Consciousness is cybernetic and semantic

2011

In this work, I examine the traditional theories of mind and consciousness. I present the arguments that support them and the presuppositions that hold them. A critical analysis of these theories will show that they all fail for apparently different reason. I will also provide the standard arguments against them. I maintain that this failure is the result of a fundamental presupposition that they all share, namely substance ontology. The standard causality view, which presents the other source of this problem is the direct consequence of assuming a substance ontology. The result of these assumptions is to render consciousness impotent or over-determining. As a result, consciousness must be reduced to some other phenomenon, eliminated, or accepted as impotent. Moreover, theses view cannot really distinguish between mind and consciousness. The position maintained in this work is to abandon the ontological primacy of substance ontology and replace it with process ontology and add emerg...

The Logical Structure of Consciousness, 2019

It is my contention that the table of intentionality (rationality, mind, thought, language, personality etc.) that features prominently here describes more or less accurately, or at least serves as an heuristic for, how we think and behave, and so it encompasses not merely philosophy and psychology, but everything else (history, literature, mathematics, politics etc.). Note especially that intentionality and rationality as I (along with Searle, Wittgenstein and others) view it, includes both conscious deliberative linguistic System 2 and unconscious automated prelinguistic System 1 actions or reflexes. I provide a critical survey of some of the major findings of two of the most eminent students of behavior of modern times, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, on the logical structure of intentionality (mind, language, behavior), taking as my starting point Wittgenstein’s fundamental discovery –that all truly ‘philosophical’ problems are the same—confusions about how to use language in a particular context, and so all solutions are the same—looking at how language can be used in the context at issue so that its truth conditions (Conditions of Satisfaction or COS) are clear. The basic problem is that one can say anything but one cannot mean (state clear COS for) any arbitrary utterance and meaning is only possible in a very specific context. I analyze various writings by and about them from the modern perspective of the two systems of thought (popularized as ‘thinking fast, thinking slow’), employing a new table of intentionality and new dual systems nomenclature. I show that this is a powerful heuristic for describing behavior. Thus, all behavior is intimately connected if one takes the correct viewpoint. The Phenomenological Illusion (oblivion to our automated System 1) is universal and extends not merely throughout philosophy but throughout life. I am sure that Chomsky, Obama, Zuckerberg and the Pope would be incredulous if told that they suffer from the same problem as Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, (or that that they differ only in degree from drug and sex addicts in being motivated by stimulation of their frontal cortices by the delivery of dopamine (and over 100 other chemicals) via the ventral tegmentum and the nucleus accumbens), but it’s clearly true. While the phenomenologists only wasted a lot of people’s time, they are wasting the earth and their descendant’s future.

In this paper we intend to discuss, from different perspectives, the relationship between language and consciousness. The whole writing will be guided by a clear theoretical perspective, the perspective of Neural Darwinism. This guideline will emerge in a variety of considerations, both in the scientific evaluation of various deficiencies related to language and cognition in general, such as Williams Syndrome (SW) or deficits of the autistic spectrum, and in the logical and philosophical evaluation of some historical case such as Helen Keller, or person suffering from congenital insensitivity to pain. Our online guide will lead us to reduce language to its syntactic dimension, showing how the semantic dimension is not a feature of natural languages, but of consciousness, of which language is just one part among others. We want to show how the language is a system of keys to activate our multimodal memories and, therefore, remembrance is the origin of the cognitive dimension. We will support this theory taking into account the principles of neural Darwinism developed by Gerald M. Edelman (1978) and conclude the work with some philosophical and evolutionary considerations, claiming a historical and gradual evolution of language consequent to the final development of our vocal apparatus.

Studia Humana, Volume 8:4 (2019), pp. 27—33, 2019

This article demonstrates that certain issues of philosophy of mind can only be explained via strict observance of the logical law of identity, that is, use of the term "consciousness" in only one meaning. Based on the understanding of consciousness as space in which objects distinguished by the subject are represented, this article considers problems such as the fixation of the consciousness level, correlation between consciousness and thought, between the internal and the external, and between consciousness and the body. It demonstrates the insufficiency of the reactive conception of action for the resolution of the hard problem of consciousness and the necessity of a transition to an active paradigm in which many issues in philosophy of mind would be formulated differently.

The Origins of Life. Volume I. The Premogenital Matrix of Life and Its Context. Analecta Husserliana. The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research. Dordrecht/Boston/London. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000

S cience is a system of true statements about reality. This means that each science contains inside itself definite methodological premises and ontological assumptions concering the structure of the reality and cognitive process, which makes scientific statements intelligent. These fundamental assumptions and premises are the philosophical basis of scientific cognition.

Res Cogitans, 2012

This paper aims at examining a new assessment of a foundational paradigm for conducting science within the fields of neurology and its corresponding philosophy of mind. The main view examined is that of Alva Noë, professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, and the view he forwards in his book Out of Our Heads. His main thesis rests on a critique of current scientific methodology and the foundational paradigm of functionalism, which he counters with a view from a more radical examination of what consciousness is in terms of living beings in their environments and the processes that animate these living beings. The author of this paper takes some issue with this process ontology that Noë forwards and critiques it based on its own premises and what follows from it, while later contrasting it with a focus on personal memory as Henri Bergson had described them in developing his metaphysical system.

The problem of intrinsic teleology is that of generating a scientific explanation of purposive (goal-directed) behavior in nature. It is far from clear, however, how purposive behavior could possibly arise in a purely causal universe. The popular approach within the biological and cognitive sciences is reductive in that it explains purposiveness in non-purposive terms. This thesis finds the reductive approach unsatisfying and offers a philosophical argument for a non-reductive alternative, delivered across six chapters. Chapter I introduces the problem of teleology and argues that the way in which the problem ought to be addressed is philosophically. Chapter II offers additional insight into the nature of the problem by situating it in a discussion of its historical context: it traces the beginnings of the reduction of teleology in the writings of René Descartes and locates the problem of teleology in its modern framing in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Chapter III explicates and critiques neo-Darwinism and cognitivism—two modern inheritors of Kantian philosophy—which act to jointly ground the reductive approach to teleology. Upon clearing the way for a non-reductive alternative, Chapter IV introduces the “enactive approach” to cognitive science and argues that it is able to leverage a non-reductive position with respect to teleology. Accordingly, Chapter V constitutes the theory-building element of this thesis and shows how exactly enactivism can act to leverage such a non-reductive position. Finally, Chapter VI summarizes the findings of this thesis and discusses some general applications for future research in cognitive science and psychopathology.

2002

Human and Machine Consciousness, 2018

I have really appreciated the help of Anil Seth, who supported my application for a Turing Fellowship and was very welcoming during my time at the University of Sussex. I am also grateful to the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science and the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex for giving me a place to work. I greatly enjoyed conversations about consciousness with my colleagues at Sussex. I would also like to thank Owen Holland, whose CRONOS project started my work on human and machine consciousness, and the reviewers of this book, who had many helpful suggestions. I owe a warm debt of gratitude to my parents, Alejandro and Penny Gamez, who have always given me a great deal of support and encouragement. Contents List of Illustrations 1 List of Illustrations All images are © David Gamez, CC BY 4.0. 2.1. Visual representation of a bubble of perception. 2.2. The presence of an invisible god explains regularities in the visible world. 2.3. Colour illusion. 17 2.4. Primary and secondary qualities. 2.5. The relationship between a bubble of experience and a brain. 21 2.6. Interpretation of physical objects as black boxes. 2.7. The relationship between a bubble of experience and an invisible physical brain. 2.8. The emergence of the concept of consciousness. 3.1. The use of imagination to solve a scientific problem. 3.2. Imagination cannot be used to understand the relationship between consciousness and the invisible physical world. 3.3. Learnt association between consciously experienced brain activity and the sensation of an ice cube. 4.1. Problem of colour inversion. 51 4.2. Some of the definitions and assumptions that are required for scientific experiments on consciousness. 4.3. The relationship between macro-and micro-scale e-causal events. 4.4. Assumptions about the relationship between CC sets, consciousness and first-person reports. 5.1. The measurement of an elephant's height in a scientist's bubble of experience. 5.2. Theory of consciousness (c-theory). 2 Human and Machine Consciousness 7.1. Information c-theory. 97 8.1. Soap bubble computer. 9.1. Testing a c-theory's prediction about a conscious state. 9.2. Testing a c-theory's prediction about a physical state. 9.3. Deduction of the conscious state of a bat. 10.1. Modifications of a bubble of experience. 10.2. A reliable c-theory is used to realize a desired state of consciousness. 11.1. A reliable c-theory is used to build a MC4 machine. 11.2. A reliable c-theory is used to deduce the consciousness of an artificial system.