thanks but not necessary. I have not felt the least bit disrespected by your excellent and thoughtful posts :)
On a super basic level: awareness happens when certain networks of neurons with in the observing entity's body somehow synchronize. [/QUOTE]
full stop. I'm not convinced that this is true. here's a convo w/ Bernardo about the "easy problem" of memory:
https://skeptiko.com/bernardo-kastrup-mainstreaming-controversial-philosophy-of-mind-theories-378/
Bernardo Kastrup: So, there is an enormous gap for explaining the normal, that’s why I focus on the normal, since the paranormal is the next step, we haven’t explained even the normal yet.
Alex Tsakiris: I’m totally with you, until the last part that you said, I might take issue with that, but I take it one step further and point out something like memory, because we really don’t understand memory, right? We don’t understand what’s going on, and memory is a tricky one because it’s one that all the neurology folks, all the mind equals brain, materialist science says, “No, no, we really have a handle on memory, we just need to drill down a little bit further.”
So, if you can, speak to memory being another one. So, yeah, we don’t understand how we experience red or how we experience love, but even this thing memory, they think they’ve nailed, but they don’t understand it.
Bernardo Kastrup: No. If you look at the literature coming out, claiming to explain memory, it’s all self-contradictory. Some explain memory in terms of large networks of neurons. Others try to explain memory in terms of interneuron processes. Things are all over the place.
I can mention one concrete example. There was a study published a couple of years ago, claiming to have found the key to memory, based on experiments with mice. They exposed the mouse to a certain experience in one environment, they moved the mouse to another environment, and then they would trigger that memory artificially and the mouse would behave as if it were in the first environment, and then, “Oh, we’ve figured out how memories are created.”
If you go through the details, what they did was, they grew some cellular switches in the brain of the mice, that they could then identify which neurons fired up when the mouse was exposed to the first experience in environment A. So, they had the map of all of the neurons that activated at that moment, in environment A, and they moved the mouse to environment B, and which a specific technique using light, they could artificially reactivate the same neurons as the mouse was in environment A, and guess what? The mouse behaved as if it were in environment A.
Now, who recorded and recalled the memory? The scientists, through this cellular technique, through exposing the neurons to light, creating the cellular switches in the neurons and recording which neurons were activated in the first situation, and then reactivating them artificially in the second situation. That doesn’t show at all how memory works. To show how memory works, we would have to figure out where the mouse stores the pattern of activated neurons without these artificial cellular switches and exposure to light that the scientists created.
So, what you see being claimed in the science press about having understood memory, it’s extremely exaggerated, we don’t understand memory.
Alex Tsakiris: Let’s give for people, maybe a counter potential explanation for how that might work. It could also relate to, if anyone is familiar with epigenetics, which in a similar way, kind of, blows all of this craziness about brain-based consciousness and consciousness being 100% brain-based, modern understanding of epigenetics blows that away.
But in your mice example, we could take something like Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields if you wanted to, or any other understanding we have of consciousness in the cloud, and that some certain patterns, some certain arrangement of physical neurons is then able to re-access that, would be potential beginning of an explanation. Am I getting, kind of, where you’re coming from there?
Bernardo Kastrup: Perhaps. I don’t really have a firm opinion on that.
Alex Tsakiris: It doesn’t matter, just there are some other ways that we could get there, right?
Bernardo Kastrup: Absolutely. Absolutely, and they may have to do with the nature of time itself. To guess here, what memory might be, I would just be speculating. I don’t really have an intelligent answer to that question.
Alex Tsakiris: Fair enough, and I think it’s important to say that maybe one of the reasons you don’t is because, once we jump into that, consciousness is fundamental mindset, everything we’re going to say back about explaining this, winds up being this, kind of, backdoor materialism,