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Author Topic:   bio evolution, light, sound and aroma
AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 74 of 142 (717258)
01-25-2014 2:19 PM
Reply to: Message 70 by nwr
01-25-2014 1:49 PM


Have you not had thoughts, dreams, imaginations and ideas?
Yes. Yet, I have no evidence for them.
Thoughts, dreams, imaginations, ideas are not things. They lack thingness. People have made nouns out of those words, but it does not follow that they exist as actual things.
The problem is we have immediate personal experience of our mental and conscious states "I think there for I am". If science can't objectively see them that is a limit to sciences scope.
People like Daniel Dennet and The Churchlands want to undermine this domains validity so that they can claim it is less than it is but unfortunately I am an authority on my experiences. The Churchland's seem to think that describing anger by using brain and hormonal language is more profound than someone knowing they are angry.
But if you didn't have the initial experience you wouldn't know what the biochemical correlates were referring to. Their is a primacy of conscious experience.
I see no valid reason to sacrifice this mental immediate realm for an ideologically loaded materialist dogma.

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 75 of 142 (717259)
01-25-2014 2:23 PM
Reply to: Message 73 by DrJones*
01-25-2014 2:16 PM


Sure I have, now tell me how you would test for a thought causing evolution. How would you determine if a dream caused an earthquake?
I mentioned in the case of Henry Ford that his thoughts causally led to the creation of car. The same as volitional thoughts lead to bodily limb movements. Just because we can't explain it doesn't mean mental causation doesn't happen.
The reality of humans is brimming over with it such as in the realm of musical composition. Handel's Messiah is a translation of his mental musical landscape being translated into a musical score. The computer was created by a collaboration of individuals thought scapes imagination and reason etc.

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 80 of 142 (717288)
01-26-2014 12:09 AM
Reply to: Message 79 by AZPaul3
01-25-2014 3:39 PM


The genes did not have to "magic up" anything. Imbecilic.
The point I made is that mutating genes have no idea what environment they are in so why should any mutation be favourable to the environmental context? (This was the gist of the original post in this thread)
And in the case polar bears and other white animals that are camouflaged their genes are totally unaware they are living in a white environment. For a gene to create such a specific, valuable, environment-matching adaptation is indeed rather like magic. And was this alleged transition series observed or is it speculated out of necessity because the theory demands it?
Back to the case of pain. Pain is essential for human survival. Humans with congenital pain deficit die young because of severe bodily injury that is undetected. The issue I raised is that pain is a property that relies on conscious and why is this property that is so useful available in reality. Why does reality have this disposition?
Some evolutionary theories for things existence appear only to cite the usefulness of an property or function to explain its existence rather than a causal bio-physical explanation. Yes pain is invaluable but that doesn't explain where it comes from and where consciousness comes from and why reality allows these phenomena to exist.
Correlation is not causation in terms of neuron correlates.

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 85 of 142 (717359)
01-26-2014 2:00 PM
Reply to: Message 83 by Dr Adequate
01-26-2014 11:59 AM


We can see a grizzly-polar bear transition in the fossil record, if that's what you mean. But perhaps you'll say that that was made by magic too.
That relies on the validity of homology claims.
Take the case of Ursus minimus
The skeleton of Ursus minimus was very similar to that of the larger Asian black bear. With the exception of the age of the bones, it is often difficult to distinguish the remains of Ursus minimus from those of modern Asian black bears
The issue I am raising is how and or why a mutation creates something in synch with the environment at all. This is what I have been discussing in the issue of dispositions.
Col2v8 said
Light impacts a cell...
well is this not what I am on about... namely how did a cell evolve and organise itself in the first place to know that light impacting on it could be used as energy... how do you get the stages going ever towards this immense sophistication and manipulation of light.
So lets look at the retina
The kind of mutation to favour a complex arrangement like this would have to be very specific to maintain a complex interaction between numerous finely tuned systems. Not just like having a general change of fur colour
And then you rely on the emergence consciousness to be aware of an image being transduced so that the organism can see anything to respond meaningfully to it.
So what is happening? The genes are mutating and throwing up an array of surprisingly very meaningful structures to be selected. Including ones like aspects of visual systems that allow an internal representation of subtle features of the external world.
What we are talking about is exceedingly specific and exceedingly beneficial mutations by genes that are apparently unconscious of themselves and their environment.
The issue of consciousness has taken me down the road of solipsism and idealism personally. If the world was just mechanical with no mental aspects I could more easily accept a purely mechanical description of reality.
Edited by AndrewPD, : No reason given.

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 86 of 142 (717361)
01-26-2014 2:13 PM
Reply to: Message 84 by ringo
01-26-2014 1:37 PM


Yes, that exorcism is known as "objectivity". Without it, we'd have to reckon with everybody's subjective ideas about "non mechanical entities".
Thomas Nagel described objectivity aptly as "The view from nowhere".
Imagine the inventor of the motorbike has a dream that led to its invention (like some musicians take songs from dreams). That would mean that in describing the origin of these things we would have to take into account the role of the dream.
Now if someone was investigation how an artefact was created should they rule out the possibility that something like the Pyramids was inspired by a mental state like a dream or desire or fantasy?
I see no valid reason to rule out entities that may be invisible to us being behind the behaviours observed in reality. It depends on what you think the whole of reality was based on (its substrate or something like) Some people believe reality is in the mind of a god and some people speculate about a simulation.
Humans succumb to reason giving explanations. So for example I might be walking down the road to catch a bus. The scientist could describe how my muscles were working and other physical forces at work whilst failing to capture my motive for walking down the road, that I have beliefs about bus stops and timetables and an internal desire to catch the bus.
So I don't see how the scientific methodology can arbitrate in these kind of issues. Because science doesn't have a methodology for discerning design and intelligence, meaning and mental content in nature.

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 89 of 142 (717367)
01-26-2014 6:00 PM
Reply to: Message 88 by RAZD
01-26-2014 5:32 PM


So that the organism can avoid or retreat from painful situations, thus giving it an advantage for survival.
It is still a unique private subjective sensation held subjectively.
The comparison with for instance vision is that there may be an object out their causing the visual perception or which the perception represents. Although how that object or representation reaches consciousness is unknown till we explain how consciousness works.
However with pain it is not representing the environment directly. We can see tissue damage on our skin and that represents bodily injury the pain is just an unpleasant sensation or qualia. Rather like colour or sound.
Where would pain, sound and colour be if there weren't conscious entities to experience them? They produce unique sensations in the mind.
If you have heard of the knowledge argument or "Mary's room" then there is a real life equivalent. Knut Nordby was an expert in the science of vision and colour but was achromatic and he said he didn't know what it was like to see colour and couldn't imagine it. Without the direct experience the scientific explanation didn't explicate the missing qualia.
VISION IN A COMPLETE ACHROMAT

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 90 of 142 (717369)
01-26-2014 6:13 PM


I am not sure if this article is free but it challenges the claims about the role of the brain in consciousness.
"Does the Brain Cause Conscious Experience?"
Majorek, Marek
Does the Brain Cause Conscious Experience?: Ingenta Connect
Among its example is that of a girl with a hemispherectomy who functioned normally after the surgery and later became bilingual with a whole hemisphere of the brain redundant.
And this man was fully conscious his only symptom was a limp and he previously had a low iq.
Man with tiny brain shocks doctors | New Scientist
Edited by AndrewPD, : No reason given.
Edited by AndrewPD, : No reason given.
Edited by AndrewPD, : Image problems

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 93 of 142 (717373)
01-26-2014 8:53 PM
Reply to: Message 91 by RAZD
01-26-2014 6:14 PM


Re: noosphere?
And when we look at all the different makers of cars and see that they have different mental states but still make cars then we know that mental states are irrelevant.
Designing cars is an emergent property of developing means of transportation systems. It does not matter who makes the first step.
People have mental states about cars. They have similar mental states with a representation of a car which they manipulate in their mind in a combination of prior input and new ideas.
For instance I am thinking of the colour pink. I am now thinking of a car. I imagine combining the two in my mind and voila! I have an imaginary pink car. If I paint my car pink that is a result of this thought process.
You can't bypass the mental realm when it comes to human artefacts. But you can't see the mental input by methodically dissecting the car.
I would be surprised if you thought artefacts like computers and other machines involving complex calculations weren't devised in minds.
On the case of bad or weird designs. Humans create those also. Humans create many malfunctioning, silly and clumsy devices. I don't know why design need infer perfection.
It is is easy to say that you don't need to posit intervention to explain something but not truly falsifiable. Similar to the way someone can claim they know who Jack The Ripper is without being truly able to prove it.
Like I say earlier it depends on what the substrate of reality is. If a creator merely created the first moment of the universe that would make the whole process dependent on them.
Lawrence krauss seems to have implicitly recognized this problem by trying to find away from the universe to come from nothing. He wants to exorcise the need for intervention at any stage in the universe with his pseudo-nothingness which strangely contains the laws of physics somehow.

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 94 of 142 (717376)
01-26-2014 9:15 PM
Reply to: Message 92 by RAZD
01-26-2014 8:47 PM


Vision is the sensation of some of the spectrum of photon frequencies, and there are organisms that see into the infrared or ultraviolet ends of the spectrum beyond the sensation of normal\average people. Color sensation is just a refinement of that limited ability to sense photons into subgroups. Being achromatic or color blind just means the person does not have that sorting of vision frequencies.
I think you are seriously mischaracterizing conscious sensation. There is no reason why any activity in the brain should lead to a conscious experience.
What is happening in the brain is not the same as what we experience. We don't experience neurons firing. The neuron firings are correlated with reported private experience.
If you look in someones brain when they are having a thought of a zebra you wont see anything like a zebra in their brain. I have raised criticisms of retinotopic and tonotopic mapping earlier. They make false assumptions about the content of conscious states.
In the Knut Nordby example it shows that he doesn't know what it is like to experience colour and no amount of theories about it will replace the direct qualitative lived experience. That shows the primacy of experience. There is something Knut couldn't know about reality because he was unconscious of it.
There are a huge range of issues in consciousness to discuss it is noway near as straight forward as you seem to be implying.
If I have a pain in my body, say around the stomach region, it is not giving me much information. I couldn't diagnose myself. Nowadays we all learn a little biology in school. I could work out that it maybe this internal organ hurting but this would be due to the application of and combination of other knowledge. The pain doesn't describe the hurting area and these pains can include misdirected and phantom pains and pain with no visible source.
Touch is by no means straightforward. It involves higher cognitive and learning processes to identify objects. So for example they have found that blind people who regain their sight can't recognise objects easily that they were familiar with by touch. none of this anyhow makes the experience any less in the conscious sphere. And we haven't got round to language, mental representation and semantics yet.
How does a neural pattern or something like manage to retain a mental image of your dead Gran or the complex conceptual meaning of a word? Meaning is also in our minds. Orthographic Letters and sounds don't carry intrinsic physical meaning etc.

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 96 of 142 (717388)
01-26-2014 11:35 PM
Reply to: Message 95 by nwr
01-26-2014 9:48 PM


I don't see that as any kind of problem. The idea that it is a problem seems confused.
There is a difference between publicly identifiable entities and private entities.
We were discussing what things you could discover or interpret as evidence. A public object implies we can all see the same entity in a similar way (although who knows!) a private entity is one that we directly personally experience and others have no direct access to.
The fact that private mental states exist means there are private entities in reality. The quasi objectivity of science is not going to be able to rule these entities in or out.
I have mentioned the example of Knut Nordby above. He doesn't know what it is like to see colour because it is not publicly available objective thing. He needs to have a personal conscious experience of it. (There is a large literature on this issue "The Knowledge Argument")
I think this is actually an example of the primacy of consciousness. We have experiences first then try to methodologically conceptualise and explain these experiences.
But conceptual objects like a tree or cell succumb to this kind of analysis far more easily than things that do not represent objects like pain and colour and sound and thoughts.
In relation to this thread I have been asking why is there phenomena in reality only available to conscious states like dreams and pain? For an achromatic like Nordby it would be like watching a black and white film oblivious that it was actually in glorious technicolour.
This applies to people analysis of intelligence or design in nature. They are looking for it at the wrong level and dismissing it because it is not at that level. Like someone without ears claiming music doesn't exist they are claiming that their level of analysis is exhaustive.
I think it is a mistake to think that mechanical explanations somehow transcend the original conscious experience we live in.

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 108 of 142 (717519)
01-28-2014 1:25 PM
Reply to: Message 107 by Dr Adequate
01-28-2014 9:05 AM


For example, consider how electrical stimulation of the brain can cause the experience of memories, sounds, smells, etc. Consider how the loss of parts of the brain cause corresponding losses of conscious experience.
I posted brain images earlier showing people with normal mental states but large loss of brain region.
How could these missing regions be causally necessary for conscious states if these states and functions exist in their absence? There are also phantom pains in the absence of limbs and hallucination and dreams with the absence of external perceptual input.
Also as is emphasized in the Majorek article brain stimulation is not sufficient too produce "normal" mental experiences that are isomorphic with everyday experiences rather they manifest tingling, simple shapes and colours but not of faces or elaborate percepts.
Also brain lesion cases are often exaggerated and the areas to large to specify a clearly delineated functional role for an area.
This happened in the case of Phineas Gage the most famous case.
Despite this celebrity[5] the body of established fact about Gage and what he was like (before or after his injury) is small, which has allowed "the fitting of almost any theory [desired] to the small number of facts we have"[1]:290Gage having been cited, over the years, in support of various theories of the brain entirely inconsistent with one another. A survey of published accounts, including scientific ones, has found that they almost always severely distort Gage's behavioral changes, exaggerating the known facts when not directly contradicting them.
Phineas Gage - Wikipedia
Edited by AndrewPD, : No reason given.
Edited by AndrewPD, : No reason given.
Edited by AndrewPD, : Spelling

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 109 of 142 (717522)
01-28-2014 1:35 PM
Reply to: Message 107 by Dr Adequate
01-28-2014 9:05 AM


Now, is this to be attributed to a physical deficit (in his retina, for example) or a defect in his immaterial soul? Which way would you bet?
The case is used to illustrate how a lack of consciousness leads to a lack of knowledge. It is saying that there are things that can only be known about through consciousness. That means there is direct conscious knowledge pre theoretically. Correlation is not causation.
Describing something as physical or material does not denote an identified distinct essence. Matter has loose definitions it does not indicate a concrete substance especially in quantum theorising and mental states cannot be described in terms of these material terms. You can't measure the qualities of thoughts and give it physical or quasi physical features.
I don't see something as being less magically if you can couch the explanation in physics terminology, because why does any kind of "physical" entity or law exist anyway?

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 117 of 142 (717794)
02-01-2014 12:18 PM
Reply to: Message 116 by RAZD
01-29-2014 2:07 PM


but with apparent design in nature we need a mechanism to realize the design, and the only one in biology is evolution .
I don't see how evolution or natural selection are actually mechanisms. I thought a mechanism was a physical structure like a mill.
I have been discussing dispositions at length here and pointing out that things can only emerge if reality has the disposition to allow them. The posited mechanism in transforming organism is mutating DNA I thought.
New features can only be created by mutations if reality has the disposition to allow them.
The discussion about intelligence and design is in relation to the invisibility of cognitions and experience in the brain.
We don't say consciousness doesn't exist because we don't see it in the brain. It is in a private realm of subjectivity.
It is easy to say you have a sufficient explanation for something after the fact more without having to genuinely replicate the totality of events. It is like someone feeling they have a compelling lone suspect for the Jack The ripper murders.

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 118 of 142 (717796)
02-01-2014 12:34 PM
Reply to: Message 111 by Dr Adequate
01-28-2014 5:47 PM


Apparently the remaining regions are sufficient for conscious states. Show me someone who's conscious without a brain, then we'll talk.
I can show you someone who is unconscious with a brain.
Neural plasticity is problem for a causal correlations and functional correlations in neuroscience. In the cases I have illustrated it rules out the necessity of any of the missing or damaged areas in consciousness or cognition.
If someones brain was missing entirely they would not be able to control their body their body to indicate they were still conscious. On the dualistic version of consciousness consciousness does need to interact with the brain.
Like when a radio is damaged you may not receive the radio programme any longer but the programme itself isn't damaged. there are different ways of describing the mind brain relationship.
A wide range of complex issues arise in the study of consciousness such as a the binding problem where we have coherent unified, multifaceted experiences but activity spread across the brain. There is not a simple step form one brain region to a conscious experience. You seem to be aiming for the crudest form of correlation.
The biggest puzzle for me is how we become conscious of being ourselves as opposed to all the other billions of consciousnesses that exist and have existed. That is the problem of arriving at a particular conscious location. Consciousness has a location where one has a unique portal to reality from a self perspective.
It is possible that many light years away someone else is conscious on the planet zorg and asking the same question.
If you don't understand this issue of unique conscious perspectival location you won't be suitably puzzled and that ain't my problem. If you take a trivial attitude towards consciousness it will seem less problematic to you. It will be hard to reason with you then.
These twins Abigail and Brittany are an example of a united body but two separate conscious locations to occupy.

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 Message 111 by Dr Adequate, posted 01-28-2014 5:47 PM Dr Adequate has replied

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AndrewPD
Member (Idle past 2414 days)
Posts: 133
From: Bristol
Joined: 07-23-2009


Message 121 of 142 (717800)
02-01-2014 3:06 PM
Reply to: Message 119 by NoNukes
02-01-2014 1:27 PM


We can also note the two heads on that united body. Surely you saw that too? For which side are you arguing here?
I am talking about the arbitrary nature of who you become conscious of being. A different issue.
Consciousness places us in a unique personal location even when like these twins one is very closely linked spatially temporally.
I am talking from my location the mind. You don't know what kind of body I have. It is a complex issue to discuss.
To create consciousness in a robot would be to create a location from which the robot has experiences of existing and perceiving and a self perspective subject to percepts. To occupy that location is an integral part of consciousness the location where one is subject to experiences from a self perspective. It leads to the homuncular problem in theories of perception and the binding problem of unified perception.
If you don't understand this situation you will chronically underestimate the problems involved.
Red exists as a sensation within someone's mental realm. Unless people here have studied issues in theorising about mind at a graduate level I don't think they are equipped to discuss it really. They are not ideas that arise easily in common sense unless you are a philosophical type of person and even then you wouldn't have encountered the vocabulary.
Conscious is not a trivial issue to be pinned loosely atop prevailing paradigms. That is clearly some peoples desire. It challenges the materialist paradigm.

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