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tazmic wrote:"Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos is an opposite bookend of sorts to Alex Rosenberg’s recent The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. Both Nagel and Rosenberg are naturalists, but both are also highly critical of their fellow naturalists -- who, Nagel and Rosenberg maintain, do not see the deep metaphysical problems afflicting the complacent materialism that prevails among contemporary philosophers (and among contemporary scientists in their philosophical moods). What Nagel and Rosenberg disagree about is the prescribed remedy. For Rosenberg, to be a consistent naturalist requires being a radical eliminativist -- denying the existence of intentionality and semantic meaning, the epistemic value of introspection, and so forth. For Nagel, salvaging naturalism requires going to almost the opposite extreme of reviving the Aristotelian teleology that naturalists have for centuries been defining themselves against."
DJB: Do you see Bell's Theorem, and our understanding from astrophysics that all particles in the universe were together at the moment of the Big Bang, as being a possible explanation for mysterious phenomenon such as telepathy and synchronicity?
NICK: Yeah, I do. But I think that it would be too easy to say that because we're all connected we have telepathy. Because, again, why do we feel so all alone?
DJB: Doesn't it have something to do with the recency of the connection?
NICK: Yeah. If you make a connection, separate, and then make any other connections, those later connections will dilute the first connection. It's just as strong, but now you have another connection that's speeding into you. So it's a little bit like what's been called the coefficient of consanguinity, which measures how close people are linked genetically. Your mother is the closest to you, then your grandmother, and so forth on down. You're all linked by connections, but the more recent connections are the strongest. But even then, even when you've just met somebody, and separated, the telepathy between you is not really readily apparent. It would be be something, wouldn't it, if we lived in a society where the last person you met you had a telepathic contact with, until you met somebody else. That doesn't seem to happen, though, at least on the level we're aware of.
So the real question is why is telepathy so dilute? I would expect a proper science to explain that fact. Then, of course once we had that explanation, we could increase it, make it greater, or overcome the diluteness if you didn't want to have telepathic contact with certain people. So that to me is the biggest mystery. Bell's Theorem could explain telepathy, but what explains the lack of telepathy? That's something I don't think anyone has really addressed. There are a few people who have addressed this fact on the level of psychology, but not physics, as to why we don't have telepathy. The most convincing answer that I know about is that it would be just too terrible to look into the hearts of people, because there's so much pain around that it would be excruciating to tap into that.
RMN: Also, it seems that a lot of people don't want to be that open about themselves, maybe they don't want people seeing into them.
NICK: There's that too--I don't want people to look into me. But suppose you want to look into other people? A reason not to do that would be that it would be very painful.
RMN: There seems to be an idea among physicists that by persistent analysis, they will eventually discover the fundamental particle, the stuff from which all matter is formed, and yet they continue to discover smaller and smaller versions of this particle. What are your thoughts on this?
NICK: Oh, ultimate particles, huh? I'd be perfectly content if physics came to an end--that quarks and leptons were actually the world's fundamental particles. Some people think this, that physics is coming to an end, as far as the direction of finding fundamental particles goes. It's okay with me. I don't think that's the most interesting way to go, looking for fundamental particles. You know my real notion is that consciousness is the toughest problem, and that physics has basically taken off on the easy problems, and may even solve them. We may find all the forces and all the particles of nature-that's physic's quest--but then what? Then we have to really tackle some of these harder problems--the nature of mind, the nature of God, and bigger problems that we don't even know how to ask yet. So, actually I'm not too interested in the problem of finding fundamental particles, but my guess is, from what we know now, that we're very close to that situation.
tazmic » Mon Dec 09, 2013 1:35 pm wrote:Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False
Exhaustive coverage here.
"Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos is an opposite bookend of sorts to Alex Rosenberg’s recent The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. Both Nagel and Rosenberg are naturalists, but both are also highly critical of their fellow naturalists -- who, Nagel and Rosenberg maintain, do not see the deep metaphysical problems afflicting the complacent materialism that prevails among contemporary philosophers (and among contemporary scientists in their philosophical moods). What Nagel and Rosenberg disagree about is the prescribed remedy. For Rosenberg, to be a consistent naturalist requires being a radical eliminativist -- denying the existence of intentionality and semantic meaning, the epistemic value of introspection, and so forth. For Nagel, salvaging naturalism requires going to almost the opposite extreme of reviving the Aristotelian teleology that naturalists have for centuries been defining themselves against."
tapitsbo wrote:so why is there a consensus that matter causes consciousness and not the other way around?
A neuroscientist's radical theory of how networks become conscious
It's a question that's perplexed philosophers for centuries and scientists for decades: where does consciousness come from? We know it exists, at least in ourselves. But how it arises from chemistry and electricity in our brains is an unsolved mystery.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, thinks he might know the answer. According to Koch, consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. All animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious; even the internet could be. That's just the way the universe works.
"The electric charge of an electron doesn't arise out of more elemental properties. It simply has a charge," says Koch. "Likewise, I argue that we live in a universe of space, time, mass, energy, and consciousness arising out of complex systems."
What Koch proposes is a scientifically refined version of an ancient philosophical doctrine called panpsychism -- and, coming from someone else, it might sound more like spirituality than science. But Koch has devoted the last three decades to studying the neurological basis of consciousness. His work at the Allen Institute now puts him at the forefront of the BRAIN Initiative, the massive new effort to understand how brains work, which will begin next year.
Koch's insights have been detailed in dozens of scientific articles and a series of books, including last year's Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Wired talked to Koch about his understanding of this age-old question.
No one doubts that our experience of phenomenal consciousness—the felt redness of fire, the felt sweetness of a peach, the felt pain of a bee sting—arises from the activity of our brains.
tapitsbo » Mon Dec 09, 2013 6:21 am wrote: so why is there a consensus that matter causes consciousness and not the other way around?
slimmouse wrote:Surely thats because this is what we are supposed to think?
where does consciousness come from? We know it exists, at least in ourselves. But how it arises from chemistry and electricity in our brains is an unsolved mystery.
Sounder » Mon Dec 09, 2013 4:26 pm[/url] wrote:If the brain is more like an amplifier than a computer say, then consciousness might not so much ‘arise’ from the brain, as much as the brain being part of an interface system that provides access to externally generated signals (vibrations).
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