Jim Cross wrote: ↑Thu Jul 14, 2022 11:57 am
Cleric,
I'm more or less agnostic and without opinion on the Kant thing. Obviously our models have to match reality-itself to some degree or we couldn't survive or operate in the world. Since the model comes from reality-itself, it would reflect it in certain ways. But the entire notion of reality-itself is part of our model and may be a distortion of reality.
I see. So in that case what is your position on the nature of qualia? Would you consider something akin to pan-psychism, where
the qualitative potential is intrinsic characteristic of reality and it is only a matter of it entering into complex enough dynamics such that this potential shapes itself into a (subjectively experienced) model of its own existence? Or you would rather subscribe to hard computationalism, where consciousness is only an illusion that any complex enough recursive mechanical process (whether biological or possibly devised by humans in a wind tunnel) can reach at some point?
Jim Cross wrote: ↑Thu Jul 14, 2022 11:57 am
Your question about waves as particles connected with springs made no sense to me. That's why I didn't respond. There is no assumption of non-locality or any quantum weirdness to explain anything. Actually in this article I barely even mention electromagnetic fields except in that are one way in which neurons could affect other neurons.
...
One other note of clarification. Fields are continuous and the same everywhere. They don't need a place to focus or come together.
For example, a radio transmitter is sending out a music program. You might be twenty miles north of the transmitter and I might be twenty miles south but the music we are receiving on our radios is same in both places.
Let me see if I can clarify this. Let's alter space and time scales for better illustration. Let's imagine the brain as large as the Cosmos and our time scale such that it takes a lot of time for signals to propagate.
Now let's imagine that we receive simultaneous visual and auditory impressions. The visual stimuli begin at the retina, the auditory begin in the cochlea. Now remember these are Cosmic distances apart. As the stimuli are transformed into neural/wave activity they begins to propagate through the Cosmic brain. We can imagine this as light from supernovae. It will be a long time before the processes around the ear are affected by what happened at the eye and vice-versa. These signals propagate and move through the nerves towards the corresponding cortices, later they interact with each other and so on.
Now the nature of subjective experience poses an interesting question. From experiential point of view we have a simultaneity of phenomena. We perceive color and sound at the same time. When we focus on something in our visual field, our hearing is not muted and vice-versa - when we listen attentively to something we don't lose our visual tapestry. So what is the nature of the subjective experience? Can it be said that we experience simultaneously some huge region of the Cosmic brain, even though the 'light' from events in the various parts might not have yet reached each other? In other words, can we have subjective experience of color and sound as they propagate through their corresponding cortices even before the shockwaves of causality of the two stimuli have interacted (that is, the visual cortex can't know beforehand that a signal is approaching from the auditory cortex and vice-versa, until their light fronts reach each other)?
If it is
not possible to have simultaneous experience of both stimuli before they have interacted, what would happen? Would we experience only the visual until we wait for the causal light front approaching from the auditory cortex to interfere and then become conscious also of the sound? Or vice-versa? But if this is the case why there should be such preference? It would mean that our subjective experience is localized in some part of the Cosmic brain (closer to the visual or auditory cortex).
Interestingly, requiring that separate signals causally affect each other before they can become part of the subjective experience, doesn't really solve the problem. One can say that only when the signals interfere and are integrated in the prefrontal cortex we can claim that we experience the color and sound. But this only shifts the problem because the prefrontal cortex is in itself a huge region of the Cosmic brain where signals still travel with the speed of causality. So we once again arrive at the need that our subjective experience must encompass some region of the Cosmic brain simultaneously even though the different parts can affect each other only at limited speed.
If one is to escape such paradoxes, he's forced to search for an infinitely small point within the Cosmic brain and say "all causal wave fronts which interfere in that point constitute the momentary subjective experience." Only in this way we escape the possibility of having subjective experience of regions of the brain that haven't yet had chance to interact with each other.
Another bizarre solution is to declare that consciousness is indeed a subjective experience that encompasses simultaneously the spacetime of the Cosmic brain. We are indeed experiencing color and sound arising in different parts which haven't yet had the chance to interact causally. Yet one can try to avoid any paradoxes by declaring that this simultaneous experience can not have any causal effect. In other words, we're like a mute observer, who grasps simultaneously events in different parts of the Cosmic brain yet can't make causal use of this knowledge. The observer can only passively experience how the events ripple towards each other, how they interact and produce thoughts in the prefrontal cortex. This seems to do the trick but it is still troubling that we
know that we experience the simultaneity. This knowledge affects our future causal thoughts in the prefrontal cortex. If this experience was pure observing without point of contact with the ripples of causality, then it shouldn't be possible to
think about it. It shouldn't be possible that our simultaneous experience of the Cosmic brain spacetime, should
leak into the flow of causality and become an object of thinking.
I hope this makes my question a little clearer. It's not really a concrete question but more of a pointer towards various enigmas that should be dealt with by any theory trying to explain the subjective experience as arising from causal interactions of the stuff of reality. The main point is that we too easily become preoccupied with the technicalities of brain ripples which affect each other causally but completely blind ourselves for the fact that we secretly place our consciousness as a God-like observer who encompasses this domain of spacetime simultaneously, independently of the causal flow.