When I am in a lucid dream, the lived experience is of one Mind appearing as different bodies, personalities, trees, sky, etc.
What is there in lived experience at this moment to tell me this is not a shared dream?
For those who say it's too vivid to be "merely" a dream, consider this; Bertrand Russell once had a series of more than 50 consecutive "false awakenings" - he believed he had awoken, examined his experience, was convinced in fact he was awake, then "awoke" to find himself in bed, only to get up from bed and soon realize he was again dreaming. I think we can all agree Russell had a remarkable capacity for analytic observation, yet he could not distinguish dreaming from waking.
How might we make that distinction at this moment?
We seem to be on the same wavelength, as you'll see in my next post!
Interesting story about Russell. 50+ times? I would go crazy! I had that kind of experience in college where I kept "waking up" except I wasn't really awake. It happened three or four times, but that was enough to make the rest of the day feel unreal. It was very disconcerting. I really couldn't tell the difference because the dreams felt so realistic and just as detailed and mundane as waking up in real life, or at least that's the way it seemed to me when I was dreaming. So I would say we can't tell the difference at any particular moment. I've only had a lucid dream once. In retrospect I realize I used a kind of asinine dream logic to test whether I was dreaming, but of course the dream logic didn't seem asinine at the time. So it seems we can only tell whether we're dreaming afterwards, if we wake up, but even then...I'd say it's an ongoing process. :)
I have a good dream story for you. I don't usually think about them or put much stock in them, but a few months ago I had a dream that my husband ran over a guy on a bicycle and fled the scene, even as I was calling 911. I couldn't tell the operator where the accident occurred because I couldn't remember the street names. I kept telling my husband to turn around and go back, but he just acted lackadaisical. When I woke up I thought it strange that I even remembered the dream, considering I usually don't. I puzzled over how immoral we were, why I didn't even think to check on the guy we ran over. Then it occurred to me that hit and runs are very common here, and I suspect that's because many drivers don't have car insurance. Which got me wondering...do we? It turned out we didn't. We had been driving around for six months without insurance. Apparently my husband had accidentally cancelled it for both of our cars when he meant to cancel it only for the one we sold. I might have to start paying attention to my dreams, at least the few I can remember.
Thanks for that fascinating account. It's funny how crazy our minds can be in dreams. I once was dreaming and almost became lucid. I looked at the sky and the sun was flashing a green color. I started to wonder if I was dreaming then I remembered: "Oh, they said in the weather report this morning the sun would be flashing green today!" Sigh. Lost a chance to become lucid:>))
Jan (my wife) and I just last week started a project I imagine will take us the rest of our lives (in our early to mid 70s, that's maybe 10-15 years if we're lucky:>)) We're trying to take the side of the materialist to begin with. And exploring neuroscience as well as lucid dreams, we're starting with the basic current scientific view that all that appears to us in our experience is a construction in our brains, and the whole range of colors, sounds, feelings, thoughts, consciousness itself, is just a production of the brain. The universe started out with pure matter and everything that emerged since depends on that.
It's funny - philosopher/computer neuroscientist Bernardo Kastrup was already publishing in mainstream scientific journals before he realized, talking to a very prominent materialist philosopher, that these philosophers DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THEY MEAN BY MATTER."
I found the conversation with Mike Smith was so illuminating, because he - like all of us, I think - have taken in (as one physicist put it) the materialist common sense view "with our mothers milk."
So we're looking at the kind of thing we learned in general science as kids; that "red" isnt' really out there; "sound" is not out there, it's all just a production of our brains. We start with that and slowly deconstruct it.
Going to be lots of fun - lots of playful videos and that sort of thing!
On the existence of life and the self, consider this question. Does baseball exist? What about Substack? Or Microsoft Windows? All of these are complex composite systems. To say we have a game of baseball, for instance, is to apply a categorical label to a collection of stuff happening in the universe. But like many categories, what gets included or excluded isn't always clear, and there are always edge cases.
I think life and the self are real in the same sense. If we hold out for a rigid pre-scientific understanding of these things, we'll find ourselves reaching for increasingly exotic theories to justify it. I think it's better to reconstruct our understanding of these concepts.
Good to see you reading Blackmore! On her points, consider what we mean by "self reflection". How do you know what you look like? You've never looked upon your own face, at least not directly. You had to look at either a mirror, picture, or video of yourself. In other words, you've come to an understanding of your appearance by using external systems to show you.
In the case of self reflection, introspection, apperception, the brain has systems which allow it to recursively model (some) aspects of its own operations. But just like an iPhone which could conceivably have a defective model of itself as a Macbook, our brain's models of its own operations evolved to be effective, not 100% accurate. Our brain's models of itself omit an enormous amount of detail, so much that whether it even came from the brain was controversial until modern times. All of which seems to imply that we can't use introspection as our guide to our own reality.
I think you know what I think about all this already, but I don't think of apperception and introspection as brain processes. Of course you can use those terms in that way, but that's not what's usually meant, at least not in philosophy. The brain can be an object encountered within the experiential, but as such it can't account for the totality of the experiential or provide the basis for it without making the experiential narrower than what it really is. Scientific studies require a subject's introspected report on their own experience to establish brain correlations. Which would mean if introspection is thoroughly unreliable, so too is the correlation, which places the science on a faulty foundation.
I'm not really reading Blackmore, that was just a quote from an article which I used because I liked the snappy way she put it. As for looking at ourselves through others, that's something I get into in the next post, but for now I'll say I basically agree with that approach, although I'll go beyond just external appearances.
Ha! I think we're definitely on to each other by now. At this point we're friends just rehearsing our arguments with each other.
On introspection being a brain process (at least in humans), it seems like it depends on the philosopher. But I'll readily concede many non-physicalist philosophers don't see it that way.
Science is definitely dependent on correlation between report and activity, at least for now. But eventually it should be able to map the causal chain from stimuli to the motor signals causing vocal cords, tongue, and lips to move in that self report. A lot is already understood in early sensory areas and very late motor ones. But obviously there's still a lot of work in between.
Pity on Blackmore. With her background, you might find her interesting. I think her Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction may have been the first book I read on consciousness. (Her main book, Consciousness: An Introduction is much more comprehensive, but also pricey.)
Isn't it annoying how expensive academic books can be? Academic publishers tend to let books go out of print, which jacks up the prices, although there's no reason for that to happen these days with print on demand technology.
Definitely. I think it's a scaling issue. Academic books rarely sell in large numbers, so the production costs have to be recovered from a smaller number of units. It's why academics call more commercial books "popular", meaning appealing to the masses. From what I've read, it's the same reason college textbooks are so stupidly expensive.
Kant’s ideal metaphysical model which he calls transcendental idealism is rejected not because it doesn’t reflect the true nature of reality but because like his predecessors before him, (Nagarjuna in particular), he refused to define the ultimate reality and/or the “thing-in-itself”. And being the creatures that we are, we do not like that kind of uncertainty. And due to the fact that Kant refused to define the “thing-in-itself” philosophers do not find his ontology useful.
To be intellectually honest we have to ask ourselves; what do we mean by useful? If useful means the ability to make accurate predictions, which in essence satisfies our need for a sense of control then any articulation of the ultimate reality that does not empower us with the ability to make accurate predictions would be rendered useless as well. Agreed? However, if one were to find a word for the ultimate reality that is useful in a different context, like the context of understanding or enlightenment in contrast to control, then maybe, just maybe we could get a glimpse of what is going on in the realm of possibilities.
I have a glimpse but I don’t want to “frighten the horses” so to speak. If we were to consider value as the “thing-in-itself” and/or the ultimate reality, then what we are witnessing is value manifesting itself through form as it unfolds over time into different states of becoming. We see this unfolding in the evolution of the cosmos, the evolution of the biosphere and even within the evolution of our own experience of consciousness, do we not?
So, to finish a sentence that you started Tina I would state: “The a priori condition for the possibility of experience for us is value.”
"...due to the fact that Kant refused to define the “thing-in-itself” philosophers do not find his ontology useful."
Very true. I think vastly different philosophers will agree that Kant's phenomena/noumena boundaries are begging to be violated. It's funny, the moment he erected his phenomena-noumena wall, philosophers couldn't wait to tear it down. Scientific realists might be glad that he saved science from Hume's skepticism, but not so happy about his destroying their claims to a mind-independent reality by revealing that science operates exclusively in the phenomenal realm. Nowadays you'll see such philosophers aligning their views with Kant's without realizing Kant wouldn't have allowed them to claim things in themselves cause our experiences, and they tend to ignore what he says about the apriority of space and time as well. On top of that, you have a very different sort of philosopher, largely on the Continental side, who can't wait to tear down the wall too because, well, it sucks. It makes us isolated from each other, torn apart from reality. It's too damned Cartesian! This is the side I'm on, though I won't try to tear down the wall so much as quietly climb over it in the dark of night and dance off into the wilderness, because Kant's philosophy certainly doesn't deserve violence or vandalism.
You won't frighten my horses by talking about value as the ultimate reality.
"what we are witnessing is value manifesting itself through form as it unfolds over time into different states of becoming. We see this unfolding in the evolution of the cosmos, the evolution of the biosphere and even within the evolution of our own experience of consciousness, do we not?"
Agreed!
"The a priori condition for the possibility of experience for us is value.”
"...I won't try to tear down the wall so much as quietly climb over it in the dark of night and dance off into the wilderness..."
Right on Tina. One should not be afraid nor frightened by that unknown wilderness because at one time long before the a posteriori world of patterns became the universe of distinguishable things, we were all in complete union with that wilderness. And to be even more succinct, without the immanent, pervasive existence of value as the leading edge of a priori experience, an infant has no means, mechanism nor reference point from which to make sense of the dizzying array of raw sensory stimuli that it is receiving. All "meaning" is derived from the reference point of value as first cause.
That's what all of the physicalists who hang out at Suzi Travis' substack don't get. In order to have "meaning" of any kind, there has to be a reference point from which to adjudicate the overwhelming sensory stimuli that for all practical purposes is nothing but noise and chaos.
>"The Kantian self is an “I” that unifies all of my representations—and nothing more. We can’t know its properties (whatever the hell a “property” is). We can’t know whether it’s a physical substance like a brain or spiritual substance like a soul. These claims, according to Kant, go beyond the limits of reason because they take the self to be a thing in itself. Things in themselves are entirely beyond our reach."
This is really interesting to me, and kind of illuminates the post I'm trying to write at the moment. It sounds almost like he's talking about the "witness" idea of consciousness found in Hindu philosophy (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Hinduism)), that consciousness is the "pure awareness" that merely witnesses all our experiences.
An alternative to this, which I think aligns with Buddhist views, is that there is no such thing-in-itself "I" that actively unifies our perceptions, but rather, the self is nothing more than the coming together of our perceptions. In Whitehead's terms, it is the "concrescence" of different influences coming together to form a "drop of experience". So there is no "I" that *unifies* our perceptions, but the "I" we experience is the *unity* of those perceptions, as they have come together.
I might also hazard another way of looking at the boundaries of the self. We might look at this "I", this unity of perception, as a clash between two streams of information/perceptions. The "self" then, is the stream of information that has the most weight behind it -- the one that we have greater belief/trust in and that extends further throughout our web of beliefs. It is our strongest beliefs that really define/delimit our selves. This would apply to our bodies in a pretty strong way -- we trust our own senses a great deal, as a general rule. Similarly, we trust our own minds more than we trust others, generally (and if we don't, we perhaps have a very weak sense of self).
I think the Kantian self and the Witness seem very similar, but Kant comes at it from a purely epistemological perspective and then draws a hard line between it and what we can say about it as a substance, which means he wouldn't say it's immortal. It has no religious or spiritual connotations or links to the divine or anything like that. Still, it looks like they both have the idea of a pure self that transcends the empirical self. It's hard to believe they aren't privy to the same thing, so to speak.
It's an interesting theory you have about the boundaries of self and the web of belief. I'll be curious to hear whether you think it jives with my rather whimsical ideas in the next post.
Taking everything into consideration of what Tina is expressing here and our inability to determine whether the Kantian self is a physical substance or a spiritual substance, we now have access to information Kant was not privileged to. And that information is the existence of the quantum world.
Also, keep in mind that the Kantian self is also a Kantian whole. A Kantian whole has boundaries and Kant elucidated those boundaries when he expressed the Kantian whole as an organized self-constructing system with the property that the parts exist for by means of the whole. To add clarity to the Kantian self one has to now drill down and ask: what is the "property" that the parts exist for by means of the whole and also, what are the parts.
The "property" of the Kantian self should be self-evident; that property is consciousness. The next question becomes: what are the parts? It is my belief that the parts are essentially quantum and the Kantian self is literally and in reality a revolutionary and radically new form of life that evolved within the biosphere. We are not what our brain does as physicalists assert, we are in fact a revolutionary new form of life that just happens to be quantum. This insight should be both stunning and jaw dropping. It is literally a game changer for consciousness research.
Tina, feel free to comment on this because I would like your critique.
I'm glad you brought up Kantian wholes. How far up the ladder of being (if you will) must we go before we get answers that explain the parts? In other words, are we ourselves parts of a Kantian whole? Can Kantian wholes have parts that are themselves Kantian wholes?
Another key question is: what kind of answer would satisfy you? What will a proper answer "look like" and can a scientific theory provide satisfactory answers to what you're looking for? I want to understand consciousness in the broadest sense, in a way that jives with lived experience (not just my own), but I don't see how a mathematical predictive explanation could provide the sort of answer I'm looking for, especially since it has to assume a working understanding of consciousness to even begin. Of course many insist that a scientific explanation answers all questions, but really, no one is this scientific, they only think they are; no one would say Sean Carroll's graphic reducing everyday life to simple equations could possibly help us give an appropriate answer to, "How was your day?":
So my question for you is, can you expect a quantum theory of consciousness (or any of the current scientific theories) to give you the sort of answer you're looking for?
As far as scientific theories go, I think the quantum theories and field theories in general seem more promising than others mainly because the others are too brain focused. The assumption that one part of the body is responsible for consciousness seems completely myopic to me, especially given that many scientists wouldn't deny the importance of the rest of the body and the body's interactions with the environment. So why shouldn't these things be taken into account too? Why must this one organ account for, well, everything? Even if I were a physicalist, I wouldn't like this idea. On top of that, the actual evidence for the brain "generating"—being wholly responsible for—consciousness is just not convincing to me. But I'm no scientist and I know nothing about quantum anything, so I couldn't possibly judge it as a scientific theory.
By the way, a friend sent me an AZPM video about Stuart Hameroff. I'm sure you already know everything he talks about in it, but I thought it was better than the talking heads stuff:
Not sure how consciousness and anesthesia studies will work out. Seems like a tricky way to study consciousness given that there's no access to conscious experience, not even through reporting, in anesthesia situations. There's the question of whether the anesthesia just causes you to forget the horrible experience you're having once you wake up, and no way to verify that. Horrific thought, I know. This is the danger of equating consciousness with external signs of it. But I do like the consciousness-at-large ideas he has, which seems sort of like the filter theory.
Yes, Kantian wholes have parts that are themselves Kantian wholes all the way down the ladder of complexity.
A proper answer for me will not look like anything that physical sciences are doing today. None of their mathematical models or otherwise reflect the true nature of reality in general, so why in the world should one expect anything useful to come from the physical sciences when it comes to consciousness. So to answer your question: no, I do not expect any type of quantum theory of consciousness coming from the institution of science to give me an answer that isn't a bunch of B.S.
Currently there are no quantum consciousness theories on the market that run on a parallel track with my own ideas. The proponents of quantum consciousness still operate off the assumption that the brain is doing all of the work so to speak and that part of that work includes quantum processes of some kind. I don’t see it that way at all. In fact, I’ve taken the bold step of positing that mind is a separate and distinct system that emerges from the brain as an evolutionary new form of life. That’s a pretty outrageous and bold statement to make. I could be completely wrong but to be honest with you, I think I’m right.
This all goes back to the Cartesian question of whether the mind is physical or whether it is a spirit of some kind. I mean, this intuition we've all had at one time or another has been with us long before there was a written language right? And I really don’t think these kind of shared intuitions are that outrageous or totally out of the ball park. There is something “spooky” going on with our shared experience of consciousness and the physical sciences are not helping by trying to pigeon hole our shared experience as some kind of mechanical, deterministic construction that we make up in our heads.
For years I've been looking for a "bridge" of some kind that would link a separate and distinct system like a quantum mind with our classic brain. You know, two separately distinct Kantian wholes that collectively make up another Kantian whole, right? A researcher named Anirban Bandyopadhyay has found that missing link, and that bridge is multiple quantum devices that are built into and part of the 80 to 100 billion neurons in our brains. And those quantum devices are microtubule bundles.
What Hammeroff's research has demonstrated is that the anesthetic compounds that put us to sleep specifically target these microtubule bundles. Further research has demonstrated that psychedelic drugs as well as anti-depressant drugs specifically target these microtubule as well. And both of these type of chemical compounds alter our conscious experience big time.
Here's the fundamental question, right? If "mind" is what the brain does then there is nothing for the "mind" to do because the brain is already doing it.
Similarly one could also assert: if the immune system is what the brain does then there is nothing for the immune system to do because the brain is already doing it. However, this is not how the scientific community views the immune system do they? So my question for them is: why should this supposedly wild, crazy and outrageous assumption that the mind is a separate and distinct system be any different from the immune system?
It's like I try to point out to Suzi over at her substack; evolution has thrown us a totally unexpected curve ball that we didn't see coming and we keep swinging at it expecting it to be a fast ball. And that curve ball is that "mind" is a Kantian whole that has evolved within the biosphere.
"If "mind" is what the brain does then there is nothing for the "mind" to do because the brain is already doing it."
Right, which sounds a lot like epiphenomenalism. Unless you want to turn "mind" into a verb. Brains mind. Hm.
We have a tendency to reduce, to take the part for the whole, because that's the way we normally operate. It's like we haven't moved past Descartes in thinking the seat of consciousness is in the pineal gland. I see little difference between that way of thinking and much of what's going on today.
I tend to think the Kantian whole—life, consciousness—must have come first, been here since the beginning.
Blackmore's position seems to assume that all moments are disconnected. It's as if each could be understood as a self-contained unity, with no greater unity between them. This curious conception of the workings of time puts me in mind of Hume's critique of causality. In the gap between moments, where is a connecting causality to be found exactly?
And this makes me wonder if causality is just the flip-side of agency as the connecting factor between moments -- where agency at least offers the hand-waving explanation of unity. Also I wonder whether thinking about time as if it could be chopped up into independent instants is the right approach, given the problems that follow.
Blackmore does seem in line with Hume, and the Kantian response seems to apply to both.
Good points about time and causality. Time is one of the most mysterious aspects of our consciousness. We have a tendency to think of things as being outside of time, or at least we're forced to talk about them that way, even when we're talking about time itself. What is a "moment", after all? Words are crystalline concepts outside time, which makes the authentic experience of time hard to talk about. Assuming there even is such a thing.
When I am in a lucid dream, the lived experience is of one Mind appearing as different bodies, personalities, trees, sky, etc.
What is there in lived experience at this moment to tell me this is not a shared dream?
For those who say it's too vivid to be "merely" a dream, consider this; Bertrand Russell once had a series of more than 50 consecutive "false awakenings" - he believed he had awoken, examined his experience, was convinced in fact he was awake, then "awoke" to find himself in bed, only to get up from bed and soon realize he was again dreaming. I think we can all agree Russell had a remarkable capacity for analytic observation, yet he could not distinguish dreaming from waking.
How might we make that distinction at this moment?
We seem to be on the same wavelength, as you'll see in my next post!
Interesting story about Russell. 50+ times? I would go crazy! I had that kind of experience in college where I kept "waking up" except I wasn't really awake. It happened three or four times, but that was enough to make the rest of the day feel unreal. It was very disconcerting. I really couldn't tell the difference because the dreams felt so realistic and just as detailed and mundane as waking up in real life, or at least that's the way it seemed to me when I was dreaming. So I would say we can't tell the difference at any particular moment. I've only had a lucid dream once. In retrospect I realize I used a kind of asinine dream logic to test whether I was dreaming, but of course the dream logic didn't seem asinine at the time. So it seems we can only tell whether we're dreaming afterwards, if we wake up, but even then...I'd say it's an ongoing process. :)
I have a good dream story for you. I don't usually think about them or put much stock in them, but a few months ago I had a dream that my husband ran over a guy on a bicycle and fled the scene, even as I was calling 911. I couldn't tell the operator where the accident occurred because I couldn't remember the street names. I kept telling my husband to turn around and go back, but he just acted lackadaisical. When I woke up I thought it strange that I even remembered the dream, considering I usually don't. I puzzled over how immoral we were, why I didn't even think to check on the guy we ran over. Then it occurred to me that hit and runs are very common here, and I suspect that's because many drivers don't have car insurance. Which got me wondering...do we? It turned out we didn't. We had been driving around for six months without insurance. Apparently my husband had accidentally cancelled it for both of our cars when he meant to cancel it only for the one we sold. I might have to start paying attention to my dreams, at least the few I can remember.
Thanks for that fascinating account. It's funny how crazy our minds can be in dreams. I once was dreaming and almost became lucid. I looked at the sky and the sun was flashing a green color. I started to wonder if I was dreaming then I remembered: "Oh, they said in the weather report this morning the sun would be flashing green today!" Sigh. Lost a chance to become lucid:>))
Jan (my wife) and I just last week started a project I imagine will take us the rest of our lives (in our early to mid 70s, that's maybe 10-15 years if we're lucky:>)) We're trying to take the side of the materialist to begin with. And exploring neuroscience as well as lucid dreams, we're starting with the basic current scientific view that all that appears to us in our experience is a construction in our brains, and the whole range of colors, sounds, feelings, thoughts, consciousness itself, is just a production of the brain. The universe started out with pure matter and everything that emerged since depends on that.
It's funny - philosopher/computer neuroscientist Bernardo Kastrup was already publishing in mainstream scientific journals before he realized, talking to a very prominent materialist philosopher, that these philosophers DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THEY MEAN BY MATTER."
I found the conversation with Mike Smith was so illuminating, because he - like all of us, I think - have taken in (as one physicist put it) the materialist common sense view "with our mothers milk."
So we're looking at the kind of thing we learned in general science as kids; that "red" isnt' really out there; "sound" is not out there, it's all just a production of our brains. We start with that and slowly deconstruct it.
Going to be lots of fun - lots of playful videos and that sort of thing!
On the existence of life and the self, consider this question. Does baseball exist? What about Substack? Or Microsoft Windows? All of these are complex composite systems. To say we have a game of baseball, for instance, is to apply a categorical label to a collection of stuff happening in the universe. But like many categories, what gets included or excluded isn't always clear, and there are always edge cases.
I think life and the self are real in the same sense. If we hold out for a rigid pre-scientific understanding of these things, we'll find ourselves reaching for increasingly exotic theories to justify it. I think it's better to reconstruct our understanding of these concepts.
Good to see you reading Blackmore! On her points, consider what we mean by "self reflection". How do you know what you look like? You've never looked upon your own face, at least not directly. You had to look at either a mirror, picture, or video of yourself. In other words, you've come to an understanding of your appearance by using external systems to show you.
In the case of self reflection, introspection, apperception, the brain has systems which allow it to recursively model (some) aspects of its own operations. But just like an iPhone which could conceivably have a defective model of itself as a Macbook, our brain's models of its own operations evolved to be effective, not 100% accurate. Our brain's models of itself omit an enormous amount of detail, so much that whether it even came from the brain was controversial until modern times. All of which seems to imply that we can't use introspection as our guide to our own reality.
I think you know what I think about all this already, but I don't think of apperception and introspection as brain processes. Of course you can use those terms in that way, but that's not what's usually meant, at least not in philosophy. The brain can be an object encountered within the experiential, but as such it can't account for the totality of the experiential or provide the basis for it without making the experiential narrower than what it really is. Scientific studies require a subject's introspected report on their own experience to establish brain correlations. Which would mean if introspection is thoroughly unreliable, so too is the correlation, which places the science on a faulty foundation.
I'm not really reading Blackmore, that was just a quote from an article which I used because I liked the snappy way she put it. As for looking at ourselves through others, that's something I get into in the next post, but for now I'll say I basically agree with that approach, although I'll go beyond just external appearances.
Ha! I think we're definitely on to each other by now. At this point we're friends just rehearsing our arguments with each other.
On introspection being a brain process (at least in humans), it seems like it depends on the philosopher. But I'll readily concede many non-physicalist philosophers don't see it that way.
Science is definitely dependent on correlation between report and activity, at least for now. But eventually it should be able to map the causal chain from stimuli to the motor signals causing vocal cords, tongue, and lips to move in that self report. A lot is already understood in early sensory areas and very late motor ones. But obviously there's still a lot of work in between.
Pity on Blackmore. With her background, you might find her interesting. I think her Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction may have been the first book I read on consciousness. (Her main book, Consciousness: An Introduction is much more comprehensive, but also pricey.)
Isn't it annoying how expensive academic books can be? Academic publishers tend to let books go out of print, which jacks up the prices, although there's no reason for that to happen these days with print on demand technology.
Definitely. I think it's a scaling issue. Academic books rarely sell in large numbers, so the production costs have to be recovered from a smaller number of units. It's why academics call more commercial books "popular", meaning appealing to the masses. From what I've read, it's the same reason college textbooks are so stupidly expensive.
None of which stops it from being very annoying.
Kant’s ideal metaphysical model which he calls transcendental idealism is rejected not because it doesn’t reflect the true nature of reality but because like his predecessors before him, (Nagarjuna in particular), he refused to define the ultimate reality and/or the “thing-in-itself”. And being the creatures that we are, we do not like that kind of uncertainty. And due to the fact that Kant refused to define the “thing-in-itself” philosophers do not find his ontology useful.
To be intellectually honest we have to ask ourselves; what do we mean by useful? If useful means the ability to make accurate predictions, which in essence satisfies our need for a sense of control then any articulation of the ultimate reality that does not empower us with the ability to make accurate predictions would be rendered useless as well. Agreed? However, if one were to find a word for the ultimate reality that is useful in a different context, like the context of understanding or enlightenment in contrast to control, then maybe, just maybe we could get a glimpse of what is going on in the realm of possibilities.
I have a glimpse but I don’t want to “frighten the horses” so to speak. If we were to consider value as the “thing-in-itself” and/or the ultimate reality, then what we are witnessing is value manifesting itself through form as it unfolds over time into different states of becoming. We see this unfolding in the evolution of the cosmos, the evolution of the biosphere and even within the evolution of our own experience of consciousness, do we not?
So, to finish a sentence that you started Tina I would state: “The a priori condition for the possibility of experience for us is value.”
"...due to the fact that Kant refused to define the “thing-in-itself” philosophers do not find his ontology useful."
Very true. I think vastly different philosophers will agree that Kant's phenomena/noumena boundaries are begging to be violated. It's funny, the moment he erected his phenomena-noumena wall, philosophers couldn't wait to tear it down. Scientific realists might be glad that he saved science from Hume's skepticism, but not so happy about his destroying their claims to a mind-independent reality by revealing that science operates exclusively in the phenomenal realm. Nowadays you'll see such philosophers aligning their views with Kant's without realizing Kant wouldn't have allowed them to claim things in themselves cause our experiences, and they tend to ignore what he says about the apriority of space and time as well. On top of that, you have a very different sort of philosopher, largely on the Continental side, who can't wait to tear down the wall too because, well, it sucks. It makes us isolated from each other, torn apart from reality. It's too damned Cartesian! This is the side I'm on, though I won't try to tear down the wall so much as quietly climb over it in the dark of night and dance off into the wilderness, because Kant's philosophy certainly doesn't deserve violence or vandalism.
You won't frighten my horses by talking about value as the ultimate reality.
"what we are witnessing is value manifesting itself through form as it unfolds over time into different states of becoming. We see this unfolding in the evolution of the cosmos, the evolution of the biosphere and even within the evolution of our own experience of consciousness, do we not?"
Agreed!
"The a priori condition for the possibility of experience for us is value.”
👏👏👏
"...I won't try to tear down the wall so much as quietly climb over it in the dark of night and dance off into the wilderness..."
Right on Tina. One should not be afraid nor frightened by that unknown wilderness because at one time long before the a posteriori world of patterns became the universe of distinguishable things, we were all in complete union with that wilderness. And to be even more succinct, without the immanent, pervasive existence of value as the leading edge of a priori experience, an infant has no means, mechanism nor reference point from which to make sense of the dizzying array of raw sensory stimuli that it is receiving. All "meaning" is derived from the reference point of value as first cause.
That's what all of the physicalists who hang out at Suzi Travis' substack don't get. In order to have "meaning" of any kind, there has to be a reference point from which to adjudicate the overwhelming sensory stimuli that for all practical purposes is nothing but noise and chaos.
It's like you're reading my mind! You'll see what I mean next week.
>"The Kantian self is an “I” that unifies all of my representations—and nothing more. We can’t know its properties (whatever the hell a “property” is). We can’t know whether it’s a physical substance like a brain or spiritual substance like a soul. These claims, according to Kant, go beyond the limits of reason because they take the self to be a thing in itself. Things in themselves are entirely beyond our reach."
This is really interesting to me, and kind of illuminates the post I'm trying to write at the moment. It sounds almost like he's talking about the "witness" idea of consciousness found in Hindu philosophy (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Hinduism)), that consciousness is the "pure awareness" that merely witnesses all our experiences.
An alternative to this, which I think aligns with Buddhist views, is that there is no such thing-in-itself "I" that actively unifies our perceptions, but rather, the self is nothing more than the coming together of our perceptions. In Whitehead's terms, it is the "concrescence" of different influences coming together to form a "drop of experience". So there is no "I" that *unifies* our perceptions, but the "I" we experience is the *unity* of those perceptions, as they have come together.
I might also hazard another way of looking at the boundaries of the self. We might look at this "I", this unity of perception, as a clash between two streams of information/perceptions. The "self" then, is the stream of information that has the most weight behind it -- the one that we have greater belief/trust in and that extends further throughout our web of beliefs. It is our strongest beliefs that really define/delimit our selves. This would apply to our bodies in a pretty strong way -- we trust our own senses a great deal, as a general rule. Similarly, we trust our own minds more than we trust others, generally (and if we don't, we perhaps have a very weak sense of self).
I think the Kantian self and the Witness seem very similar, but Kant comes at it from a purely epistemological perspective and then draws a hard line between it and what we can say about it as a substance, which means he wouldn't say it's immortal. It has no religious or spiritual connotations or links to the divine or anything like that. Still, it looks like they both have the idea of a pure self that transcends the empirical self. It's hard to believe they aren't privy to the same thing, so to speak.
It's an interesting theory you have about the boundaries of self and the web of belief. I'll be curious to hear whether you think it jives with my rather whimsical ideas in the next post.
Taking everything into consideration of what Tina is expressing here and our inability to determine whether the Kantian self is a physical substance or a spiritual substance, we now have access to information Kant was not privileged to. And that information is the existence of the quantum world.
Also, keep in mind that the Kantian self is also a Kantian whole. A Kantian whole has boundaries and Kant elucidated those boundaries when he expressed the Kantian whole as an organized self-constructing system with the property that the parts exist for by means of the whole. To add clarity to the Kantian self one has to now drill down and ask: what is the "property" that the parts exist for by means of the whole and also, what are the parts.
The "property" of the Kantian self should be self-evident; that property is consciousness. The next question becomes: what are the parts? It is my belief that the parts are essentially quantum and the Kantian self is literally and in reality a revolutionary and radically new form of life that evolved within the biosphere. We are not what our brain does as physicalists assert, we are in fact a revolutionary new form of life that just happens to be quantum. This insight should be both stunning and jaw dropping. It is literally a game changer for consciousness research.
Tina, feel free to comment on this because I would like your critique.
I'm glad you brought up Kantian wholes. How far up the ladder of being (if you will) must we go before we get answers that explain the parts? In other words, are we ourselves parts of a Kantian whole? Can Kantian wholes have parts that are themselves Kantian wholes?
Another key question is: what kind of answer would satisfy you? What will a proper answer "look like" and can a scientific theory provide satisfactory answers to what you're looking for? I want to understand consciousness in the broadest sense, in a way that jives with lived experience (not just my own), but I don't see how a mathematical predictive explanation could provide the sort of answer I'm looking for, especially since it has to assume a working understanding of consciousness to even begin. Of course many insist that a scientific explanation answers all questions, but really, no one is this scientific, they only think they are; no one would say Sean Carroll's graphic reducing everyday life to simple equations could possibly help us give an appropriate answer to, "How was your day?":
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/04/the-world-of-everyday-experience-in-one-equation/
So my question for you is, can you expect a quantum theory of consciousness (or any of the current scientific theories) to give you the sort of answer you're looking for?
As far as scientific theories go, I think the quantum theories and field theories in general seem more promising than others mainly because the others are too brain focused. The assumption that one part of the body is responsible for consciousness seems completely myopic to me, especially given that many scientists wouldn't deny the importance of the rest of the body and the body's interactions with the environment. So why shouldn't these things be taken into account too? Why must this one organ account for, well, everything? Even if I were a physicalist, I wouldn't like this idea. On top of that, the actual evidence for the brain "generating"—being wholly responsible for—consciousness is just not convincing to me. But I'm no scientist and I know nothing about quantum anything, so I couldn't possibly judge it as a scientific theory.
By the way, a friend sent me an AZPM video about Stuart Hameroff. I'm sure you already know everything he talks about in it, but I thought it was better than the talking heads stuff:
https://youtu.be/XA9Q5p9ODac?si=Ocb7phqj0bnq3Iga
Not sure how consciousness and anesthesia studies will work out. Seems like a tricky way to study consciousness given that there's no access to conscious experience, not even through reporting, in anesthesia situations. There's the question of whether the anesthesia just causes you to forget the horrible experience you're having once you wake up, and no way to verify that. Horrific thought, I know. This is the danger of equating consciousness with external signs of it. But I do like the consciousness-at-large ideas he has, which seems sort of like the filter theory.
Yes, Kantian wholes have parts that are themselves Kantian wholes all the way down the ladder of complexity.
A proper answer for me will not look like anything that physical sciences are doing today. None of their mathematical models or otherwise reflect the true nature of reality in general, so why in the world should one expect anything useful to come from the physical sciences when it comes to consciousness. So to answer your question: no, I do not expect any type of quantum theory of consciousness coming from the institution of science to give me an answer that isn't a bunch of B.S.
Currently there are no quantum consciousness theories on the market that run on a parallel track with my own ideas. The proponents of quantum consciousness still operate off the assumption that the brain is doing all of the work so to speak and that part of that work includes quantum processes of some kind. I don’t see it that way at all. In fact, I’ve taken the bold step of positing that mind is a separate and distinct system that emerges from the brain as an evolutionary new form of life. That’s a pretty outrageous and bold statement to make. I could be completely wrong but to be honest with you, I think I’m right.
This all goes back to the Cartesian question of whether the mind is physical or whether it is a spirit of some kind. I mean, this intuition we've all had at one time or another has been with us long before there was a written language right? And I really don’t think these kind of shared intuitions are that outrageous or totally out of the ball park. There is something “spooky” going on with our shared experience of consciousness and the physical sciences are not helping by trying to pigeon hole our shared experience as some kind of mechanical, deterministic construction that we make up in our heads.
For years I've been looking for a "bridge" of some kind that would link a separate and distinct system like a quantum mind with our classic brain. You know, two separately distinct Kantian wholes that collectively make up another Kantian whole, right? A researcher named Anirban Bandyopadhyay has found that missing link, and that bridge is multiple quantum devices that are built into and part of the 80 to 100 billion neurons in our brains. And those quantum devices are microtubule bundles.
What Hammeroff's research has demonstrated is that the anesthetic compounds that put us to sleep specifically target these microtubule bundles. Further research has demonstrated that psychedelic drugs as well as anti-depressant drugs specifically target these microtubule as well. And both of these type of chemical compounds alter our conscious experience big time.
I could go on, but that's enuf for now.....
Here's the fundamental question, right? If "mind" is what the brain does then there is nothing for the "mind" to do because the brain is already doing it.
Similarly one could also assert: if the immune system is what the brain does then there is nothing for the immune system to do because the brain is already doing it. However, this is not how the scientific community views the immune system do they? So my question for them is: why should this supposedly wild, crazy and outrageous assumption that the mind is a separate and distinct system be any different from the immune system?
It's like I try to point out to Suzi over at her substack; evolution has thrown us a totally unexpected curve ball that we didn't see coming and we keep swinging at it expecting it to be a fast ball. And that curve ball is that "mind" is a Kantian whole that has evolved within the biosphere.
"If "mind" is what the brain does then there is nothing for the "mind" to do because the brain is already doing it."
Right, which sounds a lot like epiphenomenalism. Unless you want to turn "mind" into a verb. Brains mind. Hm.
We have a tendency to reduce, to take the part for the whole, because that's the way we normally operate. It's like we haven't moved past Descartes in thinking the seat of consciousness is in the pineal gland. I see little difference between that way of thinking and much of what's going on today.
I tend to think the Kantian whole—life, consciousness—must have come first, been here since the beginning.
Blackmore's position seems to assume that all moments are disconnected. It's as if each could be understood as a self-contained unity, with no greater unity between them. This curious conception of the workings of time puts me in mind of Hume's critique of causality. In the gap between moments, where is a connecting causality to be found exactly?
And this makes me wonder if causality is just the flip-side of agency as the connecting factor between moments -- where agency at least offers the hand-waving explanation of unity. Also I wonder whether thinking about time as if it could be chopped up into independent instants is the right approach, given the problems that follow.
Blackmore does seem in line with Hume, and the Kantian response seems to apply to both.
Good points about time and causality. Time is one of the most mysterious aspects of our consciousness. We have a tendency to think of things as being outside of time, or at least we're forced to talk about them that way, even when we're talking about time itself. What is a "moment", after all? Words are crystalline concepts outside time, which makes the authentic experience of time hard to talk about. Assuming there even is such a thing.