The Human Brain Is Incapable Of Understanding Anything

origin said:
What else could it be a function of? Our brain is our processor, I don't believe our spleen, or our skin is involved in the 'experience of redness', my money is on the brain.
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As I mentioned to gmilam my money is he is trying to claim a Cosmic brain we are all connected to and the Cosmic brain is the controlling brain

Otherwise we need that refrigerator size brain backpack simply to see things

:)
 
C C said:
CAPTCHAs have to be constantly upgraded as bots become more adept at interpreting them. The "simple" NASA drone that's flying around on Mars is analyzing the data versions of camera images in order to "perceive" its environment. We have robots and autonomous vehicles creating much more sophisticated information maps or "p-zombie" representations allowing them to navigate through obstacle courses.

IOW, you're underestimating what blindsight, "deaf hearing" and "feeling-less tactility" processing in smart machines or p-zombies in general can accomplish, both today and especially in the future.

Even in the brain, there are equivalent dynamic data patterns or NCCs for the experiences we are having that are doing the actual legwork. (At least in the epiphenomenalism-like context that science usually operates under of allowing no immaterial causes.) For investigators, it would be not the experience of "green" or "pain" that causes us to report such and react a certain way, but the NCC configurations as the causal source.

I personally feel that epiphenomenalism is a stretch -- the human body shouldn't be aware of experiences if they have no return effect. And consequently it would be an astonishing coincidence enduring for millions of years that neural data structures causing us to report a fictional, phenomenal character of the world also happen to really have those applicable, impotent manifestations reliably parallel to them. But EP helps emphasize that these neural correlates are sophisticated enough to yield those body behaviors/responses. In theory, little should prevent technological substrates from achieving the same complexity, as well augmenting those machines with "fictional" narrative tendencies if the same parallelism doesn't occur for them (i.e., designing them to pretend to have experiences).

As an alternative to epiphenomenalism, I turn to Russellian monism. Data configurations can potentially have phenomenal character associated with them because that is the intrinsic nature of matter (the latter is converted to artificial, abstract description when stripped of the original outer appearances and quantitative properties of perception and instrument detection, anyway).

Thus, in "Russellian materialism" a neural correlate is extrinsically the "biologically described stuff" and intrinsically the "qualia manifested stuff" -- both can be treated as causal since they're just different sides of the same coin.

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
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Michael Lockwood (the philosopher, not the other guitarist): "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.

This idea has appealed to me ever since I first encountered it in the writings of Bertrand Russell (1927); I shall therefore refer to it as 'Russellian materialism'. The view antedates Russell, however. Its clearest nineteenth-century exponent was the mathematician William Clifford (1878), who influenced Sir Arthur Eddington (1928), among others." --The Enigma of Sentience
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Russellian Monism: . . . physics describes what mass and charge do, e.g., how they dispose objects to move toward or away from each other, but not what mass and charge are. Thus, [Bertrand] Russell writes the following about the events physics describes: "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." (Russell 1959: 18)

To understand the first core thesis, structuralism about physics, consider David J. Chalmers’s description of how physical theory characterizes its basic entities:

…physical theory only characterizes its basic entities relationally, in terms of their causal and other relations to other entities. Basic particles, for instance, are largely characterized in terms of their propensity to interact with other particles. Their mass and charge is specified, to be sure, but all that a specification of mass ultimately comes to is a propensity to be accelerated by certain forces, and so on. Each entity is characterized by its relation to other entities, and so on forever. …The picture of the physical world that this yields is that of a giant causal flux, but the picture tells us nothing about what all this causation relates. Reference to the proton is fixed as the thing that causes interactions of a certain kind, that combines in certain ways with other entities, and so on; but what is the thing that is doing the causing and combining? As Russell (1927a) notes, this is a matter about which physical theory is silent. (Chalmers 1996: 153)

As Lockwood stated, this conception was also around in prototype form before Russell articulated it. The following is circa 1892.

Charles Sanders Peirce: "Viewing a thing from the outside, considering its relations of action and reaction with other things, it appears as matter. Viewing it from the inside, looking at its immediate character as feeling, it appears as consciousness". --Man's Glassy Essence​
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Good thoughtful reply. Science has not been able to show how any NCC produces, or emerges to, any actual Conscious Experience. There is an Explanatory Gap here, and as Chalmers would say, they have not solved the Hard Problem. Saying that "We are getting an inside look at our own Brain Activity" is an almost poetic thing to say, but it is a mere Speculation, just like everything else with Consciousness. I decided years ago that the best thing to do is to get rid of as many distractions as possible and stick with trying to understand single isolated fundamental aspect of Consciousness. I like to think about the Experience of Redness, the Standard A Tone, the Salty Taste, the Smell of Bleach, or the Touch of a Rough Surface. But I specialize in trying to understand the Experience of Redness (any other Color would do) in our Visual Experience. What is Redness? How does Neural Activity produce the Experience of Redness? By the way, saying that it is what Neurons Do, or that it Emerges from Neural Activity is not an Explanation. These are Speculations not Explanations.
 
gmilam said:
Explain to me how it's not in the neural activity.


Red is the name we have given to the frequency/frequencies of light that the rods and cones in our eyes respond to in the 650 nm range. The typical person has three color receptors in their eyes, these correspond to what we call primary colors. There is nothing mysterious about it.
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I think you are a couple of levels behind in this discussion.
 
origin said:
What else could it be? Other organs?

What else could it be a function of? Our brain is our processor, I don't believe our spleen, or our skin is involved in the 'experience of redness', my money is on the brain.
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Just think about the Visual Experience that you have. This Visual experience is embedded in the front of your face. How does Neural Activity do that?
 
Steve Klinko said:
Are you just Messing with me? Nobody Knows what an Experience of Redness is. All we Know is that we have it.
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Ummm you don't know what Nobody Knows what an Experience of Redness

But you DO know it is NOT our brain. And apparently you have worked out this Visual Experience (which we all have)
All we Know is that we have it
And apparently it is embedded in the front of your face
Steve Klinko said:
This Visual experience is embedded in the front of your face
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You seem very specific with your pronouncements. How did you rule out the left big toe?

:)

 
Steve Klinko said:
Good thoughtful reply. Science has not been able to show how any NCC produces, or emerges to, any actual Conscious Experience. There is an Explanatory Gap here, and as Chalmers would say, they have not solved the Hard Problem. Saying that "We are getting an inside look at our own Brain Activity" is an almost poetic thing to say, but it is a mere Speculation, just like everything else with Consciousness. I decided years ago that the best thing to do is to get rid of as many distractions as possible and stick with trying to understand single isolated fundamental aspect of Consciousness. I like to think about the Experience of Redness, the Standard A Tone, the Salty Taste, the Smell of Bleach, or the Touch of a Rough Surface. But I specialize in trying to understand the Experience of Redness (any other Color would do) in our Visual Experience. What is Redness? How does Neural Activity produce the Experience of Redness? By the way, saying that it is what Neurons Do, or that it Emerges from Neural Activity is not an Explanation. These are Speculations not Explanations.
Click to expand...

Progress is possible by proceeding without an ideal or supposed slash potentially mythical final set of scientific explanations (that a distant future or an advanced extraterrestrial civilization might offer).

Which is to say, brain correlates are nevertheless useful. Chinese alchemists had no idea how gunpowder explosions worked at a micro-level, but they knew that the recipe of ingredients (saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur) could in practical context be treated as the necessary provenance of such. And again, the data patterns and processing of machines -- even if regarded as minus corresponding experiences -- yields potent results and incremental ascension to desired robot behaviors.

Historically, we need to inspect how these "mind-body problems" came about to begin with. For instance, the view that it was the dictums of Galileo and Locke that stripped phenomenal properties from matter or the "objective stuff" of that era:

Galileo thinks that shape, position, motion, contact, and number are in the objects [also with respect to future updates like mass and charge], while “tastes, odors, colors, and so on ...reside only in consciousness.” Shape etc. are called primary qualities. Color etc. are called secondary qualities. How best to draw the distinction is controversial...

Galileo's design argument for secondary qualities. (1) Experience has the features God designed it to have. (2) God doesn't care if experience is accurate [it's a representation]; he just wants us to react properly; pain is to make us pull back, foul-smellingness is so we won't eat. (3) Properties prominent in our experiences are not there in the object, unless also prominent in science. The red we see in the tomato is like the pain we feel in our foot. It is presented as in the tomato because that is where action needs to be taken.

Galileo's relativity argument for secondary qualities. (1) How an object looks (e.g.) is relative to one's sensory equipment; other creatures do or could see different colors. (2) These other creatures' experience is no less correct. (3) So there are no objective colors in the world; there are just color-experiences. --Galileo, Descartes, Berkeley, Locke, Kant ... Reason, Relativism, and Reality​

The elements of another sub-category of representation -- writing systems -- likewise vary from culture to culture in terms of symbols and syntax. Relativity or lack of consensus across a spectrum of different parties and agencies is hardly something alien to the domain of matter. Not sufficient justification for exiling phenomenal qualities.

And obviously that banishment also occurring due to an archaic conflation of experience with the supernatural -- God and the lesser minds It mediates representations of a material world to -- has no place in today's natural methodological approach. Thus, the continued separation of primary and secondary properties (one abiding in matter, the other not) is arguably groundless -- nothing more than unthinking tradition or lack of critical analysis being applied to the momentum of an outdated habit.

"Russellian materialism" and/or its affiliates and spin-offs, would thereby simply be restoring the original situation prior to these religious accommodating dichotomies of the past. Attacking the source of a "hard problem" rather than treating the symptoms.

The rival category of thought, where the displaying residents of consciousness are a radical novelty or new level brutely emerging without precursors, is just dualism in disguise. Since this supposed parallel "field" or "dimension" (who knows what such babble is precisely waving at) cannot even be publicly detected by instruments, that is conjured by the operations of a biological or technological substrate.

And at some point the asymmetrical ludicrousness of how we could be aware of the various manifestations of consciousness if they have no reciprocal effect (lack causal contribution to neural activity) will become apparent to even those who ignore the extended consequences or inconsistencies of their conceptions. Epiphenomenalism is just another brand of dualism.

Minus that latter baggage of the past, the only road for science (with respect to any serious attempt to deeply address the exhibited affairs of experience rather than flitting superficially about on that territory) is to eventually grant that matter does not consist of just extrinsic relationships, but has an intrinsic, non-abstract manner of existence that is exploited by cognitive systems to produce the complex experiences associated with a brain (whether the manipulated building blocks are qualia or yet more primitive presentations).

If you or another proposal-maker believe it is figuratively helpful to conceive of the manifestations of consciousness as abiding in some "space" of their own, then the latter could be incorporated in that "internal" character of matter, so to be construed as harmoniously causal with the "external" character. Again, the two sides of the same coin metaphor, rather than being distinct spheres of introduced (artificial) dualism schemes and the potency problems that usually arise for one of those in naturalism's conceptual preferences.
 
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origin said:
Ok. Seems to me my brain is doing that, what else could it be?

I have no idea what that's supposed to mean.
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Exploring The Human Conscious Light Screen

We do not See things in the external World, but rather we Detect things by using internal Conscious processes that we are born with. We all have a personal Conscious Light Screen (CLS) that we use to detect what is happening in the external World. All the Conscious Light of your Visual Experience is painted onto that Screen. If we try to describe where this CLS is located it seems to be embedded in the front of our faces in some way. The CLS is vaguely horizontally rectangular with ambiguous edges that are hard to locate exactly. The screen seems to just fade into nonexistence at the borders. But wherever you look, that screen is there showing you with Conscious Light what is in the scene you are looking at.

To understand this better close your eyes and observe what you See. At first there may be various After Images that represent remnants of what you were looking at, but eventually these fade away. What is left is not totally black. Note that you might have to put your hand over your eyes if you are in a bright place in order to cut off external Light from leaking through your eyelids. Most people will notice a background that has a vague grainy noise almost like the video snow noise that appeared on old analog TVs. However, this Noise is less distinct and appears to be changing much more slowly than the TV Noise. This Noise is referred to as the Visual Dark Noise when Retinal and Cortical Activity are measured using instrumentation. It is due to random Retinal and Cortical firings. But we are not making Physical Measurements, instead we are being aware of our Correlated Conscious Experience of the Visual Dark Noise. We are Experiencing the Conscious Light which is on the Dark background. Let's call this Conscious Light Experience, the Conscious Light Noise (CLN). CLN really is the background noise in your Visual detection system. Most people easily perceive that this CLN, and possible After Images, are close to the front of their faces. If you move your head around, you will See the CLN and After Images move around with your head, which keeps them in front of your face. If you move your eyes up, down, left, or right, the CLN and After Images will seem to be displaced a little in those directions, but will still basically be located in front of your face. It is interesting to note that After Images will always look close, even if the scene element that caused the After Image is far away. Now you know where your CLS is located. Of course this is probably only an apparent Location because the CLS is a Conscious Mind phenomenon and is not constructed from any Physical Material that can be Located anywhere. However, it sure seems to be Embedded in the front of our faces.

When you open your eyes the scene that you are looking at is painted onto your CLS and it is harder to perceive that the Conscious Light making up the image is still close to your face. Your Visual system tries to give you the illusion that there are things that are far away and things that are close. If you look through only one eye the depth illusion is less pronounced. But the Conscious Light that the scene is painted with is actually still located close to your face and is at the same distance as the CLN. The illusion of distance is absolutely necessary for moving around in the World.

It should be mentioned that the things and scenes you See while Dreaming are painted onto your CLS. If you try to imagine some object, you will see a grainy, hazy, version of that object painted onto your CLS. If you rub your eyes, the Lights that you might See are painted onto your CLS.

The CLS is a general purpose Visual Display Device for all Conscious beings, whether Human or Animal. The Light that is painted onto your CLS is your Light. We walk around all day long looking at our CLSs which are embedded in the front of our faces. We cannot See the CLSs of other people but if we could it would be as if everyone was wearing Virtual Reality goggles. But instead of goggles it would be Conscious Light Screens. We think we are Seeing the external World directly but we (our Conscious Minds) are always just looking (in some Conscious way) at our own CLSs.
 
origin said:
You need a drivers license to be on Facebook? So no one under 16 can be on Facebook?
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They said somebody tried to hack my account and the only way they would let back on is if I gave them a picture of my Drivers License or of of my Birth Certificate. Well I'm not going to do that, and I'm not interested enough in Facebook to pursue this.
 
C C said:
Progress is possible by proceeding without an ideal or supposed slash potentially mythical final set of scientific explanations (that a distant future or an advanced extraterrestrial civilization might offer).

Which is to say, brain correlates are nevertheless useful. Chinese alchemists had no idea how gunpowder explosions worked at a micro-level, but they knew that the recipe of ingredients (saltpeter, charcoal and sulfur) could in practical context be treated as the necessary provenance of such. And again, the data patterns and processing of machines -- even if regarded as minus corresponding experiences -- yields potent results and incremental ascension to desired robot behaviors.

Historically, we need to inspect how these "mind-body problems" came about to begin with. For instance, the view that it was the dictums of Galileo and Locke that stripped phenomenal properties from matter or the "objective stuff" of that era:

Galileo thinks that shape, position, motion, contact, and number are in the objects [also with respect to future updates like mass and charge], while “tastes, odors, colors, and so on ...reside only in consciousness.” Shape etc. are called primary qualities. Color etc. are called secondary qualities. How best to draw the distinction is controversial...

Galileo's design argument for secondary qualities. (1) Experience has the features God designed it to have. (2) God doesn't care if experience is accurate [it's a representation]; he just wants us to react properly; pain is to make us pull back, foul-smellingness is so we won't eat. (3) Properties prominent in our experiences are not there in the object, unless also prominent in science. The red we see in the tomato is like the pain we feel in our foot. It is presented as in the tomato because that is where action needs to be taken.

Galileo's relativity argument for secondary qualities. (1) How an object looks (e.g.) is relative to one's sensory equipment; other creatures do or could see different colors. (2) These other creatures' experience is no less correct. (3) So there are no objective colors in the world; there are just color-experiences. --Galileo, Descartes, Berkeley, Locke, Kant ... Reason, Relativism, and Reality​

The elements of another sub-category of representation -- writing systems -- likewise vary from culture to culture in terms of symbols and syntax. Relativity or lack of consensus across a spectrum of different parties and agencies is hardly something alien to the domain of matter. Not sufficient justification for exiling phenomenal qualities.

And obviously that banishment also occurring due to an archaic conflation of experience with the supernatural -- God and the lesser minds It mediates representations of a material world to -- has no place in today's natural methodological approach. Thus, the continued separation of primary and secondary properties (one abiding in matter, the other not) is arguably groundless -- nothing more than unthinking tradition or lack of critical analysis being applied to the momentum of an outdated habit.

"Russellian materialism" and/or its affiliates and spin-offs, would thereby simply be restoring the original situation prior to these religious accommodating dichotomies of the past. Attacking the source of a "hard problem" rather than treating the symptoms.

The rival category of thought, where the displaying residents of consciousness are a radical novelty or new level brutely emerging without precursors, is just dualism in disguise. Since this supposed parallel "field" or "dimension" (who knows what such babble is precisely waving at) cannot even be publicly detected by instruments, that is conjured by the operations of a biological or technological substrate.

And at some point the asymmetrical ludicrousness of how we could be aware of the various manifestations of consciousness if they have no reciprocal effect (lack causal contribution to neural activity) will become apparent to even those who ignore the extended consequences or inconsistencies of their conceptions. Epiphenomenalism is just another brand of dualism.

Minus that latter baggage of the past, the only road for science (with respect to any serious attempt to deeply address the exhibited affairs of experience rather than flitting superficially about on that territory) is to eventually grant that matter does not consist of just extrinsic relationships, but has an intrinsic, non-abstract manner of existence that is exploited by cognitive systems to produce the complex experiences associated with a brain (whether the manipulated building blocks are qualia or yet more primitive presentations).

If you or another proposal-maker believe it is figuratively helpful to conceive of the manifestations of consciousness as abiding in some "space" of their own, then the latter could be incorporated in that "internal" character of matter, so to be construed as harmoniously causal with the "external" character. Again, the two sides of the same coin metaphor, rather than being distinct spheres of introduced (artificial) dualism schemes and the potency problems that usually arise for one of those in naturalism's conceptual preferences.
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Very good, if I understand what you are saying. All the other so called Theories of Consciousness also imply a Dualism whether they know it or not.
 
Steve Klinko said:
We all have a personal Conscious Light Screen (CLS) that we use to detect what is happening in the external World
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So I notice you just copy and paste from
Center for Inquiry

Well who needs to type stuff when all done for you?

Any idea how this CLS handles depth? And where / who did this, what ever it is originate?

Name and qualifications would be helpful thanks

:)
 
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