Mind, body and ME

[Jonathan Edwards]

Similarly with the computing example, from one perspective 0 and 1 are just symbols used as placeholders for true and false

There is a mathematical sense in which truth corresponds to 0. Truth is the absence of contradiction or disparity, or simply difference. It is complicated by set theory issues but in simplest terms truth is the performing of a subtraction of two compared items that yields 0. Yet computers have conventionally been programmed for truth to be allocated 1.

 

[chillier]

But if you stand and look at a painting and then make a nodding movement while keeping your eyes fixed on the painting you find that the sense of I drifts up to the third ventricle and then down to your pharynx past the sphenoid bone.

Sort of but also I'm not really sure I agree! This does kind of happen for me but as soon as I actually pay attention to where the sense seems to be, it immediately jumps to somewhere else, like the base of the skull at the top of the neck. I can chase it around and it'll flicker back and forth rapidly, tensions moving around in my head as I do. My experience has been, though I say this tentatively because I'm not at all certain, that the position of the location of 'I' is on one level a kind of triangulation of subtle muscle tensions of the neck, head, or elsewhere. This also seems to be true for at least some types of negative hedonic feeling (fear, at least some kinds of pain, boredom). I'd be curious if for you if the movement of 'I' in your painting example is the same if you don't move your head but instead move the painting itself up and down just tracking with your eyes.

You're right that the location of the I is wobbly and can be just a bit outside of the body too a foot away or so. Also, especially in unfamiliar social situations, flashes of what I look like from an imagined external view point - how I might look to other people, if it's acceptable etc. Still though, the feeling of 'I' is attached to my body, even if the observation point is disembodied in that moment. If I'm on a tube car full of people, 'I' is not one of the other people on the tube, observing one of the other people on the tube. Admittedly I'm kind of glossing over the fact that the 'being' and the 'observer' sense are not quite the same thing.

The main point is I'm not sure a receiving, perceiving 'I' - in this formulation at least - is inherently part of conscious perception in humans. I think it's likely there could be consciousness without it even in a human with our neurons and DNA as they are in this species. I'm not sure from what you're saying how much of this could be culturally conditioned in some way? I do have one friend at least who tells me their sense of 'I' is in their chest.

 

[Eddie]

The main point is I'm not sure a receiving, perceiving 'I' - in this formulation at least - is inherently part of conscious perception in humans. I think it's likely there could be consciousness without it even in a human with our neurons and DNA as they are in this species. I'm not sure from what you're saying how much of this could be culturally conditioned in some way? I do have one friend at least who tells me their sense of 'I' is in their chest.

I agree that there could be consciousness without a concept of I. But in humans the concept of I is the meaning that a neuron or perhaps a set or neurons firing produce. In states of drug intoxication it is possible to lose that sense of I because that neuron(s) doesn't trigger in the same way. But because evolution 'discovered' that a sense of I is really good for survival we have that neuron(s) to thank for our sense of being ourselves most of the time.

 

[Eddie]

But of course Leibniz is well aware that right for me may be wrong for you, even if true is always true. His best of all possible worlds was a drastic compromise of the greatest good at the highest level, with the minimum of starting rules, taken overall in a context where misery might have to be all over the place. Voltaire may have been right that this was fanciful but where can the perception of good come from if not from the underlying dynamic fabric?

The thing that I disagree with is that good/bad is fundamentally different than any other indivisible event. When we think about good and bad it is something that feels completely different than blue/red or hot/cold. But why not think that this difference isn't a result of something about differences in the events, but is just how things arbitrarily developed?

The signal that triggers the feeling of blue or red is not any different from the signal that produces good or bad. It just so happens that we live in a universe where things that are good at surviving survive, and having a strong reaction to good/bad is good for our survival. It is not the case that blue and red have a strong impact on our survival (on average) so we don't have the same reaction. It is not the most uplifting answer, but I think the only one that makes sense.

 

[Eddie]

There is a mathematical sense in which truth corresponds to 0. Truth is the absence of contradiction or disparity, or simply difference. It is complicated by set theory issues but in simplest terms truth is the performing of a subtraction of two compared items that yields 0. Yet computers have conventionally been programmed for truth to be allocated 1.

I actually really like this idea. It fits well with my understanding of truth as the degree to which some perception meshes with our other interpretations of reality.

If we take a simple case like a banana is yellow, if we take the idea of the banana and remove all the yellow what we are left with is an object with 0 colour and so we say it is true. In a more complication case, like "did the US land on the moon", we take that idea, subtract all the evidence and see how much unexplained residue remains. If that residue is small enough we are prepared to accept it as true and insert it into our interpretation of reality.

The consequences of this view however, is that truth requires an observer in the sense that there must be something to do the subtracting or meshing. And because the subtraction will not always occur in the same way every time there can't be one universal truth. Now you can always insert some God or nature as the fundamental observer who provides the truth, but I am more than happy to say it is subjective.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

The main point is I'm not sure a receiving, perceiving 'I' - in this formulation at least - is inherently part of conscious perception in humans. I think it's likely there could be consciousness without it even in a human with our neurons and DNA as they are in this species.

I agree with 'Eddie' - I think we all agree. Eddie's friend Hume claimed he could never find 'I' in his experience and I think that is a reasonable starting point. A sense of I is there if you introspect and want to sense it but much of the time consciousness probably doesn't involve it explicitly, even it may be implicit in a linguistic attempt to map the meaning of the experience. The sense of I is said to develop stepwise in childhood, with things like 'theory of mind' acquisition in infants, language acquisition and a further stage in adolescence, although people argue about that.

Leibniz's philosophy is build on an essay he wrote at age 40, the Discourse on Metaphysics. The central point is the Spinoza must have been wrong to say that the world is just one thing or 'substance' (in those days a count noun not a 'stuff' noun) with an infinite number of modes or facets. He must have been wrong because there are mutually exclusive points of view. There must be true individuals because there are points of view. From this he creates an account of dynamics that presages quantum field theory and is the most parsimonious of all accounts I know.

The point of view here is associated with my body and each other human body reports a point of view. So we assume every body has a point of view. But Leibniz could see that there would be many points of view within a complex brain. He thought there must be one controlling one but that doesn't look likely now. He understood that at the fundamental level the informing of the point of view by the features in its environment that it perceives would not be optical, but an immediate local relation within a confined domain - in effect a cell body, although for Leibniz this was an 'animalcule'.

I guess my answer is that, although there may not always be a sense of being 'me', that if we want to fit an 'observer' into an overall natural science frame it only makes sense for it to be some receiving event, with some component of the account being the 'patient' (as opposed to agent) that receives (hence Descartes 'Passions' of the Soul rather than actions) and is a 'point of view'.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

But in humans the concept of I is the meaning that a neuron or perhaps a set or neurons firing produce.

Agreed, and that meaning will be 'manifest' when some other neuron or neurons receive it.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

The signal that triggers the feeling of blue or red is not any different from the signal that produces good or bad. It just so happens that we live in a universe where things that are good at surviving survive, and having a strong reaction to good/bad is good for our survival.

Yes, there is a strong case for this as default. If you have a month to spare then read the rambling New Essays in Human Understanding written late in Leibniz's life to counter Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. I finally got to read it last year. Leibniz insists that these things cannot be arbitrary and that there is a reason why red light looks red rather than green. I think he is beginning to bluster, using his a priori arguments in places where earlier he would have been more careful. It seems likely that he is wrong, even if he often turns out to be right after all.

But when it comes to the difference between red and good I think he is likely to be right. Study of language by people like Uriagereka and Hinzen shows that we have an intuitive sense of levels of meanings that we use different syntactic tricks for, so that we immediately see a sentence is odd if it crosses the syntactic rules. These are things like count and mass nouns, action, completion and achievement verbs and so on. There are also systematic rules for the order of adjectives so we have a big green box, not a green big box. Language almost certainly reflects a systematicity to non-verbal meanings manifest in neurons. So you cannot get a meaning out of 'I prefer the red or the green to the good.' 'It is red manners to say that'.

My working hypothesis is that meanings are encoded in geometric ratios relating synaptic signals to a receiving unit. To have systematic rules some rations ought to play different roles from others. Acoustics provides a simple model. Ratios that are simple fractions of a whole give harmonics. Unmatching ratios give beats, and so on. If the event of integration in a neuron is fundamental and quantised it should be based on complex harmonic oscillation rules and if it involves Goldstone mode it could actually be acoustic. And of course Leibniz guessed the interaction would be like an acoustic one, with a vibrating membrane (again in New Essays)!!

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

The consequences of this view however, is that truth requires an observer in the sense that there must be something to do the subtracting or meshing. And because the subtraction will not always occur in the same way every time there can't be one universal truth. Now you can always insert some God or nature as the fundamental observer who provides the truth, but I am more than happy to say it is subjective.

Exactly Leibniz's position. His definition of truth is a property of a statement or proposition in which the predicate is entailed in the subject. This is truth in set theoretic terms - the predicate is a member of the set of properties specified by the subjects total description. But ehe also says truth is an absence of contradiction, so it is the exact 0 when you have subtracted the yellow from yellow.

But of course a proposition is only something that means something to a point of view. And all actual points of view are finite and limited and therefore incomplete in their ability to ascertain. So a point of view can only perceive truth confusedly, whereas L'Être Necessaire, being an infinite understanding rather than a specific point of view, will know an absolute truth.

This helps to explain why we have 'wrong' concepts about the world maybe. It is just that it is clever enough to be sufficient reasons to give rise to sentient beings that sense their reality but rather mind-blowing to be sufficient reasons for sensing what never exists, to my mind. This is really the Leibnizian argument for an ineffable Être Necessaire. The idea that physics can explain meaning without some awesome impenetrable reasons is to me the great naïvety of the twentieth century.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

One thing I have been wondering about recently is what philosophers call the problem of 'intentionality'. This has nothing to do with intent or intentions but comes from Brentano who was interested in the way thoughts were 'about' other things or goings on. So it means 'aboutness'.

Why should the way an event seems from within to something partaking in that event (or even just to the event itself) be 'about' some other events? The problem is so strange that Jerry Fodor famously said that whatever internality is, it is it must be something else.

But in a purely dynamic account of the world (as science ultimately has to be) the only nature of anything we can know is its disposition to change across spacetime. It can only be known as an affordance, or even a prediction, for some other events 'to be'. So maybe it is not so strange that the inside of a neuron feels like a sitting room. The inside of a neuron is a display of sitting-room style affordances to be. It is a prediction scenario. So the 'predictive mind' is maybe no surprise.

It is still might odd, but is the way with metaphysics!

 

[Utsikt]

Does the concept of intentionality stem from a lack of information about neurons and quantum mechanics at that time?

Based on skimming the first two sections here, it seems like intentionality assumes that the mental is composed of more than just one neuron, possibly the entire brain? I did not understand much of you paper and the discussion here, but I’m fairly certain you disagree with that notion.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Does the concept of intentionality stem from a lack of information about neurons and quantum mechanics at that time?

No, I think the concept is a perfectly good one. A thought is about something - about a dog or a movement of a tree in the wind. The problem has been that both philosophers and scientists have studiously avoided trying to find a place for this thought-event in a head. Descartes saw the need for place and suggested one. A few neuroscientists have made suggestions based on nets of nerves but as Descartes pointed out, that doesn't work.