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Dear Judith. I hesitated, but I
must....
Whenever on psych related lists I argued against
the noumenon, composition of historical unidentified features - so
different in the individual researchers' application, called: consciousness,
using "mind" instead, I experienced an internal squeeze: what am I talking
about? I also got that from others: what do you call "mind"? so I made up
my mind to construct a mindful about mind; here it is if you dont
mind:
There is a complexity 'human' - a model,
interconnected part of the totality (wholeness as i say), and during
the development of such organization a "mental
aspect" also evolved. That's it. It is not different from the ideational
aspects of non-human, even the
so called "inanimate" organizations (Oops: would
you list the political parties among them? ha ha) with appropriate
features to the 'rest of that model'. So it is "human" mind. I don't deny it
from a dolphin either. Or a worm, appropriately different from human.
I wonder how can an 'aspect' be immanent or
transcendent?
Descartews had no problem: he was forced by the
intolerant religious spirit of his time to call it 'soul', only human, and make
it dualistically eternal. Neither immanent, nor transcendent: at the instant of
death - when the 'body' has plenty of time left to rot, the "soul" enters
'eternity', in other words a timeless concept, and it is over (no time-duration
defined). Fini. In eternity.
What is congruent with the "aspect": whenever a
complexity falls apart, the characteristics cease.
In your 1st par you said wise words about this,
just failed to tell what you are talking about when you say:
'mind'.
Your 2nd par (below) is a precise criticism of
the "aris-total" as I use to 'punify' Aristotle's maxim about the total being
MORE than the sum of the parts - he meant the structural material components
only of a materially identified total (model). I only take exception to your use
of 'structural': I like to consider it more than the physically measurable
objects and include the 'ideational' (anybody has a better word?) 'functional'
and even the so far undiscovered qualia of a more extendable model.
I want to pass to your 3rd par, about
biology, - mostly - aggreeable and I am not knowledgeable. However: the position
to function in a 'complex' mood by considering only (material) component(s) as
cause or activity-carriers, is deplorable. We can observe the piston's movements
as instrumental in driving a car, yet it is not the piston's movement that
drives a car. You said it perfectly about the brain not thinking.
I agree with your RR quote, would like to add
before 'human'
"live" (or: "living") but that may be
obvious.
Your conclusion is totally acceptable (for
me).
The thread-subject is also ambiguous: I cannot
refuse bluntly ANY part of the brain as being conscious (what I would like to),
because 'conscious' is poorly identified. Like: in AI they speak about
machine-conscious. Then again the 'subconscious' is also under heavy discussion
on other lists, as integral part - or just physiological attribute. (This of
course is model-view).
Do you have a take on what the 'mind' could be?
(And I don't insist to 'make it a thing').
John M
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2004 9:08
AM
Subject: Re: Which part of the brain is
conscious?
Steve,
I think you don't give yourself enough credit for deep
thoughts...
You know, the realization you posted is one that an awful lot of
"esteemed" scientists haven't been able to "get". It comes back to the
question "Is the mind immanent or transcendent?" I suppose the answer has to
do more with our definitions of those two terms than anything else, but the
way I define them, the mind is both. As you have seen, the mind is not
reducible to the structure of the brain anymore than life could
be reducible to bodily structure.
The way the structural parts relate to one another via the
organization creates interactions that act as "more parts". And that's not all
that's interacting: There are internal models, internal contexts, external
contexts... of which "time" is a constant ingredient in its myriad guises
(change, rate, sequence, anticipation, etc.) and all of these interactions act
as if they were the equivalent of 'More parts". In other words, there is a
causal effect from the interactions that is not specified by the structural
parts alone.
The case of metabolism, for example, is a whole set of
interactions interacting with each other, creating causal effects. Living
systems have an organization where the "interactions-as-parts" also
interact with one another. This creates causal chains that are entirely
without structural parts we could point to and say, with any logic
"This is the part that causes that effect." To complicate matters even
further, any physical part in a living organism serves as more than one part,
in more than one subsystem.... simultaneously and/or at different times. So,
the part of the brain that is most primitive, regulating breathing and
heartbeat, etc.... is essential to the conscious mind even though we can say
technically "we don't think with that part of the brain"... The heart and
lungs are essential to the mind because.... Metabolism is essential to the
mind because... But those subsystems are not what "cause" the mind. Not
directly and not even indirectly. It's the interactions of the interactions of
the interactions...... as specified (constrained) and made possible by
the organization.
I think my father's point is that the mind is immanent
in a certain type of complex organization, of which the human
organism is one embodiment or example.
We have discovered that if we remove some essential organ or
subsystem from the human body, but put in place some compensatory artificial
equivalent, we can sometimes preserve life. But there are "side effects". Why?
Perhaps because that missing subsystem's usual interactions no longer exist
and some of those interactions were necessary to other interactions we
didn't know about. In other words, "parts of the organization" are
missing.
Judith
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2004 12:32
AM
Subject: [ROSEN] Which part of the
brain is conscious?
This is not exactly a deep thought for people on this list but I just
realized that my reading of the various Rosen writings and related
materials helped clear up a confusion I had a for a while.
The collapse of the quantum wave function and the role of the conscious
observer in it have always prompted me to wonder which part of the brain is
actually concious. Clearly if we replace a blind person's eyes with video
cameras feeding into the optic nerve he would still count as a conscious
observer. You can continue this thought experiment ad infinitum
replacing various parts and at each step the "observer" still seems
conscious.
This always seemed like a legitimate paradox to me, whereas now it
seems pretty obvious that the concious mind is not "contained" in any
part of the brain no matter which part you replace. As you continue
replacing you will at some point destroy the emergent organization and
"lose" the mind much like Rosen always argues that a dead organism is a
poor surragate for a living one even though it seems to have the
same parts.
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