Can consciousness be non-local?

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Yeah, even if some hard evidence for a phenomenon is there it can always be discounted, explained away, or simply ignored if accounting for it gives scientists too much of a headache {No offence, Radian!}

Classical Indian physiology -now sadly 'made over' by the 'New Age' hippy-dippy contingent in a revolting colour scheme- posits a subtle but nonetheless physical body (made up of channels, winds, 'essences' and 'chakras', and recognisably naturalistic as a hypothesis), closely tied to the ordinary body as well as to subjective experience (and best detected through that means) which is reconstituted at death and which then leaves the body unnoticed by others. In Hinduism, it 'trans-migrates' some element of one's personality (along with the former person's consciousness) to its next incarnation, but in some developments of Buddhism, the little that's left of mind is 'put through the blender' somewhat, since it's no longer tied to the fixed layout of an ordinary body - When the stream of consciousness emerges from the other end of the death process in a new 'ordinary body', it experiences 'being' a 'self' that may appear to be far less than, far more than, or even a polar opposite to, the 'being' it 'was' before the death of its 'predecessor'.

So, you can have genuine NDEs without souls in a naturalistic universe

Last edited by undefineable on 05 Aug 2012, 7:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You may have misunderstood the concept of self-description, or you may rightly be pointing out that all personality traits are expressed via hard-to-change patterns of brain structure and function. Saying that, I'll still quibble that a pattern of events is not localised in the way that a pattern of atoms, for instance, clearly is.

I'd assume local in reference to the mind being material. The suggestion would be that you're nothing more than your nervous system and brain but people who still believe this are occasionally becoming open-minded about the mind having abilities to impact matter in non-physical ways even though they'd still swear by the notion that our I experience is the brain and nothing else. Its a viewpoint I'd love to get more familiar with because I'd like to see, from an educated perspective, where I agree and disagree with that viewpoint - its too new to me to really have a solid opinion on.

For me this subject is more than a sport. Mental gymnastics may be good training but the paydirt lies elsewhere. I'm aware that limitations of language lead to a number of unavoidable contradictions - once again, in order to have a meaningful discussion we're stuck with using archaic language. This reminds me of the Intelligent Design debacle where one of the things that stands between millions of ordinary people and an accessible explanation for the undirected evolution of life through Natural Selection is a distraction due to terms. I'm concerned that I may be seeing this muddle once more.

I therefore feel the need to point out that it's not just humans or other animals that can keep track of symbolic representations and hence have things "that appear to be" and thus also become subject to deception. A heat-seeking missile springs to mind as an example of this.

None taken whatsoever I think there's something that's often overlooked by victims of skepticism though - professional science is a competitive sport (seeing as how you seem to like that metaphor). It's extremely hard to go places where nobody has been before, especially when you don't want your peers to see you rooting around in the back of a wardrobe, but the rewards for going out on a limb can be virtually limitless.

Now, I had not heard of the AWARE study before although I was aware that a number of clinicians had conducted their own independent tests for certain kinds of reported NDEs by placing written messages on top of high shelves and so-on. The last time I heard mention of this, no positive results had been returned. Last night I briefly checked the Horizon Research website but it looked it was mainly a collection of patient anecdotes rather the results of any controlled experiments. Maybe a link or two to point me in the right direction?

I can see that I've projected a certain kind of attitude that might be frustrating to people who are compelled by reports of apparent para-normality. But I really can't see why a skeptic should be a threat to those who're one jump ahead on something big. What's standing in the way of recognition for something that's readily demonstrable? Take for example the random 9/11 thing (I hadn't come across that one either): if a statistically significant deviation from random distribution can be obtained either side of human significant event like 9/11 then we've got ourselves a dirt-cheap instrument for investigating a potential new phenomenon. Heck, a nobel prize would be in the bag for the first team to get on top of such a finding. A design for a thermal RNG would be something that could be posted up on Instructables website and someone could easily start up a forum to collate results. Compared to the LHC, this one's well within DIY territory.

Just imagining, for a moment that you'd thought of his and set it in motion yourself - would you seriously not want a skeptic on hand to keep you on the straight and narrow, just so you don't make an idiot of yourself? I sure would.

This "Citizens experiment" stuff is going on all the time in many ways. I've been saying for ages that the advent of widespread ownership of mobile phones with video recording capabilities should open the floodgates for hard evidence of sightings of para-normal phenomena. I hope you get the point here, from time to time we get game-changing developments that blow the cover on long-established hideouts for nonsense.



OK, so let's say that there are more people alive on the planet today than the total number of people who have died - not just from the previous generation - but over the entire history of the human race (OTOH if not true today, and I think it's pretty close, it will have been true numerous times before). There wouldn;t seem to be enough "subtle but nonetheless physical bod[ies] (made up of channels, winds, 'essences' and 'chakras'," to go around

Sadly, just proclaiming Chakras to be subtle but vital points in the physical body that can't be found through autopsy wouldn't make them "recognisably naturalistic". That's how Wiki defines this kind of stuff at any rate - do you have a better definition, undefinable?

Well yes, repeated patterns of neural activity crank out expressions of abilities - and consciousness too in some way. Likewise what you call our 'I' experience will be mediated via similar patterns, but I'd question whether anyone genuinely believes that a part or function of the brain *is* self-awareness, however they oversimplify their words for dramatic effect. Materialist monism, though, has been around for a couple of millenia; however as a fully-worked-out metaphysical and religious stance, it depends on seeing mind as the insignificant and insubstantial by-product of the brain, rather than as simply non-existent.

Not sure I follow the nonexistance of the mind bit fully. I tend strong determinist so I can understand the possibility that human lives are simply filters rather than being deliberate things that we manipulate or control. Did you mean something along those lines in terms of mind being an illusion?

The reverse, surely?! - Modern vid-cams just mean that no-one can ever tell whether an apparent para-normal sighting has simply been edited together. So neither side's nonsense will ever be in danger of 'having its cover blown' in this case.



I was using the word in its literal sense of 'natural-istic', rather than in the context of referring to ordinary matter. The opposite of this concept would be 'miraculous'. Words again _ _ {P.s. this doesn't make me 'sad', as I find both subtle bodies and re-incarnation rather scary, whereas materialism looks too blandly comforting to be true }

Anyhow, I won't assert the existence of 'astral bodies' or re-incarnation of any kind - I have no proof, or any concrete uses for them as explanations. The theory, though -which goes back to ancient Indian cosmology I think- is that some element of mind is either transferred (directly) or transported at extreme speed after death, as it's pulled to its new body. Given the absence of 'heavy' phenomena such as matter (or even light), quantum-type 'concertina' effects such as wormholing might easily open up spacetime, allowing rebirth to take place on other planets and on parallel (and even alien) dimensions and universes. {Animals being re-born human and vice-versa is ofcourse normal in this picture} All this is pure speculation, which will irritate some and interest others, but any theory of reincarnation that goes only as far as asserting a conventionally physical 'subtle body' after death falls at the first hurdle formed by your old chestnut, since the number of sentient beings on this planet was nil for eons and has since both risen and fallen many times. Meanwhile, asserting that mind can travel faster than light-speed, or that its non-locality means that it doesn't have to travel at all in order to reach the other side of the universe, necessitates some kind of dualism that could be tricky to work out

Last edited by undefineable on 06 Aug 2012, 7:50 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Wag the Dog.

ruveyn

I was making the point that absolute materialist monism is a difficult position to hold, as you effectively have to deny that what's in front of your nose actually is - in any way at all. Concepts of mind such as epiphenomenon and by-product are relatively problem-free intellectually.

Common assumptions, such as directing the world through our minds (rather than our natural desires directing us through the world) can easily be shown to be illusory - To produce the results of Libet's famous 'Half-second delay' experiment, for example, participants clearly (to my mind) delegated the decision (of when to act) to their unconscious brains; more-major 'decisions' are even more liable to be things that 'come to' people when they 'feel right'.

This wasn't a debate on free will, though - I made the point that there must be something -no matter how flimsy- to which mind is said to be an illusion, and would clarify that I mean 'illusion' the phenomenon rather than 'illusion' the word.

In other words, you may not be saying what I think you're saying, and vice-versa - I work with concepts, and yes, I enjoy the sport (despite the lack of your 'paydirt' discoveries and wages), but only when concepts appear to be involved as well as words.



How so? I've not asserted any self-evident untruths or unnecessary hypotheses, and will give your apparent near-misses the benefit of the doubt.



We're onto mysticism now -Hofstadter's "information" take on that tradition (which would have seemed very trendy around the turn of this century ofcourse) in particular-

I take it you're using figures of speech rather than asserting animism, but as Ruveyn hinted earlier, the evidence suggests that brain function is the phenomenon that allows symbolic representations and (thereby) 'faithful' or 'deceptive' appearances to form. Absent a brain, any object -to my limited knowledge- is guided at a molecule-to-molecule level by binary forces such as the effects of heat, and atleast one materialist thinker (in discussing evolution, I think) recently claimed that we don't need to invoke a holistic level of organisation - The parts sort it out just fine between themselves.

If you are writing literally, then maybe you'd find 'Theory of Mind' interesting - I can't speak for you, but my autism seems to stem more from the fact that I see/hear/sense everything all at once (rather than 'piecing together a picture' of the world with highlights already at the forefront as I recently discovered NTs will tell you they do), not from a sense that there are no minds. If I somehow twisted my mind round into a sort of 'spiritual' autism (without 'Theory of Mind'), then maybe I'd claim to see -as you may (or may not) claim to see- that the typical contents of consciousness appear everywhere events and interactions are taking place without any consciousness 'holding' them. I suspect that it's those who hold this belief who are missing something out, rather than the rest of us, and can't see how it makes any more sense than believing in 'red tasks' or any other random combination of words/concepts. {If a fundamental 'redness' is proven to accompany certain actions, then ofcourse I take that back }

So the guy's from the hippy-dippy generation you seem to have something against... so that necessarily makes his take trendy but vacuous? Not so easily dismissed I should hope! My own take should be pretty clear, the subject of this discussion is a product of evolution by natural selection. I think you agree with that. What we're asking is what "tricks" come with a universe like ours that NS could have found and exploited and therefore what scope might there be for a non-local instantiations of consciousness, despite the apparent absurdity of such a thing from a standard physics perspective.

Hofstadter's only crime in your eyes may be that the mere manipulation of information must remain sterile, and just be the wrong kind of thing to give rise to sensations like redness (qualia). Unfortunately we're just stuck on the merry-go-round again if we try to deny qualia. I therefore see no way out apart from accepting that NS found out early on that nervous systems benefited their hosts when providing them with richer and richer internal representations of the world, and developed them from the ground up along with the survival-appropriate decision making and motor controls.

Now, if we use our clunky technology to replicate the kind of thing that we can see took place early on in nature (e.g. light-sensors connected to balancing amplifiers driving motors) then building on this in numerous ways we (or our autonomous genetic programs) can get to the generation of symbolic representations and so on, all the way up to.... well, would it be a Philosophical Zombie or can there be no such thing - thus the end product necessarily turns out to possibly any one of us having this pleasant discussion here?

Because, looking down the wrong end of the telescope, if we start out with something like the stipulations of the Turing test, it sets a HUGE goal for any system, yet pumps our intuitions that no mere information processing system could ever be capable of anything like our own first-hand experiences and sensations.

Not at all; his mysticism doesn't have that character and I can't remember why I may have mentioned generations {I noted his previous publication was from 1979, but then he could be in his 90s by now for all I know}



I thought I was clear as to what my criticism of Hofstadter was, but I'll explain below how I suspect I misunderstood both of you. {Understanding on an autistic forum will always be gold dust _ _ }



I don't always care to express my feelings in writing, but I find conjectures such as Hofstadter's fascinating, albeit mind-bending - particularly when I shed cruder misunderstandings (e.g. that either of you are somehow asserting the the functions of subjectivity without subjectivity itself) and finally get my head around the ideas - Maybe a diffuse (i.e. 'non-local' in one sense) and very basic sense of being associated with and across both animate and inanimate objects is what you have in mind-?



I thought it was you who was doing that:



Assuming you're denying the substance of qualia but not their (deceptive?) appearance (c.f. sunyata), the question becomes one of how -and why- evolution (natural selection along with other similar forms I've heard are being investigated) 'encodes' information to produce qualia such as redness - besides giving rise to a 'witnessing' of the information. I'd be quite satisfied if both questions were never answered, but quite interested (instead) in any serious attempts. From what you say later, perhaps varying degrees of not being 'Zombie' is a basic property of matter - Property dualism



As an 'aside', despite everything we hear about free will, decision-making may be key here, as complex organisms can often give more than one response to a stimulus - Which of these is the most advantageous will depend on other conditions that also affect the organism. Simpler life forms will be more likely to respond in simpler, binary ways to which there are can be no alternatives within any one instant.

Oh, well, he went through his late teens and early twenties during the 60's so I may have read too much into your banter. I kind of admire the guy for wearing his heart on his sleeve by drawing on his personal life in some of his publications, so I may have had my protective input gain turned up a bit too far.



No, the proposal is that subjectivity is what you get when any system goes through the motions of holding a sufficient set of symbolic relations. Because this appears to replace all the touchy-feeliness with a huge stack of unfeeling "paperwork", the easy cheap shot is to accuse thinkers like Dennett and Hofstadter of being "deniers" - like climate or holocaust deniers, only denying something closer to home. I initially railed against this myself but David Chalmers and John Searle have been playing doubles with Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hoftsadter over this for a long time and after following the match blow-by blow, as I said, I get just the briefest glimpse of how the "paper" works. Perhaps it works something like this:

I'm unconvinced that symbolic representation is a potential property of systems, strictly defined - Your unfeeling 'paperwork' contains no symbols in the quasi-psychoanalytic sense of the qualia of redness, still less in the sense of any social references riding on top of that. {It's coincidental but fitting that red -because of its maximal brightness- means the same kind of thing to most kinds of creatures that see it.} Although I can see that inanimate objects are more likely to be pure 'systemisers' if they do have mental qualities (unlike us auties who are just more restricted in the co-ordination and use of our elements of would-be empathising), none of that seems likely to amount to much, on its own, beside Hofstadter's 'big-souled' humans.

For humans, meanwhile, 'touchy-feeliness' and 'paperwork' go hand-in-hand like left brain and right brain - Neither replaces the other, either in theory or (barring psychotic outcomes) in practice. It's just that a lot of unconscious and sub/semi-conscious 'paperwork' has been shown to be necessary in order to reach the 'touchy-feeliness' of, for example, a single intuitive hunch about a situation. The question, then, is how does raw data translate into an subjectively-experienced 'something' that's simply more than just information?. Raw data that is massively summarised and simplified -as neuroscience shows it to be before we become aware of it- should be less than the sum of its parts - Not only do our lives end up feeling to us as if they're more than the sum of those parts, but the 'higher' layers of cognition and mental activity seem to have floated off into a world of their own, and no longer always feel (to us) like one would expect such things to feel - i.e. like the apex of a house of cards that collapses just as easily. {The individual details/cards of life tend somehow to get lost in a bigger picture.}

So I don't see that I'm 'railing' against 'the deniers' as many sensitive sorts will be wont to do (if they see fit to take such ideas seriously to begin with without mentally cordoning them off as "clever people's stuff") - I just sense that such ideas are missing concrete input from the features of our subjective experience that are most salient to us (such being relatively uninvestigated and unexplored in our culture to date), and thereby lack the proverbial support that would make them intellectually convincing.

Anyhow, the popular misunderstanding of Dennett's work, as Susan Blackmore pointed out:
The Grand Illusion of Consciousness
is not just that he downplays feelings, but that that he denies the existence of consciousness. Perhaps partly because (as he says) he prefers the company of scientists to that of any other philosophers or what have you, and perhaps partly because he aims to entertain and sell books, he hasn't always honed the implications and imagery of the words he uses to best aid understanding of his ideas. So, a denial of 'The cartesian theatre' can easily be read as a denial that there is any witnessing or even interpreting going on inside us, along with a denial that there is any [potential] conscious awareness that might be reached thereby. The ideas behind that image may well be very precise, but their expression isn't always that. Ofcourse, he isn't helped by the abstruse nature of his subject matter, or by the fact that claims along the lines of "consciousness isn't what you think it is" are likely to lead -via fear of the unknown and the fact that those making such claims go on to display their subcultural bias against 'touchy-feely' and in favour of 'paperwork' etc.- to the conclusion "well you might as well say it's nothing at all". As for supposed dualists like Searle who feel forced by circumstances to play tennis despite only having the use of 'subjectivity flowers' as rackets, the awkward fit of their ideas with their career choice (and all that goes with it) does them no favours.

I will leave (this thread - unless anyone has anything to add) with a quote of John Searle's I just found on his Wikipedia entry (my knowledge of philosophy being patchy):



This means, to me, that there's no need to invoke any 'deeper' supporting reality such as soul, but no need to deny the supporting role of unconscious realities.

P.s. when we want to write or draw 'funny', paper will always work better

Since I believe that consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, it is only a result of complex material process and hence cannot be non local. Maybe, some sort of expansion (due to drugs) could make us believe otherwise.