Is the Mind Cause or Consequence?

Philosophy of Mind
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To some, a shiny card is attractive.

They usually fit into a collection of many cards.

There’s not real point to them, other than be collected, and they’re attractive for their shine.

I’m saying religious books are metaphorically like ‘shiny collectable cards’.

Fitting with outlook in life, because it talks about things in life, not necessarily to discover the foundry, but instead to be a face which is recognizable.

Alternatively, religion could metaphorically be a relatable face.

I related this to the things you said. Sorry if it’s a mismatch.

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Garon, it was a mismatch, and thanks for explaining.
For what it’s worth, I agree with what you wrote even if I wasn’t thinking about that to begin with.

It’s just that religion per se, is rather low on my priority list. Been there done that that, learned some valuable lessons, but learned in my teens that I’d rather trust my own thinking, than a bunch of old self-motivated salesmen telling me who I should be.

If a god there be, it made me to be me. I understand nature too well to have any patients with our self-absorbed self-serving Gods that emulate human Egotism.

(… as opposed to simple Ego.)

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Cheers. It feels good to be heard here.

You’re thinking correct.

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487

Not for the physicalist, who claims that everything is reducible to the physical. Chalmers favors property dualism – the idea that for consciousness to be a property of anything at all, everything must encompass the possibility of that emergence. And so he proposes that everything has the property of proto-consciousness (not panpsychism but panprotopsychism). It smacks to me of making the problem look so small that it can be inconspicuously swept under the carpet, and Chalmers himself accepts that it fails to address the combination problem.

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I would suggest that is, because the combined problem, as stated, is unmoored from biological reality:

… At the head of this ball of confusion is the Descartes-Nagel-Chalmers paradigm, summed up in Chalmers’ Hard Problem of Consciousness: Why and how do physical processes in the brain (neural activity) give rise to subjective experience? What is it like to be something? How does matter become thought?

Writer Marvin Von Renchler excellently summarizes the flaw in the Hard Problem: “Rather than demonstrate a separation between physical processes and subjective experience, it is assumed.”

Biologically everything we observe points to continuity: increasingly complex systems of memory, integration, and self-referential processing emerging stepwise under selection pressures. There is no clear place for something non-physical to be introduced.

Von Renchler concludes that, “The “hard problem” is less an unsolved mystery and more a framing issue, a mismatch between philosophical categories and how evolved systems actually work.”

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The framing of the hard problem of conciousness itself is already flawed for these reasons: miscategorizing the conciousness or mind as a system, just like the brain is a system. The brain is system, the mind is a property. There can be no difference in the mind without a difference in the brain. And this:

The mind (or consciousness) is a property of the brain. Proponents of the gap between brain and consciousness never for once demonstrated the existence of this gap, but they talk as if both are physical (!) things that need bridging. Likewise, no philosopher had successfully bridged this imagined gap while ignoring what’s really the story here.

Instead of changing our way of seeing the mind in relation to the brain, we maintained that there’s a gap. (Let’s stop this) Let’s focus on the mind: if it’s a property, how did it become a property? To answer this, it requires both a shock and an absorber.

The shock is, the mind is an illusion. The brain, having uncountable dynamic neural networks, sends electrical and chemical signals to the rest of our body that give us the ability to form thoughts. Consciousness is not formed as a whole or nothing property. Instead each brain cell has to come together as a neural assemblage to create a neural network to create a spark of recognition, such as seeing the color red. But each brain cell would not create ‘consciousness’ without the networks. And only with enough neural networks that pictures happens in the macro level. The speed is the speed of light.

So, what we consider as consciousness on the macro level is actually the “pixels” in the micro level (where, separately, a pixel would not make sense, but collectively a complete picture emerges) . Hence, an illusion.

The absorber: Philosophers, instead, call this phenomenon as emergent. The mind is an emergent property. Emergent properties depend on a system or structure. Consciousness remains stable so long as the structure remains the same. Change the brain, and we change the consciousness. (Not vice versa) An example for comparison: if we could separate each individual molecule of water, each molecule would not look fluid and would not feel wet. But collect enough of these molecules and we get the liquid, wet property. Wetness is an emergent property.

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I can’t buy that.
Everything you experience is done through your body.
Pretty near everything your brain receives is pre-processed through the senses, then body, then handed to the brain, which its constantly communicating back to the body.

Sense + Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) = awareness to consciousness to introspection
(within a spectrum, each to their own type. And it started with single cells, that can’t be denied anymore.)

Your gut thinks along, as do your gonads, but to mention the two most important impingements upon the “mind”. Mind will never be found in the Brain because it is an exquisitely tuned whole body emanation.

Have you ever listened to a full orchestra belting out music that touches your emotions? Where does that music come from? The Conductor? What about the instruments?

It seems incoherent to play that game because we all know it’s a holistic experience with every unit needing to be on-point, or the whole suffers.

Doesn’t it make more rational sense to heed the suggestion of Dr. Mark Solms who suggests the most profitable way to understand our mind, is as the inside reflection of our body communicating with itself?

The kicker is science is describing those physical details of our thinking processes in ever more detail - YET, philosophers sniff and tell us, that is the easy problem and uninteresting.

They’d rather sped our time, treasure and efforts searching for some Holy Grail.

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Sorry that’s the sort of self indulgent mysterianism, I don’t like. The manipulation of physical scale - in a just so manner, focus on such argument.

I’m an Earth Centrist, my lessons come for nature, not from super smart people with too much time on their hands and to much incentive for pursuing the producing the provocative, rather than the constructive.

I like to keep it simple,
The illusions are the one’s we create in our own brains.

And we perceive the same physical reality, each according to our specific form and life style. There are billions of living creatures out there, not a one of them is dumb, and all live by the same rules - and each one is the center of their own universe. That is something deep and worth chewing.

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So like a Whisper Game where a clear word is first uttered then it gets passed on within a chain until at the end they reveal how warped the word has become? :thinking:

There’s no manipulation of physical scale.

So you agree? :thinking:

And you agree again? :thinking:

So my conclusion is, you agree with what I posted?

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True. But only the physical details. Never the details of subjective experience. What are the physical properties or characteristics of consciousness? Science can discuss and measure the properties and characteristics of particles (mass, charge, spin), structures (height, density, weight, etc.), and processes (speed, direction, x per minute, etc.). Science is unable to say anything about consciousness.

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Sure the scaling of quantum weirdness onto our macroscopic biological scale of reality, is an example of what I’m talking about.

(I was probably off topic even bringing it up here - sorry)

While I can agree with those two items, the devil is in the details. I reread your comment,

I don’t understand what you mean with that.

Neither does this make sense.

To my mind to understand consciousness we need to start with understanding the reality of how single celled creatures need to distinguish between outside and inside, etc., etc.. (Check out Arthur Reber)

It may be trivial to this discussion, but, I have never heard of any biological signals that travel near the speed of light.

I can’t make any sense out of that.
Consciousness is about navigating the physical environment and subconsciousness is about navigating the body’s homeostasis needs.
It’s basically about observing, interaction, and feedback. How does that reality feed into your “pixels level” conception?

Okay I can agree with that on the face of it.

But “change” is a nonstop reality of biological systems, so I don’t understand what you are trying to imply with this.

Consciousness is a product of our senses, body and brain working with exquisite timing. so that sentence* sounds like a non sequitur to me.

Does any of that make sense?

Thanks for the dialogue

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@Citizenschallenge

Thank you for your response. I’m not going to discuss this based on your comments because there’s just too much to explain. And I can’t defend a view against your view because we’re just not on the same field of thought.

But I suggest that you read up on philosophy of mind, neuroscience, perception. It will help if you are going to continue to engage with other members.

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What is brain/blood?

Brain is an organ, but that is not what brain is, that’s one of brain’s facets. I, seriously, claim brain and blood are both miracles.

I tend to support that brain is a consequence(something in the realm of two things).

The only divine in my version of miracle, are anything that produces things like brain and blood, such as the sky and clouds. There is no God/no religion involved in this idea.

If not miracle, what is brain/blood?

(I prefer a miracle attributed to wonder rather than divine).

(Look. I’m loose for words. I could get the wrong view because miracle is defined as with divine. It’s not my intention. It literally looks and fits that they are miracles).

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I have been reading up (and musing) on the philosophy of mind my entire life, admittedly not from an academic setting, it was while engaged in an active introspective life.

I’ve found too often philosophizers, (especially regarding the slippery topic of “consciousness”), show little regard for the most fundamental observation that can be made about our human condition, namely Appreciating the Physical Reality ~ Human divide. Creating a mash up that missed the object of consciousness, which is the inside reflection of a biologically evolved creature communicating with itself, in order to navigate its ever changing unforgiving physical reality.

Without a sense of Self, survival is impossible! Be you germ, worm, or human and everything inbetween

For an example of philosophical failing - that philosophical search for Mind within our brain - as if our body were an externality to be dismissed like so much irrelevance. It’s simply disconnected. A dead end.

Then I get told philosophy doesn’t do biology and that I’m off topic.

Okay, if that’s the prevailing attitude, what good is philosophy since consciousness and sensation and being in the moment are all the result of biological activity to begin with?

Philosophy was born out of God Fearing religious thinking and sure seems to cling to our inner need for a sense of human exceptionalism and next to godliness, (whether out there, or even better us becoming God and master of the world ourselves).

As a 71 year, life long old nature lover, who has been struggling with understanding the Self and how it fits into Earth’s reality - and made some significant headway thanks to my embrace of learning about Earth’s Evolution via science - I want to discuss this. But find others just as soon slam the door on it. That I don’t understand.

Elephant@ If traditional philosophers can’t figure out how to embrace fundamental evolutionary biological realities, which is how I read your comment, then what good is it?

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Poetically I have no problem seeing aspect of life as miracles, that is Earth’s and evolutionary-biology’s miracles.

Which is why I prefer learning from the amazing down to Earth reality that science has been revealing to us.

For example you can find a list of excellent scientist authors that follows the progression of complexity at the end of: Considering Things Science Can Explain About Consciousness

Thanks for your response.

499

I think statements like this is what makes me want think that you and I are talking on two different field of thoughts. If you want to be religious in viewing the mind and body and the external world, by all means open a thread and frame your argument that way. But this thread is in the Philosophy of Mind category. So, it is for the benefit of the members to talk within the framework of the Philosophy of Mind (and btw, we do admit evidence or support from other fields such as neuroscience, so it is not correct to say that the Philosophy of Mind framework dismisses all other school of information).

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What’s religious about senses + body + brain + interaction (interior & exterior) = awareness to consciousness scale?

Conversely, suggesting that the brain must be the seat and source of consciousness - smacks of religion to me. Considering that the entire point of a creature’s brain is to enable its body to navigate an unforgiving fast paced physical reality. While it is the body doing all the actual interacting with and experiencing of the living world.

That’s why Nick Lane’s symphony analogy works so well for me - that is science at work, not religious thinking.

Thanks.

501

There is a strong desire among philosophers, I think, to reduce everything, including humanity and all its foibles, to a simple mathematical and binary YES or NO. There is little appetite, that I have seen, for anything deeper. But I share some of your interests here, if no-one else does. :slightly_smiling_face:

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502

Ok, I will indulge you.

So then would it be possible that an artificial brain could be a replacement? There have been brain dead people that must be disconnected from life support. Could these people benefit from an artificial brain?

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Sorry Elephant,
I’m not much into silly and just so stories.

Never had a safety net under me, so I’ve got a way more serious demeanor than many.

We live one day at a time, dancing on a sword’s edge, I’ve made peace with death long time ago.

Also I have a Living Will. I’d rather be butchered and shared with the living who might benefit from my good health body parts. So I can’t relate to your dilemma and don’t want to play.

Still, thanks for the conversation.