246. DR. MICHAEL GRAZIANO LIKENS NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE RESEARCH TO ASTROLOGY RESEARCH

If I have to choose between "flagrant violations of conservation of energy" versus "spooky paranormal underpinnings", the latter would be closer to what we observe.
Probably there's no flagrant violation of conservation of energy. If you listen at 2':40" of the video I posted, Carrol explains that when the two cars split apart there isn't "new stuff" being created. He says: "It's like there were two copies of the car all along but they were precisely the same and then they diverged when this quantum event occurred."

With that said I am not a fan of the theory. And even among proponents of the MWI there's no unanimous consensus:
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2008/11/20/manyworlds-and-decoherence/
 
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I am listening to the beginning of the interview with Dr. Graziano. I have to say that his approach is fascinating. I had never thought of approaching the consciousness issue that way. I may have to go out and get his book.
 
Probably there's no flagrant violation of conservation of energy. If you listen at 2':40" of the video I posted, Carrol explains that when the two cars split apart there isn't "new stuff" being created. He says: "It's like there were two copies of the car all along but they were precisely the same and then they diverged when this quantum event occurred."

With that said I am not a fan of the theory. And even among proponents of the MWI there's no unanimous consensus:
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2008/11/20/manyworlds-and-decoherence/

There were two copies but they were precisely the same? I'm not sure what that even means.

I mentioned in the show thread that Graziano thinks people will live forever by uploading their brains. That helps me understand why he takes eliminativism seriously, and why he thinks consciousness doesn't require going to the microtubule level. The Singularity adherents are a religion that are pretty strident about their beliefs, which Lanier criticized in One Half a Manifesto.

Though Hammeroff did say that Orch-OR might allow for a similar uploading experience after initially decrying the notion of uploading, which seems to have made some of the Singularity folk happy.

eta:

Here's a blog post which helped me better under Dr. Graziano's puppet's are conscious position. Understanding it more I'm not sure its a terribly useful way of looking at the issue or how it advances our understanding but at the very least its not the mockable position some people on here have been alluding to it as.

http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_...3/09/a-puppet-is-as-conscious-as-you-are.html

The quote I brought up already went into this. Consciousness as attribution leads to nonsensical conclusions.
 
The quote I brought up already went into this. Consciousness as attribution leads to nonsensical conclusions.

You've posted a lot of quotes.

I just don't know how useful it is to help further our understanding of how conscious processes work. And while I get what he's saying, I don't think the "puppet is conscious" is the same as saying "the puppet is orange."

With colours, while the experience of colour is internal we say: the puppet is orange because there are actual wavelengths travelling from the puppet to the eyes, translated into the brain.

With the ventriloquist, the soundwaves that give the impression of a living thing are actually coming from the ventriloquist's mouth.

Whether his conception of consciousness is correct or not, I think his puppet example distracts from rather than complements his main arguments.
 
You've posted a lot of quotes.

Hahahaha! But just one from Graziano, which is what I thought you were referring to?

Anyway, I agree the puppet example doesn't work. But then I think this whole idea of consciousness as an illusion is nonsensical for reasons Feser goes into here when discussing Noe's review of Nagel's Mind & Cosmos.

But put to one side the question of what positive alternatives there might be to the materialistic naturalism that is Nagel’s target -- neo-Aristotelian hylemorphism, Cartesian dualism, vitalism, idealism, panpsychism, neutral monism, or whatever. Noë’s response would fail even if none of these alternatives was any good. To see why, suppose that a critic of Gödel's incompleteness theorems suggested that every true arithmetical statement in a formal system capable of expressing arithmetic really is in fact provable within the system, and that the consistency of arithmetic can in fact be proved from within arithmetic itself -- and that Gödel's arguments seem to show otherwise only because of a “cognitive illusion” that makes formal systems seem “vaguely spooky.”

This would not be a serious response to Gödel precisely because it simply does not show that Gödel is wrong but either presupposes or merely asserts that he is wrong.
 
But then I think this whole idea of consciousness as an illusion is nonsensical

I think part of the problem there is that it is often not at all clear what people mean when they talk about the idea of consciousness as an illusion. I suspect that people who argue about this are often talking past one another because they don't take the time to ensure that they are referring to the same thing.
 
I think part of the problem there is that it is often not at all clear what people mean when they talk about the idea of consciousness as an illusion. I suspect that people who argue about this are often talking past one another because they don't take the time to ensure that they are referring to the same thing.

I'm not sure there's much to talk past - Noe even says without the idea of cognitive illusion the world extends beyond materialistic if not mechanistic explanation:

We have a superb understanding of how we get biological variety from simple, living starting points. We can thank Darwin for that. And we know that life in its simplest forms is built up out of inorganic stuff. But we don't have any account of how life springs forth from the supposed primordial soup. This is an explanatory gap we have no idea how to bridge.

Science also lacks even a back-of-the-envelop [sic] concept explaining the emergence of consciousness from the behavior of mere matter. We have an elaborate understanding of the ways in which experience depends on neurobiology. But how consciousness arises out of the action of neurons, or how low-level chemical or atomic processes might explain why we are conscious — we haven't a clue.

We aren't even really sure what questions we should be asking.

and:

If modern science begins by shaping a conception of the cosmos, its subject matter, in such a way as to exclude mind and life, then it shouldn't come as a surprise that we can't seem to find a place for them in the natural order so conceived.

This is why Nagel observes, at the beginning of his book, that the mind-body problem isn't just a local problem concerning brains, behavior and the mind; correctly understood it invades our understanding of the cosmos itself and its history.

As such I'd be happy to see someone present a coherent explanation of what it means to say consciousness is akin to someone believing there's a rodent in their skull.
 
There were two copies but they were precisely the same? I'm not sure what that even means.
Me neither, but admittedly I am not a fan of the MWI and I haven't spent enough time to learn all of the major details.
It certainly appeals many physicists because of the mathematics and because it essentially removes randomness from quantum theory. It's less crazy and bizarre, which is more reassuring, although the implications are the end of the batshit crazy scale :D.

I mentioned in the show thread that Graziano thinks people will live forever by uploading their brains. That helps me understand why he takes eliminativism seriously, and why he thinks consciousness doesn't require going to the microtubule level. The Singularity adherents are a religion that are pretty strident about their beliefs, which Lanier criticized in One Half a Manifesto.
I agree. "Consciousness in a bottle" sounds pretty naive considering that the current scientific understanding has no idea of what it is.

Though Hammeroff did say that Orch-OR might allow for a similar uploading experience after initially decrying the notion of uploading, which seems to have made some of the Singularity folk happy.
But the question is... what would we upload? Consciousness? Or memories, experiences? Is consciousness just memories?
Can we upload a personality? Does consciousness equals to personality?

How do we upload the experience of "just being?", Awareness... is it uploadable? :)

It will take more than a few hyperbolic claims to make sense of these questions.
 
Probably there's no flagrant violation of conservation of energy. If you listen at 2':40" of the video I posted, Carrol explains that when the two cars split a part there isn't "new stuff" being created. He says: "It's like there were two copies of the car all along but they were precisely the same and then they diverged when this quantum event occurred."

With that said I am not a fan of the theory. And even among proponents of the MWI there's no unanimous consensus:
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2008/11/20/manyworlds-and-decoherence/

The MWI theory is woo.
 
Me neither, but admittedly I am not a fan of the MWI and I haven't spent enough time to learn all of the major details.
It certainly appeals many physicists because of the mathematics and because it essentially removes randomness from quantum theory. It's less crazy and bizarre, which is more reassuring, although the implications are the end of the batshit crazy scale :D.


I agree. "Consciousness in a bottle" sounds pretty naive considering that the current scientific understanding has no idea of what it is.


But the question is... what would we upload? Consciousness? Or memories, experiences? Is consciousness just memories?
Can we upload a personality? Does consciousness equals to personality?

How do we upload the experience of "just being?", Awareness... is it uploadable? :)

It will take more than a few hyperbolic claims to make sense of these questions.

"Uploading consciousness" is a gibberish term that doesn't mean anything. In contrast, if you treat consciousness as something that a spirit or soul has, and you trap the spirit as a particular kind of quantum field, you could, in principle, create a potential energy well that traps the spirit inside of a containment vessel. If the containment vessel is some kind of properly engineered robot, then in principle a spirit could live in that. Basically that would be some strange form of reincarnation.
 
I think part of the problem there is that it is often not at all clear what people mean when they talk about the idea of consciousness as an illusion. I suspect that people who argue about this are often talking past one another because they don't take the time to ensure that they are referring to the same thing.
Biggest problem with stating consciousness is an illusion, is that it can be easily misunderstood as an illusion experienced by a consciousness.
It might be better explained as a construct of the world build up by our brain. The experiencing entity is part of that construct. Therefore to that entity does not experience an illusion but its own reality, albeit a constructed one.
 
Biggest problem with stating consciousness is an illusion, is that it can be easily misunderstood as an illusion experienced by a consciousness.
It might be better explained as a construct of the world build up by our brain. The experiencing entity is part of that construct. Therefore to that entity does not experience an illusion but its own reality, albeit a constructed one.
I congratulate you for defining your definition of consciousness very clearly. But if that were so, then how would you create a computer chip that could experience pain and pleasure?
 
The MWI theory is woo.
The idea that the energy content of the big bang, of hundreds of billions of galaxies has to be multiplied by all of the eigenstates that have every existed or could ever exist, without any kind of catastrophic energy leakage, sounds like an exercise is absurdity. Nothing like that has ever been observed in nature. In contrast, if you treat quantum fields like some form of spirit, and permit the existence of ghosts, well, you get a stable system without catastrophic energy leakage. You might get some ghosts sucking energy out of batteries.
 
Biggest problem with stating consciousness is an illusion, is that it can be easily misunderstood as an illusion experienced by a consciousness.
It might be better explained as a construct of the world build up by our brain. The experiencing entity is part of that construct. Therefore to that entity does not experience an illusion but its own reality, albeit a constructed one.

Hmmm...this sounds more like a definition of Searle's biological naturalism than cognitive illusion?

And as Feser notes, despite his protestations what Searle claims about consciousness really does seem to be property dualism...
 
As such I'd be happy to see someone present a coherent explanation of what it means to say consciousness is akin to someone believing there's a rodent in their skull.

I have not yet read Dr. Graziano's book, but if I understood him correctly he is arguing the following:

Our brains are a complex device for processing information. In order to more efficiently process, our brains create simplified models and pardigms through which to process the information, but those models are from from accurate perceptions of the real world. When attempting to process information about itself, i.e. to be aware, the brain creates a simplified model which perceives this naval-gazing as operating through a magic process we call "consciousness." In reality, however, there is no magic process and there is no consciousness, there is only the mechanical processes of the brain.

While "normal" people perceive a magic process of consciousness, awareness, and free will, some abnormal people might perceive the process as a squirell. Both are incorrect but the former is common and the latter is not.
 
I have not yet read Dr. Graziano's book, but if I understood him correctly he is arguing the following:

Our brains are a complex device for processing information. In order to more efficiently process, our brains create simplified models and pardigms through which to process the information, but those models are from from accurate perceptions of the real world. When attempting to process information about itself, i.e. to be aware, the brain creates a simplified model which perceives this naval-gazing as operating through a magic process we call "consciousness." In reality, however, there is no magic process and there is no consciousness, there is only the mechanical processes of the brain.

While "normal" people perceive a magic process of consciousness, awareness, and free will, some abnormal people might perceive the process as a squirell. Both are incorrect but the former is common and the latter is not.
Can't we just replace "magic" with "unknown" and avoid the problem?

By the way the "squirrel" in the mind of a person with a psychiatric condition is not so different from the "crazy monkey" that we, "normal" people, perceive in our heads during the day :)

Your analogy with awareness doesn't work here. You need awareness to be aware of a squirrel in your head.
 
Can't we just replace "magic" with "unknown" and avoid the problem?

Your analogy with awareness doesn't work here. You need awareness to be aware of a squirrel in your head.

I think that Graziano would say that it is not unknown. We can know the process in a precise manner by observing other brains, just that brain that examines itself creates this model that has a magical element to it.

I probably shouldn't have put "awareness" in that sentence but I do think that it makes sense. Because while awareness is the brain examining its own processes one of those processes is the process of examining processes.
 
I think that Graziano would say that it is not unknown. We can know the process in a precise manner by observing other brains, just that brain that examines itself creates this model that has a magical element to it.
No, apparently Graziano's premise in the interview denies us the possibility.

We have a faulty, unreliable, inaccurate tool with which we want to investigate the illusory entity (consciousness) that we perceive. Can't get any worst than that :)
 
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