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

[wpb]

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 Graziano used the word "attention". I'm not sure if that's a distinction without a difference. :)

Pat

 

[Arouet]

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 :)

I find it interesting when people refer to consciousness as a single thing when we have so many aspects of it: feeling, hearing, seeing, smelling, thinking, our sense of self. All aspects commonly associated with consciousness.

Also I don't know why people seem to act as if the suggestion that our tools to investigate consciousness being faulty, unreliable or inaccurate is somehow bad or an insult to us. We have the tools we have, with the limitations they have, to be used to the best of our abilities. It is no insult to recognize our limitations. What reason - other than ego - should we have to not do so?

 

[Bucky]

I find it interesting when people refer to consciousness as a single thing when we have so many aspects of it: feeling, hearing, seeing, smelling, thinking, our sense of self. All aspects commonly associated with consciousness.

Also I don't know why people seem to act as if the suggestion that our tools to investigate consciousness being faulty, unreliable or inaccurate is somehow bad or an insult to us. We have the tools we have, with the limitations they have, to be used to the best of our abilities. It is no insult to recognize our limitations. What reason - other than ego - should we have to not do so?

That's not my point.

I was pointing out to the evident contradiction of someone setting himself of the path of explaining consciousness with the premise that his tools for this adventure are inaccurate, faulty, and mostly unreliable.

Seems like he's promising to explore the vast mysteries of the cosmos flying on a can of sardines...

And it wouldn't have hurt to provide substance to his premise, which he gave for granted.

 

[Arouet]

I was pointing out to the evident contradiction of someone setting himself of the path of explaining consciousness with the premise that his tools for this adventure are inaccurate, faulty, and mostly unreliable.

Well, you've got to add in the tool of the scientific method which while also imperfect has as its goal to improve on the accuracy and unreliability of our internal tools. Again: we've got to do the best that we have with the best tools that we have.

Seems like he's promising to explore the vast mysteries of the cosmos flying on a can of sardines...

That's kind of what we're doing isn't it?

And it wouldn't have hurt to provide substance to his premise, which he gave for granted.

He mentioned that he based his ideas on a large body of work - it's too bad Alex didn't ask him much about it.

 

[Bucky]

Well, you've got to add in the tool of the scientific method which while also imperfect has as its goal to improve on the accuracy and unreliability of our internal tools. Again: we've got to do the best that we have with the best tools that we have.

Where does the scientific method comes from again? :)
Oh yes, our consciousness. So it must have inherited the same dreadful qualities according to the largely unsubstantiated premise of the podcast's guest.

How can a system with such flawed characteristic be able to produce anything of value besides delusions?

He mentioned that he based his ideas on a large body of work - it's too bad Alex didn't ask him much about it.

Yes, too bad.
After I heard that introduction I was already thinking "Stop, stop! Where does all this come from?!"

He gave a few allusions to mundane sensory deceptions and voilà... we're stupid monkeys unable to know anything but very keen to consider puppets as conscious as we are :D Oh, Lordy...

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

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 suspect this takes one idea - programs modifying their own code - and elides it into the concepts of intentionality and self-awareness. So if I understand the squirrel analogy correctly you'd need thoughts about your thoughts, and this would have to somehow make you aware of what it's like to have thoughts.

I admit I don't think I have it quite correct but there does seem to be some circularity in there somewhere, and I do feel like intentionality and self-awareness are intertwining problems. I think EJ Lowe had the right of it - Chalmers gave away too much in saying all that was left was the Hard Problem of self-awareness. As Feser notes Intentionality still seems like a big problem for materialism.

Where does the scientific method comes from again? :)
Oh yes, our consciousness. So it must have inherited the same dreadful qualities according to the largely unsubstantiated premise of the podcast's guest.

How can a system with such flawed characteristic be able to produce anything of value besides delusions?

Yes, too bad.
After I heard that introduction I was already thinking "Stop, stop! Where does all this come from?!"

He gave a few allusions to mundane sensory deceptions and voilà... we're stupid monkeys unable to know anything but very keen to consider puppets as conscious as we are :D Oh, Lordy...

Heh, makes me think of Chomsky and McGinn noting we've just not evolved to solve all of reality's big mysteries.

Though Graziano is welcome to try....though it's a bit weird to decry our ability to suss out truth and then claim his own theories are going to get to the bottom of the great mystery of mind. I feel like Hoffman is more honest when he says our sensory examination of the world - which includes our sciences - can't tell us if we should pick Idealism or Materialism, or allow us to say anything about God and by extension (IMO) many of the other Big Questions.

 

[Arouet]

Where does the scientific method comes from again? :)
Oh yes, our consciousness. So it must have inherited the same dreadful qualities according to the largely unsubstantiated premise of the podcast's guest.

How can a system with such flawed characteristic be able to produce anything of value besides delusions

That's not how I would frame the issue. I'm going to give it a shot - please consider this a rough draft, the following is my first attempt to frame this in this way and I'm writing as I'm thinking about it for the first time. I'm not presenting this as definitive but just wanted to get it out there to start discussion, I'm sure it can be tightened up.

1) Human brains perform a variety of tasks
2) Some of the tasks the human brain perform involve the translating external information into internal experiences including - but not limited to - sight, hearing, smell, touch, thought, reason, and a sense of self.
3) We will label the experience producing processes as "conscious processes" and the collection of conscious processes we will label "human consciousness"
4) Human brains and bodies are limited in their ability to use conscious processes.
5) In using conscious processes to analyse the universe, human brains and bodies are therefore also limited.
6) Using the conscious processes involving thought and reason humans have some ability (limited as the other conscious processes) to analyse their experiences. Part of this process can involve observing past inconsistencies in recall and understanding, among others.
7) the scientific method involves the use of limited conscious processes to identify areas where conscious processes are subject to error, and develop techniques to identify error, minimise error and attempt to neutralise the effect of error. Humans can also use their conscious processes to invent devices to assist in doing this as well.
8) conscious processes, while imperfect, can therefore be combined in manners that enhance the reliability of our understanding (which is also a conscious process).

Yes, too bad.
After I heard that introduction I was already thinking "Stop, stop! Where does all this come from?!"

He gave a few allusions to mundane sensory deceptions and voilà... we're stupid monkeys unable to know anything but very keen to consider puppets as conscious as we are :D Oh, Lordy...

See my link a few posts up: while I don't think his puppet piece is that helpful, it's not fair to say that he considers puppets as conscious as we are. Also, he did more than allude to mundane sensory deceptions - he mentioned a large body of scientific work. I don't think he said we're unable to know anything - again: recognizing we have limits is not the same thing as saying we can't figure anything out.

 

[malf]

To remind everyone again. Graziano was crystal clear on his mission:

to see how much can be explained by entirely rational and mechanistic means and testable means, to give a shot at that.

He's not promising anything else.

Now, all I'm hearing from proponents is "mind must be irreducible" or "consciousness must be fundamental". What can a scientist to do with that? How does that help or inform the field? If the proponents are correct (and for the sake of neutrality I'll concede that they might be) then there's nothing to break down, nothing to investigate, nothing to explore. Does that mean we shouldn't explore everything up to that fundamental phenomenon? Science is the only tool we have for that.

Some proponents on this forum (whipped up and emboldened by Alex) are criticising these explorers for pushing the limits of what science might be able to reveal. They ought to question carefully their reasons for doing so.

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

Beyond the fact that Graziano seems to be trying to find a way to say "consciousness is a trick that fools you" while trying not to fall into the eliminativist hole, it seems to me the problem is he assumes "rational" means taking a materialist approach, as he says here:

Theories of consciousness are always a difficult sell because the topic is fraught with religious and spiritual issues. Almost all people who think about the question, whether they approach it from a religious perspective or consider themselves to be scientists and atheists, start from a profoundly anti-rationalist assumption of magic.

As Feser notes, there is a difference between immaterialistic metaphysics and "magic".

So, again, what is objectionable about magic can only be that it is supposed to be inherently unintelligible, unintelligible even in principle and not merely in practice. Appeals to magic in this sense can, of necessity, explain nothing. They are rightly dismissed as pseudo-explanations or worse -- Putnam suggests that they are actually incoherent. (He does not elaborate, but perhaps his point is that it is incoherent to suppose that an appeal to “magic” is any kind of explanation given that an explanation necessarily makes the explanandum intelligible, and the notion of magic is the notion of that which is inherently unintelligible.)

But the greatest theistic writers -- thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas, Leibniz, and the like -- would agree that the notion of “magic” in this sense is intellectually disreputable.

(Of course whether rationality is itself, along with qualia and intentionality, suggestive of immaterialism is an open question.*)

The assumption means the only scientific investigation to be done is under the assumption of materialism, and anyone looking at other possibilities is being irrational. It's a False Dilemma, as the research done in Irreducible Mind - not to mention the rest of parapsychology - shows.

*Feser on Fodor's Trinity:

"What is the mind-body problem? In an article summarizing his work, which he wrote for Samuel Guttenplan’s A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Jerry Fodor answers as follows:

Some of the most pervasive properties of minds seem so mysterious as to raise the Kantian-sounding question how a materialistic psychology is even possible. Lots of mental states are conscious, lots of mental states are intentional, and lots of mental processes are rational, and the question does rather suggest itself how anything that is material could be any of these.

For Fodor, then, there are really three mind-body problems: the problem of consciousness, the problem of intentionality, and the problem of rationality. Why are the phenomena in question problematic?"

 

[Bucky]

To remind everyone again. Graziano was crystal clear on his mission:
He's not promising anything else.

Now, all I'm hearing from proponents is "mind must be irreducible" or "consciousness must be fundamental".

Honestly, there's not a single instance of those statements in any of the posts from this thread :)

If the proponents are correct (and for the sake of neutrality I'll concede that they might be) then there's nothing to break down, nothing to investigate, nothing to explore.

Oh this is funny. You are participating in the forum of a podcast that has so far generated 246 episodes of investigations :D
And it's just a tiny drop in the ocean.

 

[Reece]

I find it interesting when people refer to consciousness as a single thing when we have so many aspects of it: feeling, hearing, seeing, smelling, thinking, our sense of self. All aspects commonly associated with consciousness.

Those things you listed are things we're conscious of. So, to me, there is only a single thing: the content - feeling, smelling, thinking - that flit through change and may be mistaken for qualities of consciousness (or ourselves) . . . in fact, this is the problem some eastern traditions tell us is our root problem: we latch onto the things that flit through and think that they're what we are; they tell us, instead, we're the thing that observes, which is unchanging. It's this observational/awareness thing that is whole, not the things that it observes or is aware of.

 

[Reece]

That's not how I would frame the issue. I'm going to give it a shot - please consider this a rough draft, the following is my first attempt to frame this in this way and I'm writing as I'm thinking about it for the first time. I'm not presenting this as definitive but just wanted to get it out there to start discussion, I'm sure it can be tightened up.

1) Human brains perform a variety of tasks
2) Some of the tasks the human brain perform involve the translating external information into internal experiences including - but not limited to - sight, hearing, smell, touch, thought, reason, and a sense of self.
3) We will label the experience producing processes as "conscious processes" and the collection of conscious processes we will label "human consciousness"
4) Human brains and bodies are limited in their ability to use conscious processes.
5) In using conscious processes to analyse the universe, human brains and bodies are therefore also limited.
6) Using the conscious processes involving thought and reason humans have some ability (limited as the other conscious processes) to analyse their experiences. Part of this process can involve observing past inconsistencies in recall and understanding, among others.
7) the scientific method involves the use of limited conscious processes to identify areas where conscious processes are subject to error, and develop techniques to identify error, minimise error and attempt to neutralise the effect of error. Humans can also use their conscious processes to invent devices to assist in doing this as well.
8) conscious processes, while imperfect, can therefore be combined in manners that enhance the reliability of our understanding (which is also a conscious process).

I think there's a major error in #4, and I'm not simply trying to quibble over word usage: conscious processes can't be said to be limited, exactly.

Our thinking is limited, not our consciousness. We can only think in diachotomies, so, for instance, we can't technically think about infinity or eternity . . . though we could think about multiplying very, very large numbers . . . Or for that matter, we can't think about consciousness if we assume, as I do, that consciousness is whole, because there isn't a diachotomy to break it down into.

Also, if we have trouble differentiating between thinking and being conscious of thinking, then we can consider the difference between our 40 year old self's thinking processes and our 6 year old self's thinking processes. At 40 we can pull more things apart more accurately and see more diachotomies and extrapolate better. But, the wholistic nature of consciousness is still the same whether 6 or 40. And that's why the eastern traditions, it would seem to me, tell us we're not our thoughts.

 

[Haruhi]

Now, all I'm hearing from proponents is "mind must be irreducible" or "consciousness must be fundamental". What can a scientist to do with that? How does that help or inform the field? If the proponents are correct (and for the sake of neutrality I'll concede that they might be) then there's nothing to break down, nothing to investigate, nothing to explore. Does that mean we shouldn't explore everything up to that fundamental phenomenon? Science is the only tool we have for that.

You're misguided. Proponents want that NDEs are discussed with experts in the NDE literature, we want to treat NDE cases with markers to know when the NDEs ocurred, we want to treat NDE cases with veridical and extrasensory perception... For example:

I do think Graziano had at least one point that should be taken more seriously in our discussions of what exactly NDEs prove and how they do it. I think it may be a mistake for us to harp on the fact that NDEs show that people can have substantial conscious experiences without brain function. After all, it IS very difficult to get hard data showing that there is no brain function at the exact time the experiences are happening. It seems to me that skeptics are right to point out that it needs to be shown (1) that there was a point for the NDEr at which they had no brain function and (2) that the experience happened AT EXACTLY THAT TIME, and not, for instance, as the brain was shutting down or coming back online. It seems to me that the best way to prove when the experiences actually happened is to focus on information that the subjects obtained that they couldn't have known had they not been conscious at the very time that they had no brain function. It's my impression (from listening to a lot of Skeptiko episodes!) that these cases do exist in the literature, and I think they are the ones that need to be focused on during a debate with a skeptic.

 

[conceptualinertia]

To remind everyone again. Graziano was crystal clear on his mission:

to see how much can be explained by entirely rational and mechanistic means and testable means, to give a shot at that.

He's not promising anything else.

I was upset in the interview when he said that because I don't think he really believes that is all he is doing. Or more accurately, because he believes that rational and mechanistic means are the only means that really exist, he is seeking to explain how things really are.

 

[conceptualinertia]

No, apparently Graziano's premise in the interview denies us the possibility.

That is not how I understood his premise, but I would like to read his book to get the full brunt of his argument, not just a synopsis.

I have to admit that Graziano's explanation of consciousness if the first materialistic explanation I have heard that wasn't laughable.

 

[wpb]

Those things you listed are things we're conscious of. So, to me, there is only a single thing: the content - feeling, smelling, thinking - that flit through change and may be mistaken for qualities of consciousness (or ourselves) . . . in fact, this is the problem some eastern traditions tell us is our root problem: we latch onto the things that flit through and think that they're what we are; they tell us, instead, we're the thing that observes, which is unchanging. It's this observational/awareness thing that is whole, not the things that it observes or is aware of.

If I'm understanding you correctly, this awareness or observer does not itself think, or feel, or have a personality, etc. I'm not sure whether it could be said to experience, or just to observe experience. This idea is very much in line with my own (provisional) views. The concept of the false self and the true self is very compelling, and accords well with observations I've made of myself. But it's radical stuff, because it makes what we ordinarily think of as ourselves, into a mirage of sorts.

One of the problems with discussions of consciousness is that if you have 10 people in the conversation, you're apt to have 10 different definitions of consciousness. :)

Pat

 

[malf]

Honestly, there's not a single instance of those statements in any of the posts from this thread :)

I read other threads ;)

Oh this is funny. You are participating in the forum of a podcast that has so far generated 246 episodes of investigations :D
And it's just a tiny drop in the ocean.

Hmmm... Take out the "ragging of materialist" episodes and I'm not sure of what is left there to really inform Graziano's work. You tell me.

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

If I'm understanding you correctly, this awareness or observer does not itself think, or feel, or have a personality, etc. I'm not sure whether it could be said to experience, or just to observe experience. This idea is very much in line with my own (provisional) views. The concept of the false self and the true self is very compelling, and accords well with observations I've made of myself. But it's radical stuff, because it makes what we ordinarily think of as ourselves, into a mirage of sorts.

Sounds interesting - you should make a thread on this!

 

[malf]

You're misguided. Proponents want that NDEs are discussed with experts in the NDE literature, we want to treat NDE cases with markers to know when the NDEs ocurred, we want to treat NDE cases with veridical and extrasensory perception... For example:

I'm not calling for a cessation of NDE research. Keep talking to people about the experiences they had when they weren't very well. Try to undertake those investigations in controlled ways (I realise how difficult that is). I'm very interested in Parnia and his AWARE study; that looks like a good science to me. But point me towards an NDE paper that could alter Graziano's approach. Most proponents admit that much of the research is sometimes confusing and contradictory.

 

[Bucky]

Hmmm... Take out the "ragging of materialist" episodes and I'm not sure of what is left there to really inform Graziano's work. You tell me.

It doesn't seem to me that people like Van Lommel, Greyson, Parnia, Long, Sartori, Fenwick, and a few more hundreds NDE researchers around the globe... spend all their days philosophizing , and making things up... don't they? :)
It seems like there're many lines of inquiry, experiments and studies to be made and integrated with the rest of the research that is being carried on in more mainstream fields, such as neuroscience.

I mean, the "woo woo" people of the Windbridge Institute use EEG just like most scientists to investigate mediumship... and I seem to remember that 150 years of the SPR and ASPR have produced a ton of studies from real scientists...

How about 2500+ years of documented consciousness exploration from the inside with meditation and mind/body practices from eastern countries. Seems like modern medicine is becoming increasingly interested to use those techniques and practices instead of drugs to help people with anxiety, adhd, pstd, depression, stress induced illnesses and so on and so forth...

Come on malf, 700+ posts and you're still making these silly questions? :)