Ego vs Awareness/consciousness

[C Rod]

Are you free to act? Or it is something you are just projecting as an action and are able to simply give rise to it through some conscious justification. I feel i do things i do not want, (not just work) but attraction and morality. They are but actions but their inception and truth are unknown to me why i act. I may know this is good and want to help but i like the idea of anarchy. I may know that girl is attractive but the girl im besotted with is the one that impressed on me when i was younger. I might can act in some free regards but that because its just possible but i think you'll never escape who you actually are which isn't even you.

[robsenelstun]

If by subjective reality steve meant to infer that if not for the subjective consciousness objective reality would not exist, as if subjective consciousness somehow conjures up external referents out of thin air, then I must disagree...vehemently!

Simplistically I believe we first need a working brain, and then it requires external referents to interact with to enable any consciousness whatsoever to manifest at all, and only as a consequence of this and many prior physical interactions can what seems post hoc to be a subjective experience, to manifest in the material substance which is our brain, as consciousness. If anyone doubts this, then I challenge them to remember what they were doing before they were conceived, and more to the point, before their mental apparatus was sufficiently primed with physical experiences to allow for cross association, or memory to exist at all. It's all about energy and networks.

The brain is like a huge ball of play doh, and when external referents come into contact with the brain via our senses, physical impressions are left behind. When, over the course of thousands of exploratory investigations certain neurones fire together, it is only because these neurones correlate with such objective referents outside of our bodies in reality. When the neurones fire together, they grow toward one another and when they meet...percepts are born in the mind. These percepts, once enough of them accumulate over time (by using bayesian statistical correlation), can in the same way grow connections toward one another, and when they meet...concepts are born, but this time due to the temporal nature of their birth, prediction becomes possible (via feedback loops). Once our species started predicting, our brains became the primary guardians of our DNA.

I hope this wasn't too much waffle...it might be only I can make sense of it, but I recommend Jeff Hawkins, and staying away from woo woo puddles like steve. In my view consciousness is 100%, as in absolutely only...brain activity. No woo woo, no ethereal arial connection to ohm humming tortoise reincarnations, just boring old brain activity. I say boring, but it really is more beautiful than all that. I would recommend Sam Harris on Free Will, Dan Dennett on Consciousness Explained and Linked by Albert-Lazlo Barabasi...it's all energy and network, in fact I think when we discover everything we can about energy we will find it too is an elaborate network.

Have fun with this...or rip me to shreds...you choose.

[Whateverist]

If by subjective reality steve meant to infer that if not for the subjective consciousness objective reality would not exist, as if subjective consciousness somehow conjures up external referents out of thin air, then I must disagree...vehemently!


Simplistically I believe we first need a working brain, and then it requires external referents to interact with to enable any consciousness whatsoever to manifest at all, and only as a consequence of this and many prior physical interactions can what seems post hoc to be a subjective experience, to manifest in the material substance which is our brain, as consciousness.


In my view consciousness is 100%, as in absolutely only...brain activity. No woo woo, no ethereal arial connection to ohm humming tortoise reincarnations, just boring old brain activity. I say boring, but it really is more beautiful than all that.

I must boringly agree with you. Consciousness is a fascinating phenomenon, but it is really just a biological process of brains. It is not a 'world unto itself', and, 'external referents' do not owe their existence to being perceived by consciousness.

What makes it a slippery subject to study is that we can all critique any account given of consciousness by way of our direct experience of it. An adequate general account must not only predict lab results but also make sense of the wide variety of experiences that we all have.

Interesting stuff but there is no need to jump to magical explanations if neural science is unable to deliver an adequate general account of consciousness in our life times. It's funny how those who do jump to magical accounts will tout the certainty they enjoy over the uncertainty of those who wait for a natural account. As if undeserved certainty was ever a valid argument for anything.

[toro]

The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics can explain both the Copenhagen and many-worlds interpretation as interpretations making unnecessary assumptions (non-quantum observer and objective universe respectively).

I've referenced it so much I'm probably about to be considered a Rovelli evangelist.

Essentially, QM describes interactions in a subjective (via relativity) world. Systems don't have set objective values, they have relationships. These relationships have different values to different observers and can only be "measured" upon interaction and with relation to one another. An electron doesn't have a spin "up". It has a spin "up" relative to the state of the magnetic field measuring it at the time.

[Angrboda]

I should refrain from addressing quantum mechanics, for I don't know what I'm talking about when I do, but I'd make a few suggestions. First, the interpretation of quantum mechanics is not the science of quantum mechanics. The science of quantum mechanics is the equations and rules for mapping them to observation. Quantum mechanical interpretations, to my mind, are mere metaphysical propositions; the interpretation can change while holding the equations constant. So what is the interpretation describing? IMHO, nothing, noumenon. ...

Beyond that, I think the idea that we need to invoke some sort of quantum consciousness is crap. People look at consciousness and find it mysterious, so they conclude that its explanation must be mysterious too. It's the sort of law of similars that we would quickly conclude is absurd when practiced by a modern day witch or homeopath, but readily glom onto because we don't like not knowing how we at bottom work, and it allays some anxiety. I'm perfectly willing to accept a quantum consciousness when someone presents some evidence of it, but they haven't; and the only reason it guides many people's ideas on consciousness is that it forms a "God of the Gaps" explanation for consciousness, effectively putting consciousness in a place that is not well understood to safeguard it from being deconstructed into mundane and unremarkable components.

As to the self/ego, I come down somewhere between a simple eliminative materialist or adaptive unconsciousnist's view, and the view that... IIRC, Daniel Dennett has evolved. His idea is that the self doesn't exist as a thing or center in the sense of being a thing, the self is the narrative center of the behaviors of the organism. It isn't a place where what we are emanates from, it is a process which associates some aspects of our biological existence with others. For example, suppose we when faced with a beggar on the street we typically give the person some change. We assert that the self is caring and giving, but what we're really seeing as just a way of organizing how we make sense of our behaviors. (This, I think, is a modest distortion of Dennett's view, but I think it gives the flavor without requiring pages of exposition. For a firmer understanding, read Dennett, starting with The Intentional Stance and Consciousness Explained, and working from there. Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves are related, being his works on free will; Elbow Room being a dense but powerful early work, and I haven't yet read the later. If you are interested in philosophy of mind, I strongly recommend that you read Patricia Churchland's Neurophilosophy — which is not a book about conclusions or theories, but more a primer on how to approach the subject of mind philosophically, what common errors of thinking about it are, and why, and so on. It's been well over a decade since I've read it, but for many years it remained, for me, one of the most important books I've ever read.)

Now, I don't go quite that far as I have other ideas which place the self/ego as an actual maintained entity, in a sort of semantic holism / coherentism that, while not eliminating the center, a la Dennett, reduces it to mere information processing in the brain. These ideas that the self/ego is somehow a mysterious emergence in reality in some ways echoes the Buddha's doctrine of Anatta or what little I understand of it, anyway. In traditional Vedic Hinduism, there is the concept of the Atman, or the transcendent self, which in many versions is a universal monadic consciousness (I'm going beyond my reading, so forgive any misstatements), and that transcendence entails realizing our true nature as Atman. The Buddha inverted this in the doctrine of Anatta, asserting that there is no self, there is anatman, or "not-self". According to Buddha, you could look within for the self, and the more you look, the less you will find. He concluded that the self or ego which binds together our existence is an illusion, and that there is in fact no center, and our clinging to the idea that there is a center is what prevents us from becoming truly enlightened, in a way analogous to the way that realization of Atman brought enlightenment to the Hindu.

Now, I suspect the Buddha was largely right in saying that you can look and look within consciousness and not find it. However, I believe the Buddha was wrong in concluding that because you cannot find it within consciousness, that it therefore is not there. I think that latter entailment is not fully justified, strange as it may sound. I'm going to leave you at this point, as explaining my evidence or reasons for suspecting this shades into ideas which at this time are, for lack of a better word, proprietary, as I have not decided whether to contribute my ideas freely, or what. Anyway, I hope I've provided enough to pique your interest, and provide some sustenance, even if I have to hold something back.