Member: dboot

Hello David (dboot):

I'm writing to you after exploring the contents of your library
and reading your homepage.
We share at least 1 book; I only have 200 of our ~ 4,000 catalogued so far.

My husband's name is Zeera (Zee) Charnoe.
He is also a member of librarything (id: ZeeCharnoe).
I include the link for Zee's FREE website,
because I think there may be writings there you would like to read.

http://ecophysics.org
The Structure and The Dynamics of Oneness.

This website contains FREE writings, artwork and four books.
We also have a Sunday afternoon webcast: ANACLYSM radio program
at www.blogtalkradio.com (nothing to sell)

Zee and I live a quiet existence, surrounded by books and plants.
We seek to find others of like mind,
to have discussion / e-mail exchanges
about the shared books (writings) that we have read
and to offer Zee's writings as additional materials to discuss.

Thank you for your attention.
Kind regards,
Jennifer Gray Charnoe (id: ecohealth2003)

posted by ecohealth2003 at 1:51 am (EST) on Nov 17, 2009

Hello again, David,

I found two of Chalmers books in the public library. Prior to that, I gave as much thought to your revelation as I can manage right now. When I try to think about philosophy I soon find myself lost in a jungle of semantics. When abstraction gets so far removed from concrete referents, I find that the meaning of all the words begins to dissolve. So I find philosophy frustrating.


Nevertheless, I’d like to suggest an alternative “model” to what you proposed, namely that substance is dual. In your description, every piece of reality has two aspects: QC = substance; understanding = form. I would say instead that understanding and form are not reality, but that reality is substance (unknowable), and is composed of two aspects, one of which is observed as QC, while the other is observed as understanding/form. This is how I originally understood panpsychism.



I looked again at the first pages of Nagel’s Panpsychism chapter, and saw that the whole concept of panpsychism seems to be implicit in his premise #4 Nonemergence: that true emergence -- defined as “not derivable from constituent properties” -- does not exist. If instead true emergence does exist, then there is no hope (by definition), of understanding it. Thus the only understanding that’s possible is panpsychism, whether it’s true or not.



By definition, then, physicalism demands panpsychism and implies that qualia is in a fundamental sense physical. The concept of physical (and of dual) is therefore brought into question. But if the definition is expanded to include that which is normally considered non-physical, does it really have any meaning any more? The meaning of any word seems to depend on a dichotomy somewhere, a comparison with something else, so that if a word refers to all phenomena, does it really mean anything? The resulting understanding seems to be only a breakdown of all basic dichotomies, unifying everything in the same way that a Buddhist view gives up distinctions to experience the true emptiness of things. In the end there’s no way of defining anything. Metaphysics seems to be directly opposed to Zen, in that it’s completely cerebral, while Zen seeks to be free of everything that’s cerebral. Yet the end result seems to be the same -- a letting go of grasping after meaning. I’m sure you don’t think of it that way, but I can’t help seeing this parallel or convergence.



Is space physical? Is geometry physical? Is mathematics physical? Information? If these things can be considered physical, then I guess qualia could be too. Fortunately, I don’t have to ask if time is physical, because, after reading Julian Barbour’s “The End of Time: the next revolution in physics,” I clearly understand that time is not a thing or process, only an implied relationship. Time is only information or math, and is physical only if information and math are physical. You could say that time is less physical than qualia.



By the way, Barbour’s concept of Platonia explains the Big Bang as an illusion. It’s just the apex at the boundary of the set (or phase space) of all Nows. He goes a big step further than David Deutsch in elucidating the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. I dare say that reading this book will give you a new slant on the nature of the form of the Big Bang. It also answers Hawking’s question about why things exist.



I know that most of what the brain does is pre-attentive, unconscious, zombie-like, and constitutes “the mind.” Qualia correlates directly with these transient assemblies (neural gestalts) but cannot be reduced to them. Yet could it not still “emerge” (in the non-philosophical sense) or “transform” in some way, rather than being the identical substance down to the level of the atom? In other words, could there not be rather a “qualia-precursor,” which, when processed by interaction in the requisite knowable form, becomes full-blown qualia?



I suspect that full-blown qualia is found only in reference to brains. Ramachandran in “Phantoms in the Brain” defines the three attributes of brain qualia – irrevocability on the input side, flexibility on the output side, and short-term memory, and proposes that it evolved for a purpose: to eliminate hesitation and confer certainty to decisions. He says that without choice there’s no qualia. I see you have “In the Theatre of Consciousness: the workspace of the mind” by Baars. I haven’t read it yet, but Susan Greenfield (Private Life of the Brain) mentions his theory in terms of what she calls the readout “fallacy.” Could it be possible that the readout (if I understand this concept) goes back to the unconscious zombie processes? It seems to me on first glance that the “readout” could be unconscious (as are all intentions, of which we’re only conscious 200 milliseconds after the fact), and the unconscious reaction would cause the shift to the next qualia. In that way, then, qualia can be a sort of epiphenomena, something used but having no action in itself. Qualia and consciousness are therefore the same thing, and consciousness itself doesn’t do anything.



I believe the Abidharma book might embark on what Nagel calls a “similar chain of explanatory inference beginning from familiar mental phenomena,” leading to different properties of matter. So I’ll eventually try to read it and let you know if I think it sheds light on this question.

posted by Stephen_Arthur at 5:05 am (EST) on Jul 11, 2007

Hello David,

I'm enthralled by your answer. I understand the Chalmers quote well from my own experience long ago taking university subatomic physics and realizing in a kind of dismayed wonder that "there is no stuff," no basic substance is found. A few years ago someone gave me a copy of the essay "Panpsychism," a chapter in the book Mortal Questions by T. Nagel. I was quite taken by that, but after a while I suppose I began to feel it was just pushing the question back in the manner of the homunculus problem in the brain, or somehow taking an easy way out, and so I found myself returning, somewhat unconsciously, to a kind of blind faith in the opinion of most neuroscientists, who tend to be confident that QC can be eventually explained as an emergent property. But I have not been focusing on this question in any concentrated way, as you have. So I'll now have to start reading some of these philosophers you named.

As I recall, the model of panpsychism that I read about would have placed QC as one of two kinds of substance, both lurking unknowable behind the form and interaction we can know objectively. But I believe the parallel you proposed is that *all* substance is QC. Am I interpreting this correctly?

In any case, you've put my thinking into an unexpected new spin. I wish I could consider it deeper right now, but I'll have to take it a bit at a time. I'll try to provide a more thoughtful reply over the weekend, perhaps.

Thank you very much for your explanation, and I'd love to hear any more you might care to provide.

Cordially,

Stephen

posted by Stephen_Arthur at 5:03 am (EST) on Jul 11, 2007

Hi. You have the most number of books (weighted) in common with me, so I'd like to ask you a question. To me the only big question left is the question of qualia - how does subjective conscious experience get generated by a physical brain? The many neuroscience books purporting to answer this question are ostensibly monist, but in the end the question remains unanswered; a dualism remains. Since I don't find pure philosophy very palatable, I began wondering if a Buddhist perspective could help here. In my opinion, Western Buddhism has evolved the truest, best version of "the way things are" so far. But it still seems to suffer from accepting a dualist understanding of the world. In contrast, the Tibetan Abhidharma, or "Buddist psychology," somehow seems to manage without this separation, so I tried reading "Two Views of Mind: Abhidharma and Brain Science." But I quickly got put off reading it because their ideas are so alien to me. Do you have any advice on how to begin making this kind of reconciliation?

posted by Stephen_Arthur at 3:14 pm (EST) on Jul 2, 2007