THE INTEGRITY PAPERS Genre Group  - Buchanan      ceptualinstitute.com

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THE NOETIC JOURNAL
an international forum on the cosmology of consciousness
Vol.1, No.1,Summer 1997

AN INTER-DISCIPLINARY
PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL

Quantum Physics -
Why Classical Mechanics Cannot Naturally
     Accommodate Consciousness but Quantum
    Mechanics can                                                                      Henry P. Stapp, Ph.D.
Commentary on Stapp: Call for a Model
     of Deep Ontology                                                          Richard L Amoroso, Ph.D.

     The Noetic Press, 120 Village Sq. #49, Orinda, Ca 94567-2502 USA

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VALUES, SYSTEMS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

composed February 14, 1997      by Bruce Buchanan, M.D.*


Abstract:

Major problems facing research in cognitive sciences involve the adequacy of language and of models of biological functions and human experience. This paper suggests a model based upon cybernetics which describes consciousness in terms of values (i.e. criteria for making choices), and the guidance of integrative functions in dealing with novel situations and resolving conflicts.  On this view, consciousness is a highly variable complex set of functions organized to monitor and govern key adaptive mechanisms, to meet needs and to secure  and extend the aims of life, however these are perceived and valued by the organism.

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* Bruce Buchanan, M.D., D Psych., is a recently retired physician who has had a career in medical practice, public health, psychiatry, university teaching, and in governmental policy studies and management, with a lifelong interest in philosophy and cybernetics:
           Dr. B. H. Buchanan             Phone and fax:   (416) 231-6235
           4690 Dundas St. West           Internet: 
           Toronto (Etobicoke), Ontario
           M9A 1A6         CANADA

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SUMMARY:   ABRIDGED VERSION

The thesis of this paper is that consciousness involves integrative functions which evaluate ongoing experiences to assist with purposeful behavior. Consciousness is built upon and in turn regulates the feedback of information which links perception and response and which make specific adaptations possible. While consciousness is influenced by processes outside of awareness, and informed by feeling, memory and conceptual thought, it is most specifically engaged by novelty and perceived conflict.

Currently emerging ideas in relation to consciousness hold the possibility of altering man's view of his own nature, and changing the way we see our place in the world.

Many authors have described important limitations in established scientific criteria and methods in relation to consciousness studies. There is general agreement that immediate experience provides fundamental data. According to the thesis offered here, the ingredients needed to build an adequate theory may be found in the cybernetic processes involved in evaluation and
feedback. Such processes involve valuation criteria at many levels as well as basic conditions for perception of time itself.

Values are the criteria and measures which provide the basis for feedback which govern patterns of purposeful behavior. Where there is purposive action there are systemic values which measure effects. Where there are no conscious purposes there are nevertheless values which stabilize maintenance functions.

And time is part of consciousness insofar as human perception and action involve realtionships of before and after, and of change.

An adequate theory of consciousness will have explanatory power both in accounting for meaning in one's own consciousness as a subject, and in accounting for abservations of other human beings and living creatures. Not all the possibilities inherent in human consciousness can be formalized i.e. known fully in advance. Much can be understood, but there are no boundaries on the future. Moreover, useful approaches must recognize that, in addition to semantic and syntactic meaning, concepts also have a pragmatic dimension.

A scientific epistemology involves a circular dependency of evidence upon theory. If this circle is not to remain closed, special attention must be paid to the nature of possible new evidence.

Systems are most usefully defined by their outcomes and effects. Intended outcomes or purposes are stabilized by evaluation of effects and feedback of information concerning errors to adjust the causal factors. Alterations in evaluative criteria at higher levels of organization make posssible a progressive liberation from the immediate effects of lower level contingencies. The elaboration of more abstract and inclusive goal structures and values make possible some relative freedom from immediate circumstances. It is the contribution of consciousness to help maximize this potentiality.

Language is a basic requirement for man's second nature, which involves the context of culture, with all the ideas and beliefs that includes, including sciences and studies of the humanities.  It is the nature of language that it is consensual (which makes nonsense of the question as to whether minds can exist independently of the first person knower and speaker.)

The view which may be termed 'scientific realism' holds that scientific theories are the best guide we have to what really is, and there is obviously a certain truth in this. But to take the step of identifying the best current knowledge as identical to the actual causes of everything that happens in the world (and in the brain) is not warranted, and is a source of intractable confusion. Human knowledge is inherently indeterminate in relation to the actual external world.

These views challenge the  widely accepted thesis that conscious experience has a physical basis i.e. that the properties of experience (phenomenal properties, or qualia) systematically depend on physical properties - as understood by physical science.   Certainly they may be understood in this way, but the actualities on which they really depend cannot be so described without an indeterminate residue. And what is left out of account is precisely that which is vital in relation to immediate experience. The (conceptual) map is not the (experiential, existential) territory.

The present approach is seen as compatible with, and perhaps supportive of, a number of other theories of consciousness which have been advanced. But an open approach to evidence suggests that there may be elements of human experience which do not fit neatly within present theories. We need ways and means by which to identify or capture reportable and recurrent phenomena, and somehow validate these, especially data for which no existing theories offer an explanation.

        Abstract  -  Noetic Journal    Title page 
        Part  1 - Approach ; Consideration ; Methods ; Models
        Part  2 - Medicine ; Epistemology ; Cybernetics ; Language ; Popper ; Consciousness ; the Hypothesis
        Part  3 - the Hypothesis (con't) ; Implications ; Evidence ; Conclusion ; References

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