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Top Post By phoebus (1 thumbs up):

Consciousness, which has lacked a 'hard-wired' and 'evolutionary' explanation up to now seems to be getting a lot of attention. I recently bought and read 'The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit' by Joseph Chilton Pearce. This is only one of many 'scientific' studies of consciousness published in recent days.

I imagine the rush of such theories as these is another of those races to be the first to solve an outstanding conundrum in science. Many books of this kind are, as I see it, attempts by reductionists to surmount their last Everest; to square the circle and complete their mechanistic map of the universe.

I am convinced that there are only two possible answers to consciousness and that one of them, which may be characterized either as the 'hard wired,' the biological, or the reductionist, is wrong. The obvious answer, in my view, is that consciousness is beyond reductionist explanation. This has been the case, in my opinion, since Arthur Koestler wrote 'Beyond Reductionism' in 1956. Nevertheless our scientists will persist in looking for their Holy Grail, always inside the reductionist box.

The first reductionist explanation may have come from Pablov. If you remember, he conditioned his dogs to associate the ringing of a bell with food. After sufficient conditioning – that is, after the experimenter repeatedly rang a bell and immediately presented the dogs with food – the dogs automatically began salivating on hearing the bell alone. A great deal of animal behavior is no doubt 'conditioned' behavior where the animal has learned to associate two events. We make the same sorts of associations, and we say that one 'causes' the other. Some associative pairs are learned and others are 'instinctual' it seems.

Anything amiss here?

It should not take a genius to spot a false link here, but apparently brilliant minds do. The association between an event and the response of a sentient animal is NOT one of cause & effect as is the case of mixing two chemical compounds and producing a chemical reaction for example. To take the case of Pablov's dogs. The sound of the bell does NOT physically cause the dogs to salivate. It is the MEANING of the bell which does so. If it were simply the sound of the bell which caused the animals to salivate, then any bell at any time, and well before they were 'conditioned,' would have caused them to salivate. But that was not the case. It was only after the canines had learned that the bell MEANT food, that they began salivating.

So we are not dealing with a cause and effect relation here, but with sentient animals capable of interpreting events in relation to their own needs and selves. Furthermore, if pooches have needs, then surely the critters must have selves capable of recognizing an 'I' which experiences need. So we have discovered that these dogs are conscious, which is to say self-conscious!

Small wonder that reductionists failed to make this same discovery until lately, for it has always posed a threat likely to blow their case out of the water. But it now appears that they have accepted the principle that animal behavior is largely conscious. How else to explain the cowboys of the Lazy-R (Reductionist) ranch in such a hurry to get a lasso on this rogue steer (consciousness) in order to drag it back into the mechanist corral?

We can shed light on the nature of consciousness by taking another approach, and here I quote from a thoughtful fellow named Howard Katz.

'Take take a young child into the kitchen and show him the eating utensils. He will observe that, although the forks are different from each other (perhaps in size, material of construction or color or at least in occupying a different space at the same time), they have certain similarities. If you hold one up and say, “This is a fork,” the child will get the concept. You can then go into a different house (in a different city), tell the child to fetch a fork, and he will be able to comply. Further, you can do this with very large numbers of children, and they will pretty much all get it right. This is because all the children have noticed the essential similarities (which all forks have with each other) and the essential differences (which all forks have with all non-forks) We say the child now has the concept 'fork.' Thus these similarities and differences cannot be arbitrary. It must be that the child is perceiving something in reality, not performing an arbitrary act like naming something.'

Yes, the concept is not the name, and you have to ask: Where did the concept came from? Concepts exist nowhere but in the mind or in consciousness. Consciousness is where the Reality lies I believe.

Now, if you will hold on to the concept of a concept, I want to make a bridge to another idea, even more important. While we don't actually create objects like rocks, mountains and clouds, we nevertheless define them, which is to say, we name them and relate them meaningfully to other objects (which we also define) according to location in time and space and according to likeness and difference. Thus while the world of objects is not our creation, the world order IS. This is a fact dramatically illustrated by a story which I will tell in a moment. The world order we create or project is a matrix of meanings. If something means something in relation to something else, then it is for no other reason than we put the meaning or the relation there. Thus if we see a cause-and-effect relation, it is a cause-and-effect relation only because we choose to see that 'A' CAUSES 'B'.

It appears to be the fact that every single thing in the universe is connected to every other thing. Chaos theory tells us that the flap of a butterfly's wing is, in some part, responsible for triggering a hurricane in the Gulf. For any given outcome the causes are countless. (There are to say, many 'hidden variables.') We choose to see only the cause/effect relations which are both accessible to our senses (or instruments) and ones which accord with our latest ideas about how the world is ordered. Thus while the theory of evolution, or quantum theory, and any theory (but not a mathematical theorem) that you care to name satisfies us that we have an objective grasp of the Reality, no such theory is more than a useful and convenient explanation projected onto an inscrutable canvas. Science lays claim to 'objectivity.' Like the religionists whom they ridicule, it appears that scientists are prey to their own myths as well.

There can be no opposition between subjectivity and objectivity when subjectivity is all there is . It is the Concept – the product of a human subjectivity – that is the only objective fact we are ever likely to know. The objects of real interest are not those lying in that 'real' world conjured up by scientists. There is only one OBJECT of consuming interest, it seems to me, and that is the faculty (consciousness) which first distinguished these same objects in a web of likeness/difference relationships.

Inuit children can be taught to distinguish twenty kinds of snow and to associate a different word with each of these twenty different kinds. An Aboriginal child, on the other hand, has no word for snow. Consequently, snow is not a part of his reality. Thus snow is not an named object before it is an idea or concept. Our scientists have it the other way around. The object exists and then we name it. They are simply wrong.

Here is the story I promised. It is a paraphrase by John Alexandra (author of 'Mephistopheles' Anvil') of lines from Oliver Sach's book: 'An Anthropologist on Mars.'

In his most recent book, 'An Anthropologist on Mars,' Sacks pre-
sents the case of a blind man, Virgil, whose visual perception was
restored by surgery. Virgil, who had lost his sight when he was
six, had worked many years for the YMCA, which provided him
with a house. At 'fifty, he was about to be married, and his fiancee
wanted him to have an operation to restore his sight. ''Wouldn't it
be wonderful, she reasoned, ''if the first things he saw were the church, his
bride and the wedding?” He agreed, and the operation was surgi-
cally successful.'

When the bandages were removed, the room was vibrant with
expectation. Virgil, however, did not cry out for joy. Contrary to all
expectations, he continued to stare blankly and with bewil-
derment at a world upon which he could not focus. Virgil later
told Sacks that in that first moment he could see light, movement
and color, but had no idea what he was seeing -- it was all only a
'confused, meaningless blur.'

All involved (including Virgil himself) expected that, after the
operation, he would simply open his eyes and see the world of ob-
jects -- an expectation based on the naive view that these objects
are ''as we see them.'' What had been forgotten? The complicated
cognitive processes we developed as infants, seemingly effort-
lessly, which are essential to creating a meaningful world of ex-
perience.'

Without them our sensations remain only a confusing
maze of light, movement and color. Sacks designates Virgil
''mentally blind'' -- able to perceive with his eyes but not able to de-
cipher what he was seeing as meaningful objects. Having no con-
cept of perspective, he could not distinguish distance. He would
think objects were on top of him when they were still distant. He
found shadows confusing since he could not yet form the concept
of objects blocking light. He would stop at or try to step over the
shadow. Sunlit steps, combining perspective, shadow, solidity and
perspective, were overwhelmingly difficult. He could not dis-
tinguish whether dark areas were solid or shadow, closer or more
distant, horizontal or vertical.'

Virgil now experienced tremendous confusion when trying to
navigate his way through the house he had lived in for many
years. He could only walk through the house in a predetermined,
fixed line. He had to perceive everything in a constant way. If he
deviated from this line, he became totally disoriented. since the
same objects (a table or bench, for instance) looked completely
different from other viewpoints, and so were unrecognizable. Only
slowly did he learn to see and recognize the objects in the room
from other vantage points. He had similar difficulty grasping the
idea of a cat. He could distinguish a cat's paw. its nose. tail or
ear, but could not form the integrated concept needed to see the
cat as a whole. To think-and therefore see-even the most
seemingly obvious'' relationships (obvious to the sighted person,
that is) was an enormous struggle for him.'

Sacks points out that, in similar operations since the first doc-
umented case in 1728, nearly all the patients had also experi-
enced the most profound confusion and bewilderment. As seeing
adults, we take for granted the concepts of distance. space,
shadow and the enormous visual transformation of the appear-
ance of objects from different perspectives. We can scarcely
imagine Virgil's confusion. We developed the complicated cognitive
activity that allows us to see visual objects during the uncon-
sciousness of our early childhood. At a very early stage of devel-
opment, we too were like newly-sighted persons, for whom space
and distance did not exist. We would reach out to touch the
moon. When young children begin to develop the cognitive activity
that transforms their meaningless sensations into a meaningful
world of experience, they have many advantages the older newly-
sighted person has lost. '

A telling story, don't you think?

What Alexandra calls 'cognitive processes' and 'cognitive activity' is what I would call Consciousness. And this faculty or agency is the faculty or agency which, as Alexandra says, 'transforms meaningless sensations into a meaningful world of experience.'

Now, it is clear to me that 'the meaningful world of experience' is neither the objective world of Newtonian science nor the probablistic one of quantum mechanics. It is instead the imaginative invention of human consciousness.

Let's take another look at what Alexandra has to say.

'Since reductive science has adapted the world to suit its re-
search methods, and adopted certain preconceptions that facili-
tate such research, our present capacity to see the world is re-
stricted by these preconceptions. As a result, the quality of the
light reductionism generates is also limiting -- although differently
limiting than the Church's light. Mechanistic science's light re-
duces the reality and color of the world to gray and black shad-
ows. Havel, Hammarskjold and Solzhenitsyn, among others, call
on us to learn to see the world in its full garb of color, beauty and
richness, by developing the ideas to understand this richness as it
is. Developing a light of this kind, by avoiding the limiting
preconceptions of reductive science, is the pivotal challenge for a
postmodern renaissance.'

It is Consciousness which supplies us with the constructs and theories by which we order, assign meanings to, and make sense of our sensations and measurements. Thus any attempt to explain consciousness in terms of a biological theory or any other theory that is a product of consciousness is doomed to failure even before it begins. A shoe cannot explain the cobbler. It is that simple.

Furthermore, for a thing to exist, surely there must exist its negation. For every state, there exists necessarily an equal and opposite state; and this symmetry holds not only in the case of Newtonian action and reaction, but matter and anti-matter, energy and mass, motion and space-time warp, and so on. For every shoe a cobbler makes, there is a shoe he didn't make. This shoe which he didn't make is the mental blueprint or conscious counterpart of the shoe he did make. The blueprint or conscious counterpart is, in effect, what brought the shoe he made into existence. While we can account for the tangible shoe in terms of an idea in the head of its conscious maker, how do we account for the faculty or agency which produced the idea? How do we account for singularities such as this; for things without the counterpart which the rule of symmetry demands? There is the rub.

Consciousness has NO counterpart. This mysterious entity is the end point of a regression or compression. It is the end of the line beyond which we cannot know or go.

I go again to the workface.

If the scientists now publishing 'Consciousness' books had read Godel, Chaitan, Penrose, or even 'recursive epistemologist,' Bateman, and taken on board their proofs as well as the conclusions to be drawn from chaos theory, they would not be proposing 'hard-wired' solutions to consciousness, evolutionary theories of the brain, or organic explanations of spirituality.

These people fail to see that they lack the right answers. First of all consciousness is not a behavior. It is not the behavior of an organ such as the brain nor is it the motions of some as yet to be discovered psychic particle. These folk seem to forget that explaining my behavior – internal and external -- is not the same as explaining me, my identity, my purposes, or Why am I here? It is all very well to posit a positron or a gluon because without it your conceptual model will not work and produce the predictions you want, but another thing entirely to confuse a conscious human being with the behavior of neurons deployed in networks in a brain.

But confusing behavior with identity is only the first mistaken step made by our reductionist farriers, busy at their forges shaping metal to suit the hooves of their theories. Their second and far greater error is to fail to get to grips with the central problem of consciousness which is how to account for the entity (a conscious one) which can regard, order, and run itself.

Typically, a reductionist will resort to the slipshod argument that: I know myself to exist by the fact that I see myself in the bathroom mirror, in the eyes of my lover, named in the account of a bank holdup in the newspaper, or pictured at a celebrity gathering photographed for a spread in 'Hello' magazine. All these evidences only confirm that the material and behaving body is/was there. We do not see our real selves in any of these mirrors. We only see perceptions, not the perceiver. A conscious agent (by definition) knows itself to BE without the help of any mirrors. Nevertheless, in a culture where material evidences are the only proof of identity, it is entirely understandable that the principle should extend to the Self as well.

When I say material evidences are the ONLY proof of identity in our culture, I don't believe I am exaggerating. Look at the cult of celebrity, at logos on clothing, at social networking, at the vast and oppressive array of security measures which set out to map every individual to a finger print, digital facsimile of a face, speech pattern, credit rating, police record, network card serial number, tax number, credit card number, etc. Identity in the post modern age is a cluster of identifying marks employed for purposes of social control. Why don't they just stamp an indelible bar code on our foreheads at birth and be done with it?

There are no MATERIAL/BEHAVIORAL evidences of the agency which projects an order upon the material world. The material world, so far as we know, it is our projection, as even the quantum people would assert. As individuals, we know the world as it is interpreted by our various senses and organs. What we know and experience is something we construct. If we had the sensory equipment of an alligator or an otter, we would doubtless construct and know a different world altogether.

A radar system or cat-scan apparatus constructs a 'reality' according to its special sensory equipment. We do likewise with the sensory equipment we possess. Our 'radar' system is physical and operates according to electro-chemical principles. Although reductionists are forever confusing the two, our radar system is NOT that agency which brings US individually (we who are NOT a cluster of behaviors exhibited by a corporeal body) into existence. It is this agency which monitors the output of sensors such as fingers and eyes and it is this agency which conceives of the reasons, models, and theories to explain sense data. The data delivered by neural pathways or chemical messengers contains no meaning and no meaning or interpretation is bestowed upon it by any of the organs of the body. Consciousness is the agency responsible for making sense of the data, for consciousness provides a Self to which the data can be meaningfully referred. Without a Self as a reference, all the sense data in the world is meaningless.

Sense data is only meaningful when it changes something in me or in what might be called the domain of ME. The sense data cannot be responsible for ME for they cannot be both the subject and the object of interpretation. Data (which is always 'code') requires a separate interpreter if it is to gain meaning. Likewise, it is impossible to reason axioms from their corollaries. Recursion simply does not work. It is impossible to explain the perceiving agency (ME) by reference to the objects and order I perceive in the world. Yes we know what the perceiver (Consciousness) is doing. It is ordering our experience of a material world. What we cannot do is say that the perceiver is also a part of that same order (bio-electrical, quantum, etc.) which it is projecting upon the world. Even a movie projector cannot be in the picture it is projecting. Is this so difficult to understand?

Apparently so.

- from the topic: Consciousness

Recent Posts by phoebus:

Re: Consciousness

June 29, 2009 by phoebus

Reason vs. Illusion?




Why so many recent books and articles debunking religion? I will venture here an explanation of why there are so many of these anti-religious diatribes of late.

In the West there are many who perceive in Islamic revolutionary fervor another world-wide conspiracy; a conspiracy to destroy democracy, free enterprise, and the 4-wheel, gas-fired, outdoor barbecue, and especially the one with the 5-speed gearbox. Now that these fearful folks have discovered that there is, after all, not a Red under every bed, they are compelled to invent a new threat or must have one invented for them by the usual political hacks, media quacks, and last but not least, the philosophers.

The book-length attacks mounted by Richard Dawkins, among others, harry the 'stories' which attach to the Christian religion particularly and show the inconsistencies of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection when compared to reasonable, scientific fact. Apparently religionists must give way to delusions out of some psychological necessity. This is a bit rich considering that Dawkins is hardly dispassionate and reasonable, and in fact may well be mad and unhinged. If anybody is deluded, it might well be Dawkins himself, who projects his inner demons upon religionists of every stripe, but particularly upon the black tide of Muslim fundamentalists threatening to emerge in full force from the dank wells of ignorance and superstition in the East.

The real reason for this persecution of the religious is to prepare
for what our great minds sense is certain to be a world-scale religious
war; a war in which the Light of Reason opposes the Dark of Superstition. Of course our own St. George (Richard Dawkins?) will slay this dragon. (He will succeed where the Republican party's anointed champion and a lesser mind, plain George Dubbya, failed.)

Despite the ravings of Dawkins and the less hysterical mutterings of other paragons of reason, there is not the remotest possibility that a midwestern school board is going to finally deny a child knowledge of the theory of evolution. After all, the theory of Intelligent Design implies its unintelligent, Darwinian counterpart. It is also highly unlikely that Bible Belt fundamentalists are going to hinder the grand march of Science. The Republican Party took up the cry to ban stem cell research for purely cynical and strategic reasons.

Any reasonable, rational atheist must deny himself the soft targets. He
must recognize that there are no arguments to be made against BELIEF. It is not a requirement of belief that it be consistent with fact. Belief
has to do with that which does NOT lie in the domain of fact. For
scientists, facts determine the truth. The truth for religious believers
is not a demonstrable truth, but is discovered INSIDE where it cannot be
confirmed by independent experiment. Is this not obvious?

Eons ago in a college Phil 01 class, we debated the question: Does
God exist. And here it is again in 2009, answered routinely in the negative by gangs of rationalists ganging up on religion. After all this time, perhaps we should ask: Does gravity exist? Apparently gravity is a fact like any other, known at least since Newton's day. But gravity is NOT a fact any more than God is a fact. The term 'gravity' expresses a RELATION between Mass and Acceleration. The term 'God' expresses a
relation between Man and Creation.

We can measure mass and acceleration and attribute these and other properties/behaviors to 'forces,' but these 'forces' have no material existence. They are not facts. Aside from the behaviors or side-effects themselves, there is nothing to prove the existence of 'forces' such as gravity. Behavior is a fact, a fact which IMPLIES a cause, but says nothing about the nature of that cause. It might be that God is doing it, for all we know. Furthermore, it is not rational to define a cause in terms of its effects and then to turn around and define the effects as the product of the self-same cause. Circular reasoning such as this is not a hallmark of rationality.

Is it rational to rely on a mathematical relation as proof of existence? I doubt it, but if rationalists insist, then is it not reasonable to advance the mathematical order in Nature as 'proof' of an order-Maker?

I am aware that any number of ambitious doctoral candidates are intent on 'discovering' the graviton or perhaps the gravity wave. Such a find would undoubtedly provide the waiting world with a Nobel-winning explanation of gravity. I am skeptical. Wave or particle -- take your choice -- both are gods of a sort. Their existence may be implied (by the mathematical model or by 'triangulation,') but neither can be measured DIRECTLY nor ascertained as material fact.

Atheists suppose that there is no conscious principle operating in the
universe. They insist that behavior is driven solely by chance and
necessity; that all phenomena can be satisfactorily accounted for as
physical effects produced mindlessly and mechanically and in timely
succession by material causes.

It is here that atheists must defend their case; defend it against
Godel, Mandelbrot, Gregory Chaitin, Bohm, de Broglie, Arthur Koestler,
Whitehead Jung, and others, all of whom advance (in an impeccably
rational manner) trenchant criticisms of the mechanistic model favored
by Science.  This bottom-up model does NOT account for all observable facts (particularly the facts of living things) and, significantly, does not
account for itself. Even a turn-coat Stephen Hawking has lined up on the
side of the 'exceptionalistists.'

I believe that there is an active principle operating in the universe; one which is conscious. It is this active principle which is responsible for life and creation, not some machine. The religions have concocted various 'stories' to explain this principle to uneducated, simple folk. If you are lazy, like many a rationalist who attacks religion, you can attack the stories and easily show that they are unreasonable and inconsistent with the limited order which Science projects on the world. So what? I think rationalists could do a lot better than confirm the comfortable prejudices of their kindred clockheads.








Re: Consciousness

June 6, 2009 by phoebus


Consciousness


In a previous post I talked about dissipative systems, a subject which would appear to have nothing to do with consciousness. There is, I believe, a vital connection between the two, which I tried to make clear. I will try harder this time around.


I can do no better, perhaps, than to quote Mr. Dissipative Systems himself, Ilya Prigonone, a Nobel winner and a life-long student of these systems. I quote from the book he co-authored with Isabelle Stengers: 'Order Out of Chaos; Man's new dialogue with Nature,' Flamingo, 1985.


First here is Prigonone's definition of a dissipative system.


“During the nineteenth century the final state of thermodynamic evolution was at the center of scientific research. This was equilibrium thermodynamics. Irreversible processes were looked down on as nuisances, as disturbances, as subjects not worthy of study. Today this situation has completely changed. We now know that far from equilibrium, new types of structures may originate spontaneously. In far from equilibrium conditions we may have transformation from disorder; from thermal chaos, into order. New dynamic states of matter may originate, states that reflect the interaction of a given system with its surroundings. We have called these new structures 'dissipative structures' to emphasize the constructive role of dissipative processes in their formation. …”


And he goes on, eventually making the link with what he calls a function which is “able to perceive, to take into account … differences in the external world.” I call this function consciousness. While I confine it to living things, Prigonone finds it even in 'prebiological' entities.


Mr. Prigonone continues:


“Matter near equilibrium behaves in a repetitive [predictable Ed.] way. On the other hand, far from equilibrium, there appears a variety of mechanisms corresponding to the possibility of occurrence of various types of dissipative structures. [What a gargle! Blame the translator. What I believe he means to say is that something new and not determined by initial conditions may appear. Ed.] For example, far from equilibrium, we may witness the appearance of chemical clocks; chemical reactions which behave in a coherent, rhythmical fashion. We may also have processes of self-organization leading to non-homogeneous structures and to nonequilibrium crystals.


“We would like to emphasize the unexpected character of this behavior. Every one of us has an intuitive view of how a chemical reaction takes place; we imagine molecules floating through space, colliding, and reappearing in new forms. We see chaotic behavior similar to what the atomists describe when they spoke about dust dancing in the air. But in a chemical clock the behavior is quite different. Oversimplifying somewhat, we can say that in a chemical clock all molecules change their chemical identity simultaneously, at regular time intervals. If the molecules can be imagined as blue or red, we would see their change of color following the rhythm of the chemical clock reactions.


“Obviously such a situation can no longer be described in terms of chaotic behavior. A new type of order has appeared. We can speak of a new coherence, of a mechanism of 'communication' among molecules. But this type of communication can arise only in far from equilibrium conditions. It is quite interesting that such communication seems to be the rule in the world of biology. It may in fact be taken as the very basis of the definition of a biological system.


We begin to see how, starting from chemistry, we may build complex structures, complex forms, some of which may have been the precursors of life. What seems certain is that these far from equilibrium phenomena illustrate an essential and unexpected property of matter: physics may henceforth describe structures as adapted to outside conditions. [That is adapted as if they 'know' these outside conditions. Ed.] We meet in rather simple chemical systems a kind of prebiological adaptation mechanism. To use somewhat anthropomorphic language: in equilibrium, matter is blind, but in far from equilibrium conditions it begins to be able to perceive, to 'take into account,' in its way of functioning, differences in the external world.


“The artificial may be deterministic and reversible. The natural contains essential elements of randomness and irreversibility. This leads to new view of matter in which matter is no longer the passive substance described in the mechanistic world view, but is associated with spontaneous activity. … Today interest is shifting from substance to relation, to communication, to time. … This change is so profound that, as we stated in our Preface, we can really speak of a new dialog of man with nature.”



While Prigogine uses the word 'mechanism' quite often, (perhaps in order not to rattle the cages of the mechanists too strongly) he denies and refutes the concept. His argument, stripped of its nods to reigning scientific dogma, may be readily construed as asserting that matter or 'chemical systems' are, when in 'far-from-equilibrium' conditions, conscious. These systems are capable of responding or adapting efficiently. Efficiency is always measured relative to a purpose.





Re: Consciousness

June 2, 2009 by phoebus

Consciousness

When it is apple blossom time in West Orange, New Jersey and we are having a peach of a time, we are likely to proclaim that life is a bowl of cherries. Many more of us are likely to agree that life or living things are a homeostatic system, one constantly adapting to internal and environmental changes in order to maintain a healthy and energetic equilibrium or stasis. Then there are a few who argue that living things are dissipative systems, meaning that they change and adapt, NOT only in order to maintain a status quo, but in order to grow and to move to new and different equilibria. Darwin and his neo-darwinist followers appear to have forgotten that living things have to do more than simply adapt. They must also grow; meaning that they must change form and function, not only according to external pressures, but also to meet internal demands according to their particular program of growth. Stasis does not allow for growth, and here we have a problem.

The idea that living things are dissipative systems overcomes the problems incurred by the homeostatic model, but this idea also sets up 'problems' of its own. But first, what is a dissipative system? Here is what Ilya Prigogine, who coined the term 'dissipative system,' might say:

“In classical thermodynamics we have to do with equilibrium structures like, for instance, crystals. In non-equilibrium thermodynamics other ways of organization (into wholes) emerge. So when a dynamical system interacts with the outside world, it can be forced into a far-from-equilibrium condition by continually taking in, and exporting matter and energy. In this way dissipative systems can be formed which exhibit special behaviors.

“Dissipative systems can lead to a form of supramolecular organization. While the parameters, which describe the generation of crystal structures, can be deduced from the properties of the crystal components, especially from the range of their attraction and repulsion forces, dissipative structures are a reflection of the global situation of the condition of non-equilibrium which produces them.” (PRIGOGINE & STENGERS, 1986, Order out of Chaos, p. 144).

I say the concept of dissipative systems is a 'problem' because it causes problems for Darwinists and all evolutionists who are gradualists. It causes problems for scientists generally whether they are determinists or whether they are probablists who subscribe to the Copenhagen Interpretation; and who thus eschew the individual case and opt instead to deal (statistically) only with aggregates. It causes problems for anyone attempting to model form and function in Nature and in living things in the standard three dimensions. There are no straight lines in Nature, no equilateral triangles, and no linear mathematics.

The notion of dissipative systems causes problems for those who conceive of systems as unconscious meat grinders whose Outputs are strictly determined by the nature of their Inputs. The dynamics of weather systems and other dynamical systems in Nature are not deterministic in the usual sense. Cause does not produce effect in a linear fashion, but in a disproportionate, non-linear fashion. Hence natural processes such as evolution do not adhere to the gradualist model, but are better described by the cladists in England or by a series of eruptions in Stephen Jay Gould's long-trending 'punctuated equilibrium.'

In financial markets, estimates of deviation from the mean price (also known as estimates of 'risk') habitually rely on the Gaussian curve, an artifact of the linear, gradualist world of the 19th Century. Here is what Benoit Mandelbrot has to say about this retrograde state of affairs:

'Any attempts to refine the tools of modern portfolio theory by relaxing the bell curve assumptions, or by "fudging” and adding the occasional “jumps” will not be sufficient. We live in a world primarily driven by random jumps, and tools designed for random walks address the wrong problem. It would be like tinkering with models of gases in an attempt to characterise them as solids and call them “a good approximation”. While scalable laws do not yet yield precise recipes, they have become an alternative way to view the world, and a methodology where large deviation and stressful events dominate the analysis instead of the other way around. We do not know of a more robust manner for decision-making in an uncertain world.'

The failure of the 'financial services industry' and of ts risk managers to anticipate the flight of Black Swans which have toppled the credit house of cards erected by these 'masters of the universe,' can be traced directly to their reliance on 'bell curve assumptions,' the same assumptions which underlie virtually all reasoning from statical data in science.

We say we live in a 3-dimensional word, but the world we live in is not one of three regular dimensions, but of one of an infinite number of irregular, fractal (fractional) dimensions. The regularities to be found in Nature are those, not of lines and angles, but of scale. The only thing regular about a cumulus cloud is the self-similarity of its constituent puffs and billows at different scales. Computer renditions of mountains, trees and other natural forms take advantage of self-similarity at successive scales by simply repeating a simple pattern, but at varying scales.

A great deal more could be said on the subject of dissipative systems, but what I have given in the way of description so far suffices, I believe, to make clear that there are rational and powerful objections to the reigning 'scientific' prejudices of the day. It is not only 'fundamentalists' who find fault with a purposeless evolution and a cogs & levers or an electro-mechanical explanation of human behavior. I have labored in previous submissions to point out that life depends on a flow of coded information. As the information is in code – either in the genetic code or in the sequence of signals routed through the brain – it requires interpretation. Interpretation, in turn, demands a conscious agent to interrogate the coded input and then to initiate the appropriate action. Today I present yet another line of reasoning which ordinary, rational people may use to panic the super-rationalists among us who cling desperately to their 19th Century prejudices.

Re: Consciousness

April 22, 2009 by phoebus

Consciousness & Evolution

Let me make it clear. I do not deny evolution. My quarrel is with the mechanism proposed by Darwin, namely that the wheels and levers of random mutation and natural selection can, over time, originate and adapt species. This description ignores the role of Consciousness in evolution. Consciousness not only plays a role in evolution, it MUST play a role. Consciousness does and must mediate between environment and organism.

In the hard sciences it is conceded that the 'environment' is subjective. The 'environment' is a construct engineered by conscious human beings. It is both objectively and subjectively 'constructed' by human beings. Although they seem not to realize it, this fact spikes the Darwinists' and Neo-Darwinists guns. Human kind is not adapted by circumstances, but the other way around. We adapt our circumstances, our environment. For as long as man has been conscious, he has shaped his own evolution.

Given the choice, human beings will always adapt their circumstances (their physical and economic circumstances and their world view) to suit their needs, rather than change their minds, their behavior, their life styles, or their expectations. The penchant for avoiding reality rather than facing it and perforce adapting to it is what drives Progress – technical and cultural. It is an unwillingness to adapt from within which motivates people to 'better themselves,' although in doing this, they are not bettering themselves but their circumstances or environments.

While the evolution of the birds and the beasts may yet (in spite of domestication and destructive changes to their environments) be shaped by purely physical factors, the evolution of man is shaped almost exclusively by cultural factors. As it is man who creates culture, it is man who is responsible for his own evolution. It is conscious man who drives his own evolution, not the impersonal facts of random mutation and natural selection.

This conclusion will not surprise anyone who takes two minutes to consider the matter. So called 'primitive man' understood it well enough. He wondered how he and his fellows had come to have sufficient understanding of themselves and their environment that they could know that they were not accidents, not sparks thrown off by the grinding of stone against stone over geologic epochs, not epiphenomena produced by a mindless rearrangement of genes, not zombies. Our primitive forbear told himself stories in order to account for his sensibilities and his presence on this Earth. From these stories eventually came institutionalized religion.

Darwin's 'story' is a threat to those who take the old stories to be literally true. This is a threat of little account in my view, particularly as the Darwinists pose a much larger threat to man's cultural, moral, and spiritual evolution. Darwinism would render evolution merely a dumb, mechanical procedure and so render human will, moral decision, courage, generosity, and grand design simply meaningless.

There is more.

There is something badly wrong with the mechanics of evolution. The engines of random mutation and natural selection lack the means to transmit power to the wheels of evolution. The theory proposes no gearbox and drive shaft with the result that no rubber gets applied to the road. It is not immediately apparent why Darwin's theory revs energetically but goes nowhere. To understand why this is so, one must understand CODE.

For Darwin's theory to work 'information' has to pass from mutant individuals (who enjoy a survival advantage because of the mutations they carry) to their offspring. Information is a funny substance. It has no tangible existence. It is neither a behavior nor a thing, hence it is something quite different from facts. Perhaps the best way to describe information is to call it a property of facts, which are in their turn tangible and objective.

A piece of sheet music is a thing, a fact. The lines and blobs of dried ink on its surface are also facts. The lines and blobs are a code. Because the lines and blobs are not put down randomly, but according to a set of rules (a 'key') they are not meaningless, but meaningful. These marks mean something, but only to someone (some CONSCIOUS somebody) who understands the code and who therefore comprehends the meaning of the marks. The code does not yield its meaning or yield up its information automatically. Something must be introduced from outside the box, namely a conscious agent.

Conscious of the information or meanings enciphered in the marks, a musician may then transpose that information to a musical instrument, entering the information by means of a new code of fingering and blowing or bowing. The musical instrument will produce pressure waves in air. These waves are yet another code bearing information or meanings. The sequence of pressure waves, depending on their pitch, amplitude and accompanying overtones will vibrate the ear drums of listeners. The human ear is another transponder and it will place a succession of electro-chemical pulses on a neural pathway in response to the pressure waves. The pulses are eventually heard, rendered intelligible, or decoded by human brains.

The point I mean to make here is quite simple. If information or meaning is to pass between one medium and another or if information is to pass between individuals, it has to be encoded and then decoded; enciphered and then deciphered, encrypted and then decrypted.

Just as a 100 monkeys pounding a hundred typewriters can very possibly duplicate the works of Shakespeare, so time, accident, and mindless manipulation can very possibly eventuate in a coded message such as a piece of sheet music. On the other hand it is safe to say that neither time, nor accident, nor mindless manipulation can decode such a piece of sheet music for the simple reason that the key and the meaning are supplied from elsewhere. The meaning does NOT lie in the message itself, but is supplied by a conscious agency; an agency capable of understanding that the message is code; an agency capable of seeing the message in the code; and most importantly, an agency conscious of self and thus capable of relating the message to self and thus endowing it with meaning.

It takes two to create meaning, otherwise what you have is the sound of one hand clapping. On the one hand you must have information and on the other an agent who understands how the information relates to self; an agent who is conscious of what meaning the information has in the context of Self and the World.

Let's now get back to the theory of evolution and follow the information trail.

Let us just suppose that mindless, accidental mutation manages to encipher a potentially meaningful message in the genetic material of an individual. Let us also suppose that this individual distributes the altered genome generously. We then have a circumstance where some useful information or instructions are introduced into the cells of offspring at the very start of their development. At some point in their ongoing development this useful information will, according to evolutionary theory, equip the offspring with new organs, new functions, new properties, or new behaviors.

This scenario supposes that the code or the encrypted message is a kind of physical force. There is the unspoken assumption here that the message does not have to be understood in order to have physical effect. Since when do instructions alone accomplish the task? When have an architect's plans ever built a building? The instructions must be understood and acted on before they can have effect. A CONSCIOUS entity must be a part of the equation. It is this agency which understands and acts.

The theory of evolution does not address this lack of a conscious agency. The theory omits a necessary bridge between code and action. Code only means something to a conscious agency capable of acting. No conscious agency is identified by Darwin's theory. There is no mediator or bridge where there should be one.

Of course, the lack of a bridge is disguised by the assertion that stimuli carry their own meanings and that they are themselves capable of pushing all the right buttons to get appropriate responses. After all computers respond appropriately when the right keys are pressed. Yes, yes. But this overlooks the fact that the meanings of the key presses have already been laid down in silicon by the manufacturer of the chip which holds the computer's BIOS (Basic Input Output System). The chip was without doubt designed by a conscious agent. Present theories of the brain hold that cranial networks are a BIOS on steroids. Would they agree that the brain is a BIOS designed by a conscious agent?


Re: Consciousness

March 16, 2009 by phoebus

Consciousness and the Brain

There have been a lot of 'brain' books published lately, evidence of a rush to propose solutions to one of the few remaining 'problems' in science, namely consciousness. Like the Theory of Everything, a theory of consciousness is proving elusive. It seems there is a lot 'we don't know yet.' Nevertheless, it seems 'we' must plunge on.



If God were measurable or if His behavior or its physical correlates could be observed, He would be a bona fide scientific fact. He would be real, for in science, the Reality is what can be measured. The scientist 'knows' only that which can be observed and measured. This limitation gives rise to a good deal of uncertainty as you can imagine, for it puts the Observer – a mere mortal – in the driver's seat.

Depending on the day and the state of his digestion, the Observer may 'know' a disturbance that is detected by his instruments as a wave or a particle. Which is it then? As Heisenberg pointed out, the 'wavicle' is both. It is a superpostion of states until the Observer resolves the uncertainty by recording his observation. By so doing, he causes the wave function to collapse, yielding a single outcome. The Observer, then, is in a position to influence the Reality. Furthermore, in the opinion of quite a few, he may go so far as to construct the entire Reality. When a tree falls in a remote forest, and there is no one about to observe the event, did it happen or did it not? Apparently, in the view of many, it did not.

If the argument advanced in the 'brain' books could be put in a nutshell, it would be this. The Reality is a derivative of electro-chemical processes occurring in brain tissue; it is a function of the brain; it is a world-picture produced by neuron-firings and the like. The proof of this lies in the observation that particular brain behavior correlates with particular physical behavior and mental imagery.



Cognitive scientists, like all scientists, are bound to try and describe Things in terms of their behavior. Thus their attempts to describe consciousness as brain behavior. I can appreciate that their intention is to demonstrate a causal connection between brain and behavior, for where this correlation can be established, one can control the behavior by physical and chemical interventions. Medical scientists have come up with drugs which can control mood and Third World drug barons have supplied the civilized world with agents which can alter brain states. These successes encourage the view that the brain is the agency responsible for organizing human affects and behavior, and this includes consciousness which is considered simply as another brain behavior.

It all sounds very impressive, but in actuality scientists have erected here a house of cards on quicksand.



Their first mistake is to assume that describing the behavior is the same as describing the Thing. Gravity, for example, is never defined for what it IS; always in terms of its (predictable) effects. Scientists are on the hunt for the 'graviton' in order to lay blame on it for gravitational effects. Supposing that the graviton is detected. It will only be 'known' by its effects; the traces it leaves on a photographic plate on in a cloud chamber or the equivalent.



If you focus on the elephant's ear, as scientists do, then you miss the gorilla in the room. Their monocular focus is (conveniently perhaps) the second great mistake which scientists routinely make. If you narrow your focus sufficiently, then you fail to answer the hard questions. The two hard questions are: (1) What IS? and, (2) What does IT mean?



Many see God as the First Cause. I think it is wrong to make God responsible for what is wrong with the world, or to make him responsible at all. The role of God – the one and only role of God, as I see it – is to supply meaning to what happens. The personal counterpart of this God, as I see it, is individual Consciousness, for it is this Consciousness which supplies meaning to the events in our lives. Meaning comes out of a relation, a relation between one's self and what I would call a Reference. Code of any kind: a language, a traffic sign, Morse code, genetic code, a mariners' chart, an element of musical notation, a gesture, etc. is meaningless without a Reference which serves as a key to unlock its meaning. Consciousness is the key to the meanings of the things and events we experience. The fact that we experience or know things and events as more than data or more than information; the fact that we attach meanings to data or information, is proof in my view of consciousness.



Life and survival on Earth depend entirely on meanings. It is not the physical relationships (which obsess scientists) which matter, but their meanings. If a young child touches a hot stove, it learns something. It learns that hot stoves MEAN hurt. It does not learn the atomic number of iron or its specific heat. This information is of interest only to the scientist who is intent on exploiting the properties of iron in order to manufacture iron suitable for stoves. What the scientist might learn in probing the stove has meaning in relation to a purpose which is, so to say, 'objective.' The meaning of the stove for the child, on the other hand, is subjective.



The hurtful encounter with the stove increases the child's awareness of self or self-in-the-world. Every such encounter serves to increase a child's awareness of self. The child's encounters may CAUSE pleasure or pain, but the MEANING of them is NOT pleasure or pain (as we suppose.) It is the increased self-awareness or Consciousness which they provoke. The meaning is not objective, but reflexive. Now, if you try to imagine an encounter which would increase self-awareness or Consciousness to the maximum, then that encounter would have to be an encounter with God, (although some would argue that it would have to be an encounter with the 'travel agent' who books you on a trip on LSD.) In either case your's is an encounter with or an entrance into a reality which lies outside the box, which is to say, outside the world of sensible things and therefore outside the world known to scientists and other monists.

There is certainly a correlation between function and specific tissue in the brain. The evidence for this is that damage to brain tissue in a particular location results in loss of a particular function. If we are talking about music, then the brain is like an electric guitar. Without an external supply of energy, it is dead. When it is powered up, it translates finger movements to sounds and does this according to a set of rules. Although it behaves according to rule, it is unaware of what it is doing or why. If one of its strings should break, then it loses an aspect of its function.

Cognitive scientists, as well as other scientists, are satisfied that their model of the brain (the brainless brain) accounts for human action and feeling, including consciousness. Besides the logical difficulties which their description presents, their description is contradicted by a number of factual findings. I will mention three of these that I know of. The first is the phantom-leg phenomenon. Amputees will occasionally sense that they still possess the leg which has been amputated. An automaton brain could not make this mistake since it is entirely devoid of imagination. All it knows is what it directly experiences (including its own behavior.) There is a question, too, as to whether it knows even this much since it is not capable of self-reflection. It lacks self-awareness or consciousness.



The second contradiction of the standard model comes out of an experiment with a blind man. He was not blind a birth, but suffered destruction of his sight in his youth. This meant that, provided he could see at all, he could recognize and name familiar objects if he 'saw' them. Experimenters wired up his back with a grid of small adhesive, metal discs which could be could be selectively heated across a range of comfortable temperatures. Think of a halftone. Here is a grid of dots which can be selectively adjusted across a range of neutral colors from pure white to fully saturated black. Once you have the picture of the halftone in your mind, just imagine the dots as heat pads whose temperatures can be varied.



A halftone, as is well known, can be altered to produce any picture you choose just by adjusting the color density of the dots. In the same way the experimenters' 'halftone' of heat pads could be used to produce pictures by selectively altering the heat intensity of the pads. To complete the experiment, the researchers hitched their electrical halftone to a video camera so that the camera's sensor controlled the 'halftone' on the skin of the blind man's back. The experimenters then darkened the room and pointed the camera at a lighted candle. The blind man recognized ('saw') the candle and confirmed this by naming it and describing it.

What this experiment implies is that the brain is much more than an operating system embedded in tissue; an operating system which runs a continuous program for translating sensory inputs to physical or behavioral outputs. In the case of the blind man, the brain was able to deduce that the signals coming from the heat matrix were meant to convey picture information. As well as information content, it recognized MEANINGS, and in light of this was able to alter its own translation rules. An automaton brain could not possibly do this. It can only respond to signals as if they were physical stimuli. It has no understanding and therefore no understanding of meanings.



Finally, we have numerous cases of persons able to conceive in the mind things which do not exist and never did exist in the sensible world. This simple fact breaks the sacred-to-science causal tie between experience and brain behavior or between sensory experience and its alleged neural correlates. The square root of a negative number exists only in the mind of a mathematician and never in nature. Likewise prime numbers. As physicists are the first to say, the whole quantum conception defies common-sense experience. It has no counterpart or correlate in experience. From here, it is a short step to a dual universe and dualism. Clearly there are things which exist which are not behaviors or other attributes of physical processes susceptible to objective observation, measurement, and control. The construct Pi originated in the mind of a mathematician. It was not 'caused' nor was it found in Nature.












Re: Consciousness

February 11, 2009 by phoebus


On Intelligent Design


Those who are opposed to the theory of Intelligent Design (so-called 'Creationism by the back door') and who would insulate tender minds from the pernicious influence of this diabolical idea by banning its mention in the schools, have obviously benefited from a sanitized education themselves and consequently missed making an acquaintance with the meditative writings of such physicists as Einstein, Bohr, Kelper, Jeans, Eddington, de Broglie, (shall I go on?) Heisenberg, Schroedinger, Planck or Pauli. There are no Americans here, and none born after 1945, so perhaps one can understand why these men, despite the fact that virtually all were Nobel laureates in their time, are little regarded today except as useful history and as persons who no longer speak for science or even for physics.


All of these men undertook, in their personal writings, to compare the roles of science and religion. While they certainly did not agree point-for-point, they nevertheless assumed to exist what de Broglie (citing Duhem) called an 'ontological order,' an order in Nature pre-existing and independent of any human and heuristic representation of that order. The term 'intelligent design' is perhaps an unfortunate choice since it suggests – especially to the persnickety promoters of brain hygiene – the existence of a godlike Designer. 'Ontological order' is a better choice since it does not inevitably bring God into theargument. It allows us to concentrate on the important question whichis the nature of the Reality.


The Reality can be of two kinds, and the kind will determine whether man is held accountable only to himself or to a 'higher' purpose. Today's masters of the universe are satisfied that the Reality is a human creation, a human construct. This malleable Reality, they say, is the ever-changing answer to fundamental human needs. Additionally, they point out that the experimenter actually influences the experimental apparatus and not simply the reading or the interpretation of the experimental results. The truth is individual, they insist, and the tree ceases to be when the observer turns away.


If the Reality is a human creation and man is responsible for that creation, then he is only responsible to himself or to whatever Identi-Kit identity he chooses for himself. This is irresponsible behavior … and we wonder why we are in such an ecological and economic mess.


Those who argue for the existence of an ontological order, easily refute the proposition that the Reality isa heuristic one, an invention of the human mind, or an existentialone. [Existence precedes essence.] If the Reality were simply auseful representation devised in the light of experience, then the first men – men without experience and thus without a useful representation of the world -- would have perished and we would not be here today. These first men must have known, a priori, the essentials of how the world worked.


In recent times, it has become quite obvious that the Reality is not a thing shaped by human experience and human need. Herein lies a second powerful argument against human design and for an ontological order. I yield to de Broglie, as he makes this argument far better than I could do.


'Starting from extremely delicate andprecise experiments, the results of which could not be foreseen bythe older theories, the theory of relativity built up a new conception of space and time and of the reciprocal relations, a conception absolutely contrary to all the data of our usual intuition. It thus shows us that our mind can find in itself the necessary elements logically to constitute an interpretation of the ideas of space and time quite different from that which the experience of daily life suggests. By its successes, the theory of relativity therefore shows us how extensive is the parallelism which exists between the rule of our reasoning and the order which conceals itself behind the subtle phenomena which physics of today studies. It shows us that this parallelism infinitely surpasses all that the daily experience of the older generations was able to suggest to us.'


What is the role of man in this'larger,' ontological order? Science cannot help us here, but religion can. The fact of a pre-existent order at least suggests that human limits, needs and responsibilities are not determined bymen alone.










Re: Consciousness

December 4, 2008 by phoebus

The importance of consciousness.



For many, religion is dogmatic belief and its ritual confirmation. For a great many more, it is the sense of a 'presence' in their lives; one which validates them individually and confers upon them an identity neither susceptible to compromise by law or society nor quantifiable by the metrics of money and status. This 'presence' informs human experience, whether joyful or painful, with meaning and does so by relating individual experience to grander purposes and to a higher destiny. As I say, this 'presence' is experienced and thus the evidence for it is assuredly empirical. It is not belief, but fact.


Many religionists recognize this 'presence' as their god. It makes itself felt as a 'force,' yet not a physical force. It is a force for good, a benign force fostering and animating all life. What is important about this force from a human perspective is that it is sensed or experienced only in human consciousness and so does not show up in any instrument readout or litmus test. (Perhaps it is sensed also by all living things and at some level, yet not at a level we would describe as 'mental' or 'mindful.') Since the 'force,' as I call it, does not correlate with any electro-chemical events in the human body nor with any external stimulus, it may not be conceived as a stimulus/response module which can be measured, predicted, and controlled. Regrettably our scientists simply write it off as an incidental 'epiphenomenon of a wetware 'brain' or the like.


Surely even a clockwork universe needs winding and thus a purposer with a proper key to do the winding. This would be the case even if our universe were the equivalent of an anniversary clock which needed winding only once between Big Bangs. Like any formal system, the mechanistic universe constructed by our science is incomplete. It is incapable of explaining itself. No systematic description is complete, whether it be scientific or religious. (The proof of this, for those who like to crack a hard nut, lies in Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.) One is unavoidably driven to the conclusion that there is something outside the 'box,' and beyond measurement and literal description, which is influencing events and behavior inside. For many, this influence would be the force of universal consciousness.


Just as the universe is inconceivable as a complete system (complete in terms of itself alone) so is the human being. The human organs and the control apparatus do not add up to a creature which is innately free as well as passionate, purposeful, playful and inventive.


Behaviorists and other empiricists who lay claim to the truth and to knowledge of the reality are satisfied that 'needs' and 'conditioning' as well as DNA, complex neural networks, and environmental pressures are sufficient to explain the human animal, and that there is no need to invoke a transcendent principle or a ghost-in-the-machine to account for human function and behavior. For the life of me I cannot understand why scientists generally fail to see that the human being cannot be conceived as yet another outcome of blind causation or as one more train of outcomes assembled on a time line. Because it cannot be correlated with any electro-chemical events in the body or with any external stimulus and thus conceived as a stimulus/response module which can be measured, predicted, and controlled, scientists generally simply write off human consciousness. Surely it is not blindingly obvious to me alone that all human behavior of significance is not conditioned or determined, but consequent on independent interpretation and free choice. We are free to choose and to do as we will.


It is a modern wonder that Science, which seeks pattern, and with that predictability and above all control, should deny human consciousness and thus the very capacity which allows human beings to control or adapt circumstances to their liking rather than submit in ignorance to chance and necessity. It is human consciousness which makes a human being different in principle from a plant, although both experience much the same material needs, perform much the same basic life functions, and suffer disease, old age and foul weather. A garden plant (which is presumably unconscious) is not free in the fundamental sense. The grower may honor its 'right' to sunlight and timely sprays of water, but it is nevertheless completely at the mercy of events and circumstances. It is 'free' to adapt or react to its circumstances, it's true, but to be truly free, it must be the interpreter and creator and not the victim of circumstance. In other words, it must be conscious in the same way that a human being is conscious.


To be conscious (as a human being) is to be two things at once; to be not only the actor or the body which behaves, but also the 'intelligence' or 'consciousness' which watches and directs the actor and the motions of the body. To be conscious is to permit consciousness, the 'director,' to instruct the 'actor' as to the part he is to play.


This is not to say that a conscious human being is always the author and never a prisoner of his past, nor is this to say that he is master and entirely in control of his present circumstances. It is never a case of All or Nothing. A conscious person changes what he can, accepts what he cannot change, and hopefully is wise to the difference.


Consciousness is important. It is this capacity which sets us free (or as free as possible) from chance and necessity; free from lives nasty, brutish and short. It sets us free in a way which law and rights do not. It sets us free to be true to ourselves, to discover our individual nature, character and identity, and to do this in relation to a Creator, and not simply in response to real and imagined material and psychological 'needs' or the demands of the dominant ethos: efficiency and conformity.


Re: Consciousness

October 30, 2008 by phoebus

To be Conscious is to be Free Clearly a numerically controlled machine tool can relate the movements of its arms and cutters to the piece it is working on. In a very practical sense it is 'conscious' of itself in relation to its environment. Sensors on its robotic arms provide data to a 'brain' which interprets the data as distance and velocity measurements referenced to the work piece. The machine 'sees' the movements of its arm or arms and guides them in their work. While the machine can perform as if conscious – conscious of itself -- it is nevertheless not conscious in the true sense. It's behavior is dictated entirely by a program. Its responses are entirely a function of the environmental model which has been implanted within it. Significantly, a robot lacks free will. It cannot deviate from its program. Neither can it 'see' and know a world different from the environmental map it must employ for reference. Regrettably, a great many of us behave like robots. We are zombies, many of us, and so perhaps the computational model of consciousness is the right one to describe us and to explain our behavior. Certainly a great many people: military leaders, politicians, salesmen and pitchmen of all kinds, wish we were robots. Nevertheless we are free agents, not robots. Our world-models (they are our projections) vary enormously from person to person. Accordingly, our behavior and emotions; our responses to the world, vary considerably from person to person. We are not robots, and while our behavior can be mimicked to a certain extent by robots (and appear 'intelligent'), we most certainly cannot be known or explained by any computational model. The computational model lacks what Dorothy's friend, the Tin Man, lacked and wanted most, a heart. A conscious being is aware of itself in an environment of which it is also aware. In this respect we are much like robots. At the same time we are free to interpret our environment as we will. We not only construct the 'world' as we will, we are free to act and react in and to that environment as we will. Unlike the robot, we are free; and we are free because we have what the robot doesn't have, namely an independent (and God-given) means of referencing ourselves to the world. We are conscious in a way that the robot is not. The robot can only see to the horizon. It cannot imagine what lies beyond or over the rainbow. It cannot dream. It cannot feel desire or irritation. It can only plan and remember to a limited extent. Our mental world is immense and we are free to roam within its virtually unrestricted compass. The poor robot, in turn, can only move within the Stalinist orbit defined by The Program. At all times, the robot is unfailingly 'on message;' and it is somebody else's message at that. It is this mysterious condition we call 'freedom' that science cannot explain, but religion can. It is the god of religion, not an idolatrous science, which gives us free will. [Science provides us with security – except when it doesn't.] Scientists on the whole would prefer that we were zombies, obedient to the Program and predictable in accordance with statistical inference. The function of religion is to set us free; to inform us of our inalienable rights (God given) and to inspire us to claim them. “Set my people free” -- is a message heard by Thomas Jefferson, the Negro slaves in America, and the Jews in Pharaoh's Egypt. Thus the contest is not as advertised. It is not a contest between faith and knowledge or belief and the evidence, but between life lived in conscious freedom and life denied in unconscious and slavish adherence to The Program.

Re: Consciousness

October 22, 2008 by phoebus

An Answer to Doubters I copied what follows from the website of John Shelby Spong. He answers to doubts put to him by Charles Rainesfrom. These might be classified as the doubts of a humanist. Question and Answer With John Shelby Spong Charles Rainesfrom Royal Oak, Michigan, writes: I am curious about your thoughts on the intersection of Humanism with the teachings of Jesus. I consider myself a Christian, yet my spiritual path was altered by a brilliant Jewish Humanist rabbi who, in one of his Yom Kippur sermons, said something to the effect that if there is a "loving God," how could the Holocaust have happened? If there is a God of good, either "God" is impotent or callously arbitrary or else there is a co-equal God of evil. You've spoken and written much about your feelings of the nature of "God." There may be no point in pursuing that again. Many of the teachings of Jesus, however, seem to me to be seriously humanistic in "philosophy." I've read the Wikipedia articles on Humanism (they go on and on) among other writings. I'm not suggesting that Jesus would be a Humanist (with a capital "H") by definition. My point is that my "reading" on the notion of "eternal life" as a Jesus teaching, (on which so very much of the Christian Church's dogma and distortion is based) is that if we love our enemies (we don't make war) and our neighbors (we feed them and keep them healthy) then we will not kill or starve, nor medically ignore our fellow humans. In short, our care of our fellow humans will perpetuate the species — human life will continue vs. our exterminating ourselves either by choice or neglect, e.g. eternal life." An extension of that is humanity caring for our bio-system, our environment. The Church says it loves God's creation yet continues to be a loathsome laggard rather than a leader in environmental matters. Stripping from Jesus' teachings the hocus-pocus of an intervening deity, I read about a humanist (lower case "H"). Your thoughts and feelings? Dear Charles, You raise a significant number of issues that need to be separated before I can respond to your questions and concerns. First, humanism is not incompatible with the message of Jesus. Behind all our supernatural theology, there is the affirmation that in the humanity of Jesus, God is engaged. Second, in his teaching he emphasizes that all religious rules are for the benefit of humanity or they are without value. The Sabbath was made for the enrichment of human life; he said, human life was not meant to be bound by the religious rules. Third, Jesus teaching about the way to follow him was dedicated to humanity. You serve Christ when you feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked and visit the sick and those in prison. Fourth, when John's gospel sums up the purpose of Jesus' life, it is that "they might have life and have it abundantly." The way to experience the divine, I am convinced, is through the human. Transcendence is met in the midst of life. Eternity is engaged in the realm of the temporal. It is therefore a Christian imperative to live in the service of others even though that principle has been violated many times by institutional religion. I cannot make that case fully in the format of the question and answer part of a column. It is far too complex. Let me simply state my conclusion. The way to eternity is to live fully now. The way to God is to love wastefully now. The way to engage the holy is to affirm being now. I have no great confidence in the eternity of the human species. I do have confidence in the timeless power of love to transform the finite into the wonder of infinity. My next book is on this subject. In its 200-plus pages I hope to address your concerns more fully. It is now scheduled for a fall 2009 publication. Thanks for writing. John Shelby Spong reply quote 20th October 01:25 a.m.

Re: Consciousness

October 20, 2008 by phoebus

I am trying to make a distinction here between knowing something from experience -- I know something because I am or have been aware of it -- and simply believing in something because it was told to me by a person in authority or because I read it an approved book. I can know something without being able to name it. This is not the case with a belief. If I have a belief, I have to have words for it.

Now it is true that after I get bitten by a certain dog, I come to believe that that dog is dangerous. The belief in this case is what you might call an artifact of the experience. But it is the experience that is primary. Supposing I had never encountered this dog. The dog's owner could tell me that the dog was likely to bite, and more than likely I would believe him. But this belief is not based on personal experience.

What I am saying in my post is that a religion is not the belief system, but a body of experience. If I am religious, I experience the world as one ordered by a superhuman power. I do MORE than believe, I experience this as fact. Now this definition does not conform to the dictionary definition. I will allow that the dictionary definition which you give is correct. The majority of people conceive of religion as worshipful observances of a power which we know, not on the basis of experience, but on the basis of 'faith and belief.' I am arguing for an improved definition of religion which would have it based upon experience. If it were so based, then we would not have all this doctrinal squabbling, and we might find that people were actually changed by religious practice such as prayer. As I say it is experience which changes people, not professed belief, and not faith either, although faith may give one the strength to overcome doubts as one waits patiently for knowledge and enlightenment.

Science says experience trumps belief. Well, I am saying that science does not have a monopoly on experience. Religion (as I define it, of course) is not a belief system, but knowledge based upon experience. Science, on the other hand IS a belief system in my book since it does not deal with the Present or the NOW, but with a Past and a Future which lie outside the scope of our awareness. We are aware only of the Present. We experience only the Present. Thus we have knowledge of the Present, while we have only BELIEFS about the Past and FAITH that our theories will prove true in the future.

Re: Consciousness

October 18, 2008 by phoebus

Religion AND Science -- Two Belief Systems



Following a link I discovered on this site I found myself reading of a new church and its founder's list of principles. It seems that all Belief Systems are created equal. Thus there is, after all, no conflict between Science and Religion, for both are Belief Systems, and all systems of ideas – products of fallible human minds – are necessarily of equal merit. Apparently ethical behaviors are practical adaptations which allow humans to live and rub along in groups with a minimum of friction. The upshot seems to be that many of the things which divide us are non-issues. We can forget about them and live happily in peace, love and prosperity.

After I had finished my reading, I was left wondering what it was that was 'religious' about the religion proposed on this site. I agree absolutely that the tenets of any Belief System are not the essentials. Does it really matter if the world was created in six days or six nano-seconds? Either way, you are free to interpret the event as you will. You can interpret it as the outcome of a fortuitous, faster-than-light-speed encounter of a quark and a scintilla of dark matter or you can see it as the handiwork of a purposeful Creator. Incidentally, since we are not in a position to reproduce a super-size Big Bang in the lab, we cannot weigh either belief on the scales of empirical evidence.

Surely it does not matter HOW the world was made, unless of course you want to know the recipe for cooking up further worlds. Surely the job of a religion is to explain or know the world as it is now and not in terms of a past which we cannot fully know. Perhaps it is the job of science, and not religion, to propose plausible scenarios to plug the black holes in our account of the past.

We live in the NOW. We are aware of the world as it is now, while we THINK ABOUT the world as it was in the past (10 seconds ago or 10 million years ago) and speculate as to how it will be in the future. There are two different domains here; the domain of Awareness and the domain of Belief. The job of the scientist is to study evidences of past events and to form theories or beliefs as to their causation. Providing his theories or beliefs are correct, the scientist may then reproduce the same events (effects) in the future by reproducing the conditions which, according to his beliefs, (aka 'laws' or 'theories') 'cause' the outcome he desires and expects. Science is about past causes and future effects. The events it considers (which lie in the past and in the future) fall into the domain of Belief also known as Theory.

We are assured that Theory is supported by 'the evidence' or 'the facts.' This evidence is, it seems, 'objective.' While 'the facts' are indeed objective, 'the evidence' on the other hand is an interpretation put upon the facts by a human mind (or should I say 'brain' ?) which is never more than a subjective instrument. Theory is no more objective than the pain in my big toe. Theory and Belief are equally subjective.

Religion it seems to me is NOT a belief system. It is not, in my opinion, a passive enterprise, but an active one. In my view, the test of a religious person should not be whether he does or does not subscribe to a list of doctrinaire beliefs. He should not be concerned with Who and How Many Days Whomever created the world, for example, or what Amos had to say about buttering a piece of toast. Instead he should be aware of what is happening now; what he is experiencing now and at all levels. He should be present and aware of the presence of his god. He should be aware of a creative force operating in the world; that coincidence is not just coincidence; that accidents are not without meaning, and that behind what appears to random behavior, lies order. He should aware of these things rather than passively believe in them as one might believe any theory or law or doctrine. After all, it is experience which changes a person, not professed belief.










Religion & the Demise of Capitalism

October 10, 2008 by phoebus

Religion and the Demise of Capitalism

It is too early to inter capitalism, for although it appears – judging from the sensational collapse of the stock markets – to have expired, reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. It is, after all, making great headway in China and Russia; and the CPR manipulations performed this week by the world's central banks may yet revive it in the West.

Capitalism has of late changed greatly. It is no longer characterized, at least in part, by what might be called 'religious values': by a strong work ethic, by a deferral of gratification, by thrift, by honorable dealings, by avoidance of debt and the habit of saving for the seven lean years. Late capitalism is very much the reverse of these virtues. Corporatism (an alliance of big business and the state or what is sometimes called Mussolini's business model, National Socialism or 'socialism for the rich') has replaced unfettered competition. The savings rate is at best a pathetic 2 percent of income. Instant gratification is the by-word. Behavior in business is governed by what the law (when exploited) allows and not by one's word. And so on. Clearly religious values no longer shape economic behavior. It is The Market which dictates behavior now. Individual success depends (as in the Darwinian drama) on how well an individual is adapted to the 'System,' and not on his acting independently according to a moral conscience.

It the bad old days, it was a case of the workers having only their labor to sell to the 'bosses' who owned the jobs or the 'means of production.' There have been many changes in the relations between Labor and Capital since. There has since occurred a democratic leveling, I believe. I put this leveling down to the fact that the laboring masses have gained access to easy and nearly unlimited credit. Once upon a time, only a wealthy minority could borrow and invest; (the rest were crucified upon a cross of gold.) In the present day we are all borrowers and investors. We borrow to satisfy present needs and invest to have more than enough to live on in medicated retirement.

If credit is to continue to flow freely year after year, then the economy (i.e. GDP) must grow incessantly in order to keep pace with the burgeoning interest charges on credit (or debt.) In recent weeks, the credit pump appears to have suffered a cardiac arrest. While the reasons for today's credit freeze must be many, I put the cause down to the fact of the wheels coming off the U.S. economy as long ago as the 1970s, when the country first ceased to produce more than it consumed and began then to incur a trade gap which was obligingly filled by foreign lenders. Two billion dollars a day is now required to fill that gap. Loans from overseas have substituted for real economic growth for nigh on 40 years, as factories and jobs have been relocated abroad and the economy transformed into a credit-driven (70 percent of GDP) service economy.

At some point, of course, the gravy train had to come off the rails. If you can keep on borrowing, then you can keep on expanding credit and thus cause your credit-addicted economy to 'grow.' Nevertheless, a debtor cannot keep borrowing forever. Something will come along to destroy 'confidence,' as it did in the present case when the collateral offered to our foreign lenders turned out to be fraudulent – not AAA but sub-prime.

All of 'King' Henry Paulson's horses and all of his men are trying to get the credit pump working again. Clearly their idea of a solution is my idea of The Problem. Their idea is to get the economy 'growing' again by revving up the shopper once more, and to do this by renewing the flow of loans into the U.S. credit- (cess-) pool. This makes about as much sense as opening up the drug routes so that addicts can indulge their bad habits once more. Foreigners are being tapped for loans once again, but the bulk of the lending is coming from sources at home: the Treasury and Warren Buffet, with the tin cup being finally passed to the taxpayer.

The Government's panicked actions imply that the The Problem lies in the failure of the ersatz 'growth' machine. Life support (credit support) has been switched off and the machine is flat-lining. The Government's answer is more of the same; more of the perpetual 'hormone' (credit) injections to fill the gap between production and consumption. I consider today's bust to be a moral failure in the first instance; not an absence of credit, but an absence of 'religious' values governing behavior in the markets and exchanges.

Of course I do not mean to say that a person without religion can't act morally. At the same time, it is clear that a moral conscience does not emerge from chance mutations naturally selected, but from the spiritual source that is venerated by religion.

Re: The Wealthier a Country, the Less Important Religion, Except For The United States. Why? Asks the NY Times

October 4, 2008 by phoebus

I have read the explanations of why Americans are more religious than their prosperous counterparts, apparently contradicting the observation that religiosity declines in step with prosperity. Why are Americans relatively more religious in spite of enjoying unprecedented prosperity (at least until recent days)? The answers given in the link provided by Bob are many and varied as well as reasonable. Yet perhaps there are reasons not explored here, which prompts me to want to add my four cents worth. (Four in order to account for inflation.)

First I want to note that virtually all the explanations are mechanistic ('scientific') ones which cite historical and cultural facts as cause for a predisposition to religious belief and observance, perhaps just as misplaced DNA might predispose one to certain diseases. The respondents overlook an important stimulus for today's renewed religious expression in my view, and that is the wanton materialism which has followed (paradoxically, to be sure) on the heels of the counter-culture's righteous triumphs in the culture wars of the 1970's. I say 'paradoxical,' for what the culture warriors set free was not the prized 'individual,' but a voracious, mindless consumer.

It was an era which witnessed the 'Closing of the American Mind,' as Alan Bloom put it; one which did not produce an imaginative leap forward as promised, but instead a regression. Our own cultural revolution mirrored another such revolution in distant China, and, like a mirror, ours put things in reverse so that every egg-head was not put behind the plow, but every plowhand behind a desk. Our Red Guards were equally unforgiving. This crowd, which burned books while taking for granted the privileges of a higher education, failed to provide either schools or Little Red Books for those left behind. By failing to carry a great many Americans with them, our revolutionaries left a festering split in the American national psyche and a country divided ever since.

The rump -- left behind in the dust of Bob Dylan's tour bus; left to feel the sting of insults blowing in the wind – were the very working stiffs whose grit and down-home virtues Dylan (in slavish emulation of Woodie Guthrie) had once celebrated. Figure that one out. Yet it wouldn't be the first time the plain people were betrayed. And their reaction was to retreat once again into their certainties.

To the youthful sybarite intent on having fun, preferably at great expense, it is the religionist, fascinated with the 'occult,' who fails to get with it or get real. Yet, it is the perfect square he scorns who is smart enough to see that it is not the provocative behavior of the eternally young and beautiful that is 'shocking,' but rather the trashing of the fundamentally religious conception of the human person when moral responsibility is denied.

All religions embody the idea that human beings are moral agents, held to account by a 'higher' power, principle or creator. Beyond the Bill of Rights and all man-made law and regulation, there lie the INALIENABLE rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These rights belong to the authentic human being, not to the fashionable construct protected by law. The same creator or creative principle which confers these rights also charges the recipients with matching responsibilities which are moral. There are things which one should NOT do, for beyond the courts and the arbitrary judgments of dictators and kings, there lies another judge.

Surely custom, tradition and the moral code acquire their power from on high and not from blustering stuffed shirts or from a gang of dead white men given to sententious pronouncements, as our young revolutionaries and putative masters of the universe were wont to believe. It is certainly true that a priestly class will forever attempt to arrogate this power to itself or claim a readiness to intercede with the god on our behalf much as lobbyists are prepared to do (for a fee) when we have to deal with a resistance in the slow-working, looping bowels of an omniscient Government regulatory body. Where this higher power is hijacked and abused, as it often is by either priests in clerical vestments or priests in white lab coats, the answer surely is not to arrogate it to one's self and to lay claim to the authority to define the human being according to 'the situation,' or according to reflexive behaviors, or according to one's own estimation of one's 'human potential.'

We are told now that the human being is a Mr. Nice Guy, naturally peaceful and loving and, of course, automatically intelligent, sensitive and creative. It seems he is not given to violent or bad behavior except when first corrupted, traumatized or victimized by institutionalized prejudice, parents, psychos, the System, Big Money, the Corporations, a shadowy conspiracy which controls the levers and the gears, and so on. It seems we are good except when we are bad; and when we are bad, the fault lies elsewhere. The fault lies in the environment, and it is the Government's responsibility to advance the money or pass a law to correct the fault.

Mr. Nice Guy is today's preferred model for any number of reasons. On the one hand he is free to do as he likes, as his actions are not subject to any moral restraint (although they may be subject to nominal legal restraint.) He may be beholden to his banker and his boss, but certainly not to any god or bound to honor any religious conception of the good man. He need not behave well or honorably; he need only 'survive' while allowing others to do the same. On the other hand, Mr. Nice Guy is the perfect Stimulus/Response mechanism so beloved by scientists and salespeople. He is only a product of his environment and thus can be easily manipulated by manipulating his environment.

One is only free when one is free to choose the Good and reject the Bad; and free also to choose the Bad and reject the Good. If there were no Bad, we could not choose the Good or the Better. If we are eternally a New Age Mr. Nice Guy, then we are denied choice, for everything we do (provided we don't interfere with the strokes of other folks) is necessarily Good. How can you be a bad guy if you are automatically and forever a Mr. Nice Guy?

If we are moral agents, free to choose, there is always a Better; a Better for which we must sacrifice and strive if we are to prove ourselves truly free human beings. Thus religion is not the enemy of freedom, but its passionate upholder. The enemies of freedom are those who deny that human acts are moral choices and who conclude from their objective measurements that 'human behavior' (as they call it) is reducible to mindless and value-free stimulus-and-response or fairly described as an ego trip, paying visits to peak experiences and testing the limits of self-indulgence. Allowing the State, the media, or circumstances to determine one's identity, purposes and dreams is choosing to be a mechanism responsive to stimuli orchestrated by others. If one abdicates moral responsibility, then one is truly a slave of circumstance.

There is the notion that societies and markets are free when self-regulating or self-correcting; free when Government 'interference' is kept to a minimum. To reduce the size and influence of Government, libertarians and free marketeers advise 'starving the Beast' ( by inflicting a thousand tax cuts) and building a Maginot Line of statutory rights. The theory is that, if the larger system is self-regulating, then this permits the individual to go his capricious and self-interested way without let or hindrance. He is 'free' and his irresponsibility is legitimized.

This reasoning is wrong-headed however, for no individual is free unless he is also secure. Security cameras, identity checks, and spam filters; as well as liquidity crunches, bank failures, a dismembered industrial base, job losses, mountains of debt, foreclosures, a busted Social Security system, and a volatile stock market are all proofs, one way or another, of the fact that we are not secure in our 'free' society or in our 'free' markets. Our System is no guarantor of security and thus no guarantor of individual freedom.

The only sure guarantee of an individual's freedom is the assurance that he can trust his neighbor, his associates, his boss, his counter party in a financial exchange, his Government, and lastly the stranger. It was not the absence of a tin star in town which made a pistol, holster and gun belt a necessary fashion statement in the Wild West, but absence of trust. Even the present freeze in interbank lending is being blamed on lack of trust. Ultimately, freedom is guaranteed by trust and not by law and regulation. And need I say that the trustworthy neighbor, etc. is a moral agent; free and responsible; not free because he has no responsibilities beyond pursing self-interest.

So, we come back to the initial question: Why are Americans relatively more religious? Plausible reasons have already been enumerated on the website to which Bob points us. I would add yet another reason. I conclude that we are more religious because a great many of us have been forced, by a frontal attack on a cherished religious insight, to come out of the woodwork, to fight our corner, and to define again the nature of freedom as religion has always defined it. Only moral agents are free. Mr. Nice Guys are not.

Re: Consciousness

September 29, 2008 by phoebus

Bill-f in his reply to a previous post of mine asked: "Is this the deification of consciousness; mind-body dualism run amok?" He went on to declare: "I have never seen any credible evidence of duality, which is to say, no credible evidence that mindfulness is anything other than the result of physical processes."

While I hadn't thought of it; yes, I am proposing a duality; a mind distinct from any physical process. It is no surprise that you find no physical evidence for a non-physical function such as 'mind' or consciousness. I am not sure in what domain the evidence for 'mind' or consciousness lies; perhaps over the rainbow or through the looking glass; in any case, certainly not in the domain of Flat Earth science. I believe the evidence lies in our capacity to reason; to choose the better option in relation to our desires and needs.

Descartes was right. We have a self – an individuality – only because we (and NOT others) are mindful or conscious of who we are. In mind or in consciousness, we know ourselves to BE. We do not wander around the barrens of non-being, devoid of an authentic identity, as many an angst-ridden writer and academic would like us to do. Thanks to an innate capacity to regard ourselves (consciousness again) -- to see ourselves from above as it were; to see ourselves as occupying a place in a physical and social context – we are able to reason efficient ways of satisfying our needs from an environment which can supply these needs.

A neural network, whether it is a simulation run on a computer or the actual bio-electrical structure lodged in the brain tissue of a human being, cannot reason. It can only match stimuli (inputs) to appropriate responses (outputs) mindLESSly and mechanically according to rules or conditions laid down beforehand BY AN EXTERNAL AGENCY, which incidentally, I call 'consciousness.' Reductionists assume, uncritically, that the rules (which dictate when a link is to be forged between a particular stimulus and a particular response) are generated by an internal physical process and not by an external and non-physical process. They are wrong. For efficient rules to 'evolve' even in some sort of competitive scramble, the formative process would have to 'know' what was Success and what was Failure. As the reductionist brain is mindless, it cannot recognize this important difference. A mindful external agency, on the other hand, can recognize this difference.

If the formative agency (smithy at his forge or whatever it is) cannot know whether its tentative responses are getting nearer or further from the mark, how then can the reductionist brain 'learn' appropriate responses? It cannot. In practice the necessary 'error signals' or 'reinforcing' rewards and punishments are introduced by behavioral experimenters; in other words by external agents. When mentioning Pavlov's dogs, I noted that the dogs REASONED that the bell MEANT food. The sound of the bell could not have exerted a physical force on the animals' clockwork brain and thus forge the appropriate link between bell and food.

It it the fashion in science now to ascribe the 'intelligent' (I would say 'efficient') behavior of mechanisms to miraculous 'emergent properties.' Elsewhere any reference to 'emergent properties' is called 'hand waving.' It is a way of saying: 'I don't know.'

Finally, I want to mention as an aside that there are circumstances where even the most sophisticated programs, whether software in silicon or wetware in brain tissue, cannot reach a decision. Take this simple example. Suppose the stimulus ITCH evokes the response SCRATCH. After a certain amount of time, we need another stimulus ITCH GONE which evokes the response HALT SCRATCH. A computer cannot 'know' if the HALT SCRATCH instruction has been executed except by testing for condition, ITCH GONE. If the itch has been satisfied by my scratching, then no stimulus is coming from the previously itchy piece of skin. With no stimulus to respond to, how does the computer brain 'know' the state of that piece of skin? The answer is that it does not know because it lacks the power of reason. It cannot reason that the absence of any signal means Equilibrium or O.K..

The point I mean to make here is that a computer-like brain or any 'physical process' can only act on positive information, it cannot act on NO information or NO stimulus. As I see it, this means that computers cannot revoke any canceling instruction or halting rule once it is implemented, surely a serious defect; and one which, in my view, can only be corrected by an external agency.

Here is another computer behavior which I find troubling. When I switch my computer OFF, can it know that it is switched OFF? No. Being electrically dead, it cannot. If it is to live again, then my hand – something NOT in the resident program, divine intervention perhaps – has to switch it ON again.

Re: Consciousness

September 2, 2008 by phoebus

The argument I am making in my post is that there is room for God.  I am not claiming to have found God, only that there is an enormous gap in the reductionist-science map of the universe that can only be filled by a principle or agency which lies beyond reductionism and thus outside The Box of perceptions or projections we have constructed from the evidence of our physical senses.

It is my opinion that Life is not a chemical accident. Evolution is like the man Virgil in the story that I tell.  It is functionally blind in the same way as Virgil is, for like Virgil, it is unable to assign proper meanings to the things it sees.  Put another way, blind evolution does not understand how the sense data or stimuli it receives as input applies to itself. It does not understand what the data  MEANS.   Only a conscious entity -- one with a sense of itself --can understand the world around it in terms of its needs and intentions.  Evolution, which is purely an electro-chemical process, lacks a conscious component.  It proceeds, according to its proponents, without purpose, intention or any sense of its own needs.  This is a process which could not possibly, in my view, give rise to LIfe.

So, once again, I am not say that God is responsible for creating Life.  I am only arguing that science has not provided the answer to Life, which leaves room for God as the creator.

The evidences for God or of a creator by any name, is found, I believe, in all expression that is conscious.  Effectively all objects and acts which show evidence of design or purpose are evidences of consciousness and thus indirectly evidences of a creator. Consciousness is not the result of any material process, hence material evidences and behaviors which have a material cause are not evidences of a creator who started the whole thing.  It is conscious purpose, intention, and design which are the evidences.

Consciousness

August 31, 2008 by phoebus

Consciousness, which has lacked a 'hard-wired' and 'evolutionary' explanation up to now seems to be getting a lot of attention. I recently bought and read 'The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit' by Joseph Chilton Pearce. This is only one of many 'scientific' studies of consciousness published in recent days.

I imagine the rush of such theories as these is another of those races to be the first to solve an outstanding conundrum in science. Many books of this kind are, as I see it, attempts by reductionists to surmount their last Everest; to square the circle and complete their mechanistic map of the universe.

I am convinced that there are only two possible answers to consciousness and that one of them, which may be characterized either as the 'hard wired,' the biological, or the reductionist, is wrong. The obvious answer, in my view, is that consciousness is beyond reductionist explanation. This has been the case, in my opinion, since Arthur Koestler wrote 'Beyond Reductionism' in 1956. Nevertheless our scientists will persist in looking for their Holy Grail, always inside the reductionist box.

The first reductionist explanation may have come from Pablov. If you remember, he conditioned his dogs to associate the ringing of a bell with food. After sufficient conditioning – that is, after the experimenter repeatedly rang a bell and immediately presented the dogs with food – the dogs automatically began salivating on hearing the bell alone. A great deal of animal behavior is no doubt 'conditioned' behavior where the animal has learned to associate two events. We make the same sorts of associations, and we say that one 'causes' the other. Some associative pairs are learned and others are 'instinctual' it seems.

Anything amiss here?

It should not take a genius to spot a false link here, but apparently brilliant minds do. The association between an event and the response of a sentient animal is NOT one of cause & effect as is the case of mixing two chemical compounds and producing a chemical reaction for example. To take the case of Pablov's dogs. The sound of the bell does NOT physically cause the dogs to salivate. It is the MEANING of the bell which does so. If it were simply the sound of the bell which caused the animals to salivate, then any bell at any time, and well before they were 'conditioned,' would have caused them to salivate. But that was not the case. It was only after the canines had learned that the bell MEANT food, that they began salivating.

So we are not dealing with a cause and effect relation here, but with sentient animals capable of interpreting events in relation to their own needs and selves. Furthermore, if pooches have needs, then surely the critters must have selves capable of recognizing an 'I' which experiences need. So we have discovered that these dogs are conscious, which is to say self-conscious!

Small wonder that reductionists failed to make this same discovery until lately, for it has always posed a threat likely to blow their case out of the water. But it now appears that they have accepted the principle that animal behavior is largely conscious. How else to explain the cowboys of the Lazy-R (Reductionist) ranch in such a hurry to get a lasso on this rogue steer (consciousness) in order to drag it back into the mechanist corral?

We can shed light on the nature of consciousness by taking another approach, and here I quote from a thoughtful fellow named Howard Katz.

'Take take a young child into the kitchen and show him the eating utensils. He will observe that, although the forks are different from each other (perhaps in size, material of construction or color or at least in occupying a different space at the same time), they have certain similarities. If you hold one up and say, “This is a fork,” the child will get the concept. You can then go into a different house (in a different city), tell the child to fetch a fork, and he will be able to comply. Further, you can do this with very large numbers of children, and they will pretty much all get it right. This is because all the children have noticed the essential similarities (which all forks have with each other) and the essential differences (which all forks have with all non-forks) We say the child now has the concept 'fork.' Thus these similarities and differences cannot be arbitrary. It must be that the child is perceiving something in reality, not performing an arbitrary act like naming something.'

Yes, the concept is not the name, and you have to ask: Where did the concept came from? Concepts exist nowhere but in the mind or in consciousness. Consciousness is where the Reality lies I believe.

Now, if you will hold on to the concept of a concept, I want to make a bridge to another idea, even more important. While we don't actually create objects like rocks, mountains and clouds, we nevertheless define them, which is to say, we name them and relate them meaningfully to other objects (which we also define) according to location in time and space and according to likeness and difference. Thus while the world of objects is not our creation, the world order IS. This is a fact dramatically illustrated by a story which I will tell in a moment. The world order we create or project is a matrix of meanings. If something means something in relation to something else, then it is for no other reason than we put the meaning or the relation there. Thus if we see a cause-and-effect relation, it is a cause-and-effect relation only because we choose to see that 'A' CAUSES 'B'.

It appears to be the fact that every single thing in the universe is connected to every other thing. Chaos theory tells us that the flap of a butterfly's wing is, in some part, responsible for triggering a hurricane in the Gulf. For any given outcome the causes are countless. (There are to say, many 'hidden variables.') We choose to see only the cause/effect relations which are both accessible to our senses (or instruments) and ones which accord with our latest ideas about how the world is ordered. Thus while the theory of evolution, or quantum theory, and any theory (but not a mathematical theorem) that you care to name satisfies us that we have an objective grasp of the Reality, no such theory is more than a useful and convenient explanation projected onto an inscrutable canvas. Science lays claim to 'objectivity.' Like the religionists whom they ridicule, it appears that scientists are prey to their own myths as well.

There can be no opposition between subjectivity and objectivity when subjectivity is all there is . It is the Concept – the product of a human subjectivity – that is the only objective fact we are ever likely to know. The objects of real interest are not those lying in that 'real' world conjured up by scientists. There is only one OBJECT of consuming interest, it seems to me, and that is the faculty (consciousness) which first distinguished these same objects in a web of likeness/difference relationships.

Inuit children can be taught to distinguish twenty kinds of snow and to associate a different word with each of these twenty different kinds. An Aboriginal child, on the other hand, has no word for snow. Consequently, snow is not a part of his reality. Thus snow is not an named object before it is an idea or concept. Our scientists have it the other way around. The object exists and then we name it. They are simply wrong.

Here is the story I promised. It is a paraphrase by John Alexandra (author of 'Mephistopheles' Anvil') of lines from Oliver Sach's book: 'An Anthropologist on Mars.'

In his most recent book, 'An Anthropologist on Mars,' Sacks pre-
sents the case of a blind man, Virgil, whose visual perception was
restored by surgery. Virgil, who had lost his sight when he was
six, had worked many years for the YMCA, which provided him
with a house. At 'fifty, he was about to be married, and his fiancee
wanted him to have an operation to restore his sight. ''Wouldn't it
be wonderful, she reasoned, ''if the first things he saw were the church, his
bride and the wedding?” He agreed, and the operation was surgi-
cally successful.'

When the bandages were removed, the room was vibrant with
expectation. Virgil, however, did not cry out for joy. Contrary to all
expectations, he continued to stare blankly and with bewil-
derment at a world upon which he could not focus. Virgil later
told Sacks that in that first moment he could see light, movement
and color, but had no idea what he was seeing -- it was all only a
'confused, meaningless blur.'

All involved (including Virgil himself) expected that, after the
operation, he would simply open his eyes and see the world of ob-
jects -- an expectation based on the naive view that these objects
are ''as we see them.'' What had been forgotten? The complicated
cognitive processes we developed as infants, seemingly effort-
lessly, which are essential to creating a meaningful world of ex-
perience.'

Without them our sensations remain only a confusing
maze of light, movement and color. Sacks designates Virgil
''mentally blind'' -- able to perceive with his eyes but not able to de-
cipher what he was seeing as meaningful objects. Having no con-
cept of perspective, he could not distinguish distance. He would
think objects were on top of him when they were still distant. He
found shadows confusing since he could not yet form the concept
of objects blocking light. He would stop at or try to step over the
shadow. Sunlit steps, combining perspective, shadow, solidity and
perspective, were overwhelmingly difficult. He could not dis-
tinguish whether dark areas were solid or shadow, closer or more
distant, horizontal or vertical.'

Virgil now experienced tremendous confusion when trying to
navigate his way through the house he had lived in for many
years. He could only walk through the house in a predetermined,
fixed line. He had to perceive everything in a constant way. If he
deviated from this line, he became totally disoriented. since the
same objects (a table or bench, for instance) looked completely
different from other viewpoints, and so were unrecognizable. Only
slowly did he learn to see and recognize the objects in the room
from other vantage points. He had similar difficulty grasping the
idea of a cat. He could distinguish a cat's paw. its nose. tail or
ear, but could not form the integrated concept needed to see the
cat as a whole. To think-and therefore see-even the most
seemingly obvious'' relationships (obvious to the sighted person,
that is) was an enormous struggle for him.'

Sacks points out that, in similar operations since the first doc-
umented case in 1728, nearly all the patients had also experi-
enced the most profound confusion and bewilderment. As seeing
adults, we take for granted the concepts of distance. space,
shadow and the enormous visual transformation of the appear-
ance of objects from different perspectives. We can scarcely
imagine Virgil's confusion. We developed the complicated cognitive
activity that allows us to see visual objects during the uncon-
sciousness of our early childhood. At a very early stage of devel-
opment, we too were like newly-sighted persons, for whom space
and distance did not exist. We would reach out to touch the
moon. When young children begin to develop the cognitive activity
that transforms their meaningless sensations into a meaningful
world of experience, they have many advantages the older newly-
sighted person has lost. '

A telling story, don't you think?

What Alexandra calls 'cognitive processes' and 'cognitive activity' is what I would call Consciousness. And this faculty or agency is the faculty or agency which, as Alexandra says, 'transforms meaningless sensations into a meaningful world of experience.'

Now, it is clear to me that 'the meaningful world of experience' is neither the objective world of Newtonian science nor the probablistic one of quantum mechanics. It is instead the imaginative invention of human consciousness.

Let's take another look at what Alexandra has to say.

'Since reductive science has adapted the world to suit its re-
search methods, and adopted certain preconceptions that facili-
tate such research, our present capacity to see the world is re-
stricted by these preconceptions. As a result, the quality of the
light reductionism generates is also limiting -- although differently
limiting than the Church's light. Mechanistic science's light re-
duces the reality and color of the world to gray and black shad-
ows. Havel, Hammarskjold and Solzhenitsyn, among others, call
on us to learn to see the world in its full garb of color, beauty and
richness, by developing the ideas to understand this richness as it
is. Developing a light of this kind, by avoiding the limiting
preconceptions of reductive science, is the pivotal challenge for a
postmodern renaissance.'

It is Consciousness which supplies us with the constructs and theories by which we order, assign meanings to, and make sense of our sensations and measurements. Thus any attempt to explain consciousness in terms of a biological theory or any other theory that is a product of consciousness is doomed to failure even before it begins. A shoe cannot explain the cobbler. It is that simple.

Furthermore, for a thing to exist, surely there must exist its negation. For every state, there exists necessarily an equal and opposite state; and this symmetry holds not only in the case of Newtonian action and reaction, but matter and anti-matter, energy and mass, motion and space-time warp, and so on. For every shoe a cobbler makes, there is a shoe he didn't make. This shoe which he didn't make is the mental blueprint or conscious counterpart of the shoe he did make. The blueprint or conscious counterpart is, in effect, what brought the shoe he made into existence. While we can account for the tangible shoe in terms of an idea in the head of its conscious maker, how do we account for the faculty or agency which produced the idea? How do we account for singularities such as this; for things without the counterpart which the rule of symmetry demands? There is the rub.

Consciousness has NO counterpart. This mysterious entity is the end point of a regression or compression. It is the end of the line beyond which we cannot know or go.

I go again to the workface.

If the scientists now publishing 'Consciousness' books had read Godel, Chaitan, Penrose, or even 'recursive epistemologist,' Bateman, and taken on board their proofs as well as the conclusions to be drawn from chaos theory, they would not be proposing 'hard-wired' solutions to consciousness, evolutionary theories of the brain, or organic explanations of spirituality.

These people fail to see that they lack the right answers. First of all consciousness is not a behavior. It is not the behavior of an organ such as the brain nor is it the motions of some as yet to be discovered psychic particle. These folk seem to forget that explaining my behavior – internal and external -- is not the same as explaining me, my identity, my purposes, or Why am I here? It is all very well to posit a positron or a gluon because without it your conceptual model will not work and produce the predictions you want, but another thing entirely to confuse a conscious human being with the behavior of neurons deployed in networks in a brain.

But confusing behavior with identity is only the first mistaken step made by our reductionist farriers, busy at their forges shaping metal to suit the hooves of their theories. Their second and far greater error is to fail to get to grips with the central problem of consciousness which is how to account for the entity (a conscious one) which can regard, order, and run itself.

Typically, a reductionist will resort to the slipshod argument that: I know myself to exist by the fact that I see myself in the bathroom mirror, in the eyes of my lover, named in the account of a bank holdup in the newspaper, or pictured at a celebrity gathering photographed for a spread in 'Hello' magazine. All these evidences only confirm that the material and behaving body is/was there. We do not see our real selves in any of these mirrors. We only see perceptions, not the perceiver. A conscious agent (by definition) knows itself to BE without the help of any mirrors. Nevertheless, in a culture where material evidences are the only proof of identity, it is entirely understandable that the principle should extend to the Self as well.

When I say material evidences are the ONLY proof of identity in our culture, I don't believe I am exaggerating. Look at the cult of celebrity, at logos on clothing, at social networking, at the vast and oppressive array of security measures which set out to map every individual to a finger print, digital facsimile of a face, speech pattern, credit rating, police record, network card serial number, tax number, credit card number, etc. Identity in the post modern age is a cluster of identifying marks employed for purposes of social control. Why don't they just stamp an indelible bar code on our foreheads at birth and be done with it?

There are no MATERIAL/BEHAVIORAL evidences of the agency which projects an order upon the material world. The material world, so far as we know, it is our projection, as even the quantum people would assert. As individuals, we know the world as it is interpreted by our various senses and organs. What we know and experience is something we construct. If we had the sensory equipment of an alligator or an otter, we would doubtless construct and know a different world altogether.

A radar system or cat-scan apparatus constructs a 'reality' according to its special sensory equipment. We do likewise with the sensory equipment we possess. Our 'radar' system is physical and operates according to electro-chemical principles. Although reductionists are forever confusing the two, our radar system is NOT that agency which brings US individually (we who are NOT a cluster of behaviors exhibited by a corporeal body) into existence. It is this agency which monitors the output of sensors such as fingers and eyes and it is this agency which conceives of the reasons, models, and theories to explain sense data. The data delivered by neural pathways or chemical messengers contains no meaning and no meaning or interpretation is bestowed upon it by any of the organs of the body. Consciousness is the agency responsible for making sense of the data, for consciousness provides a Self to which the data can be meaningfully referred. Without a Self as a reference, all the sense data in the world is meaningless.

Sense data is only meaningful when it changes something in me or in what might be called the domain of ME. The sense data cannot be responsible for ME for they cannot be both the subject and the object of interpretation. Data (which is always 'code') requires a separate interpreter if it is to gain meaning. Likewise, it is impossible to reason axioms from their corollaries. Recursion simply does not work. It is impossible to explain the perceiving agency (ME) by reference to the objects and order I perceive in the world. Yes we know what the perceiver (Consciousness) is doing. It is ordering our experience of a material world. What we cannot do is say that the perceiver is also a part of that same order (bio-electrical, quantum, etc.) which it is projecting upon the world. Even a movie projector cannot be in the picture it is projecting. Is this so difficult to understand?

Apparently so.