Consciousness, the mind-body problem and physics?

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Sounds like disassociation to me. That trance state is not healthy. It feels good, but it doesn't get you anywhere and plus it reprograms your mind to any suggestions in your external environment. Disassociation eventually leads to derealization. That is the matrix. It's not healthy to get caught up in this web. But, hey...go for it you like. ; ) Maybe a little brainwashing is good every now and then...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSUBRJKS5As

It only works if one takes pragmatism to mean assumption.

Emergentism of consciousness doesn't make sense to me either. Panpsychism seems too bizarre, also but here are some interesting quotes/arguments for and against it (see link):

"For example, we say that an electron has a negative charge of about 1.6 x 10-19 coulombs, but what this means is that the electron is disposed to move in such-and-such a way in an electric field of such-and-such a strength. The intrinsic nature of electric charge remains utterly mysterious. And yet it seems reasonable to think that every dispositional property stems from underlying intrinsic properties. Of these, with respect to the fundamental physical constituents of the world, we know absolutely nothing, since physics deals only with the dispositional properties of matter. This is a long standing position. Both Eddington and Russell, among others, agree that ‘science has nothing to say as to the intrinsic nature of the atom’ (Russell called the dispositional properties of matter ‘mathematical properties’). This led Eddington to assert further that we know nothing of atoms which ‘renders it at all incongruous that they should constitute a thinking object’ and to adopt a panpsychist understanding of matter."

"The simplest, and for most quite compelling, argument against panpsychism is that it is intuitively absurd to suggest that electrons, atoms, rocks, planets etc. have minds or any kind of consciousness. Our experience with everyday physical objects gives no hint that they might possess hidden psychological depths. But panpsychism is by no means obliged to grant mind or experience to all such things. As we have seen, even if the fundamental entities that constitute the world (which are physical) have a mentalistic aspect, it does not follow that every composite made from them is similarly endowed."

"But what of the fundamental features themselves? They do not show any very noticeable signs of a mental life. In reply to this, the panpsychist can note that the sort of primitive and extremely simple sort of consciousness which the fundamental entities presumably enjoy is something of which we have little understanding, so it is not clear what would count as revealing their mental aspects. More important, why should we expect that the fundamental entities should show any sign at all of a mental attribute? Gravitation is taken to be a fundamental feature of all physical things and yet we do not expect that an individual electron will provide the slightest evidence that it generates a gravitational field."

What I find interesting in this respect, is let's assume that there is this basic proto-mental/conscious stuff in everything and we come across it at the microworld. What would it "look" like? Some features, I think:

1. Non-locality/spatiality
2. Non-temporality
3. Wholeness

I find it interesting that these aspects are actually suggested in almost all interpretations of quantum mechanics.

http://www.scar.utoronto.ca/~seager/pan_seager.pdf

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOTn_wRwDE0&feature=related[/youtube]

The rare unpopular case for dualism.

This is discussed in one of the seven laws of Hermeticism. Consciousness affects subatomic particles. The theory of a universal mind may be true, but if so I still think that we have a choice as to what we focus on. If you sit there and wonder if you are conscious, you are missing the boat. Mental Transmutation is described as the practical application of this principle. To change one's mental state is to change vibration. One may do this by an effort of Will, by means of deliberately "fixing the attention" upon a more desirable state.

Evidently mental contortionists can be as entertaining as the physical ones.

What do you guys think of this argument:

"For example, one apparently basic property of matter recognized by modern science is the so-called spin angular momentum of certain elementary particles. This property has certain functional analogies with the angular momentum we are familiar with in the behavior of macroscopic objects. For example, the spin of a proton explains its magnetic properties and hence the observed fine splitting of certain spectroscopic lines. But in other respects spin is quite unlike ordinary angular momentum. Only certain discrete values are allowed, for instance, and these values appear no matter what ‘spin axis’ we measure. The point here is that ‘spin’ is defined solely in dispositional terms. What ‘spin’ actually is remains quite mysterious (save for the aura of often misleading meaning drawn from the analogy with the everyday world). Whitehead describes this purely dispositional analysis as a matter of regarding the basic elements of material reality “in abstraction from everything except what concerns their mutual interplay in determining each other’s historical routes of life-history”. This picture leaves the laws of physics as exhausted by “the laws declaring how the entities mutually react amongst themselves”, an impoverished outlook resulting from the way “science has abstracted from what the entities are in themselves”.

Such abstraction is problematic because it is arguable that any disposition must be grounded in some intrinsic nature, and our failure to take this into account leaves us in irredeemable ignorance about the most fundamental features of the world. Whitehead described the predicament thus: “all modern ... cosmologies wrestle with this problem. There is, for their doctrine, a mysterious reality in the background, intrinsically unknowable by any direct intercourse”. Whitehead, following Leibniz in certain respects, asserts both that matter must indeed possess an intrinsic nature, and that there is only one such nature with which we are familiar: experience. Whitehead praises Leibniz, in a phrase reminiscent of Nagel’s worry about consciousness, for explaining “what it must be like to be an atom”.

http://www.scar.utoronto.ca/~seager/whitehead.htm