The Primacy Of Consciousness

[Naudian]

A fantastic presentation by Peter Russel, asking a very difficult question.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8AXmJdmzfM
Here's the rest:

Spoiler

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77Y4VKhKSxo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSnXfd9bWsc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiKdFLpuT98

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8Gb9xNeSQ0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PJp5-d2ljo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap-JvozEkC4

Well there you have it, the universe is all in the mind. Not in your mind, although everything you experience is a virtual reproduction within your brain, rather it's in the mind. We know that we don't experience reality directly, but even this thing we call reality arises from something deeper, more fundamental - The infinite capacity for experience itself, the essence of existence, or if you wanna sound like a total quack, god. The ability to experience does not appear suddenly with the formation of a nervous system. No, a brain merely gives form and complexity to experience. Instead, it is a quality that exists prior to all else, even to space-time.

Your brain is like the film in a projector, giving shape to everything you perceive, forming your sensations, thoughts, and memories, just like the film sculpts the light to form an image. But your brain is not the source of experience, it is not the lightbulb. Nor is your environment the source, the environment just keeps the film rolling. The primary source of experience is at the beginning of everything, it is the source of light, of matter, of time. Everything that I experience can be reduced a single truth: I am.

maybe

Anyway, enjoy.

 

[NeptuneUK]

This is amazing.

Proposes a lot of great questions, such as where does 'conciousness' end. Scaling from human -> dog -> fish -> jellyfish is a great thought game.
When you switch off your computer are you ending a primitive concsiousness? If elementary particles show a basic proto-consciousness such that they are aware of and respond to their envioronment accordingly.... Then that could be one sort of explanation to the WHYs of the laws of the universe and not just what these laws are (science)

 

[13LACKBISHOP]

Very good. I enjoyed this very much.

 

[Neutrino]

I'll definitely watch this later, sounds interesting.

Though I sometimes find these kinds of things steeped in too much egotistical self-importance. We love to put everything in terms of our own limited human perspective. Curious to watch it.

 

[pilot7893]

What's this weird stuff oozing out of my ears?
Oh, it's my brain. Wait, why is it on fire?

 

[Laivasse]

I thought it was very poor. Couldn't get further than 3 of 7.

I started out watching it hopefully based on the enthusiastic responses here, but soon started feeling wary due to all the false assertions about the way we treat the word 'conscious', which don't chime with my experience of the word. Then certain phrases started to pop up which triggered alarm bells like 'science likes to ignore x' and 'the thorny question for science is x' - hallmarks of a kook fighting phantom conspiracies on the part of 'big science'.

Whatever. Skepticism in the bin for a little while. I held on. It got to the point where he asserted that consciousness was an 'impossible' problem for science, without having talked any biology, any neuroscience, anything about artificial intelligence, nothing. Teeth started to grind.

But the guy has already moved on, accepting that consciousness is an impossible problem, an 'anomaly' which science can only grasp by way of a paradigm shift. He starts to hype up the paradigm shift he envisions - which I'm still waiting for, trying to feel open minded about - by talking about the other 'anomalies' which create holes in the current scientific 'metaparadigm'.

The things he lists which cause problems for science (if only science would accept that they're real, stupid conspira- I mean 'metaparadigm'!) are:
Remote viewing
Reincarnation
Healing

So I watched to the end of 3 of 7 then stopped. Thanks but no thanks.

 

[Naudian]

You should keep watching! He talks about RELATIVITY MAN! RELATIVITY!

No, I don't like the way he uses the word 'consciousness' either, although he does explain what he means in the first clip, and he does talk about several meanings of consciousness. I prefer to use the word 'experience', but even that requires explanation.

I definitely don't like the way he generalizes with "Science says", you just have to shrug and focus on the actual idea being presented. He does spend a lot of time trying to defend the idea, but that's understandable isn't it?

About the examples you listed, you may have misinterpreted that bit. He's saying those are not true anomalies, because they haven't been given enough attention to determine weather they're a real problem or just bullshit. He's not even saying that they should be given attention, he's just using them to compare with the real anomaly, which is the fact of consciousness (experience) itself. That's what all the paradigm shift talk is about.

The simple question is "Why is there an experience of consciousness, or anything at all?" It's trying to address something very...pure. 'Science has' studied consciousness plenty, but I'm not sure about the pure experience factor. If science has something to say about that, I haven't heard it yet.

I also don't like the way he says it's an impossible problem for science, I mean what is he trying to accomplish then? He also says that the only experimenting we can do is within our own mind, via meditation or whatever. Obviously we can do a lot more experimenting than that, it's just hard to confirm anything without sharing the direct experience of the subject.

Definitely watch the rest if you have time

 

[Laivasse]

About the examples you listed, you may have misinterpreted that bit. He's saying those are not true anomalies, because they haven't been given enough attention to determine weather they're a real problem or just bullshit. He's not even saying that they should be given attention, he's just using them to compare with the real anomaly, which is the fact of consciousness (experience) itself. That's what all the paradigm shift talk is about.

I've rewatched the bit in question and I'll say with confidence that, although he makes a distinction between 'problem' and 'anomaly' for the current scientific 'metaparadigm', I didn't misinterpret. He skips through this part quickly, perhaps conscious of the fact that it's suicide for his argument to dwell on it for too long, but I definitely got the gist right. Here's a transcription:

"But there's an anomaly in this worldview [of scientific materialism]. And it's a real anomaly. I mean things like remote viewing, reincarnation, [spirit] healing - these are all problems for this worldview, but they're not yet real anomalies for the worldview because they're still not accepted as problems by the majority of scientists. Some people see them as problems*; other people just say 'oh we'll understand them later', 'it's just... it's false reporting', 'coincidence', whatever. So they're not yet the status of a real anomaly in the Kuhnian sense, because they haven't yet got to the stage where everybody accepts it's real.'

The formatting is mine, signposting the guy's core beliefs:
bold bits - repeatedly belabouring the fact that they haven't been accepted yet, by everybody. The implication is that there will come a time when they will be accepted as real, presumably after his paradigm shift, which will never happen because it's misconceived.
underlined sentence - mischaracterising and belittling the skeptics' view of reincarnation, etc. Science doesn't say 'we'll understand them later'; we understand them pretty well now, as poorly supported kook theories with no hard basis in fact.
'Some people see [reincarnation, etc.] as problems [for science]'* - the presenter just described these bogus phenomena as 'problems' himself, so he's clearly among the 'some people' and not among those calling it 'false reporting' or 'coincidence'. Check the Links section of the guy's official site and you'll soon see where I'm coming from.

I suspect the only thing which causes him to elevate his theory of 'consciousness' above the other hocus pocus is the fact that the former is pseudoscience, which can fly more easily, while the others just get laughed at. In any case it's disingenuous to identify consciousness as a scientific 'anomaly' which requires a paradigm shift.

I respect that he's asking a deep existential question, with some implications that go to the very core of what it means to be human, or sentient, but aah... As someone who spends significant chunks of most days pondering stuff like this myself, it drives me nuts to see agenda-driven stuff like this break the discussion into such nonsense components. Peter Russell WANTS to find a spiritual, mystical aspect of life, so it will colour every aspect of his philosophy. Meanwhile it took me 25 minutes listening to him before I penetrated his metaphysical guff cloud deep enough to realise I'd been wasting my time (and more time discussing it, though I don't mind that). Sorry, but I won't be revisiting the vids.

If you disagree with me perhaps at least check out Dennett or Hofstadter, as suggested by another frustrated commenter, to get a view of the flipside of the discussion. In all honesty I have no idea what they propose, only that they are opposed to Russell and so am I.

EDIT: Made a bit more effort and found the first of 3 vids on consciousness by Dan Dennett for your edification. Immediate impressions: he has a big beard and actually earns his laughs, so I'm sold.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hqJ9DkaVM4

 

[Naudian]

Hah, fair points. I'll check out the flipside for sure. Edit: Not that I think anybody is going to answer the big question of "why experience?"


I was almost done with this Russell guy as well, I started writing this before seeing your response:

Hmm, seems we have the primacy of existence Vs. the primacy of consciousness.

These are inverses of each other, but neither is more comforting or useful to the scientific pursuit of knowledge, not yet at least. Either way, free will is probably an illusion, lol.

 

[Naudian]

Here's another summary of my thoughts:

These are the different arguments in my head at the moment:

Primacy of existence

Noumenal reality is primary, therefor the capacity for experience exists within it. An experience can be reduced to reactions that follow laws, but with complexity the experience(s) can manifest as subjective or as 'consciousness'.

Problem - It's hard to say where that subjectivity starts - Does a jellyfish have a subjective experience? A cell? In my opinion, yes, maybe they do experience at some kind of basic level, at some incredibly hard-to-imagine fundamentality of what experience/existence is! Here's how I see it: My experience is NOT SINGULAR, it's made up of billions of cellular experiences - the cells' experience is made up of billions of atomic experiences. At this point, I’m already accepting experience at molecular and atomic levels, so my mind takes it all the way down to sub-atomic particles and natural laws. I can’t seem to find the flaw in this thinking, yet I feel like I've lost my mind a bit.

[person on another forum] argues that the processing of information is required to have a subjective experience. So, we can say that any given experience is made of information. I see my experience as not one instance, but many instances of lower-level experiences, and what is the information for those lower-level experiences? Physical reactions. What is their source of information? Something at the quantum scale? Some unified field theory? We haven't even figured that stuff out yet. Where is the flaw in tracing experience down to this point!?

Primacy of consciousness

The capacity for experience is primary, therefor what we call noumenal reality is actually manifested within this capacity, including notions of time and space itself. Again, at the basic level we have the experience of particles, light, laws, etc. which all interact with each other to form more and more complex experiences and voilà the universe starts thinking about itself and what subjectivity means. The difference with this veiwpoint is that we assumed subjectivity the whole time, whatever how basic or unrecognizable it may be, whatever how primary to all else it may be, and however infinite its capacity is implied. Is this a lazy way to solve the question of subjectivity?

Ok, let’s try to find a problem here…does the capacity for experience really have to be primary? While it certainly might exist in some basic vacuous state, natural laws might be what allow it to exist in the first place. We could speculate that natural law or some kind of unified theory is primary, and the capacity for experience exists somewhere within it, still at some fundamental level but not quite the King shit of existence. Hmm.

Edit: Checked out Dennett, not what I'm after. Checked out Hofstadter and I think his perspective is a lot closer to Russell's...here's an interesting bit on him http://www.philosophynow.org/issue78/I_Am_A_Strange_Loop_by_Douglas_Hofstadter

 

[Naudian]

I like this guy's take:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQKNhQ0Spqw

After thinking about this for days, I'm shutting this book and concluding: I am simply a multi-experience expression of natural physical phenomena. Whether it's patterns of electro-magnetic field interactions resulting from neural activity, or perhaps some quantum-realm effect, it must be so that I am one with some quality of reality, primary or not.

The truth is likely much queerer than such a simple question of some primal creative force. In the words of Haldane, the universe may very well be "queerer than we can suppose."