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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Here's my view of particle physics:
So you have this very fine intricate mechanical Swiss watch, but it is much too small to see ...
So you put it on an anvil in a cloud chamber...and smash it with a sledge hammer...and watch the paths of the pieces flying across the cloud chamber...
And then write papers about how the thing was originally constructed.
The alternative is to train your conscious mind to focus your attention at the scale of the watch....and examine how it is functioning....
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Perhaps Ed used to be Isaac Newton...
No insult intended above...and I'm no doubt underestimating what is being done at CERN
And at SLAC LCLS, where I was nearly hired as Operations Manager before DOE eliminated the position
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I cannot refute you claim of universal consciousnes, Tom, but I don't see it as necessary at all.
To my mind it is a cop out to understanding how consciousness arises from the "merely" physical.
I could be completely wrong, but you have not much more than assertion and ancient stories viewed by your own particular modern view point.
My lifelong commitment has been to understanding the universe as a physical entity. I will not live to see the answer, bringing to mind a favorite Newton quote:
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
I am not now, nor have I ever been Newton. I am Ed Hartouni for the briefest of moments in this universe.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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That's a good way to impress me, Ed and I do respect your point of view and please excuse me viewing you as immortal...
I am not impressed by those who claim to know, because we clearly don't know much about either the ocean or even the beach
It would be an honor to sometime discuss with you why I think as I do
...and there is a lot more to it than some ancient stories....practices that might be more recognizable to Largo or Jan or WB
Being in the now counts for a lot
As Einstein wrote shortly before his death in 1955,"For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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eeyonkee, thanks for the clarity. It seems you're deep in the thick of Systems Neuroscience and Cognitive Neuroscience for its insights into mind and "free will" and social responsibility. As far as the "free will" part goes, in the sense you have under focus, it seems to me all you need is physics, chemistry and biology (incl cellular bio) for the evidence to support your automata or "illusion of free will" conviction.
...
Suddenly way too much woo here.
For myself, I'm feeling no need to post-dialogue with any James Redfield (Celestine Prophecy) or Deepak Chopra (Quantum Healing) type. They are a dime a dozen times 100, imv, and time is short.
Positive vibrations and high-Q resonance to all!
...
PS
This caught my interest though...
"I do understand that our languages ... have been structured to reinforce a materialistic view of the universe."
If anything our languages (English, Arabic and Farsi in particular) have been structured over centuries to millenia to reinforce an extremely pre-scientific, superstitious, woo-addled (ghost-in-the-machine), bronze age view of how the world works (incl how we life forms work)...
"It is similarly wondrous yet not-so-laudable..."
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Ed: I don't see it as necessary at all.
You and Healyje both bring up the idea of necessity as a criterion for a conclusion.
What is it about the universe / reality that incurs necessity? This seems like philosophy to me. It seems to reflect an attitude or an ideological belief.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Not yo mama's, nor yo papa's, strobobscope
Optogenetics
Won't resolve anything under discussion here, but interesting nonetheless
Previously mentioned by BASE104
http://www.supertopo.com/forumsearch.php?v=0&cur=0&ftr1=&ftr2=optogenetics&ftr3=&ftr4=base104&scope=all
Light-responsive proteins are allowing scientists to turn neurons on or off selectively with unprecedented precision. Introducing these proteins into cultured cells or the brains of live animals allows investigation of the structure and function of neural networks. These ‘optogenetic’ tools also hold clinical promise, with the potential for modulating activity of brain circuits involved in neurological disorders or restoring vision loss.
You know promises, promises, premises
promises to revolutionize the study of how neurons operate singly and as members of larger networks, and could ultimately offer new hope for patients suffering from vision impairment or neurological disorders such as epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease.
I had this procedure done recently. Vitrectomy and epiretinal membrane peel. I was rendered unconscious by drugs, but I "woke up" and could see the scapel scraping away. When I told the doctor after, he replied "most people don't experience that".
I can see much bewtter now, approaching 20-20 but there is still healing to be done.
File under practical applications/implications of unconsciousness.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Does baseball exist? It’s nowhere to be found in the Standard Model of particle physics. -Sean Carroll
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/07/13/free-will-is-as-real-as-baseball/
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Likewise for free will. We can be perfectly orthodox materialists and yet believe in free will, if what we mean by that is that there is a level of description that is useful in certain contexts and that includes “autonomous agents with free will” as crucial ingredients. That’s the “variety of free will worth having,” as Daniel Dennett would put it.
Wow. Well I wish I would've discovered this blog post earlier. Then I could've just cited it, as it expresses my reconcilist view nicely.
"what we are faced with is the task of reconciling effective theories at different levels of description that have apparently incompatible features..."
Wow. Nice.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Recursive opinionization
-Jimmy Hoffa
Reputed to be his last utterance before he got the chop.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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"necessity" is a word used to illustrate features of an explanation and is certainly revealing a bias towards simplicity rather than complexity. It is a colloquialism that comes from the logic of mathematical proof, that some step is, e.g. "sufficient and necessary."
In that sense, you put all the pieces of your understanding on the table and ask "what is necessary and what is not" to achieve that understanding, the bias is clear, if you don't need some pieces then you can take them off the table. Taking things off the table provides you with less things to manage in achieving your understanding, an aesthetic that comes from practical experience solving problems.
Leaving the "universal consciousness" (UC) piece of of the puzzle of mind on the table requires that we consider many aspects of just how that works to connect the UC to something physical, like the brain which is a part of the central nervous system controlling in large part what the body does. How does it affect evolution? what part does it play at the molecular level? etc.
If the UC is not physical, how does it bridge to the physical? and is that bridge one way or two way? and what keeps the UC unphysical while it interacts with the physical?
If the UC is physical, then how would it actually work? and isn't it just a way of "kicking the can down the road" in terms of understanding. The physical constraints are significant and overwhelm most naive descriptions.
This is assuming you are interested in understanding something like mind, consciousness, etc... if you are not, then of course it seems silly to worry about "necessity," you can assume that the universe is the way it is, and that understanding it a grand mystery that cannot be acheived.
But viewed as a puzzle whose pieces are laid out on your dinning room table, you don't know what the assembled puzzle should look like, and what of the pieces you have are a part of the completed puzzle, and whether or not you have all the pieces. Obviously, as you start this particular puzzle, the things you imagine the puzzle to be greatly affects how you begin to put the pieces together.
And is often the case, once you've completed the puzzle, you might not have used any of the pieces you started out with; you might find it is not a puzzle at all.
If you replace universal consciousness with "meme" you will run into the same problems regarding physicality. At least for "meme" you have a physical representation of the information, and a way of calculating the physical aspects of the "meme" mediated interaction of agents. This extends to calculating the limits of those interactions too, and provides a set of constraints to the interactions.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 2, 2018 - 12:13pm PT
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Helaje, I think we are in agreement on more points than it seems. I do agree that complexity gives rise to the mechanical creation of content (memories, feelings, thoughts, feelings) and the brain basically dumptrunks this content at the threshold of awareness.
The entire point in linking you to that paper was the point that you apparently didn’t get, or didn’t accept: The fact that we are AWARE of any content, and have a conscious subjective experience, is in no known way – in fact in no way neuroscientists can even imagine – causally linked to information, processing speed, complexity, or to content itself. That is, there is nothing whatsoever to suggest that the process by which the brain generates content is a causal precursor to being aware of same, any more than the 1s and 0s, processing and speed of a computer is the sufficient causal run up to the machine being aware of what it is doing, or having a phenomenological existence.
Many simply do not believe this is true, though as mentioned, no neuroscientist can even imagine (a model) how the quantity, speed, location and mass/structure of anything might result in sentience. This had led to wonky default positions fumbling to posit awareness itself as information, the outcome of cross correlating information, the result of content looping back on itself (the feeling OF a feeling) , that awareness is a learned behavior, or most ridiculous of all, that awareness is an algorithm or a calculation – that is, the syntactic IS semantic.
I realized several years ago that unless a person made clear to themselves the difference between machine registration and processing, and their own aware, creative process, from a 3rd person perspective, both would look the much the same if not identical. Another error IMO is to conflate content with awareness. So long as this happens, in a kind of reverse alchemy, the gold of consciousness becomes the lead of objective functioning.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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If A, then B: A implies B: A⇒B: A is sufficient for B
A is necessary for B: If B, then A: B⇒A
A is both necessary and sufficient for B: A⇔B: A if and only if B
;>)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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there is nothing whatsoever to suggest that the process by which the brain generates content is a causal precursor to being aware of same
I don't think you should be speaking for neuroscientists or neuroscience.
Not until you have done more work looking into what you are talking about.
Activity recorded from two neurons. What is the difference?
taken from a paper by Goldberg and Fernandez
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Thanks, Ed.
I wasn’t concerned with “universal consciousness,” whatever that appears to folks to be. (Another “thing,” I imagine.)
DMT: Your idea that everything is complete and, whatever it is you say ;) To me it implies necessity.
It seems complete. I never said what it is. I just questioned anyone who says that there’s something amiss with reality. I’m not sure at all just what that might mean. It’s like the color red. “There’s something wrong with it.” What?!! I just don’t get it. It’s not that there’s a necessity; it’s that “wrongness” seems to be a misplaced or irrelevant modifier. “There’s something wrong with dirt.” !!! (Or such not.)
Ed,
It seems to me that if there is a necessity to anything, that necessity is predicated on knowing what an answer must be. Let’s take an object, let’s say, a tree. So we might have a definition of a tree, and from that we *require* that one of its attributes must be branches, or leaves, or photosynthesis. So, to require or necessitate something seems to put a cart before the horse, or a petitio principii. It seems to me that someone has smuggled in a conclusion that one is trying to prove.
Where am I going wrong?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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what is empirically known, MikeL?
you know trees before you know about trees...
then you start asking simple questions.
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WBraun
climber
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You don't even have a clue to what reality is, to begin with, and now you're stating necessity must be there for reality to be complete.
The gross materialists have no ultimate clue to reality.
They only have guessing incomplete theories that never ever end since they have no clue, to begin with.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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For reality to be complete, necessity must be satisfied, by definition, no?
Maybe reality isn't compelled to follow the rules of logic?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Maybe reality isn't compelled to follow the rules of logic?
maybe logic is a product of reality, just sayin'
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SuperTopo on the Web
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I believe at this point that it's a small leap from [brain] complexity to consciousness for the reasons I pointed out; you and yours think it infinitely large. 
Let us know!