Quantum Consciousness

[Michael 345]

Procreation is not a process, it is a universal Imperative toward "Optimum parsemony".

Big words / big crap

You're right, it just adds to the process of evolution, i.e. the compulsion and motivation to procreate and generate offspring.
Do you think animals do not enjoy sex? Ask the Bonobo.

Must ask the next virus I look at under a microscope about its compulsion and motivation to procreate and while I am asking may as well ask how enjoyable it was

Think I would get the same answer from a Bonobo because like viruses they don't speak

But that does not answer the motivation to have sex.

There is no motivation

Exhibit A - asexual reproduction

Since you contend views which seem diametrically opposed to the views I hold I see little point in playing any more Ping Pong

Woo Woo is not reality

I'm out

 

[Write4U]

Big words / big crap

Hunger makes you search for food. So what is "hunger" that needs to be satisfied?

Must ask the next virus I look at under a microscope about its compulsion and motivation to procreate and while I am asking may as well ask how enjoyable it was

Apparently they do, as Hameroff demonstrates in his presentation with his term Bing, cognition and sexual response of mating single celled organisms.

Think I would get the same answer from a Bonobo because like viruses they don't speak

But they do act, and frequently, and even with Bonobos from other groups without intent for procreation but as a gesture of welcome and offer comfort.

There is no motivation

Then why would evolution and natural selection result in this otherwise useless behavior, if not for optimal parsimony?

Exhibit A - asexual reproduction

That does not require a motivation for seeking and selecting a mate, but also inhibits variety within the species.
Interestingly the Silvery Salamander does mate, but rejects the male;s sperm. Thus all offspring are female and clones of the mother. Yet it goes through the ritual of mating which apparently does stimulate cell division in the eggs.

Since you contend views which seem diametrically opposed to the views I hold I see little point in playing any more Ping Pong

OK, but in reality time will tell. Hameroff is convinced that it works, and tested it himself with positive results.

Woo Woo is not reality

I agree, and as you know that I am a fan of Tegmark, who also had objections to the feasibility of such a process. I am trying to stay balanced and am not just cherry picking for best appearnce.

I'm out ...........

Well, Penrose still seems to be in.
I hope you will at least continue to follow this non invasive method of stimulating neural repair in Alzheimer patients. IF it does work, I'm sure you (as a medical person) would be pleasantly surprised, no?.....

After considering this, I really see no conflict with Darwinian Evolution and/or Natural Selection. I see it as just another natural phenomenon to be added to the growing list on the list of natural functions. We already use chemicals, heat, and non invasive eletric stimulation for various medical purposes and in brain research.
Why should we out-of-hand dismiss non-invasive ultrasound? We already use ultrasound for other practical medical purposes related to pregnancy. Look, there's your baby inside you, it's a boy!
And as with X-rays, perhaps this research in ultrasound may prove any possible harmful, or even beneficial effects of using ultrasound.

 

[Beaconator]

How do ants work?

 

[Michael 345]

Why should we out-of-hand dismiss non-invasive ultrasound?

We don't

Dementia treatment hope after ultrasound, drug technique breakthrough

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-05/new-dementia-treatment-hope-after-breakthrough/8415366

We just don't do Woo Woo

 

[exchemist]

We don't

Dementia treatment hope after ultrasound, drug technique breakthrough

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-05/new-dementia-treatment-hope-after-breakthrough/8415366

We just don't do Woo Woo

Er, well, you and I don't, at least........

 

[Write4U]

We don't

Dementia treatment hope after ultrasound, drug technique breakthrough

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-05/new-dementia-treatment-hope-after-breakthrough/8415366

We just don't do Woo Woo ....

So you call the Hameroff and Penrose collaboration....Woo Woo ?

You just cited a "breakthrough" involving ultrasound. Did the medical persons performing the procedure know exactly the "how and why" it worked?

Seems to me that Hameroff and Penrose are working on that very problem. Yet you call it Woo Woo because they introduced a new proposal that the "how and why" ultrasound is so effective, because nano-tubulars respond to ultrasound and may repair the damaged cells.

A little pre-mature, wouldn't you say? Both are reputable professionals.

Note that I did not say "eureka", but introduced their research as possibly pertinent to the apparently effective use of ultrasound to repair nano-tubulars, at least for treatment of Dementia, which is specifically associated with cell damage.

 

[Michael 345]

Did the medical persons performing the procedure know exactly the "how and why" it worked?

Yes

researchers found using the ultrasound opened up what is known as "the blood-brain barrier" — a membrane that usually stops drugs from the bloodstream from getting into the brain

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-05/new-dementia-treatment-hope-after-breakthrough/8415366

As opposed to

Of particular interest is that the wave collapse function creates a form of sentient response from the microtubules at nano scale and ultra-sound may be a key to repair Alzheimer's brain damage.

Woo Woo

I'm out again hopefully I can stop myself returning

 

[Write4U]

Yes
researchers found using the ultrasound opened up what is known as "the blood-brain barrier" — a membrane that usually stops drugs from the bloodstream from getting into the brain
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-05/new-dementia-treatment-hope-after-breakthrough/8415366
As opposed to

Write4U said:
Of particular interest is that the wave collapse function creates a form of sentient response from the microtubules at nano scale and ultra-sound may be a key to repair Alzheimer's brain damage.

Woo Woo
I'm out again hopefully I can stop myself returning .............

Mice showed improvement? In what? Repair of already "dead" brain cells? Is the breaking of blood-brain barrier not responsible also for "strokes" in humans?

That's what Hameroff is after, but not by introducing anti-biotics, or flooding the brain with extra blood, which may cause all kinds of unintended consequences and side effects, but by non-invasive repairing and restoring damaged neurons, without any unwanted physical side effects.

Nanotubes are members of the fullerene structural family. Their name is derived from their long, hollow structure with the walls formed by one-atom-thick sheets of carbon, called graphene. These sheets are rolled at specific and discrete ("chiral") angles, and the combination of the rolling angle and radius decides the nanotube properties; for example, whether the individual nanotube shell is a metal or semiconductor. Nanotubes are categorized as single-walled nanotubes(SWNTs) and multi-walled nanotubes (MWNTs). Individual nanotubes naturally align themselves into "ropes" held together by van der Waals forces, more specifically, pi-stacking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube

In chemistry, pi stacking (also called π–π stacking) refers to attractive, noncovalent interactions between aromaticrings, since they contain pi bonds. These interactions are important in nucleobase stacking within DNA and RNA molecules, protein folding, template-directed synthesis, materials science, and molecular recognition, although new research suggests that pi stacking may not be operative in some of these applications. Despite intense experimental and theoretical interest, there is no unified description of the factors that contribute to pi stacking interactions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_der_Waals_force

This is what Hameroff and Penrose are testing.

And instead of mice, he subjected himself to the experiment and noticed a remarkable improvement (a sort of high) in his own brain, maybe repair of a few damaged nano-tubules as a result of just aging?

It's much too soon to call this woo woo, IMO.

 

[C C]

I just happened across this fascinating talk by Dr. Stuart Hameroff.

It's just another specific expression of panpsychism (or micropsychism, to be more precise). Instead, most scientists (and non-occult folk) want the manifestation aspect of consciousness to remain brutely emergent (rather than incrementally stemming from a fundamental process or additional property of matter). Merely the result of some upper-level computational process that brutely conjures it. A superficial "add-on" to biology rather than something falling out of chemistry and physics territory like life itself.

But that "brute emergence" view ironically keeps dualism in play. Since if we don't have an explanation that goes any deeper than "A complex _X_ performance of parts conjures experience, phenomena, qualia, etc according to some invented principle", then that leaves the door open to just about anything as a potential provenance. It doesn't offer a final or satisfying closure, and thus perversely provokes a future of continued speculation.

~

 

[Write4U]

It's just another specific expression of panpsychism (or micropsychism, to be more precise). Instead, most scientists (and non-occult folk) want the manifestation aspect of consciousness to remain brutely emergent (rather than incrementally stemming from a fundamental process or additional property of matter). Merely the result of some upper-level computational process that brutely conjures it. A superficial "add-on" to biology rather than something falling out of chemistry and physics territory like life itself.

But that "brute emergence" view ironically keeps dualism in play. Since if we don't have an explanation that goes any deeper than "A complex _X_ performance of parts conjures experience, phenomena, qualia, etc according to some invented principle", then that leaves the door open to just about anything as a potential provenance. It doesn't offer a final or satisfying closure, and thus perversely provokes a future of continued speculation. ~

Thank you for that reply.
I was intrigued by Hameroff's and Penrose's interest in the possible quantum information processing function of nano-tubules which apparently can be found in every biological organism and that sentience (of some sort) is inherent in all living organisms, from single celled paramecium and the more complex but still brainless slime-mold to highly evolved intelligence in humans.

If this demonstrable, then would that not prove that all living organisms posses a form sentience?

I'm sorry if my POV is simplified, but I have done a little reading on nano tubules and it seems clear that they have some extra ordinary properties and can act as information processors of wave functions, to name one.

This link may be of interest:

Using the dyes with magnetic nanoparticles and tiny fluorescent beads, allowed them to use the slime mold network as a biological "lab-on-a-chip" device. This represents a new way to build microfluidic devices for processing environmental or medical samples on the very small scale for testing and diagnostics, the work suggests. The extension to a much larger network of slime mold tubes could process nanoparticles and carry out sophisticated Boolean logic operations of the kind used by computer circuitry. The team has so far demonstrated that a slime mold network can carry out XOR or NOR Boolean operations. Chaining together arrays of such logic gates might allow a slime mold computer to carry out binary operations for computation.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-03/e-cws032714.php

I am not sure what the difference between "brute force" and "rudimentary sentience" would be, but slime molds do display some extraordinary behaviors such as finding "well lit" spaces for reproduction and an awareness (memory) of time.

Moreover they can solve a maze to find food by extending threads into every opening in the maze, but retracting and marking every dead end until it finds the exit where the food is placed. In addition, if there are several paths to the exit, the slime mold will discover all paths but will always choose the shortest path. I find that remarkable.

IMHO, this speaks of some awareness of its environment which cannot be the product of conscious thought (it has no brain), yet it is seems to have sensory experience at a much smaller , perhaps even at nano scale, by means of nano tubular sensory and computational processes. And, if so, the mystique of duality could be laid to rest.....

 

[C C]

. . . I was intrigued by Hameroff's and Penrose's interest in the possible quantum information processing function of nano-tubules which apparently can be found in every biological organism and that sentience (of some sort) is inherent in all living organisms, from single celled paramecium and the more complex but still brainless slime-mold to highly evolved intelligence in humans.

If this demonstrable, then would that not prove that all living organisms posses a form sentience?

There's arguably a version of "sentience" that is of the p-zombie stripe, which amounts to "feelings" and "responses to the environment" merely being an outward account of the activity of the organism (rather than featuring subjective or internal manifestations). As well as that third-person POV being applied to the "tinier" processes occurring within the organism which cause its larger scale behavior. When confined to that context, it's less controversial because the issue of that kind of abstract sentience having correlation to contingent experiences is ignored.

I'm sorry if my POV is simplified, but I have done a little reading on nano tubules and it seems clear that they have some extra ordinary properties and can act as information processors of wave functions, to name one.

This link may be of interest:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-03/e-cws032714.php

[...] Moreover they can solve a maze to find food by extending threads into every opening in the maze, but retracting and marking every dead end until it finds the exit where the food is placed. In addition, if there are several paths to the exit, the slime mold will discover all paths but will always choose the shortest path. I find that remarkable.

I first encountered mention of the microtubule hypothesis in Penrose's book The Emperor's New Mind. Over the years since then there have been intermittent experiments claiming to either falsify or cast doubt on it, with Hameroff and more rarely Penrose responding by either pointing out flaws in the work or countering with other research. Ultimately only time will -- neither automatic slash dogmatic propaganda against it or enthusiastic proponent arguments for it are going to settle anything. Hameroff's sometimes desperate seeking of new allies outside of science and philosophy of mind to drum-up support (i.e., those with mystical resonances) probably doesn't help in terms of first impressions.

IMHO, this speaks of some awareness of its environment which cannot be the product of conscious thought (it has no brain), yet it is seems to have sensory experience at a much smaller , perhaps even at nano scale, by means of nano tubular sensory and computational processes. And, if so, the mystique of duality could be laid to rest.....

Obviously, should there be any kind of prescriptive devotion to a physicalist monism in the scientific community, then the way to eliminate the lingering possibility of or appearance of dualism is to incrementally explain qualitative experience down to a more fundamental stratum. In contrast to having it abruptly or magically arise in response to higher level organization and mechanistic patterns (brute emergence). The latter is certainly necessary for the complexity of the manifestations as well as the memory-based recognition and understanding of them. But without primitive or elemental precursors, such offers no explanation of how it develops from the physical nature of the world itself (i.e. experience remains a potentially "reliable" alien intruder rather than a native resident; not to mention superfluous if it makes no causal contribution).

 

[Write4U]

But without primitive or elemental precursors, such offers no explanation of how it develops from the physical nature of the world itself (i.e. experience remains a potentially "reliable" alien intruder rather than a native resident; not to mention superfluous if it makes no causal contribution).

But do we not have several (if not many) primitive or elemental (chemical) known precursors? How else could one explain Darwinian evolution, which according to Hazen already starts at the level of purely chemical interactions, including bio-chemical interactions throughout the universe?

 

[C C]

But do we not have several (if not many) primitive or elemental (chemical) known precursors? How else could one explain Darwinian evolution, which according to Hazen already starts at the level of purely chemical interactions, including bio-chemical interactions throughout the universe?

Outside of skulls, proto-phenomenal properties aren't currently attributed to chemical processes, subatomic entities / interactions, quantum processes, etc. At least not in the mainstream. That's why it's left being regarded a situation of brute emergence at neural and speculative electronic design levels. (The sudden, non-gradual coming forth of a novelty.) If there seems to be an inconsistency with skulls or future computer boxes being "special domains" where electrochemical activity "abruptly slash magically" acquires new capacities it doesn't sport abroad, then that might arguably seem like incoherent nuttiness that an intellectual establishment either sleepwalks through or dodges around. (Thus astonishing or vexing some people.)

Panpsychism vs. Panprotopsychism? (1 minute)

But again, if "consciousness" (similar to embodied intelligence not sitting on a shelf) is treated purely as outward body behavior / navigational responses, and the dynamic configurations of mechanistic relationships causing that (no rich private life of experiences correlated to such)... Then that abstract or "stripped of qualities" version of awareness does have precursors all the way to the bottom. A capacity for interconnected actions taking place, and their incrementally building-up to ever more complex affairs, is indeed a given fundamental and global characteristic of the cosmos (which also makes the whole biological stratum itself possible).

However, that mundane aspect and third-person POV of "what enables a body to engage with and be receptive to its environment in special ways" is not what puzzles many. (That puzzlement stemming from their overall, paradoxical belief that matter normally lacks even primitive or elemental qualities / manifestations associated with it, or even the capacity for such listed among its properties).

~

 

[Write4U]

Outside of skulls, proto-phenomenal properties aren't currently attributed to chemical processes, subatomic entities / interactions, quantum processes, etc. At least not in the mainstream. That's why it's left being regarded a situation of brute emergence at neural and speculative electronic design levels. (The sudden, non-gradual coming forth of a novelty.) If there seems to be an inconsistency with skulls or future computer boxes being "special domains" where electrochemical activity "abruptly slash magically" acquires new capacities it doesn't sport abroad, then that might arguably seem like incoherent nuttiness that an intellectual establishment either sleepwalks through or dodges around. (Thus astonishing or vexing some people.)

Panpsychism vs. Panprotopsychism? (1 minute)

But again, if "consciousness" (similar to embodied intelligence not sitting on a shelf) is treated purely as outward body behavior / navigational responses, and the dynamic configurations of mechanistic relationships causing that (no rich private life of experiences correlated to such)... Then that abstract or "stripped of qualities" version of awareness does have precursors all the way to the bottom. A capacity for interconnected actions taking place, and their incrementally building-up to ever more complex affairs, is indeed a given fundamental and global characteristic of the cosmos (which also makes the whole biological stratum itself possible).

I believe this is fundamentally Penrose's POV.

However, that mundane aspect and third-person POV of "what enables a body to engage with and be receptive to its environment in special ways" is not what puzzles many. (That puzzlement stemming from their overall, paradoxical belief that matter normally lacks even primitive or elemental qualities / manifestations associated with it, or even the capacity for such listed among its properties).~

This why I found these three presentations fascinating to contemplate.

and;
https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_how_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality

and;

I would be very interested in your critique of these presentations.

 

[Write4U]

Why should we have to start with "consciousness"?
It sounds so abstract....

IMO, consciousness is the ultimate result of reaction to stimulus and/or sensory motor responses.
At the fundamental level, all things behave in a brute force reactive manner from nano scales to making selective choices, such as the "fight or flight" response, and subsequent "survival strategies".

IMO, all of this is a result of evolution of learning and evolving inter-relationships. A brainless slime mold which contains no brain, is still able to memorize time intervals. Without being consciousness (as we define it) how could it possibly learn to keep track of time? The entire organism, a single celled polyp, responded to, and memorized the interval to maintain in it's most parsimonious state of existence.

Does it not show that consciousness via thought is not a prerequisite for learning, but already inherent at least in bio-organisms even as they do not posses a single "processor" of information, but rather a network of sensory receptors, a form of hive mind, which seems to work extremely well in the insect world.

For every action of one object on another object, there is a natural mathematical reaction. This already happens at quantum level. Thus the reaction to brute force may start as a brute response, but as molecules/organisms become more complex in structure and form a physical hive mind, brute force becomes distributed over the entire organism and several brute force reactions make the response more complicated as different components of the organism attempt to execute their own reactions to the stimulus, i.e. the hive mind (the entire organism), having different sets of experiences of interaction with forces of different values and functions, begins to compute (not of its own free will) the most suitable response to the stimulus.
Darwinian Evolution.

Once an organism has reached a fundamental state of awareness or cognition of numbers (values and functions) which are not parsimonious to its life, natural selection will eventually yield advantage to the best adapted. This does not exclude the brain and the marvelous things it can do.

IMO, "awareness" (in the abstract) is the "experiencing" of your environment by a collective of responses. But need we compare this to consciousness? Can this not be called a pseudo-intelligence? A hierarchy of pseudo-intelligent orders, from the most subtle potential Implicates, to Physical expressions in the observable form of reality at the human level and all other stages of evolution.

Even Lemurs (a precursor to humans) can "count", i.e. recognizing the difference between more of this, and less of that.
They don't count 1,2,3,4,,,,,,but they do count, because it brings a reward if they recognize the answer, and they are as good in that humans !!!! Riddle me that..... IMO, that's pretty conscious albeit simplistic.

 

[C C]

I believe this is fundamentally Penrose's POV.

While Penrose is very much aware of qualia, he doesn't much clarify how correlating experience to a quantum process explains such manifestation anymore than correlating it to configurations of upper-level activity in neural tissue. But by making the correlation elemental (a level where many items have no deeper explanations, anyway), it is a perspective that at least closes a back door left open for dualism via the usual magical algorithm act being performed by neurons or transistors. (Which is to say, Penrose's scheme potentially treats experience as if it primally belongs to and incrementally builds-up in complexity from the bottom of nature rather than being a conjured intruder or superfluous add-on to it).

David Chalmers: The difference between the two sorts of physics-based proposals is most apparent in the article by Hameroff and Penrose. Previous work had given me the impression that their aim was to explain consciousness wholly in terms of quantum action in microtubules; but this paper makes it explicit that consciousness is instead to be taken as fundamental. In essence, Hameroff and Penrose offer a psychophysical theory, postulating that certain quantum-mechanical reductions of the wave function, brought on when a certain gravitational threshold is attained, are each associated with a simple event of experience. They suggest a kinship with Whitehead's metaphysics; the view might also fit comfortably into the Russellian framework outlined earlier.

This is an intriguing and ambitious suggestion. Of course the details are a little sketchy: after their initial postulate, Hameroff and Penrose concentrate mostly on the physics of reduction and its functioning in microtubules, and leave questions about the explanation of experience to one side. Eventually it would be nice to see a proposal about the precise form of the psychophysical laws in this framework, and also to see how these billions of microscopic events of experience might somehow yield the remarkable structural properties of the single complex consciousness that we all possess. --Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness http://consc.net/papers/moving.html​

This why I found these three presentations fascinating to contemplate. [...] I would be very interested in your critique of these presentations.

Only have time today to look a bit at and comment on Anil Seth's video / transcript.

If hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception, then perception right here and right now is also a kind of hallucination, but a controlled hallucination in which the brain's predictions are being reigned in by sensory information from the world. In fact, we're all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It's just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality.​

"Hallucination" of either type requires experience / manifestation to begin with (but he's not necessarily implying an arse-backwards relationship between "illusion" and experience as Daniel Dennet often seems to). And indirect realism has been known for centuries, though perhaps not to an audience venturing in from off the street (naive or direct realists).

And the strategy is very simple. I'd like you to think about consciousness in the way that we've come to think about life. At one time, people thought the property of being alive could not be explained by physics and chemistry -- that life had to be more than just mechanism. But people no longer think that. As biologists got on with the job of explaining the properties of living systems in terms of physics and chemistry -- things like metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis -- the basic mystery of what life is started to fade away, and people didn't propose any more magical solutions, like a force of life or an élan vital. So as with life, so with consciousness. Once we start explaining its properties in terms of things happening inside brains and bodies, the apparently insoluble mystery of what consciousness is should start to fade away. At least that's the plan.​

It's great that here Anil Seth apprehends that the biological stratum does not "float on its own", that it is dependent upon and made possible by sub-cellular affairs of chemistry and physics. Unfortunately, like so many others, there are writings elsewhere where he perhaps demonstrates he either can't hang on to that for very long or fails to pursue the extended significance or consequences. He seems to lapse back into the typical biology "floats on its own" unconscious tendencies of thinkers / researchers in this area. Who posit that the origin of experience is totally at that level (abrupt instantiation, no gradual ascent in complexity).

Anil Seth: Let’s begin with David Chalmers’s influential distinction, inherited from Descartes, between the ‘easy problem’ and the ‘hard problem’. The ‘easy problem’ is to understand how the brain (and body) gives rise to perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. The ‘hard’ problem is to understand why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all: why aren’t we just robots, or philosophical zombies, without any inner universe? It’s tempting to think that solving the easy problem (whatever this might mean) would get us nowhere in solving the hard problem, leaving the brain basis of consciousness a total mystery.

But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem). (People familiar with ‘neurophenomenology’ will see some similarities with this way of putting things – but there are differences too, as we will see.) --The real problem​

I like the way he frames the "easy problems" as revolving around a pretense that experience doesn't exist. That offers an option to having to reference or route people through p-zombie territory to illustrate what is meant.

But he still seems to be a partial adherent of the traditional view that science should ignore or dodge around the problem of experience, and just get on with ironing out the details of the mechanistic interaction depiction of consciousness (in biological context). Which is fine, except that it helps justify the claim of new mysterians that humans can't explain experience, only the cognitive / behavior / volition issues sharing space under the umbrella concept of "consciousness". Which in turn (for the nth time) ensures the possibility of some type of dualism lingering around for decades to come. And "getting on" with the "easy problems" is something that's been proceeding for ages, anyway -- the philosophical attention being given to the "hard problem" has never really obstructed that progress.

His faith that continuing to merely correlate experience with biological body structure, components and their interactions (without ever actually assigning "manifestation" and "phenomenal properties" to being legitimate slash recognized characteristics and capacities of matter) will eventually result in a "deep explanation" of such... is far less than Penrose doing similar. Since, again, Penrose is at least taking correlation down to a fundamental level whereas Seth is another example of leaving it at the biological level and the resulting appearance of it being brutely emergent (a conjuring act).

~

 

[Write4U]

I like the way he frames the "easy problems" as revolving around a pretense that experience doesn't exist. That offers an option to having to reference or route people through p-zombie territory to illustrate what is meant

I understood that the "controlled" hallucination" is the "conscious" part.

And our mental hospitals are full with people who actually live in p-zombie (uncontrolled hallucinations) land, i.e. their mental processes are so far removed from the norm, they present a danger to themselves or to others.

 

[Write4U]

I like the way he frames the "easy problems" as revolving around a pretense that experience doesn't exist. That offers an option to having to reference or route people through p-zombie territory to illustrate what is meant

I understood that the "controlled" hallucination" is the "conscious" part and offers us our "experiencing" our environment and our relationship to our environment. However Seth also explained that our brain contains subconscious parts, mainly used for "interospection", which prevents us from "experiencing" our inner organs, except when they go wrong. Can we feel the difference when our appendix is removed? An empty spot?

Note; this is not peculiar only to humans. As Hameroff demonstrated, a such a form of sentience may already exists in single celled organisms.

And our mental hospitals are full with people who actually live in p-zombie (uncontrolled hallucinations) land, i.e. their mental processes are so far removed from the norm, they present a danger to themselves or to others. And our medical hospitals are full with people where the subconscious control mechanism of interospection has gone wrong, either naturally (age) or from attack by a foreign organism.

As far as "experience" is concerned, Penrose proposes that quantum interaction which produces "change" is a physically experiential phemomenon, "bings", as Hameroff abstractly defined them. This needs not necessarily have to be consciously experienced. The fact of changing from one form into another is an physically experiential event. The term "experience" being used in the abstract.

The unconscious change from "caterpillar into a butterfly" is especially remarkable. The slime mold (lacking a brain) is an example of a purely neural form of change and experience of its environment. The ability of Lemurs to "count" (recognize) quantities is an example of a simplistic "conscious experience".
OTOH, octopi and cuttlefsh (possessing relatively large brains) are able to "learn" and "remember" some very abstract concepts such as "associating" several different clues to a reward, perhaps even more sophisticated than Lemurs.

Hence the Penrose's concept that the universe is filled with "bings", interactions which produce a existential change from one state into another state, from quantum to gross expression in reality, regardless of ability to consciously experiencing this change ( an unconscious abstract experience).

As demonstrated earlier Bees experience a different reality than Humans. Or perhaps better expressed as, the same physical reality experienced at a different level. To a bee the world must look completely different from humans. Yet it is the same world, but seen through different eyes (from a different perspective), tuned toward the infrared reflected by flowering plants.

The ability to sense infrared thermal radiation evolved independently in several different families of snakes. Essentially, it allows these animals to "see"[1] radiant heat at wavelengths between 5 and 30 μm to a degree of accuracy such that a blind rattlesnake can target vulnerable body parts of the prey at which it strikes,[2] and other snakes with the organ may detect warm bodies from a metre away.[3] It was previously thought that the organs evolved primarily as prey detectors, but recent evidence suggests that it may also be used in thermoregulation and predator detection, making it a more general-purpose sensory organ than was supposed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_sensing_in_snakes

 

[C C]

I meant to quote Anil Seth regarding his own "oblivion period" during anesthesia, but forgot it. Because that's key to the whole "matter and the cosmos in general is normally not even nothingness to itself" belief that's common in older materialism and today's physicalism. IOW, the world lacks empirical and intellectual evidence of its own existence -- apart from a few, tiny, rare entities within it like ourselves and arguably lesser animals which generate such.

Anil Seth: . . . Coming round from anesthesia is very different. I could have been under for five minutes, five hours, five years or even 50 years. I simply wasn't there. It was total oblivion. [...] Answering this question is so important because consciousness for each of us is all there is. Without it there's no world, there's no self, there's nothing at all. And when we suffer, we suffer consciously whether it's through mental illness or pain.​

I understood that the "controlled" hallucination" is the "conscious" part.

Perhaps if we restricted "awareness" and understanding of "what's presented" purely to that outer half of experience or the external representation of the world. But we're very much also aware of our own private thoughts and inner manifestations, too (whether those are sensible or crazy).

"Consciousness" is an umbrella concept that covers multiple so-called "mental" affairs, including cognition and experience (there's not even universal agreement on the list of its membership). Either a lack of specificity regarding which item is being discussed or not remaining committed to it -- just referring to them all under the generalization of "consciousness" -- is why casual, academic, and media-platform discourse sometimes goes nowhere. For instance, if a speaker or writer runs into difficulty, she can simply shift to a different particular or sub-area but still call it "consciousness" (give the impression that she's still dealing with the original distinction she started on) because that's the broader label it and other category members are subsumed under.

David Chalmers: The ambiguity of the term "consciousness" is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists writing on the subject. It is common to see a paper on consciousness begin with an invocation of the mystery of consciousness, noting the strange intangibility and ineffability of subjectivity, and worrying that so far we have no theory of the phenomenon. Here, the topic is clearly the hard problem - the problem of experience. In the second half of the paper, the tone becomes more optimistic, and the author's own theory of consciousness is outlined. Upon examination, this theory turns out to be a theory of one of the more straightforward phenomena - of reportability, of introspective access, or whatever. At the close, the author declares that consciousness has turned out to be tractable after all, but the reader is left feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch. The hard problem remains untouched. --Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness​

And our mental hospitals are full with people who actually live in p-zombie (uncontrolled hallucinations) land, i.e. their mental processes are so far removed from the norm, they present a danger to themselves or to others.

With regard to p-zombies: They would have no experienced manner of hallucinations (either controlled or non-controlled). Similar to a dead person, the philosophical zombie lacks manifestations slash feelings of all kinds (visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, etc) including both introspective daydreaming and sleeping dreams. But it is alive and processes sensory information. Like a robot or autonomous vehicle, its "awareness of the environment" is limited to navigating through such and responding successfully to the diverse situations in terms of its outward actions. The p-zombie is an ideal example of consciousness being depicted as nothing more than a complex assemblage of working or dynamic structure with special purposes. Of which more primitive or less organized precursor examples of third-person "activity" are found throughout the universe. Nothing "extra" involved.

A p-zombie was originally a thought-experiment which emphasized the superfluous or causally impotent way that either physicalism or science typically regards experience. That the latter's correlation to brain activity could be eliminated and a human would still behave outwardly exactly as before.

But despite objections like "Why would a p-zombie, via its verbal reports, be pretending that it was having manifestations?" calling the whole possibility into question, fields of research revolving around actual physiological functioning of the body still do not need to reference experience in a literal way to explain why a body does what it does. Experience is treated merely as a trivial add-on to a mechanistic relationship account of our bodies and our decision-makings (that physical approach also extended to the cosmos abroad). The manifestations make no causal contribution and accordingly don't even fall out of the agencies and properties that are taken to exist in the world before the novel arrival of experience. (Whether the latter is via computational "conjuring" or whatever inadequate explanation otherwise normally intelligent people in magic-averse disciplines might perversely contend is responsible for the abrupt correlation between the two).

~

 

[Write4U]

Thanks for the time to respond in such detail.

I have just two last observations.
a) One can be unscious at level 3, yet physically functional at level 1 and 2. (Hameroff) Which IMO, proves that consciousness (active thinking) is not an absolute requirement to stay alive.
b) In the case of human p-zombies, they do live in a reality which is caused by faulty processing or interpretation of "commonly agreed" to observed phenomena, thus lack the ability of empathy (consciously sharing their reality) with others.

We internalize and project our "best guess" of reality in a feedback loop. When the loop is broken or damaged, the ability to communicate what that person experiences is incomprehensible and thus they project and experience a divergent reality from the norm.

This does not necessarily mean the damaged brain cannot think. Idiot-savants can be brilliant in one area, but unable to interact socially.

The intersting part is that idiot-savants are almost always good at mathematics or music (two of the fundamental properties of nature), and shows that the brain need not be able communicate the thought process, yet be able solve or repeat these internal problem solving functions flawlessly.

The point is that IMO, an organism need not be brain conscious as we define it, but is still able to experience and respond to it's environment, even at extremely small scales, such as scilia and flagella (nano-tubulars).