Arouet's discussion about NDE's

[Arouet]

Arouet,

I didn't have the time to read this thread yet, just glance through real quick, but I noticed you mentioned IIT again, which reminded me ... recently, I've gotten a bit curious to learn more about that. Do you recommend a good place to start with that? Do they have a laymen's book, maybe? Or, a good introductory paper? Just want to get familiar with the basic concepts kind of thing

Also, without being too wordy, while trying to be specific, what do you think IIT means for psi, survival, NDEs, etc? IIRC, your favorite theory to date is IIT, which is why ask, but if I'm not RC, please ignore the question! Not trying to start a debate, don't really have much to say about it myself, just curious your opinion.

Thanks

I've been meaning to put together ahttp://integratedinformationtheory.org/ resource thread for IIT. A good place to start is http://integratedinformationtheory.org/ where you can find the basic papers. I haven't read any of the popular books. Mainly I've looked up articles on google scholar. Tononi is the main guy so anything by him is good. Note that it has evolved since the first paper. IIRC the latest is labelled 3.0 or something like that.

WRT psi, I'm not sure that IIT helps except to the extent that if one were to become consious of information transmitted through psi that information would have to find a way to integrate into the conscious system.

by the way, I answered your questions about that video - curious as to your response. But bring it over here.

 

[Stephen Wright]

I've read the sources you've provided and I still haven't seen a description that seems to treat information as a separate level of reality. We've looked at levels of abstraction but I think we agree that those aren't separate. We've looked at sources that describe them as different sides of the same coin with information being convertable into energy. We've discussed the link that is entropy and thermodynamics. But none of those seem to describe it as you do. I've googled information realism but haven't found anything either.

I disagree strongly with the fact that we can map reciprocal influence between physical transformation and informational transformation - that it means they are not two separate levels of a unified reality where different methods are needed to understand each! How is the idea of two sides of a coin not describing two levels, two different imprinted graphics and a separation between them not iconic of separate levels.

“Information is information, not matter or energy.” - Norbert Weiner

The thrust of my argument is that SI units of measure do not describe information science "objects" and activity. And that entropy, communication, organization and semantic meaning do not describe atoms and molecules. The levels are not metaphysical -- they are methodological!

Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves

Norbert Wiener

We do not measure patterns as to their mass or charge - we measure the organization, the ordered effects they generate and their abstract structure.

 

[EthanT]

I've been meaning to put together ahttp://integratedinformationtheory.org/ resource thread for IIT. A good place to start is http://integratedinformationtheory.org/ where you can find the basic papers. I haven't read any of the popular books. Mainly I've looked up articles on google scholar. Tononi is the main guy so anything by him is good. Note that it has evolved since the first paper. IIRC the latest is labelled 3.0 or something like that.

WRT psi, I'm not sure that IIT helps except to the extent that if one were to become consious of information transmitted through psi that information would have to find a way to integrate into the conscious system.

by the way, I answered your questions about that video - curious as to your response. But bring it over here.

Thanks Arouet, I'll check out that web site!

I'm sorry you'll have to remind me what video/question that was. I just don't pay very serious attention to the forum these days, so I guess things slip from memory easily.

 

[Arouet]

Yes but consciousness isn't just an information space - a book or a database on a computer would be examples of an information space, but consciousness has to include experience (qualia), and however people try to dice it, that is vital. Imagine that you existed, but you felt absolutely nothing! So to put it bluntly, Tononi isn't correct!

Stephen and I were more talking about the application of cause/effect to information processing. Tononi doesn't say that consciousness is information-space. And IIT pays a lot of attention to qualia.

I know you take a dim view of IIT which is because if I'm not mistaken its because you don't feel it addresses David Chalmers hard problem. This is interesting because Chalmers himself seems quite positive towards IIT. I linked you awhile back to blog comment he made about it. He has co-chaired an IIT conference with Tononi.

In this TED talk, starting around 13:00 he talks specifically about IIT and while he acknowledges that he's not sure if it's correct (which I say as well!) he is clearly quite positive about it.

Of course you have no obligation to see it the same way as Chalmers!

Yes, but I don't think you realise how far this zeal extends. It extends deep into academia, making people reluctant to even express an interest in ψ at work. Rupert Sheldrake has reported that after giving a talk, he will often have several conversations in which people express support for his ideas, but don't think anyone else in the lab (or whatever it is) hold the same views!

There is a vast bias against ψ in scientific circles. Perhaps part of the reason is that the experimenter can no longer be seen as detached from the experiment his is conducting - even if it is a purely physical/chemical experiment!

I'm not sure why you think this is news, but I'm not sure where you were going with this. I don't think this contradicts anything I wrote?

 

[EthanT]

by the way, I answered your questions about that video - curious as to your response. But bring it over here.

I'm sorry you'll have to remind me what video/question that was. I just don't pay very serious attention to the forum these days, so I guess things slip from memory easily.

Arouet,

It came to me what video/question you meant.

I guess the only thing that really stood out to me was your last statement about people not engaging with you on these topics, and I guess it all reminded me of a work colleague and friend of mine. We'll call him Fred.

As you know, I work in the field of aerospace research/engineering. Occasionally, we do real life flight tests, which all our prior work/analysis leads up to. But, the problem we face is we never have enough data, we never know our system perfectly, our models are constantly evolving and never fully representative, there is never enough funding/time to investigate everything comprehensively and other problems. All very similar to the things we face with psi and other areas of science. But, eventually you got to realize you did all you could and make a decision whether, or not, you have reasonable confidence that you can go ahead with launch. The decision is based on analysis as much as it is an intuition informed by years of experience. But, guys like Fred can never be in a position to make that decision - they are always dragged to launch day kicking and screaming. He tortures himself with over-analysis and doubt and, if it was let up to him, we'd never launch, always waiting for some perfect condition of knowledge that can never be reached.

I guess what I am trying to say is you remind me of Fred. Nothing wrong with that. Fred also happens to be a friend of mine and a great guy. He is valued VERY highly on the project because he is extremely knowledgeable and fastidious. But, his personality and approach in some matters is just WAY different than me.

So, in analogy, when it comes to psi, I think we've already achieved lift off (as Brian Josephson obviously does), while you are still grappling with analyses for your own sake and style and haven't made up your mind yet. No reason you can't do that, there is no launch here, no schedule, no pressure, and we're all here out of interest and hopefully some fun, so do things your own way. But, you need to realize other folks are on a different page than you when it comes to psi. They're just not going to be interested in "hashing through these issues". Been there, done that, moved on to another phase.

Maybe you think proponents are nuts and jumping the gun with their confidence, but so does Fred right before every successful flight test we have.

 

[Stephen Wright]

Stephen and I were more talking about the application of cause/effect to information processing.

Yes - and again I want to stress the difference having a channel makes in the causality patterns. Take our coin representation: the channel would be the boundary conditions between the coin faces. In my humble model of mind - the top of the coin would be a mental workspace and the bottom its embodiment in a physical workspace. When an image of Lincoln appears on the top from imagination and desire of a future condition - the Lincoln Memorial blueprint starts to appear on the bottom.

Ideas, plans, drives, beliefs, dreams, etc... all can change real world probabilities when in the mind of a capable agent. An information object - before its realization in the manifest world is substantially real at its own level. If the plan is copied and many agents can hold it in mind; the probability for its realization increases.

 

[David Bailey]

Stephen and I were more talking about the application of cause/effect to information processing. Tononi doesn't say that consciousness is information-space. And IIT pays a lot of attention to qualia.

So what does Tononi say consciousness is! I get sick of this dancing about with definitions by people like Tononi! What indeed is a qualia according to Tononi?

David

 

[EthanT]

So what does Tononi say consciousness is! I get sick of this dancing about with definitions by people like Tononi! What indeed is a qualia according to Tononi?

David

In all fairness David, I think you would agree, much like the dreaded God word, I'm guessing it's going to be very hard to define consciousness, or classify it, or pin it down in any way. I don't think we can say what it truly is, can we? At least not in a scientific manner. I think we can probably experience it for exactly what it is but, as you know, the experience is said to be ineffable.

 

[Arouet]

So what does Tononi say consciousness is! I get sick of this dancing about with definitions by people like Tononi! What indeed is a qualia according to Tononi?

David

Take a look at my post on the first page where I quoted from the 2015 article. It has his basic definition there. But really should read the papers. He has sections devoted to qualia in several of them.

 

[David Bailey]

In all fairness David, I think you would agree, much like the dreaded God word, I'm guessing it's going to be very hard to define consciousness, or classify it, or pin it down in any way. I don't think we can say what it truly is, can we? At least not in a scientific manner. I think we can probably experience it for exactly what it is but, as you know, the experience is said to be ineffable.

OK - but IMHO the difficulty in defining consciousness isn't like the difficulty in defining some other things - like love, say. It isn't that we use the word consciousness to cover a cluster of ideas, it is that it represents something which is unlike anything else in our physical environment. Consciousness is crucially about experience, and you can't explain experience by just inventing a new mathematical formalism! You would first have to explain what it was that permitted matter to experience something, justify that, and then add some maths if it were needed.

David

 

[Hieracosphinx]

Stephen and I were more talking about the application of cause/effect to information processing. Tononi doesn't say that consciousness is information-space. And IIT pays a lot of attention to qualia.

I know you take a dim view of IIT which is because if I'm not mistaken its because you don't feel it addresses David Chalmers hard problem. This is interesting because Chalmers himself seems quite positive towards IIT. I linked you awhile back to blog comment he made about it. He has co-chaired an IIT conference with Tononi.

I don't think anyone can fault IIT as a programme of scientific research, but as a metaphysical explanation? Nah. It's not sufficient to decode the neural correlates and relate them to phenomenology (the 'how'), though this is a very worthy goal. It's important to have the metaphysical explanation too (the 'why'). At some point you end up biting the bullet that consciousness (or at least a mentalistic concept like information) is a fundamental aspect of reality, and this is what opens the floodgates where you have to take seriously (though not uncritically accept) all the stuff that Skeptiko is interested in. In principle, IIT could be interpreted such that consciousness is an epiphenomenon that 'magically' appears when Φ is at a maximum, and otherwise you get to keep the rest of the physicalist framework, but how could you possibly make sense of this maddeningly arbitrary set-up?

 

[Arouet]

I don't think anyone can fault IIT as a programme of scientific research, but as a metaphysical explanation? Nah. It's not sufficient to decode the neural correlates and relate them to phenomenology (the 'how'), though this is a very worthy goal. It's important to have the metaphysical explanation too (the 'why'). At some point you end up biting the bullet that consciousness (or at least a mentalistic concept like information) is a fundamental aspect of reality, and this is what opens the floodgates where you have to take seriously (though not uncritically accept) all the stuff that Skeptiko is interested in. In principle, IIT could be interpreted such that consciousness is an epiphenomenon that 'magically' appears when Φ is at a maximum, and otherwise you get to keep the rest of the physicalist framework, but how could you possibly make sense of this maddeningly arbitrary set-up?

IIT does not treat consciousness as epiphenomenal. It explicitly describes consciousness as a fundamental property. Any time you have intergrated information it suggests there will be an irreducible experience. Though if it is only between two particles for example it would not be the broad experience we have. That is why IIT has often been called a type of panpsychisn, though as Tononi himself writes, it's not typical panpsychism as when information is not integrated the system would not be conscious.

 

[EthanT]

With all the consciousness theories out there (even the ones that feel like they have some promise), I can't help but think of the Alan Watts saying that goes something like, "It's like an Eye trying to look at itself".

 

[Hieracosphinx]

IIT does not treat consciousness as epiphenomenal. It explicitly describes consciousness as a fundamental property. Any time you have intergrated information it suggests there will be an irreducible experience. Though if it is only between two particles for example it would not be the broad experience we have. That is why IIT has often been called a type of panpsychisn, though as Tononi himself writes, it's not typical panpsychism as when information is not integrated the system would not be conscious.

I meant that IIT can be interpreted in terms of a conservative form of property dualism in which mind is an contingent aspect of physical systems, and physical events have causal power over mental events but not vice versa. It's not the only option, but I imagine if IIT became well-accepted this would be a common interpretation. On the other hand, I think IIT's predictions checking out would be (extremely weak) evidence for psi, because it'd suggest the existence of natural laws that deal with information (even if they are just relating physical events to mental events). My problem with property dualism is that it appears more or less unintelligible, as you simply have to accept that consciousness happens when the right criteria are met, without any explanation as to why this should be the case.

 

[steve001]

Arouet,

It came to me what video/question you meant.

I guess the only thing that really stood out to me was your last statement about people not engaging with you on these topics, and I guess it all reminded me of a work colleague and friend of mine. We'll call him Fred.

As you know, I work in the field of aerospace research/engineering. Occasionally, we do real life flight tests, which all our prior work/analysis leads up to. But, the problem we face is we never have enough data, we never know our system perfectly, our models are constantly evolving and never fully representative, there is never enough funding/time to investigate everything comprehensively and other problems. All very similar to the things we face with psi and other areas of science. But, eventually you got to realize you did all you could and make a decision whether, or not, you have reasonable confidence that you can go ahead with launch. The decision is based on analysis as much as it is an intuition informed by years of experience. But, guys like Fred can never be in a position to make that decision - they are always dragged to launch day kicking and screaming. He tortures himself with over-analysis and doubt and, if it was let up to him, we'd never launch, always waiting for some perfect condition of knowledge that can never be reached.

I guess what I am trying to say is you remind me of Fred. Nothing wrong with that. Fred also happens to be a friend of mine and a great guy. He is valued VERY highly on the project because he is extremely knowledgeable and fastidious. But, his personality and approach in some matters is just WAY different than me.

So, in analogy, when it comes to psi, I think we've already achieved lift off (as Brian Josephson obviously does), while you are still grappling with analyses for your own sake and style and haven't made up your mind yet. No reason you can't do that, there is no launch here, no schedule, no pressure, and we're all here out of interest and hopefully some fun, so do things your own way. But, you need to realize other folks are on a different page than you when it comes to psi. They're just not going to be interested in "hashing through these issues". Been there, done that, moved on to another phase.

Maybe you think proponents are nuts and jumping the gun with their confidence, but so does Fred right before every successful flight test we have.

We all understand your analogy.
Fred's approach may be overly cautious, but then sometimes things do go, Booom! Psi has no tried and true models, it's all intuition. Things do go Booom! with psi, more often than a successful lift offs.

 

[EthanT]

We all understand your analogy.
Fred's approach may be overly cautious, but then sometimes things do go, Booom! Psi has no tried and true models, it's all intuition. Things do go Booom! with psi, more often than a successful lift offs.

Steve, first of all, psi is not all intuition. That's the usual downplaying hogwash that gets sold by skeptics. There is a ton of science that has been done showing a consistent, repeatable, verifiable phenomenon. Not every experiment has to go perfect to validate psi as real. If that's the standard you can literally throw out all of physics too.

But, we may actually be in some, if not exact, agreement here. As far as the evidence that psi is a real, actual phenomenon, I feel pretty confident about that (I know you don't, that's fine). However, I do agree that it is, well, let's say unfortunate, we don't have a theory to explain the psi observations/phenomenon. This is where I personally think a "BOOM" is waiting to happen. Whatever ends up explaining psi, consciousness, etc, even partially, I think is going to surprise all of us, skeptics and proponents, alike.

For one, I don't think it's a reasonable expectation that all of reality can be encompassed by a mathematical theory/model that is solely objective and completely predictive. To operate on that assumption is to fall into the popular bias of the day. So, that's probably the first big surprise psi/consciousness is going to teach us, imho.

 

[EthanT]

IIT does not treat consciousness as epiphenomenal. It explicitly describes consciousness as a fundamental property. Any time you have intergrated information it suggests there will be an irreducible experience

Arouet, wouldn't that imply "raw" (i.e. not necessarily integrated, whatever that means) information itself would be fundamental, and consciousness is an emergent phenomenon dependent upon information becoming integrated?

 

[steve001]

Steve, first of all, psi is not all intuition. That's the usual downplaying hogwash that gets sold by skeptics. There is a ton of science that has been done showing a consistent, repeatable, verifiable phenomenon. Not every experiment has to go perfect to validate psi as real. If that's the standard you can literally throw out all of physics too.

But, we may actually be in some, if not exact, agreement here. As far as the evidence that psi is a real, actual phenomenon, I feel pretty confident about that (I know you don't, that's fine). However, I do agree that it is, well, let's say unfortunate, we don't have a theory to explain the psi observations/phenomenon. This is where I personally think a "BOOM" is waiting to happen. Whatever ends up explaining psi, consciousness, etc, even partially, I think is going to surprise all of us, skeptics and proponents, alike.

For one, I don't think it's a reasonable expectation that all of reality can be encompassed by a mathematical theory/model that is solely objective and completely predictive. To operate on that assumption is to fall into the popular bias of the day. So, that's probably the first big surprise psi/consciousness is going to teach us, imho.

I will say you make an incorrect assumption math is needed to do good science. I asked this question of myself awhile back because it seems on this forum people think good science requires math. All the rest we agree.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...ou-need-to-know-math-for-doing-great-science/

 

[EthanT]

I will say you make an incorrect assumption math is needed to do good science. I asked this question of myself awhile back because it seems on this forum people think good science requires math. All the rest we agree.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...ou-need-to-know-math-for-doing-great-science/

My assumption is actually that, important as it is in some areas, math is not enough.

I actually think Yoga is "good" science, in that it is an experientially empirical method, with repeatable, verifiable effects. I'd love to see a science that one day includes both the subjective/experiential empirical methods, as well as the objective/experimental empirical methods. (Most folks forget, or did not know, that the definition of empirical encompasses both). I think that's the only way we'll uncover all aspects of reality.

So, I'm guessing we mostly agree on the math part too, but maybe not the Yoga part, hehe ;-)

 

[David Bailey]

But, we may actually be in some, if not exact, agreement here. As far as the evidence that psi is a real, actual phenomenon, I feel pretty confident about that (I know you don't, that's fine). However, I do agree that it is, well, let's say unfortunate, we don't have a theory to explain the psi observations/phenomenon. This is where I personally think a "BOOM" is waiting to happen. Whatever ends up explaining psi, consciousness, etc, even partially, I think is going to surprise all of us, skeptics and proponents, alike.

I do think people are converging to a tentative and partial theory for ψ. It goes something like this:

1) Consciousness is not generated by the brain but heavily constrained by the brain. The connection between the two almost certainly involves QM in some way.

2) Consciousness normally interacts with one brain, but in certain circumstances it can interact with more than one brain (ESP) or multiple consciousnesses can interact with one brain (MPD, channelling, etc).

3) In extreme cases consciousness can possibly interact with inanimate matter.

4) Consciousnesses (which must be thought of as more fundamental than matter) probably reattach to another foetal brain sometime after the previous brain dies.

5) Unattached conscientiousnesses can access a timeless state.

6) Idealism could explain all the above.

I don't believe the theory will ever be mathematical at its heart, because mathematics is a mechanism, and I agree with Roger Penrose's arguments that consciousness cannot be mechanical.

David