I apologize for the previous post.

I've met the other one.

Once he realized what I was looking for, he politely brushed me off.

It turns out that he refrains from engaging with theoretical models until they are mainstream and have been thoroughly vetted and refined experimentally.

I have certain research interests...

I'm not the right guy to judge a novel theory for you. If it's as good as you seem to think, it will become widely promulgated and I'll have the opportunity to grapple with it then...

It's great that you are interested in this stuff.

So it seems Callan got a good read on him.

I suppose I'll just bow out. I won't find any proselytes with such an approach. It's not like I should be looking for ways to boost my ego anyway...

Good stuff. Thanks for the backup, fellows.

Hey, why didn't I think of this earlier?

Informatic asymmetry:

Are you consciously aware of every word that makes up your lexicon, right now? How can it be that, while reading text, you spot a seemingly unfamilar word, and then suddenly realize, 'Oh yeah, that word"?

If we were fully aware of everything going on in the brain, then how could it be possible for a memory - a recollection - to be surprising in its manifestation?

I'm sure there's more to be thought up in this vein.

And hell, when I was explaining Bakker's etiological stuff, she actually challenged, "How do you know the causal chain isn't just Person X deciding to throw the ball and then throwing it?"

I should have asked her whether she holds the view that humans are fundamentally biomechanical, and if not, whether this seems to contradict all the other findings of biology/zoology. And anyway, that's not (in such a formulation) even a scientifically valid counter, right (referring to her challenge)?

I let her get away with too much, I think.

There's just something I'm doing wrong here...

The male, I couldn't locate. I'll deal with him later.

With the female, I had an hour-long debate with much hand-wringing and exasperated sighs on both parts.

Long story short:

1. She is a full-on experimentalist.

2. She focuses on narrow aspects of neurolinguistics, and doesn't really know or care much about consciousness.

2.a. She really doesn't understand half the terms or words Bakker uses, and refuses to read him herself. Even my simplified recap was nearly incomprehensible to her.

2.b. She dislikes all of Bakker's "unscientific" approach to presenting his ideas.

3. Once I gave as clear and thorough a summary of the BBT as I could, she repeatedly...Bakker has no evidence, apparently.

3.a. Bakker does not cite his figure (in the abstract) on the number of calculations performed by the gross brain, and does not describe the consciousness models he name-drops in the first footnote.

3.b. She doesn't see that Bakker presents any evidence toward his core premise that consciousness receives less information than the rest of the brain; we really don't know anything about the brain, and Bakker seems to her to be arguing from a perspective "2000 years in the future".

3.c. She rejected the magic metaphor and vision analogy: "I don't need analogies, I need evidence."

3.d. I hardly even got her to agree (while explicating causal histories and causal gaps with the example of a thrown ball travelling and the act itself of throwing the ball) that the CNS basically works in that example with various internal and external stimuli causing various chains of action potentials until the appropriate motor neurons are activated and the muscular contractions responsible for "throwing the ball" occur. She said, "Consider my position - if *I* don't know that this is 'the so-called 'scientific consensus', then what does that say?"

So, well, what do you make of it? I couldn't convince her of informatic asymmetry - "don't take that for granted" - and I do suppose Bakker's theory pretty much falls apart without it.

Are there any more cogent proofs of informatic asymmetry I could bring to bear? Citations to throw down? I asked her whether she could consciously keep track of all her brain's activity, or consciously control her heartbeat, but she just wasn't buying it for some reason - so that line turned out fruitless.

Any way I could impress the validity of Bakker's approach onto her? "It's just not science" to her, and that seemingly invalidates the whole thing. *shrug*

Conversations are pretty tough; their progress never seems to match my (perhaps overly optimistic) expectations. Internet participation is not preparation enough.

Middle of the conversation: "I'm going to shoot you down somehow, you know?"

End of the conversation: "Look, I don't want to shoot you down."

...

*I propose that we schedule a friendly meeting to have a casual chat, not even necessarily about Bakker*

"Yeah, I'll take more time out of my schedule to go out and meet you to talk about...stuff."

That's sarcasm, isn't it? Though she didn't say it in an acerbic tone...

So, yeah: I get the feeling she's not going to humor me any longer, but I suppose I'd like to hear from you all if only for my own edification.

+1 but...

I'm not a very accommodating person - I advocate efficient communication but I don't cater to individual comfort. And I'm abrasive, I get "too real" for people "too quick." We get away with communicative felonies here, as far as socially described - it's maxim in certain circles, consistency is comfort - except I've never had the capacity to deny my curiousity and reflection isn't comfortable.

I don't see it. From what I've read, I would describe you as "a nice guy", and "sensitive to the needs and needs and feelings of others".

This board generally is more or less par-for-the-course when it comes to civil Internet communities.

So - I'll restart Disseminating Bakker and we'll get after it. Let's talk shop because we can't afford the time it takes to mention a lack without compensating with a proactive .

I never get this parochial self-congratulation charge? I'm not a guy people want to brush shoulders with - I'm clearly of the plebs. And I have this disdain for irrelevance.

Do we e-stink?

That is, we can't afford - unless we're just doing all this for kicks in our spare time, or focusing on Bakker's fiction as such - to ignore the rest of the world because 'we just get it and they don't'. That's all.

Reading the essay...

If anyone would be so kind as to skim the first few pages of Bakker's essayand suggest improvements to this 'in-depth' recapitulation of the BBT:

Quote

Quote

Neuroscientific research, according to Bakker, suggests that consciousness - which is to say, the neural circuits giving rise to what we call consciousness - is a recursive system that both feeds information to the rest of the brain, and processes information *from* the rest of the brain. There are measured threshold of sensation, therefore perception. Except that what we consciously report as experienced is unequal to the brain's activity as described by brain-imaging technologies. However, for the latter function there is a sort of structured informatic bottleneck which effectively limits the information received by the consciousness-circuits, which is to say that consciousness is "blind" to everything that goes on in the brain other than what it actually directly gets or what it can infer by analyzing environmental manifestations of the brain's performance. You can easily demonstrate this by asking, "What is my brain doing right now?" I don't know - I could begin to describe rudiments, such as the perceptive processing of visual sensation (which is 30% of our brain's neural architecture), auditory sensation, language schemas, the representation of motor function for my haphazard typing skills and, arguably, my mouth and vocal cords because embodied cognition suggests that my voice reading my words inside my head is utilizing the same brain structures to simulate my voice as it would to speak it. This simply couldn't even hint at my total brain activity or that experience - think of the gradient between average Blind Brains and those Blind Brains that push the cognitive boundaries towards the actual extremes of the BBH - I don't know what it's like to control my heart beat or my body temperature but some people are able to have those experiences by way of various practices.

What Bakker argues is that this latter bit is responsible for our confabulations of such items as intentionality, the first-person perspective, the now, and those other things he mentioned in the abstract.

Basically, the structural limitations of consciousness-circuits result in the phenomenological phenomena mentioned above - that's what he tries to argue in the paper.

Here's a crucial block from the paper:

***

Information horizons: The boundaries that delimit the recursive neural access that underwrites consciousness. The various cognitive thresholds of sensation, thus perception, described above - that is, our brains, at every given moment, experience more than our sufficient experience of our feeling of "complete" cognition. We simply don't experience all the sight, sound, touch, smell, or taste that our brains experience - our sensual paraphernalia hasn't yet changed but we won't, without effort, experience the experience of experts, who've practiced to develop their perception of sensation: the palate's of great chefs, the visual reactions of race-car drivers or fighter pilots, the tactile discrimination of the blind or violinists, the auditory experience of musicians and composers, or the olfaction of perfumists or caffeine connoisseurs. Much less, the abstract experiences of linguists, artists, and mathematicians. Past the horizon of Blind Brain, Greater Brain still experiences more than any "us."

Encapsulation: The global result of limited recursive neural access, or information horizons. We experience those cognitive thresholds, simultaneously, at all times, despite the misleading impressions and abstraction of describing them separately. I imagine concentric circle, Blind Brain, the cognitive thresholds dictating encapsulation, Greater Brain.

Sufficiency: The way the lack of intra-modal access to information horizons renders a given modality of consciousness ‘sufficient,’ which is to say, at once all-inclusive and unbounded at any given moment. We don't experience an experience, or cognition of the lack beyond our cognitive thresholds - in the same way that we don't experience that special communication expertise develops a based on novel, new, shared experiences, exceeding those outside of their community.

Asymptotic limits: The way information horizons find phenomenal expression as ‘limits with one side.’ Why don't we experience, say, the circle of vision? I am aware of the way my perception of vision is manifest illusion. Colour discrimination fails based on the distribution of rods and cones, depth, detail - we don't see what we think we see. Our experiences, mostly activate original architecture, those determined by the facilitated average schemas - the average experience of average experience. So the more that you perceive a specific pot as the same pot, or a person as communicating in a certain way, then the less we actually perceive those things - objects or otherwise - in the moment; your brain simply utilizes the most impressionistic, on average, experiences to experience. You are a brain simulating much of it's experience as a brain in an environment, rather than constantly burning the energy to actually experience being a brain in an environment. But again we don't experience that lack.

We began by asking how information horizons might find phenomenal expression. What makes these concepts so interesting, I would argue, is the way they provide direct structural correlations between certain peculiarities of consciousness and possible facts of brain. They also show us that how what seem to be positive features of consciousness can arise without neural correlates to accomplish them. Once you accept that consciousness is the result of a special kind of informatically localized neural activity, information horizons and encapsulation directly follow. Sufficiency and asymptotic limits follow in turn, once you ask what information the conscious brain can and cannot access. Our brains exhibit common characteristics and generalized localization of function. My experience of threshold is determined by what I don't experience past the limits of threshold, in this case, due to the actual connective access certain brain structures have with one another.

Moving on, I hope to show how these four concepts, along the open/closed structure of the RS, can explain some of the most baffling structural features of consciousness. By simply asking the question of what kinds of information the RS likely lacks, we can reconstruct the first-person, and show how the very things we find the most confusing about consciousness—and the most difficult to plug into our understanding of the natural world—are actually confusions. The Recursive System - our brain - can only use the neural architecture it has evolved to recognize its environment to now recognize itself. It's self-referential, in which we are the referent - and this is actually what enchephalization describes, that is, the fact that we pass through all the developmental stages of our brain's evolution, the classic triune brain: reptile, mammalian, and neocortex (human). For our brain to actually experience, total brain experience of its existing neural architecture, it would have to raise the bar with another complexity of neural structure, post-neocortex?

***

Are you interested in hearing more? Does it seem at all plausible, or does this guy just sound like a total crackpot?

My original summary of the BBT went, for the in-person conversation with the female, went something like:

Quote

It basically says that consciousness is actually a big illusion, and therefore agency, the self, the now, etc. along with it.

The evidence? Well, uhm...

Hopefully, the improved version will grab the attention without coming off as ludicrous.

Just personal impressions, of course. Not sure if I've offered anything here.

Hmm...

Remember that this is basically a script for me to recite in-person, and I'd rather not adulterate the Bakker quote. In fact, it's not clear to me whether the bolded lines are just comments or you would actually have me insert them into the...? At any rate, I don't want to come off as lecturing them on the brain rather than merely raising certain salient facts to the attention; after all, I'm a layman and they're the scientists! I'd probably get the rhetorical shit beaten out of me if I tried something like that...

But thanks for the notes. Assimilating and reorganizing what you added, here's the new version:

Neuroscientific research, according to Bakker, suggests that consciousness - which is to say, the neural circuits giving rise to what we call consciousness - is a recursive system that both feeds information to the rest of the brain, and processes information *from* the rest of the brain. However, for the latter function there is a sort of structured informatic bottleneck which effectively limits the information received by the consciousness-circuits, which is to say that consciousness is "blind" to everything that goes on in the brain other than what it actually directly gets or what it can infer by analyzing environmental manifestations of the brain's performance. To elaborate, Bakker is claiming that research shows that this recursive system of consciousness-generating circuits has evolved to be self-recognizing and self-referential in a recursive manner, but only to a very limited extent because otherwise you'd need a whole new second brain to keep track of everything that's going on in the first one - or something like that. Hence: informatic asymmetry. You can easily demonstrate this by asking, "What is my brain doing right now?" Furthermore, aren't there measured thresholds of sensation, therefore perception, yet what we consciously report as experienced is unequal to the brain's activity as described by brain-imaging technologies. Right? This informatic asymmetry is indisputable, right?

What Bakker argues is that this latter bit is responsible for our confabulations of such items as intentionality, the first-person perspective, the now, and those other things he conveniently lists in the abstract of the essay in question.

Basically, the structural limitations of consciousness-circuits result in the phenomenological phenomena mentioned above - that's what he tries to argue in the paper.

So just hear it out - here's a crucial block from the paper:

***

Information horizons: The boundaries that delimit the recursive neural access that underwrites consciousness. [So, an aside: this basically refers to cognitive thresholds or informatic limits for various sensory/perceptual modalities. Think about how your visual field just sort of seems to run out into oblivion.]

Encapsulation: The global result of limited recursive neural access, or information horizons. [Another aside: so this is related to the idea of conscious unity, and how we perceive all the different modalities simultaneously, even as it seems we can distinguish between them.]

Sufficiency: The way the lack of intra-modal access to information horizons renders a given modality of consciousness ‘sufficient,’ which is to say, at once all-inclusive and unbounded at any given moment. [To elaborate, this means that we basically aren't bothered by the fact that there is a lack of information past the information horizons; concretely, like how you don't really perceive that there's a boundary to the visual field in the sense of specifically perceiving the lack beyond it; the visual information simply runs out, and the lack of information isn't specially represented as anything, simply being a lack of information. This makes more sense if you read the essay.]

Asymptotic limits: The way information horizons find phenomenal expression as ‘limits with one side.’ [You'll recognize the link to the previous definition, I think.]

We began by asking how information horizons might find phenomenal expression. What makes these concepts so interesting, I would argue, is the way they provide direct structural correlations between certain peculiarities of consciousness and possible facts of brain. They also show us that how what seem to be positive features of consciousness can arise without neural correlates to accomplish them. Once you accept that consciousness is the result of a special kind of informatically localized neural activity, information horizons and encapsulation directly follow. Sufficiency and asymptotic limits follow in turn, once you ask what information the conscious brain can and cannot access.

Moving on, I hope to show how these four concepts, along the open/closed structure of the RS, can explain some of the most baffling structural features of consciousness. By simply asking the question of what kinds of information the RS likely lacks, we can reconstruct the first-person, and show how the very things we find the most confusing about consciousness—and the most difficult to plug into our understanding of the natural world—are actually confusions.

***

Are you interested in hearing more? Does it seem at all plausible, or does this guy just sound like a total crackpot? He does explain how the scientific evidence supports his interpretations, and how his cognitive model can be used to successfully account for all these features of consciousness, in the essay itself. Perhaps you'd like to read it yourself? I could link it to you. As a layman,  (and given that his language is still, um, a little dense) I'm sure that I haven't been able to do justice to the concept.

1. Come now Callan, let's not be obtuse - no living human meticulously qualifies every single statement they make, not even you.
2. They are not functionally obliged, for the same reason as above. It' s fundamentally impossible, as it demands that everywhere one looks one should closely examine the scene for the proverbial 'Virgin Mary on the burnt toast' before looking away. You sort of acknowledged this in your first response with

I think spare times a thing.

3. I'll factor your advice on "regular discussion" into my plans.

Moving on to particulars...

That doesn't mean the physical actions I describe aren't happening.

The way you put it, he would demand a comprehensive report or meta-analysis before considering Bakker on his terms. My own feeling is that he just doesn't really understand what Bakker's point/idea is at all/, and that he would have been more amenable to the blog-post had it been couched in clearer language. That's the substance of my disagreement, basically.

It takes two to tango - writer AND reader.

I am nothing to these two. They owe me nothing, and have no obligations toward me: more strangers than even acquaintances. They simply can not be expected to devote their full cognitive potential toward strange documents for an extended period of time at the behest of some young weirdo whom they have a decade or more on. Something similar goes for any potential future 'casual' encounters any given individual might have with Bakkerism. Bakker and his 'apostles' must be accommodating, otherwise any claims of being serious people making serious arguments toward the unlike-minded for the benefit of society - or whatever reformulation of Bakker's mission statement you'd like - is shown to be a platitude.

We simply can't afford to sit in a circle-jerk murmuring to each other, 'Ahh, those patsies are just too proud to see the genius of Bakker. But we, we are the visionaries; doubtless posterity will accept us for what we are, the heroes and harbingers of a new age'. I'm confident that Bakker himself would agree here, going by what he put front-and-center on his webzone; he claims to hate parochial self-congratulation.

How good people are at avoiding saying they don't know.

That's rather unfair, and avoids much of their responses.

1. I don't understand it myself. None of the terms Bakker uses are familiar to me from the literature, and his writing is extremely dense and confusing. He presents no clear cognitive model, no contrasting hypotheses and no ways of testing them. This just doesn't look like good science to me, and while I'm open to new ideas they must be conveyed in a way I can understand. If Bakker is a scientist he should write like one: clearly and succinctly. If he is not, then he should make an effort to talk to scientists in their own language so long as he wishes to be understood.

2. Usually, when I read philosophy I can understand it.

Their issue here seems primarily to be with Bakker's language and the way he presents his ideas.

is taking the easy way out - he's trying to appear reasonable by wanting the whole thing, with complete research and writing up, explained to him. Or he'll ignore it.

My impression is that a mere rewording of Bakker would be more fruitful than these sorts of aspersions.

Pride is the main issue here. No one wants to take a random document out of the blue and let it shame by them acknowledging 'hey, some bits make sense, so there's some legitimacy to it, but I don't understand alot of it - oh, I guess that reduces my hard earned legitimacy somewhat?'. Who wants to hand over their legitimacy to a random scrap of paper? Really?

Is one obliged to respect what seems to one like incoherent ramblings? Which is more effective in writing, engagement or alienation? At any rate, neither you nor I can rebuke another for perceived pridefulness without coming off, as Bakker might put it, as "Hitler condemning Jesus Christ for hatefulness".

Ultimately, it's likely my fault - even what I understand of Bakker... the thing is, to begin to understand Bakker one really must read him extensively. I just haven't selected the appropriate excerpts, most likely. Also, I had read these Bakker pieces in the links multiple times and very closely, which probably wasn't passed along for the recipient of my little presentation or in the evident 20 minutes that the other one took to read and respond to the TPB post (judging by email response time).

I'll try a different approach with these two next time - if they'll humor me again. I'm currently starting to read Bakker's critical essay on the BBT, which hopefully will be written in a manner more appropriate to this type of reader; I'll reiterate the basic concept and as much of the 'rigorous proofs' as I'm able, and direct them to the thing itself to judge on their own time. Moreover, I'll adopt some of your language and ask:

1. Whether there's not anything in my expatiation or in Bakker's writings directly which they can more or less grasp.
2. Whether any of it seems interesting to consider (given their purviews) from Bakker's or even another's/their own perspective.
3. Whether there's not anything insightful or plausible in Bakker's evidences, given what they know about the brain.

I'll try that out next week, if possible.

Also, I ought to have noted that one of the above is not actually a native speaker of English! You can probably guess which one: they complained that "wow, my vocabulary is not that big"...