Consciousness, Intent, and basic building-blocks

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Consciousness, Intent, and basic building-blocks

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1gregstevenstx
Ago 24, 2009, 1:50 pm

I'd like to toss an idea out there.

A lot of people struggle to reconcile phenomena of consciousness, will, intentionality, etc with a reductionist view of the universe. On the one hand, you have those that say the universe is made up of purely inanimate/physical "building blocks", that have no properties of consciousness or intent, and that consciousness or intent somehow emerges only at a higher level because of certain types of complex interactions among these building blocks. On the other hand, you have people who suppose that this is inherently inadequate as an explanation, and therefore propose that -- in addition to the known "basic particles and forces" of physics -- there must also be (as yet undiscovered) "atoms of consciousness" out there that account for the construction of complex things like minds and wills and intents and beliefs and so on.

But I'd like you to follow this line of reasoning, and let me know what you think of it:

1) Complex concepts like "atoms" or "quarks" or "photons" evolved originally (historically) from more straight-forward concepts of particles and waves. Looking back hundreds of years in our history, people were already familiar with the way rocks behave, and they knew that you can break them smaller and smaller. So when the notion of "atom" was first created, people understood it by its analogy to the more familiar "rocks": they have mass, they can hit into eachother, they move in a particular direction when you throw them, etc. Similarly, "light waves" evolved originally as an analogy from the behavior of water waves. But in essence, even the most evolved and esoteric concepts we have today evolved, originally, from mundane day-to-day experiences. As such, these concepts are at their hearts ANALOGIES: they are simply a "way of understanding" basic building blocks that are modelled after mundane concepts from our day-to-day lives.

2) Because of #1, there is no gaurantee that our concepts of basic building blocks -- being, as they are, mere analogies to "macro" objects of day-to-day life--actually are "accurate" or capture all of the meaningful properties of these things. This is examplified by the whole "is it a particle or a wave?" issue with photons. The answer is, of course, a photon is neither. Both "particle" (a way of saying "this acts like rock") and "wave" (a way of saying "this acts like a water wave) are concepts that capture only a certain PART of how a photon acts. They are analogies used to describe photons --- but the photon itself IS NEITHER.

3) Perhaps the problem we have conceptualizing the relationship between the physical and the mental is that we are starting with the wrong analogies. Maybe by assuming that the basic building blocks of the world can be "approximated" as rocks and water waves is exactly the wrong starting point. Maybe if we came up with a metaphor/analogy that introduced intentional/willful language FROM THE BEGINNING, the problems of somehow "tying in" consciousness to physical process would become.... well, less of a problem.

I know this is at its heart a linguistically-focused argument. But I sincerely believe that easy problems that are frame poorly can look insoluble. I can't help but feel, somehow, that this may be one of them.

2polutropon
Ago 24, 2009, 2:14 pm

>1 gregstevenstx:, I think Ockham's Razor precludes this idea for the time being.

"Photons are like particles/Photons are like waves," has at least this much going for it: it makes some predictions that science has been able to verify. I'm not sure what sort of predictions the axiom, "Photons are like conscious agents" would entail.

The motivation for your suggestion seems to be that it will save something like the "dignity" of consciousness (and maybe free will as well). But it's not clear how presupposing the consciousness of certain subatomic structures can explain my perception of myself as a conscious being any better than does the standard naturalistic explanation.

Have you read Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained? It's probably a somewhat tired recommendation in discussions of this matter, but I've only just recently gotten around to reading it. It's definitely the best book I've read this year, and I've been recommending it to everyone with even a passing interest in these sorts of issues.

3Jesse_wiedinmyer
Ago 24, 2009, 7:12 pm

You may also try something by George Lakoff, who argues that metaphor is one of the most fundamental cognitive processes.

4polutropon
Ago 24, 2009, 9:57 pm

I'm reading Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things right now, actually. It's a tad technical, and I probably should have started with Metaphors We Live By instead, but I'm enjoying it anyway... slowly.

5Jesse_wiedinmyer
Ago 24, 2009, 11:43 pm

Metaphors We Live By is repetetive as all hell.

6polutropon
Ago 25, 2009, 10:14 am

Has Lakoff written a book that isn't repetetive as all hell? I wasn't able to finish The Political Mind, it got so bad.

Sorry to hijack the thread, Greg. By the way, I've reread >1 gregstevenstx:, and I'm not sure my first response was totally responsive. You wrote: Maybe if we came up with a metaphor/analogy that introduced intentional/willful language FROM THE BEGINNING, the problems of somehow "tying in" consciousness to physical process would become.... well, less of a problem.

I read that to be a suggestion that we should try to apply the metaphor "photons are like conscious agents," but now I'm not sure that you had something so simplistic in mind. My question now is, in what manner might we introduce intentional language "from the beginning," so as to actually cobble together an explanation of the consciousness/free will that we experience on the macro-level? Obviously the theory would have to account for the fact that most of the objects of experience, by hypothesis constituted out of building blocks that are intentional in some sense, don't exhibit free will or consciousness on the macro-level (Wouldn't it?).

7gregstevenstx
Ago 25, 2009, 2:08 pm

I've read both Dennet and Lakoff.

But polutropon, your response in 6 is closer to an understanding of what I meant than #2. Certainly, a "rewording to save the dignity" of any particular perspective seems disingenuous from the start. But there may be a way to re-think the inanimate/intentional divide that more than re-words, but actually reconceptualizes.

Do I have "the answer" ... no, this is really just a vague suspicion. But I'm coming at it from the perspective of looking at the "gray areas", of course

Back when I taught "intro to cognitive science", on the first day of class I would put the following list on the board:

a rock
an amoeba
a cat
a chimp
the professor
yourself

And I would tell the students: For each of the items on the board, write down whether or not you think it has a mind, and why. And then I would go through and get a show of hands on each one.

It's a fun exercise, especially since in a large enough class you always have the joker who thinks the rock is conscious and the joker who says the professor is not.

But the real head-scratcher case (to me) always was the amoeba. You place an amoeba in a dish with a blob of sugar, and it will flow toward the sugar source and engulf it. You see that it's biological, and you see how it behaves, and so you almost automatically interpret it as intentional behavior: the amoeba likes sugar, so when it detects sugar it goes toward it and "eats" it.

But as it happens, we know a lot about the physics and chemistry of the amoeba. We know that when it encounters a gradient of dissolved sugar, its membrane becomes more elastic in the direction of increased sugar concentration, which forces the cytoplasm to "flow" in the direction of increased sugar concentration. So... it moves toward the sugar source and engulfs it.

Now, does that mean that the amoeba is NOT acting intentionally? Does that mean that there is NOT some kind of rudimentary "will" at work? Or does it mean that -- if we understand the basic building-blocks and relationships at work in the amoeba IN THE RIGHT WAY -- we can see how will is being expressed in those building blocks?

A physical reductionist wants to say, "Oh, see, it's all just inanimate mechanics" but that is (according to my O.P.) just because of the metaphor we are using to understand the forces and particles that make up the cell. Maybe there is a way of framing things like the force of cytoplasm exerted on a cell wall, or an electromagnetic impulse, so that we can intuitively understand that these -- in addition to being physical 'basic parts' -- are also the 'basic parts' that ultimately come together and can form a complex consciousness.

(Did that make any sense? Sorry that many of these thoughts are half-formed)

8bjza
Ago 25, 2009, 2:16 pm

1> I have the same difficulties with your proposal as the others have stated (2,6). The question any naturalist is going to immediately ask: what does your proposal mean practically? What as yet unobserved behavior of photons should we look for if you are correct?

9gregstevenstx
Ago 25, 2009, 2:20 pm

8: Practically speaking, the proposal would mean a theoretical unification. It would mean elimination of questions that seemed hitherto insoluble (relationship between mind and body, etc etc).

Remember, in the philosophy of science, theory A that can account for phenomena X and Y from a single framework is superior to theories B and C that account for each phenomenon separately.

10polutropon
Ago 25, 2009, 2:32 pm

I guess I would feel more motivated to adopt a new metaphor if I thought there was some respect in which the old one was lacking. What would you say to somebody who just isn't bothered by the emergence of consciousness from a deterministic, physical substrate, wholly describable in terms of chemical and physical interactions?

11yapete
Editado: Ago 25, 2009, 6:42 pm

Really interesting discussion...

#7,#1 Isn't the difference just the degree of complexity? The amoeba is just about simple enough to be explained by using physico-chemical models - the human brain is not, because of the sheer, literally mind-boggling, complexity. But that does not mean that mind is not based on physical interactions between neurons, neurotransmitters, action potentials...

However, because the complexity of the situation, it simply becomes intractable and therefore useless to explain mind in terms of synapses. We therefore have to switch to a higher level language (for example psychology). But that does not mean that psychology is not ultimately the result of physical forces, even if deriving the one from the other is a problem beyond our current mental abilities.

Now what you are proposing (if I am understanding it right) seems a bit like putting the cart in front of the horse -it is like trying to explain something rather simple (a photon) by invoking metaphors from something that is clearly very complex (mind, consciousness).

(#1) A photon cannot be put into the categories of wave or particle, not because it is a complicated object, but - as you have pointed out - we are stuck with familiar metaphors that do not necessarily fit portions of the universe that are beyond our immediate experience. Quantum mechanics applies to things that are way smaller than we are. A photon is neither a wave or a particle, it just behaves as one or the other depending how we are trying to measure it.

We actually understand photons very well -just not in the language of English (or German or Mandarin), but in the language of mathematics. And the mathematics makes predictions that match experiments very well (quantumelectrodynamics, which also deals with photons, makes the most accurate confirmed predictions of any physical theory).

The problem is in translating mathematics into everyday language, not in our understanding of a photon.

I guess changing the metaphors may help our mental image (and could maybe help understanding in that sense), but it would not change the mathematical understanding of a photon (and therefore may not change our understanding after all - or would it?).

12pitangent146
Dic 18, 2009, 2:22 pm

I like your idea that man may have trapped himself into a search for building blocks based on physically apparent analogies. I also like your idea that our mental activities / conscious may be an evolution of simple physical characteristics such as an amoeba’s cell membrane reaction in a certain chemical environment.

I especially like your hope of finding theoretical unification.

I have revisited a topic several times in my life that has led me to the same questions that you appear to be pondering. I am an electrical engineer who tends to be more interested in theoretical physics than electronic design. I started trying to find what the basic measurable building blocks were (fundamental characteristics). For instance we know velocity is simply a measure of distance traveled during a certain time. Therefore velocity is not a fundamental characteristic. Another way to look at velocity is that it is simply the derivative of position against time. Acceleration is the derivative of velocity against time. Force is simply acceleration times mass. At first my thoughts led me to believe the fundamental characteristics may be the mass of an object, its' location and the time at which it occupies that location.

These types of thoughts led me to quests that were not that much different from Einstein's quest for a unifying theory. The quest that he was still on when he died. I spent some time pondering wave theory and particle theory and learning about quantum theory.

This all eventually progressed to the point that I now realize mass not a fundamental characteristic. Mass and Energy can be calculated strictly based upon the frequency at which an object vibrates. Physicists are now realizing the smallest building blocks we can break nature into (photons, bosons etc..) actually have zero mass when at rest. It's the movement that gives them mass. So nature is really just mass-less objects that man cannot observe with his senses that vibrate, or spin and create the properties we can identify with our senses. When you hold a rock... you are not holding any particles at all.

This leads me to ponder some of the same things you are pondering. Could consciousness be one of the first things to exist? Can consciousness exist without a physical media or naturally observable event?