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[Obvious Leo]

In the philosophy of the bloody obvious I extend the non-linear dynamic systems model all the way down to the most fundamental units of reality. I'll cover this in more detail later but essentially I make no distinction between living and non-living matter.

Ergo, you're advocating a materialist approach. Pure and simple. That is not an insult or an ad hominem, because it is not about 'Obvious Leo', but about this proposition. (I say that because people frequently react as if that is a a demeaning statement, but it is not meant as such.)

I don't particularly care for labels, which only have meaning for the people that use them, and I honestly don't care what you call me (within reason!), if it helps you to understand what I'm saying. However if you want to think of me as a materialist I need to just mention what I left unsaid in the above post. In my model the subatomic particles are not fundamental but are themselves emergent. This is a conclusion drawn directly from Einstein's mass/energy equivalence equation E=mc². We can therefore think of the subatomic particles as simply being emergent from the behaviour of yet more fundamental energy units, all of which do their thing at the speed of light. The emergent particles with mass can't move at this speed. However complexity theory is an information theory which allows me to simply equate these energy units with information units. You can get quite a good mental picture of this from John Conway or Benoit Mandelbrot, but the hard theoretical graft was done by Claude Shannon.

Therefore if you really felt the need to hang a label on me you might consider calling me an informationist. However I tend to think that the label which would probably fit me most accurately would be "contrarian".

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

Fair enough. I have encountered that kind of idea of information previously here and elsewhere. I am interested in oursuing that. But I think your model might rely to much on this 'emergence' idea - it's doing a lot of work here.

Consider the counter-proposition - that living and non-living matter are ontologically different. That is, there is a difference of kind that can't be accommodated with reference to purely physical models. That is different to emergence, because as Bohm2 says above, the difference between physical states is not the same kind of difference as the difference between any kind of physical object or substance, and the nature of experience which living organisms partake in. Experience - any kind of experience - has a quality of 'interiority' or self-awareness (no matter how primitive) which is not shared by non-living matter.

I will elaborate but am currently travelling and posting from an iPad.

[Obvious Leo]

Consider the counter-proposition - that living and non-living matter are ontologically different.

Absolutely right they are, and this is not a counter-proposition but an important piece of common ground which is central to my entire philosophy, and I do not exaggerate. In fact I go considerably further than this, on entirely biological grounds. I make a clear distinction between living and non-living matter on the pattern of organisation principle which I referred to, but complexity modelling disallows the notion of a line in the sand which we can draw and say this pattern is life and this pattern is not. Biologists are as bad as the rest of them when it comes to arguing over the meaning of words but I don't buy into it because common sense is good enough for me. If they want to chuck out prions or viruses or even bacteria I couldn't care less. This is completely missing the point and reductionist to boot. The patterns self-organise into more complex patterns over time by well-understood evolutionary mechanisms and that's all that matters. This is the central law of complexity that cannot be violated if the external environment is conducive to providing sufficient energy to THE OVERALL SYSTEM. This ontological distinction is significant but the next one is many orders of magnitude more significant and there's still one of even far greater significance after that. US.

The entire system evolves towards complexity and it is error to think of this in terms of its parts. That sentient mind should emerge from this is absolutely mandated by the model, once again on the proviso that the energy is available to allow continued evolution. This is not a linear progression by any means and in fact the biggest leaps in complexity follow near catastrophes like mass extinctions. Without these and plate tectonics mind might never evolve. Once again I don't fart around looking for a line in the sand where I can say this organism is sentient and that one isn't. Is an earthworm sentient? Not worth arguing about. Is a spider? Absolutely yes. Spiders display complex behaviours but most importantly they can learn from their mistakes , as long as they're not fatal ones, and this represents a completely different order of informational complexity, which requires a completely different ontological definition in complexity theory.

But wait, there's more, and this more explains the entire universe. Evolution towards informational complexity cannot stop and this is a mathematical law. The self-organising system just keeps on getting more complex. However on planet earth it HAS stopped. Our system is no longer self-organising. A single species has emerged which has seized the biological control of its entire planet and that, my friend, is the end of the self-organising Mandelbrot set and an entirely new ontological definition for homo sapiens. Intelligent designer.

I've left out an awful lot of stuff, but this is how the universe becomes self-causal and this is the how the Universal Turing Machine works.

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

From post on previous page:

essentially I make no distinction between living and non-living matter.

I objected to that on the grounds that it seemed materialist, and said:

Consider the counter-proposition - that living and non-living matter are ontologically different.

to which the reply was:

Absolutely right they are, and this is not a counter-proposition but an important piece of common ground which is central to my entire philosophy

But then:

I make a clear distinction between living and non-living matter on the pattern of organisation principle which I referred to, but complexity modelling disallows the notion of a line in the sand which we can draw and say this pattern is life and this pattern is not.

An ontological distinction means a difference in kind. So you're saying, the difference is one of degree of organisation. There is no 'line in the sand' which separates living and non-living; only different degrees of organisation; same stuff, organised differently. So it's not really a difference in kind, but in degree.

But you then say that in the case of spiders, they can behave adaptively, i.e. ‘learn from their mistakes¹’, so this represents a ‘different order of informational complexity’. So the question is, what gives rise to this leap? Is it simply a ‘brute fact’ of existence — that matter is such that, in certain circumstances and combinations, a reaction kicks in which gives rise to organic life forms? Because again, that seems very much like the standard neo-darwinist view, albeit refined through the lense of fractal geometry. But if the leap to a different level of organisation is not explainable in those terms, then what causes it?

——

1. Do arachnids, insects, and so on, actually learn? I would have thought the Darwinian attitude to that would be that the instinctive behavioural patterns that would gradually change over time on the basis of natural selection. Whether that really constitutes ‘learning’ is moot point; although I have actually read that bacteria can learn.

[Bohm2]

Experience - any kind of experience - has a quality of 'interiority' or self-awareness (no matter how primitive) which is not shared by non-living matter.

On this "instrinsicity" point, I found B. Russell's argument very persuasive. When one thinks about it, we know almost nothing about the 'interiority' of stuff that constitue our physics; that is, physics only reveals the causal/relational properties of physical objects never allowing us to know anything about their intrinsic nature. The one exception is our own brains (via introspection). An interesting suggestion, I've posted previously is the following one by Jussi Jylkkä':

It is indeed the case that mind cannot emerge from scientifically described extrinsic properties like mass, charge, and spin, but do we know that mind could not emerge from the intrinsic properties that underlie these scientifically observable properties? It might be argued that since we know absolutely nothing about the intrinsic nature of mass, charge, and spin, we simply cannot tell whether they could be something non-mental and still constitute mentality when organised properly. It might well be that mentality is like liquidity: the intrinsic nature of mass, charge and spin might not be mental itself, just like individual H2O-molecules are not liquid themselves, but could nevertheless constitute mentality when organised properly, just like H2O-molecules can constitute liquidity when organised properly (this would be a variation of neutral monism). In short, the problem is that we just do not know enough about the intrinsic nature of the fundamental level of reality that we could say almost anything about it.

So, if we are ignorant of a whole class of facts about “matter”, it shouldn't come as a surprise, that we can't solve the "hard" problem. These unknown facts about matter, in combination with the known ones, would necessitate the phenomenal facts. But because

(i) we are ignorant of them and

(ii) the facts of which we are not ignorant do not by themselves necessitate the phenomenal facts, the phenomenal facts seem unnecessitated by the physical facts.

Why are we ignorant of certain “physical” facts?

(i) as a natural, evolved system, there is no reason to expect the human intellect to understand all the facts about our universe or its physical makeup, let alone understand them especially at this time in our history

(ii) tremendous philosophical and empirical difficulties surrounding consciousness occur because of the ignorance hypothesis: physics can tell us only about the dispositional or relational properties of matter, but since dispositions ultimately require categorical properties as bases, and relations ultimately require intrinsic properties as relata, there must also be categorical or intrinsic properties about which physics is silent. Yet these are properties of physical objects and thus are physical properties in one central sense. Instantiations of such properties would therefore constitute physical facts of which we are ignorant, as per the ignorance hypothesis

(iii) intellectual and chemical facts (respectively) that were not necessitated by physical facts in the past turned out later to be frustrated by thitherto unknown physical facts (e.g. unification of chemistry with physics didn’t happen until the physics changed via quantum mechanics)

So phenomenal facts seem not necessitated by the physical facts even though they might be if we had access to the intrinsic properties hi-lited by our physics/science. Stoljar has argued that in the future when we go on to discover a previously unknown but otherwise quite ordinary set of physical facts when combined together with the familiar physical facts it would necessitate the phenomenal facts.


Ignorance and Imagination: The Epistemic Origin of the Problem of Consciousness
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25270-ignora...consciousness/

Review of D. Stoljar, Ignorance and Imagination
http://www.uriahkriegel.com/downloads/slugfest.pdf

But, if we really do need to know/understand the intrinsic properties of matter to truly understand qualia/the experiential and the intrinsic properties of matter are likely forever beyond scientific inquiry, then one can argue that the "hard" problem may be "chronic and incontrovertible".

[Obvious Leo]

I warned you that you wouldn't be able to get it, Q, and I refuse to argue details with you. Complexity is not Darwinist nor neo-Darwinist and you're trying to use reductionist methods to think it. This is why I took such pains to draw you out on my 2 simple premises. Bacteria "learn" as a dynamic system, not as individuals, or as species, as do social insects and many other higher species, including humans. In fact speciation is hardly pertinent in bacteria because reproduction plays only a minor role in their evolution, most of which comes about as a result of lateral gene transfer. I'm not going to be diverted into red herrings, however, and will only respond to such comment as is pertinent to my philosophy. Reductionist interpretation is not. If you can't see the whole picture you'll never see the parts properly.

physics only reveals the causal/relational properties of physical objects never allowing us to know anything about their intrinsic nature.

Russell was prescient with respect to the problem, but information theory was non-existent in his era. The intrinsic nature of anything at all is only revealed in its emergent pattern of organisation and such a pattern is meaningless outside of the mind of an observer. A chair is only a chair because we choose to call it so and no matter how much we dig down through the embedded layers of complexity the same thing applies. Atoms are only atoms because that's what we call them. They are not objects but an informational pattern produced by the behaviour of their constituents. The central thrust of this is that we can't speak of things in terms of what their constituent bits are but only in terms of what their constituent bits are doing. Systems theory is about dynamics and process.

Bohm2. Thank you for your interest and your contributions. At no stage did I intend to refer to the works of others in this thread because I'm a story-teller, not an academic presenting a learned paper for peer review. I'm grateful to you for doing so in such a pertinent way. However nothing of what I'm saying is original basic research because I'm a theorist who simply collates different ideas and then tries to put them together in a different way to reveal a different pattern. I assert that this is a very interesting pattern that I've come up with after forty years of work but this will always be for others to judge. Luckily I can prove it but I'm not going to spoil the ending.

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

This is why I took such pains to draw you out on my 2 simple premises.

Which are: the world is all there is? Nothing happens without a cause?

Good luck with that. I could say more, but I don't want to waste electrons.

-- Updated August 10th, 2014, 11:30 am to add the following --

Why are we ignorant of certain “physical” facts?

Note the scare quotes. Maybe it's because there are non-physical facts.

if we really do need to know/understand the intrinsic properties of matter to truly understand qualia/the experiential and the intrinsic properties of matter are likely forever beyond scientific inquiry, then one can argue that the "hard" problem may be "chronic and incontrovertible".

I appreciate how carefully thought-out all of those points are, but I can't help feeling that the effort is fundamentally misplaced, because it fails to understand what kind of question it is dealing with. The major problem is, that it is intrinsically not a scientific or objective question in the first place. This misunderstanding (as that is what it is) is a consequences of the demand for, and the dominance of, 'objectivity' as an attitude to life, as one consequence of 'Enlightenment' thinking. This has become more than an element of scientific methodology; rather it has become a way of being in the world, an orientation to the kinds of questions that can be asked and the way to go about answering them. Positivism is the most obvious or explicit manifestation of that attitude, but there many more or less positivist elements in practically all the scientific and analytical approaches in the academic mainstream. There are certain underlying assumptions and elements which effectively impose a particular kind of approach to the issue; question them at your peril. ¹

I think that whole approach has to be completely dissolved, but to do that requires a different mentality altogether. Not just a new definition of mind, but a new mind! It isn't simply a matter of adopting a different set of criteria or new definitions.

I think Heidegger and some of the various post-modernist and deconstructionist philosophers are onto that. Buddhist philosophy of mind is definitely on to it (about which, check out Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy Carl Olsen.) Perhaps another avenue of exploration might be through the Mind Life Institute, which is chaired by the Dalai Lama - this was co-founded by Francisco Varela, incidentally. Or you could attend the Science and Non-duality Conference where these kinds of questions are discussed in depth and detail (albeit with more than a dash of new-age hoopla and film-flam. But I'll be there this year ).

[Obvious Leo]

Niels Bohr’s paradigm for physics.

“It is not the physicists role to tell us what the universe is, but merely to determine what we can meaningfully say about its behaviour.”

Although nobody properly understood the significance of the point that Bohr was making it did give them a direction for physics. Instead of anguishing over the intrinsic nature of the entity they were studying they should stay in their own sandbox and play with their own toys. This was excellent advice and was reasonably well heeded for a generation or more. However, because physics was delivering such astonishing success in developing new technologies the new generation of physicists began to start making up ******** again because they assumed they were on a winner. This alone was bad enough but physics itself was no longer a unified science. It had split itself into a number of various specialist factions which focused on particular aspects of the problem in hand. Cosmology split further into many factions and the particle physicists came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. None of them took much notice of what the others were doing and they most certainly took no notice of what was happening in the other sciences, which were actually making some progress. The avalanche of ******** was unstoppable and no two stories matched each other. What chance would they ever have of explaining the universe to the dumb schmucks if they couldn’t even explain it to each other or even to themselves? The stories were changing in such a frenzy of epicycling that the entire science of physics became the laughing stock of the scientific world.

How could this happen to such a community of intelligent, well-educated, hard-working decent people genuinely dedicated to advancing the knowledge of humanity? It was a tragi-farce worthy of Voltaire and it happened because they forgot about what Niels had told them all those years ago. They couldn’t understand what they were actually doing even though they were doing as they had been advised by Bohr. After the Copenhagen interpretation, physics switched from being a science into something rather different. It became an exercise in model-building. They had the spacetime model given to them by Minkowski following the work of Einstein. Every prediction made by this model had been experimentally confirmed by measurement and observation, and there were no exceptions. Bohr had warned them not to draw any ontological conclusions from this but they couldn’t help themselves from falling into the trap that Kant had spoken of. Their cognition of their object was merely confirming their cognition of their object, which in psychology is known as a confirmation bias. In homespun philosophy it means we see what we want to see, or more precisely we see what we expect to see.

Model-building operates under the principle of “what works”. If it works it’s good physics and if it doesn’t work it’s bad physics. Just about everything they were doing was working, so in their minds they were doing good physics and building on their models. Indeed they were, and they built them into mathematical edifices of mind-boggling extravagance, but there were wise heads around throughout this period who kept on warning them to “just shut up and calculate”, as the catchphrase became known, but these wiser heads were drowned out in an orgy of self-congratulation at each new success. John Archibald Wheeler was the most prominent of these wise heads but he was not alone. Wheeler knew in his heart that model-building could only be as good as the model being built on and that therefore physics had morphed from a science into a branch of mathematics. By accepting a paradigm based on a mathematical interpretation of an observation they had turned their universe from a physical entity into a mathematical one from which they were drawing physical conclusions. Wheeler was one of the very few after Einstein who hadn’t forgotten that spacetime makes no sense because it invokes reverse causation. Spacetime requires that effects can precede their causes.

This bizarre conclusion was the result of a simple statement made by a very strange man called Werner Heisenberg. Werner was a very clever mathematician who was one of those blokes who my old man would have immediately recognised as of the type “all brains and no sense”. Luckily for the rest of us Hitler didn’t notice this and put him in charge of his atomic bomb project. The old man wouldn’t have done this and would have therefore won WWII if they’d put him in charge. Because of an easily deduced conclusion from the size of small objects relative to the wavelength of light, Heisenberg concluded that it is quite impossible in the case of such tiny entities to specify both the location of this entity and its momentum simultaneously. This became known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and it was immediately adopted by the priesthood as canonical doctrine, as it should have been. The entire sub-branch of physics known as Quantum Mechanics is founded on this principle, and a more fanciful collection of ******** is impossible to imagine. However when it comes to “what works,” QM wins the chocolates by the length of the straight, and is thus the supreme manifestation of the epicyclists art. Heisenberg was the unchallenged high priest of epicycling until Richard Feynman came along to wrench his title away from him. Feynman came to be known as ‘Tricky Dick” because so clever was he that hardly anybody had the faintest idea what he was banging on about. Tricky Dick could do “what works” better than any of them and so they were awestruck. Day after day their cognition of their objects was infallibly confirming their cognition of their objects. The Standard Model of Particle Physics was born.

Let’s go back to no-sense Werner and figure out what went wrong. For a start he was talking about mathematical entities called subatomic particles but that had nothing to with his cock-up. Examine his statement again. It is impossible to specify both the location and the momentum of a particle simultaneously. Although Werner was a German and not an Australian, we can’t allow him to offer this unfortunate accident of birth as an excuse for passing off a simple statement of the bloody obvious as one of profound wisdom. Werner, my friend, you can’t do that with a jumbo jet either, and it’s got nothing to do with either the size of the object or the wavelength of the light. It has to do with the definitions of location, momentum, and simultaneity. Make up your overworked mind what you want to know about the thing you’re looking at. The reason why we can’t specify both the location and momentum of an object simultaneously is because it can’t have both simultaneously. What the **** do you think momentum means?

The psychologists of cognition will be kept busy for a very long time trying to figure out exactly how such an obvious flaw could have escaped the notice of so many great minds for the best part of a century but to an ordinary bloke it’s actually not that difficult to understand. Spacetime is a mathematical entity founded on a flaw in simple human reasoning and thus it can only be understood mathematically and not physically. Although this is not the case now, for many years physics undergraduates were forbidden to take mathematical courses outside of those offered within their own discipline. In the interests of fairness I better say “strongly discouraged” rather than forbidden but what would you do if you were a young bloke looking to get on in life? We’ll teach you the maths you need to know, said the priests, because if you let those other buggers tamper with your thinking you’ll never be able to think spacetime through “correctly”. I know this might sound hard to believe but it’s true. Physics can only be understood in the mathematics of physics. This is the uber-reductionist mathematics of the original god of space and time, the author of “Principia Mathematica”, the physicists bible, a man of supreme genius as well as an unforgivable prick of a human being, a bloke by the name of Isaac Newton.

Neurons that fire together wire together, and the priesthood of physics made sure that the neurons of all their acolytes were fused into a single solid block of Newtonian reductionism and firing in harmony. Spacetime did not need to make physical sense as long as it made mathematical sense. Ptolemy wept tears of joy.

Regards Leo

[Bohm2]

Russell was prescient with respect to the problem, but information theory was non-existent in his era.

I have yet to come across anything remotely relevant in information theory that has any bearing on solving the "hard" problem. The most elaborate informational model is probably the model proposed by Giulio Tononi but it seems to lead to panpsychism, in my opinion, regardless of what the author claims:

Consciousness as Integrated Information: a Provisional Manifesto
http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.full.pdf

Moreover, information theory is silent on the question of why informational processing should be accompanied by "raw" feelings/phenomenology as pointed out by Searle:

...no reason has been given at all why there should be any special connection between information theory and consciousness. In his earlier views, Koch argued that consciousness is explained by synchronized neuron firings. Now he objects to that previous view. The objection is: Why should there be any connection between certain rates of neuron firings and consciousness? The same question arises with information theory: Why should information theory give us the essence of subjectivity? What is the connection supposed to be? My second objection is that the theory implies panpsychism, and pansychism is absurd for a reason I can explain briefly.

Consciousness comes in units. The qualitative state of drinking beer is different from finding the money in your wallet to pay for it. But a consequence of its subjectivity is its unity. So for example, I am conscious and you are conscious but each consciousness is separate from the other; they do not smear into each other like adjoining puddles of mud. Consciousness cannot be spread over the universe like a thin veneer of jam; there has to be a point where my consciousness ends and yours begins. For people who accept panpsychism, who attribute consciousness, as Koch does, to the iPhone, the question is: Why the iPhone? Why not each part of it? Each microprocessor? Why not each molecule? Why not the whole communication system of which the iPhone is a part? The problem with panpsychism is not that it is false; it does not get up to the level of being false. It is strictly speaking meaningless because no clear notion has been given to the claim. Consciousness comes in units and panpsychism cannot specify the units...

An example prominently discussed by Tononi will make this clear. He considers the case of a photodiode that turns on when the light is on and off when the light is off. So the photodiode contains two states and has minimal bits of information. Is the photodiode conscious? Tononi tells us, and Koch is committed to the same view, that yes, the photodiode is conscious. It has a minimal amount of consciousness, one bit to be exact. But now, what fact about it makes it conscious? Where does its subjectivity come from? Well, it contains the information that the light is either on or off. But the objection to that is: the information only exists relative to a conscious observer. The photodiode knows nothing about light being on or off, it just responds differentially to photon emissions. It is exactly like a mercury thermometer that expands or contracts in a way that we can use to measure the temperature in the room. The mercury in the glass knows nothing about temperature or anything else; it just expands or contracts in a way that we can use to gain information...

A favorite example in the literature is the rings in a tree stump. They contain information about the age of the tree. But what fact about them makes them information? The answer is that there is a correlation between the annual rings on the tree stump and the cycle of the seasons, and the different phases of the tree’s growth, and therefore we can use the rings to get information about the tree. The correlation is just a brute fact; it becomes information only when a conscious interpreter decides to treat the tree rings as information about the history of the tree. In short, you cannot explain consciousness by referring to observer-relative information, because the information in question requires consciousness. Information is only information relative to some consciousness that assigns the informational status.

Can Information Theory Explain Consciousness?
http://www.brophy.net/PivotX/?e=761&w=pattys-recipes

The central thrust of this is that we can't speak of things in terms of what their constituent bits are but only in terms of what their constituent bits are doing. Systems theory is about dynamics and process.

Okay, let's not speak of constituent bits. How does process/dynamics lead to phenomenology? As Chalmers has argued:

Here, I will present a simple argument that encapsulates some reasons for doubt.

(1) Third-person data are data about the objective structure and dynamics of physical systems.

(2) (Low-level) structure and dynamics explain only facts about (high-level) structure and dynamics.

(3) Explaining structure and dynamics does not suffice to explain the first-person data.

-----

(4) First-person data cannot be wholly explained in terms of third-person data.

Here, premise (1) captures something about the character of third-person data: it always concerns the dynamics of certain physical structures. Premise (2) says that explanations in terms of processes of this sort only explain further processes of that sort. There can be big differences between the processes, as when simple low-level structure and dynamics gives rise to highly complex high-level structure and dynamics (in complex systems theory, for example), but there is no escaping from the structural/dynamical circle. Premise (3) encapsulates the point, discussed above, that explaining structure and dynamics is only to explain objective functions, and that to explain objective functions does not suffice to explain the first-person data about subjective experience. From these three premises, the conclusion follows.

How Can We Construct a Science of Consciousness?
http://consc.net/papers/scicon.html

As I see it, we've made almost zero progress on the "hard" problem in over 2000 years and I don't think this is for lack of trying. Perhaps, the problem lies at the gate, as some argue:

Introspection is our only channel to the properties of consciousness, but it does not afford us any access to the properties of the brain. Sensory perception is our only channel to the properties of the brain, but it does not afford us any access to the properties of consciousness. There is no third channel that affords us access to both consciousness and the brain. Therefore, our concept-producing mechanisms cannot in principle produce a concept for the connection between consciousness and the brain. Consequently, our knowledge of consciousness and our knowledge of the brain are doomed to be insulated from one another. More specifically, we can have no knowledge of the manner by which the brain produces or yields consciousness. The connection between the two is necessarily opaque to us. Therefore, we cannot possibly grasp the solution to the problem of consciousness.

Mysterianism
http://uriahkriegel.com/downloads/frankthetank.pdf

So, as others have argued, naturalizing consciousness is akin to a camera trying to take a picture of itself; the best it can capture are reflections.

[Obvious Leo]

As I see it, we've made almost zero progress on the "hard" problem in over 2000 years and I don't think this is for lack of trying.

Another 2 million won't help either, mate. The question has no meaning.

-- Updated August 10th, 2014, 5:07 pm to add the following --

Why do I have my consciousness instead of yours? Why is human consciousness different from that of an aardvark? I find it more fascinating watching my grass grow than bothering with such things.

[Quotidian]

Maybe it's a bit too deep a question. There's a lot of people who don't get it all. Daniel Dennett doesn't.

-- Updated August 10th, 2014, 6:55 pm to add the following --

Therefore, our concept-producing mechanisms cannot in principle produce a concept for the connection between consciousness and the brain.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanisad, which is an ancient Indian scriptural~philosophical text - I think contemporaneous with the pre-Socratic philosophers - has this to say about the 'reflexiveness problem':

Yājñavalkya says: "You tell me that I have to point out the Self as if it is a cow or a horse. Not possible! It is not an object like a horse or a cow. I cannot say, 'here is the ātman; here is the Self'. It is not possible because you cannot see the seer of seeing. The seer can see that which is other than the Seer, or the act of seeing. An object outside the seer can be beheld by the seer. How can the seer see himself? How is it possible? You cannot see the seer of seeing. You cannot hear the hearer of hearing. You cannot think the Thinker of thinking. You cannot understand the Understander of understanding. That is the ātman."¹

[Obvious Leo]

Maybe it's a bit too deep a question. There's a lot of people who don't get it all. Daniel Dennett doesn't.

Actually, Q, this is a very good point. Very few people see this as a question at all. I've been around science and philosophy forums for a long time time and this is a perennial favourite. It seems to catch the interest of a small few but the great majority seem to regard it as a waste of time. Why ask a question to which there can be no answer, even in principle, is the view of the majority. I know of no evolutionary biologists who would regard the "hard problem" as a meaningful question, just as they don't regard the emergence of life from non-life as a meaningful question. This is simply how self-organising systems work. There have been plenty of self-proclaimed mystics over the years who can find mysteries where no mysteries exist and I suspect this is what you mean by "too deep".

Since you defend a minority position on a question of interest to few others you might do better just to invent your own explanation because the tools of philosophy and science will be of no assistance to you.

However I have a question for you at a slight tangent but not unrelated. Is a newborn infant conscious?

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

Well, if a baby was delivered and didn't cry and writhe about and suckle, it would be unconscious, wouldn't it? Whereas the normal newborn does all those things, which require them to be conscious in some sense. But of course a newborn is not self-aware, it is not at all conscious in the sense that at adult is. But that is also something unique to humans. Newborn deer and horses are able to run immediately - penalties would be severe for not doing that - and newborn monkeys are able to cling to their mother - ditto. But humans have an enormous amount of extra-somatic info that has to be absorbed, which is one reason that they are utterly dependent on mother for such a long time, compared to other species.

[Evolutionary Biologists] don't regard the emergence of life from non-life as a meaningful question

Again, they don't understand it. They simply assume that it's a non-problem, or has been solved in principle, or will be. That is why that reactionary, backwards, anti-science ideologue, Thomas Nagel, takes them to task in his biased diatribes.

you might do better just to invent your own explanation because the tools of philosophy and science will be of no assistance to you.

Hey that reminds me of a joke:

Q. What do you call a Greek skydiver.

A: Con Descending

[Belinda]

Quotidian quoted:

Yājñavalkya says: "You tell me that I have to point out the Self as if it is a cow or a horse. Not possible! It is not an object like a horse or a cow. I cannot say, 'here is the ātman; here is the Self'. It is not possible because you cannot see the seer of seeing. The seer can see that which is other than the Seer, or the act of seeing. An object outside the seer can be beheld by the seer. How can the seer see himself? How is it possible? You cannot see the seer of seeing. You cannot hear the hearer of hearing. You cannot think the Thinker of thinking. You cannot understand the Understander of understanding. That is the ātman."1

St. Augustine said that the human is a bottomless pit : existentialists say that although we go along with the given facts of our various lives we invent ourselves because we have to. By contrast a horse or a cow is a phenomenon that may or may not stand out as an item of consciousness. Horses and cows as objects of consciousness are mind-dependent, but an individual cow for herself is her self inasmuch as she invents herself and feels qualia. Many humans are herd animals, but not to turn aside to discuss the merits of authenticity.

What St. Augustine said was almost certainly under the roof of God who allows the human to be a bottomless pit. Whether or not there be God the Controller, or simply nature, St Augustine's view of the human(minus the pejorative of course) has helped me to understand the difference between subject and object, between mind and extended brain .

[Obvious Leo]

Nagel is hardly a dispassionate commentator on matters of science but your language is your own.

Clearly you make a distinction between consciousness and self-awareness, as do I, so it might be wise for us to make sure we're both talking about the same thing. Does the hard problem refer to both or simply to self-awareness, in your opinion? I've seen this argument so many times that there appears to be no consensus.

Belinda. I reckon Augustine was possibly the greatest of the early Christian philosophers, closely followed by Bede. Of course these guys were able to pursue their studies without the stultifying constraints imposed by the papal bureaucracy on later scholars.

we invent ourselves because we have to.

This is so self-evident a statement that bloody obvious springs to mind. Who else could invent our own minds?

Regards Leo