Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[Angrboda]

Parsimony is fine if it accounts for all the relevant phenomena. You seem to be discounting the most important phenomena, namely intentionality. You cannot assign meaning to brain states without tacitly accepting the reverse, i.e. assigning brain states to meaning.

I don't understand what you're saying here. tacitly accepting the reverse? What do you mean?

[Angrboda]

Consciousness, experience, and feeling are composites.  Just as frontal lobe damage patients can appreciate risk without being averse to it, and cerbral achromotopsia patients experience an internal world devoid of color, we note that consciousness is a piecemeal affair, and those pieces correspond strongly to specific parts of the brain.

And what ever happened to the concept of "emergent properties"? Does that just disappear too?

I've never been a proponent of emergent properties. It has always seemed to me to be merely hand waving aside the hard problem, as in "enough complexity" poof, magically becomes consciousness. The tools we have for studying the operation of the brain are currently rather crude and primitive. My hope is that with better tools we will someday be able to see consciousness as just another set of brain processes, like memory. (Not to say we understand everything about memory, but through animal models we have been able to probe the mysteries of memory much further.) I don't find myself inclined to agree that the phenomena of consciousness will not yield to reduction. The processes in the brain are too large scale and can be too easily described in terms of classical mechanics for the cogs of the machine to not be capable of being elucidated.

[bennyboy]

I've never been a proponent of emergent properties.  It has always seemed to me to be merely hand waving aside the hard problem, as in "enough complexity" poof, magically becomes consciousness.  The tools we have for studying the operation of the brain are currently rather crude and primitive.  My hope is that with better tools we will someday be able to see consciousness as just another set of brain processes, like memory.  (Not to say we understand everything about memory, but through animal models we have been able to probe the mysteries of memory much further.)  I don't find myself inclined to agree that the phenomena of consciousness will not yield to reduction.  The processes in the brain are too large scale and can be too easily described in terms of classical mechanics for the cogs of the machine to not be capable of being elucidated.

Is there a non-arbitrary "critical mass" at which any mechanism or process represents the most fundamental thing that can still be called "consciousness?" It seems to me the end of the road is likely to be in those most simple states that could be said to represent information-- the emission and absorption of photons, for example, or changes in the energetic state of electron orbits.

[Angrboda]

I've never been a proponent of emergent properties.  It has always seemed to me to be merely hand waving aside the hard problem, as in "enough complexity" poof, magically becomes consciousness.  The tools we have for studying the operation of the brain are currently rather crude and primitive.  My hope is that with better tools we will someday be able to see consciousness as just another set of brain processes, like memory.  (Not to say we understand everything about memory, but through animal models we have been able to probe the mysteries of memory much further.)  I don't find myself inclined to agree that the phenomena of consciousness will not yield to reduction.  The processes in the brain are too large scale and can be too easily described in terms of classical mechanics for the cogs of the machine to not be capable of being elucidated.

Is there a non-arbitrary "critical mass" at which any mechanism or process represents the most fundamental thing that can still be called "consciousness?"  It seems to me the end of the road is likely to be in those most simple states that could be said to represent information-- the emission and absorption of photons, for example, or changes in the energetic state of electron orbits.

I don't believe there's a critical mass, per se. My belief is that consciousness is "built on top of" processes like perception and language, that it is a very specific way of tying these systems together, but I suspect that consciousness arose very early in the evolution of brains. For example, I would suspect that fish have a rudimentary form of consciousness. To my way of thinking, consciousness originates from problems of control of the body, and predator-prey behaviors. The problem of control is one of integrating the various behaviors the organism's body can perform with an arbitrating mechanism which would be responsible for being the master selector of behavior. I suspect, in addition, that a sort of free will evolved very early. When a predator fish attempts to predict which way its prey is going to swim, it can't automatically assume one direction or the other; it must present a range of possible future positions of the prey, granting the prey a degree of freedom, and then satisficing what behavior of the predator is most likely to intersect the path of the prey. (Or in actuality, the process of guiding it toward the path most closely resembling the prey's next move. There is the phenomenon of a baseball player guiding a fly ball into his mitt. Apparently this works by keeping the head at a certain angle, and approaching or receding based upon the angle that the head must make to center the ball. In the fish predator-prey relationship, it would be somewhat similar. A vector to intercept the prey would be calculated based on where in the predator's site the prey is located. This left-right vector would occur in a space in which the prey would be seen as possessing the freedom to change it's angle of incidence left or right.)

Anyway, I don't view consciousness as a thing which requires a certain amount to "turn on." Rather, a companion set of neural circuits evolved on top of our neural circuits controlling body behavior and perception in order to tie our behavioral responses to our perceptions. This likely occurred very early on in the evolution of highly mobile animals, and is largely an all or nothing process. In a fish, it would be used to make behavioral decisions based on perception of the environment. My suspicion is that an animal like a black fly doesn't have this extra layer of decision making apparatus, and has more or less pre-programmed responses to light, shadow, smell, and sound in its environment. That a fly has an algorithm, whereas a fish has true consciousness. But I could be wrong. Perhaps a fly has consciousness, too.

[Bunburryist]

And what ever happened to the concept of "emergent properties"? Does that just disappear too?

I've never been a proponent of emergent properties.  It has always seemed to me to be merely hand waving aside the hard problem, as in "enough complexity" poof, magically becomes consciousness.  The tools we have for studying the operation of the brain are currently rather crude and primitive.  My hope is that with better tools we will someday be able to see consciousness as just another set of brain processes, like memory.  (Not to say we understand everything about memory, but through animal models we have been able to probe the mysteries of memory much further.)  I don't find myself inclined to agree that the phenomena of consciousness will not yield to reduction.  The processes in the brain are too large scale and can be too easily described in terms of classical mechanics for the cogs of the machine to not be capable of being elucidated.

The biggest problem I have with the emergent property idea is that, while in physical systems, and even social systems, the whole "system" is there from beginning to end.  In the case of solidity being an emergent property of cooling water, everything can be accounted for from beginning to end.  In physical terms, we can, in theory, count the atoms and account for all the energy.  Everything is there.  But in the case of the emergent property of say, the taste of saltiness - the experience of taste can't be found in the same physical context as the "observable" brain processes.  There is no way to physically detect, define,  observe, or describe any experience.  That is, no "mental" emergent property can be "found" in the physical processes that, according to the emergent property theory, result in the experiences.

[Bunburryist]

You're full of shit.  Consciousness, isn't.   You claim that consciousness is.  That's a claim that requires more support than a stupid semantic argument or saying that it's self-evident.  You've never been shy that you believe in Idealism.  What is that Idealism world composed of if consciousness isn't a real thing?  And here you are trying to deny the ontology your well-known Idealism requires.  If consciousness isn't what it appears to be, then your "world of ideas" is an empty non-space.  You're simply being dishonest in pretending agnosticism here.

Although there are no doubt a whole bunch of people who might label me as an idealist, I steer clear of the title.  Idealism is a concept born as a sort of "alternative" worldview to the "given" materialist worldview.  I don't experience a material world.  I never saw a material world.  I have never seen anyone demonstrate how any aspect of anything I experience could result from processes in a material brain.  I don't know what kind of "idea" this experience (I learned to call "the material world") could be "made of."  So humanity has developed with a language in which I learned, as a child, to think of myself as being a "living thing" in a "material world," and that that simple, common sense worldview became intellectualized in to what we call "materialism" - that doesn't mean that I, once I recognize it's flaws, have to define my understanding of what I am in terms (idealist) that it has coined.  I don't know what I am, but I'm not an idealist.

The very phrases "Idealism world" and "world of ideas" display, to me anyway, a very deep misunderstanding by materialists of the thinking of those who don't find the material worldview believable.  It's like saying idealists believe in a world, only instead of being "made of matter" it's "made of ideas."  In my thinking - there is no "world" in which I exist.  I don't "look around" in this experience and think of it as a "world" that I am "in" - and it's "made of" neither matter nor ideas.  The very concept of a "world" is a misinterpretation of this experience.  As a child, thinking in simple realist terms, I learned to believe that colors were aspects of "things in a world."  Now I understand that I am the colors I experience "around me."  As a child, I learned to think of myself as being "my body" and that I exist "in space."  Now I understand that the only way I know of space to exist is as an aspect of my experience.  It is something I am.

[Whateverist]

I'm not an idealist.  I'm purely agnostic.

You think so? Or don't you know?

[bennyboy]

I'm not an idealist.  I'm purely agnostic.

You think so?  Or don't you know?

[bennyboy]

I've never been a proponent of emergent properties.  It has always seemed to me to be merely hand waving aside the hard problem, as in "enough complexity" poof, magically becomes consciousness.  The tools we have for studying the operation of the brain are currently rather crude and primitive.  My hope is that with better tools we will someday be able to see consciousness as just another set of brain processes, like memory.  (Not to say we understand everything about memory, but through animal models we have been able to probe the mysteries of memory much further.)  I don't find myself inclined to agree that the phenomena of consciousness will not yield to reduction.  The processes in the brain are too large scale and can be too easily described in terms of classical mechanics for the cogs of the machine to not be capable of being elucidated.

The biggest problem I have with the emergent property idea is that, while in physical systems, and even social systems, the whole "system" is there from beginning to end.  In the case of solidity being an emergent property of cooling water, everything can be accounted for from beginning to end.  In physical terms, we can, in theory, count the atoms and account for all the energy.  Everything is there.  But in the case of the emergent property of say, the taste of saltiness - the experience of taste can't be found in the same physical context as the "observable" brain processes.  There is no way to physically detect, define,  observe, or describe any experience.  That is, no "mental" emergent property can be "found" in the physical processes that, according to the emergent property theory, result in the experiences.

I like to ask this question: if you encountered an alien object, and it seemed to have a very complex relationship with its environment-- a high level of responsivity, etc., how would you determine 1) that it was alive; and/or 2) what it was/wasn't experiencing subjectively?

It's easy to convince us that brain study is a study of how mind works, because we can poke someone's brain with a pin, and they'll say, "I smell smoke" or whatever.  And because the studying person ALSO understands what it's like to smell things.  That makes the study of the human mind as much of an ontology as anything else.

[bennyboy]

I don't believe there's a critical mass, per se.  My belief is that consciousness is "built on top of" processes like perception and language, that it is a very specific way of tying these systems together, but I suspect that consciousness arose very early in the evolution of brains.

So consciousness literally arises out of tying things together-- for example, the data from multiple sense, and various other functions?

If you could temporarily turn off all those various systems, would that "bridge" still be there as a kind of nebulous contentless consciousness (a la say an "englightened" Buddha or something), or is there something in the act of connection itself which makes us conscious?

Anyway, I don't view consciousness as a thing which requires a certain amount to "turn on."  Rather, a companion set of neural circuits evolved on top of our neural circuits controlling body behavior and perception in order to tie our behavioral responses to our perceptions.  This likely occurred very early on in the evolution of highly mobile animals, and is largely an all or nothing process.  In a fish, it would be used to make behavioral decisions based on perception of the environment.  My suspicion is that an animal like a black fly doesn't have this extra layer of decision making apparatus, and has more or less pre-programmed responses to light, shadow, smell, and sound in its environment.  That a fly has an algorithm, whereas a fish has true consciousness.  But I could be wrong.  Perhaps a fly has consciousness, too.

Would you agree with Rhythm, then, that a non-organic system (say a computer) which can do this kind of complex coordination, is conscious?

On another note, it seems likely to me that any organism which is capable of motivated behavior (in other words, 100% of living things), have a kind of consciousness. They have some built-in sense of how the world should be for them, and a strong motivation to bring themselves to that state. I think (again, I can't claim to know), that when you try to swat a fly, it knows it doesn't want to be swatted, and takes a very deliberate evasive action.