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thinkahol *

On "Consciousness: The Black Hole of Neuroscience" aka the "hard" problem | Thinkahol's... - 0 views

thinkahol.wordpress.com/...roscience-aka-the-hard-problem

On "Consciousness: Black Hole of Neuroscience" aka the "hard" problem | Thinkahol's Blog

shared by thinkahol * on 08 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 08 Nov 11
     
    What had been lacking until relatively recently was an overarching framework or theory through which to grasp the nature of consciousness. The lack of a general theory of consciousness, of how it comes to be that there is something that it is like to be, was really the last rational bastion of opposition to the scientific assertion that consciousness emerges from the brain.
thinkahol *

TEDxRheinMain - Prof. Dr. Thomas Metzinger - The Ego Tunnel - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

TEDxRheinMain - Prof. Dr. Thomas Metzinger The Ego Tunnel YouTube

shared by thinkahol * on 19 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 19 Oct 11
     
    Brain, bodily awareness, and the emergence of a conscious self: these entities and their relations are explored by Germanphilosopher and cognitive scientist Metzinger. Extensively working with neuroscientists he has come to the conclusion that, in fact, there is no such thing as a "self" -- that a "self" is simply the content of a model created by our brain - part of a virtual reality we create for ourselves. But if the self is not "real," he asks, why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct the self? In a series of fascinating virtual reality experiments, Metzinger and his colleagues have attempted to create so-called "out-of-body experiences" in the lab, in order to explore these questions. As a philosopher, he offers a discussion of many of the latest results in robotics, neuroscience, dream and meditation research, and argues that the brain is much more powerful than we have ever imagined. He shows us, for example, that we now have the first machines that have developed an inner image of their own body -- and actually use this model to create intelligent behavior. In addition, studies exploring the connections between phantom limbs and the brain have shown us that even people born without arms or legs sometimes experience a sensation that they do in fact have limbs that are not there. Experiments like the "rubber-hand illusion" demonstrate how we can experience a fake hand as part of our self and even feel a sensation of touch on the phantom hand form the basis and testing ground for the idea that what we have called the "self" in the past is just the content of a transparent self-model in our brains. Now, as new ways of manipulating the conscious mind-brain appear on the scene, it will soon become possible to alter our subjective reality in an unprecedented manner. The cultural consequences of this, Metzinger claims, may be immense: we will need a new approach to ethics, and we will be forced to think about ourselves in a fundamentally new way. At
thinkahol *

Being No One - The MIT Press - 4 views

mitpress.mit.edu/...default.asp

Being No One - The MIT Press

shared by thinkahol * on 23 Feb 12 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 23 Feb 12
     
    According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds.
Amira .

You are not a self! Bodies, brains and the nature of consciousness by prof Thomas Metzi... - 0 views

www.abc.net.au/...2705963.htm

Consciousness mind & brain Neuroscience science philosophy psychology

shared by Amira . on 23 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Amira . on 23 Jan 10
     
    German philosopher of mind Thomas Metzinger is one of the world's top researchers on consciousness, instrumental in its renaissance as a respectable problem for scientific enquiry. From out-of-body experiences to lucid dreaming, anarchic hand syndrome to phantom limbs, his investigations have taken him to places few dare to go. Be spooked, bewildered and amazed.
alin enache

the colour of our consciousness> red and black - 0 views

http://waltherpragerandphilosophy1.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-color-of-our-consciousness.html

philosophy consciousness

started by alin enache on 03 Jan 16 no follow-up yet
Laurent P

Philosophy of Existence by Karl Jaspers - Reviews, Discussion, Bookclubs, Lists - 0 views

www.goodreads.com/...368124.Philosophy_of_Existence

philosophy existentialism jaspers

shared by Laurent P on 05 May 15 - No Cached
  • A key concept in Jaspers philosophizing is The Encompassing, particularly in terms of "modes", which forms our awareness of being, underlying our scientific and common-sense knowledge, given expression in the myths and rituals of religion. There are three modes to the encompassing: existence (Dasein), consciousness-in-general, and spirit. Existence, consciousness in general, and spirit, along with the worlds corresponding to them, comprise the immanent modes of the encompassing. Additionally, there are the transcendent modes of Existenz and Transcendence.
  • Jaspers is a key thinker in the existentialist movement of the 20th century. He's particularly influenced by Kierkegaard and Kant, with notable terminology borrowed from Hegel and Heidegger.
  • Dear God this is difficult. This is one of the most inscrutable, esoteric works of philosophy I've ever encountered. I'll start to give up on understanding it, and right then, as my mind recoils from it, there's a transcendent moment where I get it. Which I think may be his point. I think what he's saying is that only when you realize that you can't know truth or reality do you catch a glimpse of it. And even then not really. There's a lot of stuff about transcendence and Existenz. And being. And unity. And how all being is unity and as humans we experience it through Existenz. What is Existenz? Well, it's the transcendent mode of the Encompassing of Subjectivity. The raw Being of your selfhood.
thinkahol *

The Coming Insurrection « Support the Tarnac 10 - 0 views

tarnac9.wordpress.com/...the-coming-insurrection

Coming Insurrection « Support the Tarnac 10

shared by thinkahol * on 20 Feb 11 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 20 Feb 11
     
    From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. "The future has no future" is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first punks. 
Laurent P

"Taking Notes on Philosophical Texts" - 0 views

www.earlham.edu/...notes.htm

notetaking philosophy thinkingskills

shared by Laurent P on 02 May 15 - Cached
  • make your question explicit in your notes.
  • Making your conjectures explicit in your notes can be as beneficial as making your questions explicit
  • Don't limit yourself to what you know. Write down what you don't understand but hope to understand. Write down your questions and your conjectures. Put your finger on interpretation problems, not just on interpretation results. Make note of passages to reread.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • shouldn't merely record the results of your understanding, but should become part of the process of understanding.
  • John Newman method. Let the top of page 10 be 10.1, the bottom 10.9, and the middle 10.5, and so on for other intermediate positions on the page
  • Take notes on the similarities and differences between the author you are now reading and authors you have previously read.
  • I use my initials to label my own intrusions on the author's position.
  • If your notes on a book are generally thorough, but your notes for a particular chapter are skimpy, then jot an explicit warning to yourself about the skimpy coverage of that chapter
  • Consider keeping a philosophical journal. This is not a diary about daily events or a notebook for reading and class notes. It's a laboratory where your own thoughts can grow. It will help your note-taking in many ways. First, it will give you an outlet for thoughts that might not belong among your reading notes. Second, it will give you practice in articulation and analysis that will pay off in your note-taking and all your other writing. Third, it will raise your consciousness about issues that you might well encounter in your reading.
Amira .

What is it like to be a bat by Thomas Nagel | Athenaeum Library of Philosophy - 0 views

evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/nagel.htm

Consciousness philosophy cognitive science

shared by Amira . on 15 Jan 11 - Cached
  • the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism. We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.
  • I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.
  • My realism about the subjective domain in all its forms implies a belief in the existence of facts beyond the reach of human concepts. Certainly it is possible for a human being to believe that there are facts which humans never will possess the requisite concepts to represent or comprehend. Indeed, it would be foolish to doubt this, given the finiteness of humanity's expectations. After all there would have been transfinite numbers even if everyone had been wiped out by the Black Death before Cantor discovered them. But one might also believe that there are facts which could not ever be represented or comprehended by human beings, even if the species lasted for ever—simply because our structure does not permit us to operate with concepts of the requisite type. This impossibility might even be observed by other beings, but it is not clear that the existence of such beings, or the possibility of their existence, is a precondition of the significance of the hypothesis that there are humanly inaccessible facts. (After all, the nature of beings with access to humanly inaccessible facts is presumably itself a humanly inaccessible fact.) Reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in a human language. We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state or comprehend them.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, 5 and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.
  • This bears directly on the mind-body problem. For if the facts of experience—facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism—are accessible only from one point of view, then it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism. The latter is a domain of objective facts par excellence—the kind that can be observed and understood from many points of view and by individuals with differing perceptual systems. There are no comparable imaginative obstacles to the acquisition of knowledge about bat neurophysiology by human scientists, and intelligent bats or Martians might learn more about the human brain than we ever will.
  • Martian scientist with no understanding of visual perception could understand the rainbow, or lightning, or clouds as physical phenomena, though he would never be able to understand the human concepts of rainbow, lightning, or cloud, or the place these things occupy in our phenomenal world. The objective nature of the things picked out by these concepts could be apprehended by him because, although the concepts themselves are connected with a particular point of view and a particular visual phenomenology, the things apprehended from that point of view are not: they are observable-from the point of view but external to it; hence they can be comprehended from other points of view also, either by the same organisms or by others. Lightning has an objective character that is not exhausted by its visual appearance, and this can be investigated by a Martian without vision.
  • To be precise, it has a more objective character than is revealed in its visual appearance. In speaking of the move from subjective to objective characterization, I wish to remain noncommittal about the existence of an end point, the completely objective intrinsic nature of the thing, which one might or might not be able to reach. It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direction in which the understanding can travel. And in understanding a phenomenon like lightning, it is legitimate to go as far away as one can from a strictly human viewpoint.
  • We appear to be faced with a general difficulty about psychophysical reduction. In other areas the process of reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more, accurate view of the real nature of things. This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. We describe it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human senses. The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more objective is our description. It is possible to follow this path because although the concepts and ideas we employ in thinking about the external world are initially applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual apparatus, they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves—toward which we have the phenomenal point of view. Therefore we can abandon it in favor of another, and still be thinking about the same things.
  • Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favour of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.
  • In a sense, the seeds of this objection to the reducibility of experience are already detectable in successful cases of reduction; for in discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, and the auditory, human or animal viewpoint that we leave behind remains unreduced. Members of radically different species may both understand the same physical events in objective terms, and this does not require that they understand the phenomenal forms in which those events appear to the senses of members of the other species. Thus it is a condition of their referring to a common reality that their more particular viewpoints are not part of the common reality that they both apprehend. The reduction can succeed only if the species-specific viewpoint is omitted from what is to be reduced.
  • But while we are right to leave this point of view aside in seeking a fuller understanding of the external world, we cannot ignore it permanently, since it is the essence of the internal world, and not merely a point of view on it. Most of the neobehaviorism of recent philosophical psychology results from the effort to substitute an objective concept of mind for the real thing, in order to have nothing left over which cannot be reduced. If we acknowledge that a physical theory of mind must account for the subjective character of experience, we must admit that no presently available conception gives us a clue how this could be done. The problem is unique. If mental processes are indeed physical processes, then there is something it is like, intrinsically, 11 to undergo certain physical processes. What it is for such a thing to be the case remains a mystery.
  • What could be clearer than the words 'is' and 'are'? But I believe it is precisely this apparent clarity of the word 'is' that is deceptive. Usually, when we are told that X is Y we know how it is supposed to be true, but that depends on a conceptual or theoretical background and is not conveyed by the 'is' alone. We know how both "X" and "Y " refer, and the kinds of things to which they refer, and we have a rough idea how the two referential paths might converge on a single thing, be it an object, a person, a process, an event or whatever. But when the two terms of the identification are very disparate it may not be so clear how it could be true. We may not have even a rough idea of how the two referential paths could converge, or what kind of things they might converge on, and a theoretical framework may have to be supplied to enable us to understand this. Without the framework, an air of mysticism surrounds the identification.
  • Setting aside temporarily the relation between the mind and the brain, we can pursue a more objective understanding of the mental in its own right. At present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination—without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject. This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method—an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination. Though presumably it would not capture everything, its goal would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences.
  • it seems unlikely that any physical theory of mind can be contemplated until more thought has been given to the general problem of subjective and objective. Otherwise we cannot even pose the mind-body problem without sidestepping it.
  • Amira . on 15 Jan 11
     
    From The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974): 435-50
thinkahol *

The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition? - 0 views

www.nyu.edu/...DD-zombie.html

The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?

shared by thinkahol * on 03 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 03 Aug 11
     
    The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition? November 28, 1999 Daniel Dennett
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