'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009

reply to post by EnlightenUp

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I still have to disagree. Personal experiences has lead man to develop a lot of spiritualistic idea's, such as rain God(s) and yet we now know that form of personal experience is faulty to a point of being utterly wrong. The same applies when we call in for thing's like ESP or prayer, with the effects easily attributed to something mot mystical or spiritual at all. Personal experience even being used to develop a new theory, like trying to bring QM into the equation is faulty because QM does not actually allow for those things, which many people do not even realize. I've thought it myself, but as I learned more about the theory I realized I was dead wrong in what it was saying. Now I know better. Even the erroneous use of 'energy' as a way to explain these thing's is wrong.

reply to post by sirnex

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You're filling in all sorts of gaps that my assertion does not require, most namely with refutations of superstition. Do not conflate realization with experience or experienceing a realization. What I believe in particular of what exists as far as other realms, dragon universes or magic has no bearing here.

One thing is for sure, no theory of everything is a theory of everything unless it accounts for everything. I do not need to bring in QM, M-Theory or other pseudodrivel explanations to know there is a problem. My prediction is that the more is accounted for, the more complete our understanding of the physical the more obvious the problem will be. Perhaps a solution will come but it will be of a nature not yet explored, at least in a rigorous way.

I will wrap it back into personal experience anyway.

Why would the world that it appears that you align yourself with even discuss the hard problem of consciousness when there is absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever that a first-person experience of qualia exists? It's all anecdotal evidence and you know it. No number of reports counts as evidence. It should be categorized as superstitious nonsense. Do you acknowledge or deny this said phenomenon as fact?

I see only one option for you.

reply to post by EnlightenUp

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What I find uniquely interesting is that most if not all of these 'experiences' can be and some have been shown to occur all within the brain. What it sounds like to me is that you would rather the TOE explain these thing's as existing outside of the brain, regardless of labs being able to reproduce these events in a controlled setting.



I am what you would call a qualophobe. Red isn't red because it is red, rather it's red because the brain interprets that particular wavelength separately from the other wavelengths and then we utilize our capacity for language to label that particular wavelength as red. Red can equally and validly be called twelve or bridge.

Ah, but they have not. They've only shown correlates of neural activity to reported conscious experience. We know correlation isn't causation (please excuse my use of that cliche, I had to ). Even if the TOE explains it on a neurological level, it is still left to explain this other thing. If it cannot or will not explain it while remaining adamant that it is a TOE, it has to admit that something is outside its reach, at least as it stands. Once it does that it is no longer a TOE. To remain a TOE it must deny what's obvious to a good number of experiencers.



That is an interesting roundabout denial. Basically you said you deny its existence. Very well. The weavers blush. Red is red in its essence because it looks red. I have attached a label to a particular descrimination. I still see the this thing I happen to have associated with various other things. I can call it "tunafish" and the essential basic thing is not lost, though it seems smellier than usual.

You are dealing with it on the level of the easy problems that are not unlike determining how the ATA controller in a SoC functions.

reply to post by EnlightenUp

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Have not what?



Effects are reproducible.



What other 'thing'?



So your demanding that this 'other thing' resides outside of the brain whilst lacking to explain it yourself.



Such as rain Gods instead of water cycles?



Red is not red because it looks red. It is red because we agree upon labeling that wavelength of light as red. Red can equally be labeled milk dud. Our brains could even interpret that wavelength as a different color or not process that wavelength at all or properly as in color blind individuals.

The so called 'experience' of red, or "qualia" is nothing more than an attempt to mysticize a natural occurrence and process of how the brain differentiates between various inputs. Without showing how consciousness is separate from the brain and body and is experiencing these "qualia" of it's own direct accord, then all arguments of "qualia" are moot. We can show that consciousness is a direct effect of a species brain. composed of many different systems acting in unison and any one system dis-functioning or failing to work at all has a direct effect on the state of consciousness itself. Without the brain, there is no consciousness.

By tweaking the brain they have not shown that the experience of experience originates in the brain even if experience, or perhaps more accurately, the specific form experience takes originates in the brain.



Of course they are. Alter the brain and what is observed by the reasearcher changes in fairly predictable ways if the function of various regions are known. Subjective reports of subjects are in fact observations by the researcher.



This other thing. The thing I know is there. My personal inner experience of my experiences.



It isn't being explained by anyone. Even the idea of a soul is a homunculus. That is obvious but in itself neither confirms nor denies the soul's reality. Really, I don't need that here anyway.



Ummm...no. That's just your attempt at being patronizing towards me. It's rather pathetic. I am neither bothered nor deterred. It makes me laught a bit and so in a way you are giving me a blessing.



What is red in essence is not subject to change. You've just admitted it would require a different interpretation to not experience it as such, in which case it would no longer be "it". If someone experiences a lemon as sweet rather than sour, they are experiencing sweet, not sour.

'Miracle fruit' turns sour things sweet

There are also myriad colors I have no name for but can still see. In fact, they must be seen first then a label attached to the perception. I saw colors before classifying them. The essences haven't changed, only the associations. Those associations do bend the experience a little but don't take away the essential substance of it. They don't make red look cyan. If I could bend it that far it would be an experience that isn't of red. Even in cases of color illusions, the experience is of the final shift in perception to something other than the wavelengths correlations.

Zombies may in fact exist. You may be one. I cannot say for sure. At least your are being somewhat consistent with the only logical possibility that your assumptions leave open to you. One thing is for sure, my own internal awareness of my awareness is not subject to your evaluation of your own subjective state, which is the only thing anyone can really know. Outside of that, all is subject to fakery.



Who is "we" and how have y'all shown it? Nothing has been shown that consciousness itself, the experiencing of experience, awareness of awareness, the apparent presence of qualia rather than the specific ones, is a direct effect of any spiecies' brain. Great knowledge is being uncovered however in how an organism operates and is quite intriguing.

The problem is is that if you are one of those zombies, you'll not have any grasp of what I am speaking. If you have been blind since birth, you'll never understand the visual experience of purple or a painting no matter how much I speak about it. The only possible way to have that understanding is the experience.



I could agree more along the lines of without the brain, there is no experience, at least not of the variety of a human or other biological entity. With a different brain, there is different consciousness. Anyone denying that a good smack to the head can alter the apparent organism is clearly delusional.

reply to post by EnlightenUp

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They've been able to show certain areas of the physical brain that fire up when these experiences happen, showing that the physical brain is a part of the process.



If consciousness were not a direct effect of the brain, then why does it utterly rely on the proper working of the brain and why does alteration of the physical brain effect consciousness itself?



experience is an abstraction of memory of past events.



Experience is explained, hell I even just explained it.



Your full of it. Personal experience and certainly such an obvious experience as praying and receiving rain whilst not understanding the water cycle is certainly just as valid as the garbage I am hearing here.



Wrong. It is simply labeled sweet. We can label it dog crap, does that now mean we are tasting dog crap?



If the brain even interprets them to begin with or interprets them as color and not various levels of pain.



And unicorns and dragons and God and little keebler elves.



Consciousness is another way of saying self aware.



Ah, your one of *those* people.... Cute.



OK, good. So your not one of those nutters who think consciousness is some magical thing that detaches from the body after we die? I assumed you were for your other nuttery.

[edit on 3-11-2009 by sirnex]

I agree on that. It's too obvious that the brain is important to the man, even to my own inner experience.



I'm experiencing experience NOW, as I type this along with those pesky qualia that will never go away. Perhaps the real armageddon will be fought over it-- between the Zombies and the Awares. LOL.



Ok, call off the scientists. We don't need them now. It's all explained.

The problem with a TOE is that the TOE must declare what "everything" is and formulate around that. Tied to that TOE for better or worse comes "everything else" that it decided it didn't need to include.



If it's a new experience and there is no label, then it's difficult to call it anything. If some chemical altered the brain so that a new color appeared in an hallucination that can't be made from any primaries, then it something unique that cannot be communicated in words to convey it, other than to say essentially that it was just too weird to explain. YOU, having not experienced that anomaly, cannot know what I experienced. It is patently obvious to me.



With synaesthesia, it is certainly possible.

Letters look like frozen sound patterns to me, to the point they look like facey mouths making a silent sound. That's the truth. It's about the best description I can come up with for it. I have asked others and they do not know what I am talking about. If you do not experience text in that manner, do you know what I really mean about my own consciousness in that regard? No way.



The term "zombie" relates to entities that are not conscious but perform all the functions and have all the responses of the organism, etc; etc. It's not about faeries, goblins or unicorns.



It's a lousy was to define it. I don't think it requires awareness of being a self, not on an intellectual level anyway.



Ahem, perhaps.



I'm probably worse. It's never really attached to the body per se. In some pure form it exists in a potentiated way but not defined by brain organization. What it experiences is related to brain organization.

But, I am checking most of my more aberrant thinking at the door. Catch me in a thread about astral projection you'll see a nutter extraordinaire. I'll even argue with a different set of rules.


[edit on 11/3/2009 by EnlightenUp]

reply to post by EnlightenUp

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Good, at least we're not 'mysticizing' something natural.



Are you really? How can you experience something that you recall moments before a next 'now'?

Or rather, let's define experience and now so we can have more understanding here.



That's a bold statement, certainly not one I made.



What 'everything else'? If we ever develop a TOE, then what would be left that it just decided to not include? How would that be considered a TOE? Your not making much sense there.



Your right, your brain interprets various inputs differently than mine. Your genetic code created a uniquely different neural network that will interpret everything different. So where is the 'qualia'? If sweet is sweet to you and not sweet to me, then does sweet exist as something to "be experienced" or is it just something you labeled?



I still don't see how this qualifies as a concept of 'qualia'.



Ah OK.



All life is self aware to a degree, thus conscious to a degree. The brain is composed of many different systems working in unison all to certain various degrees.



Never attached? So where was it before your birth? What evidence do you have for that statement?



Let's call astral projection the willful conscious meditative dream-state.




[edit on 3-11-2009 by sirnex]

At this point in the discourse, I am impelled to reach into a different bag of communicative tools in order to express the ineffable.



Or rather, let's define experience and now so we can have more understanding here.

Good post. Star+flag.

More people should watch this video.. but somehow I doubt it will ever "reach" any of the people who need it most.

For all of us who are sane, however, and gifted with intelligence, this was very refreshing.

EnlightenUp, I tried to read all your replies.. but I don't have nearly enough patience or tolerance to go through that much garbage. I just wanted to say that I think, in my own personal opinion, that you are totally "missing the plot," as the English would say. Thank you.

reply to post by EnlightenUp

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Isn't that the gist of what I was just saying? Maybe I am just remembering a conversation I had with my wife about this post.



As I said, I never laid claim that everything was explained. What experience is may be explainable, but the process therein is still not explained fully, hence the research. Like evolution and gravity.



Evade tactics again. You still have not explained this other thing nor have you explained how your drawing the conclusion that a TOE would leave this other thing as unexplained.



Abstract thought and capacity for language.



I disagree.



What evidence do you have for that claim?



I refer to my above question.



It would be more valuable to conduct these thing's in a controlled setting rather than taking word of mouth on the honor system that these people aren't lying or speculating on a remembered lucid dream-state.

Good Post!
And the two of you have some interesting things to say. Might you two think that maybe you are both right or that maybe you are both wrong or that parts of each other statements are true!

sirnex is essentially trying to say I don't experience what I experience (ie. I don't believe in qualia therefore you don't experience them). This is clearly absurd since I experience what I experience at all times as no alternative exists for me as an experiencer (the alternative being that I don't experience what I experience). Such an assertion is a form of manipulation. The question of its "correctness" relative to "objective" observations, which don't exist because an observer is always involved, needs not even be considered. sirnex's experience of my experience doesn't match my experience of my experience. If our experiences were in lock-step, we would be indistinguishable to each other as separate entities and could not even meet in order to carry on a conversation.

Wrong, there are FIVE lights!

Except in this case there is noone to save me from sirnex's deception but myself! Noone else can observe the "lights" to reassure me that there are really four, except on faith of course. Bravo to his Cardassianmanship!

I/you do/don't experience what I/you do/don't experience.

I experience what I experience.
I don't experience what I experience.
I experience what I don't experience.
I don't experience what I don't experience.

You experience what I experience.
You don't experience what I experience.
You experience what I don't experience.
You don't experience what I don't experience.

You experience what you experience.
You don't experience what you experience.
You experience what you don't experience.
You don't experience what you don't experience.

I experience what you experience.
I don't experience what you experience.
I experience what you don't experience.
I don't experience what you don't experience.


[edit on 11/7/2009 by EnlightenUp]

reply to post by EnlightenUp

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Not at all, I am just not elevating the status of experience to something that it is not.



We have our five senses, but at no time are those five senses or the brains ability to process the inputted information from the sensory organs an accurate enough depiction of reality to simply state that I experience red because it is red. All that is doing is simplifying the issue.



Pure BS honestly. A conscious observer is not required for thing's to exist and there is no theory or observation to prove this assertion.



Case in point against concepts like qualia. You may process a particular wavelength and label it red by your capacity to abstractly think about that information received and your ability to use language to apply a label to it, whereas I may not even process that wavelength the same way and it would appear to be a different color or heck, I could experience it as pain.



You would be on to something there only and *only if* we were actually the same individual person and not separate entities. Seeing as how we are separate biological entities, your argument is worthless and wrong. Experiencing the same thing's or living the same life would not inherently make us the same person. We are composed of separate genetic coding instructions that give rise to our own separate personality traits. Even in identical twins raised the same way don't inherently come out into life the one and the same indistinguishable from one another.



Cute, but pointless crap spouting that doesn't really appear to help your case in my opinion.

Precisely how I experience myself is irrelevant to debate in itself rather simply posing an inquiry on your part out of curiosity as it not testable by any instrument. This is not an elevation of anything.

If you mean the initial posts, I intended to be clear early-on that I'm not here to convince you of the reality of any personal trancendence or advanced knowledge grasped even momentarily. I know there are certain things you will resist rather than remain ambiguous about. One thing I do claim is that the knowledge is available to investigation and will be unlocked at the appropriate time. So, I'll just keep that on track.



You do not understand the issue. This is either something beyond your grasp or you deny it for the sake of conflict, which I expect you to deny. I am not foolish, not naively so. I wasn't born yesterday.



Not at all. Theories don't prove assertions until they've been proven consistent with evidence. That reveals your ignorance about investigation.

The observation IS in fact that many report to experience something of a similar nature to what I also know I experience. Their claims have empirical evidence for me personally. You will not succeed in undermining a well-established fact for them or I. It just won't happen for all eternity. If your knowledge cannot encompass that and your empirical data cannot establish that, it is your shortcoming, not mine. You will eventually find yourself sharing company with the flat-earthers. You will find what you are seeking.

That a conscious observer is not required is supposition as this universe does have conscious observers. There is no evidence you have to the contrary as no universe without conscious observers has been observed (at least no reports have been published to my knowledge). The idea seems absurd given that observing it would imbue it with conscious observation. That conscious observation is limited entirely to animalistic material forms is undecidable and unproveable in a general way at this point merely by their needed presence to prove it. Wherever you assign the cutoff point of "conscious observation" is the limitation you have imposed and the domain you have circumscribed.



Since you deny qualia, you considerer it only as a concept or philosophical construct? Do you readily grasp this concept with little effort? If so, that is rather suggestive of your actual intuitive experience of it and suggests that your denial is an artifice.

Experience of the quality of perception that is "red" is because of particular patterns. I don't label a wavelength and I don't see a wavelength. In fact, my experience in no way resembles a wavelength. I know what a graph of a sinusoid looks like but I haven't the slightest clue what a wavelength looks like. A wavelength is a complete abstraction and something that does not exist in and of itself in the time domain that we experience.

Also, I've never experienced a sugar molecule directly through any sensory modality. My various apparatuses are not equipped to do this. I feel them in bulk as "gritty" or "syrupy", see them as "white" or taste them as "sweet".

I don't experience in my subjective self the brain and nerve activity that is part of the process. All I experience is an end result-- the look, taste, feel, sound and smell.

These perceptions are labeled as whatever they are because they were available to me as an experience to be labeled that could be labeled.

With other species it is apparent through experments that descrimination exists and comparisons can be made in the absence of language. Language is not the determining factor here at all.

There is also evidence that essential patterns in the brain tend to be more alike than different which is something I would expect you to know. In all likelyhood our experiences of what you and I label red, sweet, etc.-- aside from some severe neural or sensory anomaly-- are more alike than unalike on that basis. If we shared the same anamoly, our anamalous experiences would be more mutually alike than they are to the "normals".

The mere stating that there is a perception that could be labeled the same regardless of what it "looks like" is a tacit admission to the possibility that it does have a "look".

So, for a minute let us pretend I do not see "red" and have not the slightest clue of its appearance. Tell me what it looks like. Make me know the experience itself. Next, tell me what ultraviolet-B looks like. Tell me what ultrasonic sounds like. Don't attempt to skirt these under one of *those* people heading as you have before. That's simply casting perjorative language about and an indication of impotence.



You display an acute lack of depth of abstraction. Lock step would mean in every manner with no state distinguishable. In such a case, we are the same person. Twins are an incredibly weak comparison, hardly a comparison at all, especially because the are in contact which precludes lock-stepping.



It doesn't hurt it. It's quite fair after many somewhat inflammatory remarks and has actual grounding in reality. Double standard FAIL on your part.

An FYI:
Make no assumption that I'm "science retarded" or anything of that ilk. You aren't saying anything that I haven't mulled over since childhood. You have not expressed an opinion that I did not progress through at one time. I consider your views valid but incomplete. That kind of knowledge plays an important role in my thinking but it is also only a subset of my understanding.

As far as a TOE, do (re)familiarize yourself with Godel's Incompleteness Theorems.
link

I like this one since it also discusses ramifications compactly. One is that a complete physical description will very well leave certain things as undecidable or unproveable. So, as I stated before, there is always "everything" and "everything else". Abuse critique is valid where it is construed to refer to it as "proof of God". All it proves is ultimately certain things could be unanswerable with absolute proof and that there are no ultimate answers that can be proven. A TOE within the domain of forces is likely achievable but certain phenomena that are entirely of the subjective nature lay outside it.