Mind Over Matter?

[emjay]

Are you talking about Panpsychism? I have read a few books on that and the jury's still out for me but I have to say I am a biased against it for the reason that the particular form of consciousness in an animal (not that I can do anything but guess what other species experience) is very highly correlated with the brain and its functions. In other words it seems too brain/body specific to be universal.

I didn't mean panpsychism exactly, but let's look at that, starting with the assumption that the brain, and only the brain so far as we know right now, allows the existence of consciousness, and see where it goes.
 
So we have a brain, and we start pulling out those neurons involved in conscious experience, one by one, in a search for a "quantum" of consciousness-- the most primitive system which we would say has some sense of subjective experience.  Would the quality of experience gradually degrade as each of billions of neurons was removed from the "neural network," right down to the last neuron, or would there be a kind of critical mass, where fewer than exactly "n" number of neurons would not be capable of anything called consciousness?  I believe that the experience would degrade gradually, and that you'd have a harder and harder time calling it "conscious," not because you've crossed a critical mass, but because what is going on is so primitive that you are unable to conceive of it as conscious.  In other words, it's not thinking about taxes or getting laid, can't see colors, can't understand sounds, etc.  But so long as you have at least one neuron, you have the capability to process (kind of) information and produce an output.  You could map a fairly complex neuron from a hardware input to a hardware output, and have it perform a simple processing task, hypothetically.

At this level, does it matter that the neuron is organic?  What if it was silicon-based?  Is there something magic about organic processing that makes consciousness, or is it just about the information?  Well, without a good theory of the mechanism of mind, I would assume no magic, and that consciousness is about information processing.  Then the simplest form of processing would be called the simplest form of mind.

Okay, now let's take out our silicon chip and replace it with mostly empty space-- using laser light to transmit information across a distance.  Could this qualify as a "thinking" structure?  What if you had a few billion of them?

Until someone has a good enough explanation of the physical mechanism of mind, then I would assume that ALL interchanges of information, no matter how simple, represent simple manifestations of mind-- in other words, that the simplest physical particles represent the simplest mechanisms of "mind" as well, and that all interactions among them can be seen as processing information.  A photon leaving an atom in one galaxy and being absorbed into another involves a very small change of state in both systems which can involve a subtle causal cascade which could reasonably be defined as a "behavior," even though it doesn't involve someone scratching their nose or something.

This is not what is normally meant by panpsychism, but at least it eliminates the need for an evolving mechanism to magically figure out how to turn data processing into the rich subjective experience that we call mind.

That is uncannily similar to what I was thinking of replying to Rhythm as what seems one logical consequence of the "Computational Mind" theory he supports - that if anything can act as a processing element in a system provided it can perform the function (such as NOR) then if you take it further there could be all manner of systems in the universe made up of all sorts of different things, even operating over vast distances or at the quantum level. I certainly don't think there's anything special about neurons in the sense that they couldn't be replaced by something else... I agree with you totally on that point (and all the others actually  ) - it is all about information and the material used to build the system doesn't matter. It also fits in perfectly with another theory I subscribe to and which I mentioned in an earlier post but couldn't remember the name but now I've looked it up - it's called the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Consciousness which basically says that the more information is integrated in the system, the richer the conscious experience will be. That ties in with your thought experiment of removing neurons and the quality of consciousness deteriorating (depending of course on which neurons you remove not the quantity per se).

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LOL, I'll be here if you take a week between responses.  I understand.  

I would, yeah.

I think that free will, as generally elaborated upon...is folklore.  I know that it's -something- aftr all...I experience it as well...but I'm also pretty sure it isn't what we've thought it was all this time that we've been in ignorance of the basic operations (and we still are, to a large part).  We'd have to have been pretty damned lucky to get that right by accident.   So, I guess the short answer is that I don't conceive of such a free will myself, at all.

The principles of computation - essentially, describe interactions and relationships which we leverage to build computational systems (like computers, clearly).  You looking for a booklist or weblink for resources?  The principles of computation would apply to any "stuff" that satisfied the conditions of, for example, a NOR gate.  Whether that gate is made of toilet papers rolls, digital components - or pixie knuckles.....they will all have one thing in common - they are capable of functioning as a NOR gate.  So, if some says "well, I don't think the material brain is doing the computation, i think -immaterial stuff- is doing it" -fine, okay, and this is how material stuff does that, so we know of at least some possible ways that immaterial stuff could achieve the same effect.

If spirits impeded the flow of the aether then they could function as ghostly resistors...which we can build phantom gates out of- which we can build disembodied computational systems out of, in principle. - for example.  And what do I think a mind is, again?..... :wink:  Try to get a dualist to give you that kind of explanation though...lol - god those hookers are huge on the yappity yap and not so big on building miracle engines...........

Thanks Rhythm that's much appreciated  I always overdo it on forums and think it only polite to reply to as many people as possible, though it can be tiring.

See my post to bennyboy: I think his theory fits in with yours, and mine, perfectly. What do you think?

I love your ghostly resistors idea as well, classic.