I should visit Colorado so I can view it in all its glory.

Take a look at this- this is what neural science is doing. If none of this was related to physiological processes, if we understood personalities or consciousness as something other than physiological phenomena, this would not be possible. This is a look at the future. We are done being hoodwinked by outdated ways of thinking about these things, the proof is right here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50137987n

Ah, yes, a clear case in point. You read my words, but
don't understand what I'm saying. Try reading some David Chalmers.
Of course you can do wetware IO and interface with the world,
as I said a few posts back,

"Most of the stuff going on in our brains is like
a wetware computer. Lots of links, lots of details, but fully analogous with
lots of wiring and electric circuits. Neurons acting like logic gates. You can
map all that stuff out, and though we don't know all the details yet, we know a
lot of them. But in all the mappings and descriptions, we can look at physical
stimuli, triggering electrochemical responses in receptor cells and tracing
pathways, noting how photons excite photochemicals with specific energies,
phonons tweak cilia at specific frequencies, etc, etc. "

None of this impacts on the ineffability of the true nature of consciousness.
Here, listen to a neuroscientist, one who knows whereof he speaks (this guy
does stuff like in the article you linked regularly in his day job, and it only
enhances his awareness of the deficiencies of reductionism, because he happens
to be awake):

[zip to minute 16 to get to the pertinent content]



[I put this link in originally because it's his website
http://www.possibilian.com/ but the video there is not
quite as detailed at the point in question as the Youtube
one above, however the site does a good job of laying out
his general outlook.]

I believe I've already stated we have not yet formed complete descriptions- but it is chemistry, it is biology. If it's not this, the problem is that there is no alternative but to be ineffable- you'd have fall back on metaphysics, which for thousands of years has said: "You don't know. Your senses are not equipped to see what's behind perception." You may not have perfect knowledge, but that doesn't mean that we haven't formed better descriptions. This breaktrhough would simply not be possible if any of this were not physical- robotics, electronics, computers and so forth do not work off of anything else. Consciousness is necessarily physical. You can convolute the defintion by thinking more about it, but for now, that's the basis to start from. It's physical. If we are to learn anything more to understand consciousness, we have to accept that as the premise- it's the only way. We haven't found a way to measure things that aren't physical.

See, you're saying things like 'true nature of consciousness'- that's nothing more than a language game, it presumes in the first place that there is something more fundamental which can't be demonstrated- you don't understand the 'true nature' of your breakfast, or the 'true nature' of someone laughing- you can always apply that to anything. Meanwhile, science is showing more and more how the brain works while people say things like that. People can say it's not physical, or say it's ineffable, but they don't advance science, either. People stuck in that discussion would have never been able to come up with what they're doing now.

Sorry, no. B does not follow from A. Regardless, you still aren't hearing it.
There is nothing in our understanding of the physical world which even begins to
enter the territory of subjective experience. You can push physical bits
around for the lifetime of a universe and you will not get consciousness out of it.
You need stuff which is beyond the reach of logic. You may be able to assemble a
consciousness, but only if you do it by creating a device full of infinities and
paradoxes, whose operation you do not understand and cannot explain. You can be
absolutely guaranteed: if you fully understand it, and can map out all of its function,
then it is not conscious. And that will always be the case.




Nonsense. That is the road to guaranteed failure. You still do not grasp what is going
on inside your own mind. Your entire experience is non-physical. The physical world is
just a model built in your mind, and it is not made of physical stuff, it is made of
mind stuff. Where does the colour red come from? It is not anything remotely physical.
It is an experience which the mind uses to represent for your mapping of the world
the indication that your sensory apparatus has detected the presence of photons of a certain
range of wavelengths, but it has nothing more to do with EM radiation than that. Where does
red come from? Your mind reaches out to some reservoir of raw stuff of experience, in some
"place" which has no physical location, and it pulls the experience of red from a shelf there,
and bolts it on to its construction of the representations of the world. But the experience
of red which you have every time you are exposed to photons of the right frequency is showing
you what a non-physical event is like. As is every other thing which happens to you. None of
it is physical. Physical things belong in the world of physical things. Experiences do not.



What we haven't figured out is how to reliably share reproducible non-physical events among
different people, because as Eagleman carefully phrases it in his talk, it is private
subjective experience.


"the true nature of" is just unnecessary baggage, we can lose it.
The statement is then "None of this impacts on the ineffability of consciousness."
and that stands perfectly fine on its own. It is just that the word
consciousness is used for a great number of different things, but
I am using it for something very distinct and specific. People who
aren't attuned to that continue to conflate consciousness with thought.
They are not remotely the same thing. Thought is one of the great varieties
of things you can experience. Being conscious is being that which is
having experience *right now*. Consciousness only ever exists now.
It does not require thought. It just requires a watcher, a subject.



That is by no means clear. We need a model of the world which is more than
just physical, and a mathematics to go with it. It is absolutely science.
But we'll never get it when most people are too asleep to even see the issue.


People who have wrestled with this problem are some of the brightest and most
productive who have ever lived, scientists and philosophers. And they call it
The Hard Problem. There is only one, and that's it. Everything else is easy by
comparison.

My question to you is this- do you think consciousness is not physical? If it's not physical, what is unconsiousness? Since it wouldn't be the absence of physical phenomenna, what would it be? What does brain dead mean to you? If the brain is dead, or shows no signs of activity, consiousness must independent of brain death and have connection to it at all if it somehow is not simply electrochemical activity. What happens to consciousness in that case? Is it possible a dead individual is still conscious? How do you make that argument without bringing 'soul' or religion into it? How do you think drugs or chemicals in the body (dopamine, seratonin, etc.) work on consiousness in the first place if consiousness is independent physically of the brain? Chemicals are physical, consciousness is not- so there couldn't be any interaction, no effect one way or the other between the two since there is no physical connection between the brain and consciousness.

It's not correct to simply say that people do not know that consciousness is not chemistry- at least insofar as we understand now, the best of our knowledge demonstrates that. Our knowledge does not indicate anything else, anything else is by defintion not testable, or it's just out to dismiss it, certainly it doesn't show you alternatives. The controversial part shouldn't be that it's physical. Anything else quite frankly starts sounding New Age, and yes, even scientists have probably been seduced into that at some time or another.

I'm not convinced that anything is physical. It would take a long time to explain,
but the world we have modelled in our heads which we believe we live in, and which we are able
to share and communicate about, is not remotely what is really going on. Take a look at this
clip, where Eagleman and Henry Markram discuss what our perception of the world really entails:



First of all, consciousness is always happening *now*. There is either a now, with consciousness, or there is neither,
in which case it is perfectly consistent. Stop trying to look at consciousness from the outside. It is only
meaningful when you look at it from the inside. That is what subjective is all about.

What argument? The connection between consciousness, life, and the brain is curious,
mysterious, baffling. It is a region ripe for deep exploration, if we can figure out a way to so it.

It is manifestly obvious that there is some connection between consciousness and the physical world, if only because some of us
are able to talk about consciousness. How the connection works is at the heart of The Hard Problem.


No, our research demonstrates that behaviour is based on chemistry. Behaviour is not consciousness. Consciousness is
about experience, not action.


Physical explanations belong to physical phenomena. Subjective phenomena are in
a different realm, and require a different explanation.

That what is physical? To say that "consciousness is physical" is a category error, it is meaningless.
There is a far larger gulf between subjective and objective than between any other distinctions
you can make.

I assure you that several generations of philosophers would regard that comment with
the contempt it deserves. Take a while and educate yourself, try searching on words like "qualia".
The Hard Problem is also referred to as the mind-body problem, and despite what pop philosophers
and reductionists claim, we are not anywhere close to an understanding. Ray Kurzweil, Daniel Dennett,
Marvin Minsky, the Churchlands, etc, these guys are all quite simply wrong, and asleep. Try
David Chalmers, Ted Nagel, Alfred North Whitehead, etc. Just because lazy thinkers put out
garbage like "What the #@# do we know" (or whatever it was called), doesn't mean that there is
no other alternative to reductionism.

I don't care what several generations of philosphers say- that in itself is a lazy idea, since, well, since philosophers like Carnap, Searle, or Kripke might disagree with philophsers like Kant, Descartes, or Wittengstein. That's not anything in itself to throw around as if it means anything.

If you're not sure that anything is physical, that ends it right there. That says it all.

But it really raises its own problems. If consciousness were not physical, what is dementia? What is brain damage? A child drowns and is saved but with severe brain impairment, that probably does not work if nothing is physical. There's a gap you're not answering here- what is the connection between the symptoms of brain damage and the physical brain- but since you apparently deny that anything is physical, or since you say that it's too mysterious to know, that allows you to deny anything. That's different by the way than saying that knowledge is not certain or absolute. The brain can be damaged by physical means- mechanically, chemically, or whatever, so how would something that is non-physical such as conciousness be affected?

It's not true that it's so mysterious so as an MRI scan doesn't show physical activity in the brain for example- unless scientists have used machines to pick up and tune into something mysterious or ethereal and are not telling us, well, you're wrong.

Weird scenes inside the gold mine...

So as not to take away fun from the original topic:

My cat never much liked catnip. When presented to him, he kind of takes a sniff and then looks at you with the "yeah.. so what" attitude.

You're just hellbent on reducing everything, like a reductionist posterboy. If you want to
get into it, OK. My take on physical/non-physical is that it is completely in thematic continuity
with matter/energy and wave/particle . There is definitely a trend, a motif which the universe
seems to like expressing with these things. The truth for all of these things requires transcending
the apparent conflict and conceiving of a synthesis where both are true at the same time. So,
I expect that nothing is really physical, and nothing is really non-physical, but everything
is something which subsumes both.

You have this tiny idea that things can only be understood if they're physical. I say, No, things will
never be understood properly if you constrain them to be only physical. There's probably a lot of math
with liberal use of sqrt(-1) in it.

How does it get associated with the brain in
the first place? If I were going to divide up consciousness into separate locations in this universe, I would
only consider two sensible divisions: either the whole thing is conscious, or consciousness is a quality
attached to elementary particles, just like every other quality we know about. But that doesn't seem to
be the way it works. It is very odd. Needs a whole lot more poking about to be done. Fortunately folks
like David Eagleman and Henry Markram exist, folks who are neuroscientists well positioned to do the
poking about, while being awake enough to understand the questions about the nature of consciousness
without the trivial dismissal given by the reductionists (whose position is somewhat analogous to that
of the Copenhagen Interpretation adherents before the advent of Bell's paper in '64.)


This just illustrates how exquisitely you are able to completely miss the point.
The fact that I can experience the world demonstrates to me that I am not "wrong"
any more than anyone else who sees and understands the problem. Yes, Virginia,
there is a physical world out there, and don't worry, it won't disappear if you
try to understand it, don't be scared. However, you are a conscious being who
experiences the world, as represented by a manifold of direct experiences, which
philosophers call qualia, which can be thought of as an n-dimensional private
universe where n is unbounded, which has perhaps 0 extension in all dimensions, but
each one can be represented by a vector pointing to a raw fundamental experience,
completely different - at right angles - to all the others, which might be red or cold
or fuzzy or fingernails-on-a-blackboard or an abscessed tooth, or choclate ice cream,
or any of an infinite number of experiences which you have never imagined. And this
universe is used by your mind to represent this hypothetcal physical world "outside",
of which, as Alfred North Whitehead observed: "Nature gets credit which in truth should
be reserved for ourselves - the rose for its scent, the nightingale for its song, and the
sun for its radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics
to themselves and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellence of
the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless, merely the
hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly."

I dunno what more I can say about this. There's a school of zen where they whack people
with a stick to wake them up, but you have to do it at the exact perfect instant, or it
just drives the students away.

Right back at you- you're determined to argue that it's not physical, but what evidence shows that? Even if our descriptions are want of better defined terms, that's still way above the alternative, which really doesn't answer some glaring problems.

It even runs into an old paradox- and this is the problem of metaphysics. The first question of metaphysics asks how we can know the object outside of subjective experience- how can we know, a priori, the thing in itself if all we have is perception. When it goes from that to claim that we cannot have knowledge of the thing in itself because we can't know anything behind the veil of perception, it runs into its own problem.

In other words, if I don't know that it is physical, by the same token, you don't know that it isn't. So what if it is physical- did you ever think that is possible or are you simply closed off from that possibility? Aren't we just both closed minded then?

Let's assume we're both equally ignorant about what we fundamentally know about consciousness. However, I have more evidence on my side- for example, the evidence that connects the brain to consciousness. It's pretty difficult to describe how a robotic arm can be moved by a person's brain if there is no physical phenomena going on. It's pretty difficult to deny that mechanically damaging the brain- such as a frontal lobotomy could not have an effect on consciousness.

You make no sense at all. You want to discard your own existence and claim the state of a
zombie with nobody home, just because there appears to be a link between consciousness and
the brain, such that those who actually notice that consciousness exists are able to connect
to their brains well enough to discuss the point. Let me repeat once again: consciousness
is beyond logical understanding. You can't build a consciousness out of computer bits, because
consciousness is realms of existence beyond what machines of finite logic inhabit. You can make
a machine which will follow rules which cause it to react to certain frequencies of electromagnetic
radiation by altering electrical currents and driving motors or what have you. But you can't
program such a machine to see red because that requires a private subjective experience,
and an experiencer, and that can't be built out of finite logical bits. It is universes beyond
what a finite logical machine can be.

Joy is only available to the conscious, and consciousness is only available to... what? To systems
which are capable of being in a multitude of infinities of different states simultaneously.
The fact that you exist, that you have experience, is all you need. Imagine you had a universe where everything
was there except consciousness, and you had to generate it. How would you do it? From what? Nothing you'd
have to work with is even in the same realm. (In fact, without consciousness you couldn't be there in the
first place, so effectively such a universe cannot exist. Things only exist because consciousness allows
the experience of existence.) On the other hand, if you start with only consciousness and nothing else,
you have only to conjure up a single separation, between that which is being, and something for it to be
aware of, and you can spin out a complete universe from there.

Not one single thing which you experience directly has any bit of the "physical world" in it. It is all
mindstuff. Your every sensory signal is conjured of non-physical essence of experience, but used to
map a world of physical bits and rules which NO ONE has ever directly seen or experienced,
a world we collectively agree to infer the existence of. No sight, no colour, no shape, no sound,
no taste, no texture, no scent, no experience whatsoever that you have ever had is of this "physical
world" you insist is the only thing there is. All you have ever experienced is the inside of your
mind. Yet you want to grant it a greater reality than the only reality you are in direct contact with,
your own experience.

My sense is that you deny that consciousness is physical not just on the basis that you can show that isn't- which you haven't, and which you cannot- you're just merely defining it as that; but there is something else, and this is the crux of it: psychologically it's uncomfortable to accept that consciousness is physical. I don't really understand this, it does not disturb me either way, I don't care if it's physical or not, I'm not interested in making value judgments about it, it is what it is.

Why cannot people accept this? They want to believe there's something more to it than that, that there's something out there, that there is something sacred about it. This is the same situation as people who won't accept that morality is not a material thing that the universe abides by, or that it's even rational or logical- but based on emotivism. That isn't to say that morality isn't useful or even a good thing, but people's identities as to the self-importance they ascribe to themselves or to humanity in general means they cannot accept that it's based on emotional states: anger, terror, empathy, or whatever.

If you don't believe in the physical world, ok- there are many people who maintained that position, so the best that can be done is to remain consistent about it. But, assuming that the physical world is real, consciousness in order to exist would be physical as with everything. If it were not, if it existed outside of the physical universe, there's not anything you could say about it, we shouldn't even have a concept or a word for it, because it would be ineffable- but for some reason, treating as if it were an exclusive case that it should for some reason not be physical is just a form of emotional bias and cognitive dissonance as I explained earlier- giving it a special status because that prevents it from seeming to be less than or diminished than what it is or something with a special, magical status.

Your ideas create stranger problems than consciousness being physical, that is, the disconnect of the brain from consciousness, the problem of a 'soul' which is demented or pathological or drunk. Philosophically, it would actually be better to deny that even consciousness doesn't exist at all and that nothing actually does exist than what you're doing. Denying that it's physical doesn't change our knowledge that is, but at least it would be more tenable to argue that nothing exists, not even consciousness. I inebriate myself with four shots of booze- hey, no worry, there is no connection physically between the body and consciousness, so I must not be drunk like I feel like I am, I must not be numb like I feel- forget science, I cannot even trust my own senses, my own mind and body, even a philosophy based on solipsism wouldn't matter. It's not very rational, though.

Lime and limpid green, a second scene
A fight between the blue you once knew
Floating down, the sound resounds
Around the icy waters underground
Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania
Neptune, Titan, Stars can frighten

It is truly astounding how thoroughly you consistently completely miss the point. You seem completely unable to
grasp your own experience of the world. It is like you want to be a zombie with nobody home. Like the guy who
said "I don't believe in qualia". Oh, well, I always wondered if all the billions of people in the world were
really actually active participants. But one who "doesn't believe in qualia" must be just an empty shell with
nobody home. Because if his existence is purely physical, then he's just a lump of particles clustered
together, with nothing going on but pointless random motions following rules, with nobody inside watching.
Because as I have extraordinarily lucidly and patiently explained despite your resolute unwillingness to
even try to grasp it, all experience is of mindstuff, and if you disavow the existence of mindstuff, then
you announce that no one at your location is being an experiencer. So you are a failure of the Turing test,
nobody home. A hollow imitation of a human. To experience is to participate in something beyond the physical,
because the physical does not address the mechanism of experience. If you deny this, you deny your own existence
as a vital experiencer, as a being who is conscious.


There you go again. I do not believe anything at all, I just happen to be able to clearly see
what is in front of me. It is nothing whatsoever to do with belief. It is all about turning off
the machinery of interpretation which invents the notion of a physical world, and seeing the
actual qualia of raw experience of which the world is truly composed, and understanding what it
actually is, not what it is being used to represent.


Ah, another of your prejudices and inabilities to transcend false dichotomies.
A world which is not physical has nothing to do with being "sacred". Didn't you get anything
at all from the first video link? Geez, it sure seemed pretty well framed to me.
What the hell do you want to talk about that nonsense for? I have
no use for nor interest in "morality", a waste of time, a load of unnecessary baggage, like
religion. You keep trying to address things which are not being discussed here. The point
of this discussion is to highlight what is actually real, not fantasy noises. It is about
seeing the world as it actually is, if for the first time. Here is the truth, which you can
take to the bank: the world is not as it seems, but if you look at it with purely concentrated
attention and no prejudices, no bias born of a lifetime of burying your mind in the construction
of the physical model, then you can actually see what is there, right in front of you, for what
it is, and not what you want to spin reams of thought to interpret it to be. It only exists
right now, at this instant, and only right here, at the only point in real space which exists,
which is the point where you always find yourself, wherever you try to go. And what is it?
Well, stop and look and see. Look with all your most finely honed powers of concentration.

But perhaps you need some help with that, a little extra muscle so you can pierce your fog
of imagined worlds where "there" and "then" have meaning, your dream worlds of illusion.
Maybe a wee bit of psychedelic might help amp up your powers of concentration and attention
to the level necessary to notice what reality really is...


Now I'm sure that if you have any kind of brain you are as fully
aware as I am that what you just said has no basis in logic whatsoever. Consciousness owes nothing whatsoever to a physical realm of which it
has no part.


And that makes even less sense. Good god, man, If you can't know your own experience, what good are you, what can you know?


What? The ineffable is to be deprived of names? Why? Afraid if you acknowledge its existence it might bite?
Now what the hell are you on about? We are talking about some very elevated philosophy here, no emotions allowed, and please try to subdue your biases.
You haven't been doing a very good job of explaining anything,
mostly going around in reductionist circles without finding a way out. And cognitive dissonance is for those
who seem unable to synthesize a worldview out of disparate parts, like subjective consciousness and objective
physical models of the world, those who can't hold both concepts in their head simultaneously without freaking
out and needing one to occlude the other.
I haven't the faintest idea what you imagine you are talking about here.


The fact of the non-physical nature of consciousness is certainly far less difficult than
the impossibility of construing a world so fundamentally broken that the words "consciousness is physical"
could actually make any remote amount of sense.
Now what the hell are you talking about? I wish you'd make some effort to stay on topic.
You are wielding far too many sequential negatives there, better sort that out.

If you are trying to talk about consciousness again, please stick to the facts, as you have clearly
demonstrated that you have no knowledge of consciousness whatsoever, insisting on saying non sequiturs like
"consciousness is physical" and other patent incomprehensible nonsense.

All it would take for nothing to exist is that consciousness not exist.

The true nature of the world far transcends logic and rationality as mere humans have so far charted them.
That doesn't mean it is beyond understanding, just that it is much bigger, more amazing, and more profound,
and requires a much more open and flexible mentality to perceive its nature. For much that is to be understood,
the only way to do so is to stop the analytical, reasoning, logical mind, hold the mind silent of all thought,
and simply attend. The mind works its way in the world by switching constantly on a millisecond time scale
between observing the world, and interpreting the observations in terms of the model it has developed. Change
that rhythm, so the observational intervals are extended to the order of seconds, and what is seen changes
entirely, and profound levels of understanding become available. When not busy spinning the interpretive wheels,
the mind is capable of directly perceiving far more and far more deeply the nature of reality.

Sorry.. this is too rich to pass up..

What is it that you see? If consciousness is not physical, what is it that you are able to apprehend? The problem is that you want to believe that there is something out there outside something that materially exists, but by definition, you wouldn't be able to do it- so you haven't earned that conclusion.

This viewpoint is incongruent with what actually happens and the way you actually live your life- you go to the dentist and get local anesthesia administered. You become aware of a numb feeling that overtakes the side of your face. Yet you have no explanation how that happens. That's not the problem, however, the problem is that your views would prevent this happening, it would make that impossible- for you have disconnected the brain from the seat of consciousness, you're taking the discussion back about 2500 years when people were unclear as to what the brain even was. There simply is no justification for that anymore.

I deny the classic mind-body dualism, that people have attempted to separate mind from body as mind is something more mystical. No- mind is body, the brain is a physical organ in the physical body. It's not 'soul', it's not mystical, it's a very intricate organ. When the brain dies, consciousness is gone.

Amputees often describe being still aware of a limb that has been detached, which should be impossible- often called phantom limb pain, it can be extremely uncomfortable as if the missing limb were still there but burning, itching, freezing, twisted or as though it were cramped inside a closed container. Why would something like that be translated into noxious stimulation such as pain or discomfort? Would you be able to advance a theory on what that would happen?