An Embodied Predictive Processing Theory of Pain Experience, 2022, Kiverstein et al.

ScoutB said:
The thing you're calling 'action', when you say a photon is an action, maps to the wave function of a particle or system.
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Sorry, but this is wrong. I know it is what most students are still taught but Feynman tells us that it is wrong and I managed to establish that it was wrong in conversation with my late family friend Michael Ellis Fisher, who was in later years regarded as one of the top 6 world physicists. Michael pointed out why it was wrong.

The wave function is a bus timetable for the probability of certain types (technically ensembles) of action happening in an arbitrarily defined field domain. It is also constructed as an epistemic device so that it does not exist in the absence of initial measurements, so only applies to highly controlled systems in labs where you are allowed to assume your measurements predict a field domain precisely over a time period.

There are no systems in the universe, except in two special senses. 'Quantum system' is sometimes used to describe an individual quon or quantum unitary happening. (It would be easy to say quantum of action but in fact Planck meant something different by this - a parameter, not a quon.) That causes no problem other than confusion with the usual meaning of system. The other sense is Bohr's original meaning of quantum system which is an epistemic experimental set up, as described above, and not an entity in its own right.

Crucially, quantum bus timetables can never apply to systems that are systems by dint of being actions connected in determinate series. The timetable has to be written afresh every time an action is known to have occurred. So brains, which are systems by dint of serial cell interactions, can never have quantum level descriptions or wave equations.
 
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ScoutB said:
Just that the reality seems to be something that doesn't fit with what I'm expecting.
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This was Chalmers's lament, that experience does not seem to be what you expect. But in the seventeenth century everyone involved in science was aware of this being a false problem. Leibniz makes it an explicit feature of his theory but Galileo, Montaigne, Dcartes, Locke and all the others could see why the 'expectation' is misguided. As Galen Strawson has implied, in an important sense Chalmers put philosophy of mind back 500 years.

The simple point is that however signals are received by 'me's' in brains it will be via a non-optical, non-acoustic, non-taste route. So it is absurd to expect it to behave as if it were any of these. Leibniz makes the clever suggestion that the experience is felt by an action occupying a canvas or membrane, not illuminated by light as such but perturbed by something similar and sensed from within the canvas, not looked at by something else.
 
ScoutB said:
If we take a neuron and remove parts of it does it stop being conscious at some particular point?
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As Aristotle said, you cannot ask that because if you change the neuron it is no longer that neuron. If you could change the field of potentials but keep the same domain it might be fair to still say the experiences belonged to the neuron, although this would be getting into semantic quicksand.

I suspect the useful answer would be that if you take away a bit that alters the electroacoustic properties of the condensed matter unit then it is quite likely that the sort of experience we talk about would collapse totally. Like taking away the bridge from a violin. According to Jaan Aru that may be what anaesthetics do - they put a dead finger on the strings half way down.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
So any action within the cell would be informed almost exclusively by this body, although the body could itself be informed by, and represent, the wider universe
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It make me think of that strange phenomenon: the perfect outline of an eye on an animal’s body. People say it’s down to natural selection, nevertheless what would essentially be a matter of chance results in a true representation – without any consciousness (or what we call like that).
 
Axel said:
It make me think of that strange phenomenon: the perfect outline of an eye on an animal’s body. People say it’s down to natural selection, nevertheless what would essentially be a matter of chance results in a true representation – without any consciousness (or what we call like that).
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Mimicry in animal forms is certainly part of the story. I think we can accept that it arises from natural selection of random mutations but in living systems that have evolved and ability to create almost any shape, with the greatest selection pressure being how those shapes appear to other life forms.

To clarify what the 4E people think the 'embodiment' idea achieves, I think its stems from a sense of naive realism, which we know empirically to be wrong but suits the intuitive approach of modern academic philosophy. We feel pain 'in my foot' so the idea is that we need to explain how a conscious sensation can be felt out there in a foot. The embodied idea is that it is felt there because the bodily interaction of the foot with the sharp stone actually constitutes the mechanism of consciousness. We know this is wrong. We know that 'pain in the foot' is something manufactured in brain cells for the benefit of other brain cells. The sense that it is five feet away down near the ground is just part of the way these feelings are manufactured - in a story that has a 'space' that is not anything to do with the space of physics. (Kant was probably the first to point that out specifically, although it had been argued over for two hundred years by then.)

What makes a domain like a cell have 'consciousness' of our sort is not just being richly informed by potentials. That richness in the happening is a sophisticated representation of more distant happenings, but not in a map-like isomorphic way and not presenting itself in an optical way.
 
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