Dear John, The Koch article is worth reading as a kind of statement within the current reductionist paradigm I believe it is necessary to get beyond. It is all the more insidious because of Koch's research credentials, but it contains all the 'push-button' words that I have seen in his previous work, as well as that of others. Two of these are, in this connection, 'measure' and 'integration'. That 'the mental is too radically different to arise gradually from the physical' is a hypothesis, and begs the questions 'does it?' and 'why shouldn't it?' Despite your comment on the utility of his measure, it seems much too scalar to represent anything fundamental.
There is no indication of the essentiality of properties of process and interaction in the concept of information used by Koch. It also opens the door, as I said in my previous note, to misinterpretations supporting anti-realist positions. I conclude that the lessons the article offers about how to think about subjective experience are (ideologically) biased and miss the necessary connection between subjective and objective. In his 2010 book, Self Comes to Mind, Anthony Damasio discusses how the consciousness is constructed as a result of what he calls master interoceptive processes that occur between the multiple structures at the level of the brain stem and the cerebral cortex. He first defines a "protoself" as an integrated collection of separate neural patterns that map, moment by moment, the most stable aspects of the organism's physical structure. The nuclei of the homeostatic processes involved generate one of the two key components of the self - the "feelings of knowing". The other component, derived from non-homeostatic processes in the brain stem, generate "object saliency", Damasio's term for the recognition of the self-as-object. The origin of the invariance or relative invariance of a singular self has been the subject of much discussion as we know, and a plausible basis for both the invariance and that singularity must be established. For Damasio, this basis is neither more or less than the organism's single body. Although this body is constantly undergoing change, many internal parameters, both structural and chemical, vary only within a very narrow range during the individual's lifetime. In Damasio's view, the couplings between conscious perceptions and memories and underlying processes at the physiological level are necessary but also sufficient to generate the value-laden processes commonly designated as the conscious self. No 'proto-self' is required at the levels at which Koch sees consciousness. I had been an assiduous reader of Scientific American from high-school until the late-eighties, when it stopped publishing original scientific work. For me, today, it is not an acceptable reference. Thank you for calling the article to our attention. Best, Joseph ----- Original Message ----- From: John Collier To: fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Saturday, January 04, 2014 2:47 AM Subject: [Fis] Article on panpsychism Folks, The article on the Scientific American site at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-consciousness-universal&print=true might be of interest to this group. It discusses an information based measure of consciousness. Is Consciousness Universal? Panpsychism, the ancient doctrine that consciousness is universal, offers some lessons in how to think about subjective experience today By Christof Koch | Wednesday, January 1, 2014 | I am not a panpsychist, but this is the most reasonable version I have seen (barring, perhaps, Leibniz', with its distinction between confused and clear perceptions, which takes a similar route). I think the measure is of interest independently of panpsychism. John ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Professor John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031 Http://web.ncf.ca/collier ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
_______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
