Qualia and trees

[Explorer]

Maybe I was her second husband...or your first wife....

Or perhaps I was your wife, and she was our dog, and we hit her with a bible everytime she snapped. And now she came back to haunt us.

[Bartholomew]

Woof woof! xx

[Dendrias]

[url="Nico"]Ofcourse you can. By cutting away the crap you get closer to the core. It is a bit like sculpting. And there is a hell of a lot of crap in our 'spiritual' circles. It is not the people who expose ignorance and falsehood who ridicule people. It is the ones who spread it, they ridicule themselves.[/url]
What kept and sometimes still keeps me away from said circles is exactly that: pseudo-spiritual crap.
But before I will shut up in this thread: I don't think that expose ignorance is cutting away anything. The exposing in itself is not a constructive method of showing what is right, but only shows ignorance of others. When a discussion hasn't got a constructive aim, when the exposing isn't constructive ... well, sometimes it's wiser to just stand back from the argument, isn't it. A German saying reads: "The wiser one gives in." And if someone ridicules himself, there's no need to expose anything, is it?
Wouldn't it be wiser to close this one than to play the game of writing pure nonsense? I'm sure pmailing about Your doggystyle karmic relationship would be enough. Unless You have the pubescent desire to spiel in public and show Your manlihood by moronic coolness.

[Explorer]

Woof woof! xx

*smack*

[Explorer]

Wouldn't it be wiser to close this one than to play the game of writing pure nonsense? I'm sure pmailing about Your doggystyle karmic relationship would be enough. Unless You have the pubescent desire to spiel in public and show Your manlihood by moronic coolness.

You're in quite a mood today aren't you mr D? I saw you going for the throat at other people today also, mister wise and peaceful druid .
No worries, we all have our better days and worse days. Lighten up, behold this thread, feel the amount of wisdom and nonsense in it, and see things from a lighter perspective. Or better, read the last line in the forum rules on top of your screen, it says it all.

[Attila]

Nico

That is not how I saw it. I saw somebody tirelessly trying to bend misunderstood terms and misconceptions bend into the proper shape, and in the end becoming irritated and give up when it became clear that nothing he said made a dent. I can relate to that.

I used terms that are regularly used at other forums and on many sites I went to, [perhaps you cannot see?] If he simply filled me in on what the facts are without all the churlish and arrogant flaming, then we could have had an interesting debate.

He called the factual site I posted one for children [which is right but that doesn’t make me a child for using it right!], so what it simply stated was the facts, and in a simple way so as to show my argument that the brain is not purely chemical and produces electromagnetic fields and frequencies [and much of the chemical nature is electrically charged ~ a fact recognised by any scientist.

So don’t give me the argument of the poor scientist just trying to give information, because that is a load of nonsense.

[Bartholomew]

Ouch! I'll be back for a belly tickle. All is not lost. xx

[Jake]

That is not how I saw it. I saw somebody tirelessly trying to bend misunderstood terms and misconceptions bend into the proper shape, and in the end becoming irritated and give up when it became clear that nothing he said made a dent. I can relate to that.

Nico, thank you for seeing my intent and for sympathizing with my frustration (which did cause me to say harsher things than I would prefer to). It really is difficult to learn you haven't made a dent at all and nothing is getting through. And clearly it didn't, since now I'm supposed to have said that the brain is nothing but chemicals and electricity plays no role in neuronal activity after having spent all that time typing all that business about ions and electrical synapses.

But it's heartening to know that at least someone else saw what I was seeing.

SSSSSSH, please don't mention the G-word, or the crazy woman who thinks that she has a karmic link with me returns!

The one with all the different screen names?

Edit: Nevermind last question. Read ahead. Got it!

[Attila]

Jake

Hmm looking back on your posts I see I did misunderstand some things, ~ which occurs easily when people insult you. Its easy to get in a muddle when people are acting like that, I should have known emotion doesn’t belong in philosophy.

I prefer to see the process for what it is - living cells communicating with other living cells in a vast and beautifully complicated oceanic network of interaction and negotiation.

I took this too literally perhaps, and that’s where my mix-up [I thought you were implying that the brain was purely chemical].

Metaphysics is a valid philosophical field, you had no right to take it down. This thread is about qualia [a metaphysical concept] which any scientist would say e.g. redness does not exist in the corresponding wavelength of light.

By a similar reasoning I was trying to say that information and meaning does not exist in the brains em frequencies, but perhaps you can show how it can?…
Take note that the term ‘information’ derived from greek words and 'meanings', to put that purely into modern understanding of physics is at best limiting [even the link you gave stated all manner of kinds of info, and i clearly stated that there is mechanistic info and other]. We do not understand it as such in the minds eye do we? So like qualia there appears to be a question hanging over the idea that info and data are of the brains physical composition [however you want to denote that].

The point I was trying to make is that ‘meaning’ [info] cannot be found in any complexity of cells or em frequencies and fields.
That knowing is also not born of physical processes. This is because to know is to understand information as it exists in the subjective mind.

As I said earlier, you are expecting me to be a neuro-physicist or something along those lines, where that is not my field. This because you patently know more in that field, so you chose to use it to character assassinate me by using only knowledge from that and refusing to acknowledge anything I pointed out [as above].

[Explorer]

Metaphysics is a valid philosophical field, you had no right to take it down. This thread is about qualia [a metaphysical concept] which any scientist would say e.g. redness does not exist in the corresponding wavelength of light.

You are right. Metaphysics is indeed a valid philosophical field that has nothing to do with the supernatural. But you muddy the water by connecting it to pseudo science and speculations.

I think the real problem is that you two speak from a totally different perspective, where even words have different meanings.
Atilla speaks from a philosophical perspective, with excursions into speculative fringe science.
Jake speaks from a down-to-earth perspective, with excursions into firmly established science.

You speak different languages and end up in different places.
With Jake you end up here and now, in this reality, firmly grounded.
with Atilla you end up somewhere else.

I understand the philosphical part of what Atilla tries to say (I think), but he loses me also when he ventures into a colorful land where everything goes and nothing can be validated. And if you don't understand what I mean by that, then try googling on "holographic nature of the universe" (a scientific theory) and see how we don't end up at Fermi Lab (where the real theory is investigated), but instead on loads of crappy new age websites and a '2012 forum'. This is what happens when you mix philosophy with fringe science and speculations. (and if you don't see anything wrong with that, then I rest my case).

Atilla, I think that it would be clearer if you would stick to the philosophy part, instead of trying to weave in unvalidated and badly understood idea's from the fringes and pseudo science. But even then I think you speak different languages here.

[Attila]

Nico

Thank you for that intelligent and wisely worded post!

I agree with you entirely, my difficulty is in working in areas I don’t know so much about, however I have to go there in order to begin my questioning. I hate god of the gaps arguments as much as anyone, and I also dislike the inability of science to venture beyond the firmly grounded ~ and it probably shouldn’t do.

There are areas in the real world or at least our everyday experience of it, where science doesn’t seam to offer up any explanation. Hence I enter the murky world where metaphysics meets science, naturally people on philosophical forums understand my use of terms ~ though admittedly they are often a rounding up of ideas. For example I used the term ‘neuronal matrix’ which Dennett also used, and may I say that I had added a link to his paper denying the existence of qualia earlier, which shows I am not biased.

In future I will be sure to research my [other] links much better ~ lesson learned.

And also to re-read posts which at first seam to contradict ~ lesson learned.

And to use terminology as used in the specific field ~ lesson learned. [though this can be difficult when philosophers use different terms to scientists for the same things].

[Attila]

Right, the debate is still continuing here [and on some other threads]..
http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopi ... 2#p2210302

We have been extensively through the science aspect and are now back at square one ~ my original argument.

Here the scientists have been a little more patient with me. please read may last reply and 'the stumps' previous reply. theres some interesting stuff in there about how we experience music.

[Attila]

Thought I’d add some stuff I’ve come across…

Plants are remarkably similar to animals [considering they are plants] and have consciousness [or at least neuronal activity]. Read the link below its not very long [less than a page] and is very interesting.

http://ds9.botanik.uni-bonn.de/zellbio/ ... roview.php

From new scientist issue 3rd sept/11page 11; brain chemistry existed long before the brain.
In short [and not to break any rules] when looking for the origins of our brain, scientists have gone well beyond early man, chimps or even worms. Many key components first appeared in single celled organisms long before even nerve cells existed.
Choanoflagalletes are single celled organisms and hence do not have nerve cells, and yet proteins in these act the same as those in neurons.
These proteins are found in every nerve cell and control the release of chemicals neurons use to talk to each other! [neurotransmitters] for further intriguing fact read the full article in the mag.

----additional----- [my current philosophy on mind]

Consciousness is the network

Consciousness is not a thought, a collection of thoughts, a process, a collection of processes, it is the whole network of these things.

Networks are always entire, you can in terms of the internet [as an analogy] get a myriad of users loging on/off at any time, you may also have any number of things going on within the network, facebook, msn, blogs, forums etc. in a similar way the brain has many things going on, conceptual processing, sensory processing etc, and it may have neurons being used in different ways accordingly. However it is the entire thing that is the consciousness even though only the things being focused upon are experienced by the network, we could think of that experience as the user.

I had been perplexed by the idea that cells could/should be alive/conscious in and of themselves, or that collections e.g. in organs could have been their own entity. It seems that as soon as a cell is subsumed within the context of another a symbiosis of a kind occurs, the cells become a network formed of the communication in that relationship. this continues throughout evolution where everything brought into a network is what we know as ‘life-forms’, our entire body and brain is exactly that ~ a network experienced as a whole because all the parts are working together in a communicative relationship.

Perception probably occurs when a set of communications [working like facebook within the network -let us say] are acting at once to focus on something specific, and flicks between different prominent activities.

Experiential thought occurs at an epicentre of the network and one which is probably in no particular location in the brain.

Communications involve information and ‘thought’ or mind experiencing and collaborating the information. Once a pathway has been created such activities may become mechanistic in the sense of emulating the patterns used in the former thought processes. The latter is what we may think of as the subconscious and as the brain working like a computer/processor.

It would seam that in the process of communicating one party lies dormant or passive towards or compared to the active part which dominates. Throughout the evolutionary and foetal growth [which mimics that in an efficient way as coded by the genes] of life-forms, this trend is continued and is why there is always a single dominating active user of a network. Even in the case of a split-brain [where the two hemispheres are divided] you still have single users only the network has divided.

_