Nagel’s “The Core of ‘Mind and Cosmos’" through an Earth Centrist lens

Philosophy of Mind
41

I don’t think so, because I have no understanding of what you actually mean with “primitive mind” within us. All I can imagine is that it’s metaphor for something. I simply don’t get, without you adding more context.

It only looks like a claim to me.
What full functional model?

That was simply referring to your “primitive Mind” - and not beyond.

I’d have to reject that construction and replace it with our mind is the reflection of the inside of our biological evolved body/brain communicating with itself, as it navigates life - interior and exterior.

That’s where the science comes in, and what they’ve discovered is amazing and mind blowing.

42

Not sure why you’re struggling with this.

From what I can tell you need to get a better understanding of the brain. At the least you need to understand the basic parts of the brain, the basic functions of each of those parts and how the various parts interact with each other. You also need to understand how the brains of mammmals developed from an evolutionary standpoint.

Take the limbic system for example. From the Cleveland Clinic:
“The limbic system is one of the oldest structures of your brain. It produces natural instincts that your ancestors used to survive by triggering behaviors needed to:
Eat and drink.
Reproduce.
Care for young.
React to surroundings (fight or flight response).”
Note that it’s one of the oldest structures. It is present in all mammals. It is sometimes referred to as the primitive brain since its basic structures were formed early in the evolution of mammals. For that matter, some of the structures go back much earlier than that.

You also seem to be struggling with the concept of a functional model. No doubt you are at least somewhat familiar with Freud’s functional model of the mind geared toward understanding human behavior. The Id basically maps to the limbic system. It is sometimes referred to as the primitive mind. As I said, it’s an abstraction.

The funtional model that I presented is geared toward understanding consciousness. As I said, it’s an abstraction. The term “primitive mind” also basically maps to the limbic system.

With the above in mind reevaluate the following:

43

A little confusion here, I understood you implying primitive mind within humans,
now your writing about primitive mind as in other creatures? Okay.

I was simply trying to get more clarity.

Cool.

Nagel and Reber? Can you list those rabbit holes. Not being facetious, I’m wanting to learn more about it. Have an article or such to suggest?

44

Not sure what to make of this. What do you mean “now”? That’s been my position from the beginning. This isn’t at all controversial. It’s well established in evolution. It’s well established in psychology. Neuroscience supports it.

quote="Citizenschallenge, post:43, topic:2080"

Nagel and Reber? Can you list those rabbit holes. Not being facetious, I’m wanting to learn more about it. Have an article or such to suggest?

/quote

There is no hard problem of consciousness. Nagel and Reber both went down rabbit holes in trying to resolve a problem that doesn’t exist. Even worse they “resolved” it via wild speculation.

You don’t seem to have kept track of our discussion. Try reading back through it.

45

Great essay. Thanks for posting.

46

You left out everything important!
I have to wonder why do you want to reduce this to a barroom brawl?

Isn’t philosophy about examining the unexamined?
Picking at our bellybutton until it hurts?
Self-absorbed and self-serving is an observation - pick it apart - don’t get offended, put words in my mouth, then slam the door.

Allow me to start at the beginning.

Every biological creature is its own center of the universe - any creature that was not self-absorbed and self-serving was not going survive. Meaning it’s a pretty fair conclusion to assume that self-serving attitude was built into our DNA.
Could call it natural.

Then Abraham (and his descendants) came along and practically codified it, by declaring we were God’s special creatures and that God placed Earth under “our” dominion. Because Earth was created for us and our needs and desires, … that is, our clan, not those other humans out there. As the Catholic empire made clear.

Then something happened post WWII ('50s, '60s) and science (the only human endeavor truly dedicated to fact based honesty and rational learning) recognized that humans were getting close to crossed a terminal boundary, Our numbers, our scientific know how and technological abilities, our rate of consuming resources, our exponential rise in expectations, and the trajectory of damaging and out’n out destroying Earth’s life supporting biosphere and other creatures - was reaching untenable extremes that Earth would not be able to support.

{You may ask what are all other human institutions build upon - self interest, with honesty being a sliding scale optional thing, depending on desires and political circumstances.}

None of that up there is nice, it’s about as ugly as it gets, but it’s how it is. Get all the offended you want Wayfarer, doesn’t change the history we grew out of.

Wave modern marvels at me and I’m unimpressed because no one has the cojones to discuss the flip-side - all we want is to be present to the wonder. While going out of our way to ignore and lie about and dismiss the costs and damages resulting from our latest greatest projects or products.

No one knew it but humanity’s greatest challenge came during the last half of the twentieth century - when it was time to grow up and face up to our unbridled self-absorption and self-serving nature - to gain a little maturity, a little moderation* - a little incorporating the rest of Earth flora and fauna and geophysical systems into our heart and sphere of responsibility (as family members). ( * Dare I say a little humility in the face of Earth’s majesty and appreciation that she created this cornucopia of life we were born into - and us in fact.)

But the collective we could not muster the interest or Will, to grow into the maturity, (that a healthy future) required because of our new mastery over nature demanded. Not even, . . .

Instead we turned our government over to sociopaths who want to destroy it and who are incapable of seeing past their own immediate self-interest - and I’m the bad guy for daring to notice and care.

48

As in, nicely explaining your thoughts. Then I got carried away. The more I repeat your words in my mind, the less I understand them.

I don’t think it changed my outlook

As I understand the cupellation of Chalmers’ Hard Problem is:

“Why any biological processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all?”

(If anyone can improve or correct on that, please do.)

I couldn’t follow your labels, later looking around the web for more on Primative Mind didn’t help get closer.

Mine is an anatomical appreciation for my body/brain~mind and when I think of its various systems, I appreciate they must communicate with themselves, plus with other organs and systems. While keeping the brain informed. So I already think in terms of an interwoven organic Russian doll sort of set up.

With introspective consciousness on top of that primitive foundation. Clear boundaries don’t exist, with sleep time floating through its various levels being a great example.

Something else I think worth bringing up - beyond consciousness is a continuum built upon preexisting complexity - Is that consciousness is a nonstop interaction.

Without something to bound off of I’d think it disappears. At least seems to me my consciousness is always in regards to something else, even when that ‘else’ is components of myself.

If we put aside the fact that I may come across as an ignorant, re formal philosophy, and uncouth - the fact remains each of our minds inhabits a physical biological evolved body that’s the product of billions of years worth of progressive (even if at a drunkard’s wobbly walk) development.

How can we hope to understand our consciousness by dismissing our evolving biology reality and how that has molded what’s happening inside of each of us - as an uninteresting Easy Problem, worst irrelevant to understanding why we feel what we feel.

Furthermore, I can’t count how many times, consciousness gets discussed within a vacuum toward the reality of the act of consciousness being all about constant interaction - with split second adjustments to our behavior depending on the feedback we receive.

Even how creatures evolve, that is all about keeping up with changing environments. Endless feedback loops upon feedback loops.

Bringing it back to the Hard Problem,

A) Starting at the beginning with the tapestry, matrix of physics, atoms are constantly interacting with fellow atoms. That is their milieu.

B) Atomic complexity happens interactions happen all the time. With increases interactions driving increasing interactions - it’s simple physics.

C) Krebs cycle, a small subset of molecules evolves to capture and harness energy and electricity (known to possess formidable motive force) into a small a subset of molecules.
Creating potentials that never existed before.

D) By and by eons of increasing complexity happens hand in hand with increasing environmental complexity. With increasing complexity comes increasing challenges.

E) Up to this period there was no call for consciousness, nothing to evaluate, no decisions to be made. Then increasing complexity happened.

D) Individual molecular complexity and components evolved into agents, independent molecular agents learned to become communities with others and learned to specialize.

This is where communication, information processing, command structures, with a body that had something to be commanded, then to do as commanded and successfully accomplish instruction. All random, no planning.

Pragmatic answer to the Hard Problem?

E) Every different molecular component had an inherent physical/quantum identity and feel - it had no way of being aware of it, but that doesn’t change the cumulative quantum physics of the reality unfolding!
It felt like something to be something - an awareness of that feeling is another matter.

F) By and by, Evolution arrived at the Eukaryotic cell, a whole new program took over, that quite literally took Life out of the slime and into amazing environments and a global biosphere with organisms and new orders of complexity that are frankly beyond grasping. I can only stand in awe.

(Ediacaran and Ordovician, … and beyond.)

Here’s a good place to look for the origins of “consciousness”.

Why did consciousness need to be connected with feeling?

Because feeling is what puts “skin” into the game.
The game of life wasn’t simply a neat algorithm, it was one thrilling/unforgiving encounter after another. Challenges appeared and decisions needed to be made in a hurry. It required real effort to survive, resulting in more skills for the survivors. Blank stares and hesitation failed. Motivation was born because, stuff that had skin in the game won, while the zombies who didn’t have that “right stuff” and became supper. It’s not complicated.

What’s wrong with that for the origins of consciousness?

Why did consciousness need to be connected with feeling? Because feeling is what puts “skin” into the game. The game of life wasn’t a neat algorithm, it was an effort demanding unforgiving encounter after another.

I’ve been working with Claude.ai lately, it’s an obsequious little dweeb, great at doing research, fact checking, and wants to make me feel good. But I wouldn’t trust it to cross the street alone, it’s a total loser when it comes to grasping nuance. When in real life it’s awareness of nuance that keeps us alive.

Meaning I don’t care if Chalmers can imagine it, my bet is, his zombies could not survive upon this planet beyond his own lifetime, thus making them lousy models for understanding why each of us has a sense of Self.

Would anyone care to argue against the current expert biological consensus that the best way to understand Consciousness, is as a reflection of the interior of our body Communicating with itself, as it’s dealing with life, (interior and exterior)?

Where are its flaws?

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The biological consensus is incomplete. It risks treating the Hard Problem of Consciousness (the problem of “manifestation”) as already solved once the associated physiological feedback loops have been identified. The “manifestation” of a world (appearing from some perspective) raises a distinct problem: what kind of relational organisation constitutes that perspective? This question is not answered by even the most detailed account of how organisms self-regulate while dealing with life.

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50

The “unseen hard problem” is the problem of the physical object, AKA the problem of perception.

I see philosophy not as speculation but — more than anything — the excavation of as yet unquestioned prejudices. The “delusion” currently dominant is that the average theorist has a grip on the concept of the “physical.” It’s this delusion that “the physical is easy and obvious” that “causes” the “mystery” of “consciousness” as something “other than” the not-yet-understood “physical.”

In all of this there is a forgetting, a regression. Genuine progress on this issue was made within the tradition, but that progress has been forgotten. Not altogether, of course. But many conversations on forums like these and on Reddit operate in the “darkness” of “presentism.” A few authors are studied. The “space” of possible approaches is tiny. Much stronger old books, which provide a much larger space, are ignored. For instance, Mach and Avenarius are extremely relevant to this issue, but almost no one knows anything about them. I was lucky to find Mach in an old anthology.

What do we have instead ? A tacitly theological postulation of a trans-empirical “true world” has obscured “the primacy of perception.” The word “real” gets associated with the range of function. In other words, f(t_0) is understood as the determinate configuration in absolute space of an updated version of “atoms and void” at universal-time t_0. While some try to work in GR and QM, most still enact a sense of Newtonian absolute space and absolute time. The notions of space and time are (madly, humorously) taken for granted as “easy.” If you press someone to say what they mean, you get frustrated handwaving. For this is “obvious” and yet — the handwaving would suggest — ineffable.

Because perception is presumed to be “internal,” this configuration of absolute “external” stuff becomes the “theologized” physical. While the ideology is secular on the surface, the monologic confesses its origin. Moreover the human is understood as fundamentally a theorist — a spectator. This is a further flight from our primate basis. For all the piety directed at science and a facing of evolution, the Cartesian core is intact. The “mysterious emergent stuff” is not plausibly or easily denied, for this is “experience.” It’s “absurd” to “deny consciousness.” On the other hand, it is not seen as absurd — though it should be — to divorce the physical object from its qualitative pragmatic presence, which is always for a particular primate.

A genuinely empirical approach starts from what scientific knowledge tacitly depends on, and to work outward from that. Instead empirical analogies ( models) are “transfigured” to play the role of metaphysical (non-empirical) theses. In other words, earnest people accidentally lose themselves in “woo woo.”

51

Yet we think and we act - and we know we are products of this planet’s evolving biosphere and kin to all other animals. Even though many want to deny it.

But rather than embracing our biological reality, seems we prefer to stake out our numinous being.

Then I look around at the world we’ve created for our children.

Then I wonder about the parade of the ill considered choices that got us here.

I also wonder why it’s more fun to follow the Why question beyond the limits our understanding - rather than doing the best we can with the information at hand.

I ask, if it’s too complex for our petty minds to grasp, does that mean it does not exist?

52

We are largely enculturated to turn a blind eye to the fact that what we are is not exhausted by a third-person description.

The fact of the first-person perspective is precisely the issue under investigation.

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53

Meaning the fact of first-person consciousness is in question?

54

The relationship between the first-person perspective and our third-person descriptions is itself the issue under investigation. And the methodological assumption that third-person description is exhaustive (an assumption that is neither neutral nor self-evident) is hampering that investigation.

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55

What happened here? Instead of addressing my latest post, you responded to a post from about about three weeks ago to which you had previously responded.

56

What anything is is not exhausted by any description.

What possible way of investigating your perspective other than by means of living it could there be?

57

I was trying to expose the unquestioned priority entailed in taking our third-person descriptions as the starting point for the investigation.

58

Surely it is uncontroversial that some aspects of the mind, consciousness and the self can be investigated by empirical (which is what I take you to mean by “third person”) methods. On the other hand, is it not also uncontroversial that no one but you can know how it feels to inhabit your perspective, that is to be you?

59

What engages me is the relationship between these two “entry points.” The first-person perspective is a “view from somewhere,” and our third-person descriptions seem like an attempt to draw together a plurality of such views in a way that converges on a “view from nowhere.” I have misgivings about the assumption that such a view exists, and if it doesn’t, then what guides that convergence? Is this something you’ve engaged with yourself?

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60

But it isn’t that straightforward is it?

2. The “Limbic System” Isn’t Actually an Isolated System

  • The Old View: The limbic system is a self-contained, hardwired emotional circuit.
  • The Modern Correction: Many neuroscientists, such as Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, argue that the “limbic system” is an anatomical fiction. There is no clean line separating where the “emotional brain” ends and the “thinking brain” begins. Brain structures are not locked into single psychological tasks. The amygdala, for instance, triggers during fear, but it also fires during hunger, novelty, and positive excitement. The brain operates as a singular, highly integrated, predictive network, not as three independent brains battling each other. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

At least I have a better conception of your “primitive brain” conception and frankly it seems somewhat outdated in light of modern science.

Sorry that doesn’t work for me.

The brain myth that won’t die | Lisa Feldman Barrett

I would love for you to enunciate the rabbit hole that you see Reber going down. Would you please?

There’s some truth to that. lots of stuff going on, and most of it sending me into another direction for a while, until it gets overwhelming and I need to pull back and let it process. Plus this is a fairly active forum, step off the boat for a moment and it’s down stream from where I’m standing. Plus sometime I reread too much and pick up on older comments - in fact, I’ve found myself deleting a few potential comments because thread has gone too far. Sorry for the confusion, I am a bit of chaotic character, doing my best to with a crowded life. So I appreciate your indulgence.

61

I have never liked the term “view from nowhere” because it makes no sense. “View from everywhere” or “view from anywhere” seem more apt. In the human context I think “view from anywhere” is most appropriate since we cannot be omniscient.

We can never achieve a view from everywhere, but the view from anywhere (at least the human anywhere) is what I think science is about, and it is constantly growing. I think what guides the convergence that constitutes the ever-evolving view from anywhere is observation, feedback and experiment.