sounds like vague wafflings. As for the last sentence, this is not what consciousness is, it is not the process of thinking or information or whatever it is more like the awareness of thinking. Not only do I think but I'm aware of myself thinking i.e. in a sense I'm outside the process that you call 'information flow', observing it in a subject-object relationship.

And although there is a compelling feeling of a being 'inside' us giving rise to an intuition of dualism, that feeling of agency and personhood is itself a complex product of subliminal processes of consciousness according to neuroscience.  We know of this too from psychiatry - patients suffering from a breakdown of this process have a condition known as Cotard's syndrome, and they (quite wrongly) believe themselves to be dead, a most peculiar state of affairs,  These people are in effect real life philosophical zombies.  The mind is a focus of subjectivity and the sense of there being a 'person inside' arises from the brain's procurement, enrichment and synchronisation of that subjectivity.

You talk as though these are plain facts, no may be's or perhaps....?

"...subliminal processes of consciousness..." - Now that's a telling phrase that points to your error.

"...the sense of there being a 'person inside' arises from the brain's procurement, enrichment and synchronisation of that subjectivity." -  Which implies that that subjectivity is a separate entity and product from the brain : another telling phrase. If this subjectivity is a product of the brain how does it manufacture it?

[Udayana]

is there anybody on here actually qualified to talk about this stuff or am I to continue to be disappointed with half truths , fantasy, and bullshit?
no offence...

What stuff? Karma? Consciousness? Do you have a specific question?

[wigginhall]

Again, in relation to subjectivity, a key area of research concerns children, whose sense of self seems to require loving (and safe) contact with other people from their birth, so that the brain is stimulated in the right way.   Well, you could argue that the brain is not involved here, so I wonder what else is?  A baby soul, I suppose.

[Jack Knave]

JK,

The average human brain has about 100 billion neurons (or nerve cells) and many more neuroglia (or glial cells). Each neuron may be connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, passing signals to each other via as many as 1,000 trillion synaptic connections, estimated to be equivalent to a computer with a 1 trillion bit per second processor.

Why does it overstretch your credulity so much that from such astonishing complexity consciousness emerges?

That's like saying a trillion stupid people would be as intelligent as an Einstein. Numbers don't matter it is 'content' or quality.

[torridon]

Just saying stuff doesn't make it so (that's something the theists do), and you do say 'seems' which is a type of act of faith. And again you have no direct way of judging that your intelligence (an undefined term) is associated with an emergence from the collective actions of your neurons.

Granted 'emergence' is high level a concept term, and there will be detail lower level mechanisms that can be described of how it arises.  For instance we describe wetness or fluidity as an emergent property of when you have many molecules of H2O together and we can describe in detail the mechanisms at the molecular level that give rise to the emergent property at the higher level.  That is a fairly simple one. No ant is intelligent but ant colony makes decisions that have an intelligence that emerges from the combined interactions of many ants. We are justified in using the concept of emergence to study intelligence in brains not least because of the striking parallels of similar if less sophisticated examples of emergence thougout nature. It is not an unwarranted assumption out of the blue, it is the best way to model such processes.  At Bristol and other places, they are using specifically live ant colonies to study decision making in a brain, in which individual ants stand as an analogue for individual neurons.

[torridon]

"...subliminal processes of consciousness..." - Now that's a telling phrase that points to your error.

eh ?

I don't see anything controversial in that.  The vast majority of the processes of consciousness are subliminal.  The conscious experience, by contrast, is a contrived retrospective phenomenon which results from largely subliminal preconscious processes.

[Alan Burns]

we now know that a haddock feels sadness and joy and we have established this not just through external observation and inference but through testing their cortisone levels in response to controlled stimuli. 

Surely there is a big unproven assumption here in that cortisone levels in a haddock correspond with sadness and joy as experienced by humans.  Cortisone levels in humans may well correlate with feelings of sadness and joy, but I put it to you that there could be more to these human emotions than mere chemicals in the brain.

Just going back to perception - is there any evidence of animals just pausing to appreciate the beauty of a sunset, or any other of nature's wonders?

[Alan Burns]

What is that exactly and how is it achieved?

Learnt experience in animals is a similar concept to the way chess playing computer software is designed not to make the same mistake twice.

[wigginhall]

Interesting stuff in relation to feelings and emotions, and how these correlate with changes in the brain.  This research stems from new developments in scanning, so that in vivo neuroimaging can be used, while people are actually doing something, e.g. looking at pictures or whatever.

http://mediarelations.cornell.edu/2014/07/09/study-cracks-how-the-brain-processes-emotions/

[bluehillside Retd.]

JK,

That's like saying a trillion stupid people would be as intelligent as an Einstein. Numbers don't matter it is 'content' or quality.

No it isn't. A million stupid ants will make a colony, will cut leaves to farm a fungus for food, will create cemeteries for their dead etc. No single ant can envisage or plan these things though. Numbers matter a lot, and the "content" is what emerges with no design whatever from the constituent parts that produce it. Have a look at the Steven Johnson book I've referred to a couple of times here to understand it better. 

[Sriram]

Observed physical reaction does not prove perception, granted, but then science is not about proof, it is about evidence, and the evidence strongly suggests that animals have cognitive perception and experience emotions just like humans.  No animal is insentient; the fact that human mothers love their offspring for instance derives directly from the prehuman ancestors love of their offspring. We share at least six or seven basic emotions with all other mammals, and some also with fish - we now know that a haddock feels sadness and joy and we have established this not just through external observation and inference but through testing their cortisone levels in response to controlled stimuli.  These functions are all hundreds of millions of years old massively predating the evolution of homo sapiens and there is no reason to suppose that near identical limbic systems in other creatures are not producing a similar internal emotional experience for them.  Like Sriram, you are just using lack of total proof as an excuse to ignore the evidence.

You are mistaking mechanisms for causes. If a car accelerates, you can explain it as petrol pouring into the engine and pistons moving faster etc. That is the mechanism. Or you can say that the person driving the car wants to go faster. That is the cause.

[bluehillside Retd.]

Sririam,

You are mistaking mechanisms for causes. If a car accelerates, you can explain it as petrol pouring into the engine and pistons moving faster etc. That is the mechanism. Or you can say that the person driving the car wants to go faster. That is the cause.

And both car and driver are material phenomena that happen to interact. So what? 

[Nearly Sane]

Learnt experience in animals is a similar concept to the way chess playing computer software is designed not to make the same mistake twice.

assertatron alert!

[Udayana]

Interesting stuff in relation to feelings and emotions, and how these correlate with changes in the brain.  This research stems from new developments in scanning, so that in vivo neuroimaging can be used, while people are actually doing something, e.g. looking at pictures or whatever.

http://mediarelations.cornell.edu/2014/07/09/study-cracks-how-the-brain-processes-emotions/

See also: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.4450.html

"These results reveal the existence of a common spatial organization for memories in high-level cortical areas, where encoded information is largely abstracted beyond sensory constraints, and that neural patterns during perception are altered systematically across people into shared memory representations for real-life events."

[wigginhall]

See also: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.4450.html

"These results reveal the existence of a common spatial organization for memories in high-level cortical areas, where encoded information is largely abstracted beyond sensory constraints, and that neural patterns during perception are altered systematically across people into shared memory representations for real-life events."

Very interesting.  The stuff on emotions seems to show that although obviously we have individual experiences of them, there is a 'standard code' which is shared across people.   I don't fully understand all this, but I would have thought that experiences of beauty and the like might be involved here.   It amazes me, when this exciting kind of research is going on, that people are still bleating on about the soul and other undiscoverable stuff. 

I also wonder if mirroring is involved here, i.e. that we share emotions and feelings, and experience empathy.