| Topic: |
Science > Physics |
| User: |
"Rick Sobie" |
| Date: |
13 Nov 2003 08:51:03 PM |
| Object: |
Scientism and consciousness |
I just spent 30 minutes writing an article on consciousness
where I refuted Searle.
Not a refutation of his stand against computationslism.
But I merely pointed out that Searle is much a religious fanatic,
in his theories of consciousness as are those who attack him
with religious fervor, insisting tha the brain, is nothing
more than a computer.
Then Windows XP crashed and the message was lost.
Devolution is the result of this prejudice whereby scientisists
begin with what they believe, then set out to prove it
to be true, ignoring anything that stands in the way
of their foregone conclusions.
Windows XP is a devolved example of an operating system.
It may not crash as often, but it is not as functional
as previous versions, and it is full of problems that
were not there previously.
It is not getting better, it is getting worse. More difficult
to use, and more frustrating to use, and less and less serving
the actual purpose of the thing itself.
The argument that all it takes to know that consciousness
is a product of electro chemicals in the brain, is for
a person to drink a glass of Sctoch, Searles pundit
explanation as if only a true dunce would disagree
would that assertion, fails to take into account,
that when you get drunk, a dog, does not suddenly
become a tree, nor does red, suddenly become yellow,
nor does anything whatsover perceived to be a thing
while sober, suddenly appear to be something else
when drunk.
The ability of the senses to report input is impaired,
but only a dunce would equate sensory input with
consciousness.
With the same religious vigor, that he sees in those
who insist the brain is a computational device,
he defends his assertion, that consciousness has
nothing to do with duality.
Then he goes on to use duality when convenient to
make his point elsewhere.
This is not science. This is something else entirely.
This is wishful thinking, based on prejudice of what
the scientist does not like. And that dislike is anything
remotely spiritual or esoteric, or non mechanistic.
It would be laughable, if it wasn't so obscene.
I can only say to him, what I have said to many others,
stub your toe in a lucid dream Dr. Searle. and you will
see the light.
http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/searle.html
The Searle lecture series on consciousness is available
on Kazaa Lite.
-*-
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| User: "Rick Sobie" |
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| Title: Re: Scientism and consciousness |
13 Nov 2003 11:24:33 PM |
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Allow me to let you in on a little secret.
When a person suffers from Alzeimers, and their spouse comes
into the hospital room, teary eyed, the bedridden patient says,
"Who are you, do I know you?" They do not say, "What are you?"
Searle gave an example of a Dr. in Canada, who attached electrodes
to patients, and was able to move their arm, and even caused
them to vocalize. In each case the patient said that it was the
doctor causing the action, not themselves.
Searle believes that electro-chemical processes give rise to
consciousness.
This is the standard scientific viewpoint.
Chicken and egg.
With a complex echange of chemicals and electromagnetism, the brain
like some sort of neural net, computes data to the point where
it can relect on stored data quickly and solve problems,
understand, and percieve.
I think that people are aware of how computers work and they are
also aware of how data storage works. Yet Searle himself in the
same lecture, used an example of a painter (I think it was Monet:)
and he said Monet was born in 1906 - I think - but don't quote
me on that.
Well what is this then?
'Sort of' data retrieval? How does that work then? You _think it
was 1906?
Just like I _think it was Monet.
A computer doesn't substitute data by class of object. It
deals in facts. The only thoughts a computer has ever had,
are those put there by a thinking person.
But anything to do with the brain, the body, the actual manipulation
of the body, is done by the consciousness. As in the case above
where the patient moved its arm, it was the consciousness of the
doctor, moving the patients arm by using electrodes attached
to the patients brain. Stimulate the correct area of the brain,
and the motor reflexes will of course cause the body to work,
just like a hammer on the knee cap.
I think that the problem today is that consciousness has too wide a
definition.
Just as above the Alzeimers patient cannot recognize the person,
but does not ask what *is* a person, the function of
consciousness is not the same as the function of the brain.
Consciousness alone, is insufficient to be considered a
person. Without memory to draw on, you have nothing
but awareness.
You can have a lucid dream, and be for all intents and purposes
in another reality, but also when you awake, you remember
that reality and what you did there. Not always, but if
you are in a particluar level of sleep that is not too deep.
If you are in very deep sleep, you will not remember or you will
remember only faintly.
But the confusion today arises, when scientists try to lump
all the functions of the brain, into one thing, and call it
consciousness.
A part of consciousness exists outside the realm of the brain.
It is that part of the whole of the conscious universe that we are.
We are made of that same mind. Individuals in a larger consciousness.
Our bodies may be are own. And we work them and we work our brain,
more by instinct that by effort, but brain activity does not
give rise to awareness. All the evidence points the other way.
That our consciousness somehow uses the brain, to think.
Near death experiences and even people who have been declared
clinically dead, often recount experiences after death.
It is a touchy subject. One of the unsanctioned areas of
reality that scholastic people fear to delve into lest they be
seen as being too contravercial.
Isn't that so often the case?
Throw out all data that is too contravercial and relegate
it to the fringe.
What sort of basis is that for scientific investigation?
What you end up with is not the study of reality, but rather
the study of an elephants tail pretending to be an elephant.
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| User: "Immortalist" |
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| Title: Re: Scientism and consciousness |
14 Nov 2003 02:25:21 PM |
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"Rick Sobie" <rsobie@nospamtelus.net> wrote in message
news:lGZsb.385454$pl3.97184@pd7tw3no...
Chicken and egg.
Chickens make eggs and eggs make chickens.
Some egg layers evolved into chickens.
Some multi-cellular organisms began to lay eggs:
Fallacy of "The Prime Mammal"
There is always another alternative, which naturalistic philosophers should
look on with favor: a finite regress that peters out without marked
foundations or thresholds or essences. Here is an easily avoided paradox:
every mammal has a mammal for a mother--but this implies an infinite
genealogy of mammals, which cannot be the case. The solution is not to
search for an essence of mammalhood that would permit us in principle to
identify the Prime Mammal, but rather to tolerate a finite regress that
connects mammals to their non-mammalian ancestors by a sequence that can
only be partitioned arbitrarily. The reality of today's mammals is secure
without foundations.
http://pp.kpnet.fi/seirioa/cdenn/selfport.htm
"... every mammal has a mammal for a mother - but this implies an infinite
genealogy of mammals, which cannot be the case. The solution is not to
search for an essence of mammalhood that would permit us ... to identify the
Prime Mammal, but rather to tolerate a finite regress that connects mammals
to their nonmammalian ancestors ..."
Dennett believes that a solution to the problem of intentionality is
straightforward. To explain the intentionality of a system, we simply have
to decompose the system into many, slightly less intelligent, subsystems.
These subsystems can also be broken down into many more less intelligent
subsystems. We can continue to break up these larger systems until
eventually we find ourselves looking at individual neurons. The point is
that the intentionality that we seem to have has been derived from the
collective intentions of many smaller elements, which in turn derive their
intentionality from even smaller elements.
"We are descended from robots, and composed of robots, and all the
intentionality we enjoy is derived from the more fundamental intentionality
of these billions of crude intentional systems."
http://crash.ihug.co.nz/~bsilby/articles/silby015.html
With a complex echange of chemicals and electromagnetism, the brain
like some sort of neural net, computes data to the point where
it can relect on stored data quickly and solve problems,
understand, and percieve.
how data storage works.
Yet Searle himself in the
same lecture, used an example of a painter (I think it was Monet:)
and he said Monet was born in 1906 - I think - but don't quote
me on that.
'Sort of' data retrieval? How does that work then? You _think it
was 1906?
Just like I _think it was Monet.
A computer doesn't substitute data by class of object. It
deals in facts. The only thoughts a computer has ever had,
are those put there by a thinking person.
Neural nets use fuzzy characteristics to conclude those 4 curvy lines are a
face. "Sort of" category query.
But why be so impatient? Things are evolving and changing pretty fast, why
should we get to biological computers faster so we can say that they do what
you say?
But anything to do with the brain, the body, the actual manipulation
of the body, is done by the consciousness. As in the case above
where the patient moved its arm, it was the consciousness of the
doctor, moving the patients arm by using electrodes attached
to the patients brain. Stimulate the correct area of the brain,
and the motor reflexes will of course cause the body to work,
just like a hammer on the knee cap.
Same thing could be said about the Federal Government while local town
meetings are taking place. The Federal government is only aware of what it
is aware. It controls in a mediate fashion with each immediate or
intermediate layers wobbling the next it usually consist of as parts.
I think that the problem today is that consciousness has too wide a
definition.
I think consciousness should be legal. But the various viewpoints on
consciousness seem to have some other interest in need of support from the
putative framework. Can there be somewhat neutral researchers looking for
what is instead of what they want?
Just as above the Alzeimers patient cannot recognize the person,
but does not ask what *is* a person, the function of
consciousness is not the same as the function of the brain.
That various part of the brain can malfunction and ideosyncratic behavior
emerges for each type of damage/malfunction, doesn't necessarily say
anything about the parts still operating, except, they might be next for
disolving into computer gue or not. Or you could say that those parts of the
body-brain/world still operating lend credence to a notion, but the notion
needs some other supports to gain enough weight to infere that "this is what
consciousness is."
Consciousness alone, is insufficient to be considered a
person. Without memory to draw on, you have nothing
but awareness.
DNA is like a memory in structural form. A tornado has very short memory,
its last state of affairs and this to the next state of affairs, but it
comes into a state of affairs that could be constued and an reaction to the
external to the tornado events by how the last configuration changing to
this configuration altered to whatever degree the normal entropic decline
[dissipation] to a mere breeze.
The DNA is a contingency model. It initiates various possible responses by
what is present in the local environment. In the embry cells divide and
duplicate from 1 to about 10 trillion. Along the way the DNA steers by
navigation the resulting replicas into about 450 types of cells. If you take
out the cells contingency/memory but leave its ability to divide and double,
it would be like a germ or bacterium.
You can have a lucid dream, and be for all intents and purposes
in another reality, but also when you awake, you remember
that reality and what you did there. Not always, but if
you are in a particluar level of sleep that is not too deep.
If you are in very deep sleep, you will not remember or you will
remember only faintly.
4 to 6 times a night we swing from dreaming for 20 minute periods to hour
and a half periods of deep and vulnerable sleep with no dreams. While in
deep sleep mode no rapid eye movement is noted in animals that dream and
humans.
The idea is that when an typical dreaming mammal prepares to sleep he puts
his back against the safest place and faces the sensory knob [head] towards
the most likely direction of possible threats.
Out to sleep it goes, a deep sleep for over an hour. During that hour you
could noisely walk up and smash the animal in the head with a rock and it
wouldn't know.
If it is in REM dreaming mode your approach will enter into the dream. If
the pattern of noise sounds like past threats the dream picks up and if a
match is made with a bonafied threat in memory it bolts awake and sees the
monster in the dream before it and fights or runs.
Later on some organisms discovered another layer to add on to this process.
They used dreams to integrate long term memories with things experienced in
the last few days. The dream became a battleground between the old and the
new.
But the confusion today arises, when scientists try to lump
all the functions of the brain, into one thing, and call it
consciousness.
A part of consciousness exists outside the realm of the brain.
It is that part of the whole of the conscious universe that we are.
We are made of that same mind. Individuals in a larger consciousness.
Our bodies may be are own. And we work them and we work our brain,
more by instinct that by effort, but brain activity does not
give rise to awareness. All the evidence points the other way.
That our consciousness somehow uses the brain, to think.
What if elements of the brain interact to produce consciousness which
interacts to produce elements which produce consciousness, or an
interaction? Why does it have to wholism OR pluralism? How about wholism AND
pluralism.
Near death experiences and even people who have been declared
clinically dead, often recount experiences after death.
It is a touchy subject. One of the unsanctioned areas of
reality that scholastic people fear to delve into lest they be
seen as being too contravercial.
Isn't that so often the case?
Throw out all data that is too contravercial and relegate
it to the fringe.
What sort of basis is that for scientific investigation?
What you end up with is not the study of reality, but rather
the study of an elephants tail pretending to be an elephant.
If we had eyes on the back of our heads I guess we could see both ways at
once. But since we are in the world and see a particualar scale of
activities there and not others, why not stop whinning about it or calling
it science; its the human predicament isn't it? Science can't steel that
from this critter.
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| User: "ck26" |
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| Title: Re: Scientism and consciousness |
14 Nov 2003 09:51:13 AM |
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and he said Monet was born in 1906 - I think - but don't quote
me on that.
Monet was born in 1840. I'm just stating fact.
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| User: "Rick Sobie" |
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| Title: Re: Scientism and consciousness |
13 Nov 2003 11:59:59 PM |
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Here is the absolute farthest I can go on this subject
from a scientific viewpoint after 30 or so years of study...
We have no real control over our memory banks. Yet we need
them to preserve oour relationships. We need them to remember
the past. That goes without saying.
But our memories need to be stored somewhere if they are to
exist and be retrieved after for instance a person is reincarnated.
Books, can provide some clues, if a person knew who they were
in a past life. They might use that to store their memories.
But how would a person know where to look to find their memories
even if they wrote everything down in great detail?
Only by the assistance of others, could a person relearn or
remember anything of any previous existence they might have had.
Yet, there are some mysteries, such as deja vu, when a person
feels as if they have done this before.
This leads many people to believe that life repeats itself, which
is not so. The truth is that you may redo some portions, but
not after a long period lapses. Not without a greater
degree of devine intervention, but by design, existence is
not repetitive.
For one thing, in order to be considered repetitive, you would
have to remember everything, and since we cannot, then that
forces the definition of new.
But you might, remember a person, or see a vision of a person,
and remember them. You may not know from where, or how,
but you will pull memories from somewhere outside of your
own brain, and remember that individual.
Some memories may even come back with regards to that individual,
that are not in any way related to your present life.
So some memory exists, outside the brain, somehow, and you
can get those memories some times.
Then of course there are memories that may be passed on in
genetic encoding from parent to child. Perhaps memories
that are not so much to do with consciousness, but more to
do with the physicality fo the human body. Causing a
predisposition to certain things. Racial inclinitaions as well.
The body is just a vessel for the consciousness or spirit
of man. The essence of who you really are. Not in total,
though, because without your brain, your memories, and
etc, you are just a mere shadow of yourself. :)
But I do believe that, even without your body, you can be
a complete person, providing the conscious universe,
provides the necessary means, as a replacement for those
things which your body provides.
It happens in dreams, in particular lucid dreams, and it
happens in numerous other real cases as well.
There is a wealth of evidence for reincarnation, and a wealth of
evidence for life of the spirit.
I will leave you with this thought.
If consciousness, is a product of brain activity, visa vis
electrochemical processes, would not your consciousness
be interfered with, uynder the influence of electromagnetic
fields, or radio waves, or micro waves etc?
Of course it would.
A fish is a fish is a bicycle? Or a fish is a fish is a fish,
even when you are stoned on acid.
It may melt or wobble, but you will still say, "Hey look,
it wobbled, isn't that weird"
Consciousness is unaffected, but brain activity is.
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| User: "Uncle Al" |
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| Title: Re: Scientism and consciousness |
14 Nov 2003 10:39:53 AM |
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Rick Sobie wrote:
I just spent 30 minutes writing an article on consciousness
where I refuted Searle.
[snip]
Take ten years to write a better one, then get back to us.
Stooopid is as stooopid does.
--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" The Net!
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| User: "Ivo" |
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| Title: Re: Scientism and consciousness |
14 Nov 2003 02:24:08 AM |
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Rick Sobie wrote:
But I merely pointed out that Searle is much a religious fanatic,
Which is not a valid argument against his theories, but an ad hominem, and
therefore pretty useless to point out.
--
Ivo
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| User: "Stan R" |
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| Title: Re: Scientism and consciousness |
15 Nov 2003 04:19:15 AM |
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Rick Sobie wrote:
The argument that all it takes to know that consciousness
is a product of electro chemicals in the brain, is for
a person to drink a glass of Sctoch, Searles pundit
explanation as if only a true dunce would disagree
would that assertion, fails to take into account,
that when you get drunk, a dog, does not suddenly
become a tree, nor does red, suddenly become yellow,
nor does anything whatsover perceived to be a thing
while sober, suddenly appear to be something else
when drunk.
The ability of the senses to report input is impaired,
but only a dunce would equate sensory input with
consciousness.
Go drop some lysergic acid and get back to us on that.
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