Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

Speaking of weird theories surprised no one has mentioned Julian Jaynes--so I'm gonna mention him! Totally nuts but one of the more fascinating books I've ever read, and I came across a recent defense of it that deals with a lot of these problems, mentions Nagel, etc.

"we are spirits in the material world"

The Sting

though seemingly valid, it may be incomplete or even incorrect in light of what we do not yet know.

magic FTW

if it were so - that the electron really were in one state, rather than a superposition of two possibilites - humans would not see the interference patterns they do when they do diffraction slit experiments

Waveform collapse isn't superposition. The many worlds theory thinks it can get by fine without the collapse.

came across a recent defense of it

would love to see that, jaynes always struck me as insane, but wonderful

It's from a subscription only journal I think but it's called "What is it like to be nonconscious?" by Gary Williams

think back to those days in 1656 - what was it like?

smells like clean spirit: nonconscious effects of scent on cognition and behavior (utrecht university)

what if the voice in my right brain ... is god?

why did albrecht always make all those men have such weird asses in his engravings - herein lies the center of the riddle of time itself

The bicameral stuff is wonderful and insane. I love the image of these glazed early humans wandering about being commanded by the voices in their mind. (Very Snow Crash, that, too)

http://www.backtoclassics.com/images/pics/albrechtdurer/albrechtdurer_hercules_at_the_crossroad.jpg

His reading of the old testament is characteristically wild but actually kinda profound and moving if you take it as literary rather than "literal."

It's from a subscription only journal I think but it's called "What is it like to be nonconscious?" by Gary Williams

does this link work outside .edu access?

i voted 'freaky' but i don't really want to talk to anybody else about it, sorry but this headspace is mine and i'm not sharing

doesn't look like it ;_; xp

yeah, no

magic FTW

― the late great, Monday, July 16, 2012 12:41 PM (22 minutes ago)

harrumph. to admit that we don't know everything and that the map may not be a perfect representation of the territory is not to introduce "magic" into the equation. i don't dispute the mathematical validity of waveform collapse. i do, however, think it might be a mistake to equate the math too closely with what it attempts to describe. to the extent that they attempt to describe material realitity, mathematical constructs are abstract analogies, after all. we risk the pitfalls of argument by analogy (to refer back to our previous discussion) when we rely too heavily on abstract mathematical modeling as the provider of "real truth" about what is actually happening in the concrete, material world.

wait what is this conversation even about now?

fuck if i know

ok then let's start over

yeah, good plan. i'm going with "freaky shit" this time. shit is some freaky shit.

holy shit, i can't believe gary came up in this thread. dude is the husband of one of my best friends. i always found his affinity for jaynes quirky at best, but he is dedicated and works hard at his fascinating new theories, gotta give him that.

does this link not work?: http://wustl.academia.edu/GaryWilliams/Papers/156099/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_Nonconscious_A_Defense_of_Julian_Jaynes

"disagreeing with Ned Block" must be one of the #1 most popular philosophical activities

That link works, and yeah I got some issues. Ok it's a semantic problem but his use of 'consciousness' is highly unorthodox. 'J-Consciousness' might be a useful distinction but to call that and that alone consciousness and say that animals are non-conscious and so are we 90% of the time is highly misleading and unhelpful. And his dismissal of the explanatory gap/hard problem is perfunctory and unconvincing.

but to call that and that alone consciousness and say that animals are non-conscious and so are we 90% of the time is highly misleading and unhelpful.

yeah, this was my main problem with it when i first read it, iirc. i think he claims that only consciousness + language/symbolic thinking is actually consciousness, and then uses bicamerality to bypass an actual rigorous history of humanity's development of language and how that would've developed the human mind (i.e. a genealogy of language.)

I've never read Jayne directly but I can see why people think the bicameral stuff is wonderful & insane, some of the just-so stories in that paper lean heavily towards the latter though.

By essentially telling ourselves through a linguistically structured neural command to “keep at it” when engaged in a time consuming task (such as sharpening rocks), humans were able to develop cultural skills unparalleled throughout the rest of the animal world.

orly_owl.jpg

orly is a god

yeah, i'm really bothered that he was only mentioned and not actually pictured there. he looks like this:

http://anongallery.org/img/3/5/o-rly-orly-owl.jpg

that should be the blurb on the back of Jaynes' book.

i've always meant to read TOOCITBOTBM (pronounced "toccitibottom") cuz my parents were impressed by it once upon a time. same with godel, escher, bach.

i think both of those are great and the kind of books i wish were written more often.

I am actually pretty receptive to parts of Jaynes' theory. particularly the idea of consciousness as a product of cultural conditioning. but I love that book most of all because it's this imaginative engagement with the dawn of civilization, a period of history i just find so mysterious and fascinating. i remember being in Hawaii and seeing a display about how they think the first humans arrived there like 6000 years ago and i thought what it must have been like to sail across the ocean back then and their view of just what the world is must have been so different from ours. like, everything must have been so unimaginatively vast. of course there were gods, and magic, and all that.

Well I can certainly recommend GEB unequivocally; reading it pretty radically changed my adolescent mind about some stuff. Though some of Hofstadter's stances about cognitivism are less popular in the cognitive science world than they were 30 years ago. It's still a really delightful and informative book.

my stepdad told me about the general gist of jaynes' book when i was 13 or so, and because he was very learned, i just accepted the idea as sensible people consensus. i didn't question it until many years later when one of my professors gave me a funny look in response to my mention of how, once upon a time, everyone went around obeying the dictates of voices in their heads.

"i think he claims that only consciousness + language/symbolic thinking is actually consciousness"
is there anything really wrong with that claim? you'd need to propose a model of ego-consciousness that is devoid of linguistic processing, and i'm not sure if that's possible.

seems reasonable to think that consciousness could exist without language and symbolic thinking, but that gets into how we define consciousness.

i guess i'm just opposed to the idea that consciousness doesn't exist without language, or that consciousness w/o language is some whole other non-human type of process

agree

it's fine to be politically opposed to it, but you'd need to come up with a reasonable alternative. also why would you think non-humans don't have some kind of language?

Oh god let's not have a semantic argument. I think most people are pretty clear that whatever animals have, it ain't language.

i'm not "politically" opposed to it, i don't even know what that means. and i doubt that the consciousness that, say, cats experience is mediated by various types of meows running through their mind. xpost

or yeah, what ledge said.

i don't know how you can avoid a semantic argument when defining what consciousness is seems to be nothing but a semantic argument. (i don't think cats have a secret meow-based language, but they'd need some kind of abstractive mechanism to do anything clever)

I thought we'd been doing pretty well at defining - well discussing - what consciousness is (phenomenal, physical, illusory, magic, etc) not how we apply the term (awareness, introspection).

Do you think language is necessary for a conceptual schema?

i'd wager it is, but mostly because I can't fathom how you could devise a mechanism for holding concepts without it looking an awful lot like a language.

can you guys introspectively come up with any examples of what you feel is a conscious experience that isn't affected by a linguistic process in some way?

I find it hard to conceive of consciousness without a language-type structure. Parents to thread, there has been quite a lot of research into the early stages of mind and their relationship to language development, istr.

Were there real cases of "raised by wolves" types? Did any of them have anything they could articulate about their pre-language interiority?

i don't think cats have a secret meow-based language, but they'd need some kind of abstractive mechanism to do anything clever

i don't know about this. some birds know how to open electric doors by flying in front of the sensor. this is clearly not a dumbly programmed behavior that evolution has "selected for". it's something they've individually learned by observing and doing. but i'm not sure that it requires abstract, conscious thought. the system could work on nothing more than stored memory and desire: desire for food + awareness that food is <there> (in that direction, w/e) + knowledge that doing <this> allows access. the second part of that might not even be necessary.

I think it's best to consider bare consciousness as the perceptual ground or "environment" to any communicational process---that communication doesn't "represent" conscious experience but in fact excludes it as the very basis for it to be communication.

like, the owl might not actually be saying "oh, really?" it could be something that just sounds like that.