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How is consciousness even possible?
materialism implies it cannot exist

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How is consciousness even possible?

Simple Occam
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Posted 07/07/08 - 01:39 PM:	#251
An emergent cause is really no 'cause' at all because there is no cause-effect relationship such that whenever X occurs, so does Y. Science uses laws of nature to explain and predict what we observe. That does not mean that it promises to predict every event that occurs or will occur, as in the exact time and place a hurricane will make landfall. But they get pretty close and the margin of error is due to the complexity of the interactions, not some error in the laws of nature. You don't really want to say that the storm 'emerges' from the ocean; rather it is caused by the fully explainable and predictable fact that hot air rises, so the warming of the oceans in the summer increases this flow of air, fueling hurricanes. There's no emergence in that explanation of a hurricane at all, even though we can't always crunch all the numbers to come up with a landfall prediction that's exactly correct. Hurricanes and other weather events are hard to predict but still not emergent properties in the sense of being irreducible to the basic laws of physics. However, even the second law of thermodynamics (the entropy law) itself is not reducible to the laws of motion and electromagnetism. This is because it holds only in a spatiotemporal context and is not reversable in time as those other laws are. So it is not reducible to the basic laws of physics and, thus, appears to be an emergent law of nature. The same is true of the 'law' of natural selection. So both of these 'laws' describe regularites about nature that are not reducible to more basic laws. This is fine as long as you are willing to give up the causal completeness of physics. But if you want to believe that everything we see on the 'macro' level (our bodies, trees, mountains, this chair im sitting in, the cat on the mat, etc.) is composed ONLY of those basic particles (atoms and their component parts), then physics must not know EVERYTHING about the basics or else things like entropy, evolution, even consciousness could be explained reductively by that COMPLETE causal explanation that we seem to be missing. The reason I reject emergentism is that, if it's true, science will always be causally incomplete and, even worse, we have to deny, ontologically, that we are made up only of atoms (and their components). Emergentism is a form of intractable ontological dualism that cannot explain how whole structures take on characteristics of the whole that are distinct from the characteristics of the separated parts. I understand that some people's 'playbooks' allow for emergent properties as phenomena of complexity or reduce them to statistical laws. In my playbook, though, neither attempt to account for these phenomena does so in a way that addresses the serious ontological problem underlying emergentism that results from the regularities that are not explained by the basic laws of the things that they are made of.

lemmingsoup
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Posted 07/24/08 - 12:08 PM:	#252
I have been thinking about the concept of consciousness a great deal recently. The longer I consider it the less plausible the concept seems and it is now my opinion that consciousness is a useless concept. Within a universe in which events are subject to cause and effect the eventual state of any system, including that of a 'conscious' entity, is dependent only upon the state in which it began and the period of time that has elapsed. To suggest that the system 'decides' what resultant state to assume is meaningless. Equally in a universe ruled partially or entirely by random chance (the only alternative to cause and effect that has occurred to me - i'll go back to the drawing board should I have ignored a possibility) the eventual state of a system is subject to only to random chance. Even if one chooses to describe the random event as a 'decision' it is ludicrous to suggest that that 'decision' was made by the system the state of which it dictates, it is nothing but a random event beyond the control of the system and any (irrelevant) conscious entities within it. In both of these possible scenarios (regardless of the nature of the mind, material or otherwise) the mind can only act in the manner of any other part of the system, subject either solely to cause and effect or to a degree of random chance. Is mere complexity enough to render the human mind (or any other mind deemed suitably complex) 'conscious'? And if so are all things this complex to be considered complex? If not, on what grounds does one determine what can and cannot be considered conscious? It seems to me that by far the most simple answer is that 'consciousness' as people perceive it is the result of the complexity of the mind and that is is a fundamentally useless concept. We are no more 'conscious' than a rock, merely more interestingly arranged.

Makarismos
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Posted 07/24/08 - 01:14 PM:	#253
lemmingsoup wrote: ...Within a universe in which events are subject to cause and effect the eventual state of any system, including that of a 'conscious' entity, is dependent only upon the state in which it began ... ...in a universe ruled partially or entirely by random chance ...the eventual state of a system is subject to only to random chance. Even if one chooses to describe the random event as a 'decision' it is ludicrous to suggest that that 'decision' was made by the system the state of which it dictates, ... In both of these possible scenarios (regardless of the nature of the mind, material or otherwise) the mind can only act in the manner of any other part of the system, subject either solely to cause and effect or to a degree of random chance. ... I like your reasoning. Too often people argue against a possibility based upon its impossibility, forgetting to support the alternative they suggest. To put your statement in to terms of mutual exclusivity: the universe is either entirely deterministic, or else partly undetermined (the other choice is entirely chaotic, but this does not compare with the universe we see). This set of options does exhaust the logical possibilities... lemmingsoup wrote: It seems to me that by far the most simple answer is that 'consciousness' as people perceive it is the result of the complexity of the mind and that is is a fundamentally useless concept. We are no more 'conscious' than a rock, merely more interestingly arranged. What do you want from "consciousness"? It seems to me that you have proved that we cannot logically have what I would call "free will", and merely be a complex machine, determined by its inputs. This might seem rather mundane compared to the ideas suggested by the words "consciousness" or "free will": however it really is quite a wonderful machine, with almost infinite inputs, living in a world which cannot be predicted. Perhaps if we accept that we cannot have what is impossible, we will see what we have for what it actually is: awesome.

lemmingsoup
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Posted 07/25/08 - 02:24 AM:	#254
Makarismos wrote: What do you want from "consciousness"? It seems to me that you have proved that we cannot logically have what I would call "free will", and merely be a complex machine, determined by its inputs. This might seem rather mundane compared to the ideas suggested by the words "consciousness" or "free will": however it really is quite a wonderful machine, with almost infinite inputs, living in a world which cannot be predicted. Perhaps if we accept that we cannot have what is impossible, we will see what we have for what it actually is: awesome. I suppose it depends, as things so often do, upon your understanding of the word consciousness. My mind, it seems, considers external stimuli and must (as this statement makes self-evident) be capable of monitoring its own responses to these stimuli. I am able to consider my consideration of the external world and am hence 'aware' of myself (or at least, the actions of my mind). If it is accepted that all of these actions are merely the product of cause and effect then the cyclical 'awareness' of thought within the mind is simply a product of complexity. If you consider this to be 'consciousness' then you must accept that any machine with a series of aims and a variety of stimuli that is capable of monitoring its own responses and the effects that they have is conscious in precisely the same way (if not to the same extent) as a human. I find it easier to think of consciousness (particularly considering the common understandings of the word which would link it to the idea of free-will) as a meaningless concept and to accept what we have as mere complexity. Though I will agree with you on one thing, despite my use of the word 'mere' the complexity of my mind and those with whom I seem to communicate is most definitely awesome. On a complete tangent, existentialist thinking need not result in angst, Sartre just had a boring way of looking at a completely open-ended existence.

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Posted 07/29/08 - 01:18 PM:	#255
lemmingsoup wrote: ...On a complete tangent, existentialist thinking need not result in angst, Sartre just had a boring way of looking at a completely open-ended existence. Quite true. Is the existential glass half empty, or half full.

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Posted 07/30/08 - 07:36 AM:	#256
I don't see why 'mind' cannot be both a subjective entity and yet perfectly compatable with the world of physics (the materialist worldview). Interacting neorons are a lot more complicated than billiard balls. A complex of electrico-chemically connected billiard balls is a better metaphor. And if such a thing could be arranged, a state produced by the whole network would be analagous to the mind; in that way, brains cause minds. There is an ousider-insider ontology here that troubles philosphy.
For fifteen long centuries we had to toil and suffer owing to that "freedom": but now we have prevailed and our work is done, and well and strongly it is done. Thy people feel fully sure and satisfied of their freedom; and have themselves and of their own free will delivered that freedom unto our hands by placing it submissively at our feet. - F.D.

Andy Pedersen
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Posted 07/31/08 - 01:22 AM:	#257
Mike H wrote: So lets assume our universe contains only material objects - no spirits or anything like that. Just atoms and energy. Then it seems to me that we have ruled out the existence of minds - things that are self-aware or conscious - altogether. Think of the world as a collection of trillions upon trillions (probably more) of tiny points of mass - billiard balls, you could say. Is there any arrangement of these billiard balls such that consciousness could arise? How could anyone possibly think that if they just moved these billiard balls around in the correct way, they would suddenly become self-aware? Doesn't that just seem like nonsense? Now it is true that there is not just matter in the world, but also energy. But I don't think that affects the conclusion. If we suppose these billiard balls come in different shapes and sizes, and energy allows them to bond together and interact in various ways, how could that then make consciousness possible? Is there some special way that they interact, exchanging smaller parts of themselves and so on, that could result in the billiard balls being self aware? I think not. I think this is an oversimplification of physics. There is a lot more involved than just microscopic "billiard balls". The term materialism has even become outdated in philosophy of mind because it implies matter. As a replacement, 'physicalist' has become more popular. The point is that your post excludes electromagnetic forces, quantum events, and all of the other "weird" scientific elements which may be heavily involved. Mike H wrote: Some people just say consciousness is an "emergent" phenomenon - but they fail to say how such a mysterious thing could possibly emerge from mere bits of matter. Its acceptable to say that we don't know exactly how it emerges - science just hasn't advanced that far yet - but shouldn't we be able to say that its at least possible for such a thing to occur? Again...oversimplification. Additionally, the lack of scientific evidence doesn't discount the possibility. In fact, I don't see why it isn't possible. Concerning our understanding of the physical world, our ignorance greatly outweighs our knowledge.
"This is the life of gods and of god-like and blessed men - liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth - a flight of the alone to the Alone." --Plotinus "This is the dark silence in which all lovers lose themselves." --Ruysbroeck per se notam quod nos

Simple Occam
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Posted 07/31/08 - 11:37 AM:	#258
Andy, "Electromagnetic forces, quantum events, and all of the other "weird" scientific elements" do not result in "consciousness" at the end of some chain of efficient causes. Also to say we do not understand everything enough yet and maybe some day we will "discover" consciousness in the brain somewhere is, to me, just the opposite of the "God of the gaps" fallacy used by supernaturalists to use whatever science does not explain at any moment as a reson to believe in God to account for that gap in scientific knowledge. Even though "concerning our understanding of the physical world, our ignorance greatly outweighs our knowledge", that in no way justifies believing that science will discover consciousness as caused by some non-conscious thing or process.

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Posted 07/31/08 - 01:05 PM:	#259
Simple Occam wrote: ...to say we do not understand everything enough yet and maybe some day we will "discover" consciousness in the brain somewhere is, to me, just the opposite of the "God of the gaps" fallacy used by supernaturalists to use whatever science does not explain at any moment as a reson to believe in God .. I take it your agnostic on the question of how consciousness is formed? I would say it is entirely proper to not claim knowledge on the subject, but that it is proper - after accepting this - to put forward your belief, and what justification you can. Of course I also believe it is possible to be entirely undecided, especially if one does not think the question is clear enough (and to be honest, one of the best candidates for being beyond human understanding is the human mind!)

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Posted 08/01/08 - 06:05 AM:	#260
Simple Occam wrote: "Electromagnetic forces, quantum events, and all of the other "weird" scientific elements" do not result in "consciousness" at the end of some chain of efficient causes. That's the issue in dispute now isn't it? Care to tell us why you think that is the case? Simple Occam wrote: Even though "concerning our understanding of the physical world, our ignorance greatly outweighs our knowledge", that in no way justifies believing that science will discover consciousness as caused by some non-conscious thing or process. I never said it justifies that. I said our ignorance only justifies believing in the possibility of such a conclusion.
"This is the life of gods and of god-like and blessed men - liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth - a flight of the alone to the Alone." --Plotinus "This is the dark silence in which all lovers lose themselves." --Ruysbroeck per se notam quod nos

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Posted 08/03/08 - 02:44 AM:	#261
Andy Pedersen wrote: I think this is an oversimplification of physics. There is a lot more involved than just microscopic "billiard balls". I agree. But I see no reason in principle why a (sufficiently complex) mechanical system cannot become "self-aware", IF the system is first able to be "aware", in other words if it has some means of processing information from the external world and thereby create some forms of representation or model of that world within itself. But as you say, any such brief explanation entails oversimplification, and therein lies the problem. One cannot begin to understand how consciounsness arises unless one is prepared to get deeply involved in understanding all of the complexity required - and this cannot be done in one simple paragraph. Take a look at Metzinger's explanation of consciousness in "Being No One" to get an idea of what's involved, here: http://www.moving-finger.com/papers/bno.pdf
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Posted 08/03/08 - 05:41 AM:	#262
It may be over-complication. Consciousness has been referred to as a uniform, undifferentiated field. There isn’t a higher concentration of consciousness in one area as opposed to another. It cannot be focussed because it never changes. It never changes because there is nothing to it to change. It isn’t divided up into subject and object. It may be everywhere and everything and so simple, so close and so much ‘you’ that it is somehow missed. It might not have a root or a nurse object that it emerges from. Consciousness may be groundless and the source of all that is.

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Posted 08/03/08 - 06:49 AM:	#263
[quote=reincarnated] I see no reason in principle why a (sufficiently complex) mechanical system cannot become "self-aware", IF the system is first able to be "aware", in other words if it has some means of processing information from the external world and thereby create some forms of representation or model of that world within itself. Your reference to Thomas Metzinger entails a solution to the selfawareness problem, esp. his concept of 'transparency'. The processing of sense data by the brain is 'transparent', which means that the process is invisible for introspection. As a consequence, humans and other animals live in a direct contact with the outer world. Similarly, the processing of proprioceptic data of the body (position in space, moving etc.) is 'transparent': your brain looks right through it, so to say, and does not show what is going on. The continuous representation of your body equals the sensation of 'I'. Both data processing systems emanate in the brain as a subject-object distinction The perceived outer world, thoughts, memories and feelings are at the object side (as the content of consciousness), and the 'I' is on the subject side (as selfconsciousness). Edited by janvanweeren on 08/18/08 - 02:34 AM

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Posted 08/04/08 - 03:43 AM:	#264
janvanweeren wrote: [quote=reincarnated] Your reference to Thomas Metzinger entails a solution to the selfawareness problem, esp. his concept of 'transparancy'. The processing of sense data by the brain is 'transparant', which means that the process is invisible for introspection. As a consequence, humans and other animals live in a direct contact with the outer world. Similarly, the processing of proprioceptic data of the body (position in space, moving etc.) is 'transparant': your brain looks right through it, so to say, and does not show what is going on. The continuous representation of your body equals the sensation of 'I'. Both data processing systems emanate in the brain as a subject-object distinction The perceived outer world, thoughts, memories and feelings are at the object side (as the content of consciousness), and the 'I' is on the subject side (as selfconsciousness). Metzinger's concept of transparency is one thing that I have trouble with. Whilst I agree that human consciousness is indeed "transparent" in the sense defined by Metzinger (ie we are indeed blind to the exact workings of our conscious brains), I see no reason why such transparency is a necessary *precedent* for consciousness. To me, it simply seems like an artefact, or a possible nomologically necessary consequent of consciousness (not a precedent). I have no trouble, for example, conceiving of the possibility of conscious agents for which the transparency condition does not apply. Of course, this does not mean such agents are nomologically possible - I just have difficulty seeing which came first - transparency or consciousness?
�If one pays attention to the concepts being employed, rather than the words being used, the resolution of this problem is simple.� (Stuart Burns)

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Posted 08/04/08 - 04:25 AM:	#265
Simple Occam, Simple Occam wrote: An emergent cause is really no 'cause' at all because there is no cause-effect relationship such that whenever X occurs, so does Y. Science uses laws of nature to explain and predict what we observe. That does not mean that it promises to predict every event that occurs or will occur, as in the exact time and place a hurricane will make landfall. But they get pretty close and the margin of error is due to the complexity of the interactions, not some error in the laws of nature. You don't really want to say that the storm 'emerges' from the ocean; rather it is caused by the fully explainable and predictable fact that hot air rises, so the warming of the oceans in the summer increases this flow of air, fueling hurricanes. There's no emergence in that explanation of a hurricane at all, even though we can't always crunch all the numbers to come up with a landfall prediction that's exactly correct. Hurricanes and other weather events are hard to predict but still not emergent properties in the sense of being irreducible to the basic laws of physics. However, even the second law of thermodynamics (the entropy law) itself is not reducible to the laws of motion and electromagnetism. This is because it holds only in a spatiotemporal context and is not reversable in time as those other laws are. So it is not reducible to the basic laws of physics and, thus, appears to be an emergent law of nature. The same is true of the 'law' of natural selection. So both of these 'laws' describe regularites about nature that are not reducible to more basic laws. This is fine as long as you are willing to give up the causal completeness of physics. But if you want to believe that everything we see on the 'macro' level (our bodies, trees, mountains, this chair im sitting in, the cat on the mat, etc.) is composed ONLY of those basic particles (atoms and their component parts), then physics must not know EVERYTHING about the basics or else things like entropy, evolution, even consciousness could be explained reductively by that COMPLETE causal explanation that we seem to be missing. The reason I reject emergentism is that, if it's true, science will always be causally incomplete and, even worse, we have to deny, ontologically, that we are made up only of atoms (and their components). Emergentism is a form of intractable ontological dualism that cannot explain how whole structures take on characteristics of the whole that are distinct from the characteristics of the separated parts. I understand that some people's 'playbooks' allow for emergent properties as phenomena of complexity or reduce them to statistical laws. In my playbook, though, neither attempt to account for these phenomena does so in a way that addresses the serious ontological problem underlying emergentism that results from the regularities that are not explained by the basic laws of the things that they are made of. You still seem hung up on emergence. Physics is a science, it does not "know" anything (second paragraph above). Unfortunately you mix up epistemic and ontic perspectives in your argument. I have highlighted some of the epistemic (bold) and ontic (bold italic) terms in the above, so that you might be better able to see what I mean. Weak emergence does not necessarily entail lack of causal closure. Weak emergence simply entails an epistemic boundary. The world may be causally closed, but it does not follow from this that all of the precise workings of that world are open to our scrutiny, observation, knowledge and understanding. Some things may simply be beyond our epistemic horizon. If this is the case, then this opens the door for *emergent properties* in the weakly emergent sense - properties that we cannot predict based on the rest of our knowledge of the world. But prediction is epistemic, it is not ontic. The world may be causally complete (ontic), but that does not mean it is always predictable (epistemic). IF the second law of thermodynamics is indeed not reducible to other laws as you suggest, then it is by definition a weakly emergent phenomenon. It is not that it simply "appears to be emergent" - it IS (weakly) emergent according to the accepted definition of weak emergence. Once again - our inability to explain, or to reduce, laws does not imply lack of causal closure. It might simply be due to the limits of our epistemic horizons. Weak emergence is alive and kicking.
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janvanweeren
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Posted 08/04/08 - 06:27 AM:	#266
reincarnated wrote: I just have difficulty seeing which came first - transparency or consciousness? The brain cheats (Daniel Dennett). It delivers 'you in the world', whereas it processes sensorial data of a body and its environment. 'You in the world' constitues your consciousness. The existence of a working sensory system and a working brain which processes and integrates the data is both a necessary and a sufficient condition to create 'you in the world'. To create a movie you need a film, a projector and an operator. Without the equipment there can't be any movie. Edited by janvanweeren on 08/18/08 - 02:32 AM

Simple Occam
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Posted 08/04/08 - 12:37 PM:	#267
reincarnated wrote: You still seem hung up on emergence. Physics is a science, it does not "know" anything (second paragraph above). Unfortunately you mix up epistemic and ontic perspectives in your argument. I have highlighted some of the epistemic (bold) and ontic (bold italic) terms in the above, so that you might be better able to see what I mean. Weak emergence does not necessarily entail lack of causal closure. Weak emergence simply entails an epistemic boundary. The world may be causally closed, but it does not follow from this that all of the precise workings of that world are open to our scrutiny, observation, knowledge and understanding. Some things may simply be beyond our epistemic horizon. If this is the case, then this opens the door for emergent properties in the weakly emergent sense - properties that we cannot predict based on the rest of our knowledge of the world. But prediction is epistemic, it is not ontic. The world may be causally complete (ontic), but that does not mean it is always predictable (epistemic). IF the second law of thermodynamics is indeed not reducible to other laws as you suggest, then it is by definition a weakly emergent phenomenon. It is not that it simply "appears to be emergent" - it IS (weakly) emergent according to the accepted definition of weak emergence. Once again - our inability to explain, or to reduce, laws does not imply lack of causal closure. It might simply be due to the limits of our epistemic horizons. Weak emergence is alive and kicking. Alive, maybe. But without much kick; and that's the problem I'm pointing to. I'm not hung up on emergence and I'm well aware of the difference between ontology and epistemology, as well as the difference between strong and weak emergence. Of course nature is causally complete; I don't know how we could possibly assume otherwise. I've been talking about the causal completeness of the science of physics...that most basic of all the epmirical sciences and the one to which all the others should be reducible. The problem is that they are not. The second law of thermodynamics and the theory of evolution are 2 very glaring examples of this. They do not only appear not to be reducible; they cannot be derived from the basic laws of physics... nor will they ever be. They are surely regularities about nature, observed to be true everywhere we look. But, unlike the electro-magnetic, strong and weak forces, as well as gravitation, they have a temporal aspect to them that is simply not accounted for by the basic forces. This is a problem... whether you call it weak or strong emergence... because these regularities seem to operate according to different forces of nature than the others because they are time-dependent. If you understand the forces that bind particles into atoms you can predict (as Mendeleev showed) ALL of the elements in the periodic table. Many were predicted before they were even discovered. You can't predict entropy or evolution like that. They are either emergent or accidental: and in either case physics is causally incomplete. Most physicists are not willing to admit physics is causally incomplete because then we really couldn't account for its successes or justify replying on it as we do in every area of research. But, in fact, it is incomplete. And the irreducibility of these "laws" proves it. We need a deeper understanding of reality than the laws of nature can provide, and yet, as "modern" philosophers, we have ceded all cognitively meaningful knowledge of the world to the empirical sciences. Anything else is metaphysical mumbo jumbo, as I am repeatedly reminded, whenever I suggest that metaphysics and ontology might have something to offer to resolve this dilemma.

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Posted 08/07/08 - 11:36 AM:	#268
all the evidence points to a materialistic universe, with no mysterious entities like souls or ghosts or gods and goddesses. But all the evidence does not point to a materialistic universe. You subjectively experience the world. For example, when you "see" a tree, you literally have an image of tree in your head. The existence of that image of a tree is absolutely not predicted by materialist physics. Therefore, materialism, at least as it is commonly understood, is false.

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Posted 08/11/08 - 02:54 AM:	#269
heimdall wrote: But all the evidence does not point to a materialistic universe. You subjectively experience the world. For example, when you "see" a tree, you literally have an image of tree in your head. The existence of that image of a tree is absolutely not predicted by materialist physics. Therefore, materialism, at least as it is commonly understood, is false. Agree. We evoke our own problem by using the term 'materialistic' as opposed to 'non-materialistic' or 'idealistic'. These words refer to something which seems to exist only in the mind, something which can neither be detected nor described or explained by ordinary physics. But now do I ask you: what is electromagnetism, what is gravity? What is an elementary particle, if it can pass trough two slits at the same time? How can particles - which are no particles at all - be entangled and react at the same time, although being many lightyears separated? What is phantasy? Electromagnetic waves in certain regions of the brain. What is a tree? Light reflected by something which we cannot know as such hits your retina and is processed by the brain to build up your mental image of the tree. Now what in this mysterious world is materialistic, what non-materialistic?

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Posted 08/12/08 - 11:20 AM:	#270
janvanweeren wrote: Agree. We evoke our own problem by using the term 'materialistic' as opposed to 'non-materialistic' or 'idealistic'. These words refer to something which seems to exist only in the mind, something which can neither be detected nor described or explained by ordinary physics. But now do I ask you: what is electromagnetism, what is gravity? What is an elementary particle, if it can pass trough two slits at the same time? How can particles - which are no particles at all - be entangled and react at the same time, although being many lightyears separated? What is phantasy? Electromagnetic waves in certain regions of the brain. What is a tree? Light reflected by something which we cannot know as such hits your retina and is processed by the brain to build up your mental image of the tree. Now what in this mysterious world is materialistic, what non-materialistic? Yes, there are many difficult problems and some will probably never be solved, but I know this, the materialists are wrong. It's better to approach nature modestly, learn what we can, and not deny realities just because we can't yet explain them.

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Posted 08/19/08 - 06:53 AM:	#271
Andy Pedersen wrote: I think this is an oversimplification of physics. There is a lot more involved than just microscopic "billiard balls". Hi Andy ! I've been musing how this action/reaction (billiard ball) effect works, and would appreciate any insight by anyone. An action is in itself a reaction to a previous action etc etc etc until the first action which is of no other. I thought the first action is an action unto itself which is equal to itself in that it is the first and only action. Further, I considered this implied action and reaction are not opposite but the same, and not two but one. I thought action is a reaction to it's own action and there is only one action of self reaction. It dawned on me that the first action is alot like me in that I am reacting to my own action. SO, I figured action/reaction (the universe) is self reflection not unlike our own and this is an aspect of conciousness. Thanks, both of you, Throng and gnorhT.

Kurt_Godel
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Posted 08/19/08 - 11:01 AM:	#272
Simple Occam, Simple Occam wrote: However, even the second law of thermodynamics (the entropy law) itself is not reducible to the laws of motion and electromagnetism. This is because it holds only in a spatiotemporal context and is not reversable in time as those other laws are. So it is not reducible to the basic laws of physics and, thus, appears to be an emergent law of nature. The same is true of the 'law' of natural selection. So both of these 'laws' describe regularites about nature that are not reducible to more basic laws. This is fine as long as you are willing to give up the causal completeness of physics. But if you want to believe that everything we see on the 'macro' level (our bodies, trees, mountains, this chair im sitting in, the cat on the mat, etc.) is composed ONLY of those basic particles (atoms and their component parts), then physics must not know EVERYTHING about the basics or else things like entropy, evolution, even consciousness could be explained reductively by that COMPLETE causal explanation that we seem to be missing. This is quite simply untrue. Thermodynamics (TD) is indeed applicable in a spatiotemporal context, but how does this imply that "it is not reducible to the basic laws of physics"? Surely, it MUST be reducible...else either it is incorrect/inconsistent, or the laws of the universe are inconsistent. You are slightly off in stating that TD is an emergent "law". I would say that it is an emergent "model" or "theory". As such, the equations of thermodynamics (and the predictions they make) make sense at that level of reality where TD 'emerges', namely the macroscopic level. However, TD is very much reducible to the basic laws (please note, the laws of motion and electrodynamics aren't the only basic laws). Indeed as stated, it MUST be reducible in order to be consistent. For example, consider the breakup of the first law of TD: dU = dQ - dW U = energy. This is axiomatic, used in QM and Relativity Q = heat. Explained as the modulus of the energy of the vibration of molecules W = work = Force * displacement * cos (x) Displacement in the real world would be the position of an entity in reference to an origin, on any spatial dimension. Force = mass * acceleration Mass = Manifestation of energy, E = mc^2 Acceleration = dV/dT V = displacelement/time Time = Temporal dimension, part of the spacetime fabric. The same goes for natural selection. Now, things like chairs trees and consciousness can be explained in reductionist terms, since they are all emergent epiphenomenon. Things like entropy and causality cannot be explained in reductionist terms, since they are axiomatic and as such are at the lowest level. These are the most basic irreducible phenomenon of our universe, and as such are accurately described as "laws". Simple Occam wrote: The reason I reject emergentism is that, if it's true, science will always be causally incomplete and, even worse, we have to deny, ontologically, that we are made up only of atoms (and their components). Emergentism is a form of intractable ontological dualism that cannot explain how whole structures take on characteristics of the whole that are distinct from the characteristics of the separated parts. I understand that some people's 'playbooks' allow for emergent properties as phenomena of complexity or reduce them to statistical laws. In my playbook, though, neither attempt to account for these phenomena does so in a way that addresses the serious ontological problem underlying emergentism that results from the regularities that are not explained by the basic laws of the things that they are made of. As shown, all emergent regularities are and MUST be explained by basic laws. Its the 'most basic law's that cannot be explained/reduced, since they are not themselves emergent. In the end, emergentism is an abstract phenomenon which has more to do with epistemology than anything else. Things present different information at different levels of perception. Just like Chile appears to be a long thin strip from space, a land with forests plains and mountains from 100000 feet, a place with people and buildings from 500 feet, and a road with a sidewalk and shops at 10 feet. To say you reject emergentism would mean you reject the practice of breakdown of knowledge into modular/hierarchial levels of information. As has been expressed by others, I think OP is falling into trap of oversimplification with his billiards balls analogy. Consciousness is (like most emergent phenomena) the result of extremely complex activity within a hugely complex system, one which has the scope for a staggeringly high amount of logical interactions that signify basic information processing. The attempt to understand consciousness from a reductionist point of view is most definitely a mammoth (and somewhat misguided) task. Trying to understand consciousness in terms of neurons firing (or worse, atoms and molecules of the brain interacting) is akin to trying to understand what software is running on a computer by taking electrical measurements at all transistor points on its processor (or worse, by studying the actions of all the electrons atoms and molecules that make up the transistors). Surely though, whatever causes consciousness must be consistent with the laws of the material universe. Else, we are appealing to souls and other deus ex machina. Hence, it is completely accurate to say that consciousness is an emergent epiphenomenon, just like a planet's climate is an emergent epiphenomenon. Edited by Kurt_Godel on 08/19/08 - 11:15 AM. Reason: typos removed to enhance legibility

Kurt_Godel
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Posted 08/19/08 - 11:32 AM:	#273
Heimdall, Heimdall wrote: But all the evidence does not point to a materialistic universe. You subjectively experience the world. For example, when you "see" a tree, you literally have an image of tree in your head. The existence of that image of a tree is absolutely not predicted by materialist physics. Therefore, materialism, at least as it is commonly understood, is false. That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think? That we subjectively experience the world doesn't render materialism as necessarily false. It merely opens the door that materialism may be untrue, that too on the far side of a very blunt Occam's razor. Are you suggesting that the universe simply doesn't exist beyond our perception of it? If so, may I ask why you hold this veiwpoint? Also, how would one go about proving this?

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