Falsification of Scientific Theories of Consciousness

[Astra052]

Science studying consciousness and being able to explain it are two different things. I think if consciousness can only be explained from subjective expereince then it just cannot be fully explained. There's no reason it can't study it or its behavior though. Unless it doesn't have behavior at all.

OK thanks that cleared up the confusion for me. Perhaps Simon and Eugene are also talking about whether the pursuit of science can explain the essence of consciousness? In my view, as I briefly mentioned before, that is a meaningless metaphysical question. Consciousness does not need to be explained because it is the only activity we experience, and also we should not divide what consciousness is from what consciousness does. We cannot really divide anything along those lines, including human beings. When dualisms such as those pop up in our line of inquiry, we should take them as canaries in the coal mine.

Honestly I don't see how its an entirely meaningless metaphysical question. The essence of consciousness could be the difference between awareness or unconsciousness after death. If consciousness is just created by a materialist brain or something else I think that's important. Maybe I misunderstand what you mean.

[AshvinP]

Science studying consciousness and being able to explain it are two different things. I think if consciousness can only be explained from subjective expereince then it just cannot be fully explained. There's no reason it can't study it or its behavior though. Unless it doesn't have behavior at all.

OK thanks that cleared up the confusion for me. Perhaps Simon and Eugene are also talking about whether the pursuit of science can explain the essence of consciousness? In my view, as I briefly mentioned before, that is a meaningless metaphysical question. Consciousness does not need to be explained because it is the only activity we experience, and also we should not divide what consciousness is from what consciousness does. We cannot really divide anything along those lines, including human beings. When dualisms such as those pop up in our line of inquiry, we should take them as canaries in the coal mine.

Honestly I don't see how its an entirely meaningless metaphysical question. The essence of consciousness could be the difference between awareness or unconsciousness after death. If consciousness is just created by a materialist brain or something else I think that's important. Maybe I misunderstand what you mean.

I am not even sure anymore...

If the question is whether scientific inquiry can rule out mind-matter dualism, then I am not sure. Maybe it could by showing more and more of what are now considered "material" processes are more precisely emergent from conscious activity, as Hoffman is pursuing, especially in reconciling QM and GR. Philosophy can and has ruled it out, IMO. Ultimately all science is nested within larger philosophical frameworks - the latter determine what is possible-impossible, what types of questions must be asked, what methods can be used, etc. As the philosophical framework transitions towards idealism, I expect the sciences to follow suit. Then we will never need to bother with scientifically "disproving" materialism-dualism, as they will naturally die out from their own internal contradictions.

[Simon Adams]

I am really confused as to why I am on more of the same page with Jim than you and Eugene

First, doesn't all of this talk about subjects and objects, subjectivity and objectivity, subjective experience and objective experience... remind you of something? Not simply as distinctions, but as markers to set fundamental boundaries of empirical investigation? It should remind you of Cartesian dualism and Kantian divide. That is what you are implicitly accepting when making such claims.

Second, we all agree (except maybe Jim) that the world of 'things' from the smallest particle to the largest galaxy are expressions of conscious activity, right? That is within the realm of what science has been studying for a long time now. Now most scientists may not understand what the results of their studies mean, or mistake the objects of their study for some underlying fundamental reality, but nevertheless they have been studying the behavior and relationships of only ideal content.

To play a pun on the two meanings of the word, I think you’re being over idealistic about how idealistic science can ever be. Ignoring for now any distinctions between mind, spirit, being, life etc, let’s say that everything is ultimately ‘made of mind’. However science doesn’t study mind, it studies representations, what Bernardo calls images of mental processes. This takes it at least one step back from fundamental, from the ontological primitive.

There is a way in which this is inevitable, you can’t have a process that meets the criteria of science that works at the fundamental level. I can just about imagine a kind of revolution where someone can go a bit deeper and produce a model for the mechanism of how mental forms/essence/process are represented. However that’s still outside-looking-in. It’s still studying the aspect that has the appearance of duality, of material and non material components.

Does that make any sense?

[AshvinP]

I am really confused as to why I am on more of the same page with Jim than you and Eugene

First, doesn't all of this talk about subjects and objects, subjectivity and objectivity, subjective experience and objective experience... remind you of something? Not simply as distinctions, but as markers to set fundamental boundaries of empirical investigation? It should remind you of Cartesian dualism and Kantian divide. That is what you are implicitly accepting when making such claims.

Second, we all agree (except maybe Jim) that the world of 'things' from the smallest particle to the largest galaxy are expressions of conscious activity, right? That is within the realm of what science has been studying for a long time now. Now most scientists may not understand what the results of their studies mean, or mistake the objects of their study for some underlying fundamental reality, but nevertheless they have been studying the behavior and relationships of only ideal content.

To play a pun on the two meanings of the word, I think you’re being over idealistic about how idealistic science can ever be. Ignoring for now any distinctions between mind, spirit, being, life etc, let’s say that everything is ultimately ‘made of mind’. However science doesn’t study mind, it studies representations, what Bernardo calls images of mental processes. This takes it at least one step back from fundamental, from the ontological primitive.

There is a way in which this is inevitable, you can’t have a process that meets the criteria of science that works at the fundamental level. I can just about imagine a kind of revolution where someone can go a bit deeper and produce a model for the mechanism of how mental forms/essence/process are represented. However that’s still outside-looking-in. It’s still studying the aspect that has the appearance of duality, of material and non material components.

Does that make any sense?

It makes internal sense but is still suffering from the self-imposed Kantian ontic-epistemic divide. We are imagining two separate realms of phenomenon (representations of mind) and noumenon (mind) and then claiming the former offers itself to our scientific inquiries but the latter does not. That is a philosophical framework for science which only holds up under materialism or dualism. It only makes sense if we are dealing with two different kinds of things and we assume one operates according to different 'laws' than the other. Perhaps we start imagining that the mental things do not even have any laws to speak of.

Under idealism, that cannot be the case. It is much better to think of the phenomenon as pointers towards the noumenon - they are begging for us to follow the direction in which they are pointing. Moreover, they are begging us to add the ideal content which they are missing to manifest a coherent and unified whole. The 'laws of nature' are nothing other than our ideal representation of relations between ideal content. And it only takes a shift in perspective, not a shift in the essential scientific method, for us to see how those ideal laws lead us towards their sources.

I will quote Steiner again:

True science, in the higher sense of the word, has to do only with ideal objects; it can only be idealism. For, it has its ultimate foundation in needs that stem from the human spirit. Nature awakens questions in us, problems that strive for solution. But nature cannot itself provide this solution. Through our capacity for knowledge a higher world confronts nature; and this fact creates higher demands. For a being who did not possess this higher nature, these problems would simply not arise. These questions can therefore also not receive an answer from any authority other than precisely this higher nature. Scientific questions are therefore essentially a matter that the human spirit has to settle with itself. They do not lead the human spirit out of its element. The realm, however, in which the human spirit lives and weaves as though within its primally own, is the idea, is the world of thoughts. To solve thought-questions with thought-answers is the scientific activity in the highest sense of the word. And all other scientific procedures are there, ultimately, only in order to serve this highest purpose.

[Simon Adams]

It makes internal sense but is still suffering from the self-imposed Kantian ontic-epistemic divide. We are imagining two separate realms of phenomenon (representations of mind) and noumenon (mind) and then claiming the former offers itself to our scientific inquiries but the latter does not. That is a philosophical framework for science which only holds up under materialism or dualism. It only makes sense if we are dealing with two different kinds of things and we assume one operates according to different 'laws' than the other. Perhaps we start imagining that the mental things do not even have any laws to speak of.

Under idealism, that cannot be the case. It is much better to think of the phenomenon as pointers towards the noumenon - they are begging for us to follow the direction in which they are pointing. Moreover, they are begging us to add the ideal content which they are missing to manifest a coherent and unified whole. The 'laws of nature' are nothing other than our ideal representation of relations between ideal content. And it only takes a shift in perspective, not a shift in the essential scientific method, for us to see how those ideal laws lead us towards their sources.

From my fairly philosophically ignorant position, I do think Kant ‘broke’ metaphysics, as a kind of response to Hume. It’s like these powerful minds have had a great war, without any of the rules of the ‘Geneva convention’ that had developed through the scholastics and even Spinoza and Liebnitz. Kant applied a kind of extreme skepticism to defend his flanks, then rammed his troops through the middle by firing cyanide ahead of them, poisoning the battle field for all that came after him.

So I fully appreciate the need to undo some of that damage. However what needs to be recovered in my view is reason, the idea that the world is intelligible, even if there are limits. The apparent consistency of the materiality of the world is one aspect of that intelligibility, and science has proven itself pretty good at uncovering that. Yes I agree completely that the process by itself tends towards a worldview of dualism, even worse, physicalism.

This trend is ever more powerful as the broad horizon of science is lost in ever more specialisation, and it is a problem. But is it a problem of science, or a problem of philosophy? I would argue the latter, and also that this can be traced back in large part directly to Kant. I think philosophy could provide a more ‘whole’ context to science, but we’re back to the problem that philosophy is essentially broken. Postmodernism is now busy breaking the fundamentals of even maths, applying Kant’s unknowable “thing-in-itself” logic even to numbers, which become human creations with no reality. Most of the rest of philosophy is essentially clinging to reason by adopting a kind of philosophy-of-physicalism basis, clinging to the coattails of science rather than informing it and bringing the more integrated view you are looking for.

The church seems to have escaped the mess by broadly ignoring everything that came after the scholastics, which I used to thing was weird, like it was kind of stuck in time. But as I learn more of the philosophy that came after, it makes more and more sense to me. I’m just starting to look more at Pseudo-Dionysus, and there is some great stuff there where I feel I’ve learnt some things after reading it, in a refreshing way compared to much from the last few centuries which seems to mostly be clever arguments responding to someone else's clever arguments.

I’m being unfair of course, and if that was the case we could just forget the last few centuries and start from some point before Hume without making the same ‘mistakes’. In reality it seems impossible to unpick these from the genuine insights along the way. Nonetheless, science can plod along making progress without philosophy, which is why it’s overtly developed it’s own implicit philosophy of scientism (for those who don’t have anything better anyway).

For you to be successful in rejoining science and metaphysics, and form it into a single monistic discipline, you would need to undo Kant, and show the way in which the laws that apply to the representation apply to the “thing-in-itself”. As far as I can tell, it’s not clear they do. The representation is in some way an interaction, a meeting of surfaces. Also, Nature seems very habitual, up to a precision of more than 10 decimal places at least. Even my body follows the same habitual laws (up to the point of ‘my’ control of it). However my individual meta-conscious mind does not - even ignoring the question of free will, I can break all the laws of physics in my mind.

Anyway I’m rambling, but I personally think it’s difficult to see how you can expand science back into philosophy. Rather you can have a philosophy into which the theories of science can fit more reasonably than materialism. You then have the ability for science to expand beyond the assumptions of materialism to some extent. Maybe in the far future science will have swallowed it’s tail and be able to measure nature from the inside-out, but would that be an abstraction still? In some ways, that sounds more like what we do every day just by being alive!

[AshvinP]

It makes internal sense but is still suffering from the self-imposed Kantian ontic-epistemic divide. We are imagining two separate realms of phenomenon (representations of mind) and noumenon (mind) and then claiming the former offers itself to our scientific inquiries but the latter does not. That is a philosophical framework for science which only holds up under materialism or dualism. It only makes sense if we are dealing with two different kinds of things and we assume one operates according to different 'laws' than the other. Perhaps we start imagining that the mental things do not even have any laws to speak of.

Under idealism, that cannot be the case. It is much better to think of the phenomenon as pointers towards the noumenon - they are begging for us to follow the direction in which they are pointing. Moreover, they are begging us to add the ideal content which they are missing to manifest a coherent and unified whole. The 'laws of nature' are nothing other than our ideal representation of relations between ideal content. And it only takes a shift in perspective, not a shift in the essential scientific method, for us to see how those ideal laws lead us towards their sources.

From my fairly philosophically ignorant position, I do think Kant ‘broke’ metaphysics, as a kind of response to Hume. It’s like these powerful minds have had a great war, without any of the rules of the ‘Geneva convention’ that had developed through the scholastics and even Spinoza and Liebnitz. Kant applied a kind of extreme skepticism to defend his flanks, then rammed his troops through the middle by firing cyanide ahead of them, poisoning the battle field for all that came after him.

So I fully appreciate the need to undo some of that damage. However what needs to be recovered in my view is reason, the idea that the world is intelligible, even if there are limits. The apparent consistency of the materiality of the world is one aspect of that intelligibility, and science has proven itself pretty good at uncovering that. Yes I agree completely that the process by itself tends towards a worldview of dualism, even worse, physicalism.

This trend is ever more powerful as the broad horizon of science is lost in ever more specialisation, and it is a problem. But is it a problem of science, or a problem of philosophy? I would argue the latter, and also that this can be traced back in large part directly to Kant. I think philosophy could provide a more ‘whole’ context to science, but we’re back to the problem that philosophy is essentially broken. Postmodernism is now busy breaking the fundamentals of even maths, applying Kant’s unknowable “thing-in-itself” logic even to numbers, which become human creations with no reality. Most of the rest of philosophy is essentially clinging to reason by adopting a kind of philosophy-of-physicalism basis, clinging to the coattails of science rather than informing it and bringing the more integrated view you are looking for.

The church seems to have escaped the mess by broadly ignoring everything that came after the scholastics, which I used to thing was weird, like it was kind of stuck in time. But as I learn more of the philosophy that came after, it makes more and more sense to me. I’m just starting to look more at Pseudo-Dionysus, and there is some great stuff there where I feel I’ve learnt some things after reading it, in a refreshing way compared to much from the last few centuries which seems to mostly be clever arguments responding to someone else's clever arguments.

I’m being unfair of course, and if that was the case we could just forget the last few centuries and start from some point before Hume without making the same ‘mistakes’. In reality it seems impossible to unpick these from the genuine insights along the way. Nonetheless, science can plod along making progress without philosophy, which is why it’s overtly developed it’s own implicit philosophy of scientism (for those who don’t have anything better anyway).

For you to be successful in rejoining science and metaphysics, and form it into a single monistic discipline, you would need to undo Kant, and show the way in which the laws that apply to the representation apply to the “thing-in-itself”. As far as I can tell, it’s not clear they do. The representation is in some way an interaction, a meeting of surfaces. Also, Nature seems very habitual, up to a precision of more than 10 decimal places at least. Even my body follows the same habitual laws (up to the point of ‘my’ control of it). However my individual meta-conscious mind does not - even ignoring the question of free will, I can break all the laws of physics in my mind.

Anyway I’m rambling, but I personally think it’s difficult to see how you can expand science back into philosophy. Rather you can have a philosophy into which the theories of science can fit more reasonably than materialism. You then have the ability for science to expand beyond the assumptions of materialism to some extent. Maybe in the far future science will have swallowed it’s tail and be able to measure nature from the inside-out, but would that be an abstraction still? In some ways, that sounds more like what we do every day just by being alive!

I love your battle imagery there and also agree with just about everything you wrote. It is exactly right to say it is a "problem of philosophy" not of science, which then makes us realize it is only a mental habit which prevents science from venturing much further into the depths of conscious activity rather than hard divisions built into the structure of Reality. We only get the various incompatibilities and mysteries of science, including the QM-GR split, because we are limiting ourselves to only one perspective on the phenomenal relations. As you correctly point out, it is a perspective on the exterior of the world at the expense of the interior.

So, yes, Kant must be undone and Descartes too. Each individual is responsible for undoing it within themselves first, others later. It is a very powerful mental habit - even though I know the issues with Cartesian and Kantian divides clearly, I often catch myself slipping back into them. Yet it remains only my responsibility to become more empirical and rigorous about my interior life instead of simply passing through my experiences without serious reflection. That introspective activity is what all true science is about - finding out where and how our experiences and ideal content fits into the broader network of ideal relations.

Your bolded statement above should not be an issue once we realize the laws which apply to the representations are themselves [partial] representations which must be explored further through our spiritual thinking activity. We must always resist the idolatry of mistaking partial ideal content for the complete picture. The 'secular' approach to science, which is generally only paid lip service, is at least correct in that regard - we are never arriving at a "final" theory of everything, only more expansive and precise understanding of the ideal relations which necessitate our experiences.

[Simon Adams]

I love your battle imagery there and also agree with just about everything you wrote. It is exactly right to say it is a "problem of philosophy" not of science, which then makes us realize it is only a mental habit which prevents science from venturing much further into the depths of conscious activity rather than hard divisions built into the structure of Reality. We only get the various incompatibilities and mysteries of science, including the QM-GR split, because we are limiting ourselves to only one perspective on the phenomenal relations. As you correctly point out, it is a perspective on the exterior of the world at the expense of the interior.

Yes the QM-GR apparent conflict is a good example. There seems to be a way in which the physics is moving towards a world made of agents and information, acting on a field. In Shakespeare’s terms it’s actors with scripts, on a stage. “All the world’s a stage” doesn’t have the same predictive power as physicists would expect from a “Theory of Everything”, but his plays have their own explanatory power. I think all these ‘ways of knowing’ have their place, but to make sense of how they fit together you need a cornerstone. Otherwise they all become separate from the whole, untethered. Once you realise the universe does have a cornerstone, there’s this strange way in which the building is actually inside it’s own cornerstone, and the different ways of knowing are of interest rather than of critical importance.

The way in which they are important of course is when you have people around you only interested in carpets, or doorbells. To me idealism is like saying, actually this thing is really a house made of bricks, but obviously from my perspective it would be nothing without the cornerstone

[AshvinP]

I love your battle imagery there and also agree with just about everything you wrote. It is exactly right to say it is a "problem of philosophy" not of science, which then makes us realize it is only a mental habit which prevents science from venturing much further into the depths of conscious activity rather than hard divisions built into the structure of Reality. We only get the various incompatibilities and mysteries of science, including the QM-GR split, because we are limiting ourselves to only one perspective on the phenomenal relations. As you correctly point out, it is a perspective on the exterior of the world at the expense of the interior.

Yes the QM-GR apparent conflict is a good example. There seems to be a way in which the physics is moving towards a world made of agents and information, acting on a field. In Shakespeare’s terms it’s actors with scripts, on a stage. “All the world’s a stage” doesn’t have the same predictive power as physicists would expect from a “Theory of Everything”, but his plays have their own explanatory power. I think all these ‘ways of knowing’ have their place, but to make sense of how they fit together you need a cornerstone. Otherwise they all become separate from the whole, untethered. Once you realise the universe does have a cornerstone, there’s this strange way in which the building is actually inside it’s own cornerstone, and the different ways of knowing are of interest rather than of critical importance.

The way in which they are important of course is when you have people around you only interested in carpets, or doorbells. To me idealism is like saying, actually this thing is really a house made of bricks, but obviously from my perspective it would be nothing without the cornerstone

I may have lost you on that one, but I'll attempt a brief response and you can let me know if it has anything to do with what you wrote above.

The evolution of consciousness is critical to keep in mind - what could only be expressed in mythology, philosophy and poetry before can be expressed in scientific terms now (or soon). That comes with our scientific mode of consciousness which was barely nascent at the time of Shakespeare. That is not to say, of course, that we should abandon philosophy or poetry as other ways to approach the same knowledge, but rather to recognize that a valid approach has been added to world which was not there before.

[Simon Adams]

No you didn’t loose me on that, I’m just not convinced - especially with the idea that science is anywhere near revealing the foundations. Assuming environmental collapse, or the adoption of anti-reason by our universities, doesn’t cause a collapse of civilisation, I would expect there to be Kuhnian type revolution every century or so, for many more centuries. Each time it happens, humanity will yet again think we’re close to understanding nearly everything.

In terms of our “scientific mode of consciousness”, I actually think that to some extent this has a disintegrating effect. Even in classical times there were a range of narratives from extreme skeptics to strange cults, but the extent to which so many people have abrogated responsibility for seeking any deeper meaning to life (beyond the 24hr news cycle and various conspiracies) is surely more extreme than it ever was then.

I’m hoping we’re past the peak of this, but the idea that the wider collective consciousness is at some point of making a great leap forward is not one I see in the wider culture. Maybe some of the realisations in parts of the scientific community about the limits of materialism - such as in consciousness studies - will eventually filter through. Certainly there are pockets of sub cultures that are yearning for wisdom, but often that’s not much more than a rediscovery of past wisdom. Overall I see just as many backward steps as forward steps, and if anything the big picture is one of increasing disintegration and fragmentation.

I sound very negative and I should add that I see plenty of reason for hope in many areas. I just don’t see this species wide leap to an Omega point that you envision.

[Eugene I]

I applaud the Ashvin's enthusiasm to completely close the "Kantian" gap, but I do not think his approach to it can close it completely. It's good that Simon mentioned Dionisius here because it is very relevant. Under idealism, the reason we can apply cognition to know the world is because the world was and is being created by ideas: it's the ideations of the MAL that are the origins of the appearances and experiences of the world. However, there is a limit to this approach, and that is because the Consciousness itself have not originated from ideas, it's the other way around - the ideas have originated from Consciousness. If there would be no ideas, Consciousness could still exist, albeit in a "dumb" state, just experiencing itself without any rational understanding. But of course, Consciousness has the ability to cognate and create ideas, so it naturally does. But if there would be no Consciousness, no ideas would be able to exist whatsoever, and no ideas could re-create Consciousness into existence. So, ideas originate from Consciousness, just like the appearances of the world originate from ideas of the world. And that is why cognition can comprehend the world using ideas, simply because the world is constructed from ideas. However, because Consciousness does not originate from ideas, then such argument does not apply: we can not claim that we can comprehend Consciousness itself with ideas exactly because Consciousness has not originated from ideas. Unfortunately, that means that we are back to corner 1 of the Kantian divide. However, there is a rescue: Consciousness has an innate ability to experience itself directly prior to any ideas, and that has been known to mystics of both Eastern and Western traditions. That is exactly what St. Dionisius, the author of "The Cloud of Unknowing", Meister Eckhart and other Christian mystics were saying, as well as many mystics in the Hindu, Buddhist, Judaist and Sufi traditions. Such direct knowing, called Jnana in Hinduism and Gnosis in the esoteric Christianity, is Consciousness directly knowing itself that truly closes the Kantian gap. That does not mean that such experience can not be reflected by cognition, but in this case the best that cognition can do is simply reflect it as a fact using ideas, but can never claim to fully understand and explain it rationally.

Basically, the position that Ashvin promotes, which is based on Steiner's philosophy and has its origins in German idealists such as Hegel, Goethe and others, can be called "spiritual rationalism" claiming that Consciousness can fully comprehend itself and all its aspects and creations using its cognitive thinking ability. However, I would argue that such position has no ground in the original spiritual traditions of both the West and East and is a development of scientism and rationalism during the Western enlightenment era. I would agree that such "spiritual science" can indeed be successfully applied to the whole creation, including the world of ideas, phenomena, representations an so on. However, there is a limit to it: it is not directly applicable to Consciousness itself as an existential reality.

PS edit: Expecting Ashvin's argument that such position introduces a "divide", I would argue that there is no such divide. It is exactly the Awareness - the innate ability of Consciousness to experience everything, to be aware of everything, including direct Awareness of itself and direct Awareness of all ideas, phenomena and forms, that unites everything into oneness (without denying the variety of ideas and forms) and closes any divisions. That is why such experiential Gnosis is called "non-dual".