Comments or Analysis Sought

[amachina]

Would appreciate reasoned responses/analysis/criticisms of this article. My initial reaction is that the author is using consciousness to create an explanatory abstraction he labels Flexible Response Mechanism. It makes me wonder why I even read this stuff.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10 ... 00697/full 

[Simon Adams]

I actually think it’s a pretty good paper. It’s clearly from a physicalist perspective, but is at least asking some of the right questions (e.g. from the inside). Some of the brain damage cases are also useful to think about from an idealist perspective, as these all need to fit any more detailed description. For example this (where the “Flexible Response Mechanism” is a little like Bernardo/Hoffman’s “dashboard of dials”):

Damasio (1995) reported that patients with damage to brain regions involved in the generation of emotional and other feelings consistently exhibit dysfunctional reasoning, decision-making and behavior. This would be expected if consciousness is input to the FRM, because people who lack emotional and other feelings lack the nonconscious evaluations these feelings represent, which are sometimes needed to get the best outcomes from complex or difficult decisions

If you want to see a REALLY BAD and confused article that shows absolutely no understanding of consciousness at all, try this https://theconversation.com/is-it-time- ... ine-160688

[Jim Cross]

I thought the paper was good too. BK has argued that the materialist necessarily requires that consciousness be thought of as purely an epiphenomena. That is more or less the position of the REALLY BAD paper that Simon points to but not the position of the paper. The Biological Function of Consciousness argues that consciousness does have adaptive value. Ultimately I think this means that consciousness is causative of something. It must be more than an effect, even if it does not perform the executive functions that we think of it as performing. Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka in The Evolution of Sensitive Soul in particular point to a role for consciousness in complex learning as a sort of threshold test for the presence of consciousness in organisms. By this standard, most multi-celled organisms show evidence of complex learning.

[AshvinP]

Would appreciate reasoned responses/analysis/criticisms of this article. My initial reaction is that the author is using consciousness to create an explanatory abstraction he labels Flexible Response Mechanism. It makes me wonder why I even read this stuff.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10 ... 00697/full 

I started reading but could not get past a few basic errors before I stopped:

"This research is an investigation of whether consciousness—one's ongoing experience—influences one's behavior"

What? How could "one's ongoing experience" not influence one's behavior?

"consciousness is solely information in various forms"

It may have helped if he defined what he means by "consciousness" in the beginning. Under most definitions of "consciousness" and "information", this is a terrible conclusion.

"we do not know why we have experiences"

This question presumes there is non-experience we can compare experience to and determine why one occurs and the other does not. But no such non-experience exists.

"Lashley (1958, p. 4) wrote that “No activity of mind is ever conscious” (emphasis in original). His examples were that we do not experience how our perceptions are created"

This is not true and can be verified by observing our own Thinking process - in it we do experience how our thought-forms are created.

For all other perceptions we can ask, "what is the meaning of this object? why do I perceive this object? what stands behind this perception?" For our thought-forms, these questions are answered by the very nature of thinking. I know what they mean because it is my idea projected into the thought-forms. I know why I perceive them because I will the thought-forms into existence. I know that it is my own ideating activity which stands behind the thought-forms!

[Simon Adams]

I started reading but could not get past a few basic errors before I stopped:

"This research is an investigation of whether consciousness—one's ongoing experience—influences one's behavior"

What? How could "one's ongoing experience" not influence one's behavior?

It’s an important area under physicalist assumptions. For people like Daniel Dennett, consciousness is like an illusion generated by the brain. However the paper shows evidence that meta-consciousness awareness of something has a causal role above and beyond what they see as the “real” processes happening in the brain. So they are left having to explain how and why an illusion feeds back into chemical and electrical processes in the brain.

"consciousness is solely information in various forms"

It may have helped if he defined what he means by "consciousness" in the beginning. Under most definitions of "consciousness" and "information", this is a terrible conclusion.

"we do not know why we have experiences"

This question presumes there is non-experience we can compare experience to and determine why one occurs and the other does not. But no such non-experience exists.

There papers are always going to be addressing physicalist assumptions. A robot will never have experiences, for example.

[AshvinP]

I started reading but could not get past a few basic errors before I stopped:

"This research is an investigation of whether consciousness—one's ongoing experience—influences one's behavior"

What? How could "one's ongoing experience" not influence one's behavior?

It’s an important area under physicalist assumptions. For people like Daniel Dennett, consciousness is like an illusion generated by the brain. However the paper shows evidence that meta-consciousness awareness of something has a causal role above and beyond what they see as the “real” processes happening in the brain. So they are left having to explain how and why an illusion feeds back into chemical and electrical processes in the brain.

"consciousness is solely information in various forms"

It may have helped if he defined what he means by "consciousness" in the beginning. Under most definitions of "consciousness" and "information", this is a terrible conclusion.

"we do not know why we have experiences"

This question presumes there is non-experience we can compare experience to and determine why one occurs and the other does not. But no such non-experience exists.

There papers are always going to be addressing physicalist assumptions. A robot will never have experiences, for example.

I generally disagree - even for the physicalist these types of inquiries are (or should be) pretty much meaningless. Of course they can claim non-conscious physical processes give rise to consciousness and remain within the realm of reasonable scientific inquiry, but to claim that conscious experience does not feedback into behavior or that we can imagine states of total non-experience is beyond any reasonably scientific endeavor. Although I will admit it may turn on the definition of "consciousness" used by the author, which was not given at the beginning of the paper as far as I could tell.

[Jim Cross]

I think the paper works really well with the BK/Hoffman dashboard/desktop model for consciousness.

Most of what is happening is outside consciousness but consciousness simplifies and integrates the most salient aspects of reality into representative forms that are fed back into the unconscious processes for decisions and actions. This is also very similar to reducing valve theory. Physically it could be explained as energy representing spatially integrated information arising from neural circuits but also feeding back into the same circuits.

[Simon Adams]

I’ve corrected your statement for you

I think the paper works really well with the BK/Hoffman dashboard/desktop model for consciousness.

Most of what is happening is outside metaconsciousness but meta consciousness simplifies and integrates the most salient aspects of reality into representative forms that are fed back into the subconscious processes for decisions and actions. This is also very similar to reducing valve theory. Physically it could be explained as energy representing spatially integrated information arising from neural circuits but also feeding back into the same circuits.

I think you run into problems if you’re seeing these as circuits, in the way physicalists see consciousness. If the brain produces the mind like a film produced by chemical and electrical reactions, then what is it responding to the film? You need to have another part of the brain watching the film, and I don’t think neuroscience supports that (despite it’s naturally physicalist tendencies).

From an idealist perspective of course there is still a kind of loop, but as awareness is just what consciousness does, it’s trivial to have an ‘attention’ process the effectively filters the contents.

[Simon Adams]

I generally disagree - even for the physicalist these types of inquiries are (or should be) pretty much meaningless. Of course they can claim non-conscious physical processes give rise to consciousness and remain within the realm of reasonable scientific inquiry, but to claim that conscious experience does not feedback into behavior or that we can imagine states of total non-experience is beyond any reasonably scientific endeavor.

Yes I agree with that. The problem they have is finding a physicalist model to explain how that happens

[Jim Cross]

I’ve corrected your statement for you

I think the paper works really well with the BK/Hoffman dashboard/desktop model for consciousness.

Most of what is happening is outside metaconsciousness but meta consciousness simplifies and integrates the most salient aspects of reality into representative forms that are fed back into the subconscious processes for decisions and actions. This is also very similar to reducing valve theory. Physically it could be explained as energy representing spatially integrated information arising from neural circuits but also feeding back into the same circuits.

I think you run into problems if you’re seeing these as circuits, in the way physicalists see consciousness. If the brain produces the mind like a film produced by chemical and electrical reactions, then what is it responding to the film? You need to have another part of the brain watching the film, and I don’t think neuroscience supports that (despite it’s naturally physicalist tendencies).

From an idealist perspective of course there is still a kind of loop, but as awareness is just what consciousness does, it’s trivial to have an ‘attention’ process the effectively filters the contents.

Circuits produce energy - that is somewhat less tangible physical quality that can feedback to the more material parts of the brain. That is the "film" to use your term.