going inside

...a 1999 book by John McCrone exploring a single moment of consciousness

http://black.hollygo7.co.uk/dysturbwiki/index.php/Interview_with_McCrone

the reason I'm posting this is because it's kinda like what i'm into as far as hobbies, this and cosmology...

...just thought it might spark a discussion is all

Funny thing is i met the guy twice cos he lives in Christchurch NZ as well and was asking all sorts of questions and putting forward my own theory surrounding consciousness/intelligence and when it became a factor in the evolution of the universe if you buy into the big bang, without knowing he was some kind of expert

I had actually organised an informal meet regarding an arts/science crossover event I have in mind and he was just some random guy I got to chatting on the net with and then found out we live in the same city along with a particle physicist studying category theory
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/category-theory/

so we dragged her along as well and then I got my media producer friend along so now I'm thinking let's make a TV documentary...

synchronicitous eh ???

does anyone else have strange seemingly out of the blue events that reveal themselves to be impeccably timed opportunities or get into this sort of stuff ???

just wondering...
 
O

Omaar

Guest
That interview is quite short and for this reason doesn't really get into the nitty gritty of what he's on about - is he arguing for an evolutionary view of consciousness? evolutionary neuroscience or something?

I heard some guy doing a reith lecture on that, using fact that there is a time lapse between a person performing an action and the delayed conscious sexperience of the mind of the sensation of will to perform an action after the action has taken place to argue for an evolutionary explantion for consciousness or something like that .. didn't buy it myself.

Though he did mention in the same lecture an incredible mental illness in which a subject is completely unable to deal with the reality of events around themselves and that the only explanation they find satisafactory is that they are in fact dead, so they live life as though they're in the land of the dead ... or something. can't remember what this syndrome is called though ....

There are a few of us nzers on this board btw - even an an antipodean thread somewhere ...
 
howzit Omaar...

...here is the amazon link to the book with some good reviews on it

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0880642629/102-1730170-7236163?v=glance

It's a good time to be an NZer eh ??? It's like the net has reduced our isolation but consolidated our identity

BTW McCrone is an expat kiwi who just moved back...

...personally i think the mind is collective and extant of the brain, maybe another dimension or field we tap into and feedback on during sleep then project onto a 4d screen as reality

whatever is known and can be observed was always known and can be observed, it's just we as humans aren't evolved enough to know or see it yet, we do however get glimpses through dreams, visions and deja vu...

...i'm more about instinct and intuition than reason and logic

I think>>I feel>>I believe>> I know>> I AM
 

DJ PIMP

Well-known member
HELL_SD said:
...personally i think the mind is collective and extant of the brain, maybe another dimension or field we tap into and feedback on during sleep then project onto a 4d screen as reality

I think>>I feel>>I believe>> I know>> I AM
Sounds like (religious) mysticism to me :)

McCrone seems to be talking about consciousness as brain function or mind - whereas Buddhism would say (transcendent) consciousness is the root of our being and mind is a layer sitting on top. What is interesting to me is his focus on the moment and his observation that the brain/consciousness is fluid, which reminds me of the naturalistic metaphors of Taoism, i.e. water is the state between heaven and earth.

I often feel the idea of living in the moment is emphasised in or is part of the conclusion of the philosophical/religious texts I've read.

Omaar: That mental condition sounds interesting. Samurai were meant to meditate on death on a daily basis so as to be entirely fearless/selfless, which in turn meant that in battle there would be no hesitation in responding to danger/stimuli, thus prolonging their life. As an aside, a great book on the warrior/philosopher tip is The Unfettered Mind by Takuan Soho - a series of zen essays written in the 1600s. It popped my noodle.
 
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hey Bleep

I'm only about a 3rd of the way through the book so can't fully comment yet on whether he thinks the mind is solely a brain function...

...hold tight til I get to the end or i might see if he wants to come here and answer your questions direct

bloody interesting stuff, would love to make tv series about this book just to get some geek mates of mine to 3d animate a neuron firing with all it's feedback loops going off as well...
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
Omaar said:
I heard some guy doing a reith lecture on that, using fact that there is a time lapse between a person performing an action and the delayed conscious sexperience of the mind of the sensation of will to perform an action after the action has taken place to argue for an evolutionary explantion for consciousness or something like that .. didn't buy it myself.

Though he did mention in the same lecture an incredible mental illness in which a subject is completely unable to deal with the reality of events around themselves and that the only explanation they find satisafactory is that they are in fact dead, so they live life as though they're in the land of the dead ... or something. can't remember what this syndrome is called though ....

.

Probably V.S. Ramachandran? The experiment you're talking about was done by Benjamin Libet, and it shows that the conscious decision to act occurs after the start of the neural signal which instigates the action. It's supposed to be an argument for the non-existance of free will. I can't think off the top of my head why it might support an "evolutionary" explanation for consciousness.

It seems as if this guy, McCrone, is a pop science writer condensing parts of the school of thought which has come to be know as embodied/enactive cognitive science. This is a totally live field, with a lot of debate and theory flying around, without much consensus, apart from that the old computational model of consciousness is severly lacking.

For those interested in the idea that consciousness exists in the moment and is tied up with action, I'd recommend the classic text that started most of this thought, "The Embodied Mind":

Which explicity draws on Buddhist thought as one of its inspirations. The other axis that it depends upon is of course phenomenology - especially that of Merleau-Ponty, althought Husserl and Heidegger get a look in.

Not having read McCrone's book, but most of those within the embodied/enactive stance do not think of the mind as a function of the brain - that's the view of older, funtionalist theories of consciousness. Rather, the experience of consciousness is the acting of the brain, or even more precisely, an action which cuts across traditional boundaries of mind, brain, body and enviroment.

I'm suspicious of so called neo-Darwinian theories that attempt to reduce everything, consciousness included to principles of natural selection, partly because of their relation to capatalist economics. What do we mean by "evolutionary consciousness"? If we believe in evolution, then presumably consciousness has to have evolved... beyond that, what exactly do people mean by "evolutionary neuroscience" or whatever?


PS The way this thread is headed, I would say it belongs in "Thought", not "Art, Lit & Film"
 
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I would imagine that just as a baby has to evolve a consciousness to suit it's environment so to do does succeeding generations of man have to evolve a consciousness to suit the changing times...

...I'm not sure if he is advocating evolutionary consciousness purely based on a darwinian natural selective model but i think he might be getting around to saying that it is possible over time and that it removes the hypothesis of intelligent design

can't wait til i finish the book...

me, I'm going for a collective mind possibly even a compactified dimension of thought or a quantum field of intelligence, a harmonic attractor of sorts
 
O

Omaar

Guest
spackb0y said:
Probably V.S. Ramachandran? The experiment you're talking about was done by Benjamin Libet, and it shows that the conscious decision to act occurs after the start of the neural signal which instigates the action. It's supposed to be an argument for the non-existance of free will. I can't think off the top of my head why it might support an "evolutionary" explanation for consciousness.

yep, that's the one.


spackb0y said:
I'm suspicious of so called neo-Darwinian theories that attempt to reduce everything, consciousness included to principles of natural selection, partly because of their relation to capatalist economics.

Right on. with you on that one.

re: evolutionary neuroscience - I'm guessing the idea is that conscious evolves as a mutation that aids survival, and any study of it start with this idea.

I'm thinking that 'heightened consciousness' is associated with mysticism which usually leads to a lack of desire to breed which in terms of survival of the gene/species is not really a good thing. I'm not going to go anywhere with that though right now though...


hell sd: collective mind? sounds a bit bonkers to me. what evidence is there for this?
 
evidence, evidence we don't need no stinking evidence...

I don't know if i mentioned but i'm more about instinct and intution than reason and logic. I just got or get a feeling and follow things on from there. The classic gut reaction. I can often be most unreasonable and illogical.

but anyway, I think it was Jung with his collective consciousness and a wellspring of ideas we tap into and feedback on that got me started, then reading a bit about string theory with it's ever present compactified dimensions add in the holographic universe of Bohm

kinda like if one person has an idea anywhere in the world then it makes it easier for someone else to have it and follow on and so on. Think of non locality but apply it to thoughts.

so whats the tie in to capitalism from neo darwinist evolutionary consciousness ???
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
HELL_SD said:
so whats the tie in to capitalism from neo darwinist evolutionary consciousness ???


well.. its to do with neo-darwinian evolutionay psychology applied to organisational management. will have to write more later...
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
HELL_SD said:
I would imagine that just as a baby has to evolve a consciousness to suit it's environment so to do does succeeding generations of man have to evolve a consciousness to suit the changing times...

Evolution doesn't happen that fast. Changing social/cultural environments occur on the order of decades and centuries, not over the many thousands of generations that are required for natural selection of characteristics.

If one was to take a baby born hundreds of years ago, and bring it up in a modern environment, it would develop just the same as a bay from our own times.

This is the basis that allows evolutionary psychologists to make claims about modern behaviour based on very ancient naturally selected traits.

evidence, evidence we don't need no stinking evidence...

I don't know if i mentioned but i'm more about instinct and intution than reason and logic. I just got or get a feeling and follow things on from there. The classic gut reaction. I can often be most unreasonable and illogical.

Why do you bother reading scientific papers then?

That JCS paper from McFadden is quite interesting, but has quite a few holes. For instance, the idea that unconscious thoughts can't have any influence on motor neurons - that seems obviously false.

As for Darwin and capitalism, some economic theorists use natural selection to maintain that a particular kind of system (ie free-market liberalism) is somehow "natural" and an objective certainty rather than a socially constructed phenomenon. There is also a lot of work in using evolutionary psychology in management - by understanding the basic selected behaviours, people can be manipulated in the workplace.

hmmm..sounds interesting

you ever come across scale free networks and power laws before ???...possible tie in ???

McCrone got me onto them...

Possible tie in... mmm, well, yes in a way. Small-world theory (scalant-invariable networks) probably is tied into consciousness, but only because it seems to be present across all levels of life, and complex non-living systems.

I don't want to be rude, but it does seem like you're just grabbing at lots of "cool" theories withou really understanding them, and jamming them together to try and say something about consciousness.
 
yeah, i got my own ideas on consciousness so kind of am "jamming" theories to suit...

...i do understand them, just don't really want to write a thesis on it here

on a side note, you ever come across cosmic natural selection ??? another Darwinian model applied to the universes most suited to host life.

anyway evolution, which is basically change over time with a degree of feedback to a system hopefully to improve it, is a natural process that can be applied to anything, yes even economics

...i suppose in terms of consciousness though, i'm a dualist not straight cartesian but close

so tell me about these unconcious thoughts you're having, if they're unconscious how do you know you're having them ??? ;)
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
HELL_SD said:
yeah, i got my own ideas on consciousness so kind of am "jamming" theories to suit...

...i do understand them, just don't really want to write a thesis on it here

on a side note, you ever come across cosmic natural selection ??? another Darwinian model applied to the universes most suited to host life.

anyway evolution, which is basically change over time with a degree of feedback to a system hopefully to improve it, is a natural process that can be applied to anything, yes even economics

...i suppose in terms of consciousness though, i'm a dualist not straight cartesian but close

If you're a dualist, good god, even a Cartesian, why are you reading all this stuff by McCrone etc? All these contempory ideas in cognitive science are strongly anti-dualistic, even more so than computational thories.

Evolution is not a change over time with a degree of feedback. If it was, such simple dynamic systems as the Watt govenor would count as "evolving". I suppose they do, but only in a loose sense of the common use of evolution - not the scientific theory of evolution. Evolution via natural selection requires reproduction and the passing on of inheritable traits. Universes, as far as we know, do not reproduce. Nor do they carry inheritable information.

Also, it is in no way about an organism "improving" - simple creatures are not evolving into more complex ones. It's about a dynamic relation between species and organism, where species evolve to best fit a niche.


so tell me about these unconcious thoughts you're having, if they're unconscious how do you know you're having them ??? ;)

Most of your daily life passes unconsciously. For example, in sport - all your reactions and bodily movements happen unconsciously.
 
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the thing with these new theories on consciousness is that without understanding the eletromagnetic aspect of neurons firing and how it relates to the greater EM fields operating within our universe, they are still only best guesses...

my dualism is, like I said a collective mind, extant of the body operating within hidden dimensions or as yet undiscovered quantum fields, not quite the spirit and matter of classic cartesian duality...

...and i am reading Mc Crone to test my faith in my intuitions against logic and reason, broaden my horizons and evolve my own personal state of mind

these new cognitive thoeries are only non dualistic if they percieve the mind to be a function of the brain, not as i would have, if the brain is a processing unit for the mind which we tap into, feedback on and project onto 4d reality thus making the brain a function of the mind. Our goal then is to evolve beyond physicality to become conscious beings of pure thought transcending the multiverse as streams flitting in and out of multiple dimensions. Not just vehicles for 5 senses trapped in 4 dimensions

Universes by all accounts of the latest theories especially those of Loop Quantum Gravity do reproduce by black hole bounce, pushing beyond the singularity. Check the work of Lee Smolin and Martin Bojowald...

I would say evolution is about improvment for if a species or system doesn't and degenerates, natural selection says it will not survive for long...

...on the contrary reactions and body movements in sport happen by a conscious thought and effort of a trained mind and body to effect the action you want by thinking about it

the guy who hits the home run wanted to hit it, thought about it and made it happen. It was purely a conscious effort based on thought...

... An unconcious thought is not anything really beacuse if you are not conscious of it how can you be sure you had it ???

for instance, I just had an unconscious thought but by my awareness of it, it makes it conscious so i didn't have one...
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
HELL_SD said:
the thing with these new theories on consciousness is that without understanding the eletromagnetic aspect of neurons firing and how it relates to the greater EM fields operating within our universe, they are still only best guesses...

my dualism is, like I said a collective mind, extant of the body operating within hidden dimensions or as yet undiscovered quantum fields, not quite the spirit and matter of classic cartesian duality...

Dualism is a belief in two different substances that make up the world. The mental and the physical. Do you believe in that or not? "Yet undiscovered quantum fields" sounds to me like physical substance that we don't know about, ie physicalism.

...and i am reading Mc Crone to test my faith in my intuitions against logic and reason, broaden my horizons and evolve my own personal state of mind

these new cognitive thoeries are only non dualistic if they percieve the mind to be a function of the brain, not as i would have, if the brain is a processing unit for the mind which we tap into, feedback on and project onto 4d reality thus making the brain a function of the mind. Our goal then is to evolve beyond physicality to become conscious beings of pure thought transcending the multiverse as streams flitting in and out of multiple dimensions. Not just vehicles for 5 senses trapped in 4 dimensions

Again, no, sorry. Being non-dualistic is simply to say that the world is made up of only one kind of stuff, ie physical matter (or mental matter, if you were an idealist). Contempory "embodied" theories of mind are both non-dualistic (physicalist) and also non-cartesian (they deny the separation between body and mind). They are not functionalist.

If you think humans have "goal" to evolve beyond their physical nature, then you don't believe, or understand, what the theory of evolution is. As someone said before, it sounds just like some kind of religious mysticism, the guiding hand of some higher power.

Universes by all accounts of the latest theories especially those of Loop Quantum Gravity do reproduce by black hole bounce, pushing beyond the singularity. Check the work of Lee Smolin and Martin Bojowald...

I would say evolution is about improvment for if a species or system doesn't and degenerates, natural selection says it will not survive for long...

I'm sorry, you're just wrong here. That might be what you say evolution is, but that's not what biologists say evolution is. "Improvement" and "degeneration" are terms from discredited Lamarckian evolution.

I'm aware of quantum loop gravity theories. And of course the theory that our univerise "bounces" back through big bang and big crunch. A cyclic system does not equal reproduction, however - as I said before, there needs to be some kind of inheritance of traits, and elimination of those unsuitable by natural selection. Talking about universes in this way is essentially meaningless. How does information pass though the singularity? What external "environment" provides the selection pressure?

...on the contrary reactions and body movements in sport happen by a conscious thought and effort of a trained mind and body to effect the action you want by thinking about it

the guy who hits the home run wanted to hit it, thought about it and made it happen. It was purely a conscious effort based on thought...

... An unconcious thought is not anything really beacuse if you are not conscious of it how can you be sure you had it ???

for instance, I just had an unconscious thought but by my awareness of it, it makes it conscious so i didn't have one...

The crucial point here is the training aspect. When you first learn to play baseball, you actions are slow, deliberate and conscious. You have to consciously think "i have to rotate my wrist just this much, apply this much force, etc etc". When you've learned a degree of skill, you no longer think about the constituent actions that make up the swing. You just think "I'm going to hit a home run". Then, commmands your brain sends to your hands to rotate a precise degree, to apply just the right force, are unconscious. You are no longer aware of those commands - they are unconscious.
 
oh no...

...you're not going to dictate your definition of dualism to me and expect me to wear it

I suggest you read around on how many dualistic interpretations there are, there is so much more to my philosophy that can written about in your words...

...undiscovered quantum fields such as the higgs field which suppposedly attributes mass to particles may be proven with the latest hadron collider and give some substance to string theory given that it is a symmetric partner and doesn't easily fit into a model of physicality we have. It is not a substance but a field in much the same manner or magnetism is not a substance. Basically i am imagining a dimension/field of thought

your one type of physical matter doesn't wash in a mutli dimensional ,many worlds scenario as the limit of physicality is what can be sensed by entities with 5 senses in our 4 dimensions anything beyond that is metaphysical in nature and beyond our ability to understand at present which is why we are evolving towards that state

I suggest you read more on LQG and cosmological natural selsection to see the error in your remarks

guiding hand of a higher power, hmmm... dunno about that, but guided by an intelligence factor within the system yeah...attractors

If you want to speculate first causes go ahead. Of course there is a goal to evolve towards there is a goal to be achieved for everything we do.

if a species or system doesn't improve and degenerates, natural selection says it will not survive for long... are you saying this statement is wrong ???

are you confusing sub conscious with unconscious ??? one happens at a level we are not fully aware of the other is what happens when I drink too much...
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
HELL_SD said:
oh no...

...you're not going to dictate your definition of dualism to me and expect me to wear it

I suggest you read around on how many dualistic interpretations there are, there is so much more to my philosophy that can written about in your words...

...undiscovered quantum fields such as the higgs field which suppposedly attributes mass to particles may be proven with the latest hadron collider and give some substance to string theory given that it is a symmetric partner and doesn't easily fit into a model of physicality we have. It is not a substance but a field in much the same manner or magnetism is not a substance. Basically i am imagining a dimension/field of thought

Well perhaps you'd like to explain what your definition of dualism is? If you're going to use a philosophical term in a non-standard way, we won't get much further with understanding each other. I was assuming you were talking about substance dualism. Perhaps you mean property dualism?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind)

your one type of physical matter doesn't wash in a mutli dimensional ,many worlds scenario as the limit of physicality is what can be sensed by entities with 5 senses in our 4 dimensions anything beyond that is metaphysical in nature and beyond our ability to understand at present which is why we are evolving towards that state

I suggest you read more on LQG and cosmological natural selsection to see the error in your remarks

guiding hand of a higher power, hmmm... dunno about that, but guided by an intelligence factor within the system yeah...attractors

If you want to speculate first causes go ahead. Of course there is a goal to evolve towards there is a goal to be achieved for everything we do.

if a species or system doesn't improve and degenerates, natural selection says it will not survive for long... are you saying this statement is wrong ???

Yes, that's right. Natural selection says nothing of the sort. Species do not have to "improve". There are species of insects that have been on this planet for millions of years, and by some measures are many times for "successful" than humans.

Maybe you should unpack that statement, and explain what you mean by "improve" and "degenerate", because to me they imply a linear progression that all species are on. Maybe you don't mean that?

are you confusing sub conscious with unconscious ??? one happens at a level we are not fully aware of the other is what happens when I drink too much...

*shrug* semantics. If you read around the field of philosophy of cognitive sciene, you'll find that the two terms are used interchangeably.
 
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DJ PIMP

Well-known member
Omaar said:
I'm thinking that 'heightened consciousness' is associated with mysticism which usually leads to a lack of desire to breed which in terms of survival of the gene/species is not really a good thing.
Yeah, well, the shit they don't tell you in books is that Jesus, Gandhi, Nietzsche, Buddha etc was all knee-deep in pussy macking hunnies left and right 24-7
pimp.gif
 
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