Miscellaneous Chatter > Philosophy & Science

Bakker's Blind Brain Theory

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Royce:
Wilshire, I never said that "the world does not exist". The world is definitely real. All I am saying is that you should never confuse the map for the territory. The map being the world as humans perceive it through interpreting sensory data and described through conceptual language, and the territory is the world as it is behind all the labels.

You mention logic, but isn`t logic a concept too?  One of my favorite philosophical ramblers Terence Mckenna said that the world is literally made of language. It took me awhile to really understand what he meant by that, but now(after certain convincing experiences) I have to agree with that statement.

Your reality tunnel is a learned one. That reality tunnel can be altered if you want it to.

If you really think that the world is  what our descriptions of it tells us it is, then you are entering solipsism, and I really think that our minds/consciousness is way more weird than we might imagine at this point.

For the record I do not go around telling people I meet that "I do not exist". That would be crazy. I play the game as everyone else, and it really does not affect my day to day life if I ,on a philosophical level, do not exist.

Wilshire:
Royce, I'd respond, but I'm at almost a complete loss. I lack the learning to participate further along this discussion I think ;). I don't think you don't believe we exist, I'm just not playing the word games it seems.


--- Quote from: H on July 28, 2015, 03:41:52 pm ---I kind of started rambling there, but does that help?

--- End quote ---

The general concept makes sense, its what was described above in your/my original posts. I get it on general terms but appear to lack the knowledge for deeper understanding.

Camlost:

--- Quote ---I can tend to agree with the wide ascertain that what we experience as "The Self" (as a director, as the operator) is indeed not what it actually is.  Our brain does what it wants when it wants, whether we are conscious of it or not.  In fact, research has kind of shown that our brain (without thought, consciousness, The Self) actually runs the show, not the reverse.  Decisions are made, then consciousness is informed, with the feeling of "I made this choice" (I being The Self, here).
--- End quote ---

I have done no research on the topic, not even Bakker's blog to be honest as I often get mired in the language and lose the meaning(but language is 9/10 of any expertise if you ask me), so my understanding may be dramatically off of what he is trying get at. Preface aside, my interpretation whilst reading Neuropath is that the notion of Self is misrecognized by that which I call my Self. The most succinct and precise way I can describe it, again my interpretation, is that we (read "I"/Self) mistake ourselves for the authors when we are in fact only narrators. Using another of Bakker's fictions as a referent, this gap, infinitesimal as it is, delineates the darkness that comes before from our conscious experience of such. It sounds far to familiar for myself to have come up with it, but I think that's the crux of the notion that our thoughts precede " us".

As to the hurdle of the Self being illusory, I don't think the argument is necessarily that the Self doesn't exist(it seems a bit bootstrap to me, self-refrencing itsself for its own existence), but rather that we can't point anywhere and say that this is the origen of consciousness. If I had to guess, I'd bet there are camps of neuroscientists divided by the theory that consciousness is an emergent principle, a by-product of a wildly firing thicket of neurons, and those that might argue that our observational tools aren't exact enough to locate consciousness.

I don't know. Thought I'd throw my two cents in on an argument none of us really seem to have a complete grasp of lol

EDIT: Sorry H, I think all I've gone and done here is reiterate the point you were trying to make. If I'm interpreting you correctly that is.

Madness:
As a little warm up to my possible TPB guest post, I'm going to try wading into this thread... after work (which essentially means I'm dead tired - but I have my laptop back and typing is pleasing).


--- Quote from: Wilshire on July 15, 2015, 06:02:12 pm ---So the crux

--- Quote ---Intentional concepts such as belief, desire, good, perception, volition, action–all the furniture of conscious life–are simply ropes and trees and snakes. Misapprehensions. According to BBT, there are literally no such things.

--- End quote ---

But I'm still uncertain: what, then, is the Elephant? What is the whole that we cannot comprehend?

--- End quote ---

'The Elephant' is everything your brain is doing that you don't experience "directly." Science is hard-pressed to coherently express how much information the brain processes and how it does so (mostly a mixture of chemical and electrical activity, maxing out the basic heat potentials of an organ like the brain by dispersing its energy output). But what "you" or "I" directly experience is a fraction of what's going on in the brain at any given time (though, I might argue that we can train ourselves to experience more of that going's on).

As a segue, one of my favorite introductions to the brain was the Default Mode Network (because computer metaphors won't die, despite the brain defeating analogy by every historical comparison ever) and the Connectome.

Bakker's picked the thalamocortical because it is a structure at the crux between many "higher cognitive functions" neural-correlates of consciousness we might associate with "the self" in this discussion and unconscious, non-conscious, mammalian, reptilian, functions of the brain stem, cerebellum, etc.

Again, we can argue that you can work to experience more. But as a commonality, we aren't able to articulate the majority of our brain's functional life because it just doesn't exist to "us." One point that really changed my outlook on all of this was the variety of brain dysfunction and degeneration. Blindsight, prosopagnosia, akinetopsia, etc, etc, ad nauseam. Dysfunction and degeneration can be so, so selective and one need only read My Stroke of Insight to have a clear example of the old adage "few are lucky enough to diagnose themselves." And yet in almost every case, people cannot articulate their own absences. For instance, it was a common demonstration in the psychology textbooks I read to showcase our blindspot, where our visual field actually has an absence where the retinal nerves exit the eye.


--- Quote from: Royce on July 28, 2015, 12:17:03 pm ---This notion that "self" is illusory and that perception/consciousness can be altered through neurological experiment is hardly breaking news?
Haven`t people all over the world figured that out through the use of psychedelics and deep meditation/yoga?  Another example is the experience called "satori" in zen buddhism.
--- End quote ---

Some people have. Supposing that a majority of people adopt this perspective is foolish, though. In many cases, many of those realizations are attributed to "the mind," instead of "the brain," etc. As you wrote, our articulations dominate every domain.

Lol - now that I've read the thread, I see that you all haven't taken this too far.

So to finish up for the moment, though I feel this has been good warmup for tomorrow, if only as a short introduction, our experience of what we call consciousness is truncated, no matter how we cut that discussion. Whether or not one can truly maximize their experience of the brain's function is another guess, entirely.

SilentRoamer:
As a child and indeed through most of my teenage years I subscribed to the idea that I was the only real "conscious" and all else was illusory - part of the holographic world. At the time I was and am still fairly convinced of the holographic theory.

Anyway it took me a long time before I began to understand this extreme form of Solipsim and to come to terms with it both personally and academically.

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