If you cannot be what you perceive, but must be something apart from what you perceive, then what are you? If are not what you perceive then it follows that you are not a body or a mind with thoughts and feelings.
There are too many “ifs”. Can you rephrase what you are trying to convey? What have you been reading? Seems like Eastern philosophy. If you are a westerner, you need to be careful. You don’t want to end up in a dark place.
How many times do I have to post this. This lecture explains your relationship to the external world. Your brain can only make a “best guess” as to what information it is processing.
Please watch this and reflect on the implications of what Anil Seth is saying.
Hal9000:
If you cannot be what you perceive, but must be something apart from what you perceive, then what are you? If are not what you perceive then it follows that you are not a body or a mind with thoughts and feelings.
For the Experience of Redness as an example: I understand that there will be particular Neurons Firing when I Experience Redness in my Visual Field of View. So I deduce that those Firing Neurons are producing the Redness Experience for me somehow. But I know the Neurons are part of what I am. So logically, since the Neurons seem to produce the Experience of Redness, I deduce that the Experience of Redness must be part of what I am. I am the Experience of Redness or any other Colorness, or the Experience of Light in general. It is my own Internal Light that I perceive. It seems to be part of what I am. But yet when I Experience the Redness it still does not seem to be a part of me. It is always out there or over there. So I can know logically that I am the Redness but I don’t have Conscious awareness of being that Redness.
You are what you perceive ! Please do watch Anil Seth . He explains exactly in very simple terms what it is that creates “YOU”.
To Write4u
Thank You for the link. I have seen this before, but sorry it doesn’t help. Consciousness as a Hallucination concept goes way back to the 60s with Max Clowes.
steveklinko said; Thank You for the link. I have seen this before, but sorry it doesn’t help. Consciousness as a Hallucination concept goes way back to the 60s with Max Clowes.An AI computer programmer? What is it that you have seen before and what does it not help?
If you have not fully grasped the implications of what Anil Seth is demonstrating in his examples of the brain making “best guesses” of incoming electro/chemical information via the neural network and in particular of the role microtubules play in this process as demonstrated by Stuart Hameroff, I urge you to revisit the latest science in this young field.
Write4u:
An AI computer programmer? What is it that you have seen before and what does it not help?
If you have not fully grasped the implications of what Anil Seth is demonstrating in his examples of the brain making “best guesses” of incoming electro/chemical information via the neural network and in particular of the role microtubules play in this process as demonstrated by Stuart Hameroff, I urge you to revisit the latest science in this young field.
I have seen the Seth videos before. They are interesting. But Seth does not Explain what Consciousness is. Saying Consciousness is a Hallucination does not help solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Hameroff is another good thinker on Consciousness but the Microtubule conjecture is very Speculative. And even if Microtubules did have something to do with Consciousness there is still Zero Explanation for what mechanism in the Microtubules cause Consciousness. We have known that the Neural Activity seems to produce Consciousness for a Hundred years. But nobody can say how Neural Activity, which would include anything the Microtubules are doing, produces Consciousness.
Is a camera what comes through its lens? I think not; a camera must be a camera before it functions as a camera. Is a computer the inputs it receives? Again no, same reason. Is a person what he perceives? Again, I think not; a person must be a person before he can achieve any perception. Form always precedes function.
ibil said; Is a camera what comes through its lens? I think not; a camera must be a camera before it functions as a camera. Is a computer the inputs it receives? Again no, same reason. Is a person what he perceives? Again, I think not; a person must be a person before he can achieve any perception. Form always precedes function.That's a meaningless statement. A person must be a person before he can achieve personhood? Descartes' "brain in a vat" disproves that immediately. Your brain can only make "best guesses" of what it is to be you. There are 5 "selves" which make up a complete person, and any of these selves can go wrong, without you even realizing it.
Consciousness alone does not create a self. The hard problem is Descartes; “I think, therefore I am”. And that self is an emergent awareness of being an autonomous selfness, the central actor in your unfolding reality.
From Anil Seth
Bodily self, your physical selfPerspectival self, perceiving the exterior world
Volitional self, motive, will, intent
Narrative self, being a continuous presence
Social self, memory of social interactions
The point is that you “predict yourself into existence” based on the information of your interoceptional control of the physical survival mechanisms in your body. Ultimately we are the result of a few million years of natural selection and ever more complex sensory and information processing abilities giving us a natural survival advantage for procreation and continuation of the species. That’s fundamental.
First there are many biological organisms that have a sense of self. Most of them are purely chemical in nature, such as bacteria which are able to communicate via “quorum sensing” and thereby gained the advantage of being able to act in unison. An even more sophisticated quasi consiouness is found in the hive-mind of many insects with extremely limited brain power, but have enormous numerical advantage, each with a specialized ability combined to form an orderly social rather than individual survival pattern.
Natural selection for our survival mechanism was a genetic mutation in our common ancestor with our great ape cousins, which produced a larger and more complex DNA chromosome, which created an emergent ability to form a larger brain able to generate composite mindscapes from stored memory and place ourselves in the center of that reality.
Human Chromosome 2 is a fusion of two ancestral chromosomes , All great apes apart from man have 24 pairs of chromosomes. There is therefore a hypothesis that the common ancestor of all great apes had 24 pairs of chromosomes and that the fusion of two of the ancestor's chromosomes created chromosome 2 in humans. The evidence for this hypothesis is very strong.http://www.evolutionpages.com/chromosome_2.htm
As to the “hard problem” of the ability to fashion an internal “mindscape”, with you as the central actor. The center of your universe. This is an emergent holographic mindscape where you are allowed to imagine anything based on your “experiences” of your universe.
The holographic function is the emergent result of billions of bits of information distributed throughout the brain and accessing memories to form an experiential best guess of what your brain is processing as compared to your experiential memory of previous similar experiences
The imaginary mindscape is an emergent phenomenon, but does not require a special exterior ingredient.
Max Tegmark proposes that consciousness is the ability to mentally re-experience visual patterns from the memories which create the entire sensory reality of the mindscape.
These sensory memories are stored in microtubules in the neural network of the brain and when recalled, form recognizable patterns of the original sensory experience, optical, auditory, smell, touch . The cognitive experiences recreate the original sensory input along with the accompanying emotional experience.
Fight or flight emotion is a powerful survival technique present in many animals. These cognitive abilities rest on the possible danger contained in (as yet) undefined sensory informational patterns.
Once a pattern is defined its memory creates a experiential image, a form of mental holography, consisting of pixels, using the brains spatial dimensions to form a mindscape and even imagine it as a lifesize representation outside the spatial confines of the brain itself. Our brains create our reality.
The brain’s hivemind consists of microtubules which process incoming sensory information and recall prior sensory information from specialized memory microtubules thereby recreating an entire sensory mindscape.
The mindscape is not truly recreation of sensory input but a best guess of what it is experiencing, hence Seth’s “controlled hallucination”
The functions of microtubules of the brain count by the trillion, very much like pixels in a picture. The brain can access specific memories, based on the incoming signals. The brain then compares its memory with the incoming information and like a good computer, forms a final pixelated pattern by which you experience external sensory stimuli.
Interoception of your body’s internal organs does not work that way at all. No pixels, no imagining. Only an autonomous control over the functional processes of the organs. When they go wrong the only experience is discomfort and we go see a doctor because he knows what our insides should look like. He has actually seen and handled healthy and diseased internal organs and stored their actual patterns in memory.
So there are levels to our self-awareness. IMO, the hard problem can be explained by analogy to a very sophisticated hive-mind, which can produce experiential pixelated patterns as mindscapes.
But our perception is always only a best guess.
This proves it. I’ll give you the answer, yet your brain will refuse to produce the actual pattern that reality presents. OK. A = B
Isn’t that uncanny? You know the two squares are the same color of gray, but your brain does not allow you to experience both squares as having the same color. This is due to the natural appearance of a shaded object as darker than it appears in reality. The optical illusion does not lie in A or B, it is the suggestion that B is in the shade which makes the brain present it as lighter than the apparent shade in which it is placed. Your self has no control over this “controlled hallucination”.
Your sense of self is but a best guess based on prior stored experiential and emotional information. The hard problem is not so hard, it is often incorrect. It just tries to be functional like a good biological computer.
To Write4u:
I am not sure I understand your use of the Hard Problem here when you say the Hard Problem is not so hard. How can the Hard Problem be incorrect? Are you talking about the classic David Chalmers Hard Problem or something else? There is nothing that you have said that solves the Hard Problem in any way. If you are going to talk about Hallucinations then you will have to Explain How our Minds Experience those Hallucination. That would be the Hard Problem. Just saying the word Hallucination, although insightful in a certain way, does not solve the Hard Problem. You have just given Visual Experience another name and, then having given it another name, proclaimed that you have now solved how we have Visual Experiences. Hallucination should be set aside for what it really means, which is seeing things that are not there like other people and objects. Shading effects and Color effects are simply a manifestation of the Neural Processing that the Visual System is performing.