From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Mon Nov 21 2005 - 18:49:46 GMT
Patrick,
Patrick said:
Interesting position regarding consciousness. You say:
"QM shows that what underlies our perception of spatio-temporal things and
events cannot be understood as spatio-temporal things and events.".
When you further on say that the question of consciousness is or is not
related to
space and time is a question of metaphysics, I cannot agree. You seem to be
advocating a particular radicular viewpoint of nonlocality. There are at
least
three viewpoints of nonlocality.
1) All events (consciousness-events as well you might say) happen in space
and
time, but with a certain amount of freedom/uncertainty.
2) All events do not occur in space or time at all. They come from
'somewhere'
else, a 'no-place' which can access time and space at essentially any point.
3) All events do not occur in space or time at all. Space and time are
properties
of more fundamental physical ingredients.
You seem to be holding the third or maybe the second position, which maybe
are just
two reformulations of the same viewpoint. To argue for any of these two you
can
consider two particles flying from a common source; if they are entangled
they can
remain so even if they are micrometers or even lightyears away. Distance
doesn't
really seem to matter at all, and might therefore be secondary to the way
the world
works.
Scott:
I don't think I'm holding any of these positions, or at least I wouldn't
phrase them this way. I hold that the spatio-temporality of events is
produced in the act of perception. What it is produced out of, I can't say,
though I think that QM provides a helpful model in addressing this question.
For someone who has thought this through in more detail, I recommend Samuel
Avery's book "The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness: A Physical Basis
for Immaterialism". If I'm correct, then it will turn out that physics has
all along unknowingly been a theory of perception, not of that which exists
independently of perception. That is, I think the mathematics of relativity
and QM are about the translation from the non-spatio-temporal to the
spatio-temporal that occurs in perception. But clearly a lot of work needs
to be done to put meat on this hypothesis. Avery has done some of this work.
Patrick said:
Though it seems that these three viewpoints are just a matter of
metaphysics, the
first one seems to me the most pragmatical. Consciousness has a certain
freedom
beyond space and time but nevertheless is distributed primarily in
mesoscopic
regions of matter, our brains, and hardly outside it. So if you stimulate
the
sensory cortex with an electrode, a sensation is felt on the hand. With
transcranial stimulation of the right side of the brain, the raising of the
left
hand is preferred by subjects when asked to choose voluntary either one of
the
hands (or the other way around, I forgot). Future neuroscience will be able
to
pinpoint conscious events in the brain with evermore precision. Do you
really think
the possibility of having microchips of some kind in the brain interacting
directly
with conscious processes is part of metaphysics? There are already blind
people
seeing phonemes or lightspecks in their consciousness because of chips in
their
visual cortex.
Scott:
None of this, present or anything in the future that I can imagine,
distinguishes between two metaphysical hypotheses: (1) that the neural
system produces consciousness, or (2) that the neural system regulates
consciousness. I hold with (2), because (1) cannot answer the objections
that I laid out to Case:
1. QM shows that what underlies our perception of spatio-temporal things and
events cannot be understood as spatio-temporal things and events. It
therefore seems reasonable to assume that spatio-temporality of the things
and events perceived (what makes them, in fact, things) is produced in the
act of perception from this underlying structure. It thus makes no sense to
try to explain perception in terms of spatio-temporal things and events.
2. If the universe consists of chemical reactions, with each reaction
separated in space and/or time from the others, how can there be awareness
of anything larger than a chemical reaction?
Patrick said:
Don't you think that by identifying neurophysiological processes in the
brain even
more, we can evermore freely manipulate conscious processes?
Scott:
If you are asking whether or not I think that studying neurophysiological
processes is a good thing to do, no question, it is. If a drug can cure
Parkinson's disease, by all means, administer the drug. A badly-performing
brain will interfere with our ability to get along in this world. But how
does this decide between the two hypotheses mentioned above?
Patrick said:
What do you do when someone tries to chop of your head with a sword? Do you
just
think: hey, these are real sensequalia I'm perceiving relating to my
perception of
space and time, but have nothing to do with my conscious processes as such
because
they disregard space and time and so there's no real danger?
Don't get me wrong, I symphatize with your position because it's close to
mine, but
I wonder how you would reply to such a simple question.
Scott:
If my head gets chopped off, my consciousness is no longer regulated by a
functioning neural system. Since a functioning neural system is necessary to
get along in the shared spatio-temporal structure we loosely call
"physical", I can no longer do so -- that is, I die. What happens to "me" at
that point, I don't know. I suspect that I continue to exist in a
non-spatio-temporally structured way (or in a differently more or less
spatio-temporally structured way, like a dream), but it could also be the
case that "I" simply cease to exist.
- Scott.
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