Does consciousness affect matter?

[syrakusos]

Bob Kolker: It is an absolute physical fact (maybe) that for an electron to travel forward in time, a positron must travel backward. It is an absolute physical fact (perhaps) that the electron affects itself with its own field.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I recommend two stories.

The Blind Men and the Elephant.

and

Flatland.

Michael,

I posted about the elephants a few days ago on a thread you probably don't follow:

btw - Here is a quote from Six Blind Elephants by Steve Andreas. It seems somehow germane to this discussion, but I haven't placed my finger on why.

Six blind elephants were discussing what wise men were like (never having seen one).

Failing to agree, they decided to find one and determine what it was like by direct experience.

The first blind elephant felt the wise man, and declared, "Wise men are flat."

After feeling the wise man, the other blind elephants agreed.

Michael

[syrakusos]

Funny! That would be Heisenberg: you cannot measure something without affecting it... or even effecting it. We call them subatomic "particles" and we know that they have "wavelengths." Both of those aspects or perceptions or models,or etc., are likely to be manifestations of something else, which now we think of as a field..

This gets back to an earlier discussion on the extent to which science drives technology or technology drives science. We had electrical utilities - the telegraph, electric motors and generators - before we understood very much. J. J. Thomson did not isolate the electron until 1897, ten years after Edison's light bulb, also ten years after the first electric streetcars (trams; trolleys). James Clerk Maxwell was already dead (1879), and it was he who gave the equations** for magnetic and electric fields. ... but the idea of a magnetic "field" goes back to William Gilbert (1544 to 1603).

To answer the topical question here: "Does perceiving something change it?" Apparently so. And we do not know why.

** By the way, this is not how Einstein did it, but in fact, you can derive E = mc^2 from Maxwell's Equations. That just shows that they are, indeed correct. Contrary to post modernism (see the "Comic Book" discussion in another thread), we are not ever more ignorant, but always gaining knowledge. I believe that so-called "abstract" mathematics truly is not, but is only mathematics for which we have not yet found a use. Any mathematics that is logically consistent must be empirically real (somehow).

[BaalChatzaf]

** By the way, this is not how Einstein did it, but in fact, you can derive E = mc^2 from Maxwell's Equations. That just shows that they are, indeed correct. Contrary to post modernism (see the "Comic Book" discussion in another thread), we are not ever more ignorant, but always gaining knowledge. I believe that so-called "abstract" mathematics truly is not, but is only mathematics for which we have not yet found a use. Any mathematics that is logically consistent must be empirically real (somehow).

do you really think there are sets with honest to god infinite cardinality in the real physical universe?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[syrakusos]

You mean, is the universe infinite? Does it contain any physical infinites or physical infinities, or even just one? More to the point, you want to know if I believe (think) that such exist.

I do not know of any. ... Of course, my knowledge is finite, very finite...

[BaalChatzaf]

You mean, is the universe infinite? Does it contain any physical infinites or physical infinities, or even just one? More to the point, you want to know if I believe (think) that such exist.

That is somewhat ambiguous. To say the Universe is infinite is to assert that given any large real number L there are two points (or events) in the Universe whose interval distance is greater than R. That is one kind of infinite. You can find points separated by indefinitely large distances.

Another meaning is that there are infinite collections of objects in the Universe. This is distinct from being metrically unbounded. Example: take a unit interval. It is of finite length (by definition) yet it contains an uncountable set of points.

The question I asked is: Do you believe there are sets of physically real objects in the Universe with infinite cardinality.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Brant Gaede]

Nothing is infinite. The universe qua universe comes the closest for as far as we can tell it's expanding into that nothing and because we cannot get outside it except conceptually where anything can go anywhere. As for cardinality, I assume this means actual things within the universe. They seem finite but infinitely stretched unless the expanding universe reverses direction and collapses in on itself. Maybe our universe is a universe within another universe which is pulling this one apart!? That's not much to think about. I'm not saying it's a time-waster to think about such speculations, except for me and most people.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Of course, my knowledge is finite, very finite...

Michael,

You hit the nail right on the head.

And moving from space to time, the only way our knowledge extends beyond our lifetime is because humans pass it on and build on what they receive.

How can anyone say whether the universe is finite or infinite, or time-limited or eternal? All we can say is that our perception of the universe is finite and time-limited because we are. But we can specualte that it is infinite and eternal because we also come with imagination.

On a strict verification level, humans have no way to observe the universe from a big picture perspective. We can only abstract it in a manner that makes sense to our human size.

Incidentally, I had an epiphany years ago when coming out of drug addiction. I no longer knew what I wanted in life, nor, in light of the mess my life turned out to be, did I know who or what to believe. So I decided to start with some basics I could conclude from first-hand thinking. I decided that since I didn't know what I wanted, I would start with what I didn't want.

That helped a lot.

In fact, it helped so much that here are the two other things I came up with that day.

1. The universe is an enormous place.

2. I do not know everything, nor will I by the time I die.

That might seem to be "duh" level, but I let that cut all the way down into the limits of my soul. And I can give honest witness to an inner serenity I have achieved and maintained since that day. I still get riled and insecure at times, of course, but suddenly the bottomless hole in my soul had a bottom and, since then, I have been able to work at filling the hole up.

I'm comfortable with me, Michael, not being able to know everything, especially since I realized that this is an axiomatic component to my time-and-space limited existence. There is absolutely nothing I can do about that except accept it or deny it. But neither will change it.

It's funny how I used to think that Rand's ideas were my own. (I don't mean authorship here, but honest conviction.) The truth is, until the day I had that epiphany, it was nothing but me telling myself Rand's ideas were my own. Now, the ideas of hers I agree with are my own because I have thought them through from the bottom up and the top down.

It all started with identifying and evaluating my own limitations.

I conclude that people who claim that the universe is finite or infinite have not done that job correctly (including Rand). They don't know the extent of the universe--and there is no way for them to know it.

Yet they say they do.

Michael

[Guyau]

MSK asked, somewhat rhetorically, “How can anyone say whether the universe is finite or infinite, or time-limited or eternal?”

There was around 2500 hundred years during which men thought of, but did not know whether there were atoms, tiny discrete physical units which could explain much phenomena that is directly experienced. They speculated and tried to reason to a conclusion back and forth, but no one really knew. We do, thanks to modern science.

There are specific ways in which the universe could be finite or infinite. We are making scientific progress in formulating that question for the members in the family of those ways and making experimental and observational tests of those questions, including whether the mass-energy of the universe existed through all past time. We think it did, because mass-energy exists today, and we have respectable knowledge that mass-energy is conserved. Whether all past time is finite or infinite is an open question for science today, one which modern science (with its power of mathematics), and modern science alone, may someday bring about human knowing of the answer.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Stephen,

I basically agree with you. But the operative word is "may."

My beef is with people who say "is" and have no way of knowing.

That goes for scientists and people of faith. (And philosophers. )

"Probably is because of..." and "probably isn't because of..."--or other similar qualifiers--are far more precise ways of talking about the extent of the universe when dealing with human knowledge.

And, we may learn the final answers by "modern science alone," or by evolving new sense organs, or even by another unknown or currently unknowable way of dealing with the currently unknowable.

I don't have faith in science or God. I am not a man of faith.

(Don't forget, human knowledge will only exist so long as the human race exists. Or, if we die off, unless some alien life form can make sense out of the remains of what we have done.)

btw - Here's a speculation about the expansion of the universe I don't see in the science I have looked at. It might be there, but I haven't seen it so far.

What if, instead of dark matter and energy, these mysterious sections were more like the growth stage of an organism--more like cell biology in multiplying cells? Just looking at patterns, doesn't the big bang (which created something new) resemble an orgasm/fertilization and the cosmic expansion resemble growth from an egg to an adult?

What if the universe were alive?

in your view, is that a proper question for science to examine?

Michael

[Guyau]

Yes. But there is competition for what to invest time and money in thinking through and forming hypotheses and designing tests. As I recall, Bergson, and perhaps Whitehead, speculated something akin to yours. You might find Bergson stimulating.

Leibniz wondered something like that about the universe in the large or anyway at least he would go so far as to leave open the possibility that the cosmos they knew might be a fob in the pocket of a giant man, to put it jokingly. More definitely and earnestly, he argued for a quasi-organic character of inorganic matter in an infinitely descending microscopic scale. That is not something science would bother with today. For since the time of Leibniz, we learned that life appears at the level of cells and not below.

One thing about a conjecture that the cosmic expansion at intergalactic scale is organic would be to cash how that integrates with all the physics aspects we have been able to confirm going on out there. In the history of biology, in the nineteenth century, there came a big transition of thought once it was established, by very precise and difficult measurements, that phenomena for which a distinctly vital force had been proposed were subject to exact conservation of energy. After that they went more and more with the idea that while life cannot be understood without looking at the organism's development of internal organization and the organism's characteristic behaviors, no special physical vitalistic force is needed to characterize all the little underlying operations. In that way, organisms are like the nothing-but-physics-and-chemistry of a candle flame or of the cycles of an internal combustion engine.

For the expansion of the universe, we have explanation in Einstein's field equations as tweaked variously in the cosmological-constant term to accommodate the accelerations of the expansion over the course of cosmic history indicated by observations in the late 1990's. We continue to test implications of those equations, always looking for conflicts and new physics. Even if someday researchers have continued to be successful by working with those equations and have a good well-tested model of the large-scale structure of the universe and its history, and even if those equations survived a full integration with quantum theory into a quantum theory of gravitation, something about those equations, our explanation of many things, might still be wondered. Those equations are a relation between matter (stress and mass-energy, say) and curvatures of spacetime, which equations express a two-way causality for which we have the saying: mass-energy tells spacetime how to curve, and spacetime curvature tells mass-energy how to move. That is our modern level of explanation of gravitation, but it still might be asked in its imagined successful future, Why is that two-way causality the case? It seems that whatever explanation we find for something, we can always sensibly ask why is that the case, short of the nonsense from Schopenhauer "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

[BaalChatzaf]

Bob Kolker: It is an absolute physical fact (maybe) that for an electron to travel forward in time, a positron must travel backward. It is an absolute physical fact (perhaps) that the electron affects itself with its own field.

I think that is still an open question. Feynman never solved it even though he raised the question.

[BaalChatzaf]

.

I don't have faith in science or God. I am not a man of faith.

How about technology? You don't have to -believe- in technology. You just have to use it and see what it does.

Technology is the best proof that the physical sciences work in a way that philosophy never has or never will.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[syrakusos]

"Philosophy and Science" is also the subject of a Joseph Rowlands essay on RoR. (Unfortunately, Baal Chutzpah was banned from that site.) I see this as similar to the problem of painting in the wake of the invention of photography. It is said that the camera took the foundation from representational art, at the same time engendering impressionism, expressionism, dada, and more, as painting was liberated from mere representation. I challenge that by offering the Academy school, especially the French Academy that brought us images impossible for the camera of heroic, beautiful, and wonderful painting.

So, too, here, do we have "philosophy" declared bankrupt or useless when that simply is not true. It is only that the rationalist-empiricists were submerged by trendier schools.

http://www.bouguereau.org/Jeune-Fille-Se-Defendant-Contre-Lamour-large.html

[Guest Anya]

I am not a neuroscientist, but I do ascribe to the general metaphysics of George H. Smith and Aristotle (not to treat them as a unit), and for related reasons as a determinist. My answer would be: consciousness is a name for a phenomena whose reality lies in the relationships of the various properties of matter. If we want to be meriological nihilists we might say that consciousness does not 'exist', i.e. does not have a particular substance, but that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't real (that is, we are addressing a real relationship, but relationships do not 'exist' the way hammers do). Whether or not we do this, we will wind up saying that the existence of the matter is logically and ontologically prior to the existence of derived properties in the relationship.

Now, consciousness/mind would then be something derived from recursive patterning, analog computing, and whatever else complicated machinery is used to achieve logical thought and faculty coordination. The question of whether consciousness affects matter might be like asking whether voltage effects matter. No particular electron or molecule is acted on by 'voltage', yet material structures most certainly feel the effects of changes in voltage and it can't be denied that the 'voltage' phenomena is objective. Consciousness is something analogous to that, the systematic structure of the brain itself involves will/intentionality generation and cognitive capacities, which in turn affect the fine material scale which is 'set up' to respond to shifts in the overall system.

It's very complicated, but I think the answer is 'yes, and consciousness derives from matter'.

[Brant Gaede]

I am not a neuroscientist, but I do ascribe to the general metaphysics of George H. Smith and Aristotle (not to treat them as a unit), and for related reasons as a determinist. My answer would be: consciousness is a name for a phenomena whose reality lies in the relationships of the various properties of matter. If we want to be meriological nihilists we might say that consciousness does not 'exist', i.e. does not have a particular substance, but that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't real (that is, we are addressing a real relationship, but relationships do not 'exist' the way hammers do). Whether or not we do this, we will wind up saying that the existence of the matter is logically and ontologically prior to the existence of derived properties in the relationship.

Now, consciousness/mind would then be something derived from recursive patterning, analog computing, and whatever else complicated machinery is used to achieve logical thought and faculty coordination. The question of whether consciousness affects matter might be like asking whether voltage effects matter. No particular electron or molecule is acted on by 'voltage', yet material structures most certainly feel the effects of changes in voltage and it can't be denied that the 'voltage' phenomena is objective. Consciousness is something analogous to that, the systematic structure of the brain itself involves will/intentionality generation and cognitive capacities, which in turn affect the fine material scale which is 'set up' to respond to shifts in the overall system.

It's very complicated, but I think the answer is 'yes, and consciousness derives from matter'.

Consciousness is. One investigates from that. It's axiomatic. But if you investigate into that (as opposed to from that) you'll end up with circularity. We know consciousness is energy and matter is energy contained, somewhat, as in the brain. All this life after death stuff needs consciousness as uncontained energy to work, not yet demonstrated scientifically. The body needs a brain. Does the brain--consciousness--need a body? If the answer is "No" there is one way to show it if only to yourself. But if the answer is "Yes" it won't be shown to anyone.

--Brant

try a seance; there's no need to hurry

[BaalChatzaf]

Bob,

Insturmental means? Not really. But I don't expect to detect color with a magnet, either.

We detect biomorphic fields simply by watching something grow.

You want measurement? The biomorphic field for humans means two legs and two arms. As the child grows, you can measure those. If there are three legs, for example, something popped outside the field. If only three legged people start being born, the field has changed and we are in deep shit.

btw - Can you measure gravity? Not the things gravity operates on. Gravity itself.

If not, that must be a fiction. Right?

Heh.

Michael

One way of determining causes is seeing the effects. There is no such -thing- as gravitation. Gravitation is an interaction (a process) the takes place among masses or energetic ensembles. Mass/Energy bends spacetime. You can see what the bends are by watching things move.

Caution: Do not let your clever witty verbalizations get in the way or real thinking. Language is a useful servant and a dreadful master.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Caution: Do not let your clever witty verbalizations get in the way or real thinking. Language is a useful servant and a dreadful master.

Bob,

You mean be careful when the verbalizations don't support your view?

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

Caution: Do not let your clever witty verbalizations get in the way or real thinking. Language is a useful servant and a dreadful master.

Bob,

You mean be careful when the verbalizations don't support your view?

Michael

No. I mean it in general. We are all in danger of being bamboozled by our own wit.

If something is contrary to my view, I will state plainly why I think it is contrary. I do not playing word games with serious issues and questions.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I do not playing word games with serious issues and questions.

Bob,

You mean like you don't say Aristotle was responsible for events that transpired centuries after he died?

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

I do not playing word games with serious issues and questions.

Bob,

You mean like you don't say Aristotle was responsible for events that transpired centuries after he died?

Michael

Aristotle plowed the road for the Aristotelians.

He gets a C- for checking out his conclusions. Both in his own time and in terms of the attitude he helped to promote in his followers.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

The question of whether consciousness affects matter might be like asking whether voltage effects matter.

Anya,

Welcome to OL!

Here's a quick response to your statement. Those are not similar questions.

Look up neuroplasticity sometime. It's fascinating. You will find many things that can change the brain, but you will also find that the mind itself can change the brain.

Basically, if you consider the brain to be matter, as a strict determinist, you have to conclude it causes the the mind (consciousness). A lot actually does happen that way.

But there is a huge body of research showing that the mind can physically alter the brain. In other words, the mind is a causal agent on its own cause so to speak (whereas voltage is merely the result of its cause). A simple example is the pianist who mentally rehearses (for several days) complex music he has never played before and then sits down to play it perfectly the first time.

Mental rehearsal is important in all kinds of areas for creating physical neural pathways in the brain.

Another example is the effect of placebos. The mind believes these chemicals entered the body, then things happen just as if they did. This happens over and over, even with strong medicine.

Healthy people literally die when they lose the will to live, like from heartbreak.

If you want Objectivism straight on this, volition (including the faculty of volition) is considered to be a causal agent in the literature. (btw - I agree with this.) I would have to dig, but I can come up with quotes if you like. I'm not so sure neuroplasticity is what Rand imagined, but she did believe she could program her subconscious with her mind alone. That's a form of neuroplasticity.

Michael

EDIT: Here's a good layman's introduction to this idea from 2007: The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge.

[Guest Anya]

But there is a huge body of research showing that the mind can physically alter the brain. In other words, the mind is a causal agent on its own cause so to speak (whereas voltage is merely the result of its cause). A simple example is the pianist who mentally rehearses (for several days) complex music he has never played before and then sits down to play it perfectly the first time.

I would tend to look for a different model for the results, i.e. the overall cybernetic system of the brain that generates volitional and cognitive faculties. Consciousness may not be identical to any particular bit of matter, but consciousness must derive its reality from matter (and by 'matter' I mean 'physical stuff', not the more specific physics models like mass/energy).

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Consciousness may not be identical to any particular bit of matter, but consciousness must derive its reality from matter (and by 'matter' I mean 'physical stuff', not the more specific physics models like mass/energy).

Anya,

This is a presumption, not a fact. I'm not sure consciousness must derive from anything just like I'm not sure space or electrons or hierarchical forms must derive from anything.

I used to believe like you do, but I decided to limit my knowledge to things I can know for certain and be serene in not knowing the things I cannot. I find great comfort in saying I don't know when I truly don't.

For instance, it is very popular in O-Land to claim that the universe is finite. I don't know that. I know the universe exists and that I exist in it. I don't know the nature of its boundaries, nor what would be on the other side of them if there were some.

There is an epistemological error I often see committed in our subculture. People like to deduce reality from principles and make all-or-nothing binary claims based on that. And if observed reality doesn't fit, they ignore it, rationalize it, or start getting snarky.

But the very process of concept formation in Objectivism is not like that. It is true that there is the static part--the concept as a kind of file folder. That doesn't change. So it's possible to be binary about that. Either consciousness exists or it does not. In the latter case (if true) the concept has no referent in reality and the word becomes a silly audio-visual symbol meaning nothing. We can be perfectly binary about that. (And I am. Consciousness exists.)

But every concept has an open-ended part to it because, as Rand says over and over, man is not omniscient. Also, new concepts come into being all the time as humans learn more about reality. This applies to the concept of consciousness, especially to the extent we learn more about it.

Keeping that in mind, I have a speculation that humans are still in evolution. I see no reason to presume the evolutionary process has stopped with our generation. I also speculate that there is more to the universe than the human 5 senses perceive and we might be evolving to acquire the sense organs or other possible means for perceiving this "more in the universe." I don't know that, but I find that speculation better than claiming the existence and nature of the universe are limited by human perception and what we know at the present (even axiomatic concepts).

In The Art of Living Consciously, Nathaniel Branden speculated about an "underlying reality." I've written on this several times, but I don't have time for more than at cursory search right now. Here is a link where I went into it a little back in 2006. If the present discussion continues and you are interested, I will try to find some better quotes.

Michael

[Guest Anya]

I believe that materiality (and the finiteness of any particular, which may not include the Universe) is simply a property of things which actually exist, as a species of logical coherence. I don't think it would mean anything to say something exists but has no physicality, it gets to the problem of 'souls' if we deny this, because the relationship between a material and an 'immaterial' object is anything but clear.