Reflecting  Upon  Irreducible  Mind

Recently (on January 13, 2009), a friend of mine called my attention to a critical analysis of my review of the book Irreducible Mind. This critical analysis can be read in the link below:

http://subversivethinking.blogspot.com/2009/01/julio-siqueira-and-irreducible-mind.html

The author of the blog identifies himself by the name (or nickname, maybe) Jime, and his analysis is a very insightful one in many regards. This kind of stimulated me to make further and more thorough comments and reflections on this most valuable book, and so I will be commenting on this critical analysis during the next weeks (starting on Jan 14, 2009). My original text (extracts from it) appears in bold black font. The critical analysis of it, by the blogger, appears in normal black font. My comments to this critical analysis will be written in brown font.

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Julio Siqueira and Irreducible Mind: A critical analysis of Julio Siqueira's review of that book

Spiritualist, researcher and open mind skeptic Julio Siqueira (Siqueira is a true skeptic, not a materialist pseudo-skeptic), in a recent Amazon review of the excellent book Irreducible Mind, posed some critical remarks and questions that I'd like to examine here.

Let's to begin:

"First of all, I give only four stars out of ten to this book. This is because I really think there are lots of problems in it."

We'll see if the "a lot of" the real or supposed problems of a 800 pages book mentioned by Siqueira justify the conclusion of "give only four stars out of ten". You'll be the judge.

The reader should be warned that the "800 pages book" is comprised of 643 pages of argumentative texts plus a fifteen-page introduction that also contains argumentative presentation (658 pages, so). The remainder is mostly non-argumentative. What I address is the 658 pages.

"The title of this book is "Irreducible" "Mind." For a book with such a title, I would like to have seen a deeper analysis of (reflection on) the concept of reducibility vs irreducibility. And also a deeper discussion of the possible concepts of mind. There are some tricky issues related to both terms that deserve deep analyses, and I do not know how much the authors are aware of these, or even if they consider these relevant or not."

That is a good point and I share it. However, it doesn't undermine the book in the way pretended by Siqueira. Even without a technical discussion of "reducibility vs." irreducibility", any intelligent reader would understand that a irreducible mind refers to a mind that can't be fully explained by cerebral processes alone. Thus,the mind would more (in a ontological sense) than the brain, and in this way, different from it (if they were identical, you couldn't draw any difference bewteen them).

Ok, this will be a lengthy comment, and that will most probably be the same with all other comments. To begin with, I do not suggest or think that this point (i.e. the lack of a lengthier discussion of the concepts of irreducibility and mind) undermines the book in a deep way. Despite this and other problems, I even stress, in my review, that this book is worthy of deep respect and attention by the scientific community. Nevertheless, I do think this point has some bad impact, and that, worse, it is a source of further problems. It is true that any intelligent reader would understand it (that is, would understand that a irreducible mind refers to a mind that can't be fully explained by cerebral processes alone); but that, too, is the very problem that I am talking about! The subject of this book is outside standard paradigms, and this is a very important reason to try to explore and to "revisit" the meaning of the terms and concepts that we use. The intelligent reader is, thus (IMO), at a serious risk of being encaged in old and ineffective notions of these terms and concepts. So, let me think of these issues further:

First, if the mind that we humans have is irreducible, what is it irreducible to? Is it irreducible to the neurons in the cortex of the brain? Is it irreducible to the neurons in all of the brain? Is it irreducible to the brain as a whole (made of roughly 10% of neurons and 90% of glia cells, the latter also capable of some information processing, as it seems - remember, too, the intense presence and activity of the immune system and of the immune-system's cells in the brain...)? Is our mind irreducible to the whole of our body? Depending on what you consider, or claim, that the mind is irreducible to, the task you face in supporting this assertion is different, and varies in its difficulty. The difference, in terms of argumentative difficulty, between claiming, on the one hand, that the mind is irreducible to the neurons in the cortex of the brain and claiming, on the other hand, that it is irreducible to the whole of the body is simply, IMO, astronomical. More or less alternatively, one may say that what is intended by the authors is that the mind cannot be explained through the Computational Theories of the Mind, particularly those who adhere to the "Neuron Doctrine" (which can roughly be stated as "it is the neurons that do it all"). So, in this last view, the mind would not be reducible to the ND-CTM (Neuron-Doctrine Computational Theories of the Mind).

A second point is what you are claiming to be irreducible, that is, what aspect or what function supposedly performed by the mind is irreducible. The authors mention lots of different phenomena: memory, binding, prodigies, secondary or alternate centers of personality, mystical experiences, stigmata (and similar influences of the mind on the body), psi (paranormality), DMILS (direct mental interaction with living systems), and afterlife survival (etc). At a preliminary reflection, I think only survival seems necessarily to outstrip the potential powers of the body.

A third point is what is irreducibility? The intelligent (but ordinary-paradigm stuck) reader knows that when B cannot come from A, then B is irreducible to A. But when we say, or when we claim, that B cannot come from A, what exactly do we have in mind? That is (again): what is the meaning of "irreducible"? The notion of reducibility/irreducibility is tightly linked to the notion of causality. We know that heat causes ice to change into water. Or better, we know that when we have ice and when, then, heat is added to the system, this ice will turn into water. This is usually seen as a case of reducibility. The liquid state of water is reducible to ice + heat. But how do we come to know that one thing is reducible or irreducible to another? Usually through observation + experimentation + theorizing. In the end, all that we really come to know is that A causes B; however, the very reason for this is utterly mysterious and magical. A causes B because it does and that is it! So, usually, when one says that one thing is irreducible to another, what is meant is: 1- A actually can cause B, but this is extremely unlikely to happen (example: planets teleporting from the other side of the universe to our solar system through quantum tunnelling). 2- We do not really know if A can cause B, but we deeply believe (guided by what we know) that it cannot (example: inheritance, by mammals' offsprings, of traits aquired by ancestors' non-germinal cells). 3- A cannot cause B indeed, because of unsurmountably stringent logical contingencies (example: if quantum mechanics predicts that a given event B has zero percent probability of happening through the action of A. So when we see B happening, either B has another cause other than A, or quantum mechanics is wrong...). Number 3 is the really stringent one. But even then we must be cautious. All physicists (most likely, I bet) thought that Einstein's theory of relativity forbid backwards travel in time until Goedel showed (after decades this theory had come into being) that, actually, this theory entailed it...!

So, basically, what I have sketched in these three paragraphs (!) above is what I think would have paved a better ground to help the authors in putting their subject in a better and more solid perspective.

"If the brain is not a mind, what is the definition of mind? We must bear in mind (in mind...) that mind is an objective thing; what is subjective is consciousness (qualia, etc)"

Siqueira gratuitously affirm than mind is objective but consciousness is subjetive, but he doesn't explain what justify that distinction.

We should ask him how you can objectively directly "see" another people's mind.

Well, I don't really affirm it "gratuitously." As a matter of fact, I had to spend a lot of money to do it... :-)  But basically what I ask for here is for a definition of terms. Jime is correct in pointing out that I ended up making an arbitrary distinction between mind and consciousness. And I did this without "explaining" exactly why and without explaining the possible "advantages" of this distinction. So the best thing to do is to present my definition of these terms now. Most of the times that I see the term consciousness being used, I see it referring to something pretty close to subjective first person experience or to qualia (perhaps the only exception would be the medical use meaning awake vs not awake). On the other hand when I see the word mind, often it is used referring to something objective. So, I consider all the "functioning" as the mind. A mind is, the way I use the term, a system that accepts inputs from the outside, processes this input and additionally has an associated memory module, and produces an output to the outside. This definition is pretty much computational. But it is not necessarily materialist in the traditional sense. In fact, it is not even computational in the traditional sense, since I do not limit it to algorithmic processing (Roger Penrose, in The Emperor's New Mind - 1988 - says that computers can only perform processing using algorithms, while humans perform also non-algorithmic processing). Ghosts and gods or God would qualify nicely. Consciousness, on the other hand, is the subjective counterpart. And minds would have consciousness as one of their properties (it is a most relevant question whether all minds have consciousness or not, and even if all human minds have it; that is the zombie issue or the philosophical-zombies issue), though no one has as yet come up with a good reason for consciousness's existence, IMO. Many of the mind's parts and functions are "visible" and "objective," so to speak: the input, the information coming in; the output, the information coming out; the place where memory is stored; the very processing of information. Obviously, when we talk about humans, all this is the very subject of the book Irreducible Mind, and at least some parts of the mind is claimed by the authors to have been misidentified by modern day neuroscience. For example, the authors point out that the place memory is kept and how memory is kept is far from identified; so it would be question-begging to say that human memory is objetive. So, the minds that can most confortably be described as "objective" are the "Artificial Minds" (there is an insightful book by Stan Franklin with this name), computers mostly. The curious thing is that when I started to think deeper about this concept and definition of mind as I define above, I ended up concluding that even a single cell would qualify as a mind. Now I think that even a dead rock would qualify as such...!!! In a way, a rock has input-processing-output. So that is where I am now, right or wrong...

Similarly, on page xvii in the Introduction, we see this opening statement by Edward Kelly: "The central subject of this book is the problem of relations between the inherently private, subjective, 'first-person' world of human mental life and the publicly observable, objective, 'third-person' world of physiological events and processes in the body and brain." So, the central subject of this book seems not to be the Irreducible Mind, but the Irreducible Consciousness instead... (David Chalmers' "Hard Problem")"

The arbitrary and subjetive Siqueira's differentiation between mind and consciousness prevents him to read, in a charitable way, the book's argument. Thus, Siqueira's rises irrelevant (and not strong) objections against it.

Siqueira would have to explain the difference between mind and consciousness, why the former is objective (and how can be that objectively verified) and the latter is subjetive; and how that distinction (if true) affect the book's substantive arguments.

Well, now I have detailed better my definition and my use of these two terms, mind and consciousness. This distinction is really relevant and beneficial, I think. Emblematic of this is the fact that David Chalmers gave to his book (1996) the title "The Conscious Mind." And as I said, the authors of Irreducible Mind would have paved their way better if they had made their definitions more detailed (I said the same in regards to Dean Radin's Entangled Minds in my review of it. This link). For example, in the quote above from the book ("the central subject of this book"...), the authors are stating that the central subject of the book is consciousness, subjective awareness; at least that is the only way I can understand what they say in this phrase. However, secondary personalities and unconscious memories and unconscious thought might lie completely out of this land depicted by them as the "central subject of the book," and yet they are fully mind.

However, Siqueira could justify his position arguing the the authors of the book concede that mind is objective, when they wrote: "There exist certain kinds of empirically verifiable mental properties, states, and effects that appear to outstrip in principle the explanatory potential of physical processes occurring in brains."

But the authors aren't saying that mind is objetive, but that mental properties are empirically verifiable. Both things are different. You can empirically verify that a person X killed another person Y intentionally (e.g. through the forensic science criteria of intentional killing, existence of motives, localization of the lesions, etc.) But these empirically verifiable effects doesn't prove that the mind (and specially, the subjetive thoughts of the killer previous to his behaviour) is objective.

We "see" the workings of the mind. But we do not see (in any sense) the workings of consciousness. That is why I prefer to make this distinction and to place mind as an objective thing.

Siqueira seems to discern mind from consciousness based on a episetmological description. Mind is objetively describeable, while consciousness is subjectively experienced. However, it could be argued, perhaps we're talking about the same thing, but examining it from different angles (and it doesn't justify an ontological differentiation between them)

When it comes to consciousness, all that I can say for sure is that I experience it. I have it. I experience qualia. So in regards to myself, I can say that I have an objective brain and I believe I have an objective soul that will survive my death and that this soul is the true source (center) of my Self, and that my objective body (material or spiritual, mortal or immortal) has, associated to it, a subjective counterpart. And I dearly hope all of you have it too... ;-). So Jime is correct. We are talking about the same thing. But this "same thing" has an inner structure, so to speak. It has different properties at least. A mind without consciousness, or a watch without consciousness, is not the same thing as a mind with consciousness (Chalmers' Conscious Mind, 1996) or a watch with consciousness. You can have input, processing + memory, and output, without having consciousness (subjective awareness). Unless you are, like me, a panpsychist... So the use of different terms is, IMHO, justified and highly beneficial.

Siqueira' next point of criticism is the filter/transmission theory presented in the book: "A good way to put this theory is the "visible light vs prism" metaphor (one may include the infrared and the ultraviolet in this metaphor too). Just as the red light is not created by a prism out of white light, but only filtered ("transmitted") by it, consciousness, in all its forms (and all modes and intensities of human consciousness), is not created by the brain/body but merely filtered by it instead. Now, this is pretty bizarre. And I must add that this is, also, my own theory for consciousness (in a maybe-not-slightly different shape)..."

Two comments:

1)Siqueira's gratuitously affirm that the filter theory is bizarre, but he doesn't offer arguments to substantiate his opinion. It's only his subjetive opinion (not shared by William James, Myers nor the authors of the book.)

I am not using this term, bizarre, in a derogatory way. I just mean something very far from commonsense. Something capable of surprising us and perhaps shocking us.

2)More shockingly, Siqueira accepts that bizzare theory as his own theory of consciousness! (Thus, we should think that that theory is not so bizarre after all, or less bizarre that the alternatives... and the latter case, Siqueira's remark is not only trivial, but irrelevant. If it's not the case, then we should to ask him why he acccept as his own theory of consciousness a bizzare theory instead of non-bizarre ones)

This is because being bizarre or not is not a standard for my accepting or rejecting theories. Perhaps the most bizarre ideas that we humans have come up with have been the theory of relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics. And yet they are, quantitatively, the most correct and precise things that we ever found... When it comes to the issue of consciousness, my own present intellectual persuasion is Brahmanist Panpsychism, a position that seems to have been held by late physicist Erwin Schroedinger. And so this consciousness plenum would be filtered/limited/constrained by bodies and by brains and by don't know which else entities and objects in the universe. The way the state of the consciousness debate is now, I think that there are only two tenable positions: Brahmanist Panpsychism and Solipsism. I chose the former.

Siqueira then adds a bunch of rhetorical questions (probably, intended to make evident the supposed "bizarre" character of the filter theory). :

The questions are not really rhetorical. For some of them, I only have feeble guesses. So, they are all questions that I would like to have seen more deeply discussed in the book, and as a matter of fact some of them have indeed been discussed to some satisfatory introductory level. Further, the discussion of these questions would not necessarily make the filter theory more bizarre. Actually it would most likely make it less bizarre.

But how did this theory come to be? (And there are versions of it tracing back to ancient Greece!).

That is not relevant if we're talking about the correct or incorrect nature of that theory.

Discussing how a theory came to be is, IMO, more often than not, highly relevant to evaluating the theory's possible weaknesses and strengths. The authors do present preliminary material for this in the book. On page 29, we read: As indicated by an 1897 letter to Schiller (Perry, 1935, vol. 2, pp. 133-134), (William) James thought initially that the transmission theory was his own invention, but it certainly has a much longer history. By the time of the Ingersoll lecture James himself had identified the following passage from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: "The body would thus be, not the cause of our thinking, but merely a condition restrictive thereof, and, although essential to our sensuous and animal consciousness, it may be regarded as an impeder of our pure spiritual life" (1898/1900, pp. 28-29). Michael Grosso informs me that the filter concept can also be detected in a number of the Platonic dialogues, including Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Ion. Clearly, a definitive history of the filter model is yet to be written. So, the interesting question to ask in this regard is, how come such a non commonsensical (bizarre) view keeps appearing again and again? The answer that naturally springs to mind is that there must be some solid and true inner core to it. My present view is that this theory keeps coming again and again because many thinkers have come to understand, throughout human history, that the materialist-mechanical-causational view of reality can indeed explain a lot of things (almost everything, in fact), but when it comes to handling consciousness (subjective experience) it leaves us empty; to the point that the only logical conclusion is that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe.

What is being filtered?

Consciousness.

Well, that is the very kind of answer I would not like to see... :-( . I mean, it is, with all due respect, too simplistic, IMHO. What I want is to take, or to try to take, some steps further. Trying to be brief, I will limit the question to its two extremes (as I see it): we are talking about the filtering of consciousness, all right. But what kind of consciousness is being filtered? Is it the "primitive simple irritability," as Myers put it? Or is it, on the other hand, God Almighty? Believe it or not, my bet is the latter... (and that is what I call Brahmanist Panpsychism); and that through sheer reasoning. I do not see it as tenable that a primitive simple irritability could give birth to consciousness in all humans. But a primitive consciousness plenum (Brahman) could... And as a matter of fact, I think HE would want it most desperately...

and how, and by what exactly?

The how is not well known or understood, but it doesnt' prevent us to consider that theory as the most compatible with the data taken as a whole. Materialists doesn't know how consciousness is created by the brain, but it doesn't prevent them to consider materialism as one of the alternatives of the debate.

Again, the authors do discuss the "how" to some satisfactory introductory level, with the permeable boundary hypothesis presented in the book. But in science, when good introductory answers are given, more (and eager) questions are expected to come.

"by what exactly?" According to the filter theory, by the brain. The "exactly" is a non-reasonable exigence, because you don't need to know "exactly" something to accept it as probably true or correct (e.g. dark matter isn't "exactly" known in his nature and mechanics, but you don't reject that idea for that reason; the same applies to the non-exactly known causes of multiple sclerosis and other diseases, or to the origin of life)

Granted, the "exactly" is an exaggeration. But, regarding the "by what," it is a little risky to say that the answer would be by the brain. On page 73 of Irreducible Mind we read: Myers himself did not refer to the brain specifically as the filter,. Myers may have thought the brain was indeed the filter. He might have thought that it was just the neurons (10% of the total cells of the brain) that was the filter, or perhaps the whole body. This distinction is a very important and necessary further step in handling and in perfecting the filter theory.

What happens when the filter... dies?

Consciousness won't be trasmitted in this specific filter anymore. When we get some hints about what consciousness do "after the filter dies", then we talk about afterlife phenomena.

As a matter of fact, if we stick to the filter theory, consciousness would indeed continue to be transmitted in this specific filter! That is, the "filter" (brain/body) would not "die" in the sense of disappearing (unless you jump into a black hole or collide with antimatter, etc). The "filter" would merely change its state. Its biological metabolic activity would be stopped, and it would rot, but it would still be there. A dead body and a dead brain are still body and brain. Now, would there be, then, less consciousness or more consciousness? At this point, no one can really tell. But just as present-day neurological materialism holds that we are bodies that have brains in us (brains that perform information processing in a computer-like way), present-day "spiritualism" holds (usually) that we are bodies/brains with souls/spirits in us (spirits that perform information processing in some way, computer-like or not). For this kind of spiritualism, the filter would also be the spirit. When alive, we would have a double filter, so to speak. When dead, only the spirit would be filtering consciousness. In sum, I think this issue is far more tricky than most people usually realize.

And what is the dynamics of this filtering?

It's not well known. But, in principle, we could argue that the filter enable consciousness to interact with the physical world as currently known. The functioning of the filter is currently researched by neuroscience.

The authors do tackle this issue introductorily with the permeable boundary hypothesis in their book. Further, my paragraph above, talking about the "double-filter," also deepens the discussion of this issue.

Siqueira then add some comments about Meyers/James' theory: The bottom line is this: there is, throughout the evolution of the universe, a shifting of the waking consciousness (i.e. supraliminal consciousness, consciousness, etc) into the "ultraviolet region" of the full spectrum of consciousness-modes available in the universe, and this shifting is brought about by the demands of the environment, that is, by natural selection.

The demands of the enviroment isn't the same than "natural selection", because the latter is correctly a kind of enviroment demand, but not the only one (e.g. the naturalist neo-lamarckian view of evolution offers other evolutionary model without the need to use the concept of darwinian natural selection).

Natural selection is perhaps better (and is quite often) described as "Survival of the Fittest." This is the way this "selection" happens, that is, not by nature choosing who will live, but rather by nature choosing who will die. It doesn't matter if the fittest will come up through blind random mutations in the DNA or by self-made changes in lamarckian ways. The net end result is the same. So, what is this "other demands from the environment" other than "natural selection" that Jime talks about? He didn't name one. And I do not know of any... (and certainly they are not to be found in lamarckism either).

Also, Siqueira' uses the concept of natural selection, when it isn't applicable to the time before the beginning of biological life. He limits the "demands of the enviroment" concept, to the darwinian model of natural selection as used in biological sciences. And it misconstructs the argument.

True. Before the so called biological life, I agree that we should not talk of a "shifting" (i.e. something rather arrow like), but rather of a "drifting," since there was no "survival-of-the-fittest" demand. Or, alternatively, we might talk about an arrow-like shifting (slightly bent, maybe) driven by the "creative tendency" in the universe.

The Siqueira' straw man (that identify natural selection with demands of the enviroment mentioned by Myers) is made evident in the following Myers' comment that his theory: "requires that there be some global creative tendency in the universe, however slight, that results over time in increasing richness and complexity of biological forms"

The concept of "some global creative tendence in the universe" is incompatible with natural selection, because natural selection is a non-ramdom process that acts in random mutations (most of the which are deleterous), So, the teleologically creative nature of universe requeried by Myers' thesis is incompatible with the non-teleological, purposeless, blind darwinian model of (biological) evolution.

But the so called global creative tendency is not necessarily teleological... And it is obviously subject to the "survival-of-the-fittest" process. So much so that Darwin himself believed in the so called inheritance of acquired traits, which is the core of lamarckian evolution. We should not confuse darwinism with neo-darwinism. Darwin himself had views that are now demonized by people like Richard Dawkins. Therefore, the "some global creative tencency in the universe" is in fact compatible with natural selection and pretty much subject to it.

Siqueira list some of the "perplexities" with Myers's model:

1- If what we have at the beginning is a primal germ of consciousness, a primitive irritability, still undifferentiated, then this thing should, IMHO, better be described not as a panaesthesia stuff/state, but rather as an "anaesthesia" stuff/state.

It's a reasonable point and I tend to agree with it. However, it's only affect the description of the phenomena, not its ontological nature.

It doesn't affect its ontological nature??!! A primitive undifferentiated irritability is something perhaps more dumm than Richard Dawkins (though I have serious doubts about this being possible at all... :-) ); a true panaesthesia, on the other hand, would be God Almighty (Brahman!). Well, I do see an ontological difference between these two.

2-If "bodies" end up (through natural selection) bringing about this differentiation of the primal consciousness germ, then, actually, bodies can be said to create consciousness (just as fairly as an electron jump to a lower energy level in an atom can be said to create a photon, which, thus far, had been "undifferentiated" together with the higher-energy electron).

It's an obvious non sequitur. If bodies brings differentiation of consciousness, it doesn't follow that bodies "create consciousness" (they only "create" specific forms or manifestation of consciousness, not the consciousness in itself). This fact (provided we accept it as correct) is sufficient to support the filter hypothesis and consider materialism falsified.

Siqueira's main fallacy here is to confound consciousness with its concrete, specific, filter-dependent manifestations.

Jime did not understand the point. If you have a true primitive panaesthesia, that is, something like Brahman (a consciousness plenum), then we can talk about filter theories and about consciousness being filtered and/or constrained by bodies and by brains. If, on the other hand, what we have is a primordial undifferentiated irritability, a proto-consciouss stuff, then we cannot talk about filter theory. If you have together big oranges and little lemons, you can set up a filter to let pass only the little lemons. That is filtering. Note that you already had oranges and lemons! This is the very prerequisite for the filtering process: the elements to be filtered must be there prior to the filtering. But if, instead, you did not have oranges and lemons and somehow you manage to come up to us with lemons (maybe you have all the organic molecules needed plus metabolic machinery), this is not filtering. This is creation. The idea of the filter metaphor comes from the perception (by Myers and etc) that there is something bigger in us than our ordinary selves. This filter idea does not come from Myers' having identified, in us, a "primitive simple irritability." If that had been the case, he (and anyone else too) most likely would have never used the notion of filter at all. It simply would not apply.

3-We know that bodies change (evolution) by the demands of the environment (natural selection), and we know the mechanics of it. But we do not know the mechanics of the shifting of consciousness to the so called "higher levels." So, we may as well just say that bodies change through the demands of the environment, and consciousness merely comes along with the bandwagon.

Leaving aside Siqueira's incorrect identification of "demands of the enviroment" with natural selection, let's to explore the substance of his argument: his objection reduces itself to a complain about our ignorance regarding the shifting of consciousness to the "higer levels". It's true, but Siqueira's conclusion from it is irrelevant: consciousness comes along with the bandwagon of bodies changes, but it doesn't follow that consciousness (in its ontological conception, not in its concrete manifestations) is created by physical bodies.

At this point above, I am not talking about consciousness being created by the body or not. And actually I do not conclude that consciousness comes along with the bandwagon (i.e. I am not taking sides). What I am pointing out it that the very problem that bedevils materialism seems to me to be bedeveling Myers' views as described by the authors of Irreducible Mind. They are not showing any account for the shifting of consciousness. In sum, I do not see any theory of consciousness whatsoever (of subjective experience) in all that the authors have described in the book.

It's the well-know fallacy of materialists who identify correlation (body changes-consciousness changes) with ontological creation/production. (Siqueira is not a materialist, but some of his ambiguous and idiosincratic positions fall victim of the materialistic fallacies, as shown by a close reading of his writings)

Jime understood things the other way around. As a matter of fact, it is the authors that are hastily inferring causation from correlation here, not me! What I am pointing out, again (in my quoted paragraph above, number 3), is that we merely have a case of correlation, and that, due to the lack of any indication whatsoever of causal mechanisms, it is unwarrented to infer causation from this correlation.

4-The "global creative tendency in the universe" seems to be in something of a mismatch with all the rest of Myers's theory. (But not necessarily with his data! Also, lots of phenomena do point in this direction, like the spontaneous symmetry breaking, though we must be very cautious when pondering over these matters...). We might expect this creative tendency from a true panaesthesia primitive plenum (Hyperconscious/Omniconscious), but much less so from a primitive "anaesthesia" (as I see it).

I'd like to ask Siqueira if the "data" that support the "global creative tendence in the universe" is compatible with purposeless, blind, unguiaded (Dakwins' words) process of natural selection.

Yes, it is compatible since this creative tendency would operate on the one side of the evolution mechanism, that is, the appearing of biological innovations. Natural selection would operate on the other side, choosing those to die.

But Siqueira may be right about a mismatch between that idea, and some of the original descriptions of Myers' theory.

Conclusion - In my humble opinion, Myers's theory, as presented by the authors and as understood by me, is just as insightful as all the other theories attempting to explain consciousness and to put it into a scientific framework, that is: it explains absolutely nothing whatsoever...

If Myers' theory is just as insightful as all the other theories attemting to explain consciousness, why does Siqueira concede that "this is, also, my own theory for consciousness (in a maybe-not-slightly different shape)..." Why that and not the other theories?

Well, to begin with, I am not sure if my view is indeed a scientific theory or even a candidate for it...

Obviously, Siqueira' conclusions aren't warranted. He uses double standards, misconstruct the arguments, doesn't make fine distinctions, and assert incompatible and self-refuting claims.

This passage above from Jime is very insightful. As he accurately perceived (it just dawned on me that I don't know if Jime is a man; nevermind), I am highly contradictory in my views, even though these contradictions spring out of the very contradictions that I see in nature. Most of these contradictions, however, are not incoherent. Rather, they make up a coherent whole (Contraria Sunt Complementa. NB, 1947). My present view is that consciouness can only be a fundamental feature of the universe, from the universe's very beginning. And its original form is not a primitive irritability, but a consciousness plenum (just imagine what that would be!). This idea comes from a rather lengthy thought-chain of mine, and so I leave this explanation for later or for elsewhere... (or both). But just to highlight one of the questions from Jime, I don't think a filter theory that advocates that all humans have consciousness (i.e. no zombies) is viable if we start with a primitive irritability. We have to start with Brahman.

For example, look at this comment: "I see consciousness and volition as belonging to the same sort of phenomena (qualia/Chalmers' Hard Problem, basically), free will as non-existent, and teleology (depending on how we see it) as easily explainable"

Siqueira doesn't explain why free-will is non-existent, I suppose (and I can be wrong here) because he considers the physicilist's argument against free-will as convincing.

In my book review, I just felt relevant to mention in brief these views of mine; I did not think I should detail them more deeply especially because I was trying to call the reader's attention to the fact that what some people (the authors) might see as one thing, others (me) might see as many. I do not know what are the "physicalist's" arguments against it, nor the "dualist's" argument for it... All I know is that I thought a lot about it and just could not get this idea to work at all. Determinism and randomness is understandable and explicable. Free will is not.

Siqueira's uses the Chalmers' concept of "Hard problem", but that problem is only hard (and only a problem) in a materialistic framework, because, by definition, the problem consist in the question "How can a physical brain, made purely of material substances and nothing else, give rise to conscious experiences or ineffable qualia?" (Susan Blackmore. Consciousness. A very short introduction. 2005, p. 4)

Susan Blackmore has many intellectual virtues and is worthy of being read (though she frauded in the past... See Rick Berger text about her. Here). But sometimes she just does not hit the spot. There is no problem at all with an "ineffable qualia" coming out of "purely material substance." The tension is not "material substance" vs "spiritual substance." The tension is between causal account vs no causal account. We understand pretty well the "ice + heat = water" story. But we do not understand the "brain-creates-consciousness-in-all-humans" story.

The "hard problem" implicitly assumes that a material brain causes consciousness (the basic materialist assumption). For a substance dualist, the problem is "how consciousness interact with the brain", not "how consciousness is created/produced by the brain", because that question makes no sense at all for a dualist.

For the substance dualist, the problem should actually be: "how can there be consciousness in a ghost or in God"?

(For the record: Some materialists, like Dennett and Churchland, also deny the "hard problem" for other reasons different than those of dualists; but it is not relevant in this moment)

However, Siqueira is an spiritualist and, according to their own words, a believer in afterlife. Therefore, he is not a materialist, but a substance dualist (at least regarding the mind-problem). So, if he were coherent with himself, he couldn't take seriously the "hard problem" posed by Chalmers and less use it as argument against the dualist filter theory.

I am a monist. I do believe that we are spirits incarnated and that we will reincarnate after some time living without biological bodies, but this is in mismatch with the discussion of matter vs consciousness. I see the problem of matter vs consciousness as exactly the same (or almost) as the problem of spirit vs consciousness (or God vs consciousness). What is the causal account for the emergence of consciousness in spirits? None whatsoever. (Note that my point is that this lack of a causal account ends up leading us, paradoxically, to a conclusion; and although this conclusion may very well be wrong, it is the best that we can come up with at this stage of human knowledge - and things have been like this for the last 2.500 years at least... - And this conclusion is Brahmanist Panpsychism; coincidently, this conclusion is corroborated by mystical experiences...).

That is another example of the inconsistence of some of Siqueira's positions.

Let's to see another example:

"The authors point out, about Henry Stapp's theories for quantum mechanics and consciousness, that "As Stapp (2004a) remarks, his model 'makes consciousness causally effective' " (page 614), and that "Stapp and his quantum-theoretic allies have already successfully undermined the basic-science foundations of presentday materialist-monist psychology and neuroscience" (page 616). It may be so. But although I am highly sympathetic to Stapp's views, I doubt it... The place for consciousness in quantum mechanics is still a highly debated and far from settled issue, and the ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics is even more so. We, non-physicists, had better be attentive and respectful to all informed points of view, I think"

Siqueira argues that although he's "highly sympathetic to Stapp's views, I doubt it". Leaving aside the possible ambiguity of that expression, let's to examine the premises supporting it. He argues that "The place for consciousness in quantum mechanics is still a highly debated and far from settled issue, and the ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics is even more so. We, non-physicists, had better be attentive and respectful to all informed points of view, I think"

But exactly the same can be said of parapsychology research. The existence of ESP is "highly debated and far from settle issue" for the scientific community; and its ontological interpretation is even more so. The same is valid for afterlife reserach (but Siqueira is a believer in afterlife!).

If Siqueira were coherent, he would have to conclude (regarding psi and afterlife): "We, non-parapsychologists, had better be attentive and respectful to all informed points of view, I think"

You can be attentive to all the informed points of view, and at the same time (and for the same reason) support one of the points of view debated as the better one. Parapsychology is the most debated field of science, but many of us accept the evidence for some of these phenomena (including afterlife).

And that is exactly what I think. When I talk about these matters specifically, I try to always point out the different points of view, and their strengths and weaknesses. This is precisely what I do not see sometimes in the exposition of many psi researchers (and survival researchers too) and of physicists supporting "spiritualism" (Henry Stapp) or supporting "materialism" (Victor Stenger). And that is precisely what I almost never see in the exposition of the pseudoskeptics (CSICOP and friends, including Victor Stenger with full ten negative stars!).   

Thus, Siqueira has many arguments and ideas that are incompatible to each other and refute themselves. He seems to be inclined to accept one or other conclusion if they fit his previous opinion about the matter. He is not a materialist, but uses arguments dependent (in its force) of materialism to argue against the dualist filter theory, and misconstruct key points of the arguments analyzed.

I believe now Jime will see this in a different way. Unfortunatelly, he or she does not provide even an email. But his/her blog is very good and worth of reading. His/her ideas and opinions are intelligent and constructive, and often quite insightful.

Said that, you can judge by yourself if the the arguments used by Siqueira justify his initial point about the "a lot of problems" of the book reviewed by him, and the low rate he give to it.

Just by the way... I still have many of the "lots of problems" left to mention. Anyway, I think I did mention the most important ones. So, as Jime said, be the judge:

Please, visit Julio Siqueira's anti-pseudoskeptical website here. You can find there some good material.

Thank you, Jime (this link).    See  Bellow  a  Follow-up  to  this  exchange  of  viewpoints: