I would add that along with researching dream-states during sleep… progressive levels of anesthesia and brain/mind altering drugs are fertile ground which have been sadly abandoned until only recently.

Regarding one commenter pontificating that QM has slayed any notion of a deterministic universe… and without a shread of evidence asserts free-will (FW) exists… I think absurd. Like evolution, the great weight of evidence has demonstrated the utter lack of FW, whether from mountains of reasearch in neurobiology or interrelated genetics. The alleged randomness of QM does not equate in any sense with some notion of FW. Quite the contrary, it would be a strong argument against it. Someone as eminent as Gerard t’Hooft has authored a paper on the “determinism underlying QM” as I recall!
I challenge anyone who desires to escape the determined Natural world (but certainly NOT the simplistically “mechanistic”) to explain the nature of this “free-willing agent” which somehow, by some means, supervenes on our physical brains. When did this supernatural agency appear in the context of human evolution, apart from the evolution of our physical brains? When during our embryological development does FW appear? Does FW operate at the synaptic, neuronal level… or is it some kind of ethereal super-identity, which comes from who-knows-where… for who-knows-why?

Cheers.

Arnold Trehub

I have to wonder if this is not a big part of the common materialist presumption that physics has “complete causal closure.” When physical phenomena are based on quantum phenomena, which have a built-in random factor, it’s hard to see how that can be characterized as “complete causal closure.” Granted, there are the intermittent attempts of a few determined determinists — such as David Bohm, to rewrite quantum theory into something that it’s not; but among physicists the Copenhagen interpretation wins broad support. One might claim that the “complete causal closure” of physics does not imply that all events have a physical cause, but it only implies that if they have any cause at all, then that cause must be physical. However, physicists generally don’t make those same kinds of claims on reality; they’re inherently more modest than philosophers when it comes to the role of physics in describing the nature of the universe.

The standard assertion of “No Hidden Variables” refers to no hidden *physical* causative factors, which would lead to physical determinism. It says nothing at all about potential non-physical variables that might act as causative factors. To some minds, the gap in causation at the quantum level — which is ubiquitous, since all physical processes are ultimately based on quantum physics — is one possible place for consciousness to hide out in the physical world, and for free will as a causative agent. (This could readily lead to a panpsychist view of the physical world, since consciousness per se would not be restricted to biological entities and processes, but would permeate all of physical reality. However, the specifics of biology and physics and chemistry would of course restrict the range of actions and behaviors that any physical entity could exhibit, as well as their range of phenomenal experience.)

This introduction of non-physical aspects to the universe is widely abhorred by contemporary philosophers, who often seem to think they are being “scientific” by adopting the philosophical stance of materialism. But materialism is not demonstrated by science; it’s just a metaphysical assumption. It so happens that physical science generally works well with materialism as a useful default assumption; but that’s only to say that physical science is about physical stuff, and not about non-physical stuff. All areas of inquiry have a proper domain, and the fact that the proper domain of physical science is physical stuff should not imply that there are no other domains or dimensions to reality, or that other areas of inquiry should be compelled to limit themselves to the default assumptions of physical science.

And, of course, the physical sciences can also be compatible with other metaphysical stances, such as idealism or dualism. There is no necessary violation of the known facts or laws of science involved in assuming that all the scientific facts that we know about the universe are the result of a universe composed of consciousness. Insofar as physics does not concern itself with consciousness, it has nothing to say about whether consciousness is constructed out of physical processes, or whether the physical universe is constructed out of consciousness, or whether consciousness and physicality are two aspects of some underlying unity.

But when it comes to attempts to understand the mind, regarding the materialistic assumption as the necessary default assumption makes no sense. It’s like wearing dark purple sunglasses, and then looking at a forest and declaring that no non-purple things exist. The most interesting things may be unintentionally filtered out that way.

Re comment #7, it did not appear that comment #6 was asserting that quantum phenomena can explain consciousness or its phenomenal content. I took Mr. Seyfried as making a more general point: that materialism assumes a physical cause for all physical events; and that that assumption has been amply disproven by quantum mechanics. But I think one could hold the materialist assumption without the assertion of physical determinism that violates quantum mechanics. That would mean accepting that many physical events ultimately have no cause at all, neither a physical cause nor a non-physical cause.

As to explaining consciousness itself, that is a much harder problem than merely explaining some of the details of the contents of conscious experience. David Chalmers did a great job of addressing “the hard problem of consciousness” in his book, outlining how there is something there that seems, from our own direct subjective experience of consciousness, to be fundamentally non-physical. He ended up defending a dualistic metaphysics of sorts; but most of the same arguments would work equally well for an idealistic metaphysics.

Idealistic metaphysics is very common in eastern philosophy, but apparently it’s anathema in western philosophy these days. (And Berkeley’s version of idealism was problematic; but vedantic or Buddhist idealism is quite a different beast.) However, the only objection that western philosophers can seem to raise against idealism is the “but that’s just absurd!” objection. That seems like a woeful lapse of intellectual rigor on their part. To maintain that the position of idealism is simply untenable by anyone who is intelllectually serious is demonstrably wrong; as evidenced by its popularity among the most rigorous of Indian philosophers and physicists alike. A reductio ad absurdum argument loses its teeth when confronted with the existence of many profound thinkers who don’t seem to find the “absurdity” to be absurd at all.

The study of consciousness as an interdisciplinary effort involving science and philosophy and psychology has been revealing fascinating things about the mind and how we think of it. But with regard to some of the “hard problems” of consciousness, I can’t help but feel that this area of inquiry will be chasing its own tail in some ways, so long as researchers feel duty bound to swear oaths of fealty to the presumption of a materialistic metaphysics.

Arnold Trehub

I am a scientist (biochemist) absent from the university 20 years and have recently pursued a study in philosophy. Current science education is very restrictive and does not consider history. In my own mind I have reduced all things(including cause and effect) to the word witness(of both unique witness A and the act of his(its’) witness =A). From this scheme A chain is thus described of witness and events A.B.C.D …over time of any change.. This must be true even for temporally unextended events. A question can be posed-can a volume of space exist that is closed such that a witness process within it leaves no external record from uncommunicated thought, and I do not think that this is possible. Between the past and the present, in general, the existence of a closed space implies the alignment of all witness processes from an origin. Thus if the molecular interactions within the brain are chains of witness in terms of communications between intracellular and extracellular events, thought produces a sum change of some type, rather than saying A causes B. Like the layers of an onion, it is conceived from a (differential-i.e conceived from a more previous change)..previous change.. and relates to itself that way…relates externally that way the same, and to the same, of objects of mutual witness and cannot be detected if it did not occur in this ad-infinitum means of mutual relation . .e.g. occurred with intention as an external relation appropriate to the relations of another onion-set of onion like, layered entity. If such a relation did not occur, it did not exist; the suggestion of whether an uncommunicated thought/unextended event, could be detectable is not any different from the suggestion of being able to detect what dies niot exist. This is very different from a notion “does cognition alone produces detectable or undetectable change”. The way one spends his time, where his thoughts rest can change the way he relates–self-relates. I think this fact might be instantiated to concepts of history.
With respect to the onion example, the world, all of its’ processes might be divided into the appropriate (direct, basically originating proximally, and directly applicable to one’s perceptions) and the inappropriate (indirect, originating distal to what is proximal and relocated in the sense that it contains “information” more applicable to a distal place). These elements –appropriate and inappropriate, associated with momentum/energy-by comparison and difference, I believe, define time, are the perceived elements of change, as of the different layers of the onion-and the basis of all relations. Actual time itself I think to be of a higher order(e.g. x^2) oscillation, with respect to our mental frequencies/wavelengths as space and volume seekers; are but a subset. Einstein himself did not believe that the correct elements to describe phenomenon had been ascertained (major topics being “observed and then reconsidered”).
If one reflects on history, it is dominated (from description see Nietzsche “On the Geneology of Morals) ) to be riddled with actions and concepts formed from inappropriate connections(the Arians and the Jews and their described activities and ascribed life positions with respect to others-one another).

To include the human habit of soul searching, but extended deep into the realms of science and philosophy, where serious controversies exist and a vast dark area continues to emerge, I would like to propose the notion that there is an inappropriate light in every beacon on this earth from its’ beginning –from the first recorded thoughts.
With respect to history and science, it is simple to state that all things emerge, but not so simple to accept that we might not find laws that enable us to assemble an understanding or order to provide explanation-but only a simple list of circumstances evolved over time from the past and unwitnessable. I believe that natures mechanism for continuance is recurring in the sense that (information for) survival in (innately) included with conscious experience. Science, though, appearing useless, in this case of unpredictable emergence, might only suffer from a poor orientation(see personal manuscript in URL list) in its avoidance, or ignorance, of individual ratios (that might be, with empirical categorization, become individual potential ratios, for each unique,causality becoming, in both science and individual perception a range of hierarchically ordered potentials uniquely suited for each unique relation). A newly ordered scheme that accounts only for a mechanism of transmission, transmission/replication of form, self avoidance as the issuer of force/momentum-the means of uniqueness(and uniqueness in perspective and emergence), is possible. In this sense though, I believe/fear that we have overextended our means to take an inappropriate direction for continuance with an excessive exploitation of nature arrived at from failed insight and overconfidence.

Marvin E. Kirsh

http://www.authorsden.com/marvinelikirsh
http://www.marvinekirsh.com
http://philosophy.elte.hu/philphys_archive/2007/msg00015.html

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: Esquire Magazine has an article on pioneering neurosurgery on Iraq vets to reconstruct large areas of damaged skull. Cognitive Daily looks a research suggesting that judges may be biased in their b…

http://www.tbiomed.com/content/4/1/10/

The essential structure is a simplified, but inherently tunable, tangent space to a complicated manifold in which the mapping is defined in terms of the rate distortion theorem. Under proper tuning, relatively little information is lost, although poor tuning can lead to quite spectacular inattentional blindness.