Mind, body and ME

[Jonathan Edwards]

Similarly with the computing example, from one perspective 0 and 1 are just symbols used as placeholders for true and false

There is a mathematical sense in which truth corresponds to 0. Truth is the absence of contradiction or disparity, or simply difference. It is complicated by set theory issues but in simplest terms truth is the performing of a subtraction of two compared items that yields 0. Yet computers have conventionally been programmed for truth to be allocated 1.

 

[chillier]

But if you stand and look at a painting and then make a nodding movement while keeping your eyes fixed on the painting you find that the sense of I drifts up to the third ventricle and then down to your pharynx past the sphenoid bone.

Sort of but also I'm not really sure I agree! This does kind of happen for me but as soon as I actually pay attention to where the sense seems to be, it immediately jumps to somewhere else, like the base of the skull at the top of the neck. I can chase it around and it'll flicker back and forth rapidly, tensions moving around in my head as I do. My experience has been, though I say this tentatively because I'm not at all certain, that the position of the location of 'I' is on one level a kind of triangulation of subtle muscle tensions of the neck, head, or elsewhere. This also seems to be true for at least some types of negative hedonic feeling (fear, at least some kinds of pain, boredom). I'd be curious if for you if the movement of 'I' in your painting example is the same if you don't move your head but instead move the painting itself up and down just tracking with your eyes.

You're right that the location of the I is wobbly and can be just a bit outside of the body too a foot away or so. Also, especially in unfamiliar social situations, flashes of what I look like from an imagined external view point - how I might look to other people, if it's acceptable etc. Still though, the feeling of 'I' is attached to my body, even if the observation point is disembodied in that moment. If I'm on a tube car full of people, 'I' is not one of the other people on the tube, observing one of the other people on the tube. Admittedly I'm kind of glossing over the fact that the 'being' and the 'observer' sense are not quite the same thing.

The main point is I'm not sure a receiving, perceiving 'I' - in this formulation at least - is inherently part of conscious perception in humans. I think it's likely there could be consciousness without it even in a human with our neurons and DNA as they are in this species. I'm not sure from what you're saying how much of this could be culturally conditioned in some way? I do have one friend at least who tells me their sense of 'I' is in their chest.

 

[Eddie]

The main point is I'm not sure a receiving, perceiving 'I' - in this formulation at least - is inherently part of conscious perception in humans. I think it's likely there could be consciousness without it even in a human with our neurons and DNA as they are in this species. I'm not sure from what you're saying how much of this could be culturally conditioned in some way? I do have one friend at least who tells me their sense of 'I' is in their chest.

I agree that there could be consciousness without a concept of I. But in humans the concept of I is the meaning that a neuron or perhaps a set or neurons firing produce. In states of drug intoxication it is possible to lose that sense of I because that neuron(s) doesn't trigger in the same way. But because evolution 'discovered' that a sense of I is really good for survival we have that neuron(s) to thank for our sense of being ourselves most of the time.

 

[Eddie]

But of course Leibniz is well aware that right for me may be wrong for you, even if true is always true. His best of all possible worlds was a drastic compromise of the greatest good at the highest level, with the minimum of starting rules, taken overall in a context where misery might have to be all over the place. Voltaire may have been right that this was fanciful but where can the perception of good come from if not from the underlying dynamic fabric?

The thing that I disagree with is that good/bad is fundamentally different than any other indivisible event. When we think about good and bad it is something that feels completely different than blue/red or hot/cold. But why not think that this difference isn't a result of something about differences in the events, but is just how things arbitrarily developed?

The signal that triggers the feeling of blue or red is not any different from the signal that produces good or bad. It just so happens that we live in a universe where things that are good at surviving survive, and having a strong reaction to good/bad is good for our survival. It is not the case that blue and red have a strong impact on our survival (on average) so we don't have the same reaction. It is not the most uplifting answer, but I think the only one that makes sense.

 

[Eddie]

There is a mathematical sense in which truth corresponds to 0. Truth is the absence of contradiction or disparity, or simply difference. It is complicated by set theory issues but in simplest terms truth is the performing of a subtraction of two compared items that yields 0. Yet computers have conventionally been programmed for truth to be allocated 1.

I actually really like this idea. It fits well with my understanding of truth as the degree to which some perception meshes with our other interpretations of reality.

If we take a simple case like a banana is yellow, if we take the idea of the banana and remove all the yellow what we are left with is an object with 0 colour and so we say it is true. In a more complication case, like "did the US land on the moon", we take that idea, subtract all the evidence and see how much unexplained residue remains. If that residue is small enough we are prepared to accept it as true and insert it into our interpretation of reality.

The consequences of this view however, is that truth requires an observer in the sense that there must be something to do the subtracting or meshing. And because the subtraction will not always occur in the same way every time there can't be one universal truth. Now you can always insert some God or nature as the fundamental observer who provides the truth, but I am more than happy to say it is subjective.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

The main point is I'm not sure a receiving, perceiving 'I' - in this formulation at least - is inherently part of conscious perception in humans. I think it's likely there could be consciousness without it even in a human with our neurons and DNA as they are in this species.

I agree with 'Eddie' - I think we all agree. Eddie's friend Hume claimed he could never find 'I' in his experience and I think that is a reasonable starting point. A sense of I is there if you introspect and want to sense it but much of the time consciousness probably doesn't involve it explicitly, even it may be implicit in a linguistic attempt to map the meaning of the experience. The sense of I is said to develop stepwise in childhood, with things like 'theory of mind' acquisition in infants, language acquisition and a further stage in adolescence, although people argue about that.

Leibniz's philosophy is build on an essay he wrote at age 40, the Discourse on Metaphysics. The central point is the Spinoza must have been wrong to say that the world is just one thing or 'substance' (in those days a count noun not a 'stuff' noun) with an infinite number of modes or facets. He must have been wrong because there are mutually exclusive points of view. There must be true individuals because there are points of view. From this he creates an account of dynamics that presages quantum field theory and is the most parsimonious of all accounts I know.

The point of view here is associated with my body and each other human body reports a point of view. So we assume every body has a point of view. But Leibniz could see that there would be many points of view within a complex brain. He thought there must be one controlling one but that doesn't look likely now. He understood that at the fundamental level the informing of the point of view by the features in its environment that it perceives would not be optical, but an immediate local relation within a confined domain - in effect a cell body, although for Leibniz this was an 'animalcule'.

I guess my answer is that, although there may not always be a sense of being 'me', that if we want to fit an 'observer' into an overall natural science frame it only makes sense for it to be some receiving event, with some component of the account being the 'patient' (as opposed to agent) that receives (hence Descartes 'Passions' of the Soul rather than actions) and is a 'point of view'.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

But in humans the concept of I is the meaning that a neuron or perhaps a set or neurons firing produce.

Agreed, and that meaning will be 'manifest' when some other neuron or neurons receive it.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

The signal that triggers the feeling of blue or red is not any different from the signal that produces good or bad. It just so happens that we live in a universe where things that are good at surviving survive, and having a strong reaction to good/bad is good for our survival.

Yes, there is a strong case for this as default. If you have a month to spare then read the rambling New Essays in Human Understanding written late in Leibniz's life to counter Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. I finally got to read it last year. Leibniz insists that these things cannot be arbitrary and that there is a reason why red light looks red rather than green. I think he is beginning to bluster, using his a priori arguments in places where earlier he would have been more careful. It seems likely that he is wrong, even if he often turns out to be right after all.

But when it comes to the difference between red and good I think he is likely to be right. Study of language by people like Uriagereka and Hinzen shows that we have an intuitive sense of levels of meanings that we use different syntactic tricks for, so that we immediately see a sentence is odd if it crosses the syntactic rules. These are things like count and mass nouns, action, completion and achievement verbs and so on. There are also systematic rules for the order of adjectives so we have a big green box, not a green big box. Language almost certainly reflects a systematicity to non-verbal meanings manifest in neurons. So you cannot get a meaning out of 'I prefer the red or the green to the good.' 'It is red manners to say that'.

My working hypothesis is that meanings are encoded in geometric ratios relating synaptic signals to a receiving unit. To have systematic rules some rations ought to play different roles from others. Acoustics provides a simple model. Ratios that are simple fractions of a whole give harmonics. Unmatching ratios give beats, and so on. If the event of integration in a neuron is fundamental and quantised it should be based on complex harmonic oscillation rules and if it involves Goldstone mode it could actually be acoustic. And of course Leibniz guessed the interaction would be like an acoustic one, with a vibrating membrane (again in New Essays)!!

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

The consequences of this view however, is that truth requires an observer in the sense that there must be something to do the subtracting or meshing. And because the subtraction will not always occur in the same way every time there can't be one universal truth. Now you can always insert some God or nature as the fundamental observer who provides the truth, but I am more than happy to say it is subjective.

Exactly Leibniz's position. His definition of truth is a property of a statement or proposition in which the predicate is entailed in the subject. This is truth in set theoretic terms - the predicate is a member of the set of properties specified by the subjects total description. But ehe also says truth is an absence of contradiction, so it is the exact 0 when you have subtracted the yellow from yellow.

But of course a proposition is only something that means something to a point of view. And all actual points of view are finite and limited and therefore incomplete in their ability to ascertain. So a point of view can only perceive truth confusedly, whereas L'Être Necessaire, being an infinite understanding rather than a specific point of view, will know an absolute truth.

This helps to explain why we have 'wrong' concepts about the world maybe. It is just that it is clever enough to be sufficient reasons to give rise to sentient beings that sense their reality but rather mind-blowing to be sufficient reasons for sensing what never exists, to my mind. This is really the Leibnizian argument for an ineffable Être Necessaire. The idea that physics can explain meaning without some awesome impenetrable reasons is to me the great naïvety of the twentieth century.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

One thing I have been wondering about recently is what philosophers call the problem of 'intentionality'. This has nothing to do with intent or intentions but comes from Brentano who was interested in the way thoughts were 'about' other things or goings on. So it means 'aboutness'.

Why should the way an event seems from within to something partaking in that event (or even just to the event itself) be 'about' some other events? The problem is so strange that Jerry Fodor famously said that whatever internality is, it is it must be something else.

But in a purely dynamic account of the world (as science ultimately has to be) the only nature of anything we can know is its disposition to change across spacetime. It can only be known as an affordance, or even a prediction, for some other events 'to be'. So maybe it is not so strange that the inside of a neuron feels like a sitting room. The inside of a neuron is a display of sitting-room style affordances to be. It is a prediction scenario. So the 'predictive mind' is maybe no surprise.

It is still might odd, but is the way with metaphysics!

 

[Utsikt]

Does the concept of intentionality stem from a lack of information about neurons and quantum mechanics at that time?

Based on skimming the first two sections here, it seems like intentionality assumes that the mental is composed of more than just one neuron, possibly the entire brain? I did not understand much of you paper and the discussion here, but I’m fairly certain you disagree with that notion.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Does the concept of intentionality stem from a lack of information about neurons and quantum mechanics at that time?

No, I think the concept is a perfectly good one. A thought is about something - about a dog or a movement of a tree in the wind. The problem has been that both philosophers and scientists have studiously avoided trying to find a place for this thought-event in a head. Descartes saw the need for place and suggested one. A few neuroscientists have made suggestions based on nets of nerves but as Descartes pointed out, that doesn't work.

 

[voner]

I think I might have held this view in my forties. I cannot really remember. You are expressing the view of people like Christof Koch, at least until recently, and the Patricia and Paul Churchland, I think. The problem is that neuroscientists are completely stuck precisely because they have not engaged with these fundamental issues. Michael Hausser, who is perhaps the most eminent neuroscientist in London, recently co-authored a review in Nature saying how stuck everyone was and that people from a wider range of disciplines needed to work together.

The central problem is that you cannot work out what awareness is going to be until you have a hypothesis of what physical dynamic unit is actually aware. It is not a person or a bee that is aware - that is just lay parlance. Awareness has to be a property of whatever inside a central nervous system gets the information it is aware of. That is just a brute causal imperative. Yet neuroscientists dance around refusing to say what it is they think gets the information. Giulio Tononi and colleagues have recently tried to get around this by proposing 'systems' that have 'integrated information' (Integrated Information Theory, IIT). However, the Journal of Consciousness Studies has just put out a volume of essays on IIT, several of which point out that the theory's causal structural basis is invalid. I am preparing my own paper with a student where we try to pin down precisely where the error in causal dynamics is made.

As William James pointed out 'Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.' The metaphysical issues around consciousness are issues around how the physics questions can even make any sense. As indicated, the key issue is what 'bit' is going to be aware? How are you going to address that without having some idea of what candidates would even qualify?


I don't think that is right. Monkeys' good and monkeys' bad are just something monkey DNA encodes in the developing brain to further social interactions. Tigers' good and bad may be very different. But the sense of good or bad is something quite different - it is the sense that we allocate to whatever our DNA tells our brains to allocate it to. Assuming that we believe that physical laws cover all the causal dynamic interaction in the universe we then have to discover what interactions give rise to this sense, irrespective of the fact that it is triggered by different things in monkeys' brains and tigers' brains.

So we have the question: what dynamic unit X in a brain will undergo a physical interaction which to X feels 'good' or 'bad'. For a crossbill that event may be triggered by seeing a spruce cone, for a parrot crossbill it will be a pine cone and for a two barred crossbill it will be a larch cone, but that is another issue.

Put differently, the metaphysics is not extraneous to the physical arguments, it is the base they stand on. The problem with neurobiology at present is not that it is too 'physical' but that it is not physical enough. It does not respect the basic causal requirements that you need for a physical theory to be true or false.

I recently watched this video. It features some researchers at the AI company, “Anthropic”, discussing what they know and don’t know and how they approach the problem of how their AI models actually work. They still don’t understand it very well. At one point I thought, “they need to talk to Jonathan Edwards“….

 

[Utsikt]

I appreciate that 'self-awareness' is a popular definition of consciousness for some people in neuropsychology and also in the arts but I see it as problematic. We have no way of knowing that our sense of 'self-awareness' (I don't actually have that sense but perhaps was brought up that way) is actually awareness of the same thing that is aware. Neurobiology strongly suggests it isn't. Physics indicates pretty strongly that it cannot be. So it is another illusion about a rather local part of the world. I tend to think that the difference between the human subject and animal subjects is that our sort has a much more sophisticated misconception of its own nature.

I read parts of this thread from time to time because it’s really fascinating to me. I don’t think I understand much, though. So apologies if this has already been covered.

I’m trying to understand the point about the awareness of the thing that is aware, but I’m not getting anywhere. Would you be able to elaborate or point me to any explanations?

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

I’m trying to understand the point about the awareness of the thing that is aware, but I’m not getting anywhere. Would you be able to elaborate or point me to any explanations?

My original paragraph is not easy to read, I guess.

People talk of being self-aware, which presumably means they are aware of something they think of as 'myself'. But David Hume pointed out that whenever he tried to observe or 'find' or describe this self he found nothing except 'impressions' or ideas of other things. That is my experience, although other people claim to 'find' a self.

The problem is that from a physics point of view there does not seem to be any way in which the same unit can perceive itself or be informed by itself except indirectly. So if an event of being informed (perceiving) involves some physical influence on A (that which perceives) there is no way in physics for the influence to be from A. You have to say A is influenced by B, which was previously influenced by A. And of course, because it is indirect you can never be sure that B's influence on A reflects the 'true nature' of the power of A that influenced B.

The main significance for me is that I am pretty sure that there is no single perceiving unit in a brain. There are millions. And each one perceives via being presented with a pattern of information that reflects both external and internal events but does not reflect the nature of any particular internal perceiving unit or I. The internal events are reflected in terms of system processes like memory or sense of time. The perceiving units must presumably be neurons and neurons never get any incling of what neurons are like - unless they learn neurobiology.

 

[Sean]

I have never really understood what is meant by 'self', beyond the obvious and rather mundane point that all of us have unique combinations of major and minor genetically and environmentally driven variables. Even identical twins turn out at least somewhat differently.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

I have never really understood what is meant by 'self', beyond the obvious and rather mundane point that all of us have unique combinations of major and minor genetically and environmentally driven variables. Even identical twins turn out at least somewhat differently.

I think there is a useful conception of a self as an individual, as a certain thing that is 'in a world'. Something here is informed of a world and also about an immediately surrounding bodily system. The mistake is to equate the informed individual with the bodily system or organism. There is a major fashion in thinking that selves are organisms or systems so computers, once complex enough, might be selves as systems. But a system cannot be an individual thing at a fundamental level and the law of locality requires that experience is an immediate and direct interaction and therefore fundamental.

So the field of consciousness studies continues to wade up a flooded blind alley in the dark.

 

[Utsikt]

My original paragraph is not easy to read, I guess.

Just difficult to wrap my head around!

The problem is that from a physics point of view there does not seem to be any way in which the same unit can perceive itself or be informed by itself except indirectly. So if an event of being informed (perceiving) involves some physical influence on A (that which perceives) there is no way in physics for the influence to be from A. You have to say A is influenced by B, which was previously influenced by A. And of course, because it is indirect you can never be sure that B's influence on A reflects the 'true nature' of the power of A that influenced B.

This makes sense to me.

There is a major fashion in thinking that selves are organisms or systems so computers, once complex enough, might be selves as systems. But a system cannot be an individual thing at a fundamental level and the law of locality requires that experience is an immediate and direct interaction and therefore fundamental.

Is this related to figure 1 in your Qeios paper on consciousness in individual neurons?

I took that to mean that if ‘something’ is to ‘experience’ something, the experiencing has to happen at a singular point in time. If the ‘experiencer’ is defined as a system A, B, C that is interconnected, when does the experiencing happen? Is it when the signal reaches A, B, or C?

Because we can’t determined when the experiencing happened, the system can’t experience according to our definition of experience.

And if a system can’t experience, the experiencing has to happen in a singular unit, i.e. a neuron.

Although what I don’t understand is what in the neuron that does the experiencing, because the neuron exists of many parts. So presumably you’re saying that consciousness has to exist somewhere in the neuron, not that the neuron itself experiences? (Edit: the title of the paper says in - I completely forgot!)

What really does my head in, is how millions of consciousnesses can appear like a singular uninterrupted flow of consciousness.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

What really does my head in, is how millions of consciousnesses can appear like a singular uninterrupted flow of consciousness.

But if you think about it there is nothing peculiar here. For each unit receiving perceptions about world and body, there is no information about any other units receiving so there is no reason for there to be a sense of one amongst many.

The flow may be uninterrupted. In modern physics a unit (dynamic or causal unit) is an instance of a mode of excitation of a field. That may sound very technical but a photon is a mode of excitation of the EM field. An 'occupied' electron orbital is a mode of excitation of the electron field and, more comfortingly, the peal of a bell is a mode of excitation of an acoustic or phonon field. They all involve notional oscillations that carry energy. So my assumption is that the 'perceiver' in the cell is an acoustic-type mode occupying the dendrites of the cell in the way a musical note occupies a violin. In a sense the note 'mode' is continuous in that it is always present, even if very faintly, because the violin is always present. Conveniently, acoustic mode still have a finite energy content even when 'silent'.

So we can allow the acoustic 'soul' of a cell to experience uninterruptedly.

But there is another side to this. When we say something is uninterrupted we mean there are no gaps. So in a sense you are puzzled by being no times when you are aware of not being aware. But that is an impossibility because to be aware of not being aware you have to be aware. This relates to a well known problem with the format of perceptions that might be called the pixel problem. We do not see any pixels in our visual perception. But to see pixels we would have to see the gaps between the pixels and to see those we would have to see the gaps between them and the pixels and .... on to infinity. It becomes clear that discontinuous perception is a contradiction in terms from the outset. That is OK because all physics is continuous for any individual dynamic unit. The discontinuity is between the identities of the perceiving units. They are entirely separate individuals, but that is a different sort of discontinuity - not of space or time but of identity.

 

[Utsikt]

But if you think about it there is nothing peculiar here. For each unit receiving perceptions about world and body, there is no information about any other units receiving so there is no reason for there to be a sense of one amongst many.

The flow may be uninterrupted. In modern physics a unit (dynamic or causal unit) is an instance of a mode of excitation of a field. That may sound very technical but a photon is a mode of excitation of the EM field. An 'occupied' electron orbital is a mode of excitation of the electron field and, more comfortingly, the peal of a bell is a mode of excitation of an acoustic or phonon field. They all involve notional oscillations that carry energy. So my assumption is that the 'perceiver' in the cell is an acoustic-type mode occupying the dendrites of the cell in the way a musical note occupies a violin. In a sense the note 'mode' is continuous in that it is always present, even if very faintly, because the violin is always present. Conveniently, acoustic mode still have a finite energy content even when 'silent'.

So we can allow the acoustic 'soul' of a cell to experience uninterruptedly.

But there is another side to this. When we say something is uninterrupted we mean there are no gaps. So in a sense you are puzzled by being no times when you are aware of not being aware. But that is an impossibility because to be aware of not being aware you have to be aware. This relates to a well known problem with the format of perceptions that might be called the pixel problem. We do not see any pixels in our visual perception. But to see pixels we would have to see the gaps between the pixels and to see those we would have to see the gaps between them and the pixels and .... on to infinity. It becomes clear that discontinuous perception is a contradiction in terms from the outset. That is OK because all physics is continuous for any individual dynamic unit. The discontinuity is between the identities of the perceiving units. They are entirely separate individuals, but that is a different sort of discontinuity - not of space or time but of identity.

Thank you for explaining, I think that makes some amount of sense, but I’m sure there are lots of things I don’t understand that I don’t understand yet!