Does eliminative materialism become panpsychism?

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One of the things that really bothers me about the QM hypothesis of consciousness lately is that it seems like the more a person actually knows academically about QM the more adamantly they're against any suggestion that such hypotheses are correct. A great example I've heard recently is Ed May, the guy who was in charge of the US remote viewing program who was also a physicist for ten years and who also is just as adamant a materialist and against quantum 'woo' as he is a proponent of the idea that psy is real.

What deeply disgusts me about the debate on that topic - unless you've been a physicist for ten or twenty years it seems like whatever collection or proportionality of evidence there is against quantum consciousness you'll never actually hear it coherently explained or even hear someone attempt such an explanation. Ed May, for example, is the first person I've actually heard even sort-of articulate the idea that spacial distances are still a thing with quantum effects and that under most circumstances they're only available over extremely short ranges (such as what you'd have with plants using QM in photosynthesis). That leaves all kinds of people, who want to actually know the truth on that but simply can't fund a couple decades of personal experience in physics, out in the cold and with an odd sense that they're just getting brow-beaten by authorities who, if they have a coherent reason for their objections, refuse to express their rational. That last bit plays directly into the hands of people who'd say "You see? It's just a dogmatic taboo! They won't explain it because they're too invested in materialism, too afraid of having their career destroyed, or both!".

I don't think this research (not yet repeated and on only two subjects) can really be send to constitute a factual basis for discounting ITT or panpsychism.It seems to me that a number of previously published studies on corpus callosum splits had very different results.


Interesting.

Does evidence for quantum effects in neurons necessarily require a non-reductionist view? I'm not completely convinced. This is quite interesting, though. Anesthesia seemed like such a profound interruption of consciousness to me that the fact that it works suggested an interruptible physical mechanism for consciousness. This seems to extend that mechanism into the quantum world, but where does that get us?

Two more talks that may be of interest to those who are following these lines of conjecture:

"the guy who was in charge of the US remote viewing program who was also a physicist for ten years and who also is just as adamant a materialist and against quantum 'woo' as he is a proponent of the idea that psy is real. "
And remote viewing isn't woo? That is a very odd combination, a strict materialist that believes in remote viewing.

Yes, a physicist - who's completely against the notion of quantum consciousness, life after death, or anything like that but he's a strong proponent of psy. It's a very unusual combination.

What is his purely materialist explanation for remote viewing?

That it's real, he doesn't know what it is, but that it can't be quantum because for all he knows of QM its impossible by that mechanism.

If one defines "matter " as anything real, then when one says " matter is real" one is saying " matter is matter" and/or " what is real is real'. In other words a meaningless tautology.

I think he was implying a yet unknown vehicle of delivery that's neither Newtonian nor QM-related.

What is matter that is not Newtonian and not QM? It seems to me that his definition of "physical" is so broad and all encompassing that it is meaningless.

Our modern understanding of matter is closer to mind then what most of us think of as matter. Electrons have no volume, they are point like particles. How can something ( within the physicalist paradigm ) without any volume be said to exist? Also, subatomic particles have no precise location, they are here and there and neither simultaneously. Note that I am not saying that matter is mind. I am saying that if one calls oneself a physicalist and one believes in such attributes of matter, there is little to differentiate him from someone that believes in ghosts. Yes, there is empirical evidence for matter but none for ghosts. That is not my point. My point is that both believe in the same properties ( no volume, no location ) .

I think the current going definition of physicalism includes anything down to fields, which electrons and quarks are manifestations of, and it probably in most cases includes seeing all things as emergent from fields. As far as I can tell the overarching philosophy is that truth is scientifically verifiable and repeatable, that these are the only safe claims, that if its suggestive but not pinned down scientifically it's an unsubstantiated notion (possible but unproven), and considering the currently accepted flow of evidence by means of repeatable experiments the logic goes that anything which sounds completely unlike what's been discovered and vetted - ie. spiritual existence, astral travel, planetary magic, sigils, spirit guides and channeling, etc.. that its worse than substantiated - it's heterodox to vetted structure to the point of being inimical to the whole endeavor.

All of that said science has also, thus far, been hemmed in by a few things:

1) Quantity of occurrence for study. Deltaville's first article mentions that there are fewer and fewer split-brain patients to study, which means they're a fixed commodity and thus difficult to schedule experiments with.

2) Financing - you can't replicate an experiment many times, especially if it's not in the main line of current logic, if the experiment itself is particularly expensive.

3) Instruments sensitive and accurate enough for certain types of inquiry. A good example - this is an issue for anyone in biology, neurology, chemstry, or physics who'd like to measure quantum processes directly.

In some ways from that standpoint the corpus of scientific knowledge we have to day, and the general flavor of it, has been guided by and large within certain practical constraints. I don't think we can say that's necessarily good or bad, it's just an artifact of where we've been historically and where we're at now in terms of means.

You might like Bernardo Kastrup if you haven't heard of him already. He's an idealist, also a programmer at CERN if I remember correctly, and he's hashed out some interesting concepts such as all things we deem 'physical' being the second-person aspect of any first person experience, of which we're experiencing the primary mind, ie. the universe, as altars or split personas. While it's an interesting exploration and effort on his part I think he needs to be able to say more clear and precise things relatively soon, like on the level of making predictions or thinking up experiments that can vet or falsify his line of reasoning.

Bringing up another one of my odd-angled experiences:

Just a day or so ago I was at work, listening to something on Youtube and I did something I normally don't do which is log on to my Google account and post a comment. Everyone around me was sitting at their cubicles and no one was in eye-shot. I had it on the down-low in the lower left of my screen but I felt some intense pressure from over my left shoulder. It was as if my boss or someone like her was standing right behind me staring a hole in what I was doing and calling me out on posting something on the job. The particular part of this that caught my attention was that I was smelling perfume strongly enough that you'd have to be within a foot or two of someone to catch it that way and the sense of someone morally leering at me from that close up was intensely palpable. I didn't smell it before or after and any gusts of perfume I smelled for the rest of the morning were at normal or near-normal levels, ie. none of the ladies around me took a bath in the stuff.

To be fair I can't rule out that, in an odd way, it could have been someone I worked with and that this was one of those yet-unknown things with people's fields of abstract awareness criss-crossing. For analogy I remember a few jobs ago where a younger girl with a particularly cocky attitude had come to ask me about a mistake she saw in something I did on one of her accounts when she was out. She was asking me the kinds of persistent questions where you're not supposed to say "Thanks for the feedback - I'll look out next time", rather you're supposed to berate yourself or emotionally pull out a razor-blade and cut yourself for their satisfaction and I didn't go for it. You could say that even though I was across a divider and couldn't see her I felt some very intense heat coming my way, not literal temperature but like she was psychologically blowing daggers in my direction, in a way that was equally palpable to the experience above.

I still don't know what to make of experiences like that. If there's anything directly real as it's offered by perception I'd have to guess that we have broader means of communication and perception than we're aware of. How much of that's un-obstructing of subconscious data collection that's usually filtered out, possibly reconstructed from that data, I don't know. I would say, for certain, it's not fast and loose no matter what some new ager would tell you. I had to laugh listening to the latest Sam Harris podcast where he had Jordan Peterson on for round two and called sympathetic magic dangerous BS - I'd have to agree with him, if this stuff was indeed fast and loose all you'd need to cure cancer, get rid of diabetes, or avoid going under the knife to have an appendix or gallbladder removed is a good chakra realignment with your nearst level 3 reiki master. Similarly any of The Secret or 'you create your own reality' is also, as far as I can tell, completely inside out, ie. you may have more subconscious means of data collection as well as ways of communicating with other people or examining the world around you than just your immediate five senses, I don't think it's supernatural at all (it can't be - IMHO the word's meaning has morphed over time into a slur for 'that which can't exist'), but essentially that's going on all the time in the background and I think, lets just say, it helps what you merit in the dominance hierarchy catch up to you faster for good or for ill which can also mean that if you're doing your best but are still struggling or are lonely and miserable that it also means that in this world of internal factulties, extended communication, data-gathering, and influence, that you're being sized up and either kept where you're at, rejected, or haggled with for what you want on a different level so that circumstances are hardly ever fully bad luck (at least past your luck with your own health, capacities, dispositions, etc.).


Wow, that got a lot longer than I'd planned to go on this topic.

All the same - the stuff I said above, I keep it in the unsubstantiated bucket because TBH I have to admit that I don't know what it is. I've heard something along the lines that trees can communicate by way of fungus on their bark, could a mechanism as attenuated as that also be at play with human communication over distances? Even if and when something happens pretty directly in the world around me to show me I wasn't crazy it just shows that there was more guiding that experience than just my own brain having a go at me. The most suggestive sign to me that it's not 'spirits' or anything along those lines is that there's nothing ministerial about it and I could ask them and pray till I'm out of breath for guidance and clarity, I tried that in the past and the silence I got seemed more like the kind of silence you'd get from a fence post rather than a sage - ie. no sign of withholding and every sign that I simply wasn't understanding these experiences correctly if I tried going that route.These stories, at the more materialist end, at least suggest to me that Ed May is partially on the right track and, if not, then it very well could be in the Neil Theisse and Kaufmanns' direction. I still have no clue as to whether any of this says anything about whether I'll keep on or cease to exist when I die, and I find Ed May's suggestions particularly interesting and curious in that regard. Any which way it's enough to keep me wondering just how much we have yet to uncover about what we do daily.

Jordan's absolutely brilliant and I'd have to say I can't get enough of his lectures these days. Another good one that's quite recent is The Resurrection of Logos.

To my lengthy post from a couple days ago I'm going to recompound a certain point.

My understanding of mystical experience as well as experiences people can have on hallucinogens or dissociatives such as DXM and the like:

The first category is visual stimulation, sensory flanging, and particularly the release of hypnogogic imagery to non-hypnogogic states, ie. such as when you're wide awake and seeing mental images of this sort almost supersede your vision. Sometimes you'll see these almost like some type of Windows screensaver fading or weaving through each other like sliding texture collages. At other times you'll see a normal image but the person or things in the picture have certain pronounced features and the image will refresh several times over with those pronounced features becoming more gaudy/eccentric with each pass as if there's a sort of fractal-monster effect at play. All of these experiences clearly smack of neurological feedback loops in the brain doubling back on themselves and smacks quite heavily of what Oliver Sacks describes in this video as Charles Bonnet syndrome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgOTaXhbqPQ


Then there's the 'other' type that I've described here. The sense that your nervous system is cross-sectional to these super-tight guitar-strings, which are so tight that they're unnoticeable and at certain points they can go slack as if someone let the tensioners down. Normally you might be somewhere and if something lets say 'other' wants to interact with you you'll feel it on your skin and it's almost always an excitement of your neurons. This would make sense because if whatever this is, ie. quantum effect or something that isn't quantum but nonetheless barks, wags its tail, and chases cats as if it were, if it's so tightly correlated with each neuron it would mean that you have no other place of sensation for such things to interact. It's part of why when people talk about these experiences such as being paralyzed and accosted by a ghost or touched in some way there's a sensation like spider-webs associated. Similarly if that coupling between your nerves and, whaver this is, goes slack you can really start to detect major outlines of forms, intentionality, emotion, etc.. and tbh - some of these things when you do pick up intentionality or personality from them it's difficult to describe their personality and intention attributes as anything other than sublime/holy. To me I don't know what these are, and to my best guess there are plenty of people who may do this when they're sleeping and not realizing it (certain key-offs or me is that feeling it when I'm waking up is a common occurrence). The other part is that there may very well be people who've 'learned to swim' so to speak while they're awake, and further still there could be the whole managerie of living things that people like Robert Bruce, William Earnest Butler, or Franz Bardon often like/liked to talk about.


^^ Take the above with as many grains of salt as you wish, entire quarries if you need to. When I try to map out my own experiences I'm at least glad that this does sort out relatively neatly now that I've studied myself and my experiences longer, and I won't lie - there are dynamics that are closer to the center where honesty I can't tell, ie. they could either be very well-built subconscious characters or they could be very dim apprehensions of third-party agencies but they're not far enough to either one side or the other to say anything definitively.

I really do look forward to the day when subjective experience can be demistified because I really don't think that hallucinations, lets say, are infinite in their quality and variety; ie. certain patterns seem like they're persistent with neurological artifacts. My personal sense of what's going to happen - we'll probably find outselves in a position where rather than trying to figure out where everything comes from in the brain we'll be trying to figure out how much of us resides on the brain, how to test whether things like memories are truly synaptic (in their granular details they very well could be), and be able to get a clear sense, if there are both physical and non-physical strata to the self how much goes to what. That and - we'll able to do it without all kinds of obscurantist riddles and requests to take absurd claims on faith as a sign of worthiness or dedication.

Getting back on topic though:

I think the arguments in my OP hit more directly the types of people who claim that consciousness is irrelevant than those who claim strong emergence. Strong emergence at least has a limit, just that I think when people put consciousness too directly back on mechanism they saying things more in line with weak emergence or even lower parts of the chain.

I guess really I, and I think the guy who I posted a video of in my OP, were taking a shot at how poorly Dan Dennett and people like him tend to articulate their ideas. While I do respect the degree of academic work they've done I think they set themselves up rather badly and for a lot of very incisive criticism if they leave certain very important areas wide open and up to the reader or listener to try and sort out for themselves.