The subjective observer is a fictional character

[jamest]

Play nice or leave. There will be no more warnings.

Who has been misbehaving now?

It's okay - it's my head he's after. I annoyed him elsewhere.

[SpeedOfSound]

Even in a windowless room painted black, the walls (at room temperature) are emitting radiation in the visual spectrum. Just not enough to exceed thresholds.

What about if I'm in a windowless room, with my head under the duvet and my eyes closed? I still experience 'darkness'. Is there a point when we have to accept that the experience is generated by the brain itself and has nothing to do with the environment?

There isn't any such thing as "silence".

I'm not sure about that. Certainly, what I know of as silence can be a wonderful experience. I'm not sure that a deaf man gets the same experience.

You have asked a very good question here and it will lead to a complicated discussion about visual experience. I need to figure out how to have that discussion and I also need to make sure my facts are straight.

Again. Do you understand the relevance of state machines? What I bolded above makes me think not.

[jamest]

Again. Do you understand the relevance of state machines? What I bolded above makes me think not.

'State machines' is a new concept for me.

[SpeedOfSound]

...

check this out on google books.

Action in perceptionby Alva Noë
also his other book: Out of Our Heads.

That one has no preview but a good write up on the thrust of the book. It's formatted a little strange, someone hit the paste key too many times, but it's good.

[SpeedOfSound]

Again. Do you understand the relevance of state machines? What I bolded above makes me think not.

'State machines' is a new concept for me.

A state machine is something that keeps a current historical context inside and accepts sequences of info from outside. So the environment has an effect on what the machine is currently doing but the historical context does too.

So the brain, as a state machine, can't be said to JUST be affected by the environment. It's affected by all of it's history of the environment plus it's initial state (gene constructed brain).

There is often this same confusion about nature vs nurture. It isn't a versus kind of thing. The two are inseparable. My sons are identical twins. Same genes two very different and strangle similar guys.

[SpeedOfSound]

Again. Do you understand the relevance of state machines? What I bolded above makes me think not.

'State machines' is a new concept for me.

The book I linked to last night : The problem of perception
By A. D. Smith, talks about argument from Illusion(AFI) on page 21 of the google book preview.

You have a variation of this that I will call Argument from Internal Representation(AIR, nice. see what I did there?) . The brain only ever knows it's internal representation.

This is also older than the hills and not a well respected argument. I see the argument as horribly confused and even if it were spot on it proves nothing about the existence of the external.

We can get further into the horribly confused part with the discussion of black and visual perception.

You should read these first pages though.

[SpeedOfSound]

Maybe off topic.

I have been asked why I argue with guys like LI and james and others of that CosmoCon ilk. I owe them a serious debt. In the last two years I have been spurred to educate myself in ways that I never could of without them. While their arguments don't seem to change a hell of a lot mine have. Almost daily. They provide me with a little anger oriented incentive and an outline of material to digest and things to consider.

The philosophical backing to my neurology studies and the amount of world-view self-searching I have done with their help could never have been obtained in any other way, at any price.

So to my arch-enemies...

[colubridae]

James

Do this experiment. It may not be relevant but it is still cool.
You should find that the thin stream of water ‘bends’ round the comb.
Maybe impress the kids with it.

Get a nylon/plastic comb.

Go to a kitchen sink.

Turn the cold tap on to a low level, not drips, but only just continuous flow.

Comb you hair vigorously for several seconds.

Now bring the teeth of the comb very slowly to the flow of water, without touching it.


As to the brain and ‘state machines’

I would differ with sos.


My view is that if you could set any given brain into the exactly the same state, then given the exact same sensory input the brain would respond in exactly the same way.

The difficulty is that ‘the exact same state’ and ‘the exact same input’ are so immensely difficult to achieve as to be more or less unobtainable.

for the brain to have the ‘same state’ then the neurons and synaptic junctions would have to be identical, living brains change their structure continuously so achieving the same initial state is virtually impossible.

The neuron electrical state must also be identical. This would mean the exact electrical pattern prior to the sensory input being given. Again virtually impossible.

Having said all of that, the same initial conditions would result in the same response.

The implications for this is that there is no ‘extra - supernatural’ component which would affect the brains response to identical stimuli.


Having said all of that, brains are so complex, that to all intents and purposes you would never get the same response from the same brain even in with exactly identical stimuli.

Whether this goes in any way to answering your questions, I don’t know.


Whether the brain is aware of itself may be moot. Certainly I am aware I have a brain in the same way I am aware have an eye.

[SpeedOfSound]

I would differ with sos.


My view is that if you could set any given brain into the exactly the same state, then given the exact same sensory input the brain would respond in exactly the same way.

The difficulty is that ‘the exact same state’ and ‘the exact same input’ are so immensely difficult to achieve as to be more or less unobtainable.

I don't think we differ at all on this. I jsut emphasize that the brain is continually changing.

An interesting thing to consider. Imagine you were able to commandeer the entire neural interface to the brain and give it a red object input continuously or more than once. More than once would require a different input in between even if that were nothing. But ignore that for the moment.

The continuous state in itself would result in brain changes. If the brain is alive and has blood that is. The brain would not even react the same in any two adjacent milliseconds for the same input.

This is actually a segue into what consciousness really is. Things that persist longer than about 200 millisecs in certain areas of the brain are conscious things and they are causally effective in changing the neural connections in the brain. This is why we know what happened to us just fractions of a second ago or longer.

The physiology of this, in the hippocampus particularly, has been painstakingly worked out over the last 60 years.

But that C conversation will get deep real fast.

I agree with you that if we could do the magic of same exact state that the same exact thing would happen. But that is not ever possible.

[Surendra Darathy]

Even in a windowless room painted black, the walls (at room temperature) are emitting radiation in the visual spectrum. Just not enough to exceed thresholds.

What about if I'm in a windowless room, with my head under the duvet and my eyes closed? I still experience 'darkness'. Is there a point when we have to accept that the experience is generated by the brain itself and has nothing to do with the environment?

If you're really sure you can completely separate the "experience of darkness" from the "experience of the weight and texture of the duvet", then what is it you want to say about "experience" in general? I agree that there are some experiences that are more divorced from the ambient environment than others. Much of dreaming is due to the cutoff of visual and auditory stimuli by the state of sleep that the brain is in. It's not as if we do not recognise that much of the content of dreaming is some sort of recycling of past experience. No reliable presence of future experiences has been identified.

You're asking if there is or is not a separate locus for the "experience of darkness" and for the "experience of the duvet". It's a good question, but that's where it leads, rather than back toward a "subjective observer" who is "cut off from the environment", and sits somewhere in the pineal gland, collecting experiences and pasting them in his scrapbook.

Even, if you can imagine it, a naked astronaut floating in a soundproof darkened room on the ISS, at a temperature that should feel neither hot nor cold to the skin is going to experience the air going in and out of her nostrils, and sensations of coolness as perspiration evaporates from the skin.

Do you want to design an experiment in which one can listen to this proposed "subjective observer" in isolation from an environment? All the "transcendent meditators" who claim to be doing this are leaving out some details, which it would only make sense to ask them directly. What they are doing is reporting on their memory of the purported "experiences" of meditation, since they never report anything while they are "meditating". But I can't tell the difference between someone who's meditating and someone who's just asleep, unless I do some CAT scanning.

The parsimonious explanation for a person "speaking in tongues" is "going mental" (in the colloquial sense!)

It's not particularly important to me that you agree with me about these matters, James, but it is important to me that you become aware of them, hence my participation in this thread. I don't mind if you skip responding to the details I bring forward, as long as you quote my posts to show that you had a reasonable opportunity to consider them.

One has to have a prior commitment to a spiritual dimension in order to see the spiritual dimension in "experience". I don't make much of reports of "spiritual dimension" because nobody seems to be able to bend a spoon with it.

[Surendra Darathy]

My view is that if you could set any given brain into the exactly the same state, then given the exact same sensory input the brain would respond in exactly the same way.

The difficulty is that ‘the exact same state’ and ‘the exact same input’ are so immensely difficult to achieve as to be more or less unobtainable.

Interesting. For some reason this reminds me of sorting out phase space trajectories of chaotic dynamic systems. In phase space, those trajectories can pass very close to previous loci in the time series, but the trajectories do not intersect. They may not intersect. But by using the same brain over and over again, at least you reduce the "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" that chaotic systems exhibit. The same sane brain stays mainly on the chain.


The business about preparing the ambient conditions runs up against certain granularities of nature. Maybe I'll have to bring back NonErgodic for a guest lecture.

The continuous state in itself would result in brain changes. If the brain is alive and has blood that is. The brain would not even react the same in any two adjacent milliseconds for the same input.

Really. Good nutrition is important to a properly spiritual lifestyle. Mens sana in corpore sano.

[SpeedOfSound]

Put gas and air into a running engine and the pistons will keep moving and wear on the cylinders.

Everything changes.

[Surendra Darathy]

Put gas and air into a running engine and the pistons will keep moving and wear on the cylinders.

Everything changes.

This reminds me of the sign on the wall in the locker room at school when I was about thirteen: "Good feet prevent defeat."

How I revere the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It rules out a lot of woo.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Play nice or leave. There will be no more warnings.

Who has been misbehaving now?

Reading the thread will provide the information you need. The guilty parties will demonstrate their decision as to staying or leaving by their future conduct. I won't miss them, so I won't feel bad at all.

Well. After this thread wraps up I think I'll be moving along.

Do you assume you're one of the parties that doesn't want to play nice?

[SpeedOfSound]

Play nice or leave. There will be no more warnings.

Who has been misbehaving now?

Reading the thread will provide the information you need. The guilty parties will demonstrate their decision as to staying or leaving by their future conduct. I won't miss them, so I won't feel bad at all.

Well. After this thread wraps up I think I'll be moving along.

Do you assume you're one of the parties that doesn't want to play nice?

When someone is pissed it has been my experience that I'm usually somewhere on the list.