EEG spikes in humans and rats at end of life and what this means for the supposed 'evidence' for idealism

[Cleric K]

Consciousness is tied to knowing since whatever we know exists in some form in consciousness. That epistemic truth doesn't lead directly to the ontological conclusion that everything is consciousness.

I agree. I don't need to postulate neither that everything is consciousness, nor that some world opaque to consciousness exists. I simply accept the given fact that whatever I know, I know it in some form of consciousness. I'm under no illusion that everything that exists is to be found in my consciousness as it is in this moment. But to place limits on what may enter my consciousness at some other time is completely arbitrary decision.

The point is that I gain nothing if I artificially invent some impenetrable boundary between consciousness and the world-in-itself. Think about it. In what way exactly this boundary is needed for any of the scientific facts that we all know and love? The simple fact is that this boundary doesn't add anything to our knowledge. Actually, it only dogmatically restricts what is possible and what is impossible to know. Everything we learn in science is about thinking relations between perceptions. The separate 'frames' of a falling apple I unite through the law of gravity, the attracting charges, through the Coulomb's law and so on. All we are doing is relating perceptions through concepts and ideas in thinking. This is the immediate fact. Even contemplating EEG graphs has meaning only as long as I unite in thinking, the perceptions of the spikes on the graph with some feeling for example. So really - what of all this requires that I postulate hard boundary between consciousness and a world-in-itself which by definition can never be proven to exist? Please, observe this well. Nothing, really - nothing - of all the achievements of science depends in any way whatsoever on a world independent and of completely opaque nature to consciousness. I speak about the facts of science, not about their numerous philosophical interpretations, which don't change the facts in any way.

And I repeat - I don't claim that the full reality of the falling apple exists in the contents of my consciousness, as it is in the moment. I'm only saying that there's nothing in the given which justifies to postulate a world of different nature than consciousness. Any such postulate can only come from arbitrary decision of thinking.

So let's be clear. There's nothing in current science that requires the existence of a world of different nature than consciousness. All that science does is find lawful relations between perceptions within consciousness. This doesn't prove in itself that consciousness will find the reality of the apple in some future expanded state but there's also no justification to reject this possibility out of hand. Any such rejection can only be the result of thinking that feels comfortable to draw a chalk circle around itself and believe that there's no need to look beyond it. This is what it really boils down to.

Let me put that in a box:

There's nothing in the scientific method that requires the existence of a world opaque to consciousness. All the laws that we find are thinking laws that interrelate perceptions. It is completely irrelevant to our mathematical models what the true nature behind these perceptions are. With our science we practically try to replicate the appearances of our perceptions by correlating them with mathematical models.

If we postulate an impenetrable boundary between consciousness and the World, we can do that only as an arbitrary decision of thinking. There's nothing in the given that hints of the existence of such an opaque to consciousness World. And how could there be? If there was something in consciousness which proves that the world-in-itself exists, this would mean that it's not that independent of consciousness after all. If it was really opaque to consciousness then by definition we can never know if it exists or not. Thus the world-in-itself forever remains only a matter of blind belief. We simply choose with our thinking to postulate such a world.

So I hope it's crystal clear that science does not depend on the existence of this world-in-itself. The reason that people insist on the existence of such an opaque World has nothing to do with science. It has to do with entirely psychological factors. It's all about the chalk circle and the uneasy feeling that reality may indeed be much closer to us than we imagine it by fantasizing it as a remote and inaccessible world-in-itself. The fact that one hasn't experienced anything beyond the chalk circle doesn't yet prove that there's nothing there. There are people who have never experienced love or haven't seen the Pyramids with their own eyes but does this mean that no such things exist? Or it simply means that the expanding chalk circle has not yet encompassed them?

[Eugene I]

Eugene and Soul,

Idealism is doing a sleight of hand by declaring its primitive to be consciousness, which means by definition it can't be explained. It doesn't tell anything about what consciousness really is or how consciousness manifests the world as it is, because idealism has ruled that off limits by declaring it original and uncaused. So it is beyond study.

Rephrasing:

Materialism is doing a sleight of hand by declaring its primitive to be matter, which means by definition it can't be explained. It doesn't tell anything about what matter really is because materialism has ruled that off limits by declaring it original and uncaused. So it is beyond study.

What is beyond study in both materialism and idealism is the origin of the most fundamental level of reality. What is within the study in both materialism and idealism is how that fundamental manifests the world as it is. In that respect there is really not much difference between materialist and idealist epistemological methodology.

This is what is so bizarre about calling for science to accept the primacy of consciousness, because the acceptance of the primacy of consciousness would immediately put out of bounds of science what is, according to idealism, reality itself. So it fundamentally can't research its own subject.

Generally the call for idealism in science is just a stalking horse for taking seriously the claims of parapsychology. But nobody is stopping people from studying "paranormal" phenomena. People can study it no matter what ontological preference they have. The problem is convincing others that what the being studied really exists as it is claimed.

I agree. IMO we should call natural sciences to be metaphysically agnostic. We should not call them to accept the primacy of consciousness, but neither we should call them to accept the primacy of matter. These metaphysical questions are beyond the scope of natural science.

Between the two

1 - Brain activity causes consciousness
2- Consciousness causes brain activity

The commonality is brain activity.

With 1, we can study how different types of brain activity correlate with conscious states, how modifying brain activity can produce new states, even possibly how consciousness could affect brain activity.

With 2, consciousness become a fence we can't see behind and we have no way to study how or why consciousness could be create certain types of brain activity at certain times.

The #1 and #2 are again metaphysical statements, not scientific. And the commonality between the two is both brain activity and conscious experience. Both of these commonalities are experimental facts that can be studied by sciences. The job of natural sciences is to study their correlations and how they affect each other without presupposing any of the two metaphysical positions.. Natural sciences have no capacity to prove which causes which (i.e. which statement #1 or #2 is true), that question is beyond the scope of natural sciences and belongs to the realm of metaphysics. This is the scientific approach to consciousness studies.

Now, the #1 and #2 become legitimate statements if we are to consider them within the scope of metaphysics. Again, so far the biggest problem with statement #1 is to explain how exactly the brain activity causes the very existence of conscious experience (aka the "hard problem").

[tjssailor]

Once again "spikes "of electricity mean nothing as far as experience is concerned. These "spikes" are probably in the microvolt range. So what. What about the hundreds or thousands of volts of "spikes" that occur all over the place. Are they creating experiences? How can electricity in your head create "your" existence while the same electricity in my head creates "my" existence?

"We don't need to measure the immeasurable to understand that brain activity associates with consciousness." Truly a statement of faith..

[Jim Cross]

We should not call them to accept the primacy of consciousness, but neither we should call them to accept the primacy of matter.

We agree on that but where do you see science using the primacy of matter to explain anything. You can find the term "matter" used in physics but I'm not sure I've seen it used to explain anything except perhaps its relationship to gravity or energy. Nobody tries to explain the universe or consciousness with "matter" per se. "Matter" is an explanation is as bad as "mind as an explanation because neither explain anything. It is the interaction of things, how things relate where explanations lie.

[Jim Cross]

Once again "spikes "of electricity mean nothing as far as experience is concerned. These "spikes" are probably in the microvolt range. So what. What about the hundreds or thousands of volts of "spikes" that occur all over the place. Are they creating experiences? How can electricity in your head create "your" existence while the same electricity in my head creates "my" existence?

"We don't need to measure the immeasurable to understand that brain activity associates with consciousness." Truly a statement of faith..

Once again when these spikes go away you are dead and you won't look like you are conscious. You can choose to believe your consciousness doesn't need these spikes but there is no science or philosophy that has proven that. It would be a question of faith.

As for spikes all over the place, the spikes in your brain and nervous system are organized, structured, complex, and carry information unlike the electricity that comes from a wall socket. It is also tuned to the "frequency" of living matter with origins in single cell life.

[Cleric K]

We agree on that but where do you see science using the primacy of matter to explain anything. You can find the term "matter" used in physics but I'm not sure I've seen it used to explain anything except perhaps its relationship to gravity or energy. Nobody tries to explain the universe or consciousness with "matter" per se. "Matter" is an explanation is as bad as "mind as an explanation because neither explain anything. It is the interaction of things, how things relate where explanations lie.

Yes, it is indeed about relations. We must be clear that the meaning of 'explanations' has become corrupted in our age. Today 'explanation' has become a synonym of 'reduction'.

There's not a single place within our experience where we can give an example of true reduction. If this seems absurd claim to make, it is only because both science and philosophy today are completely blindfolded about the thinking process through which they develop their own subjects.

Reduction does not exist as far as our conscious experience is concerned. There's not a single phenomena which can be reduced to other phenomena. There are countless correlations which we can find between phenomena but not reduction. Even the concept of 'two' can't be reduced to a pair of 'one'-es. Every concept that we use in thinking is discovered independently. A toddler may be looking at a pair of objects but it requires a flash of insight to conceive of the quality of 'two-foldness', which later becomes condensed into a concept of the intellect. No amount of rearranging of the two objects can mechanically produce a new concept. If we don't know the color red, no amount of juggling with our concepts of blue and green, or any other color, will lead us to the concept of red. Here by concept of red I mean the concept that we experience when we behold the quality of red, not some abstract concept of 650 nm EM radiation.

Similarly, no amount of arrangement of the concepts of individual letters can give the concept (the meaning) of the word. No arrangement of the concepts of trees can give the concept of forest, the concepts of cells can't give the concept of plant, the concept of mother doesn't produce from itself the concept of son and so on.

Again - if it seems strange that attention is pointed to these details, it is only because the 'thinkers' of our age do not really observe what they are doing with their thinking. They have completely 'user-experience' of thinking - they only care for the consumer end products. We can only make some progress if we seek also the 'developer-experience', to learn something about the process in the kitchen.

If we observe thinking in this way, we see as immediate fact that concepts do not proceed from one another through mechanical transformations. We live entirely in relations of concepts. If we add 53 045 298 + 423 425 619 = 476 470 917, chances are we see these exact numbers for the first time in our life. Yet the concept of the sum is not the mechanical combination of the concepts the two addends. It is much rather that the concepts of the two addends and the addition operation lead our thinking in the vicinity of ideas where we can easily discover the concept of the sum. It may seem outrageous to describe things in this way but it is precisely because people are unaware of these fine details that everything suffers down the line.

If thinkers were not so concentrated on the user-experience of thinking, the simple fact that concepts are not produced mechanically from one another but are discovered as independent meaningful experiences which intercorrelate in the most complex ways, would prevent the fallacy of reductionism to occur to anyone. The only reason reductionism is so prevalent in both science and philosophy (the whole search for the perfect set of 'things' and 'laws' which can 'explain' everything) is because this simple fact if not recognized. Thinkers are overindulged in correlations and completely disregard that any attempt to imagine some perceptions and their concepts as mechanical product of others, is a completely arbitrary decision.

Let's look at simple example. I stretch my arm to take the pen on my desk. There's a whole spectrum of conscious phenomena which are correlated in the most complicated, yet consistent ways. Physically, the motion of my arm, the nerve impulses, the brain activity are all consistent. But these are only part of the spectrum of conscious phenomena. My idea that I need to take the pen for some purpose, which I experience as activating the will, is also fully correlated with all other perceptions, and is no less valid conscious experience than the others. In fact, from my perspective it is the most important one, because it is what brings into harmony all the separate frames of perception of my arm movement. If scientists observe my action from the outside, they may have very good account of the nerve activity and it will be found to be fully consistent all the way but nowhere will they find the actual idea which meaningfully unites all the observed muscle movements into something whole. So the question is: what gives me the right to try and reduce this manifold conscious experience to arbitrarily chosen subset of phenomena? Nothing really. There's nothing in the given which suggests that I should regard the idea as effect of the perceptions of nerves.

The only reason the above approach is so prevalent is because scientists are blindfolded for what they do with their scientific thinking. They focus entirely on the correlations and arbitrarily choose what to regard as fundamental. Then they present it as if everything else can be reduced to these fundamentals. And here's where the blind spot works - correlation is mistaken for reduction/causation. The scientist is blind for the fact that he cannot produce the concept of 'idea' in any other way than through thinking contemplation of his own inner experience. Yet he fantasizes that it somehow emerges from the mechanical combinations of the fundamentals.

So reductionist thinking not only poses a hard problem but is in itself a fractal of hard problems. The only remedy is to observe thinking properly and realize the given fact - that concepts do not proceed as mechanical transformations of one another but are independent meaningful experiences. Only then science can continue safely with what is its real strength - to trace the relations between concepts (which themselves are discovered in our intercourse with perceptions).

Please note that in this way we don't take anything away from the scientific method. We're simply purifying it from its arbitrary pernicious philosophical embellishments, which only lead to confusion and hard problems. At it's core, the scientific approach is fully compatible with thinking which lives in concepts and traces relations. The desire to promote some of these concepts as cardinal and present everything else as reducible to them is something completely different and doesn't in itself add anything useful to the scientific process. In fact - it only hinders it because it rises imaginary boundaries and preconceived ideas about where the truth should be sought, what form it should take, what is possible and what impossible to know, and so on.

[tjssailor]

"Once again when these spikes go away you are dead and you won't look like you are conscious. You can choose to believe your consciousness doesn't need these spikes but there is no science or philosophy that has proven that. It would be a question of faith.

As for spikes all over the place, the spikes in your brain and nervous system are organized, structured, complex, and carry information unlike the electricity that comes from a wall socket. "It is also tuned to the "frequency" of living matter with origins in single cell life."

Let me repeat the refrain that the equations of electro-magnetics do not predict consciousness or any other mental phenomenon. To say that electromagnetic phenomenon have anything to do with consciousness is superstition.

" Once again when these spikes go away you are dead and you won't look like you are conscious." - My body may be dead but nothing can be said logically about consciousness.

"As for spikes all over the place, the spikes in your brain and nervous system are organized, structured, complex, and carry information" - Really? Spikes are generally considered to be random noise. What would give them organization, structure, and complexity? The only information these spikes could carry is voltage, frequency, wave shape and that information only exists because of consciousness. To say they carry any mental information is once again superstition. "Spikes" are just electrons in motion and it doesn't matter where they occur. If electrons in motion create mental phenomenon they would do it everywhere including my blender.

"It is also tuned to the "frequency" of living matter with origins in single cell life." - This is a nonsense phrase. Frequency is just the movement of electrons once again changing in amplitude at a fixed rate. No frequency is found exclusively in "living matter" whatever that means.

You still also cannot explain why out of the trillions of tons of "matter" in the universe there only three pounds exclusively that seem to allow your personal existence.

[Brad Walker]

Why do idealists with personal validation owe thinking to all physicalists with varying levels of intellectual honesty?

[Hans-Werner Hammen]

If the symbol "experience" is symbolizing- / synonymous with- / meaning:
Detected-, realized-, aware-, per-/conceived-, observed-, experienced-, -ness/-hood
= informed-ness/-hood = information = property = truth = opinion
iow all that is
- "invisible TO the eye" = totally undetectable
- only IN the eye = fabricated from/about the detectable
then we cannot explain experience,
all that we can assert is "it is imaginary"

An example of experiences is colors.
Colors are, beyond a shred of doubt, totally undetectable.
Colors are NO-thing, they are ONLY being fabricated from/about SOME-thing.

Everybody who is subscribed to the assertion "I see a color"
is committed to the assertion of a categorical error:
Any color cannot be - not in the slightest - be scientifically researched.
All that you CAN scientufically research is the thing you are detecting / observing.

When we observe an object we can not even remotely explain,
HOW the brain allocates the imaginary = inside-brain-effect (a color)
AT the very real outside-brain cause = the object being observed.
I wonder why nobody mentions this.

Btw any worldview, it belongs to the imaginary.
Idealism and Nominalism are NO-thing from/about SOME-thing.
They are, like colors, imaginary-non-causal = epiphaenomenal = do not exist.
Each is, all the louder being asserted = object-ized = FAKED.
The asserrtion OF the imaginary is detectable, is real.

[Cleric K]

If the symbol "experience" is symbolizing- / synonymous with- / meaning:
Detected-, realized-, aware-, per-/conceived-, observed-, experienced-, -ness/-hood
= informed-ness/-hood = information = property = truth = opinion
iow all that is
- "invisible TO the eye" = totally undetectable
- only IN the eye = fabricated from/about the detectable
then we cannot explain experience,
all that we can assert is "it is imaginary"

An example of experiences is colors.
Colors are, beyond a shred of doubt, totally undetectable.
Colors are NO-thing, they are ONLY being fabricated from/about SOME-thing.

Everybody who is subscribed to the assertion "I see a color"
is committed to the assertion of a categorical error:
Any color cannot be - not in the slightest - be scientifically researched.
All that you CAN scientufically research is the thing you are detecting / observing.

When we observe an object we can not even remotely explain,
HOW the brain allocates the imaginary = inside-brain-effect (a color)
AT the very real outside-brain cause = the object being observed.
I wonder why nobody mentions this.

Btw any worldview, it belongs to the imaginary.
Idealism and Nominalism are NO-thing from/about SOME-thing.
They are, like colors, imaginary-non-causal = epiphaenomenal = do not exist.
Each is, all the louder being asserted = object-ized = FAKED.
The asserrtion OF the imaginary is detectable, is real.

Hans,

what you say is an important recognition of fundamental polarity. Are you familiar with the Philosophy of Freedom (the title also translated as Philosophy of Spiritual Activity or Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path)? The polarity that you describe is there referred to as Perception (which you call NO-thing) and Idea (which you call SOME-thing). Thinking is the process which weaves between these two poles.

The whole drama of our current age is that the place of thinking can't be found - or more precisely, since thinking is not seen, there's no inkling that there's something to be found. It is something that weaves in the background and people are generally only aware of the perceptions of thoughts that pop up in consciousness together with their meaning but not of the thinking process which is the expression of their spiritual activity.

In this sense, calling the pole of Perception, NO-thing, FAKED and so on, may be a good way to nudge somebody and point their attention to the other pole, but from that point onwards such designations become counter-productive. We must be aware that in the ordinary state of consciousness, characteristic for the everyday life, we cannot be conscious of the Ideal SOME-thing unless we experience its reflection in colors, sounds and so on. The averagely developed person of our age can be conscious of thoughts only when they are reflected in sensory-like perceptions (for example words of the inner voice). If you take away these words (which you call FAKE NO-thing) the person will drop unconscious. He might still be living in ideas but with no way to reflect them, the state of consciousness will be practically the same as the one we experience in deep dreamless sleep.

So I invite you to reassess the role of thinking in the picture. The simple denial of one pole leads to mysticism, where we cling to the Ideal pole but by losing all means to reflect spiritual activity, we can know no more than the nebulous mystical state. Then we can only fantasize that somehow everything we experience as perceptions emerge from that state but without ever being able to know how and why. They are like orthogonal worlds, like the difference between wave function and its collapsed state - the process that links them together remains a mystery.

On the other hand, if thinking is investigated, it will be found that it's not that one pole is discarded in expense of the other, but that the two poles gradually come together, as two polar aspects of the same spiritual be-ing. Thinking is the point of contact between the two worlds. We can see that this is the case because SOME-thing (the meaningful experience of our thought) and the NO-thing (the color, sound, etc., image of the thought) belong together in a unity. The NO-thing color or sound are no longer mysterious phenomena of unknown origin but they closely reflect the meaning that we experience in the SOME-thing.