Prof Reber's insightful Cellular Basis of Consciousness presents a key understanding regarding the actual physical facts surrounding the origins of our human consciousness. Metaphysics-enthusiast will sniff & resent & ignore til the cows come home. Still, here it is. The answers are in Evolution. If you "believe" in Science. You'll want to learn about Prof Reber's suggestions.
Professor Arthur Reber's Question and Answer Session
The “Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)”
Reber’s 2018, Institut des sciences cognitives - UQAM presentation.
{Part one, visit The "Cellular Basis of Consciousness" proposal - A Student's Introduction to Dr. Arthur Reber's CBC}
A challenging audience, Professor Arthur Reber rises to the occasion.
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I’m posting this transcript of highlight from Professor Reber's talk, because I’m stunned at how little attention Reber’s "Cellular Basis of Consciousness" conception has received since Reber started sharing this with the academic community over seven years ago.
I believe the profoundly insightful Cellular Basis of Consciousness and key to understanding the actual physical facts regarding the source of our human consciousness. So I can well imagine how interests, who have hung their hat on metaphysical skyhooks, and human exceptionalism, would resent Dr. Reber, turn shoulders and slammed doors. The emotional defensives is demonstrated in one of the questioners.
I'm no scholar, but I can still be excited by clearer understanding via science, and I'd enjoy finding some like-minded, who see the promise in Reber's proposal. Folks simply wanting to discuss it. Because seems to me, rationalists really need to start developing some solid founding conceptions that are strong enough to stand up to the disconnected faith-dependent crowd, and their malicious anti-science crazy-making games.
Biological evolution makes sense, and now we have evidence at every step in the process.
Here are my best proverbial trading cards - experts who have been at the leading edge of modern science, and capable of clearly explaining it to all who are curious to learn - David Attenborough's 1979, "Life On Earth" - Hazen, Lane, Sloan-Wilson, Solms, Damasio, Sapolski, Levin, Turin, Reber, among many others.
Anyone want to toss in their suggestion?
1:07:00 … Is Reber making a circular argument? …
1:03:42
Reber: Dan Dennett has bought for himself is a huge emergentist dilemma. At what point along Evolution does, suddenly, the capacity for comprehension come in? With what point does understanding emerge?
It’s a better scientific strategy to assume that it starts at the beginning. And just continues to evolve and get more complex …
different functions are taken on as you get into more complex environments (and bodies) …
1:04:28
Reber: … more complex stuff there's no goal here. There’s no teleological components to it. It’s just what happens. …
1:05:03
(I use this color to convey questioner’s blood pressure)
QUESTION: Excuse me! That does not sound like an answer to the second question. It's a simple question: Are there degrees of consciousness?
Reber: Consciousness is a label for subjectivity for internal representational systems that have a, what's it like to be, now fill-in-the-blank.
Are there different degrees of this? There are different forms of it, there are different varieties. Do you want to put them along some scale of complexity, or scale of cognitive function?
You can. …
1:06:05
QUESTION: Now I'm going to state the Hard Problem, to show that there is no solution to the so called emergentist dilemma, which is basically to explain when did the solution to the hard problem appear.
The Hard Problem is, if you have an organism that can do something, and you have an explanation a physiological functional explanation of how it does, it a causal explanation. You explained what it can do, how do you explain that it feels? If it feels? That is the hard problem.
… what you need to explain. If you're gonna solve the hard problem, is how and why organisms feel.
And what you think that you've done is by reducing the Hard Problem to just one cell way way back. Then that somehow you've made it more tractable. On the contrary you've put it in broad relief.
Why should any of that stuff that you describe for that first cell be felt?
1:07:20
Reber: Well I think the answer is, because without it you would not get a viable organist
And why is that?
Reber: Because the organism needs to be able to navigate a complex environment.
Navigating is doing!
1:07:37
Reber: It all emerges at the same time, I don't see what the problem is.
When you get life, you get sentience. When you have an organism that has to navigate a complex difficult environment, it has feelings. It has subjective experience, it's part of the package.
My guess is that what we'll find is that the origin of life crowd, … when these folks finally figure it out. I will bet you will discover the biomolecular components that also produce sentience. …
1:08:52
QUESTION: So are you essentially saying that mind, conscious, or sentience is the facility? Or the process of a mechanism that allows an organism to respond adaptively to the environment over its lifetime? In which case, of course, what you're saying it’s not falsifiable. That's evolution, that's not natural selection.
Reber: Yes.
QUESTION: so then basically you've reframed what a mind is …
Reber: Yes.
1:09:42
QUESTION: Okay, so then, it's a circular argument. Isn't it? So it's not falsifiable?
Reber: Of course it is falsifiable. All you have to show—
QUESTION: Only if evolution stops!
1:09:53
Reber: No, no, no, once we've worked out what the underlying biomolecular components are, it’s dead easily falsifiable.
All you have to do is tweak a molecule and pull it out and see if sentience is still there. See if you still have the adaptive functions.
1:10:10
Reber: It’s actually the same sort of strategy that people take when they work with anesthetics. The argument is how do you know whether a specific organism is conscious? Whether its mind is operating and functioning? Well you anesthetize it. If it stops doing those things - you say, okay well, it's no longer conscious. So it's a parallel, it's analogous kind of argument …
1:13:00
… Anthropomorphism …
Reber: … There’s a long section on anthropomorphism because this is really a big issue. Because if you do anthropomorphism badly you really get yourself in trouble. Like the clever Hans fallacy, the smart horse.
That one does happen with (some) anthropomorphism, that's an anthropomorphism gone wrong.
But on the other hand, as people like, Frans de Waal have pointed out -
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
1:13:15
Reber: Anthropomorphism is one of the intuitive pumps. It's a driving engine of a lot of comparative work in comparative ecology and so you know I try to balance these things. Because you know, your points are exactly right. They are good and these are complex issues. …
… with regard to robotics …
Reber: 1:17:ish solve v. resolve.
Reber: … the panoply of work done over the last hundred fifty years, a lot of problems that really energize and exercise people faded away. They were resolved.
And they were resolved, not because they were solved. But because another framework was created within which to see them. Another scaffold was built upon which to hang these ideas—and more progress was made taking that approach, than the previous one.
So, I wouldn’t say that the issues that are raised by behaviorists were solved—but they were resolved.
They were resolved by reconstituting them in more cognitive and neural cognitive frameworks …
1:17:55
Reber: … the way in which Chalmers and and others,he’s certainly not alone, have approached the hard problem is that it cannot be resolved, solved, within that framework. Which is why they ended up themselves in this mysterionism. They ended up a dualists, they end up as panpsychics, …
1:21:25
QUESTION: I guess it's a bit of an emergent is dilemma, then how does unconsciousness exist? Does it exist in all conscious beings? How did it come to be?
Reber: Well I think what happened is what I hinted at earlier, which is, when you get a multicellular organism, you start getting this functional specificity. Then certain groups of cells begin to take on particular functions, some are sensory, some are control of locomotion and movement, and some handle conscious experience. What it's like to be that organism function.
And so, the other stuff is the unconscious stuff. What really captures the functions of the cognitive unconscious is the detection of patterns of covariation among elements in the world around you.
What you're picking up is the relationships between an event here and the probability that some other events will occur afterward. The more sophisticated the system that you have, the more complex and more tenuous these statistical relationships, these stochastic relationships can be detected.
But that's taking place unconsciously and it's taking place unconsciously because these are based upon fundamental function. They have to take place before this kind of top-down component is there,
But, the thing is a top-down component the way we view it for a complex species like us, has to do with the fact that we've evolved these specified functions, these units, these modules.
When you go back to a primitive organism you don't have these. What you have is the singular representation which is the conscious subjective experience.
This is why I'm using the term sentience because you can see the mess you get into when you start trying to call this a mind. Is this consciousness? No, it’s sentience … there is something it’s like to be a bacterium in pain. …
1:24:34
… swarm behavior, and there's what's called quorum sensing … I would not want to say that a termite colony itself had consciousness. But I'm comfortable saying that the individual consciousnesses of each of the termites, coordinate in a social way that produces a large panoply of functions and behaviors. But, I would not want to say that there's any sentient outside of the combined sentience of the individual organisms …
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