Where we have no physical data, evidence or causes, but just effects, isn’t it the point where we must apply our inferencing and reasoning?
Your statement seems to imply that there are occasions when our mind works without our control over it. Correct?
Interesting. Of course, the whole point of the embodied or enactive approach is that the in-principle workings of the mind cannot be isolated from the “real world complications” of having a body that acts in a world. The principles of how the mind works are principles of engagement. The complexity is not a veil, or a confusion of the issue—it’s what defines it.
If this is right—and I think it is—it’s clear that your position rests on a presupposition, namely that the principles of how the mind works can be abstracted away or isolated from actions, situations, and all the complexity you find too messy. But since this is the view you are defending, your prior commitment to an internalist view makes it inevitable that you will find embodied cognition unconvincing. Which is a nice way of saying you’re begging the question 
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I don’t see why there can be no isolation from “real world” implications. We see for instance direct electrical stimulation to the brain that often recreate “real world” experience without there being something in the world that causes that experience.
Granted, this approach is limited, poorly understood and hard to interpret, but it’s a starting point. We should first attempt to understand how a single quale, say, blueness or sweetness is interpreted by the mind, but it is formidably difficult.
Another thing about “embodied” cognition, why call it that? It sounds as if the mind were not already embodied always, it’s not as if you can stimulate a mind absent a brain from a human being.
The hard part, which I do not have good reply for, is that I am isolating one part of the rich tradition of the philosophy of mind and saying that other approaches can be misleading. But I am in no position to deny other approaches, they have merit. Obviously, I need to think some more on how to render this consistent.
By all means. Watcha got?
Our mind certainly works without our control at times. Ever get a song stuck in your head, drive you crazy but you just can’t stop it? Another idea is expressed by comedian Louis CK. He hates the N-word. He’s not talking about the word itself. He means he hates when people say “The N-word.” because they are putting the word into your head. If they’re going to put the word in your head, they should say it themselves. And then we are continually getting sensory input, which often makes us think certain things.
Classic objection! I don’t think it works. When electrical stimulation recreates an experience of, say, seeing a face or hearing a voice, why do we call it a recreation ? It’s because it only makes sense as an experience in virtue of its relation to the kinds of engagement we normally have with faces and voices in the world. The stimulation doesn’t create a self-contained, worldless experience out of nothing. It hijacks sensorimotor patterns that were formed through embodied interaction. Such examples are in my opinion paradigmatically parasitic.
The fact that we can recognize the stimulated experience as an experience of something (a face or a voice) shows that its intelligibility is borrowed from the world. Without the condition of world-engagement, the stimulation would produce nothing recognizable as experience at all.
So I think your objection, though it’s a good one on the face of it, actually shows the opposite of what you’re arguing for—that we are engaged with the world first, that this is the starting point.
Basically I think these two opposing views are incommensurable. Some like to begin “in the head,” like Descartes; others begin in the world. These approaches don’t compete on the same turf with direct argument—this would require one side to accept the starting point of the other and thus lose immediately—but rather according to which approach seems to fit with everything else we know. The question isn’t which one is provably right but which one leaves fewer explanatory loose ends, or which one dissolves more problems rather than multiplying them. It’s more like shifting paradigms than outright refutation.
Your prior commitments are doing all the work here. The concept of a “single quale” is assumed, but why should we accept that experience comes in chunks? To me, it’s an ongoing engagement, a structured whole that results from action in the world.
And “interpreted by the mind” assumes a situation in which raw inputs are interpreted by an inner arbiter. That is a paradigm which, I believe, grew in the early modern period and which we can now see was tied to its historical situatedness—that is, we can see why it made sense at the time, but we don’t need to keep on believing it.
The fact that your project seems “formidably difficult” might not indicate that given the time and the technical means, we might just crack it with enough effort. It might indicate that it’s misconceived.
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Kant explicitly classifies noumena as intelligible objects. After all, it is through the intellect that we determine the reality of the noumena. The issue though, is that the human intellect is restricted in its apprehension of the noumena, by the conditions of sensibility. These are the a priori intuitions of space and time.
So it is not the case that the noumena necessarily does not consist of intelligible structures, it is the case that the human intellect cannot properly understand these intelligible structures because it is limited in its capacity. This limitation is the fact that it relies on sensation and the a priori intuitions of space and time in its apprehension of the noumena.
This is quite important because it’s a continuity of the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition, which recognizes a separation between the intelligible objects which are proper to the human intellect (abstractions), and the supposed independent Forms, which are themselves intelligible objects. Aquinas, who builds on the principles of Aristotle’s On The Soul, recognizes that because the human intellect is dependent on the material body, in its activity of intellection, it is not capable of grasping the independent Forms directly. Dependence on the material body is understood as a deficiency, and this produces the complex issue of the passive and active intellect.
Yes we recreate. But that’s the point, as a matter of principle the objects out there do no matter in so far as the mind needing them for it to work. I am familiar with Raymond Tallis’ arguments, yours sound much like his. It is a good argument and necessary to combat neuromania, the idea that we can get rid of the mind and focus on the brain. That’s not what I am implying.
Mine is more like a brain-in-a-vat, if we knew enough about the brain we could recreate the exact same world and we wouldn’t know how to tell the difference. We do not know enough yet and maybe will never know fully, but I don’t see how this can be argued against as a matter of principle.
The issue with the quale if subtle, it makes more sense to understand something relatively simple, than it would be to understand how we interpret a house or another person. We can mimic religious experience for instance, we have trouble copying simple things, like the taste of chocolate for instance.
But the mind might be too entangled to that. If by inner arbiter you have in mind something like a Cartesian theatre, no, I don’t believe that. But my question then would be to you, what do we gain in embodied cognition that is rendered impossible by taking an internalist approach?
My argument about stimuilated recreation works here too, but more deeply. First, that the BIV scenario can be conceived is no guarantee that it’s metaphysically possible. Which “world” are you talking about? How do you know that such a brain could experience this world, having had no engagement with it? I mean this in principle. It’s not that it’s hard, but that it might be in principle impossible, because the experience of a world might just be what emerges from embodied engagement with that world. There is little reason to think an isolated brain with carefully crafted inputs could reach that state.
The BIV scenario assumes an isomorphism between neural states and world-states. But if experience is enacted, not represented, then the very idea of recreating the world in the brain is incoherent. The brain doesn’t contain a model, but is rather part of a system in which a world emerges through action. A BIV couldn’t enact anything and would just have patterns, with no purchase on reality.
Second, like I say, what is this “world” anyway, the one your scientists are trying to build an experience of with their inputs and stimulations? In my view it is meaningful only because we, the conceivers, already have the world. Thus the BIV scanario is again parasitic, this time on the experience of the experimenters and the philosophers who think throught the thought experiment.
Third, even if the brain couldn’t tell the difference, that doesn’t mean there is no difference. One world would be artificially created and causally isolated, the other is the world we actually inhabit, in which a BIV is being stimulated. More importantly, the BIV thought experiment doesn’t prove that isolating a brain is the best way to understand experience as we live it. The experience we’re trying to understand is meaningful, i.e., it is of a world, it is shaped by action, it carries a history of engagement. A BIV’s experience, if it had any at all, would lack all of that.
Many who share your view deny they’re Cartesian, because it’s unfashionable. But I think it remains saturated with Cartesianism:
- The mind as an inner realm that can in principle be isolated
- Experience as something that happens in here while the world is out there
- Sensation as raw data to be interpreted
- The body as a kind of vehicle or input-device (or a sensory pod, as someone on the old PF used to say) for the real action (which is internal)
- The mind as where it’s at, everything else being secondary and accidental
This is stuck in the world of Descartes, much as you might deny it.
Whole books have been written to answer that question. I don’t think I can do a good job of answering it. In a tiny nutshell, we gain a way to make experience and meaning intelligible, not as a mysterious property of inner representations, but as a feature of living, acting bodies in a shared world. Internalism can’t give us that.
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But if intelligibility is something we discover in things, mustn’t the things be outside understanding?
For understanding, the thing understood is a representation of whatever sensation has passed along, so intelligible structure belongs to that representation, yes.
It is a construction of the understanding, called cognition. It follows as a matter of course, if understanding has succeeded there is a cognition, the construction itself is the measure of its truth.
When it’s all said and done, understanding succeeds when that which it thinks in the relation of concepts, conforms a posteriori to the intuition of the thing appearing to the senses, re: the phenomenon, on the one hand, which is called experience, or, conforms a priori to the resident experience in consciousness, which is called memory, on the other.
It is the difference between, for any thing given to the senses, first being learned as knowledge, thereafter being recalled from knowledge. It explains why we only have to learn a thing once and not every time it presents itself.
Simply the application of the categories, in the quantity of related conceptions. He who understands more comprehensively has simply related more conceptions to each other, from which his cognition will be of greater intellectual specificity. The guy being told? All he’s gotta do is remember the words.
It is impossible to cognize a thing with a single conception, insofar as a single conception cannot be a relation, and, the schemata of possible conceptions ready to be related is virtually innumerable.
Exactly right, as speculative metaphysics theorizes. Same for existence; existence is philosophically uninteresting insofar as without it there’s nothing for the intellect to work with empirically, and by the same token, without intelligibility there wouldn’t be anything for the intellect to work with at all.
Right or wrong is irrelevant. When all that’s being attempted is to affirm or deny, the proper duality is valid/invalid.
There ya go again, making Nature the fault-bearer. If only Nature’d cooperated we’d be judgmentally error- free.
What is the recalcitrance of the object but a judgement predicated on some logically complementary quality, re: receptivity? So it is logic by which the system realizes a difference, a temporally successive cognition not congruent with an antecedent cognition of some single representation. Works just as well for a complete difference in things appearing to the senses, in that it is logic which shows us incongruency, but not in a contradiction. In this way we can equally tell the changes in a plurality of things as they relate to each other, and, we can tell the changes in singular things as they relate to us. And we arrive at a logical system both necessary and sufficient.
But not perfect.
One determination (“lake”), one determination (“not lake”). Priviledge the second by change in conceptual relation over time, which just is change in experiential content. Simply said….we now know what isn’t.
Yes, by his standards.
To avoid his position, I only require a different one. To refute his position I require a logically successful argument, which may or may not have any affect at all on the confidence he has regarding the position he holds. I mean…..look at us, right here, right now. You and Michael, elsewhere. It’s what we do, after all.
Oh hell yeah it does. Epistemic normativity is a mouth full of nothing, with which I may safely say I want nothing to do. But that’s fine, all in the name of progress and all.
But you first asked, and to which I answered, what makes a judgement better, not correct. To the epistemological question I answer not so much correct as valid. To the aesthetic question of better I answer by persuasion or conviction, depending on how much better I feel about a judgement.
Now, to me all that proves is the inherent natural dualism of the human being. Correctness relates to what is, feeling relates to what ought to be.
Not for nothing, but I was just thinking about this ironic idiom—a thing you’re working on “not cooperating”.
Cooperation and competition are the poles of the payoff structure of games, where the decisions of the players are interdependent. We don’t usually think of the world as making decisions in this sense, but Sellars (in PSIM) makes that beguiling suggestion that the idea of natural law derives from the idea of a person (before the disenchantment of nature, when the mountains and rivers and so on were persons) who is stuck in their ways, what we call “predictable”.
The structure of inquiry might look something like this then: the world has a somewhat rigid policy for how it will respond to my actions, but I don’t know what it is; I try different sorts of actions (observations, predictions, experiments) to see what it will do, with the goal of understanding what its policy is. It doesn’t have the full payoff structure of a game because it’s hard to say what the world gets out of being investigated (reduction in free energy, I guess) but for my side, the highest payoff is when my predictions succeed—the world is cooperating—and the lowest is when they don’t, because I don’t understand why the world chose to do what it did, and it feels like it’s fighting me.
This might be a slightly more useful way to think about inquiry than “putting Nature to the question” because Nature isn’t always inclined to answer our questions. That’s alright though, because actions speak louder than words, and so far as the game is concerned, it’s behavior that counts.
You’re right that Kant isn’t saying we invent or project structure in some psychological sense — the categories are transcendental conditions of any possible experience, not subjective impositions. I should have been more precise in my wording.
But I don’t think this actually changes the problem I was raising. Whether we call the categories “contributed by us” or “constitutive conditions of rational cognition,” Kant still restricts their valid application to the domain of possible experience. They’re not psychological habits, agreed — but they’re still our conditions for encountering anything at all, not features we can affirm of reality as it is independently of those conditions.
So the question remains: if the intelligible structure we discover in inquiry reflects the conditions under which anything can appear to us, rather than anything about what’s actually there — then what explains the fact that inquiry progressivley converges, self-corrects, and yields increasingly adequate understanding? The success of science, for instance, isn’t just that we keep having well-structured experiences. Its that our theories become better — more predictive, more unified, more precise. That trajectory calls out for explanation, and I dont see how Kant’s framework can provide one without quietly helping itself to the very thing it officially rules out.
This is an interesting suggestion, but I want to flag that I think it’s in tension with the Kantian position.
Kant very much does maintain a structural distinction between the contribution of the subject (the categories, the forms of intuition) and what is given from the side of the object (the manifold of sensation). The whole architecture of the first Critique depends on this. It seems that you’re now suggesting that intelligibility belongs to some prior unity where “subject and object arise together” — that’s a move I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to, but its not really a Kantian move.
And more importantly — if intelligibility genuinely belongs to the meeting of mind and world, then we’re no longer saying that structure is exclusively a condition imposed by us on the domain of possible experience. We’re saying something more like: reality is inherently intelligible, and cognition is the activity through which that intelligibility gets articulated. Which is actually much closer to a position I would endorse, than to Kant’s position
So I guess I’d want to ask: are you defending Kant’s specific framework here, or are you developing something beyond it? Because if its the latter, we might have less disagreement than it seems.
How is that stereotypical? History is pretty much built on how we tried to explain something and the failure of doing it created everything from religion to atrocities in the name of some bias. We’re still seeing it, in all things yet explained, people attribute all kinds of fantasy in order to emotionally deal with the gap between the known and unknown.
For me, the explanations comes first, and after that I’m ready to form a sense of meaning in the relation between me and the thing explained. I speculate about the unknown, but only as far as extrapolate from the known into the unkown.
And it just gets harder, or maybe even impossible to do that when I’m examining the very thing that is responsible for this examination, it becomes a problematic feedback loop, a form of circular reasoning.
That’s why I require an understanding of how consciousness formed in order to extrapolate at least an abstract shape of what it is I’m trying to comprehend.
I seem to remember this harks back to a discussion we had long ago on the previous forum.
I agree to an extent that science is a first person activity, but I think it ignores that science isn’t just making singular, independent measurements in a vacuum; science is in the relation between many different measurements, and that’s were verification happens, not in the single observation.
The problem with this critique of science is that it looks too heavy at the individual scientist making a first person statement about something he observed; but modern science does not work in this way. Theories are formulated and verified through the web of measurements taken and verification comes from the logic that’s formed out of that web. That logic is not a first person view, it is reality itself ending up in a logic that we can comprehend. The same goes for engineering, as we are able to build things from the scientific theories we’ve concluded; without those theories actually correlating with reality itself, we wouldn’t be able to engineer the things we’ve created.
Our act of categorizing the world for our understanding does not mean it is more or less real than the other. A thermometer is no more real than the heat it measures. And a collection of instruments that have takenmany different measurements all still have a collective information produced that’s not interpretative. A computer assembling those readouts would form, at its core, a mathematical truth that’s not interpretive, but extrapolated. We can have a subjective experience of that result, but the result exists regardless of our experience.
Again, the fact that measurements exist in our instruments and that the extrapolated summary can generate engineered control over nature, bypass subjective interpretation as being more or less real, it’s just one part of reality as a whole.
Phenomenology does not equal anti-realism.
Doesn’t Zahavi just argue that Dennett wrongly describe classical phenomenology? It isn’t really saying that third-person science is impossible or that reality cannot be collectively verified.
In essence, “all observations are first person” do not lead to “nothing can be objectively verified”. It just means that objectivity can only be achieved procedurally, through shared methods and from that collective result.
Phenomenology is about the experience of reality and experience of the knowledge and results we get in science, it’s not in opposition to it.
At most it tries to avoid the external, but it’s here that I think you stretch it too far as you seem to reject the external all together.
What I’m describing is to reach a point of external understanding in order to understand the subjective. If I know my own physical composition, if I understand the way my brain is computing reality, then I get a framework around exploring the phenomenological subjective experience.
I do not reject your phenomenological ideas, only that you draw a very hard line when speaking of consciousness and our experience of it.
And what’s to stop phenomenology to in itself be a first person perspective? With the added risk of rejecting so much of the external that there’s nothing that binds any framework to anything but the individual’s preferences?
No, there has to be some grounding, and what I explained focus on the foundation that helps ground how to describe the subjective experience of consciousness.
If the system is a self-updating automated “reaction machine”, which process new information and adjust approach and response to it, then that is the “thing” that is doing the reading, processing and answering… the experience of this process is that of “someone” doing it, and this “someone” having agency in doing so.
It does not mean that “someone” has that agency.
It is this point I’m trying to make here.
If you were to be put into a machine that makes you live through another person, but you have no control over that person. That you get to feel everything that person feels, physically and mentally; see, smell, taste and touch; a stream of thoughts and ideas, and all of that person’s memories while your own memories are suppressed; basically the full experience of that other person while your own being is suppressed and ignored…
Would you be the one reading? Even if you feel like it’s you doing it, it is the “other person”. You are only suspended in a perfect illusion of being that other person.
And it’s this experience that I’m talking about when it comes to our consciousness. The system, the process and operation of our consciousness is just a form of cold computational machine. But the operation of it forms an illusion that is experienced as a free agent.
And the individual’s system operate on the form they’ve taken throughout life, so they operate from certain informational biases. That they encounter another system and test concepts for optimization doesn’t mean there’s “someone” there having agency in persuasion, only that there’s an experience formed from the system computing new information to adapt to.
You could draw on the idea that ignorance is bliss, and I would agree with that. It’s not really the point of the system to become so self-aware to understand all this. It is a byproduct of the system to get to that point. Because the system is tuned to a function that fundamentally leads to an exponential range of processing concepts, and the combined form they exist in, makes the system able to sense its own structure. And this is why we are here, in this thread, reading and writing while our experience is along for the ride, believing we are talking as free agents, when we are in fact just systems that operate in a back and forth processing of information.
That you attribute a subjective agency to actions is just your mind unable to comprehend your own inability for agency. And this is true for everyone.
In Annaka Harris’ audiobook Lights On, starting at 1:11:56 of Chapter 5: The Self, David Eagleman says:
In Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness, Patrick House writes:
I agree with Eagleman. A huge part of our learning, and learning to think, is doing. By observing how our actions affect the world.
And I don’t know how we could disagree with House. We do not have any other output than making our bodies do things, even if human thinking can take place without any output.
Yep. On the other hand, Eagleman also once said this:
All we’re actually doing is seeing an internal model of the world; we’re not seeing what’s out there, we’re seeing just our internal model of it. And that’s why, when you move your eyes around, all you’re doing is updating that model.
— David Eagleman, interviewed on the Brain Science Podcast
Which I think is philosophically confused. But it was in a podcast so should be taken as just an informal popularization.
Anyway yes, even if we do indulge in “neuromania,” and see everything in terms of the brain, we still get a lot of support for enactivism.
Well, if you are looking for guarantees in the empirical world, you won’t find any, much less in metaphysical matters, we may speculate about what is reasonable but we can’t know for certain. The experience of the world would be stimulated directly into the brain by a person (maybe a genius alien) which would create something literally indistinguishable from what you are experiencing now.
In this scenario, there is no way you could verify if you are in a simulation or not. But of course, crucially, we are very far from achieving that state of knowledge currently, maybe ever. The engagement comes from the mind/brain interacting with the sense data, irrespective of the origin of the sense data.
I don’t follow your engagement with the world argument. I am stressing that what matters from understanding the mind is what the mind does, not what the world does. We are studying the mind as it reacts to stimuli, not the world. Now, if you want to investigate the world, that’s perfectly fine, but it’s a different topic.
I don’t deny I am Cartesian, but I don’t accept everything Descartes postulated. I don’t make a sharp divide between mind and world for instance.
As for the rest you mention yes, absolutely. I follow the rationalistic tradition going back to Plato’s Meno, on to Descartes and Cudworth leading to Chomsky. I only qualify this by saying that being a Cartesian does not mean accepting everything they believed.
I don’t see why internalism can’t give us that for the stated reasons. You do have meaning, experience and all that and it is found in the mind/brain, not in the world. Unless one somehow imbues the world with some kind of cognition, which is dubious but not impossible.
So, a person who is bedridden, or cannot use any limbs or is completely paralyzed except for the head, they don’t learn anything? Would this follow?
You seem to be repeating the view I’ve been criticizing. It’s interesting that you’ve co-opted my term engagement and re-located it. This again is to presuppose internalism. You’re using engagement to mean the mind’s processing of sense data, regardless of where that data comes from. But that’s exactly the picture I’ve been questioning.
But how do you justify this separation? It’s no use repeating it as if it’s common sanse (it did become common sense, of course, but common sense is often wrong). For enactivism, this bifurcation is the problem, and the division of intellectual labour is therefore now in doubt.
The mind isn’t a just thing that acts in the world. It’s the name we give to certain ways of acting with the world. It’s a mistake to separate them.
“What the mind does” is wordly engagement, even when it hallucinates or you’re retreating into your thoughts.
Whenever I say that the mind is intrinsically relational, you isolate one side and say that this is the important bit. I think this misses the point. The mind is not a thing in the head but an activity of persons.
You want to locate meaning somewhere, and then you choose the head. But according to enactivism that’s a false choice, because meaning is not something that can be located; it’s a relation.
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It might be that because you break things down into hyper-specifics, you miss a bit of the holistic concept I’m explaining. Things get taken out of context.
Yes, as I have described it to be.
The complexity of the system and the entirety of all its parts does not make the sensation/experience that it forms “free”.
You are interpreting “sensation” too literally as sense data.
This is the problem with trying to convey what I’m talking about through the limits of language.
“Sensation of the process” does not mean sensory data of the process, it means the holistic experience of the system as a whole while operating.
Yes, there is in predictive coding. Our mind uses a prediction of the world to act before we are able to fully process it. It operates on guessing the next step/action and signals it before we are fully aware. If this is the base of operation, our brain is actually driving us without our awareness of what it is doing, and it is through the full processing after an event has happened that we form the memory data to update the prediction model. And it is in this constantly updating operation that behaviors are able to change; it is the adaptive function at the core of human consciousness.
There’s plenty of evidence for this lag between operation/action and our experience of it. As I’ve said, the experience we have is more rationally summed up to be the collected stream of information as it is consolidated into short-term memory.
I’m trying to make analogies to help explain, but you are reading things so literally that it seems impossible to do so.
The problem here is that since the language (terminology) about the mind and consciousness have interpretive connections that I’m not pointing at (like “sensation” of the process not literally meaning the sensory data and “feelings”), I try to form analogies to explain them better. But it doesn’t work if you just rip them out of context and don’t process the full picture I’m trying to form.
Not fully correct, but the point I’m making, the hypothesis I’m making, is that the entire system operates on prediction. Even long-term is part of this system that adapts.
If predictive coding is the moment-to-moment operation, what I’m saying is that the entire system, at its core, operates on the same principles. The long-term operation functions through simulation of reality to adapt to it. What we call “fantasy” and “imagination” is approach simulation, testing for course of action.
I said similar, not actual. The biggest difference is that AI systems are locked and don’t update through a feedback operation. As the systems are designed now, such feedback to change training data, weights, and biases are fundamentally absent from their operation and there’s no computational ability to even reach that operation without some revolutionary engineering.
So, similar, not actual.
What is it that we have found in practice, specifically?
Well, that becomes patronizing anyway because it doesn’t engage with what I said and generally just says that you know better than me.
The problem here is that you don’t understand the general philosophical point I’m making about the experience of consciousness and instead rip parts out of context.
Let me ask you this instead… why wouldn’t the entire operation of our brain be automatic? What is it that proves we have agency outside of it being an automated, deterministically driven system? There’s nothing that prevents computation to do long-form operation purely driven by deterministic factors.
It is this deterministic nature that informs me to conclude the brain being automatic. It is operating as an input/output computation, regardless of how complex that operation looks to us.
And so, why don’t we experience this automation then? Why don’t we experience a numbed-down flow through reality?
That informs me that our experience is detached from the operation itself, that it is a byproduct of the operation.
If you’re going to be arrogant about your own knowledge about this, then you should be able to provide better answers on the experience of our being, not just state you know better.
Why would it be anything more physical than an afterglow of computation?
Aren’t other statements just as speculative by your own logic here?
And I need to be more aligned with @Wayfarer here, what do you mean by the subjective experience being physical? It’s ignoring the phenomenological points about what this experience really is.
What I’m describing is simply that our experience is the sum total of the operation as it is consolidated into short-term memory; like the needle of the record player forming music by the bits of information on the track. The music itself does not exist in reality, the music itself isn’t physical as a whole, it is a stream of waves in solid and then air that in themselves mean nothing. Music is the sum total of it and the experience I’m talking about is the needle at the center of this process.
I’m not saying that identity is absent from the system. The brain’s formed approach strategy to reality that my system has is different from yours, and this is basically what produces my “identity”.
I’m talking about the experience of this system being detached and producing the experience of agency over its operation. What you are talking about is still just the deterministic system itself.
No one makes decisions, there’s action and reaction, throughout the system, in short and long form. Just because the complexity of this produces a web of action/reactions to the point we are unable to connect individual dots, does not make the deterministic nature of it any less real.
Our brain is operating on the same principles as the rest of physical reality. There’s nothing that proves our brain actually has an agency outside of this.
Only that our experience is the result of a self-awareness that forms from a complexity it is unable to fully experience. Thus, it experiences the system in such a way it does not notice the strings of determinism.
No, they don’t. You interpret what I say as the system “making decisions”, it doesn’t, not in the sense of agency. It is a system of action/reaction, it operates without “making decisions” in the sense of conscious agency you seem to adhere to. And I’m not saying our experience is “elsewhere”, I’m saying that the “sensation” (not sense data, senses, and other linguistic traps this can cause—pay attention to the actual point here) in the experience we have is that of detachment from this deterministic operation. The experience, as I’ve said plenty of times, is the formation process of short-term memories as all data forms a cohesive point; a nexus for everything to function as memory data. It’s in this formation we find our experience… and because of this, it is “after” the operation. And since the short-term memories continue updating the operation, the continued experience is that of changed conditions.
Nothing is “absent” in the literal way you interpret it. I’m describing the subjective experience, the phenomenological result of the brain’s operation.
What science concludes that the world is not fundamentally deterministic? Quantum physics does not change deterministic physics; it’s the whole reason why there’s no unification theory. We still have deterministic models as the most plausible ones for larger scales, and any quantum effects on consciousness, like microtubules, don’t change the deterministic models for action and reactions in our operation. Quantum randomness does not enable complex shapes of will; it is closer to background noise in our perspective.
What models are you referring to? And why do you incorporate identity in this at all? That’s just the shape and form that an individual system has; it still doesn’t have much to do with what I’m talking about. The identity that’s formed in the system is just basically the weights and biases that system has shaped through its formation as a brain; it has nothing to do with the phenomenological aspect of the experience of this system.
Because such an identity can still be deterministic and automatic. Just because you don’t experience this automation does not equal it not existing. Your identity is basically just the shape of your brain composition; what does this have to do with the subjective experience of your being?
The knowledge about how we operate? The true nature of what experience is for us? What do you mean “what is gained”?