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Video Debate on God and Consciousness
Can consciousness be best explained by God’s existence?
Hamza Tzrotzis section:
Very nice presentation, and I can find agreement with much of it. I do find a problem with the idea that theism explains ‘where consciousness comes from’, since God cannot be said to exist prior to God’s consciousness. Can God be unconscious? If not, can we say for sure that consciousness does not create God instead of the other way around?
This goes along with the sentiment expressed earlier in examining the shortcomings of panpsychism, when he asks ‘what is thought without a thinker?’ While this is certainly difficult to imagine in a normal state of mind, I have experienced dream states in which there was a dream, but it was more like a film, and I woke up specifically noticing that I did not find myself in the movie or in the audience. The experience of the movie simply was. In light of this, and the fact that human beings occupy such a minute and idiosyncratic position within the biosphere of this planet, I would not rule out the possibility that our waking experience of human ego might be limited to animals or certain animals, owing to their autonomy of movement. The vast majority of phenomena in the universe may indeed be felt experiences without an experiencer per se.
Even if this is true, the idea that the universe is composed of consciousness (awareness, or to be more technical, aesthetic participation/sensory-motive re-acquaintance), even proprietary qualities of awareness, but without an overriding executive, there could still be God-like influences within or through the larger potential of our human consciousness. Retrocausality, synchronicity, intuition, and other exotic metaphenomenal conditions may indeed flirt with the boundary between reality and surreality to produce veridical insights and delusional obsessions alike. God may be no more than a figment of consciousness, just as we are, but that doesn’t mean that human consciousness does not include some kind of meta-human guidance for some people at some time, although such guidance may be indistinguishable from mental illness.
Professor Simons section:
Opens well, setting the stage for a criterial of success for explanation in science. I hadn’t heard before the origin of the word melancholia before (black-bile). He goes on to look at intentionality and awareness and asserts that there is nothing that it is like to be a stone. I agree superficially, that what we see of a stone does not express any intention, but given the vastly different scale of time between ourselves and geological time, it is conceivable that what we encounter as static minerals are, within another frame of reference, some unfamiliar kind of experience. Rocks don’t have feelings, but they may *be* feelings – slow, or intermittent feelings which perhaps only awaken when there is a significant change in physical state. When rocks collide, something may feel something, even if it is not the rock itself as we experience it.
I like that he embraces being honest about the shortcomings of science in explaining phenomenality (the Hard Problem). His examples of evolved body parts which have been repurposed could apply to consciousness in theory, but I submit that would have to be a very superficial theory that overlooks the completely anti-physical nature of consciousness. Unlike an ear, awareness is not a plausible feature of some unrelated physical system.
I appreciate Professor Simons call for modesty in consideration of supernatural explanation, but I’m not sure that alone constitutes a refutation. It may be more reckless to insist upon a naturalistic explanation to the exclusion of all explanations which happen to transcend the spatiotemporal aspects of nature.
It seems to me that rather than presuming God as a literal being, we should try thinking of the various theological concepts as a metaphor for being itself – for consciousness. We can learn about consciousness by our own intuitive accounts, written in the native mytho-poetic language of what I call the ‘metaphenomenal’ layer of awareness. God is something like the local, human-shaped shadow of the infinite potential of the future of consciousness. By itself, the universe is only theological and meaningful on the inside. It is up to consciousness, to conscious beings, to imbue the exterior world with divine shades of care and attention. God is not for being, but for becoming.
I liked Simons parting comments about Spinoza and dual-aspect theory. He says, (as most would agree) that consciousness is a process, not a thing. I suggest that consciousness is neither, rather it is the eternal firmament from which processes and things are ‘carved out’ (by time and space…types of entropy or reduced sense). Locally, our human experience is very elaborately enfolded multiple times into spacetime, so that it does actually take on nested process-like characteristics as well. Just as the entire life of our body is the story of a single cell in self-replication/modification, the story of our lives is a single moment stretched out into innumerable sub-moments.
Both critiques of panpsychism I think are ultimately rejections of a straw man. Nobody, Leibniz included I’m sure, thinks that electrons ‘have’ human-like consciousness, but that is completely beside the point, IMO, in considering whether the fabric of nature is more likely sensitive vs physical, information-theoretic, or theological. In those terms, I find it easy to account for physical, informational, and spiritual phenomena as elaborations of sensory experience, but I find no real way to justify any of the others existence in the absence of sense.
Bang!
If Big Bang was a singular event that created space, time and matter, then one must view the universe as a rapidly expanding billiards table of N dimensions with all events pre-determined. There can be no intervening force or new element of causality possible. There can be no uncertainty, and any notions of either free will or divine intervention are illusory.
If the Big Bang created time, then I think that it should not be thought of as an event (in time), but rather as the hub that all events have in common. The Big Bang never happened, it did happen, it is still happening, it hasn’t happened yet. Because we are measuring it from inside of spacetime, and using instruments that are limited to only the most generic spatial-quantitative measurements, our results reflect a narrowly defined model of the origin of causality itself. It is the fallacy of the instrument – we have a hammer of physics so everything that physics measures looks like a nail. What I propose instead is a Big Diffraction, where the birth of spacetime is an influx of dissociation into countless semi-permeable perceptual frames of reference that are united beyond spacetime.
If we place ourselves in the moment of the Big Bang, we cannot judge it on a human scale of time, since that scale of time had not been invented yet. If the universe itself is awareness, the first trillionths of a second of the invention of time are no less likely to feel like five minutes than they are an eternity. As the singularity breaks into multiplicity (Tzimtzum for fans of the Kabbalah), it is inventing the possibility of multiplicity for the first time. Eternity is spawning micro-eternities in which each micro-view is stretching out eternity so that it seems both ever longer and slower and seems to have originated in an ever more brief instant. Time is all about comparing frequencies of awareness – beats per measure. Time is relativistic because time is relativity itself – the framing of perceptual reference.
What we see through a telescope is an objectified version of the story of objectification that serves as a creation myth for the anti-mythology of functionalism. Free will was never inside of spacetime to begin with. It was not created, it creates. If free will is illusory, then it is that which is illusory which gives birth to realism and physics, not the other way around. The universe is a single thread of singing, signaling, significance-building experience,weaving and winding through a maze of its own self-imposed alienation. Divinity is optional, and free will is scarce, but the universe is only a billiard table if you limit the vocabulary of inquiry to that of billiard balls.
Nothing is an o…
Nothing is an object in its own frame of reference.
A simple thing to say, but the implications are profound when taken literally. I do take them literally, so that like time and length, objectivity itself is relativistic*. There are no truly objective objects, only experiences which are frozen by distance and unfamiliarity. What is truly objective is, ironically, subjectivity. The sense of perceiving and participating, while nested in an elaborate way for human participants, is, in my view, the simplest possible phenomenon within which all other phenomena are described. The capacity for experience is absolute and irreducible, even though the capacity for human qualities of experience is contingent upon a Matroyshka doll nesting of continuous non-human experiences.
*I call this variation of object and non-object qualities by proximity and similarity ‘eigenmorphism’ (proper form).
m-zombie: A Challenge to Computationalism
Have a look at this quick video, or get the idea from this gif:
Since the VCR can get video feedback of itself, is there any computational reason why this doesn’t count as a degree of self awareness?
Turning the Systems Reply to the Chinese Room on its head, I submit that if we consider the Chinese room to be an intelligent *system*, then we must also consider the system of VCR+camera pointed at itself to be a viable AGI as well.
The correlation of corrupted video feed with the actual physical attacks on the system must be construed as awareness, especially since the video effects are unique and specifically correlated so as to present a complex vocabulary of responses. If functionalism rejects the evidence of this correlation as being experienced qualitatively, then it must posit the existence of an m-zombie (machine zombie), in which the system unintentionally mimics the responses expected from sentient computations from a sub-computational level.
Why Light is Sight (not photons)
A case against photons being necessary and sufficient to explain the experience of light:
There are many examples of scientific studies and first hand experience which implicate human visual perception as the result of neurological and phenomenological states, rather than a direct mapping of photons striking the retina of the eye.
1. What we see cannot be explained by the presence of photons alone.
From this paper, On the Neural Correlates of Visual Perception:
“Neurological findings suggest that the human striate cortex (V1) is an indispensable component of a neural substratum subserving static achromatic form perception in its own right and not simply as a central distributor of retinally derived information to extrastriate visual areas.
[…] elemental visual experiences of punctate white or colored lights called ‘phosphenes’ can be evoked in man by direct electrical stimulation of densely hemianopic striate cortex after severance of its connections to and from the LGN.”
The paper goes on to describe many neurological conditions arising from specific damage to the brain which reveal that the visual conditions which we take for granted, such as identification of shapes and motion, have their neural correlates in diverse areas of the brain. There is no video screen equivalent in the brain which which reconstructs an image from the outside world made of photons.
“Crick and Koch also proposed that explicit representations of visual features, coarse-coded neural representations that correlate with percepts or objects, are a necessary but not sufficient condition for visual experience. I find no reason to disagree with this premise.
[…]figure–ground segregation and object recognition cannot progress in a simple bottom-up serial fashion, but have to occur concurrently and interactively within recursive loops”
[…]In summary, the present model is based on the primacy of phenomenal experience (Humphrey, 1992; Nelkin, 1995; Raffman, 1995) and supports views that any possible explanation of phenomenal experience cannot be formulated solely in terms of its reportability (Chalmers, 1995).”
2. Stimulation of the visual cortex in the congenitally blind results in tactile rather than visual perception (Changes in visual cortex excitability in blind subjects as demonstrated by transcranial magnetic stimulation).
“…phosphenes could be induced in only 60% of subjects in Group 2 (blind subjects with a low degree of residual vision) and in only 20% of subjects in Group 3 (blind subjects without residual vision).
[…] Studies of the functional consequences of visual deprivation in humans have disclosed correlates of cross‐modal plasticity, with a role for the visual cortex in tactile processes (Uhlet al., 1991; Sadatoet al., 1996; Cohenet al., 1997; Büchelet al., 1998).”
“In a PET study we demonstrate that congenitally blind subjects show task- specific activation of extrastriate visual areas and parietal association areas during Braille reading, compared with auditory word processing. In contrast, blind subjects who lost their sight after puberty show additional activation in the primary visual cortex with the same tasks. Studies in blind-raised monkeys show that crossmodal responses in extrastriate areas can be elicited by somatosensory stimulation. This is consistent with the crossmodal extrastriate activations elicited by tactile processing in our congenitally blind subjects. ” – Different activation patterns in the visual cortex of late and congenitally blind subjects.
3. Visual experiences can be produced internally, and outside of the primary visual cortex.
“A phosphene is a phenomenon characterized by the experience of seeing light without light actually entering the eye.”
“this phenomenon of “seeing” without seeing in the traditional sense leads one to believe the ability to receive light is not entirely necessary. In addition, this is not a foreign concept, as when most people close the eyes, they are able to visualize images.” – Dreams: Seeing without seeing
“The results by Knauff and colleagues, also with fMRI, do not support the hypothesis that primary visual cortex is involved in visual mental imagery, but rather that a network of spatial subsystems and higher visual areas appears to be involved (Knauff, Kassubek, Mulack, & Greenlee, 2000). The results support the hypothesis that visual imagery is a function of the visual association cortex.” – Visual imagery without visual perception (Bértolo 2005).
4. Congenitally blind people can interpret experience graphically.
[…]In conclusion, the congenitally blind are not only able to describe what may be the visual content of their dreams verbally, but they can provide, through drawing, a graphical representation of such content, and a significant negative correlation between the Visual Content of the dreams and the alpha power was found in both groups.” (Bértolo 2005).
5. Color mappings are not entirely caused either by electromagnetic frequency or stimulation of the retina’s cone cells.
a. Some colors are not part of the visible spectrum
Pink and purple are combinations of red with blue or violet. Brown and beige are low intensity orange, olive is low dim green, grays and black are dark whites. – source
“This means that colours only really exist within the brain – light is indeed traveling from objects to our eyes, and each object may well be transmitting/reflecting a different set of wavelengths of light; but what essentially defines a ‘colour’ as opposed to a ‘wavelength’ is created within the brain. ” – Magenta Ain’t A Colour.
b. Color perception can change independently of the retina.
“…the number of color-sensitive cones in the human retina differs dramatically among people—by up to 40 times—yet people appear to perceive colors the same way. The findings, on the cover of this week’s journal Neuroscience, strongly suggest that our perception of color is controlled much more by our brains than by our eyes.
[… That points to some kind of normalization or auto-calibration mechanism—some kind of circuit in the brain that balances the colors for you no matter what the hardware is.” – Color Perception Is Not in the Eye of the Beholder: It’s in the Brain
6. Blindsight shows that optical information can be communicated subconsciously without a conscious experience of seeing.
A rare, but much studied condition, blindsight, along with synesthesia and anosognosia reveal that the pairing of visual qualities of experience with optical conditions is not automatic. The functions of information processing, physics, and the qualities conscious experience can all be teased out separately.
Blindsight – the ability to respond appropriately to visual inputs while lacking the feeling of having seen them – might be something which only occurs in cases of brain damage, but seems much more likely to be a significant phenomenon of intact brain function as well. Indeed, it seems likely that blindsight (and similar phenomena in other spheres) is an important ingredient of of a variety of activities where one wants to move quickly and appropriately, without “thinking about it”. – Seeing What You Don’t See
7. Photon interaction begins and ends with the isomerization of rhodopsin.
Optical processing a vast chain of mechanical reactions on multiple levels of description of the nervous system; molecular, cellular, organ, and somatic. From the indications of neurology alone, what our visual cortex would ‘see’ should really be nothing more than interruptions in the flows of glutamate from rod cells, not an array of photons. There is something called ‘dark current‘ which refers to “the depolarizing current, carried by Na+ ions, that flows into a photoreceptor cell when unstimulated” and suggests that our access to optical conditions is triggered by a silencing of ‘off’ signals rather than an instantiation of ‘on’. It might be supposed that photons are not what we see, but rather they are a measure of the initial molecular triggers which stop us from not seeing.
8. Photons with frequencies in the infra-red range are felt as heat rather than seen.
A rather obvious example, but one which reveals that photons themselves need not be seen to be detected. Ultraviolet and infrared radiation are referred to as ‘light’, but they are no more or less ‘illuminating’ than radio waves or gamma rays. Generally when we refer to light and lighting we are specifying a capacity to illuminate our visual perception, not thermal conditions. The use of light to refer to invisible phenomena is not entirely untrue, as it can be stepped down into a visible range using photographic equipment, however, unless the target of such a process is ultimately a visual experience, it is hard to justify the connection to the term, and the word ‘light’ should be considered somewhat figurative. If we refer to brain activity associated with conscious experience to be ‘neural correlates’, then we should likewise refer to physical activity associated with perceptual experience to be ‘electrodynamic correlates’ of light rather than light itself.
9. If light is sight and not photons, what is sight?
Philosophers would call it qualia, neuroscientists might call it ‘sense data’, phenomenal visual experience, or ‘static achromatic form perception’. In short, seeing light is irreducibly experiential. All light is only that which is seen, and photons do not necessarily have any visible qualities.
Semiotics: What are the implications of the Saussurian sign (signifier/signified) for a theory of meaning?
In my theory of meaning, Saussurian concepts of signifier and signified are a good start, but I propose a fundamental change. In his answer, Keith Allpress offers:
here is where I think we stand:
Shannon removed content from meaning but using bits.
Saussure claimed that language creates meaning.
and points out the limitations of post-modern/relativistic/deconstructionist approaches. I would say that the computationalist approach is similarly limited, in that there is no compelling reason that ‘it from bit’ should apply to all aspects of meaning. I think that what is missing from these two approaches is the same thing, only seen from opposite sides. To understand more about that thing, we can begin by asking:
“What cares about the difference?”
I think where Saussure and modern semiotics in general went too far is in presuming representation without presentation. The error of the computationalist view is even more subtle, as it presumes presentation as an emergent property, thereby taking it outside of the realm of science, but without admitting it. To me, this is a very seductive but misguided approach which leads directly to the Emperor’s emergent clothes.
Taking the term ‘signifier’, we can crack the kernel of truth that semiotics-as-cosmology is based on. Just as it is not incorrect to call someone who is driving a car a ‘driver’, neither is driver a complete description of the role of human beings in the world. What is missing? What *cares* that something is missing? What fills the gap is what I call aesthetic participation, or sensory-motive presence. In my view, before ‘information’ (a difference that makes a difference per Bateson) or sign, there must be the raw sensitivity to detect and interpret such ‘differences’ or ‘signs’ and to *care* about those differences. What we have done, by reifing pattern as objectively real things which are recognized, or de-realizing things as subjectively constructed patterns is to void the existence of sense and sense-making itself.
Not to get too cheeky, but what I propose is that beneath Bateson’s adage is a deeper context from which information and signs emerge: an aesthetic phenomenon which likes its own likeness by making its own differences. I call this primordial pansensitivity, or ‘sense’ and the particular quality of appreciation that it cares about I call ‘significance’. Significance cannot be automated, it must be earned directly through intimate acquaintance. It may sound like I am talking about human intimacy here, but I mean nothing of the sort. By acquaintance (stealing that word from Chalmers), I mean sensory-motive encounters on a fundamental level: before humans, before biology, and before even matter. The universe has to make sense before anything can make sense of it.
The aesthetic agenda is purely hedonistic. It is to develop ever richer textures and modalities of appreciation. While the universe is replete with repeating patterns, it never seems to repeat its particular, proprietary holons. A whirlpool, hurricane, and galaxy all share the same unmistakable topology, but nobody would mistake one for the other. Not just the scale but everything that constitutes their appearance and role in the universe is different. In calling the universe signs or bits we are losing the appreciation and proprietary character. The unique and worthwhile becomes generic and inevitable. It ultimately is to make meaning meaningless.
Names (representations) can be related to each other in ways that nature (presentations) cannot be. The equal sign is itself a name for one of these relations. In nature nothing can be absolutely equal to anything else. All of nature is unrepeatably unique in a literal sense, but will seem to be made of repetition and variation from any particular perspective within it. In this way, the postmodernists are right. We have only the presence of our own ability to feel that can be known absolutely as it is. Everything else that exists for us, within our individually customized experience has some degree of approximation/representation.
What makes this even more complicated and confusing is that there are different levels of sense-making whcih can contradict each other. We would like to think of signs as simply a case of dictionary definitions were signs literally signifiy what we expect they should signify. Even the identity principle of A = A is subject to a deeper degree of expectation about what A and = mean in different contexts. We can look at a surreal painting and say ‘that is a painting of something impossible’, but it is only our expectation that the paint shapes refer to something other than themselves which is being misled. What surrealism signifies is not ‘real’, but neither is it nothing.
Where the computationalists are right is in seeing the uniformity of arithmetic principles across all phenomena which can be measured. Reducing all transactions to bits obviously has been tremendously transformative in this century. By banishing the aesthetic qualities (qualia) to an emergent never-never land, however, we have been seduced by the representation of measure (quanta). Simulation-type theories now abound, in which the entire history of human experience (including the development of science, but shh…) is marginalized as a confabulation/illusion/model and the only true reality one which can never been contacted in any way except through theoretical abstraction. We either live in an unreal world, or the world which we now think is real is not the one that we actually live in. We are being asked to believe that meaning is meaningless and that the only alternative to solipsism is a kind of ‘nilipsism’* in which even our ennui is yet another meaningless function of the program.
To turn the page on this era of de-presentation**, I suggest that we look at the roots of semiotics more deeply, and recognize that signs themselves depend upon a deeper context of sensation and sense-making which goes beyond even physics or human experience.
*a word I made up to describe the philosophy that the self (ipse) must be reduced to a non-entity.
**another neologism that I use to refer to what Raymond Tallis calls the ‘Disappearance of Appearance’…the overlooking of the phenomenon of aesthetic presence itself.
Quora Question on Entropy
Help me understand this. If entropy is about signal transmission, and is measured by “how much information is missing,” it implies a transmitter and receiver – in other words, a relationship. Entropy is an appealing notion because at first glance the receiver of the information cannot suddenly know more than what is transmitted. But the amount of information the receiver can receive seems to be highly relative and transformable.This is if I understand correctly that entropy is not a measurement of a system’s physical properties, but of how much information is missing when that system is observed. For sure, a system will emit is information, and there will be a less than 100% reception of that signal for any system observing it. That number cannot be 101%…. But there are two sides to a relationship, and a system’s entropy is not related to some total “information” it “contains”… So there are simple workarounds to that 100% threshold.
For example, if I look at a blade of grass that I hold in my hand, I can only receive so much information about it, and I cannot get more information than what it is transmitting to me… Unless I then look at it under a microscope and now the information loss (entropy) has decreased. If entropy were a law of the universe, my act of changing my receptor would be “impossible.”
It seems to me that labeling entropy as an unbreakable law is a naive notion, and instead I see it as a useful property of observation. Does entropy deserve the status of “law of the universe”?
The subject of entropy is, appropriately highly entropic. There are a lot of different ways that the word is used, some more figuratively than others. Thermodynamic entropy is not the same as information entropy, in the sense that if we make an MPEG compressed video of a glass of ice melting into room temperature water, the first half of the movie would take more resources to compress than the last half, given that the last half would feature only a glass of still water. As the thermodynamic entropy of the actual ice increases, the information entropy of the content of the video decreases. The sensitivity of the video camera is limited, so it can’t detect the microstates of the water molecules.
I think this speaks to the question of perception, and how our designation of what constitutes a ‘system’ is more arbitrary than it may seem. All of our instruments and all of our sensing and sense-making capabilities are potentially as limited as the video camera. Our attention is squeezed into an anthropocentric range, so that our window on ourselves and the universe does not allow us to discern ultimately what is ‘a law of the universe, or simply an assumption based on our perceptions’. Everything that we can understand about the universe is furnished to us only by our perceptions, intuitions, and understanding.
Our perception leads us to expect a universe of laws and realities beyond itself, but these too are either ultimately subjective conditions, or else subjectivity itself must include the possibility of transcending itself. The difference between what we presume to be our private perceptions and what we presume to be something more is…. entropy. There is no way to obtain 100% of the information about anything. Even given omniscient access to the entire history of the universe, the nature of the universe may be intrinsically open ended within any given inertial frame.
What I am suggesting is that just as entropy is the gap between what we experience and what we think could be experienced (‘objectively’), what we consider information may only appear to be finite because of the gap between our native perceptual frame of reference and the target frame of reference. Rather than being a true description of what a phenomenon is, ‘information’ may be as fictional in its amputation of subjective qualities as perception is in its failure to pick up on physical properties. The definition of entropy itself can be thought of as gradually reversing or flipping in proportion to the distance (literal and figurative) between two perceptual frames. Take these words for example. If you read English, then your absorption of their meaning is rather loose and general. You get the idea of what I am saying, and even sort of ‘hear’ an inner narrator voice that stands in for me. It’s all rather fuzzy, but it works really well. Entropy is actually what allows you to get the gist of what I am saying or even what I am not saying (reading between the lines).
By comparison, someone who cannot read English at all may have a much clearer view of what these characters ‘actually’ look like (without as much fuzzy interpretive conditioning). In the same way, some people find it easier to draw realistically if they are copying an image upside down. Entropy and significance, subjectivity and objectivity are not functional properties, they are aesthetic ranges. The universe as a whole can, in the same way, be considered primarily an aesthetic phenomenon as a whole, in which any part can reduce another to a functional stereotype using variations on the theme of distance or insensitivity.
Multisense Realism 
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