Here is a link to some reading about Charles Tart's experiments....

http://www.near-death.com/tart.html

Beatya' to it

But even though Tart's experiments are among the more commonly known, it simply goes to show that the information is there for those who really wish to investigate on their own. The more one looks ( I've been at it for 8 years), the more one will find data, anecdotes, and phenomena which seem to defy society's present worldview, and require philosophical re-inquiry into old assumptions.

I can understand when people question the credibility of individual researchers, but when respected universities produce data that correlate from sepparate experiments, it takes claims of nothing less than co-conspiracy to attack the findings; that is the scientific method- when an experiment produces repeatable results, and can performed in other parts of the world, with different teams, to the same result, that result gains the title of "statistical significance", and researchers are forced to either integrate the results into their current theories, or find some explanation the fits the descrepancy.

Just because something may seem unlikely to an individual, that does not give them the right to pick and choose which repeatable experiments are real, and which are mistakes- that sort of bias is the antithesis of what the scientific method represents.

Although I don't remember the individuals involved (weak, I know), I recall people on this site claiming that they can determine five or six digit number pretty much everytime. If you go to Robert Bruce's site, astral dynamics, you can post a question to him on their forum. I disagree with some of his ideas, but he is still a library of information about the phenomenon, and knows dozens of people who can do this with ease; you might even check the question archives, as someone is bound to have asked the same (I asked it way back in the day )

I refer you again to Charles Tart's experiment, where Miss Z apparently does just what you say:

http://www.psywww.com/asc/obe/missz.html

I may try AP just to try out some experiments, but my beliefs more or less stay the same.
Thanks for your post.

There! The human condition

I am glad you can at least entertain possibilities- that is what this site is all about.

While what you describe sounds dubious, I am not sure it qualifies as Blackmail; I think a necessary part of Blackmail is threatening to reveal something, or in some way damage another person if the money or services desired are not forthcoming; I think what you described is some form of Extortion, a broader set of crimes, which are related to Blackmail, but are normally based on coercsion, rather than a threat to reveal information.

I would do some legal research and pin down the exact crime commited, and see what evidence you can legally gather. If you are serious about this, I would not do too much more without consulting an attorney, as you can destroy your case based on how the evidence is obtained.

If you don't risk anything of yourself by going to jail or anything, yeah sure do it.
If you do risk going to jail, just let it go.

But don't take my word for it, I'm a troll who doesn't help people.

I think they said you were some kind of acne thing, lol- they called Hisoka a troll. Your extended reaction is too funny, lol; you really have to just ignore all of that stuff.

Hi Mustardseed,

I understand where you are coming from, and have followed the thread from the beggining, and have seen the behavior you are describing; I also believe that if a person truly is disruptive, and repeats the same behavior, it is best to see it for what it is and pay it no attention, as doing so is an invitation for more of the same.

I do stand by what I said, in that it is best for the discussion if the focus is not on the individuals themselves involved, but rather what they have to say.

If what they say is of merit, then we respond accordingly; if it isn't, we courteously offer our counter-reasoning; if what they say is inane, or they repeat the same statements without reading what others have to say, they are probably not contributing and it is best to ignore them, without making reference.

When forum members begin posting comments about the character of other members, it is clear that control has been broken, no?

Please do not feel I am talking down to you, as I understand your position; I am merely stating my observation that both "sides" are acting rudely, and some reflection upon what has developed into a complicated social combat might be in order.

P.S. :

http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/diplomat.htm

This one looks like a role I seem to fill too often, lol; speaking vaguely, as you can see it suits me, I have seen examples of each of these "net personalities", and the majority of them do seem to have a close representative on this forum   

I think everyone needs to stop bickering, lol.


We have 5 pages of banter not even related to the topic, and it shows no signs of stopping.


This thread has formed its own subcultures! That is nothing short of a sociological marvel!


There are now two camps organized around competing belief systems, and each poster seems to be strongly identifying themself with one of them, and defending against its offences!

We need to stop arguements against individual people; if this discussion is to generate anything useful, we must sepparate arguements and ideas from the people who made them, and analyze them on their own merits;furthermore, before anyone goes supporting their belief system, it is courteous to address the objections of the other side, otherwise the converstation will continue to circle as it has done for days.

I think those 11 dimensions are based on Super-string theory, or its successor theory- they don't necessarily mean the same thing as "plane"; they seem to describe the peculiar property of the universe Super-string theory predcits to fold in on itself, but mainly on a microscopic level.

I think there may be some bit of confusion with spatial dimensions and planes of existence, as many people seem to come to the conclusion that we are on a "third plane", because we exist in three dimensions, lol. Although there may be planes where it is possible to experience more than three spatial dimesions at once, I think the fact that we experience three is not grounds for any sort of conclusion.

On the number of planes in the universe:

Who knows? 

My tendancy would be to say infinite, because, with the starting point of a universe based on Idealism (which you may or may not accept), with its corollary that mind itself is infinite, the number of planes might also follow that rule; but that might be another misconception, who can really say?

Hisoka:

I've not followed the entire convo here, but I'll just jump in and be a prat and just react, if you don't all mind.
Now, Joe, how can the activity in the brain be ''just a reflection'' of what is in the mind or ''soul''? Where would this soul be then?

Hi Hisoka,

To butt in again, and offer solutions to problems posed to other people.....

As this thread has demonstrated before, Materialism, that doctine that states that mind is a product of brain (matter), has numerous strong qualities, since it seems to perfectly describe our apparently mechanical universe, and the fact that things which happen to our brain, such as a concussion, directly affect our consciousness; that would make sense, if the brain were producing our consciousness, no?

But, as I have shown in other posts, and in another parellel thread, though a theory, like Newtonian physics, can describe the real world in most cases, if there are exceptions and loopholes to this explanation, such as Relativisitic physics introduces and explains, then the theory is either incomplete, a mere approximation of what is actually occuring, or, looked at another way, and entirely invalid model of reality.

Now I am not saying Materialism is wrong, as no one has the authority to say so, but

1)It cannot explain instances, like project PEAR at princeton, when mind can apparently affect physical universe, or instances when it can gather information about it outside of senses, such as experiments like Charles Tart performed with Miss Z.

2)It does not address the "Hard problem of Consciousness", namely why a brain, a thing composed of matter, which is composed of dead things called atoms, can manifest awareness if organized in the proper fashion- it has been demonstated that if Materialism is true, and brains really can produce every aspect of a mind, including awareness, then machines such as computers could also be aware if built with enough complexity.

Now number one is strong, as it is built on a massive amount of anecdotal evidence, but if you choose to say that all of those individuals, many of them disciplined experts of their field in a labratory setting, all produced erroneous data, then I think number 2 is still enough to put a major roadblock in declaring Materialism fact, as Materialism can address how our brains produce cognition, and store memories, but not why we have an experience of thinking, or feeling. The brain, on the level we understand it, is a machine for gathering, storing, and transducing data in the form of chemical bonds and electrochemical signals, and neither data, nor the machines that handle data, should in any way experience that data.

On the location of a "soul":

No one said we had such a thing, or why if we did, it must have a spatial location; for example:

Imagine you are experiencing a virtual reality setting; you could ask yourself, "Where in this world am 'I' ?"
Now you can see the location of your representative body, but that doesn't really tell you where 'you' are, as you know this to only be an illusion to be in keeping with the virtual environment. 'You' actually do have a location, but it is one that transcends the virtual environment, so it is useless to describe that location in any refrence to the virtual environment.

Perhaps our awareness, which some call "soul" (I try to avoid the word as it is associated primarily with dualism) has the same relationship to our body that the person experiencing the virtual world has to their virual representation. Since our awareness may in fact transcend what our senses tell us is a physical world, what is the sense in looking for our mind "here or there"? Yes, our brains seem to account for most of our mental functions, but cannot account for all of them (such as awareness of experinece), so why is the mind necessarily there?

Don't make me cut and paste Chalmers again, lol.....

Well, I hate to reuse posts, but this is one I used in another thread (Experiment to prove past lives in metaphysics section of this forum) that I think perfectly addresses the issue being raised here again, namely why materialism hasn't proven the brain can account for every aspect of of consciousness (the major bone being the inability for materialism to account for qualities such as "awareness", which a mere collection of atoms cannot explain), and thus shows how science has far from disproven Idealism and dualism. I wish there was a link to send someone to whenever this Mind-body arguement arose in the forums (as it seems to every week), as so much has already been said on the subject in history, but I guess material like this from Chalmers is the next best thing. I seem to adopt this as my "pet issue" whenever a new group of posters arrives, lol.

Now pay attention to the fact that Chalmers does not say that the answer is outside of science, as it clearly isn't, since science takes as its goal an understanding of the entire universe, whatever non-physical elements it may or may not contain; furthermore, he does not make the mistake of saying that science has already solved the problem through materialism, as so many dangerously assume.


_________________________________

I can probably not explain the issue as well as the professionals, so here is an excerpt from Chalmers (link provided again) to better elucidate the issue, with the parts I think are most important underlined:

http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

1 Introduction
Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given.

To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. I critique some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness, and argue that such methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the door to further progress is opened. In the second half of the paper, I argue that if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given. I put forward my own candidate for such an account: a nonreductive theory based on principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance and a double-aspect view of information.

2 The easy problems and the hard problem
There is not just one problem of consciousness. "Consciousness" is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others. At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into "hard" and "easy" problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.

The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:


the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
the integration of information by a cognitive system;
the reportability of mental states;
the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
the focus of attention;
the deliberate control of behavior;
the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. For example, one sometimes says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake.

There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. To explain access and reportability, for example, we need only specify the mechanism by which information about internal states is retrieved and made available for verbal report. To explain the integration of information, we need only exhibit mechanisms by which information is brought together and exploited by later processes. For an account of sleep and wakefulness, an appropriate neurophysiological account of the processes responsible for organisms' contrasting behavior in those states will suffice. In each case, an appropriate cognitive or neurophysiological model can clearly do the explanatory work.

If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem. Although we do not yet have anything close to a complete explanation of these phenomena, we have a clear idea of how we might go about explaining them. This is why I call these problems the easy problems. Of course, "easy" is a relative term. Getting the details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work. Still, there is every reason to believe that the methods of cognitive science and neuroscience will succeed.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as "phenomenal consciousness" and "qualia" are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of "conscious experience" or simply "experience". Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g. Newell 1990, Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term "consciousness" for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term "awareness" for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about "consciousness" are frequently talking past each other.

The ambiguity of the term "consciousness" is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists writing on the subject. It is common to see a paper on consciousness begin with an invocation of the mystery of consciousness, noting the strange intangibility and ineffability of subjectivity, and worrying that so far we have no theory of the phenomenon. Here, the topic is clearly the hard problem - the problem of experience. In the second half of the paper, the tone becomes more optimistic, and the author's own theory of consciousness is outlined. Upon examination, this theory turns out to be a theory of one of the more straightforward phenomena - of reportability, of introspective access, or whatever. At the close, the author declares that consciousness has turned out to be tractable after all, but the reader is left feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch. The hard problem remains untouched.
3 Functional explanation

Why are the easy problems easy, and why is the hard problem hard? The easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions. To explain a cognitive function, we need only specify a mechanism that can perform the function. The methods of cognitive science are well-suited for this sort of explanation, and so are well-suited to the easy problems of consciousness. By contrast, the hard problem is hard precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions. The problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained. (Here "function" is not used in the narrow teleological sense of something that a system is designed to do, but in the broader sense of any causal role in the production of behavior that a system might perform.)

To explain reportability, for instance, is just to explain how a system could perform the function of producing reports on internal states. To explain internal access, we need to explain how a system could be appropriately affected by its internal states and use information about those states in directing later processes. To explain integration and control, we need to explain how a system's central processes can bring information contents together and use them in the facilitation of various behaviors. These are all problems about the explanation of functions.

How do we explain the performance of a function? By specifying a mechanism that performs the function. Here, neurophysiological and cognitive modeling are perfect for the task. If we want a detailed low-level explanation, we can specify the neural mechanism that is responsible for the function. If we want a more abstract explanation, we can specify a mechanism in computational terms. Either way, a full and satisfying explanation will result. Once we have specified the neural or computational mechanism that performs the function of verbal report, for example, the bulk of our work in explaining reportability is over.

In a way, the point is trivial. It is a conceptual fact about these phenomena that their explanation only involves the explanation of various functions, as the phenomena are functionally definable. All it means for reportability to be instantiated in a system is that the system has the capacity for verbal reports of internal information. All it means for a system to be awake is for it to be appropriately receptive to information from the environment and for it to be able to use this information in directing behavior in an appropriate way. To see that this sort of thing is a conceptual fact, note that someone who says "you have explained the performance of the verbal report function, but you have not explained reportability" is making a trivial conceptual mistake about reportability. All it could possibly take to explain reportability is an explanation of how the relevant function is performed; the same goes for the other phenomena in question.

Throughout the higher-level sciences, reductive explanation works in just this way. To explain the gene, for instance, we needed to specify the mechanism that stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next. It turns out that DNA performs this function; once we explain how the function is performed, we have explained the gene. To explain life, we ultimately need to explain how a system can reproduce, adapt to its environment, metabolize, and so on. All of these are questions about the performance of functions, and so are well-suited to reductive explanation. The same holds for most problems in cognitive science. To explain learning, we need to explain the way in which a system's behavioral capacities are modified in light of environmental information, and the way in which new information can be brought to bear in adapting a system's actions to its environment. If we show how a neural or computational mechanism does the job, we have explained learning. We can say the same for other cognitive phenomena, such as perception, memory, and language. Sometimes the relevant functions need to be characterized quite subtly, but it is clear that insofar as cognitive science explains these phenomena at all, it does so by explaining the performance of functions.

When it comes to conscious experience, this sort of explanation fails. What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience - perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report - there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open.

There is no analogous further question in the explanation of genes, or of life, or of learning. If someone says "I can see that you have explained how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next, but you have not explained how it is a gene", then they are making a conceptual mistake. All it means to be a gene is to be an entity that performs the relevant storage and transmission function. But if someone says "I can see that you have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but you have not explained how it is experienced", they are not making a conceptual mistake. This is a nontrivial further question.

This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere.

This is not to say that experience has no function. Perhaps it will turn out to play an important cognitive role. But for any role it might play, there will be more to the explanation of experience than a simple explanation of the function. Perhaps it will even turn out that in the course of explaining a function, we will be led to the key insight that allows an explanation of experience. If this happens, though, the discovery will be an extra explanatory reward. There is no cognitive function such that we can say in advance that explanation of that function will automatically explain experience.

To explain experience, we need a new approach. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say.

4 Some case-studies

In the last few years, a number of works have addressed the problems of consciousness within the framework of cognitive science and neuroscience. This might suggest that the analysis above is faulty, but in fact a close examination of the relevant work only lends the analysis further support. When we investigate just which aspects of consciousness these studies are aimed at, and which aspects they end up explaining, we find that the ultimate target of explanation is always one of the easy problems.

___________________________________

Okay, so Chalmers covers so many ideas, but most importantly, he explains why describing how the functions of the brain are performed does not explain the "Hard Problem" of awareness that accompanies some of these functions.

I really hope you can see why this is such an issue, and how unassailible it has proven, even to modern neuroscience.

Feel free to read the entire link, and any information you can find, as I think it is useful to a person interested in pschology and neurobiology, and what has and hasn't been achieved by the sciences to this date.


Quote

From our point of view the robot has no consciousness, but what if human beings don't have consciousness either? Can you actually say a human being other then yourself has it?
Why do you think you have it? "I think therefor I am?"

Yes, that is a problem philosophy also recognizes, and I agree it may be impossible to prove.

An interesting thing, though, is that Chalmers' "Hard Problem" of consciousness still exists even if there is only one aware entity in the universe (for every person, that one they call "me"), as the problem of awareness still exists then.

But I do think "I think, therefore I am" is ample proof to a self-aware organism of its own existence- this principle, which as you probably know, was proposed by Rene Descartes as his Cogito, or the one thing he could easily prove without any other information but his mind, has never to my recollection been disproven.


Quote

If I make my choises based on how I feel about the choise.
The feeling makes the choise, not me.
Because there is no "me".

Maybe there is a thing like consciousness but it is so queer that it can't make it's own decisions.
It is merely an observer?

If this was right, why the need for the observer?

Well, I do agree that if Materialism is true then we don't have free-will, and so basically can't really make choices, but even if awareness only existed as an observer believing it was making choices, as you say (and I would agree with, within materialism), it would still be a (queer, yes) type of awareness, and this still subject to Chalmers' "Hard Problem". 

I hate to go on and on about this Chalmer's guy, and how he had problems and stuff, but I think he really highlights the essence of what a person examining the issue philosophically should be take note of.


Quote

If this was right, why the need for the observer?
And that is where I think it logically eliminates that.
Which only leaves matter.
A biological organism that is build for progress.

Well, it comes down not to propriety, but reality, I guess. No one can say why there is awareness, or if it should be there, but that does not change the fact it is, even if it is not needed for the function of an organism.

Another merely accademic issue, lol, but still important: most biologists, especially Materialists, do not believe evolution is progress based, but rather generates a timeline of organisms which were statistically likely in a given situation to produce offspring. In the famous moth case, a moth whose species was mostly light colored, to blend into birch trees, later evolved to have mostly darker individuals, as industrialization darkened trees, later, with better pollution standards, they went back to the lighter kind! So you can see there is no real progress per se, but rather adaptation to environment. But I am splitting hairs, and you probably understood this, despite the wording.

Or lady, if that is what you were

sk8tchik --> "skate chick"?

Well, I would look at it this way- this whole 2012 business started with the Mayan calender, and a bunch of people, among them a minority of respected researchers, and a whole group of clowns, seizing this idea and making all sort of theories out of it; so the real thing to remember is that the only thing which significantly supports the idea is the original Mayan calender source material, regardless of what people are shouting back and forth about it.

I for one, am not convinced, but there seem two possibilities:

- The whole thing is a big misunderstanding, and people got excited over nothing; you survive past 2012, nothing the worse for it.

- Pandemonium ensues, the Pope is proven to be the Antichrist, it rains skittles, and we die; the mystical presentience of the Mayans "proves" there really is a spiritual realm, and we pass on to other planes, nothing the worse for it.

Now I think there very may well be some sort of spiritual realm, as the collective anecdotes and reasoning I have faced over the years implies its possible existence, but I don't think we need "2012" to prove it, lol.
Either way, you win!

Lol, dude.....

You are going to have to draw these with paint or something over the images....

I can't really see them, lol, just a bunch of pictures of the carpet...

Not saying they are not there ( and I don't mean this saracastically), it is just that I only see the carpet...

I think the pope one is visible to me, but the rest escape me.

I have moved a lot as a child, though, so I totally get the box furniture

I think you both make logial points in different posts, but I also think this discussion has degenerated, lol.
You both apparently have good intentions, and I don't like silencing people, so do as suits you, lol, but I think this line of exchanges is getting  ugly

(Ducks back into trench with helmet)

Racism is an odd thing....

There are times when it is so apparent and striking, yet no one does anything about it; there are other times when a person is so accustomed to seeing it, they begin to see it everyplace, even when it doesn't exist. These people have good intentions, as they are trying to point out the descrepancies they think exist, but they unfortuantely hurt the greater cause, as now others think that whenever someone brings up racism, they are a hypochondriac of sorts.

It is much like the "Boy who cried wolf" case.

There is so much confusion about the issue, it is difficult to determine when it is occuring and when the appearance of racism is just a correlation, or a person looking for attention- which is sad, as survey data, in my opinion, clearly shows it is occuring, at least in the States.

I am sorry about what happened to you, I can easily believe the story, unfortunately.

[The hard problem remains untouched.]

I'm sorry but I still disagree.
Because (now bear with me because this is going to sound queer), the only problem with materialism according to you is that it does not explain awareness.

No need to be sorry- better than to keep those beliefs that make sense to us than to allow others to convince us of strange ideas. My goal here is not to convince you, but rather that you understand the problems which are associated with various viewpoints.

That is not the only problem, but almost definitely the biggest one, and one which most folks who are familiar with the arguements feel is fatal to materialism unless it can be answered.

I can probably not explain the issue as well as the professionals, so here is an excerpt from Chalmers (link provided again) to better elucidate the issue, with the parts I think are most important underlined:

http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

1 Introduction
Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given.

To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. I critique some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness, and argue that such methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the door to further progress is opened. In the second half of the paper, I argue that if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given. I put forward my own candidate for such an account: a nonreductive theory based on principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance and a double-aspect view of information.

2 The easy problems and the hard problem
There is not just one problem of consciousness. "Consciousness" is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others. At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into "hard" and "easy" problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.

The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:


the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
the integration of information by a cognitive system;
the reportability of mental states;
the ability of a system to access its own internal states;
the focus of attention;
the deliberate control of behavior;
the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness. For example, one sometimes says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake.

There is no real issue about whether these phenomena can be explained scientifically. All of them are straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. To explain access and reportability, for example, we need only specify the mechanism by which information about internal states is retrieved and made available for verbal report. To explain the integration of information, we need only exhibit mechanisms by which information is brought together and exploited by later processes. For an account of sleep and wakefulness, an appropriate neurophysiological account of the processes responsible for organisms' contrasting behavior in those states will suffice. In each case, an appropriate cognitive or neurophysiological model can clearly do the explanatory work.

If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem. Although we do not yet have anything close to a complete explanation of these phenomena, we have a clear idea of how we might go about explaining them. This is why I call these problems the easy problems. Of course, "easy" is a relative term. Getting the details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work. Still, there is every reason to believe that the methods of cognitive science and neuroscience will succeed.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of "consciousness", an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as "phenomenal consciousness" and "qualia" are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of "conscious experience" or simply "experience". Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g. Newell 1990, Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term "consciousness" for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term "awareness" for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about "consciousness" are frequently talking past each other.

The ambiguity of the term "consciousness" is often exploited by both philosophers and scientists writing on the subject. It is common to see a paper on consciousness begin with an invocation of the mystery of consciousness, noting the strange intangibility and ineffability of subjectivity, and worrying that so far we have no theory of the phenomenon. Here, the topic is clearly the hard problem - the problem of experience. In the second half of the paper, the tone becomes more optimistic, and the author's own theory of consciousness is outlined. Upon examination, this theory turns out to be a theory of one of the more straightforward phenomena - of reportability, of introspective access, or whatever. At the close, the author declares that consciousness has turned out to be tractable after all, but the reader is left feeling like the victim of a bait-and-switch. The hard problem remains untouched.

3 Functional explanation

Why are the easy problems easy, and why is the hard problem hard? The easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions. To explain a cognitive function, we need only specify a mechanism that can perform the function. The methods of cognitive science are well-suited for this sort of explanation, and so are well-suited to the easy problems of consciousness. By contrast, the hard problem is hard precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions. The problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained. (Here "function" is not used in the narrow teleological sense of something that a system is designed to do, but in the broader sense of any causal role in the production of behavior that a system might perform.)

To explain reportability, for instance, is just to explain how a system could perform the function of producing reports on internal states. To explain internal access, we need to explain how a system could be appropriately affected by its internal states and use information about those states in directing later processes. To explain integration and control, we need to explain how a system's central processes can bring information contents together and use them in the facilitation of various behaviors. These are all problems about the explanation of functions.

How do we explain the performance of a function? By specifying a mechanism that performs the function. Here, neurophysiological and cognitive modeling are perfect for the task. If we want a detailed low-level explanation, we can specify the neural mechanism that is responsible for the function. If we want a more abstract explanation, we can specify a mechanism in computational terms. Either way, a full and satisfying explanation will result. Once we have specified the neural or computational mechanism that performs the function of verbal report, for example, the bulk of our work in explaining reportability is over.

In a way, the point is trivial. It is a conceptual fact about these phenomena that their explanation only involves the explanation of various functions, as the phenomena are functionally definable. All it means for reportability to be instantiated in a system is that the system has the capacity for verbal reports of internal information. All it means for a system to be awake is for it to be appropriately receptive to information from the environment and for it to be able to use this information in directing behavior in an appropriate way. To see that this sort of thing is a conceptual fact, note that someone who says "you have explained the performance of the verbal report function, but you have not explained reportability" is making a trivial conceptual mistake about reportability. All it could possibly take to explain reportability is an explanation of how the relevant function is performed; the same goes for the other phenomena in question.

Throughout the higher-level sciences, reductive explanation works in just this way. To explain the gene, for instance, we needed to specify the mechanism that stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next. It turns out that DNA performs this function; once we explain how the function is performed, we have explained the gene. To explain life, we ultimately need to explain how a system can reproduce, adapt to its environment, metabolize, and so on. All of these are questions about the performance of functions, and so are well-suited to reductive explanation. The same holds for most problems in cognitive science. To explain learning, we need to explain the way in which a system's behavioral capacities are modified in light of environmental information, and the way in which new information can be brought to bear in adapting a system's actions to its environment. If we show how a neural or computational mechanism does the job, we have explained learning. We can say the same for other cognitive phenomena, such as perception, memory, and language. Sometimes the relevant functions need to be characterized quite subtly, but it is clear that insofar as cognitive science explains these phenomena at all, it does so by explaining the performance of functions.

When it comes to conscious experience, this sort of explanation fails. What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience - perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report - there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open.

There is no analogous further question in the explanation of genes, or of life, or of learning. If someone says "I can see that you have explained how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next, but you have not explained how it is a gene", then they are making a conceptual mistake. All it means to be a gene is to be an entity that performs the relevant storage and transmission function. But if someone says "I can see that you have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but you have not explained how it is experienced", they are not making a conceptual mistake. This is a nontrivial further question.

This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel? Why is it that when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere.

This is not to say that experience has no function. Perhaps it will turn out to play an important cognitive role. But for any role it might play, there will be more to the explanation of experience than a simple explanation of the function. Perhaps it will even turn out that in the course of explaining a function, we will be led to the key insight that allows an explanation of experience. If this happens, though, the discovery will be an extra explanatory reward. There is no cognitive function such that we can say in advance that explanation of that function will automatically explain experience.

To explain experience, we need a new approach. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say.

4 Some case-studies

In the last few years, a number of works have addressed the problems of consciousness within the framework of cognitive science and neuroscience. This might suggest that the analysis above is faulty, but in fact a close examination of the relevant work only lends the analysis further support. When we investigate just which aspects of consciousness these studies are aimed at, and which aspects they end up explaining, we find that the ultimate target of explanation is always one of the easy problems.

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Okay, so Chalmers covers so many ideas, but most importantly, he explains why describing how the functions of the brain are performed does not explain the "Hard Problem" of awareness that accompanies some of these functions.

I really hope you can see why this is such an issue, and how unassailible it has proven, even to modern neuroscience.

Feel free to read the entire link, and any information you can find, as I think it is useful to a person interested in pschology and neurobiology, and what has and hasn't been achieved by the sciences to this date.

From our point of view the robot has no consciousness, but what if human beings don't have consciousness either? Can you actually say a human being other then yourself has it?
Why do you think you have it? "I think therefor I am?"

Yes, that is a problem philosophy also recognizes, and I agree it may be impossible to prove.

An interesting thing, though, is that Chalmers' "Hard Problem" of consciousness still exists even if there is only one aware entity in the universe (for every person, that one they call "me"), as the problem of awareness still exists then.

But I do think "I think, therefore I am" is ample proof to a self-aware organism of its own existence- this principle, which as you probably know, was proposed by Rene Descartes as his Cogito, or the one thing he could easily prove without any other information but his mind, has never to my recollection been disproven.

If I make my choises based on how I feel about the choise.
The feeling makes the choise, not me.
Because there is no "me".

Maybe there is a thing like consciousness but it is so queer that it can't make it's own decisions.
It is merely an observer?

If this was right, why the need for the observer?

Well, I do agree that if Materialism is true then we don't have free-will, and so basically can't really make choices, but even if awareness only existed as an observer believing it was making choices, as you say (and I would agree with, within materialism), it would still be a (queer, yes) type of awareness, and this still subject to Chalmers' "Hard Problem". 

I hate to go on and on about this Chalmer's guy, and how he had problems and stuff, but I think he really highlights the essence of what a person examining the issue philosophically should be take note of.

If this was right, why the need for the observer?
And that is where I think it logically eliminates that.
Which only leaves matter.
A biological organism that is build for progress.

Well, it comes down not to propiety, but reality, I guess. No one can say why there is awareness, or if it should be there, but that does not change the fact it is, even if it is not needed for the function of an organism.

Another merely accademic issue, lol, but still important: most biologists, especially Materialists, do not believe evolution is progress based, but rather generates a timeline of organisms which were statistically likely in a given situation to produce offspring. In the famous moth case, a moth whose species was mostly light colored, to blend into birch trees, later evolved to have mostly darker individuals, as industrialization darkened trees, later, with better pollution standards, they went back to the lighter kind! So you can see there is no real progress per se, but rather adaptation to environment. But I am splitting hairs, and you probably understood this, despite the wording.



sk8chik:

wow thanks again Stillwater

I think the fundamental discrepancy in defense of materialism is the definition of "consciousness". A machine can be programmed to act like an eye and interpret light and analyze it, and say understand that the light it is receiving is blue. That merely gives the machine the data that it has seen blue light, with which it can manipulate/use that data. But that is entirely different from the conscious experience of actually seeing blue light.

Yes, Chalmers points out just this idea in the above excerpt

It looks like I am writing a book, lol....