The Inter Mind
- Thread starter Steve Klinko
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DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Here you go river:
https://bfy.tw/Q6oN
In case it is not obvious what that is, it is a page that Googles things (such as What is Omega Point) for people who don't know how to Google things (such as What is Omega Point). It will provide you with links to articles about those things (such as What is Omega Point).
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
I guarantee, no one here* has their own personal definition of it. You can safely assume that, if those words are used here, we* are all talking about the same thing.
*with the exception of Write4u, who will invariably have woven his own personal definition a term that already has an accepted definition.
Good .
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Tipler, however, is at least an academic physicist of some stature, unlike pure charlatans such as Chopra. Tipler thus seems to be a sort of "crossover" artist between physics and woo.
This supposed necessity for a conscious observer in QM does seem to have led to an awful lot of rubbish being spread around, over the years.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
There is also the brief summary I made in post 195 - but no doubt that is unreadable to our friend.
I think it's a case of a scientist writing about something that is not really in his field of expertise. It's partly due to overconfidence in one's own capacities, I think. In some people it can become delusional.
Maybe it's just because I'm more familiar with people in physics than other areas of science, but it seems to me that at any given time there are usually two or three high-profile physicists around who dramatically over-reach the bounds of their own knowledge. Possibly buoyed up by their own previous successes, they begin to imagine that their own more fanciful ideas are most likely to be true, even in the absence of good evidence. In Tipler's case, my impression is that he managed to convince himself that he'd found an equivalent of God in his scribblings. The preface to his book essentially makes the claim that he's proved that God is real (he calls it the "Omega Point", but it's essentially God) using maths, but that nobody else will be able to understand his proof until they have studied the physics he has studied for 20+ years. It's very egotistical and it immediately set my spidey sense (aka bullshit detector) tingling. The book didn't get any better after the preface, and I quickly gave up on it.
Yes. Also the idea that "everything is connected", which is another thing that is more at home in tarot reading and crystal energy than in quantum mechanics.
Steve Klinko
Registered Senior Member
I could be wrong, but I think this discussion has drifted away from the Topic of: The Inter Mind Model of Consciousness.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
Nobel disease is well-known - and is not strictly confined to Nobel winners: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
It's an ego that has got the better of its owner and led him (it's never a woman) to think he is infallible. Linus Pauling and his cold cures? Luc Montagnier and his homeopathy? Wigner and his quantum mysticism? Even Lord Rayleigh, apparently.
Perhaps because you haven't mentioned what The Inter Mind Model of Consciousness actually is
You don't talk, for example, of the OUTER mind or the WAY OUT IN THE SUBURBS mind
Never heard about DOWN IN THE BASEMENT mind
Or, dare I say, THE QUANTUM mind
Dup
It's just an idiot philosophical fad providing limited job or publication security for its enthusiasts.
Non-consciousness is the absence of everything (images, sounds, feelings, odors, tastes, linguistic thoughts, etc). Superbly exemplified by the state of being dead.
Accordingly, the opposite of that (consciousness) is the presence or manifestation of anything.
To fully qualify at the level of complex experiences that humans or even some animals have, there also needs to be memory-based awareness that something is exhibited, as well understanding/identification of some degree rounding out cognition. In people that's heavily facilitated by language-expressed concepts (as far as the accessible activity of one's private, internal narrative goes).
That's why even if a molecule's existence (for itself) was a primitive materialization or feeling of itself, it would still seem the same as the default, blank manner of existence that the universe as a whole is usually considered to be basking in. Due to that lack of a memory and recognition system to verify the presence of the molecule's _X_ elemental experience.
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Steve Klinko
Registered Senior Member
Steve Klinko
Registered Senior Member
You can say that you don't agree, but you have no reason to say that the OP does not say what the Inter Mind Model is.Perhaps because you haven't mentioned what The Inter Mind Model of Consciousness actually is
You don't talk, for example, of the OUTER mind or the WAY OUT IN THE SUBURBS mind
Never heard about DOWN IN THE BASEMENT mind
Or, dare I say, THE QUANTUM mind
Well, just to probe for what particular consciousness camp or school of thought on the overall landscape that you slot into...
https://theintermind.com/#WhatIsConsciousSpace
Doesn't your "Conscious Space" really just amount to the neutral placeholder of Russellian Monism? I don't see why manifestations need a "place" to reside in, something prior in rank that would become yet another enigma itself.
In one sense we have direct access to the neutral placeholder after it has been worked up into complexity by brain processes and configurations, but not what it is in its raw or elemental condition. What Michael Lockwood essentially says here:
"Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five sense, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity."
When not referring to the manifested bodies and "stuff" of our everyday experiences, "physical" is not really an adjective for an ontological substance but instead technical description (relationships, magnitude) that has been abstracted from the phenomenal environment presented in the senses. It's a classic case of hypostatization that both sides of the "hard problem of consciousness" debate are indulging in. The so-called intrinsic or internal properties are potentially "real", but the extrinsic or external properties are artificial, as any symbolic system is (something creatively outputted by reasoning, though extremely useful in grappling with the phenomenal world they model or map).
Bertrand Russell: "All that physics gives us is certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes. But as to what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent."
Henri Poincaré: "...contrary to the naïve dogmatists’ view, that which science captures are not the things themselves, but simply relationships between them. Beyond these relations, there is no knowable reality..." [Science and hypothesis]
Lee Smolin: "The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains." [Time Reborn ... page 270]
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Steve Klinko
Registered Senior Member
As an Engineer I thought it would be fun to do a reverse engineering study of the Human Visual system to understand how I See. I was stunned and disappointed to find that Science had nothing to say about Conscious Experience except that it was an Illusion or that it was all in the Neurons, and we just had to wait for Science to show us how it was in the Neurons. I came to realize that an Experience like the Redness of Red was completely incompatible with anything that I studied about Neural Physiology. It was apparent that Science had actually been trying to put Redness into the Neurons for over a Hundred years and had nothing to show for it. No matter how hard I tried to Logically put the Redness into the Neurons, my attempt failed. There is no Logical chain of reasoning that can take you from Neurons firing to that Experience of Redness. Something seemed seriously wrong with the attempt to put the Redness into the Neurons. The Redness just seems to hover there in my Visual field of View defying any Scientific Explanation. It became more and more clear that this Redness needed a place to Exist in. I just called it Conscious Space. I independently deduced Conscious Space based on an Engineering approach to the problem. The Conscious Space in The Inter Mind Model is not derived from any any other Existing concept that might seem similar from Philosophy, New Ageism, Religion or anything else. If there is similarity then it is coincidental and probably indicates that there really must be some sort of Conscious Space to ever make sense out of Redness. But if you just want to talk Place Holders then the Place Holder from Russellian Monism seems close. Hahhh! Seems like me and Bertrand Russell think similarly.
I don't see how we can even get a glimpse of the Intrinsic Nature of anything with the Sensory Experiences that I have studied. Sensory Experiences are Correlated and related to Brain Activity but are far removed from the actual Physics of Brain Activity.
Yes to all that. To me Conscious Experiences are purely in the Mind, or in Conscious Space, and are there to help us navigate the World. In my way of thinking the whole Physical World could disappear and I would still have Conscious Experiences because they were never in the Physical World in the first place.
Over time, it's the thought orientation I've finally adopted to clarify the ridiculously cluttered landscape of the general topic area.
Via our own experiences, we do get a glimpse that a basic characteristic or ability of raw existence (i.e., minus the many mediating representations) would be manifestation. Though beyond that it's probably as inaccessible as Kant's things-in-themselves in terms of developing a science for it, or explaining at a deep level how the complex versions of materialization and feeling with respect to consciousness would arise.
However, decades or centuries of tinkering around with the configurations of an artificial mind (an "experiencer" rather than a mere AI) that could make reports about its private, controlled hallucinations, might aid reason in eventually crafting an elaborate theory that works or justifies itself in terms of predicted effects. But the knowledge it would yield is the very knowledge one needs to deliberately construct it in the first place.
Like many, Schrödinger in the quote below seemed to favor the "brute emergence" route of appearances (phenomena) popping into exhibition due to procedures performing the correct magical conjuring spell (that's what such literally amounts to, no matter what disciplinary nomenclature is recruited to obscure the appalling fact). I believe primitive precursor capacities already have to be the case, just as the emergence of life-forms was dependent on molecules and atoms beforehand, or the electrical power supplied to homes is dependent upon electromagnetism. Manipulation requires an available _X_ to manipulate.
Erwin Schrödinger: "The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness?" --What is Life? Mind and Matter ... (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 1
I sort of agree. As Schrödinger remarked above, the physical "world" in terms of every day environmental appearances is just that -- a mental representation, not the thing itself. And the other (intellectual) version of it outputted by science (primarily physics) and taken up by physicalist philosophers, is a complex abstraction of symbols, technical language, etc. As Lockwood referred to it figuratively: a map of causal structure. Form alone. Relationships and magnitudes extracted from the phenomenal version via reasoning and experiment.
So in essence, both types of "physical world" are dependent upon the experiences and concepts of minds and their inter-communicative discourses. That doesn't mean that there is not a non-represented manner of existence independent of brain-related affairs. But how it exists is certainly not artificial, abstract description nor is it views and sensations of objects outside themselves from contingent distances. (Though that basic ability of "manifestation" may be required of it, to avoid the magical-like conjuring of brute emergence.)