Sorry this took so long, but I kept reading further in hopes of getting to something more meaty to talk about before my first post on this subject. I’m through 3 chapters and it has essentially only been basic definitions and a few thought experiments.

My first comment is that I always forget that I’m not actually interested in philosophy of consciousness. What I associate to phil. con. (my abbreviation from here on out) is not what the typical philosopher associates to it. I tend to view all of philosophy through the lens of philosophy of language. So I usually start form some sort of premise about how language is more primary and fundamental than consciousness. Now lets try to figure out how it is that language brings about consciousness. Of course, this is not at all how the book goes about it. In fact, I think the opposite assumption is implicit here. So needless to say, the book isn’t as interesting to me as I would have hoped.

The one argument that was presented right at the beginning that I had heard before but forgotten that was pretty interesting was about debunking the “brains in a vat” idea. Basically this goes back to Descartes who wanted to know if there was any way we could tell if we actually existed or if our brains were bodiless in a vat somewhere and scientists were just stimulating certain neurons to make us think we were people (well, so Descartes’ description was a little different, but this is the modern Matrix-esque interp). Essentially we don’t have to go through the trouble that Descartes went through to debunk this possibility. The standard sort of pragmatic argument is that it just isn’t possible for any reasonable interpretation of the term “possible”. The amount of computer power needed to do this would encounter a combinatorial explosion for even the simplest experience of the world. Thus, it is not possible we are being tricked (so before a torrent of arguments fill my replies, I watered it down, try to fill in the details yourself before arguing).

Other than that the only sort of important terms that might show up in later posts have to do with phenomenology. All of chapter 3 is essentially devoted to this. Essentially it is a method of philosophy of consciousness developed by Husserl that tried to remove subjectivity. I really don’t want to go into this much, since I feel like it won’t play much of a role later and it is giving me flashbacks of my 20th century philosophy class when we had long tedious arguments about the method of “bracketing”. Overall, what you should know is that it played a huge role in influencing major philosophers and schools of thought on philosophy, but in general is highly criticized and probably has been overtaken by neuroscience studies and interpreting them.

My one complaint so far is that the results of thought experiments (which play a major role in this book) are very skewed by leading questions. I don’t doubt that the visualization of X was harder than Y, but coming to that conclusion before asking, “Wasn’t visualization of X harder than Y?” would have been more convincing for your argument. I’m not sure if any were that bad, and I should look a specific one up, but I don’t really feel like it now.

My guess is that the next chapter is on a rejection of Husserl’s phenomenology, and then hopefully it will get into some of the crazy things our brain’s do from a neuroscience perspective. That could make things more interesting.

I’ve been running a very unscientific experiment for awhile now. It has produced some very interesting results that I can’t seem to explain. So every time my cat comes up to me and wants to jump on my lap (several times a day for at least a month I’ve been running this), I try something new. I either look near her, or don’t look at her at all, or look at her eyes, or some variation. The point was that I noticed she seemed to only make the jump when after we made eye contact.

Recently I’ve tried to be very specific about the different between looking near or at a different part of her body vs making eye contact. It may be my imagination as hardcore scientists would probably tell me, but I’m am quite convinced that she understands the difference between eye contact and non-eye contact.

Here is why I don’t understand this. Even if we make a huge leap and grant full out consciousness to cats (probably an overkill assumption), I still can’t explain it. Humans understand eye contact because they are aware that that is where sight comes from. I can see of no scenario in which a cat can come to the realization that eyes are where sight and recognition come from.

The only explanation I can come up with is that she is getting up there in cat years, and so has developed a conditioned response through years of experience that eye contact means that I am paying attention to her. As a good Pavlovian, we could say that she doesn’t have to have any idea what the cause is or why it works, it is merely a conditioned reaction.

Anyone else that might know something about animal behavior want to take a crack at this one?

Moving on finally. I have recently come into contact with an “interpretation” of quantum mechanics that I was unfamiliar with (I think). I at least never looked it up in depth if I have heard of it. It is called Penrose Objective Reduction (or POR for short). It is very different than the standard theories in that it doesn’t ignore the collapse of the wavefunction (many worlds or decoherence). Instead it postulates something possibly more fantastic. Let’s start more towards the beginning before going there, though.

Take and interpret it. E is the degree of spacetime separation of the superpositioned particle and t is the time until POR occurs. This shows that small superpositions (i.e. things that are almost in a determined state) will take a long time to collapse objectively. This intuitively makes sense, since there isn’t really a “need” for it to take a determined position if it is undetermined at close to plank-length distance. It doesn’t contradict our world view. On the other hand, extremely large objects (say Schrodinger’s cat) will objectively collapse to a single position extremely quickly. This eliminates the “paradox” of Schrodinger’s cat.

But what exactly is POR? It is “objective” collapse of the wavefunction in that it doesn’t require an “observer” as other theories claim. Wavefunctions will naturally collapse. Will this collapse go to a random state (in which we know the probabilities, but still random)? Penrose says no. He claims that there is information embedded fundamentally in spacetime. He makes an even more extraordinary claim that it is “Platonic” in that it is pure mathematical truth, aesthetic, and ethical. Since I have spent weeks rejecting Platonistic views, I feel I should offer an alternative based on this method.

It is known that “empty” space (e.g. the mass gap, actually I can’t find it now, I was going to link it, I’ll keep looking) has enormous stored energy. Many people interpret this as where collective consciousness lives. Instead of some objective random collapse of the wavefunction, or some ethical godlike decision as to what it should collapse to, it seems as if we are missing the power of our own minds. Maybe a more karmic collapse. The thoughts and energy we put into the world gets stored in the area and influences the POR to give us back what we put out.

I didn’t get into a lot of aspects of POR, and I was just making up that last part on the spot, so it wasn’t very scientific or rigorous as to how it could work. Just some thoughts for today.