Correlation versus Causation

[Parodite]

Pixels on a screen
An analogy

The self-aware representation.

Imagine your conscious experience is more like a self-aware movie- or computer screen. A collection of continuously changing dots or “changing space-time volumes” that simultaneously integrates these bits into a coherent self-conscious representation of “you yourself here living in the world out there”. Just like you experience yourself now as an individual in the physical world. But you and the physical world are both but representations. Pixels on the same screen.

Strong and stable correlations between those dots are called “causes". In a sense they are "virtual causations” (Scott Adams would like the term!)

Connecting the dots on the screen: causality, the mechanics can’t be derived from the relationships between the moving-changing dots on the screen alone. These are but statistical correlations, i.e., the wave function in quantum mechanics. This made Einstein say that quantum mechanics is incomplete and that “God doesn’t play dice", or David Bohm looking for “hidden variables” because something seems seriously missing. But what is missing?

What is "hidden from view” from the self-aware movie screen's point of view? It certainly doesn’t see the mechanics that goes into the computer, video projector, light waves sent through a lens, cables etc. before the projection on screen happens, before the representation is generated. Which means that there is no causal explanation directly available for that very basic question everybody has asked at least once in their lives: why am I here, and why is consciousness such a “hard problem”?

Well, I say it as rather obvious why you won’t find the answer in the correlations you find between all those dots on the screen.

We cannot step out of the representation, our conscious experience and “look into the machinery that generates the self-conscious representation". Same as the optical delusion while looking at your own brain: why can't I find myself in there? Duh...

One could even speculate there isn’t such a machinery. Or if there is.. we can never know anything about it. We can believe whatever we want though, like “God is just dreaming a dream that is me and the universe I find myself in, wondering if He really exists..”.Any poetry will do.

I intuitively understand the poetry of re-incarnation quite well, as the question kind of begs for an answer like that. Problem is that any and all answers like that only beg for more, even harder questions. “God created me.. but then, who created God?" Etc. A dead end street, or a regressively progressive one without end.

People who wonder "Do I live in a simulation?” like Scott Adams et-al (those usually interested in AI etc.), will inevitably also be compelled to ask: but, if I live in a simulation, then what generates this simulation? And then end-up banging their heads against the same brick wailing wall everybody has always done, included the greatest physicists and philosophers that ever lived.

This is IMO where the real journey starts.

[Nonc Hilaire]

We all live in our individual interpretations of reality. That is a simulation of sorts.

We cannot separate Truth from Illusion, but we can determine Falsity and Utility. Truth may be revealed from logic, but usually logic is not applicable so we rely on reason.

[Parodite]

The idea of a representation (simulation) of the world arising in our individual brains is the standard model. Nobody doubts it.

On the one hand we have a physical brain in a physical skull that is part of the physical body that exists in the physical world. On the other hand, we have a conscious mind that apparently arises in our physical body-brain. Nobody knows why that is, or should be the case (the hard problem) and yet it is. At the same time everything we experience subjectively has an observable correlate in the body-brain.

Now anybody who looks at this situation with reason and logic has to conclude something is off. Crazy to say the least. But the error is so obvious: if "the physical brain” is but a representation of itself, then your conscious experience can’t emerge from that representation. It is a BSOD error in thinking about it, that’s all. It is not only hard, but impossible to squeeze consciousness out of a representation of the thing that does it.

You could say something like: the physical brain, as we know it, is a representation that arises in "the real brain that does the real work”.

Now as far as I can tell, the above immediately deems “the hard problem” a non-problem, because consciousness does not arise in/from the representation that the brain made of itself OBVIOUSLY.

So far so good, right? Yours truly thusly solved the hard problem of consciousness. This piece of cake insight is decades old for me, so it baffles me how most are still stuck in this non-existing hard problem.

That was the good news. Now the bad news. The idea of “an original brain creating representations of the world and of itself” is completely bunkers too of course. The hard problem was solved, right? Nope, it was just moved one floor lower: to the "original real brain.” So, you are stuck again! Even worse, because with "the physical brain” we had at least something to work with; a model with endless correlations to be discovered between brain and experience. With the pre-model source brain… we have nothing at all! Just your experiences.. correlated with a complete Unknown.

How would you even try empirically correlate your conscious experiences with that original brain of which you don’t even have a model to work with?

Now you are not just stuck, but really up to your armpits in the swamp.

Well, not so much. Now that it is clear that “the hard problem” of “how experience arises in a brain” just returns with a vengeance no matter what, it might be time to conclude that the theory that a representation arises in some substrate is probably gobbledegook!

Conlusion: “the hard problem” is a non-problem, and reality as we know it cannot be understood as a representation or simulation arising in a substrate.

This is also relevant to the AI crowd. “Self-learning information systems” is a thing, but the idea that they are moving towards creating something that is intelligent or sentient-conscious is faulty. "Advanced mimicry" is a better term, with loads of definitional high-brow chewing gum that sells better.

[Nonc Hilaire]

The brain is an electromagnetic organ attached to an antenna that we call the vagus nervous system.

Put two people in proximity and signals/vibrations harmonize. Mimicry and habituation interact inter alia to bring individuals into an overlapping of consciousness.

Most extreme in romance and lovemaking. I remember the novel “Sabbatical” by John Barth about a couple voyaging alone on a sailboat. The protagonist was one consciousness composed of two individuals.

[Parodite]

I don't buy into the idea that the vagus nerve functions as an antenna picking up eletromagnitic signals from the environment. It connects loads of areas and organs in the body like a multi directional super highway, but the fact that it is very important internally doesn't make it an antenna for em waves in the environment. It is the senses that are the gateway to the environment.

Is there any proof that the vagus nerve also functions like a sense organ, i.e. an antenna receiving eletro magnetic information from outside the body?

There exist sensory organs that do process em in the environment like the Ampullae of Lorenzini and they are, not surprisingly, located on the surface of an organism.

If I would have to bet on an underrated organ or body-part that functions as an antenna able to process broad spectrum eletromagnetic waves in the environment, it is human skin.

[Nonc Hilaire]

Not stuck on the physiology, but I think something is there.

I do see evidence that individual consciousnesses can form connections. Herd animals are a case in point.

I am also thinking about the CIA research into consciousness, particularly hemi-sync and the Gateway Process. That was a frequency based sensory approach to manipulating consciousness.

https://youtu.be/zMK8bPEerEM

zMK8bPEerEM

[Parodite]

I try understand consciousness after dumping the idea of “a causal relationship between mind and matter” altogether, because the mind-matter distinction is a BSOD error causing a hard problem that is a non-problem caused by an optical delusion of sorts.

In the analogy of pixels on a self-aware screen that have no direct causal relationship among each other: they are events with a probabilistic correlation only.

The reason quantum physics talks probability rather than causation made me think along those lines. When the probability is high and stable, the relationship is called “causal”. “Classical objects” are also quantum objects, but with stable and high probability distributions, that’s all.

I do believe however there is some magic machinery called brain, that in a mysterious way can represent itself in consciousness. As well as represent loads of other events into a full-blown experiential cosmos with me in it. What this magical-brain seems to be doing, is “connecting dots” by plotting a probability distribution into an experiential map. Which would mean that the nature of consciousness is indeed probabilistic. What you “see” is statistics at work. That boolean brain.

We experience continuously “what is probably true”, "what might be the case" and "what actually gets confirmed". What is true means: what is most likely to happen next or happens again with enough similarity, which is decided by our statistical brains. Pixels on the screen competing for their best next chance. Bad ideas, delusions and illusions can also auto-propagate in that space. Doubt is a necessary part of the game just like randomness and unpredictability. To clean the barn and get rid of lies.

I don’t know if there is a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with how one branch of mathematics smoothly transitions into another. Sort of meta-mathematics that studies “the ecology and evolution of mathematical organisms”. Maybe it points to some candidates and what you need for purely probabilistic organism to evolve.

I suppose Albert Einstein would love it if some causal ancestor would be found in mathematics. One with “hidden variables”, some legs to walk with. Going from a to b, like in the old days, when things were local sort of obvious.

Maybe it is probability-turtles all the way down. Or maybe it turns out that probability is just a rare case of hidden causes when systems become too complex for our statistical brain to calculate probabilities. Like climate change. Too many variables at play and experimental limitations.

Impotence going underground. Time for a new religion perhaps. Las Vegas versus God, the eternal battle.

[Nonc Hilaire]

Habituation is a reliable phenomenon. When sensory input is regular the sensors and the brain stop attending. Habituation is both sensory and a psychological.

You drive to work, but when you arrive you cannot recall the drive. You do not see your own nose, but cover one eye and there it is.

The ‘Boolean brain’ is not aware of the most frequently encountered stimuli. That seems to be a fundamental problem here. If there is an omnipresent god, we would habituate to it and fail to attend.

[Parodite]

Yes. Maximum habituation is found in reflexive stimulus-response mechanics. The autonomous nervous system.

It is quite a bonus when you think of it: all the things that work on autopilot when you yourself can listen to music.

Not much habituation in Hell. Maybe God's presence is felt most strongly in Hell, while in Heaven people get too habituated and doze away.

Relatively stable and vital experiential objects are always in a flux of change too, so we have to keep an eye on them. Things need to be kept in check. Eyes on the road, hands on the steering wheel. Part of a cat's brain can sleep while another remains attentive.