I’ve compared the mind to a model but I’ve struggled to find a good example of the type of model it is.
We know there are different types of models. In science most models are abstract and mathematical. A couple of equations with tunable parameters could be used to model a complex physical interaction. For example, a climate model might need to account for variations in the Earth’s orbit and spin, influence of volcanic eruptions, solar variations, geological and oceanic changes, the effect of greenhouse gases, and the efficiency of carbon sinks. In a perfect model, the known and best estimate variables would predict accurately the variations in the temperature and ice caps over millions of years. Another example of this same type of model would be using physics equations to graph the arc of a projectile fired at specified velocity.
While the mind might be modelled abstractly, the mind itself isn’t an abstract model. Mathematical models quickly break down in modeling complex interactions. Even models of the interactions of as little as a hundred particles would require the computing power of the universe. While abstract models can be dynamic and arrive at different results with different inputs, they are frequently narrow in scope.
In contrast to abstract, mathematical models, there are concrete, physical models. The simplest of these to understand would be the scale model. Some of the earliest scale models were of buildings and dwellings from several thousand years BCE. Scale models are still extensively used in architecture, but the use has expanded to cars, rockets, and action heroes.
My first attempt at describing mind as model was the airplane in the wind tunnel. The problem with the example is that it is a static model and the mind is not static. We can put a model airplane in a wind tunnel and measure turbulence and lift, but the model just sits there. It doesn’t change. We can pull it out of the wind tunnel and change it, but it does not change itself. A second attempt was the YouTube video of kinetic art. This model isn’t static but it is very mechanistic and deterministic.
I was watching My Octopus Teacher for the third time with my wife (she hadn’t seen it) a few days ago. The movie is on Netflix and tells the story of the interaction between a man and an octopus over the course of a year. It begins with the octopus camouflaged in shells. Later we learn that the octopus does this to hide and protect itself from sharks. Through the movie, the octopus hides in kelp, merges with the sea bottom, and adopts the colors and textures of its background. Apparently the mimic octopus has even greater capabilities and can emulate more than a dozen creatures to trick predators and prey.
Mimicry in nature usually arises slowly through evolution and typically involves a harmless organism taking on the appearance or characteristics of a dangerous or poisonous organisms to fool predators. This is usually static. Once the organism develops it can’t change its appearance The dynamic sort of mimicry found in chameleons and octopi is more rare. In the octopus, apparently the skin has thousands of are chromatophores controlled by nerves that the octopus can squeeze or stretch to change their reflective properties.
The mimicry of the octopus is like the brain/mind model. First, it is biological. It is also dynamic. It can change rapidly based on environment. It is, I suppose, somewhat involuntary. The octopus may decide to take a form, color, and texture but we can suppose that whatever mechanism it uses to control each chromatophore is unconscious and automatic. Most importantly, however, the mimicry of the octopus reflects the world. In fact, it has been used to argue against extreme “no objective reality” views such as Donald Hoffman’s. Applied to mind and consciousness it could also be used to argue for some fundamental veridicality of mind.
This doesn’t mean necessarily that the mimicry of the octopus works identically to how the brain forms its model of the world. I am only arguing for similarity and likeness. The characteristics of mimicry – physicality, living, dynamic reaction to environment, reflective of reality – are similar.
Mind is essentially an internalized mimicry of the external world. The way it mimics is by creating spacetime relationships between sense datum coming from the senses. Closely related data become objects. The temporal-spatial relationships of objects is mimicked by neuronal speed (time) and the dimensional and patterns in the spatial architecture of of neural connections. This mimicry is what I have been calling a model and it maps (probably polymorphically) its internal objects with external objects based on a best fit for the sense data available.
If mind is internalized mimicry, the problem of explaining how it works becomes drastically simplified. We don’t have to imagine how complex computational algorithms evolved and became embedded in the brain. We just have to assume that the primary function of the brain is to mimic external reality by maintaining internally the same relationships that the sense data presents. The brain and its neurons doesn’t to know anything. It just has to faithfully copy the relationships and revise its copy whenever new data appears.
There certainly is more than this but this gets directly at how neurons can seemingly know about the world.
Broad Speculations 
Re “Even models of the interactions of as little as a hundred particles would require the computing power of the universe.”
Uh, no. Consider a container with 100 gas molecules in it. I can predict exactly the future state of those molecules with almost no effort whatsoever. I think the problem here is the degree of precision expected. You are implying that each molecule would need a novel to be written about its life and experiences when confined with those 99 other molecules, when that level of precision is not needed to predict the future state of the group.
Similarly, I don’t think accounting for the behavior of each neuron in a brain will ever be necessary as groups and subgroups will be adequate to answer many of our questions. Even simple systems can show complex and even unpredictable behavior (coupled pendulums, etc.).
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Uh, no.
“Robert Laughlin, also a condensed matter physicist, wrote a book called A Different Universe, in which he argued that attempts to apply the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics to any system with more than 100 particles leaves you with something that can only be solved with God’s computer (i.e., it can’t really be solved). Based on this, he argued that you really can’t derive the higher levels of structure from the lower levels and that there do exist higher order, emergent principles that are required to understand the world”.
https://bigthink.com/13-8/condensed-matter-physicists-reject-reductionism/
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Why apply those equations in the first place? What can they tell you that you couldn’t figure out otherwise. I understand that taking a too fine focus on a topic can make it much more difficult, but that’s why scientist focus on the pragmatic and not the ideal.
There is a schism between theorists and experimentalists in the sciences (and be “pure mathematicians” and “applied mathematicians” in mathematics). Just because the “laws” of quantum mechanics apply to the individual particles doesn’t mean they apply to the group of particles. (Yes, I know there are exceptions both ways.)
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Steve, I’m actually arguing here for a simpler system – a physical model not a algorithmic one.
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No, no, I understood, I am just in the mood to argue against what seem to be unreasonable assumptions. (I am current reading a post entitled “The Color Purple Isn’t Real” . . . sheesh, even to dragonflies who can see 16 million colors?)
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Or take a look at the three body problem.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-three-body-problem/
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I studied that in college (back in the previous millennium). :o) Yet, we same to have quite an excellent grip upon the solar system which consists of way more than three bodies. Maybe that is because we don’t require exact accuracy. I think the ideal of 100% accuracy is a fallacy of human thinking. We always take everything to extremes and then infer the extreme exists, like absolute zero, the speed of light, Plato’s forms, etc. Such concepts can be useful, but we need to stop claiming that we have proved our assumptions.
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I think we talking past each other to some degree.
In some ways you made my point when you wrote: “I can predict exactly the future state of those molecules”.
For sure, if the prediction is high level and limited we can model it very well with mathematics.
My statements are made in the context of modeling – modeling the world. They built wind tunnels because turbulence wasn’t understood and, even after it was, there wasn’t enough computing power until recently to do the calculations .
My point is that to model the world the brain doesn’t calculate; it mimics. There are no controlling algorithms. There are just a bunch (about a billion) of neurons that try to mimic the temporal-spatial relationships of the world through their rhythmic oscillations in the spacetime architecture of the brain. Since the brain operates in space and time, it can store (remember) those relationships and run them forward into the future to predict – the imagination element you often write about.
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An excellent book for all men and women looking for peace and balance in a totally confused world to make sense of our human condition would be The Sophia Code. The answers to life’s inconsistencies and disregard are all the product of not knowing ourselves and appreciating the huge gift life could be if we could love ourselves fully first and see the world through that lens.
I will be at the newly renovated Stone Mountain library on July 22nd from 2 -5 pm for a book signing and aer show.
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“Mind is essentially an internalized mimicry of the external world. The way it mimics is by creating spacetime relationships between sense datum coming from the senses.”
I respectfully object to your use of the concept of “sense data.” It’s an old idea and perhaps you are not using it in the way I think you are. Moreover, I’m reluctant to rehash a discussion you and I were participants in on another blog. Nevertheless I feel compelled to say that I do not think we experience something called sense data. By that I mean some sort of mental object mediating between the cause of my perception and my perceptual experience. To separate sensory experience out as its own object of experience is, I submit, erroneous. The object of our perception is not the internal experience—the object of perception is not the subjective experience itself. The object of our perceptual experience is what causes that experience. Internalized mimicry to me just sounds like another way to express the old concept of sense data. And we do not experience sense data—we experience the cause of it. Sense data is not the cause of our experience. And I hope that is not what you mean.
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I find that the mind is given powers far greater than what I experience. I am currently writing down memories, mostly vignettes I can pull from memory to leave my son when I die (reasonable soon). So, I write about these events but I can’t remember dates, times, time of day, names of people I was interacting with, and more. So, if we have these memories, created by mimicking what we observes, we aren’t very good at it.
I am aware of people who possess almost perfect recall, but I sure as heck do not.
BTW, I remember reading about the resistance to the kinetic molecular theory (late 1800s). It was objected to because a bunch of gas molecules bouncing around in a perfect container would eventually attain the same state they started in (if the number of molecules wasn’t too great). And the conclusion was, yep, they would. But once the number of molecules gets fairly high, the number of possible microstates explodes and we are back to a point where those exact calculations can’t be done for want of computing power. (This is my objection to a deterministic universe, you cannot possibly trace back through a series of causes so very, very long in each case.)
So, if brains creating minds cannot be “modeled” exactly (and I suspect they cannot), I would like to know how they actually function in broad strokes, because they are acting in broad strokes IMHO. Minds and brains don’t do “exact.”
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Exactly!
Mimicry isn’t exact but, if it is dynamic, it is improvable.
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The eye has over thirty types of ganglia, I think. and each type is designed to detect something- movement, color, edges, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_ganglion_cell
W-ganglion, for example, detect movement. So when it reacts it sends something upstream.
You tell me what you want to call it if you don’t like sense data.
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Interesting biological facts about about the eye. However, it has nothing to do with my comment about “sense data.” I assumed you were expressing your thinking about perceptual intentionality. If not, I have absolutely no idea what you mean by describing the mind as “internalized mimicry” using so-called “sense data” for such a purpose. What would I call it? I have no other name for sense data. Like many contemporary philosophers I have no use for it. It creates a troublesome form of conceptual dualism. In fact, combining both the idea of sense data and your new term “internal mimicry” sounds like you’re doubling down on conceptual dualism. I view perception as direct without something else, some intermediary, by which I perceive the world.
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I’m asking for how you would describe inputs from sensory neurons. 🙂
Maybe a more expanded example will help.
I will be playing pickleball this morning. We play often with yellow balls. If one of the opponents hits a ball in my direction, the ganglia of the eyes picks up the fragments of information that eventually my visual cortex will consolidate into a complete image. The fragments are color, edges, movement, and probably more. Some of the consolidation may happen in the eye itself, more in lower level parts of the brain, but eventually yellow must relate to ball must relate to movement must relate to distance must relate to speed must relate to where my brain thinks the ball will go for me to be able to get to the ball to return it or let it bounce out of play.
The hypothesis here is of the brain/nervous system relates the fragments of sensory information about color, movement, and edges by mimicking the movement of the yellow ball in its own temporal-spatial architecture.
The mere fact that there is defined visual cortex already tells us that physical relationships in the brain itself are important. However, there is an abundance of evidence that does well beyond that.
I covered some of it in another post.
There are a number of other studies which have trained neural nets to interpret MRI scans to “read” minds. While I have previously dismissed a lot of this, the nearly inescapable conclusion is that brain firing patterns correlate with subjective experience. The firing patterns are the temporal-spatial architecture of the brain.
Here’s some other references suggesting similar correlations.
Neurons that control walking go round in circles
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02238-1
New Clues to How the Brain Maps Time
“The same brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time. The research suggests that our thoughts may take place on a mental space-time canvas”.
“cells in rats that form the brain’s internal GPS system, known as grid cells, are more malleable than had been anticipated. Typically these cells act like a dead-reckoning system, with certain neurons firing when an animal is in a specific place. (The researchers who discovered this shared the Nobel Prize in 2014.) Eichenbaum found that when an animal is kept in place — such as when it runs on a treadmill — the cells keep track of both distance and time. The work suggests that the brain’s sense of space and time are intertwined”.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-clues-to-how-the-brain-maps-time-20160126/
Brain’s Positioning System Linked to Memory
“One striking feature of this system of grid and place cells is that it seems to encode abstract properties. “The big breakthrough is that these cells are not just responding to sensory cues, like an odor on the ground,” said David Redish, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Instead, grid cells form an internal positioning system, and place cells use that information along with other cues to create a sense of place. Together, they create a rich map. “Understanding how we build those maps is part of a larger framework of cognitive science — how do we build inner models?” said Matthew Wilson, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology”.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/brains-positioning-system-linked-to-memory-20141007/
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Again, interesting biological facts or, specifically, interesting neurobiological facts. And again, I respectfully submit, off point regarding my comments about “sense data.” So, rather than repeat myself a second time I’ll ponder how best to clarify my comments. This may take me a while. In the meantime let me note that the title of your essay is “‘consciousness’ as mimicry.” To me that implies something about the mind—something more than merely the neurobiological functioning of the brain. And sense data is usually used in that context.
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By sense data, I am simply saying information from the neural firings that comes from sensory neurons. Of course, that is not all of consciousness and a lot of sensory information, in fact, never makes it to consciousness. But I think it is a good starting point to understand how consciousness works. It’s hard to imagine any theory of mind that doesn’t include information from senses.
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Matti,
To moderate some of these differing perceptions, I consider Jim’s use of sense data to be synonymous with your use of the word object. However, the object that is causing our experience is just that, sensory data until the mind rapidly jumps through all of the hoops of complex correlations before an association is made identifying the object that is causing the experience.
The thrust of Jim’s essay is that the mind (a sovereign system that emerges from the brain) reconstructs an internal model that mimics the actual object in space and time (another correlation) from the sense data that is the object of our experience, this eliminates the need for complex algorithms to be built into the brain.
In order for this idea to be tenable there are a couple of grounding assumptions that have to be made. First, that mind is a separate and distinct system that emerges from the brain, a system that is sovereign, a system that is dependent upon the brain for its existence and a system that uses the substrate of the physical brain for its own purposes. Second, the mind reconstructs or literally builds a model using sense data it receives and data that is stored in the brain by mimicking. It is a literal reconstruction on a micro-scale in space and time that replicates the real object of our experience in space and time.
The idea that the mind is sovereign is the basis for subjectivity itself. Without a system that is sovereign there is no such thing as subjectivity. This is why functionalism is untenable because functionalist do not recognize the existence of mind. They believe that the physical brain (a single single system) is both objective and subjective. This conflation of two opposing dynamics defies everything else we know about the natural world. Why make unnecessary assumptions that cannot be reconciled?
I don’t know if you see subjectivity this way so I ask: What you mean by subjective experience?
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FC,
We’re definitely really close in our views, I think. I will comment some more a little later.
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First Cause: Let’s parse this to see if I can understand it. Here is how I read your comment: “…the object that is causing our experience is just that, sensory data … until the mind [identifies] the [real] object that is causing the experience.” First, if that is your meaning, it makes no sense. There is only ONE cause! There is only one experience! The cause of our subjective experiences are the objects and state of affairs in the real world that are independent of our perception of them. Instead of repeating what I wrote TWICE already I will refer to my previous comments. But perhaps you really don’t mean what I understand you to be saying. Then I’m at a loss. Second, both you and James appear to be using “sense data” in a nontraditional and confusing way. Sense datum was coined by philosophers some time ago as the object of perceptual awareness. However, it came to be an ambiguous concept that depended on its use. If by sense data you mean the actual conscious experience, I would have no objection. But, then, the term is redundant. However, if you mean that sense data are the objects of perception, I object. I don’t think what I’m saying is so obscure. As I said, in an effort to avoid regurgitating the same comments, I would ponder how to say it with more clarity. I conclude I cannot. I’ll leave it there.
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“The cause of our subjective experiences are the objects and state of affairs in the real world that are independent of our perception of them.”
I don’t have a problem with this assessment Matti; in fact I agree. However, to a new born infant, those objects and state of affairs in the real world that are the cause of our subjective experience is just incoherent, confusing background noise. That is the conscious experience of a new born.
Over a period of time, the infant will soon make the connection between the complex correlation of patterns, the differences between patterns, then correlations between the differences, and then repetitive patterns of the correlations. But it is not until the infant is several months old that it is capable of using the power of its own mind to make sense of the enormously complex correlation of sensations, boundaries, and desires called an “object” to be able to reach for one.
This object, now firmly clasp in the infant’s hand is not the conscious experience. The conscious experience will be a “relationship” to the complex correlations of repetitive patterns derived from the experience that gives the infant its first connection to a patterned world and a sense of control.
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People blind from birth who have their sight restored at a latter age have to learn to see. The visual cortex has to build the relationships to recognize objects.
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Matti,
Leaving the sniping about sense data aside, it would help me to understand your metaphysical position better if I knew what you mean by subjectivity.
Also, it would help is I knew whether you agreed or disagreed with the theory that mind is an emergent system that is sovereign or whether you see mind as what the brain does like functionalists do.
Thanks
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There was no intent, in my obviously failed attempt at clarity, to snipe. I’m a bit baffled but quite sorry you found by comments hurtful. Please accept my apology. Moreover, my comments were only about the concept of sense data. It’s a complicated and controversial concept. It obviously has not been a simple discussion. I think my comments stand independently. I don’t think they require what I suspect would be a lengthy excursion down any additional philosophical positions I may hold. Moreover, I’m unprepared to do that as I have a busy day ahead of me. So, I’d prefer to leave it at that for now.
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“It is a literal reconstruction on a micro-scale in space and time that replicates the real object of our experience in space and time”.
I would quibble with the word “literal”. Maybe “representational” but that word doesn’t thrill me either. At any rate, I think you get my point.
The pickleball is present in my physical brain and in my mind but it only looks like a pickleball in my mind. These mappings are likely polymorphic. There isn’t a single brain pattern for a pickleball (isomorphism). There are likely many different mappings dependent upon the relationships in the context.
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Yes, I do get your point because they are representational. The only open question is the substrate of the representation? It’s mental sure, but what does mental mean if one is not an idealist or dualist. But, no quibbling here…
And likewise, these mappings are more that likely polymorphic.
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“The only open question is the substrate of the representation?”
It is physical. It is the brain.
My mimicry analogy is trying to address two questions:
1- The language or common currency between the physical and biological events in the brain that correlate with subjective experience.
My take similar to Northoff’s is that the physical spacetime architecture of the brain – the patterns of neurons firings – correlate with mental spacetime which is the foundation of consciousness.
2- How “dumb” neurons model the world
To me this is more important part of the analogy.
There is no controlling set of neurons that manage neural firings in the brain. There is no place where consciousness is assembled or built. No neuron knows anything about other neurons beyond its connectivity to some of them. Neurons in the brain know nothing about the world.
How does this work to provide a model of the world?
I think networked neurons must simply mimic its inputs in its own internal language and that language translates to the mental experience of the world. The internal representation must constantly reconcile itself with new inputs. The language that evolved improved fitness so it was refined over millions of years and in different ways and to different degrees in different species. Quite possibly the more complex the network, the more detailed and accurate the model.
Mind , for convenience, I talk about as if it were separate from the physical. But it isn’t. It is simply we don’t understand all of the physical principles involved yet.
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“It is physical. It is the brain.”
I hope you do not misunderstand me because I agree with this assessment. However, since I have the predisposition to be a little pedantic, I look for technicalities that are important.
It is important to account for the so-called “ghost in the machine” (brain), because for lack of a better descriptor there is one. The “ghost in the machine” is the very feature of consciousness that illusionists deny. Dualists recognize this phenomenality and that is what makes them so rigid in their position because fundamentally they are correct. Where dualist go off the rails is assigning this ghost properties that are not literally “physical”.
To me, there is no question that mind is a physical system but I do see it as separate and distinct in the sense that it is emergent and sovereign. Emergence is not a scientific mystery, all of complexity is derived from emergence. Furthermore, without mind being a separate and distinct system with its own properties we are pigeon holing ourselves into a corner by asserting that a single system can be both objective and subjective at the same time.
If one chooses to take this position one has to account for this anomaly because it does not conform to what we observe with other systems universally. One has to account for which part of the brain is objective and which part of the brain is subjective and why. Or, as a single system is there a switch somewhere that flips transforming the brain from being an objective system to a subjective one?
This may be where we disagree…….
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I’m not sure we disagree as much as you think.
When I write we don’t understand all of the physical principles involved yet, I mean we still have more to discover to account for the anomaly.
In the Waves and Dimensions post, I speculate the more might involve electromagnetism and additional spatial dimensions.
Have you read any of Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes?
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I haven’t read any of Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes recent work. He is a hardcore panpsychist as I recall unless he has changed his position. Psychedelics in therapy seems to gaining prominent recognition and I’ve seen a few documentaries on the topic.
Psychedelics are useful in helping people break from the rigid intellectual boundaries that keep them captive and it requires a bit of coaching by the therapist. Maybe we need to get a government grant to use psychedelics on Academics to help them break through this now “very old” idea that consciousness arises from information processing. You talk about being stuck in the dark ages…….
On another note: mimicry is more pervasive than we might originally think. Most of learning is mimicry all the way through post secondary education. One place we break through the limiting boundary of mimicry is in our dreams where anything goes. I think dreaming is important for learning and memory as well as a venue for creative individual thinking. But most people settle for someone else to do their thinking for them and they adjudicate whether they like it or not based upon their own “set”, what they bring to the conversation.
Discussions are like psychedelic experiences in that what one gets out of it is dependent upon “set and setting”.
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If you can access this, it is an abbreviated version of a chapter from the book.
https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-and-higher-spatial-dimensions-auid-2107#:~:text=Philosopher%20of%20mind%2C%20Peter%20Sj%C3%B6stedt,key%20to%20the%20hard%20problem.&text=The%20inquiry%20into%20the%20relation,very%20terms%20are%20poorly%20understood.
Funny I just noticed sense-data in some of the discussion of Smythies.
What seems to be proposed is a mind-matter monism that unifies mind with matter at extra dimensions.
Now that isn’t exactly my belief. Mine is based more on the possibility mind manifests itself via EM in an extra dimension. Since the fundamental basis of mind is manifesting our 3+1 spacetime reality, an additional dimension(s) would be outside our model so largely invisible to us. We might someday develop techniques or experiments that might infer its existence.
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The link worked. Nothing wrong with creative thinking and extra dimensions. But wouldn’t the quantum realm itself qualify as an extra dimension?
I think it would so I don’t see the necessity of coming up with another exotic dimension when we already have one to work with. I think the biggest reason these so-called intellectuals are reluctant to look at the quantum realm as a viable space for mind to exist is because of this nonsensical idea that the quantum world is a wave. Even Penrose is hamstrung by those restraints, although he readily admits he is probably wrong about wave function and collapse. This absurd conventional wisdom has been around for over a century and I don’t see it going away any time soon.
If one goes with Rovelli who is on my short list of geniuses, quantum mechanics is identical to classical mechanics only invisible and undetectable. So with that predicate concept, it is not inconceivable that the objects of our experience are mimicked, stored in the brain and literally reconstructed in the micro-space of that fourth dimension by the mind. This rendition would account for the non-spatial aspect of mind that Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is looking for.
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If you follow Tim Andersen on Substack or Medium, he has a theory the explains QM in terms of an additional dimension. So there may be no difference in the two ideas at the root.
quote
A 5D theory of quantization means that classical become quantum theories by being averaged over a fifth dimension. Such a theory is only nonlocal in 4D since it is a classical theory in 5D and perfectly local.
In my conception for such a theory, I proposed that the universe is a 5D classical manifold (a word meaning a topologically closed set of points). This manifold is divided into slices sort of like slices in a loaf of bread. Each slice is a 4D universe.
The 4D universe that we observe is essentially flowing in a 5th dimension, similar to how our 3D universe flows through time. Each “moment” in the 5th dimension is a complete universe both in terms of space and time from Big Bang to heat death.
View at Medium.com
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I’m not sure how we got off on this debate about sense data.
From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Sense data constitute what we, as perceiving subjects, are directly aware of in perceptual experience, prior to cognitive acts such as inferring, judging, or affirming that such-and-such objects or properties are present. In vision, sense data are typically described as patches exhibiting colors and shapes. For the other senses, they would manifest sounds, tastes, odors, and tactile qualities. Suppose that you are looking at a brown table with a white coaster on it; your sense data would be a patch of brown corresponding to the brown expanse in your field of view, along with a roundish-shaped white patch. Based on such data, you might come to affirm that a brown thing and a white thing, or a table and a coaster, are present before you.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sense-data/
The only thing I would quibble about in this definition is that the relationships of sense data are almost certainly assembled or correlated unconsciously at lower levels (but likely also by a mimetic process). Scientists and philosophers had little idea how fragmented sense information is until recently. Take a look at We Know It When We See It by Masland to understand how vision works. Vision especially seems to be like elephant and blind men story except in the end all of the blind men combine all of their perceptions of the parts of the elephant and come up with something that is actually like an elephant we see.
At any rate, the brown table and white coaster example in the definition is certainly very similar to my pickleball example.
In any case, I am not a philosopher and I am primarily talking about information that comes from the senses.
This raises the question naturally about how and when stuff becomes conscious. Let me end this comment and begin another to discuss that.
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James, I would suggest you read the whole article in the Stanford Encyclopedia. And, just as a taste of things to come, i quote immediately after you left off.
“The early advocates of sense data (explicitly so-called) mainly considered them to be mind-independent, that is, to exist apart from the mind, perhaps as a special kind of thing, neither mental nor physical. In the latter part of the twentieth century, sense data came to be viewed most often as mind-dependent, as mental objects or contents of which we are directly aware in perceptual experience. Sense data dominated discussion of perception in the first half of the twentieth century. The notion is now frequently used as a stalking horse in the philosophy of perception, as an example of a position that should be avoided.”
“This entry first examines the classical meaning of the term “sense data” and the concept of a sensory given. It then pursues the history of these notions, from the early modern period to the mid twentieth century, before turning to major critical responses that led to a decline in the popularity of sense data.”
Moreover, I suggest a work by John Searle entitled. “Seeing Things As They Are.”
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Please tell me what you want to call information from sensory neurons and I’ll use that term. 🙂
Unless you think there is no such data?
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You may read too much into my objection of the term “sense data.” As ‘SelfAwarePatterns’ cogently said, philosophical terms, as he puts it, come with “baggage.” I would describe using any philosophical term of art (without qualification) as acceptance of all of it’s background assumptions—i.e., baggage. And, as you well understand at this point, I (along with a large number of like-minded philosophers) reject “sense data” as a useful concept. Using that term together with your own term of “mimicry” may unfairly spoil what you are trying to say. And more to the point, I certainly do not reject recent achievements in the neurobiology. All of that, and more, is necessary if we are going to get a fuller understanding in philosophy of mind. I think “information from sensory neurons” is as good as anything right now.
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BTW, I like Searle generally so I may be checking out that book.
While there definitely can be a debate in my mind about the veridicality of subjective experience, I can’t see how there is ever direct experience of reality without senses. Blind people don’t see.
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Yup! And schizophrenics see things that don’t exist!
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How do you reconcile that with: “The object of our perceptual experience is what causes that experience.”.
What is the object that doesn’t exist but that schizophrenics see?
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The “object” of the schizophrenic’s experience (as we both correctly note) doesn’t exist. Yet we are very much tempted to think the schizophrenic’s experience is the object of the experience itself. And here is where we get into trouble. Here is where sense data—a troublesome conceptual duality rears its ugly head. But quite simply the schizophrenic is sick—he “sees” nothing. But we are tempted by our use of language to fall for a form of the fallacy of ambiguity. We are tempted to invent a word of some sort as the object of the sick man’s experience. I’m not sure this is right, but let’s say his sickness is the object of his experience.
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That the representation doesn’t align with external reality – an external object – shows the representation only arises through brain interactions, of which some arise from direct sensory information and some arise through internally generated interactions.
Researchers several years ago found that the vivid visual hallucinations under ayahuasca correlated with activity in the visual cortex. The objects are quite real and vivid I can attest to from experience.
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As one can discern from my last comment above, I would not say the [hallucinatory] “objects” are quite real. But I would say the internal “experience” is quite real. And there is the issue that will be debated for quite some time I suspect. I have to leave on a trip. Good discussion my friend! I’ll be back!
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I was hoping to skate by the conscious/unconscious question in this post and address it later after spending more time on the Northoff’s books that I am planning to review. So some of my opinion may change going forward.
I am not taking back the idea of consciousness as mimicry. I think that mimicry may be a key feature of all networks of neurons. In fact, it might even be involved in reflexes. So what makes some of it conscious and some unconscious?
Northoff points to multiple brain rhythms involved in consciousness. However, it is the slower rhythms that occur from several times a second and up to hours that are particularly associated with self. These rhythms are primarily self-generated in the brain but begin to incorporate sense data, memories, abstract thoughts, and imagination.
Back to the pickleball example,. My brain may decide to run after the ball and possibly even return it to my opponent with little conscious involvement until the act has already occurred. It’s appearance in consciousness is only after and only if it rises to some level of importance to me as an organism. At that point the information involved has merged into the slower rhythms and can become available to other brain processes for evaluation and decision making. At that I am conscious of the moving ball and that I managed to return it.
So the slower rhythms may be the foundations of consciousness but the faster rhythms are associated with the incorporation of new information.
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So far so good Jim……
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Mimicry is an interesting take on it, but my immediate question would be, mimicry for who or what? The word “mimicry” seems to imply an audience. (To be fair, so do most words people come up with like “representation”. Even “model” and “prediction” can be seen as problematic, although they seem easier to take it as resources utilized. But for “mimicry” it feels like it might be more intractable.)
I had the same thought about “sense data” that others have raised, but I quickly concluded it was unlikely you meant the philosophical concept with all its baggage. That’s the problem with philosophy of mind, it takes innocent sounding phrases and loads them with dubious assumptions.
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Well, what do you call information from senses? 🙂
As you note, almost any term we use to describe experience gets into the “audience” issue but it arises from the difficulty in talking about subjectivity without implying a “viewer”, It is hard to escape the subject/object dichotomy. However, we could argue the “audience” (so to speak) is the organism itself.
Quote:
“I am only arguing for similarity and likeness. The characteristics of mimicry – physicality, living, dynamic reaction to environment, reflective of reality – are similar [to how consciousness works].”
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Mike,
Mimicry as a model of how the mind works will be intractable to any functionalist for the following reasons:
“In order for this idea to be tenable there are a couple of grounding assumptions that have to be made. First, that mind is a separate and distinct system that emerges from the brain, a system that is sovereign, a system that is dependent upon the brain for its existence and a system that uses the substrate of the physical brain for its own purposes. Second, the mind reconstructs or literally builds a model using sense data it receives and information that is stored in the brain. It is a (literal) reconstruction on a micro-scale in space and time that replicates the real object of our experience in macro-space and time.”
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Lee,
I agree that wouldn’t fly for a functionalist. Although given James’ response above, there might be interpretations of his idea that could.
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Mike,
Could you elaborate a little on that comment relating to my response?
Functionalism doesn’t work for me but not for FC’s reasons. Consciousness isn’t as much about what it does as how it does it. What it does may useful for understanding its evolutionary value but doesn’t by itself offer any explanation for it. We know photosynthesis drives plant metabolism but a solar cell can’t be interchanged for it even though it does some of the same functions.
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James,
I was keying off your point about aiming for similarity and likeness, which I felt left room for a functionalist interpretation. Didn’t really have it thought out beyond that.
Photosynthesis and solar cells both extract energy from sunlight, but I wouldn’t say they’re functionality identical, at least not for plants. Even if they were, it’s always true that the implementation details matter for the interface of the process with surrounding processes. C-fibers are necessary for feeling steady pain in vertebrates, but their absence in invertebrates doesn’t mean invertebrates don’t experience that type of pain since there could be alternate mechanisms for it. But their mechanisms wouldn’t work in vertebrate nervous system anymore than vertebrate ones would in theirs. None of that, I think, invalidates multi-realizability, only that you can’t change out only pieces of a system unless you deal with the incompatibilities.
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Thanks I was thinking maybe we had some more important point of agreement.
Of course, we expect variations in sensory neurons and brains across the biological spectrum. Spiders were believed to be without hearing until it was discovered some species “hear” through hairs on their legs. It is still all biological and neurological. And maybe not so different. Even Cochlear implants move hairs in the ear to feed information into the nervous system
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That’s an interesting point about Cochlear implants. Do you recall where you read it? Everywhere I check (admittedly in five minutes of googling 🙂 ) says it’s an electrode (or series of electrodes) that directly stimulates the auditory nerve. Although it does sound like there are multiple types and variations. And “directly stimulates” could mean different things. But it seems like if the hairs are functional, a hearing aid / speaker mechanism would be more useful than an electrode.
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Bottom line is I think misread this sentence.
“Cochlear implants bypass most of the peripheral auditory system which receives sound and converts that sound into movements of hair cells in the cochlea”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant#Parts
Actually, however, this may be poorly written because it is unclear from that sentence whether the implant is moving the hair cells or the normal auditory system is moving the hair cells. Later it says the electrodes stimulates the nerve directly.
If you read it as
“Cochlear implants bypass most of the peripheral auditory system and converts that sound into movements of hair cells in the cochlea”
Then I would be correct but if you read it as
The peripheral auditory system receives sound and converts that sound into movements of hair cells in the cochlea. Cochlear implants bypass most of peripheral auditory system and etc
I would be wrong. Probably somebody ought to edit the Wiki page to lessen the ambiguity.
Even in this example, however, the artificial ear is only working the periphery of a nervous system and there isn’t any presumption that the implant is actually responsible for the subjective experience of hearing.
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Jim,
As you know, my model is based upon sentience being an intrinsic property of matter without the feature of awareness like panpsychism asserts. Since I have the predisposition to be a little pandentic, I’ve been tweaking my definition of consciousness to correspond to that original assumption by being more explicit.
Thought you might be interested, so here is my latest Rev……
The word consciousness is not as elusive as everyone wants to make it. Its origin is Latin and consciousness means: together (con), to know (scious), us (ness). “Together to know us”: it’s all about the shared experience or, what it is like to be homo sapiens.
DEFINITION:
1. Consciousness is a conceptual and/or mental “reconstruction” of a fundamental reality that is made up of structured patterns. These structured patterns consist of both patterns that are determinate, well defined and easy to assess (objects) as well as patterns that are indeterminate, not well defined and difficult to assess (subjects).
2. Consciousness is a unified, relatively stable localized quantum field, the contents of which are sentient in nature. These sentient contents are grounded, derived and rooted in sensations because they always have, without exception a “feel” associated with them, “feelings” that are characterized by either a positive (+) or negative (-) correlation.
NOTE:
As observed within the natural world, the polarity of opposing sensations or forces is responsible for motion that results in form. This synthesis is consistent with the mental motion that results in form within conscious experience as well. Furthermore, as observed within the natural world those sensations or forces are “intrinsic, non-conceptual in nature and therefore public”.
Unlike the non-conceptual direct experience of a positive (+) and negative (-) sensations which correlate to protons and electrons, a conceptual “reconstruction” of a positive (+) or negative (-) sensation experienced in consciousness is an “indirect experience and therefore private”.
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We have areas of agreement but there is some other things in your view I don’t see.
“Consciousness is a conceptual and/or mental “reconstruction” of a fundamental reality that is made up of structured patterns”.
I agree except I would drop “fundamental” from it.
“Consciousness is a unified, relatively stable localized quantum field”
Certainly it has field and wave-like properties but still I don’t see anything compelling that forces QM into the picture. I could be wrong in that but I’ve yet to hear the compelling argument in its favor so I am agnostic on it.
I’m still struggling somewhat to produce something on Georg Northoff whose book (The Spontaneous Brain) I am finding difficult to condense or summarize. I will very interested in your comments on it when I finally get something posted.
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Thanks for your assessment Jim. I agree that the word “fundamental” could be problematic for some, myself included. For now, I’m committed to QM until there is a compelling argument to refute it.
Looking forward to your next essay….
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I think I’m understanding better the problem I have with the QM explanation.
This could be incorrect but I feel QM turns out to be another form of reductionism whereas I see consciousness as emergent. Consciousness has a quantum foundation, of course, as does everything, but it seems to me it arises at higher levels of organization of matter. and information.
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I also see consciousness as emergent and that it arises at higher levels of organization and complexity. But the future of Penrose and Hameroff’s ORCH theory is uncertain because they have taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque by positing consciousness as another form of reductionism. This is something I do not agree with; and it’s a huge mistake. The reductionist approach will be the final nail in the coffin that discredits ORCH because it looks and smells like a QM spin on panpsychism.
Hammeroff is pretty rigid in his reductionism approach whereas Penrose is more flexible and does not necessarily agree with Hameroff’. But Penrose is in his nineties now and will not be around much longer to keep Hammeroff in check.
Hammeroff’s research team is making some very interesting finding though. They have verified that the microtubule bundles in brain neurons are the mechanism that instantiates wakefulness, moods and sensations. They have demonstrated that not only do sedatives target the microtubules, but so do psychedelics and anti-depressant drugs.
The idea of consciousness being QM is catching on and there are other research teams getting on board, and if they collaborate effectively enough there may be progress. You might want to check out this article:
Can consciousness be explained by quantum physics? My research takes us a step closer to finding out
Published: July 19, 2021 1.08pm EDT
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Do have any references on the Hammeroff research? Wakefulness requires a completely different pattern of firings in the parts of the brain above the brainstem and thalamus that is activated by secretions of neurotransmitters. Psychedelics and anti-depressants act on receptors. Even if microtubules are involved in any of that, I don’t see how it demonstrates quantum effects.
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Try this article Jim:
https://www.newswise.com/articles/neuroscience-needs-a-revolution
I haven’t done an exhaustive internet search on this and I’m hoping more information will be available after the annual consciousness conference held in Italy this summer.
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Here’s another interesting article:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/27538699221142510
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I found this.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30453-2
“Our findings indicate that electrical oscillations are an intrinsic property of brain MT bundles, which may have important implications in the control of various neuronal functions, including the gating and regulation of cytoskeleton-regulated excitable ion channels and electrical activity that may aid and extend to higher brain functions such as memory and consciousness”.
However, even if the activity in the microtubules has a quantum element in its workings, that doesn’t get us to explaining consciousness by it alone. And the electrical oscillations properties of MTs could as easily tie it back to an EM field. BTW, they found the oscillations at 39 hertz, in other words in the gamma brain wave range.
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