Consciousness and the World

@paulhanke,

I can see external scaffolding being a feature to our evolutionary progress.

So its a benefit to our future generations to write a lot?

But external scaffolding as a functional component of the modern mind. How far is he willing to go? That reality is independent of consciousness and consciousness is dependent on reality.

Maybe the media should switch to hypercube advertising and maybe it will benefit future generations be providing an advanced mind or something. lol.

1 Reply

@paulhanke,

paulhanke wrote:

Andy Clark wrote a book entitled "Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again" ... in it, Clark expresses the concept of "external scaffolding" (pencil and paper, etc.) without which the human mind would be incapable of certain types of thought (long division, etc.) ... and if I'm remembering correctly, Clark actually asserts that such "external scaffolding" can be considered a functional component of the modern human mind ... a very interesting read.

Taking Clark's concept of "external scaffolding" to its logical conclusion, do you think there are elements of the world without which there could not be (modern) human consciousness?

Paulhanke, Smile

I take it I am missing something here, but, without the world in general there would be no human consciousness, the physical world is the fuel that the mind operates on. It is the old subject and object stand or fall together thing, take away the physical world as object and there is no reality whatsoever. That said, what am I missing? Ok I reread, so, you are saying that certain conditons must be in place in order to evoke potentiality from the mind, yes that does seem reasonable. People born and raised in the desert, do not often make strong swimmers.

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@Holiday20310401,

Holiday20310401 wrote:

That reality is independent of consciousness and consciousness is dependent on reality.

... in a nutshell - yes Wink

The next time you take a walk, pay attention to your leg muscles ... what do the muscles in your trailing leg do when it's time to take the next step forward? - they relax! ... your leg just swings forward into the next step naturally, powered by gravity, and controlled by the passive dynamics of bone, joint, and tendon ... the alternative (tried by many early roboticists) is to compute and actively control every minute movement - which is so computationally expensive that the resulting robot can only manage to walk excruciatingly slowly ... so to steal from the above quote, reality is independent of walking and walking is dependent on reality.

Why should consciousness be any different?

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@boagie,

boagie wrote:

... you are saying that certain conditons must be in place in order to evoke potentiality from the mind, yes that does seem reasonable. People born and raised in the desert, do not often make strong swimmers.

... that's one aspect ... another is exemplified in the possibility that modern human consciousness is qualitatively and/or quantitatively different than the human consciousness of, say, medieval times precisely because the world ("external scaffolding") was different then ...

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@paulhanke,

I know that morals are defined relative to society because what is moral then is not moral now but I never really allowed myself to believe that the mind back then was a little primitive compared to today. Somehow I doubt it, it would be very minimal in that short of a period, which really stinks when knowing that our society will eventually progress at too fast a rate.

I agree with Boagie, and you when considered in the long run. If humanity found a planet that could sustain life, but was different in a lot of ways it would make sense for the body to adapt to the changes in the envionment. But in this situation, aren't we assuming that the consciousness relies on the mind? Which is ok ofcourse.

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@paulhanke,

paulhanke wrote:

... that's one aspect ... another is exemplified in the possibility that modern human consciousness is qualitatively and/or quantitatively different than the human consciousness of, say, medieval times precisely because the world ("external scaffolding") was different then ...

paulhanke, Smile

Really I don't think there is any doubt that there would be a correlation between the environment and the mental state of a subject. It would not be unlike the adaptation of an organism to a given environment, the environment changes, thus the organism of necessity is in process of change in relation to its environment. As a matter of fact I think there is a correlation in the quality of consciousnes with the quality of the environment in general, the degradation of the environment means degradation of consciousness. The environment must be considered an aspect of consciousness, for without it, there is no consciousness.

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@Holiday20310401,

Holiday20310401 wrote:

But in this situation, aren't we assuming that the consciousness relies on the mind?

... yes! ... and assuming that the mind that exercises the external scaffolding associated with the scientific method is a different mind than the one that has no concept of science (and the fact that this external scaffolding is culturally transmitted completely sidesteps the need for biological evolution), can something similar be said of consciousness? ...

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@boagie,

boagie wrote:

As a matter of fact I think there is a correlation in the quality of consciousnes with the quality of the environment in general, the degradation of the environment means degradation of consciousness.

... so let's take it a step further - as the quality of consciousness changes, does the experience of consciousness change?

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@paulhanke,

As the quality of the mind changes so does the reality, right? Is consciousness the interpretation of actuality into a reality that can be cognated by the mind? Because afterall, the environment is just emanations of immaterial when sought at deep, deep down.

But as the quality of consciousness changes the experience does not change because I think consciousness is just a threshold, a uniform part of being. The consciousness will either be there or not there, I don't see any superpositionitive state of consciousness being controllable through experience, although then what am I to say dreams are?

And when you say the quality of experience, do you mean perception? Because perception is a part of the mind, not the environment, well, I suppose the body is part of the environment, but the body is what is causing your consciousness anyways. Its turning to a conundrum.
If you meant experience as the reality we envision, well, thats proportional to the mind's construct anyways. If it were meant that the actual environment were to change then the mind would in order to make sense in its construct to what is applicable to the new actuality. But there is not bias out there in the environment so the environment in acutality can't degenerate to make the mind also do so, it can only change... if thats even possible which I doubt too.

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@paulhanke,

paulhanke wrote:

... so let's take it a step further - as the quality of consciousness changes, does the experience of consciousness change?

paulhanke, Smile

The experience of consciousness is the quality of consciousness, you have heard perhaps it said that, the quality of ones mind depends upon what it has to think about, if there is nothing to think about, there is no mind. There is the given organic condition of the brain, but, assuming that is healthy, the art of consciousness would depend on the quality of the materials and the order consciousness bestows upon it.

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@boagie,

boagie wrote:

There is the given organic condition of the brain, but, assuming that is healthy, the art of consciousness would depend on the quality of the materials and the order consciousness bestows upon it.

... makes sense ... if I were born in medieval times, my experience of consciousness would be that of a medieval person; but if the current "I" were transported back to medieval times, my experience of consciousness (ignoring the astonishment at finding myself back then) would still be 21st-century-based ... which implies that no matter how much I read from the past, I can never truly comprehend what the past was like (?) ...

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@paulhanke,

paulhanke wrote:

... makes sense ... if I were born in medieval times, my experience of consciousness would be that of a medieval person; but if the current "I" were transported back to medieval times, my experience of consciousness (ignoring the astonishment at finding myself back then) would still be 21st-century-based ... which implies that no matter how much I read from the past, I can never truly comprehend what the past was like (?) ...

Paulhanke, Smile

I am in full agreement with you here, reading a historical text one can get the feeling that you know the times, but it is an illusion, mind you a pleasant one for the most part, it adds to the pleasure of reading a historical novel.

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@paulhanke,

paulhanke wrote:

Taking Clark's concept of "external scaffolding" to its logical conclusion, do you think there are elements of the world without which there could not be (modern) human consciousness?

This notion of specifically 'human' consciousness is rather belittling to other forms of existence, but they probably do not recognize that we understand many more things than we need to. So this support of the individual's interaction with reality, the 'external scaffolding', could possibly be provided for other forms of life; if we were to build a system that could cause wild animals to coexist harmoniously with humans, providing food for lions would register as a form of external scaffolding for the lion, the next step is to cause the lion to acquire food passively itself - without aggression - thus finishing with the 'external scaffolding' and achieving a deviation from 'natural' evolution.

The difference between this example of the lion, and the use of logical systems by humans is the control of the scaffold by the individual seeking the benefits. Could it be possible to teach a lion to use an 'external scaffold', a system of farming food for itself, thus negating it's current method of claw-to-mouth hunting. What sort of 'external scaffold' could one impose upon the lions' perception to force it to engage with such a system? Imprisonment is a form of scaffold, one is caused to climb up, into the mind, instead of wandering and hunting. Is anybody in agreement with the previous statement?

1 Reply

@Doobah47,

Doobah47 wrote:

The difference between this example of the lion, and the use of logical systems by humans is the control of the scaffold by the individual seeking the benefits. Could it be possible to teach a lion to use an 'external scaffold', a system of farming food for itself, thus negating it's current method of claw-to-mouth hunting.

... and I think this difference may be key - in the former example where humans impose an artificial environment on the lion, exactly what is the external scaffolding and for whom? ... is the artificial environment scaffolding for the lion, or is it just a new environment? is the artificial environment created by the human scaffolding for the human? is the artificial environment and the lion scaffolding for the human? is none of it scaffolding (i.e., does this construction miss Clark's point of scaffolding-as-supporting-cognitive-abilities-beyond-human-capability entirely)?

As for the latter example, do lions already employ external scaffolding? ... that is, is there anything in a lion's natural environment that allows them to reason in ways that would otherwise be beyond their reasoning capabilities? ... say, habitually peeing on the landscape in order to recall their (and other lions') territorial boundaries?

As for teaching lions to farm, there may be some potential forms of scaffolding that are entirely beyond the mental sophistication of such a being ... and what does that say about us humans? ... are there potential forms of scaffolding that are beyond our mental sophistication? are there potential forms of scaffolding that are beyond our mental sophistication but within reach of our cultural sophistication?

1 Reply

@paulhanke,

paulhanke, Smile

When one takes an animal out of the relational complex which is its environment one changes the animal not to a different animal but to a
monstrosity a muted form of life. I have a little difficulty with this term forms of scaffolding, does scaffolding refer to the aspect of the creatures environment which evokes certain behaviour, and if one were able to present such an altered environment that would make new demands of said creature that it would transform the said animal into something akin to improvement, progress? Nature does this of itself over eons, but as with the physical world and an organisms adaptation there is no progress there is no moving towards perfection, there are simply two unending processes one the animal in constant struggle to adapt to the greater presence and process of the earth, and the earth one would suppose is altered by the cosmos which it inhabits. If I am off the mark here would you please define in detail the meaning of this scaffolding, as I cannot imagine it as anything but environmental engineering. Actually this is occuring as we speak in the negative sense, man has transformed the earth to the point of the mass extinction of species.

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@boagie,

boagie wrote:

... please define in detail the meaning of this scaffolding, as I cannot imagine it as anything but environmental engineering.

... maybe I can explain by example ... take long division - this is not a procedure most people can do in their head in its entirety ... but people can estimate the single steps of the procedure in their head - it's the amount of working memory that's required that poses the problem ... this is where pencil and paper become "external scaffolding" - pencil and paper provide an external memory bank for the biological brain ... and such scaffolding is not necessarily limited to simple external memory.

To quote Clark directly:

Quote:

In general, evolved creatures will neither store nor process information in costly ways when they can use the structure of the environment and their operations upon it as a convenient stand-in for the information-processing operation concerned.

Quote:

The combination of basic pattern-completing abilities and complex, well-structured environments may thus enable us to haul ourselves up by our own computational bootstraps.

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@paulhanke,

paulhanke, Smile

Ok, I think I get it now, your scaffolding is what I would call biological extension, the pen and paper are an extended system of your biology. Actually to my way of thinking, everything man has created, agriculture, society, technology, arts and sciences are all biological extensions or as you put it, scaffolding. I am on track here? Smile

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@boagie,

boagie wrote:

I am on track here?

... perfectly! ... (but as usual I have to resort to quoting others to get my thoughts across - I totally suck at explaining myself! Wink

)

As Clark asserts, such scaffolding can greatly enhance the computational capabilities of a being ... I'm just wondering out loud if something similar can be said for consciousness ... is there anything in the world that we human beings leverage in order to greatly enhance our consciousness? is a computational enhancement sufficient for a consciousness enhancement? or does a consciousness enhancement require more than just a simple computational enhancement, implying a qualitatively distinct type of scaffolding than the computational examples Clark gives?

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@paulhanke,

paulhanke wrote:

... perfectly! ... (but as usual I have to resort to quoting others to get my thoughts across - I totally suck at explaining myself! )

As Clark asserts, such scaffolding can greatly enhance the computational capabilities of a being ... I'm just wondering out loud if something similar can be said for consciousness ... is there anything in the world that we human beings leverage in order to greatly enhance our consciousness? is a computational enhancement sufficient for a consciousness enhancement? or does a consciousness enhancement require more than just a simple computational enhancement, implying a qualitatively distinct type of scaffolding than the computational examples Clark gives?

paulhanke, Smile

Just thinking out loud here. All of humanities creations are a product of its existing consciousness, I believe all of man's creations add to this consciousness. It is an interesting thing about any existing system, it is bound to have as it constitution, elements of a previous simplier system or systems. So, as the system develops in complexity from a former simplier model, it is itself reprograming the mind that creates it, as it creates it. Just as order builds on order in the exterior world so to it must be with the innner world of the mind, with each development of a complex system by its creator, new neural pathways are created---------maybe!

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Consciousness and the World

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