- May 2nd, 2017, 8:10 pm
#288423
I do hope to read this topic cover to cover, I'd present an opinion but I still don't feel like I'm informed as well as I'd like to be.
What I might say is that I'm at a point right now where I'm curious about the arguments regarding downward causation vs. supervenience. The downward causation bit is interesting from the standpoint that consciousness seems to intuitively fit something like a turn-around point or the apex of an ark where information is passed upward from internal sensory input sending data up through the nervous system to higher and higher levels of aggregation until a thought reaches the threshold of conscious consideration. Conscious consideration seems like it's a process, a piece that handles the various strings of data deemed salient enough to arise together for the conscious agent to weigh against one another and have about the most informed opinion that the neurological apparatus of the brain can provide with respect to proportional problem solving. Unfortunately the calibration, as some people like Mark Blyth have noted, is great for personal survival but terrible with respect to attempts to soberly contemplate much larger scales, such as trillions of dollars and what they mean or a 100 kilometer ice sheet moving at 3 cm per year.
I did recently catch a pretty good lecture on Youtube by Michael Silberman where he criticizes panpsychism and strong emergence in favor of neutral monism and particular open-system ideas like ontic structural realism and his contextual emergence. Unfortunately I couldn't tell quite how well he understood the topic or didn't - he seemed to, however I've also listened to lectures from James Ladyman, Peter Tse, a few more whose names I can't remember, and I'm realizing how complex and subtle the argument gets even just staying in the on-reductive physicalist quarters. I'm liking the approaches that tend toward functionalism right now, if for no better reason than that the theorists in this area seem to be working their hardest to think outside the box and throw out as many philosophic commitments as they can for the sake of navigating the data from a fresh perspective.
A few things I remain interested in:
- Attempts to align the layers being referred to correctly and take apart the confusion in ways that I feel like I can be sure of. For example, with downward causation, people seem to be having problems with this idea based on commitments to supervenience however it sounds a lot less radical (unless I'm showing my ignorance here) to me just considering that consciousness straightens out the signals and sends them back downward in a more synchronized manner.
- Is dualism really dead? It seems like, from what I mentioned above, we have quite the nice closed loop where signals rise up the chain and can be sent back down. At the same time I don't know at this point (would like to) figure out what degrees of freedom would mean in any substantial sense with respect to decision making. While I haven't believed in libertine free will for close to a decade now (prior to that I had no commitment for or against) I do feel like my strong-determinist sense has softened a little, not to where I'd go back the other way but to where I understand that the feedback loops are complicated enough that our agency is almost never as dismally misinformed as to give in to a textbook illustrated example and it seems like when we do fall into pitfalls it usually involved having more high-stress processing rammed into our circuits than we can handle at once properly hence the more basal and survival-oriented mechanisms come online. I also think of a Sam Harris podcast I listened to recently where he was talking to David Chalmers about the philosophic zombie problem and Sam's wife had brought up a really good question - how could a zombie have the frame of reference to perseverate in questioning the meaning of its own self-awareness without having been informed in such a manner to do so by a self-conscious agent? It does seem like a lot of this is more generally falsifiable than we've given ourselves credit for
- As a person whose had quite a few, for the lack of better terminology to express such things, 'supernatural' experiences in my life - I'd really like to know, if these things aren't real, what it is that can make certain seemingly veridical perceptions or visitations from others seem so convincing. If our nervous systems are coughing this up it seems lightly important for us still to understand the context of this kind of data, the spirit in which the nervous system generates it, and where it's extrapolating its source material from. For example - touch at a distance working like sonar for things reportedly there but unseen (usually conscious agents themselves). Even for this to be a purely material phenomena the content of these experiences seems not to lend itself toward degraded thought but perhaps levels of conscious organization or perhaps 'peak experiences' of a variety we rarely tap into. At the more controversial end of that - if they are real, are they higher up a chain of hierarchical connections, much like we're the summations of our nervous systems, but something that finds its processing apex at a higher vantage point looking down at us? Some open-system philosophies, not necessarily even idealist ones but even considering some perspectives on neutral monism or functionalism don't necessarily rule that out - considering the absurdities given in for example in a lecture I heard where if we weren't closed systems it would mean that the country of China and its 1.6 billion people could share a group mind and that this mind could reach back downward and touch them. Memes and the zeitgeist complexes they can create are interesting but I do occasionally wonder if we should be checking into that direction before we miss it. For what PEAR, Dean Radin, and the random-number crunchers have been showing us we're not psychic, we're not bending spoons, but there's something of a seemingly weak but nevertheless organized wind of sorts blowing through our environments and perhaps touching us in ways that we wouldn't suspect as well as setting up many of the spontaneous currents of social conformity. To think of myself as a conscious node overlooking various subconscious components, each with varying degrees of neurological 'fame' as Dan Dennett put it, if we are subsets of a larger whole with subconscious chutes much larger than ourselves - the idea of deities even doesn't seem that strange, rather our history seems like a bumbling and often times obtuse effort to understand ourselves and our environments; the larger conduits that may perhaps organize us in that case weren't all that better informed than ourselves.
That last point I'd admit is pretty wild and open, and I'm not interested in defending it without having given the data and research its proper due, but that's part of why I'm doing a lot of the research that I am. I'm sure, no matter what's at the bottom of this, it's fascinating stuff and I think it's critical for the going concern of our race that we get to understand what makes us tick. For us not to understand ourselves is to see people killing in the name of bronze-aged books or, perhaps stranger still, rioting over the ideas of 19th and 20th century philosophers with the notions that either real utopia hasn't been tried yet or that they're fighting this horrific genocidal 'other' (which is quite likely to be a figment of their imaginations) and doubling down on that to the point where they're willing to maim police men and women in the process. If 2016 and 2017 are showing us anything, IMHO, it's just how difficult it is for us to dig ourselves out of our atavisms and how easy it is for us to shell ourselves off in bubbles and fall into Manichean tribal thinking of one type or another.
-- Updated May 2nd, 2017, 9:18 pm to add the following --
I just realized the orientation of my comment above to the rest of the thread could be confusing. Earlier on, especially in the first few pages, a lot of argument seemed to be going back and forth over mind, consciousness, etc. and its role in biology as well as to what degree it could be classed as a fully 'material' phenomena.
For abiogenesis which the thread seemed to steer more clearly toward later - I think my current outlook might be similar to what JamesofSeattle brought up earlier; that is the formation of RNA chains and their encasement in naturally occurring lipid spheres does seem promising. Again, I wouldn't claim to know what the whole story is and I'm sure we could, most likely will, spend hundreds of years or more fleshing out the details but I think that's on the right track at least.
Humbly watching Youtube in Universe 25. - Me
- By Fried Egg
- By Sanju Lali
- By Thrylix
- By Pattern-chaser