Does it make sense to speak of "Universal Consciousness" or "Universal Intelligence"?

[MindForgedManacle]

[Cato]

No, that doesn't make sense. The evidence points to consciousness being an emergent property of a complex assemblage of matter, not the matter itself.

What evidence? How do you test your hypothesis that consciousness is an emergnet property?

The fact is that emergent materialism is piece of metaphysics, not science ... So, you seem to have a double standard.

In any case, you have the burden of proof to tell us how is emergent materialism testable? So go ahead, if you know something that I don't.

I do not claim that human consciousness is not the product of brain. Surely it seems to be. The question is: what is it in the brain that is responsible for this miracle? You claim it's some emergent information processing. Ok, that's a hypothesis, but how do you test it?

I claim that it's more plausible that consciousness is connected to some quantum phenomena in the brain, most likely in the microtubules.

This is a fucking joke right? Unless you ascribe to some form of dualism, consciousness is an emergent property of the brain by definition.

Not understanding this you ask how emergent materialism is testable. You then immediately foist on us Hameroff's unsupported microtubule claims. Doesn't it bother you that those claims are impossible to test?

I suppose you also don't realize that all the microtubule baseless speculation does is attempt to give a materialistic explanation for the rise of emergent consciousness that you are trying to replace. If on the other hand you are claiming that actual computation occurs at the microtubule level, you are suffering from the fallacy of division. Decoherence is a bitch.

Woo Meister is as Woo Meister does.

[Chas]

I was not making any claim for which I have no evidence. Only you are, if you claim that emergent materialism is a fact, not just a hypothesis, which has other alternatives, such as the theory of quantum mind.
And the idea of some "supermind" does not follow from quantum mind. Quantum mind is scientific theory, theory of "supermind is" piece of speculative metaphysics. I only maintain that neither such notion of "cosmic intelligent" is no nonsense. Scientific idea -- that it ain't.

In any case, you confuse notions of testability scientificity and reasonability.
Testability is the strongest notion: not all science can be testable, for science has to make some assumptions that are non-testable and at its limits it must include speculative elements. And not all non-science is unreasonable nor "pseudo- science" (unless it prtends to be science), for scope of current scientific knowledge never grasps everything, and one can make reasonabel non-scientific speculations about what is left6 outside (e.g. is universe infinite, are there alternative universes, etc). Such ideas can later insipire science, as it has frequently happened. The question of "supermind" belongs to this last subclass. It ain't science, I never said that.
[/hide]

My claim is only that the evidence supports a purely materialistic mechanism.

Microtubules are still part of the brain structure, so that does not contradict the hypothesis that consciousness is brain-based and emergent.

I am not the least confused between reasonableness and testability. I am also not going to entertain ideas for which there is not only no evidence but no proposed mechanism, like matter being 'conscious all the way down'. Not reasonable, not testable.

[Mudhammam]

[bennyboy]

This is a fucking joke right? Unless you ascribe to some form of dualism, consciousness is an emergent property of the brain by definition.

Not it's not. There are myriad other possibilities, some of them physical monist.

You can say you strongly think the mind is only an emergent property of the brain. But if you want to define it as such, you're just cheating.

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I was not making any claim for which I have no evidence. Only you are, if you claim that emergent materialism is a fact, not just a hypothesis, which has other alternatives, such as the theory of quantum mind.
And the idea of some "supermind" does not follow from quantum mind. Quantum mind is scientific theory, theory of "supermind is" piece of speculative metaphysics. I only maintain that neither such notion of "cosmic intelligent" is no nonsense. Scientific idea -- that it ain't.

In any case, you confuse notions of testability scientificity and reasonability.
Testability is the strongest notion: not all science can be testable, for science has to make some assumptions that are non-testable and at its limits it must include speculative elements. And not all non-science is unreasonable nor "pseudo- science" (unless it prtends to be science), for scope of current scientific knowledge never grasps everything, and one can make reasonabel non-scientific speculations about what is left6 outside (e.g. is universe infinite, are there alternative universes, etc). Such ideas can later insipire science, as it has frequently happened. The question of "supermind" belongs to this last subclass. It ain't science, I never said that.
[/hide]

My claim is only that the evidence supports a purely materialistic mechanism.

Microtubules are still part of the brain structure, so that does not contradict the hypothesis that consciousness is brain-based and emergent.

I am not the least confused between reasonableness and testability. I am also not going to entertain ideas for which there is not only no evidence but no proposed mechanism, like matter being 'conscious all the way down'. Not reasonable, not testable.

Either I've been making strange posts in my sleep again, or you've misquoted.

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That's a great Sagan quote. Good post too. Thanks.

If something like the multiverse theory is in fact the case, I like to think of our Universe as some sort of quasi-organism that is in some Darwinian way competing with other Universes, perhaps to bring about the prevention of it's own death, although that's all very far out and I don't think of it much beyond a place of intrigue.

It's a neat idea, but with one problem: modern physics is at least as woo as the science it's supposed to be replacing.

[Mudhammam]

[Cato]

Not it's not. There are myriad other possibilities, some of them physical monist.

You can say you strongly think the mind is only an emergent property of the brain. But if you want to define it as such, you're just cheating.

What myriad of possibilites? Nobody takes seriously ideas similar to the claim that consciousness comes from the pineal gland. If you believe the mind comes from the brain it must be an emergent property. If it weren't we would have found the source by now, like the pineal gland.

Understanding the definition of emergence and observing what we do know of the brain today is hardly cheating.

[Jackie]

To answer the question in the TITLE of the thread. NO, science is pointing away from any type of cognition doing all this. Our cognition is something that arises out of evolution, it is not something bigger than us, and regardless of mythical god claims, even a generic concept of a cognition as a starting point would still have the problem of infinite regress.

Stephen Hawkins "A God is not required", so why would any type of cognition be required?

[Hegel]

This is a fucking joke right? Unless you ascribe to some form of dualism, consciousness is an emergent property of the brain by definition.

That is simply as far from truth as it possibly can be.

And to say "c. is emergent prop. by def" is getting close to non-sense. I am not going to explain this to you, for others have proven it. Read, e.g. David Chalmers' argument.

Not understanding this you ask how emergent materialism is testable. You then immediately foist on us Hameroff's unsupported microtubule claims. Doesn't it bother you that those claims are impossible to test?

Well, emergent materialism must be testable, if it's science.
But you just seemed to claim it's "by definition". That's bullshit, not science, like ontological proof of God: its Gods def that it exists, so it exists!
So, you found emergent materialism on an ontological, not empirical argument!

If you want me to take emregent materialism seriously as SCIENCE, tell me, how you test your theory.

I suppose you also don't realize that all the microtubule baseless speculation does is attempt to give a materialistic explanation for the rise of emergent consciousness that you are trying to replace.

No. MIcrotubule hypothesis does not take any standpoint as such on the ontological question; it is a theory of material correlates of C. What I wrote was not to claim that quantum-mind implies that emergent materialism is false; what it does is that it gives a way of understanding rationally an alternative viewpoint.

The question was: DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO SPEAK OF UNIVERSAL C. OR UNIVERSAL INTELLIGENCE, not whether there is scientific evidence for it. I have proven only what the opening post asked, nothing more thatn that.

If on the other hand you are claiming that actual computation occurs at the microtubule level, you are suffering from the fallacy of division.

I am not really claiming anything, and certainly
I am not claiming that "actual computation takes place on microtubule level". I think the bulk or of the computations of our mind appear on neuronal level. But that's not all; the basic idea of Penrose is that mind is not exhausted by computation. To begin with, you should read Penrose's work.

Decoherence is a bitch.

Surely, but it does not show that Penrose is wrong. That's a fact, I am sorry.

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Well, I think the neural level is enough.

Most folks think like that and I am not claiming it ain't possible.

But what bugs me is the dogmatic attitude of many of the proponents of this metaphysics (for that's really what it is). Look how Cato just gave an argument of the form of ontological proof of God for it!

Dogmatism bugs me, that's all. I am not a Believer in anything.

Each time I think that I once created an Artificial Neural Network (fully software based) that, with only some 50 neurons, could perform tomography, I wonder what could be achieved with millions of neurons that are always tweaking their own pathways.

Sure its magic what software can do ... but why should it give rise to awareness? And on what level of complexity, if you dont' believe in conscious thermostats, in case of which you're back in some sort of universal mind stuff.

To me, it seems unnecessary, and the testing of that hypothesis will be far more difficult than the "simple" neural activity.
"proto-consciousness" on all matter? really? I can't wait to see this published!

But a non-testable hypothesis is not science. And thus, the ultimate argument against different views is not that they are not scientific, but that they are too "odd", too far from "common intuition". I think that's always a bad argument knowing what we know about physics, etc.
& I think if I tried to publish it they'd say this has been said a thousand times ... Leibniz was the guy to invent the idea. He was not an idiot. Also the grandfather of computer, btw. Whitehead, David Bohm, etc have given their versions.

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What myriad of possibilites? Nobody takes seriously ideas similar to the claim that consciousness comes from the pineal gland.

AI is also based on dualism.
What causes somehow magically the consciousness is the non-material algorithmic processes that the brain implements and -- as some believe -- can even in future be downloaded into computer.

[pocaracas]

Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS (born 8 August 1931), is an English mathematical physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science.

Not a biologist, not a neurologist...
Maybe you are aware that, if you have some ailment and go to a doctor, you have several outcomes:
- If you go to an endocrinologist, you have some problem with your hormones.
- If you go to an orthopedic doctor, you have something wrong with your bones.
- If you go to a cardiologist, you have something wrong with your heart.
- If you go to a dermatologist, you have something wrong with your skin
- and so on and so on...

This Penrose fellow is a mathematical physicist, so deals mostly with theoretical physics and quantum is everywhere for him... So it makes sense that he'd come up with something involving his field of work... or else he'd just shut up.
He's biased.
His notion of computer processing on the algorithmic level does not correlate with the kind of processing done on a neurological brain. He strawmans the brain with that algorithmic processing and then claims it can't be like that... well whoopedidah!