I’m a citizen disappointed by the shallowness of our media and lack of honest examination of today’s deeper challenges. Such as coming to grips with what society has done to our Earth’s biosphere (life support system). I realize no one likes bad news, but faith-based denial isn’t going to do our children any good either.
~ ~ ~ Thus I’ve taken to writing what I'd like to see more of and to sharing selected writings of others.
~ ~ ~ feel free to copy and pass along any of the following.
Let me lay out the chain of reasoning that drives this challenge.
It starts with accepting the reality of this physically evolving Earth around me. I know I’m not imaginative enough to conjure up this vision of the miracle planet I live on. Seems to me, it has to be one or the other. If it’s real, it goes back billions of years, and evolution actually happened one day at a time.
Once that’s out of the way, the rest ought to be easy. Evolution, that is — change over time. First Earth, geology, and chemistry, working together with time — lots of time.
Then geology and chemistry figured out how to harness electricity, via the Krebs cycle and such.
I believe it’s honest to suggest this is the birth of biology. By and by, chemistry, geology, and biology created ever more complex “electrified” molecular components — that is, molecular biology — eventually figuring out how to colonize themselves. Up to here, it’s all pretty much spontaneous electro-magnetic interactions.
About the same time, that is, four billion years ago, something else astonishing happened. “Membranes” started showing up. I believe it is reasonable to suppose that this is where “awareness” made its first appearance. The membrane must know what belongs on the inside — and how much of it — also what needs to be excreted. It must also know what to allow in and how to keep the whole cell on an even keel, so to speak.
With growing complexity, sensing, processing, motion, and strategy become increasingly important. And we haven’t even made it out of the microscopic scale.
As creature bodies become ever more competent at basic survival functions, they have an increasing amount of processing space and energy available for doing more. We come from a line of animals with increasing skills, physical and mental. Consider our mammalian forbearers with their family bonds and ability to communicate and cooperate with each other. We are a continuation of that trajectory and gene pool.
This brings us to the title question and why I suggest that searching for the mind within the brain is a dead end.
Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) = Mind (consciousness). Remove any of those and consciousness collapses. What are we left with?
A realization that our consciousness is best understood as an interior reflection of our body dealing with life. (See Solms, Damasio, Sapolsky, Wilson-Sloan, etc. for details.)
Everything we know and experience is filtered through our body and its many sensing organs and systems. Our body is the only connection to the physical world we have — be it a calculator or a lover. Our body is the instrument through which we present ourselves to the world, and our physical self is what the outside world is looking at and talking to.
Scientists have shown us how our senses work in excruciating detail. Our brain may be our central processing organ, but within our body scientists have discovered other discrete information processing centers, along our spinal cord; in our guts with the enteric nervous system; our immune system’s cytokine signaling; and the heart’s sinoatrial node.
Not to be overlooked is the newly recognized functions of fascia, the connective tissue between muscle bundles that sports curious communication channels running throughout our musculature, communicating with itself, and reporting — helping our brain know what our body is doing.
It’s mind boggling, and I bet I’m missing some, and that scientists still have some to discover.
When it comes to understanding the so-called “hard problem of what gives rise to subjective, qualitative experience,” we need to realize that it takes a whole lot more than simply a brain to create an experience. It requires a holistic, spot-on biological symphony.
The bat feels like the bat, and being there feels different from looking at the postcard, because it’s a whole-body experience — a series of momentary, unique, vital connections to the living experiences as they race through your living body.
Mind is the product of the entire body-brain system interacting with the living moment, interior and exterior. What else can it be?
Philosophically fixating on the brain as the source of consciousness feels to me like a reflection of our own all too human self-absorption, and it is emblematic of our general disconnect from the rest of this planet Earth that created us to begin with.
This is a good place to put in a plug for appreciating the Physical Reality–Human Mind divide, along with its cascading implications. Seems to me it’s a first-base concept, a prerequisite before the rest of our human condition can start making rational sense. Then we can start taking responsibility for the consciousness that our evolved biological body produces.
I read Steven Gambardella’s interesting article Spinoza, God, and Youand found it very engaging. I made a few comments and figured it was enough. But thinking on it all day, I still want to write about a key element that I feel keeps getting left out of such discussions about God and consciousness.
(SG) The morning is a symphony of small things — the rumble of the kettle, the diminuendo of a passing car, a shard of sunlight across the worktop. Outside the breeze catches a dewy web, the spider tremors.An odd thought occurs — what if none of these things are really separate?
What if the kettle and the car, the spider and the heart beating in your chest aren’t items laid out on the counter of the world, but kinks in a single fabric? Spinoza the most ambitious claim a philosopher can make — there is only one thing. And that one thing is everything.
Wow, talk about getting smacked across the face. Good morning, wake up and smell the coffee!
But, but, I believe in Evolution! I understand a good deal about the astounding pageant that has brought us to this point in history. The one-ness of my existence with the All out there - it is a reality, once appreciated, it can't be escaped. So give me a moment to clear my head before continuing with what promises to be a fascinating article.
First, to clarify - I am an individual evolved biological animal (an Earthling), with some 600 million years of successfully evolving generations under my belt. One thing that means, is that I appreciate that my biological body has layers of insights and agendas well beyond my awareness. {It sets up an odd sort of partnership situation between my mind and my body. Difficult to convey, but oh so real.}
My thoughts & mind ( the "conscious" part of me) are an internal reflection of my biological body (the physical part of me) dealing with the rush of physical reality coming at me, interior and exterior. (Physical science, [as opposed to philosophy/theology], supports this supposition. For details see, Solms, Damasio, Sapolsky, Sloan-Wilson, etc),
I'm not unique, one of billions.
Yet my mind and my life's journey is unique.
And it is mine, same as it ever was.
And that's about all I can know with certainty,
based on a life time of absorbing the developing scientific evidence and understanding. It's fractals all the way down.
Okay now that I have that out of my system, on to the rest of Gambardella’s story . . .
(¶10) (SG) “Here we meet Spinoza’s definition of God: “By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite.” (Ethics 1.6)
Not a bearded man in the sky, nor a hidden engineer — “absolutely infinite” means nothing stands outside or alongside God. God is — surely — all powerful, all knowing, so therefore must be all present.
If there were a second thing, God would not be all. Spinoza argues that outside God “no substance can be or be conceived” — that is, there cannot be two ultimate stuffs. There is only one — and “whatever exists is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God.”
In Spinoza’s phrase, Deus sive Natura — “God or Nature” — are not two names for two things but two names for one. You can say “Nature” if “God” gets stuck in your throat, or say “God” if “Nature” feels thin. (Or, the Universe)”
That works for me. God permeating everything and beyond our understanding. With us humans as the most spectacular, if oh so flawed and destructive, manifestation of Time and Earth's evolutionary drive.
Matthew Whiteley has written another fascinating and provocative article. Although, I’ll admit, it confused, rather than enlightening me. Still, it offered me plenty to think about, while inviting some questions, perhaps offer some suggestions towards resolution.
I believe the other side of this story is terribly under reported, so even though I’m under-qualified, what I do know comes from the best and the brightest in their fields and it deserves being shared one way, or the other.
Here is a down-to-Earth, Evolution appreciating approach to unraveling these hard philosophical problems about human consciousness, including the apparently baffling experiencing the experience conundrum.
In his article, right out of the gate, Matthew hits me with some cognitive whiplash because his title reads, “Physicalism is False.” Wow, quite the suggestion. Okay, let’s see where this goes. Followed by, “Why the mystery of consciousness is not vitalism.”
Bam, where did that come from?
How could vitalism — or Anil Seth’s use of it as metaphor — inform our understanding of Physicalism, one way or the other?
Ironically these days, scientists have cracked open significant aspects behind the biological mechanisms that actually do produce our body’s “vital spirit” — though it’s quite a bit more complicated. Still, biology, and life is factually all about harnessed electricity.
This brings us to Physicalism, that’s an observation, a description. Everything is made out of atoms, molecules, folds within folds of harmonic cumulative complexity, gravity, the laws of nature, Earth’s evolution, biology, etc., and all that follows. The stuff science is capable of objectively observing and measuring.
Then there are our thoughts, fleeting as the moment. We feel a soul inside of ourselves, even though nothing has ever been found. Our thoughts, passions, ideas, the voices in your head, all this isn’t like anything physical. What is it? It’s a product of our physical body and brain. For me not more baffling than iron and magnet and motion producing electricity.
There are more channels of communication happening within our bodies than we dream of. We are only aware of the surface. Our human consciousness is this generation’s iteration of over half a billion years worth of unbroken generations and Earth’s research, and development, and culling, and dumb luck. All the work happened down here on Earth via geology/biology/time, evolving with every generation. Squishy wet and messy biology and deep-time unfolding one day at a time.
The stuff science is capable of objectively observing and measuring.
Zoom image will be displayed
Contemplating a postcard vs. being there.
(¶4) Matthew “… many physicalists simply take to denying elements in the (philosophical) discussion as having any meaning and suggesting that those who point out a property to consciousness that is self-evidently non-physical are somehow deluded by a kind of linguistic woo.
If I could have a dialogue with Matthew,
I’d ask him to elaborate on that. Because, I, myself understand consciousness as something the living body (the physical) produces.
All of consciousness neatly fits into the “meta-physical” realm of our existence. In fact, seems to me, it is our thoughts that create the bounds of the metaphysical realm.
(¶5) Matthew “The result then is that we seem to require laborious thought experiments to somehow exactly delineate the aspects of consciousness that are non-physical in order to somehow “prove” it, as if we can put them in a separate category as “stuff science will never explain, …”
I would suggest: Physical Reality ~ our Human Mind as a natural divide.
(Actually any biological creature’s “mind”. Since some level of self-awareness exists within all living creatures that ever survived to create off-spring.)
(¶5b) Matthew “Thought experiments … attempt to cut with a scalpel in between physical and non-physical aspects of experience to induce the realisation that something about experience simply lies beyond the reach of science.
I wonder if philosophers ever use that scalpel to cut between a radio transmitter and the electromagnetic wave it generates? What would they find?
Pondering the physical producing the non-physical signal.
If you’re thinking, “Come on, we know radio signals are physical because we can observe and measure them.” — okay, then consider the state of modern brain imaging.
You’ll find images of human thoughts in motion. Some studies even claim mind-reading abilities. You will also find images of the molecular components that produce bits of consciousness and thoughts.
Of course those bits mean nothing, Not until incorporated with the whole of the humming super complex organism, that is our physical body/brain, in motion, process the “now” moment.
What more do Philosophers expect?
Are they still looking for God?
(¶6) I think however that all of these thought experiments are slightly misguided, largely because their aim lies in separation.
I totally agree.
Only through a holistic appreciation can we hope to build the evidence into understanding.
Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) = Mind, (a constituent of the fleeting moment.)
(¶8) You might observe that all this sounds like an argument for physicalism. I am not a physicalist, in fact I think physicalism is an absurd dogma of the modern world whose existence represents the absolute spiritual, philosophical and cultural failure of our current civilization.
This remark floored me.
I won’t guess at what Matthew is implying. So, have no response to this, even though his words keep bouncing around in my mind.
If I were in an actual discussion with Matthew, I would certainly ask him to elaborate on what sorts of “failures” he’s referring to.
(¶9) At its basis is a problem of definition. What actually is physical? The word tends to act as a stand in for a set of other things, perhaps often simply the word ‘science’
Philosophy can over complicate and obscure any meaning.
At its root Physicalism is recognizing the fundamental material stuff of our existence.
Stuff we can observe, measure, replicate, (even if only in principle). It’s everything in the world “out there.”
What is overlooked way too often, is that physicalism is biology too.
Biology is Physicalism at its most complex! It will challenge, mystify overwhelm, while putting one in touch with “Awe” like nothing else I’ve experienced.
Looked at seriously, biology almost demands mystical grappling. It offers up intellectual challenges and, I dare say, resolutions beyond anything any school-boy-club, or preacher, can dream up.
Yet, it is all of the physical realm, with a touch of electricity at its heart.
I would suggest the following categorization is an important first base appreciation, the
Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide.
(¶9b) but more commonly a general feeling that there is some atomic level substance that we can reduce everything to, aimed more often not at a clear articulation of what this even means but a forbidding of any other possibility, namely the “God talk” that may afflict you if you crack open the doorway to it.
Matthew, why that tone of defensiveness?
The beautiful thing about recognizing that we are creatures of Earth — and that our consciousness actually and truly is the reflection of our body communicating with itself,while in the act of surviving — is that we learn to appreciate that, oh, of course, my God is real!
As real as I want him/her/it to be.
Why? Because we create our own gods out of the stuff of our own experience and fears.
Why would people create God?
Because we are lonely!
Life is constant toil and unforgiving.
Our loved ones die, and abandon us, or don’t understand us.
Sometimes we make stupid “unforgivable” mistakes, yet must live on.
We create Gods out of the needs within our hearts and souls and loneliness.
We need someone who Will Always Be There willing to listen and reassure, during the darkest night, and the most glorious of daybreaks, and everything in between, including those weirdest, scariest last moments of our lives.
I’ve experienced babies becoming toddlers, while a specific blanket evolves into a life’s necessity item. Especially when times get scary, visit to doctor, travel, etc. It’s like a fractal of how we once acquired Gods.
I believe we can not help but create a metaphysical (wishing it could be super-natural) companion, and it seems to me, of course, it would be modeled after that buried feeling of being enveloped in mom’s loving bosom with dad’s protection nearby (especially those first months and years that form the core of our character), coupled with our needs and expectations.
Okay, so God is real? What does that mean?
It means, God is a product of your own physical experience and mind, not something come down from on high!
(¶10) … Of these positions, only one is philosophically incoherent, which is physicalism. Physicalism proposes the problems inherent in all of the above thought experiments, and can only resolve the problem of consciousness
with recourse to some form of illusionism,
ie. we seem to be experiencing something non-physical,
but since the non-physical can be explained by physical laws,
therefore the intrinsic nature of its existence must be physical.
Oh boy,
that paragraph doesn’t offer near enough definitions.
Besides all this feels within the philosophical arena, while my mind is occupied with the real Earth and evolution, biology and physical data.
Modern evolutionary-neuro-biological sciences are dancing with that spark of life — get up to speed on the insights of Solms, Damasio, Sapolsky, beyond that, Nick Lane, Hazen, Shubin, Sloan-Wilson and many others.
I believe the problem is that philosophy never escaped theology’s base convictions, which remain a potent undiscussed under-current to most of todays, profitable, but fruitless, philosophizing.
(¶11) But vitalism is not something that makes sense as an analogy. …
Actually it’s ironic, modern understanding is demonstrating that a metaphorical “vitalism” actually is at work within our cells.
It started long ago, with an evolving geological Earth plus deep time.
Earth produced geologic conditions just right enough to create a matrix upon which energy, that is electricity could be harnessed.
By and by, the Kreb cycle (citric acid cycle) came into being.
Seems to me, this could be the moment biology was invented.
Then there were beyond-epic geological changes over more deep time during which the dance between geology & biology was evolving and refining Earth’s mineral composition — while continuing to learn how to harness that Kreb cycle into a source for Life to thrive with.
About 8, 7, 6 hundred million years ago, complex multicellular life established themselves.
By half a billion years ago, they were active creatures creating ecologies, and it was off to the races. Driven by Earth’s changing conditions. (Check out David Quammen’s “The Tangle Tree”)
Worth noting, is that the most fundamental reality of living creatures is that they required a degree of self awareness & decision making & controlled action-potentials, 500 million years ago, as they do today.
(¶12) …The observation that no scientific explanation will account for consciousness is not a claim that science can’t fully explain what the brain is doing.
The even if it did, it still wouldn’t tell you what the thing it describes actually is. … Science tells us nothing about the essential nature of experience, it does not tell us what it is.
Of course it does. The nonstop symphony of interactions is the essential nature of experience. Wedged in the fleeting moment between future and past.
What more are we expecting?
Perhaps ponder why a video of a roller coaster ride — doesn’t feel like — actually strapping your creature body into the car, then climbing up the track, then having your world drop out, and your face and hair whipping through the wind, as your guts feel the Gs, and your belly does somersaults.
Can you understand why this philosophical attitude feels like a bored kids’ self-indulgence, to a thinking/working stiff like myself?
(¶13) If someone conducts brain surgery on a conscious patient, they see a brain, obviously. For a physicalist, that’s it, and the question “how are a brain and the experience you are having the same thing?” is moot, the thing that connects the two is the scientific explanation, and if we haven’t explained it yet, we will: any attempt to argue anything else takes us back to vitalism.
That feels pretty unfair.
What does Matthew mean with “the same thing”?
What’s his question?
Our answers are constrained by the quality of the questions we ask.
In this case I suggest the questioner is obligated to work harder on formulating a coherent realistic question that is respectful of modern evolutionary biological understanding.
Here I read, sweeping biased opinion.
(¶13b) But what kind of a solution is this? Consciousness is the most basic fact there is, and it is the only fact that is actual. …
Right so let’s look at what our observations tell us at face value.
Body + Brain + Interaction (interior & exterior) = Consciousness
A review of the state of the science offer amazing insights, supporting such a formulation. I invite challenges to that opinion.
(¶14) … any dogmatic physicalism simply rests upon nonsensical assumptions and projections of future explanations that seem to misunderstand the role of science.
I would say that statement is ill-considered and ignores the depth and breadth of modern neurological evolutionary biology, all of which is certainly physical reality.
(¶14b) … but it will still be up to us to consider what to do with that remarkable and stupefying fact that existence is found only in through ontological stained glass of perspective.
What’s the problem?
Though the glass darkly and all that?
For me, a clear appreciation for the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide, has done wonders in clarify that glass.
(¶14c) … This fact can only be explained as ‘physical’ if we are willing to uphold the deliberate pretense that it is otherwise.
Please excuse my blunt words, but this statement can only be made by someone who hasn’t done his homework and throughly considered modern evolutionary biological neurological findings, insights and how that is informing and reshaping our understanding of ourselves in the world, as part of the world, not above it.
It comes down to asking better questions, and reducing faith-based expectations.
I don’t mean to sound snippy. But I’m a 70 year old heart broken evolution science enthusiast who has spent his life keeping up on new findings, thereby gaining a front row seat to the past half century of evolutionary breakthroughs and revolutionary scientific insights.
And I’m tired of seeing philosophers ignoring that wealth of new understanding because philosophy is more about ego, theology, careers and gamesmanship — rather than grappling with questions that would have mattered to humanity.
