The Second Apocalypse

Miscellaneous Chatter => General Misc. => Topic started by: Bakker User on April 21, 2013, 01:17:13 am

Title: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 21, 2013, 01:17:13 am
Don't ask me how, but I got hold of a couple of neurolinguistics researchers, and attempted to present some of Bakker's work to them.

One I had read Notes Toward A Post-Normative Philosophy (http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/speculative-musings/notes-toward-a-post-normative-philosophy/).

He replied by email:

Quote
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.

Another I read (in person) some excerpts from Bakker's old lecture Semantic Apocalypse (http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/the-semantic-apocalypse/), as well as some TPB posts for supplement and clarification.

To paraphrase:

Quote
She: This is so amazing!
I: *sub rosa fist-pump*
She: None of this makes any sense!
I: Well, he is a philosopher.
She: Usually, when I read philosophy I can understand it.

...

I: *explaining the gist of the Blind-Brain Hypothesis.*
She: He's not even a scientist. Does he have any evidence for this?
I: Well, if you would just read these essays...
She:  :o  :-\
I: Alright, how about this blog post...

...

She: This Bakker guy seems to be taking the obvious and coming to really weird conclusions from it.
She: I don't think I'm his part of his target audience. 

Well, Bakker loves to go on about how he's actually arguing with his writing, putting across important ideas to unlike-minded audiences, and so on.

And yet, if no one understands what the fuck he's talking about... Perhaps he should tone down the diction?

I myself must admit that I understand little of Bakker's posts and essays beyond their main point, especially his writings of the past year-and-a-half. I'm often mystified by his terminology, analogies, and thought process. I used to attribute this to my own stupidity, but these guys quoted above are legitimate scientists...

Thoughts? Does Bakker just make perfect sense to you all?

If not, perhaps we could collectively back a strongly-worded email advising him to tone down his obscurantist language if he actually wants to promulgate his ideas beyond like, a thousand fans and fellow crackpots?
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Callan S. on April 21, 2013, 08:36:21 am
There was this bus ticket information guy at the bus stop the other day - supposedly to give out new information (mostly about them scraping paper tickets, the butt heads). I tried asking him another question about the zone we were in, when using a ticket machine.

It was really quite facinating how he fluidly veered around the fact that he didn't have a clue, even as he wore the big blue jacket of the company in question.

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

Your first example
Quote
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.
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. He's not treating it as an opportunity to start research himself, he just wants someone else to do all the research, then present it to him. In a way it's alot more open minded than most because I think he would listen to it when presented in the form he refers to. But in another way it ignores question marks as any kind of opportunity. He wont say 'Well, there are some question marks there, but I aint got the time to chase them up (there's a universe full of question marks and I have my own to pursue)'. Everyone wants to think they have good reason to ignore something, so he invents a good reason. Ironically, it's a symptom of heuristic compression itself - the compression being to cut off any 'I wonder' question marks (they eat up calories like the Dickens!) and instead to go with 'no, there's no reason to think about that'.

Quote
She: None of this makes any sense!
I see this alot - you say something complicated, but even if you stuck 'the sky is blue' in the middle of it, the person would still say EVERYTHING you said made no sense! 'The sky is blue' made no sense?  'Heuristic compression' isn't that complex to grasp. Perhaps applying it to the brain is, but then again understanding refraction of light is complicated as well. But no acknowledgement of even part of the document making sense.

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?

And so I complete my knocking of the readers...

I think spare times a thing. Were talking question marks which may be of interest to pursue. Someone who's schedule is full (or atleast they think it's full) obviously doesn't have any time left for new question marks. Though they most likely wont admit it.

Quote
Thoughts? Does Bakker just make perfect sense to you all?
I've studied other models who's texts made more sense years after the first read - like the gamist/simulationist/narrativist theory of roleplay inclination (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/), for example. If you're a long term roleplayer that might seem utterly alien from first contact.

But there I go avoiding saying I don't understand it/cannot full model all of it that is described.

Perhaps we could break it down to the question marks that, whether we grasp the question right or not, we find the question interesting.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 21, 2013, 09:33:55 am
Quote
How good people are at avoiding saying they don't know.

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

Quote from: Researchers
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.

Quote
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.

Quote
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"...

Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Wilshire on April 21, 2013, 02:29:45 pm
I think the opinions of your scientists seems reasonable. I'm not going to say I have spent any reasonable amount of time looking into Bakker's philosophies, but from what I have looked at, I can say that I felt similar to your quoted opinions. I, however, and just some guy off the street. One would hope that someone that is, more or less, in the field of study that the paper was written about, would be able to more fully grasp what the hell was going on.

Though the credentials of your readers may be important. I don't know what the paper(s) were about, and I don't know how much a 'neruolinguistic researcher' would know about it. However, what I can say is that Bakker does not write scientifically, and the people in the scientific community expect a certain kind of writing. I don't know how much Bakker claims to be a scientist, but he certainly isn't doing 'science' on a day to day basis. Philosophy and science can be more or less similar depending on how theoretical ones research is. I would imagine that your readers, since they are doing research (which I take to me actually doing experiments and developing working models of theories) that philosophy is not close to heart. Practical science, outside the realm of purely theoretical stuff, is not much like philosophy, and the practitioners would not appreciate something like the texts written by Bakker.

This is because, like they said, he isn't a scientist. I'm sure he could write something that could be more comprehensible for a scientific audiance, but from what I've seen, most of his work is not for them. Its for the philosophers. His papers are not scientific papers.

Go to google scholar or something similar and look up a journal article regarding something scientific.  You'll find a very similar design in all of them. They will start with an abstract, then go into their hypothesis, then a theory section, then their apparatus and method for testing, data and discussion, and finally the conclusions they came to. There will also be an appendix section.

There is not a lot of fluff. Not a lot of confusing dialect and complex sentence structure. The only thing that may be confusing are the terms that are very specific to the research itself, and these things are usually explained in the appendix, accompanied by all the references they used for their work.

Peer-reviewed scientific journal articles go through a rigorous process to get published, and their findings are typically more accurate and more reliable than textbooks or papers, since those can be written by just a few people and hold no obligation to be accurate.

I'm just trying to say I can understand the stance of the your scientists. Bakker is a philosopher not a scientist, and grabbing any random scientist from the street and asking them to interpret his writing will probably yield you the same result over and over again.

Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 21, 2013, 08:54:48 pm
A very reasonable assessment; my only complaint is that it condemns Bakker to irrelevance - unless he's not really a post-posterity writer...

Although, perhaps I should have been more careful with my labels. While I did approach them in their capacity as such, they certainly do their fair share of theoretical work in syntax and semantics, from what I've learned, though one more so than the other (who is a full-on cognitive scientist). For the she, in fact, neurolinguistics is more of a sideshow, and one of her degrees is an MPhil in Linguistics; then again, I do recall her saying:

Quote
Wow, I really don't know philosophy...

She didn't even believe there was such a thing as neurophilosophy until I wiki'd it for her.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Baztek on April 21, 2013, 09:11:25 pm
Bakker's ideas are fairly straightforward, but readability is a whole other story. Sitting down and reading a blog post of his from start to finish is as about as fun as pinching a loaf when you're constipated: it feels great when you're done, but there's a whole lotta grunting and pushing to get there. I never read his blog anymore and frankly I only keep it bookmarked for TUC updates.

Not to be the typical unsatisfied fantasy fan, but I think he'd get a lot more done if he didn't write mammoth dissertations on theories of the mind that only his userbase reads anyway. Like whatever, it's his life, who the fuck am I to tell him what to do etc, but the guy has a great knack for philosophically dense stories and I think a lot of that productivity is getting channeled into more fruitless endeavors.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Wilshire on April 21, 2013, 10:07:16 pm
Yeah I would agree that the judgment passed was a bit harsh. Sure his stuff isn't a breeze to read, but there is no rule that it has to be. It isn't a scientific article and should lose points because of that fact. It might not be what one generally reads, but just because you dislike how it is written doesn't mean it is garbage.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Callan S. on April 22, 2013, 02:11:05 am
That's rather unfair, and avoids much of their responses.
I think my responce left some room for appeal and discussion, rather than just being a concluding judgement.

If it didn't and just seemed just a concluding judgement from me, okay, fair enough you responding with a concluding judgement yourself.

Okay, your judgement that it's just unfair (case closed) is heard and that you offer no appeal process is recognised.

Quote
Their issue here seems primarily to be with Bakker's language and the way he presents his ideas.
I talked about it, but it just turned out to be unfair.

It takes two to tango - writer AND reader. I think you're quote just looks at one side as if they handle all of the dance themselves. I say that with room to appeal though, let me make clear this time.

Quote
Quote
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.
I certainly projected my values onto it. That doesn't mean the physical actions I describe aren't happening.

But if the rule is that if I'm not completely affirming then I'll be dismissed, okay. But if I'm completely affirming, then everyones right (well, except Bakker).

Quote
Quote
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?
Obliged by some sort of god being? Or obliged by a recognition that tons of ideas that have atleast been scientifically proved in history have been dismissed as incoherant ramblings before that, by many people?

That a cursory look at history shows that time and time again sufficiently advanced truth can appear to many as incoherant rambles? And there's really not much to make it clear that oneself is going to be immune to that effect?

You can argue I'm wrong and nobodies every treated an eventually scientifically proven idea as incoherant rambling. If so I atleast agree you're consistant with how you see history.

But if you agree rather than argue that, well what, are you advocating that these people you know will be the ones who are immune to what many others have succumbed to in the past - seeing a coherant idea as incoherant?

Otherwise they are obliged by intellectual honesty to treat themselves as potentially sucumbing to the 'incoherant ramblings' effect.

Quote
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".
Okay?

So there was a rebuke somewhere? An implication that someone simply MUST change their behaviour? Perhaps you're saying from me?

To me, you've come in with a problem, like a guy bringing in a car to a garage - I'm just a mechanic. You think the problem is X, I tell you it's Y. When I tell you it's Y, it's my technical evaluation - not a finger waving proclamation of how thou must live. You can take your car to another garage. In a way, I'm indifferent if you don't care to engage the services of my garage. I was just offering a quote.

Never mind I have to wonder at christianities death toll total over the ages, compared to hitlers score. But damn I'm stupid to wonder such things and obviously start fighting a discussion war on a second front as well as the first. And yet...intellectually I'm compelled to wonder.

Quote
1. Whether there's not anything in my expatiation or in Bakker's writings directly which they can more or less grasp.
If I sounded like I was giving aspersions before, I wouldn't put it this way!

Do you see any components, like heuristic compression, which make some amount of sense to you? Then just talk about what makes some amount of sense to you first, before putting forth documents - that's just part of regular discussion.

Quote
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"...
Vocabulary is just a compression method as well, to say more with fewer words. It's like a trade off, reader wise - make it less verbose, but it becomes longer, and people get bored before reading (applies to me as well!), verses concise vocab, makes it shorter, but starts falling down in immediate understanding with various sizes of audiences (size in proportion to vocab).

Then again maybe short vocab is Bakker being lazy as well, making him have to write less - it cuts that way too! Mind you, hey, he's gotta write us books, aye! Instead of all this brain wankery! ;) Joking!
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Callan S. on April 22, 2013, 02:22:15 am
There is not a lot of fluff. Not a lot of confusing dialect and complex sentence structure. The only thing that may be confusing are the terms that are very specific to the research itself, and these things are usually explained in the appendix, accompanied by all the references they used for their work.
So how do you explain this thing alot of us seem to be going through, often called conciousness? In a clinical fashion?

I mean, that our skull is full of synapses has been known for ages. But has that stopped ideas like dualism?

If the idea of conciousness was littered with fluff (never mind if the idea of conciousness itself is fluff), you'd have to include the fluff in order to reference it and begin to dismantle it.

It's a difficult situation. What do scientific works which pertain to dismantling superstitions through scientific testing refer to? Don't they refer to the superstitious fluff at various points?
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Wilshire on April 22, 2013, 02:58:15 am
Oh I've no idea how to go about it as I explained. Not a clue. I was merely trying to say that the way it is presented is more philosophical than scientific. Nothing is wrong with that, but if you ask a scientist to read it then they will likely give you a disappointing response.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Callan S. on April 22, 2013, 03:35:12 am
I think it'd be interesting to raise the topic of 'conciousness' first. I suspect that a scientist might harbour a number of ideas on the matter, but not recall them to mind simply upon contact with a verbally dense document.

If they were to recall the ideas first, they might be able to start hesitantly pinning them to the words of the document, like 'heuristic compression', for example - one might think of how one simplifies our memory of things (or how art teachers have to teach you to draw what you see, not how you think of the object - because the latter isn't the same, as its been subject to compression).
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 22, 2013, 07:00:01 am
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

Quote
I think spare times a thing.

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

Moving on to particulars...

Quote
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.

Quote
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.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 22, 2013, 08:43:06 am
Reading the essay...

If anyone would be so kind as to skim the first few pages of Bakker's essay (http://www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind_Brain_Theory_of_the_Appearance_of_Consciousness)and suggest improvements to this 'in-depth' recapitulation of the BBT:

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. 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?"

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.

Encapsulation: The global result of limited recursive neural access, or information horizons.

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.

Asymptotic limits: The way information horizons find phenomenal expression as ‘limits with one side.’

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?

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.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: What Came Before on April 23, 2013, 04:42:38 am
Apologies, Bakker User, because I lack the cognition at the moment to respond appropriately to your thread's topic ;).

Though the credentials of your readers may be important. I don't know what the paper(s) were about, and I don't know how much a 'neruolinguistic researcher' would know about it. However, what I can say is that Bakker does not write scientifically, and the people in the scientific community expect a certain kind of writing. I don't know how much Bakker claims to be a scientist, but he certainly isn't doing 'science' on a day to day basis. Philosophy and science can be more or less similar depending on how theoretical ones research is. I would imagine that your readers, since they are doing research (which I take to me actually doing experiments and developing working models of theories) that philosophy is not close to heart. Practical science, outside the realm of purely theoretical stuff, is not much like philosophy, and the practitioners would not appreciate something like the texts written by Bakker.

+1 for two distinct formats.

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.

+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.

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.

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?

Reading the essay...

If anyone would be so kind as to skim the first few pages of Bakker's essay (http://www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind_Brain_Theory_of_the_Appearance_of_Consciousness)and suggest improvements to this 'in-depth' recapitulation of the BBT:

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.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 23, 2013, 05:53:15 am

+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.

Quote
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 essay (http://www.academia.edu/1502945/The_Last_Magic_Show_A_Blind_Brain_Theory_of_the_Appearance_of_Consciousness)and 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:

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. 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.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Callan S. on April 23, 2013, 06:57:49 am
Quote
The evidence? Well, uhm...
I don't know what her problem with the evidence is?

It's also the binary people seem to default into that either it's proven to them right now, or it's utterly wrong.

When there's a middle ground of just trying to form a replica of the described model in their mind. Heck, every time you read fantasy you're (attempting to) replicate someone elses model. It's not an uncommon thing to do.

She seems to grasp the model enough to get the idea that conciousness is an illusion - so ignoring evidence for now, ask her where does the model seem inconsistant with itself?

I think being asked that will cross reference real world understanding of structure (because that's where we get our idea of consistancy) with the model - and slowly start to tie it to real world elements. Ie, the evidence (that this is probably a worthwhile line of research) will slowly become clear, if you just ask if the model seems consistant with itself.

Also the question to ask is have either of these people actually initiated new lines of research? Most scientists haven't really - they refine what's already been done. So they wont percieve a crazy theory paper as a potential new line of research to follow, because they just haven't done/don't do new lines of research.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 23, 2013, 07:22:07 am
Again, it was my fault. I didn't have a solid grasp on the BBT besides a few mentions in blog posts. I couldn't really properly explain its basis, only its 'profound' implications. After I fumbled with whatever random tidbits came to mind, she flatly stated:

Quote
You have to show me the evidence; otherwise, how do I know it's not just noise?

Now that I've read and at least mostly understood Bakker's major thesis on it, I should be better equipped to meet potential challenges.

Quote from: Callan S.
Also the question to ask is have either of these people actually initiated new lines of research?

Ahhh... I have enough latent social graces to know that I should broach something like that v-e-e-e-ry delicately in this context. Aspersions...

Of course, my interest here is not to hoard the deficits of my betters in order to rubbish them on the side...

It's to convert others so that I might feel self-efficacious.  ;D
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: What Came Before on April 23, 2013, 06:42:09 pm
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.

+1.

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:

Yeah, just notes - I know people are generally unclear on Bakker's descriptive metaphor and was hoping only to offer more clarity.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Jorge on April 23, 2013, 06:58:05 pm
Let's get a few things straight:

1. I am a scientist. I just got my PhD in biology. I am not a neuroscientist, but I understand the subject (up to a point, I'm not an expert on electrophysiology or neuroanatomy). I understand what Bakker is claiming.

2. Bakker's work is primarily in philosophy of mind, not science. One of his claims is that the "blind brain theory" can be falsified by experiment. This is problematic for a few reasons.

a) Very few scientists understand the explanatory gap and the hard problem of consciousness. This is because it has traditionally been considered a philosophical problem, not a scientific one... indeed THE PROBLEM ITSELF is that the raw 'stuff of mind' seems inaccessible to science.

b) We do not currently have the technology to falsify BBT. Nonetheless, preexisting studies (such as those on anosognosia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia)) support its core hypothesis (namely: that consciousness turns on information LACKED rather than information HAD).

c) Not everything Bakker talks about is science. His posts on continental philosophy ARE extremely dense and philosophy-jargon heavy.

3. The "Semantic Apocalypse" is not a scientific hypothesis. It is socio-cultural speculation about the ramifications of a neuroscience that validates BBT. You must remember that BBT may be FALSIFIED by neuroscience, so the Semantic Apocalypse might not have any empirical basis whatsoever.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Jorge on April 23, 2013, 08:40:35 pm
From an article published in the highly prestigious journal Science last week:

Quote
It is important to acknowledge that our research does not provide a direct proof of subjective experience. Indeed, it is a genuine philosophical problem whether such a proof can ever be obtained from purely objective neurophysiological data. Rather, we show that neural markers of consciousness found in adults can be generalized to infant populations. Such objective measures have proven useful to probe consciousness in patients in a vegetative state and in minimally conscious patients and might help pediatricians confront issues of infant consciousness in relation to anesthesia, pain, and pathologies.

See? Science is starting to rub up against this very ugly problem. Dual-classed (http://www.rogermwilcox.com/adnd/Munchkin.html) philosopher/scientists like Giulio Tononi and the Churchlands are at least bringing this issue to the forefront.

In the above paper, the authors are essentially claiming they have narrowed the search to Francis Crick's famous 'neural correlates of consciousness'. The next step will be figuring out what is special (if anything) about the circuitry that is involved in this.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Wilshire on April 23, 2013, 10:21:56 pm

It's also the binary people seem to default into that either it's proven to them right now, or it's utterly wrong.


This, I think, is an important statement. Its very true in a lot of cases that people tend to see things this way, especially if they feel they are being challenged or confronted, even if its subconcious. Like mentioned earlier, having someone whip out a paper and say "hey do you get this", it would be almost (almost) an insult to themselves if they didnt understand whatever it was (depending on the person, the situation, and the context of the confrontation).


Also, Jorge, I'm glad you chimed in. I think earlier I was trying to say a lot of what you just did. You, however, did a much better job at it and have the credentials to back it up. I was mostly just whistling in the dark :P
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 24, 2013, 12:30:05 am
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.

Quote
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.






Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Callan S. on April 24, 2013, 01:04:31 am
Again, it was my fault. I didn't have a solid grasp on the BBT besides a few mentions in blog posts. I couldn't really properly explain its basis, only its 'profound' implications. After I fumbled with whatever random tidbits came to mind, she flatly stated:

Quote
You have to show me the evidence; otherwise, how do I know it's not just noise?

Now that I've read and at least mostly understood Bakker's major thesis on it, I should be better equipped to meet potential challenges.
The thing is, prior to the theory of evolution becoming widely accepted in scientific circles, she could have asked the same question if a theory of evolution was presented to her. What's the evidence? How does she know this evolution idea isn't just noise?

The question isn't so much 'is this correct?', but more like if Darwin asked you to help with his research on this kooky new idea he has.

She's right to be skeptical in that some research just doesn't go anywhere.

But clearly some research has been pivotal to our understanding today.


Quote from: Callan S.
Also the question to ask is have either of these people actually initiated new lines of research?

Ahhh... I have enough latent social graces to know that I should broach something like that v-e-e-e-ry delicately in this context. Aspersions...[/quote]
Oh for goodness sake...

I'll say I'm a son of a retired general practioner. When a GP asks intimate questions, it is not to cast aspersions. To a degree I am a reflection of that culture.

It amazes me how human scienctific practice still is...

Quote
3.c. She rejected the magic metaphor and vision analogy: "I don't need analogies, I need evidence."
What does she need evidence for?

She's not stating her own hypothesis that runs counter to this idea. What is her hypothesis on the matter? You don't need evidence if you already believe the idea (if you mentioned evolution she wouldn't demand evidence before talking further) - thus she believes another idea. What is that idea?

Perhaps putting it like this "If I mentioned the idea of evolution you wouldn't ask for evidence - you'd pretty much take it as a given. But if I said something counter to evolution, you would ask for evidence. With this blind brain theory thing, what theory of yours is it counter to so much so that it makes you ask for evidence?"

If she keeps asking for evidence, keep saying if you were talking about evolution that she whouldn't ask for evidence. Her asking for evidence shows she has a theory that BBT runs counter toward. It's not just about you providing evidence, can she articulate the theory that BBT runs counter to?

Also I'm tempted to say if Jorge says he understands it, then you have a reference to give. But I can't volunteer Jorge that way (I can only prod him with a sharp stick - poke poke poke! Okay, that didn't help...)


Jorge,

Along with Wilshire I'll say thanks for posting here. It helps give an idea of the perspectives involved.

Quote
Indeed, it is a genuine philosophical problem
Really? Why is that the case? Question begging.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Jorge on April 24, 2013, 06:08:02 am
Quote from: bakker_user
Bakker has no evidence, apparently.

You should not be trying to convince any scientists of BBT, because at this stage it is backed up only by circumstantial evidence and has not been properly experimentally falsified. Your friend is correct to take a skeptical stance.

You do not need to use analogies to explain it.

Ask your neurolinguistic friend if she has heard of anosognosia. If not, you can refer her to Prigatano's "The Study of Anosognosia" which is a technical and respectable volume on the subject. Very briefly: when people suffer strokes they can lose the capacity to see or move their limbs, and yet they are unable to detect the limitation.

The brain confabulates explanations to account for the lack of information.

This can be interpreted in many ways, but one way of looking at it is that "consciousness" (which you should define to her as the private, subjective, first-person experiences which go away when we enter dreamless sleep or coma state... you can refer her to Chalmers for more on the subject)  is actually caused by gaps in information that must be 'filled in', just like the anosognosia patient does. Just as we cannot 'see' where our thoughts come from but accept their provenance as normal, and just as we concoct a magical ability called "Free Will" to explain movements that originate from our brain, the very ground of our phenomenal experiences may be illusory. This in turn explains why we have a philosophical problem in the first place.

Semi-formally:
1. Everything seems amenable to naturalistic/materialistic (ie scientific explanation): gravity, explosions, bacteria, human biology.
2. Our own subjective experiences ('my experience of red' vs. 'your experience of red') do not seem amenable to materialistic reduction.
3. Science can find correlates to conscious states, and different conscious states.
C1: Given 3 our intuition about 2 is wrong. But it doesn't seem wrong, no matter how hard you think about it.
C2: Something our 'wiring' prevents us from 'seeing' the truth of 3.
C3: We are 'blind' brains, who are mainly blind to themselves.

BBT could be partially or fully falsified by the following experiments:

1. Fine-grain neural mapping shows that networks involved in consciousness do not neglect or ignore any information.
2. Experiments using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) or Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) find that under certain circumstances the patient can detect what part of his cognition is being manipulated (BBT has already partially passed this test, in my opinion, since under many circumstances where tDCS is used to cause a patient to move a limb, the patient will confabulate an explanation for their movement other than the current).
3. Neural mapping finds that neural correlates of consciousness are not distributed and instead map specifically to a single brain region. (This would falsify BBT because then you can say there's a single part of the brain that's doing the "seeing" of the rest of the activity in the brain. This would also be contra Giulio Tononi's integrated information theory)

I have a few other (very) speculative ideas how you could go about finding confirmatory evidence for BBT, but they remain outside technical capacity for the time being.

I hope this helps.


PS: I highly recommend reading several books before speaking to scientists on this subject. At the very least acquaint yourself with-

"The Tell-Tale Brain" or "A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness" by VS Ramachandran
"The Conscious Mind" by David Chalmers
"The Mind's I" edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett
"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks
"The Brain that Changes Itself" by Norman Doidge

Further reading:
"Wider than the Sky" by Gerald Edelman (1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine)
"Phi" by Giulio Tononi

Advanced:
Original papers on computability (Turing, Church, etc.), information theory (Shannon, Kolmogorov, etc.), neuroscience (Kandel, Bliss, LeDoux, Eliasmith, ect etc etc etc etc etc etc) and philosophy of mind (Searle, Nagel, Churchland, McGinnis, Dennet, Chalmers, Schwitzgebel, etc etc etc etc)
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 24, 2013, 07:43:41 am
This is good to know, at least.

Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Callan S. on April 24, 2013, 08:04:35 am
Jorge is laying it down!  :)
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 24, 2013, 08:28:48 am
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.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Callan S. on April 24, 2013, 11:42:49 am
Quote
"How do you know the causal chain isn't just Person X deciding to throw the ball and then throwing it?"
How do you know it is?

It just feels that way?

Where's your evidence?
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Jorge on April 24, 2013, 04:12:02 pm
Quote
I should have asked her whether she holds the view that humans are fundamentally biomechanical,

Absolutely. Not every scientist accepts this premise, because people are monkeys full of "believies" to use a Louis CK term. Isn't it just warm and fuzzy to think your mind is exempt from the law of causality that seem to dictate the rest of the universe?

OK, I'll stop beating this very dead horse now.

Quote
Are you consciously aware of every word that makes up your lexicon, right now?

This is potentially a very illustrative approach. Just yesterday I used the phrase "acrid smoke" and found myself wondering where the hell 'acrid' had come from since I hardly ever use that particular adjective.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 24, 2013, 07:30:07 pm
Here's an experience to add to the list of proofs: how is it possible for someone to not notice a stroke even to the loss of consciousness altogether?

Surely  - and let's say there's no pain... - the conscious brain should be able to detect, 'There seems to be something impairing specific functions of this gestalt, sir. [Localized processes affected in area of stroke] Alarm! Alarm! Prefrontal cortex indicates that this may require 'medical attention'. Reason dictates that you use your free will to call emergency services. Hurry, before the connection to your mortal coil is lost and you are left hanging in the perdition of the aether! FUCKING CIPHRANG WILL EAT YOU

*ahem* I got carried away. But, something like that, right? I'm thinking the relevance of anosognosia is similar.

Quote
I like non-fiction, and this sounds a lot like fiction to me
: Bah! Well, I suppose at this point I'm beating a dead horse as well. But hopefully this will be useful for any *confrontation* with the male.

WHOOPS
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 26, 2013, 08:28:38 pm
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.

Quote
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.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: What Came Before on April 27, 2013, 02:57:42 pm
Bakker User, apologies if I missed that crucial detail that you solicited these scientists in person.

There's a great adage, something to the effect of no scientist has the luxury of diagnosing their own degeneration or disorder. While that's not entirely true, Bolte Taylor describes a haunting account of having a stroke in her book and ted talk My Stroke of Insight.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Callan S. on April 27, 2013, 11:29:11 pm
While what he says has a fallacy in it (it's like the job experience fallacy - where you wont be given a job because you have no experience in it - how do you get experience? By doing the job. Here he wont listen to the idea until it's widely promulgated. How does it get promulgated? By people listening to the idea...) atleast he sets out his terms for acceptance, instead of falling to the usual human habit of throwing up a smokescreen of rationalisations. So a tip of the hat to that.

It kind of reminds me of games companies - you might have an awesome idea for a game, but someone in a games company has about a dozen of their own ideas they've come up with over the decades that they still haven't actually made into a game and would go and make way before they'd consider your game idea. Here, the dudes have an abundance of ideas to work through.
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Meyna on April 29, 2013, 10:34:17 pm
Bakker has read our minds (or, somehow less likely I think, our forum): http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/the-crux/
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Callan S. on April 30, 2013, 01:07:42 am
Bakker has read our minds (or, somehow less likely I think, our forum)
LOL! Good one, Meyna!
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Bakker User on April 30, 2013, 02:12:14 am
Quote
Aphorism of the Day: Give me an eye blind enough, and I will transform guttering candles into exploding stars.

Isn't it the other way around?

More information (exploding star) -> bottlenecked data-bus/consciousness (eye blind enough) -> less information (guttering candles)

Have Bakker's aphorisms finally gotten the better of him?  :D
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: What Came Before on April 30, 2013, 07:14:51 am
I read that as something to the affect of the blind are unhindered by vision and, therefore, unconstrained in their imaginings.

Bakker dons the omniscient trickster who leads ignorant (of greater perception, in this case) humans to see beauty in a shit stain. In other words, Kellhus. Though it smacks of Cishaurim (not that I attribute any of these qualities to Bakker in actuality, beyond the aphorism.)

Though, I haven't had the capacity to read the whole post yet. Mornings before the exertion of the day are best.

Through the Brain Darkly is a huge development though. I'll bet it outsells his entire discography...
Title: Re: Explaining Bakker
Post by: Callan S. on April 30, 2013, 08:26:26 am
Quote
Aphorism of the Day: Give me an eye blind enough, and I will transform guttering candles into exploding stars.

Isn't it the other way around?

More information (exploding star) -> bottlenecked data-bus/consciousness (eye blind enough) -> less information (guttering candles)

Have Bakker's aphorisms finally gotten the better of him?  :D
It suffers a little that way. But you need more information to tell what you're seeing is a guttering candle, not less. It's like when you give a little kid a dollar and they get really, really excited. Because they don't know any better. But yeah, blindness tends to remove information, fuzzifying stuff and making less of more. It does seem more like it's Cishy that way.

Probably something like : Give me an eye small enough and I will transform a guttering candle into a super nova.

'Blind' probably has too many cultural connotations in regards to people recognising they are losing their sight. It doesn't harken much to anognosia or whatever it's called.

Edit: Anosognosia. Sog of sogs.