intelligence
rs...@nycap.rr.com
the relationship between body and soul. Some, of course, are not aware
that there is a problem. Let them be happy in their ignorance. Do not
disturb.
Others are aware of a pseudo-problem that they lay to a poor choice of
words, a misuse of language. They tend to be very, very clever. They
turn on a spigot, and a rush of words befogs the question.
Soul (spirit, essence, psyche, mind, consciousness, awareness,
intelligence, intellect, mentality, self, individuality, persona,
personality, conscious mental field, self awareness, sentience,
executive function).
All these words imply an uneasiness with soul. All these words imply
an object, or something approaching an object. Something we might
carry about in a watch pocket and take out for display at an
appropriate time.
Such a diarrhea of the mouth. There is no talking to them. They have
surrounded themselves with such a fortress of words that they cannot
hear.
---- ---
Definition of soul:
1. (philosophical) the immaterial essence, animating principle, or
actuating cause of an individual life.
2. (theological) the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all
rational and spiritual beings, or the universe.
--- ---
In more recent metaphysics less has been heard of the soul and more of
the mind; the old problem of the relationship of soul and body is now
that of the relationship of mind and body.
A few have carefully parsed the question: Chalmers, an optimist, says
we need a new physics. McGinn, a pessimist, replies, "Save your
breath".
The practical issue, in questions of intelligence, arises when we ask,
"Does the soul (mind) have causal powers?" The scientist demands,
"No!" The religionist asserts, "Yes!" Descartes said, "Yes". The
Princess Elizabeth said, "No". There it rests.
The late Sir Francis Crick looked for the neural correlate of
consciousness (NCC). He failed, but not for lack of trying.
If we should isolate a neuron, such that every time it burst you
should experience a patch of blue, a quale, and if we should go
further, and connect a button to the neuron so that every time you
pushed the button, you should be aware of a patch of blue, would you
feel in touch with your soul? Most would say, "No!"
Would you even feel that you understood why you experienced the blue?
Again, Chalmers says, "We need a new physics to understand the
experiencing". Again, McGinn replies, "Saved your breath".
You, a soul, experience a world. You know not why.
Let us explain intelligence as a circuitry of neurons. Let us put
qualia one side as a matter of religion.
ray
brian fletcher
<rs...@nycap.rr.com> wrote in message
news:f93b8a94-7c1a-4c5f...@x41g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
Excellent post ray.
Im reminded of such koans as "the eye cannot see itself".
On a point of semantics. People interpret words in sync. with their state of
consciousness, so when comments are made regarding the location of "their"
soul,they are actually contributing to their barriers of identity (self
dialouge could be a component of 'new science', as an adjunct to quantum
physics....but I dont have to hold my breath ;-))...When I finally realized
that I am soul, a whole new perspective of 'authenticity' opened up.
Hope to hear more from you on alt.philosophy.
BOfL
turtoni
soul = consciousness
"Philosophical criticisms of the concept of consciousness
From the eighteenth to twentieth centuries many philosophers
concentrated on relations, processes and thought as the most important
aspects of consciousness. These aspects would later become known as
"access consciousness" and this focus on relations allowed
philosophers such as Marx, Nietzsche and Foucault to claim that
individual consciousness was dependent on such factors as social
relations, political relations and ideology.
Locke's "forensic" notion of personal identity founded on an
individual conscious subject would be criticized in the 19th century
by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud following different angles. Martin
Heidegger's concept of the Dasein ("Being-there") would also be an
attempt to think beyond the conscious subject.
Marx considered that social relations ontologically preceded
individual consciousness, and criticized the conception of a conscious
subject as an ideological conception on which liberal political
thought was founded. Marx in particular criticized the 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, considering that
the so-called individual natural rights were ideological fictions
camouflaging social inequality in the attribution of those rights.
Later, Louis Althusser would criticize the "bourgeois ideology of the
subject" through the concept of interpellation ("Hey, you!").
Nietzsche, for his part, once wrote that "they give you free will only
to later blame yourself", thus reversing the classical liberal
conception of free will in a critical account of the genealogy of
consciousness as the effect of guilt and ressentiment, which he
described in On the Genealogy of Morals. Hence, Nietzsche was the
first one to make the claim that the modern notion of consciousness
was indebted to the modern system of penalty, which judged a man
according to his "responsibility", that is by the consciousness
through which acts can be attributed to an individual subject: "I did
this! this is me!". Consciousness is thus related by Nietzsche to the
classic philosopheme of recognition which, according to him, defines
knowledge.[9]
According to Pierre Klossowski (1969), Nietzsche considered
consciousness to be a hypostatization of the body, composed of
multiple forces (the "Will to Power"). According to him, the subject
was only a "grammatical fiction": we believed in the existence of an
individual subject, and therefore of a specific author of each act,
insofar as we speak. Therefore, the conscious subject is dependent on
the existence of language, a claim which would be generalized by
critical discourse analysis (see for example Judith Butler).
Michel Foucault's analysis of the creation of the individual subject
through disciplines, in Discipline and Punish (1975), would extend
Nietzsche's genealogy of consciousness and personal identity - i.e.
individualism - to the change in the juridico-penal system: the
emergence of penology and the disciplinization of the individual
subject through the creation of a penal system which judged not the
acts as it alleged to, but the personal identity of the wrong-doer. In
other words, Foucault maintained that, by judging not the acts (the
crime), but the person behind those acts (the criminal), the modern
penal system was not only following the philosophical definition of
consciousness, once again demonstrating the imbrications between ideas
and social institutions ("material ideology" as Althusser would call
it); it was by itself creating the individual person, categorizing and
dividing the masses into a category of poor but honest and law-abiding
citizens and another category of "professional criminals" or
recidivists.
Gilbert Ryle has argued that traditional understandings of
consciousness depend on a Cartesian outlook that divides into mind and
body, mind and world. He proposed that we speak not of minds, bodies,
and the world, but of individuals, or persons, acting in the world.
Thus, by saying 'consciousness,' we end up misleading ourselves by
thinking that there is any sort of thing as consciousness separated
from behavioral and linguistic understandings.
The failure to produce a workable definition of consciousness also
raises formidable philosophical questions. When Antonio Dimasio[10]
defines consciousness as "an organism's awareness of its own self and
its surroundings," he hasn't said anything. The words "consciousness,"
"awareness," and "perception" convey a very passive sense, bringing up
images of the homunculus observer. The idea of consciousness also
implies a gratuitous distinction between awareness and sensation, as
if sensation or thought is something we have to be aware of.
The neurological data shows, however, that experience is a very
interactive thing. Our brain massages vast libraries of experience
that it draws upon to create a coherent body and a coherent world for
us. As in the act of reading a text, our reading of our bodies and the
world around us is a very active thing. Maturana and Varela[11] showed
that the brain is massively involved with creating worlds of
experience for us with meager input from the senses.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins[12] sums up the interactive
view of experience: "In a way, what sense organs do is assist our
brains to construct a useful model and it is this model that we move
around in. It is a kind of virtual reality simulation of the world.""
Sir Frederick
Hubris R US :
http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_10.html
<begin quote>
NICHOLAS HUMPHREY
Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, The Mind Made Flesh
I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an
inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to
bolster human self-confidence and self-importance-so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives.
If this is right, it provides a simple explanation for why we, as scientists or laymen, find the "hard problem" of consciousness
just so hard. Nature has meant it to be hard. Indeed "mysterian" philosophers-from Colin McGinn to the Pope-who bow down before the
apparent miracle and declare that it's impossible in principle to understand how consciousness could arise in a material brain, are
responding exactly as Nature hoped they would, with shock and awe.
Can I prove it? It's difficult to prove any adaptationist account of why humans experience things the way they do. But here there
is an added catch. The Catch-22 is that, just to the extent that Nature has succeeded in putting consciousness beyond the reach of
rational explanation, she must have undermined the very possibility of showing that this is what she's done.
But nothing's perfect. There may be a loophole. While it may seem-and even be-impossible for us to explain how a brain process
could have the quality of consciousness, it may not be at all impossible to explain how a brain process could (be designed to) give
rise to the impression of having this quality. (Consider: we could never explain why 2 + 2 = 5, but we might relatively easily be
able to explain why someone should be under the illusion that 2 + 2 = 5).
Do I want to prove it? That's a difficult one. If the belief that consciousness is a mystery is a source of human hope, there may
be a real danger that exposing the trick could send us all to hell.
<end quote>
IMO "consciousness" is a quale on dynamic brain state.
Same as "blue" is a quale on sensor driven brain state.
As such they are the same as all qualia : low level illusions.
"Soul" then is false folk lore theory on the quale "consciousness".
BTW.
What rythms with "hubris"? With "soul"?
Immortalist
I tried to take out some of the anthropomorphism in this version;
Human consciousness is probably a needed organizer and recognizer of
the self and others, designed to help us in our struggle to survive.
The organized pattern of boundries that helped direct the evolution of
this agency was natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster
human self-confidence and self-importance-so as to increase the value
we each place on our own and others' lives.
Consciousness was an empty "niche" to be filled by particular
organized activities.
If this is right, it provides a simple explanation for why we, as
scientists or laymen, find the "hard problem" of consciousness just so
hard. The limited resources of the genome, genes which direct the
assembly of the brain, would have to take up to many genetic resources
to make the problem of consciousnes production by neural activities,
and easy to understand process.
"Mysterian" philosophers-from Colin McGinn to the Pope-who, have
incorperated this blind-spot in our understanding and exploited it as
a means to the ends of their social, religious and political thinking.
Excellent Fredrickeanism;
> IMO "consciousness" is a quale on dynamic brain state.
> Same as "blue" is a quale on sensor driven brain state.
> As such they are the same as all qualia : low level illusions.
> "Soul" then is false folk lore theory on the quale "consciousness".
>
> BTW.
> What rythms with "hubris"? With "soul"?-
Prof. Dan Dennett: Lecture on Consciousness (pt 1 to 6)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=wIdxbJyvfNw
http://youtube.com/watch?v=IsXiC1O7_PI
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XresYg25W_A
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VPkGeL_MS8E
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YcXNGsv_5Ps
http://youtube.com/watch?v=AEK3EPFBGMM
Brain Lecture (pt 2 to 5)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=brOcjvubJoY
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XJxPrcJTumI
http://youtube.com/watch?v=X7hq47Rf2eY
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1N-4NViGVIY
http://youtube.com/watch?v=T7nXiXQb2iM
Curt Welch
I just posted this to the ENTP list - yet another attempt to attack this
same problem....
I have a very different take on "consciousness". I've not read Tom's
book so I can't comment on anything there, but I enjoy debating ideas
of consciousness from an engineering and AI perspective. I'm
definitely a strict materialist or physicalist in my views of these
issues.
I think humans are just complex information processing machines which
work very much like all our electronic and signal processing
equipment, including our computers. Many people however think they
have a property about them which they use a wide range of words to
describe, such as "consciousness", or "subjective experience", or
"awareness", which they don't believe any of our machines have. Many
people describe a feeling of being disconnected from their body in one
way or another in connection with this, such as describing their
consciousness as being something created by the body, instead of
_being_ their body. This theme of us (or something about us - like our
qualia) existing separate from our body is the underlying thread
linking all these ideas together. I believe this separation feeling
we all generally have is nothing more than an illusion created by how
the brain works, and I believe this illusion is is the root cause of
all the confusion over issues such as consciousnesses, and even the
reason we say we have a mind instead of just saying we have a brain.
What is this thing we call a "mind" anyway if it's not just our brain
we are talking about?
I believe the universe is exactly what physics tells us it is (to the
limit that we currently understand it). Human consciousness is
nothing more than a what results from building a machine which is able
to interact with the environment though a control system - a robot.
There is nothing special about our power as humans to do this over
what our robots do, other than the obvious fact humans are very
advanced robots. But that advancement is not some odd type of
"consciousness", it's just a bigger and more advanced "computer-like"
control system which humans have (our brain).
I don't believe for a second that mediation is connecting to us to
some wider and more fundamental force of nature that deserves to be
labeled "consciousness". What it does, is allows us to explore
properties of our own hardware - our own brain and body. I don't see
any problem with people using meditation, or drugs, or exercise (eye),
to learn new and exciting things about themselves and in general to
"have fun".
At the same time, any soul searching can at the same time give us new
insights to the universe, but it's not because we are connected to it
through some other channel unknown to physics - simply because we are
exploring all the odd nooks and crannies of the stuff already in our
own brain.
I believe the brain is an adaptive controller which is trained by
reinforcement learning to allow it to adapt to the environment we are
born into. It's there simply to allow us to move around and interact
with our environment in ways that help improve our odds of survival.
This illusion of separation from our body it creates is just a natural
side effect of the processing it must do to be a good adaptive arm and
leg controller. This side effect is what creates all these ideas of
consciousness being something special that exists in us, but it's not
special at all. I believe once it's understood and accepted, it will
be seen as no more special than any illusion the brain creates for us.
Evolution didn't "make us conscious" for some special survival value.
It gave us a standard and I believe what will turn out to be simple
processing system which just so happens to have this side effect which
is mostly harmless, but which has created all this confusion over many
issues of self understanding that exist today. It's the source of the
never ending debate of the mind body problem in psychology.
I believe our awareness of our environment exists totally in the
processing which happens in our brain. We aren't aware of the
environment really. We are only aware of the model of the environment
which the brain builds as part of it's basic function. The model our
brain builds, and how it reacts to the sensory data it collects from
the environment, is our awareness. If you stop the brain from working
normally with the help of drugs, our awareness goes away because that
processing is our awareness. If you alter the processing with the
help of drugs, it changes our perception of reality, because that
processing is our reality. Everything we know, and can sense, is
inside our own brains. It's not out in the universe, it's in our
heads. We are in effect trapped, in this virtual reality created by
our brain. But to say it like that is technically incorrect because
it implies that the "we" which is trapped, is somehow separate from
the brain, and that once again, is only supporting the error of the
illusion that "we" exist as something separate from our own brain. We
don't. We _are_ a brain. The thing that's interacting with you right
now (me) is just a mussy naked hunk of neural circuits which happens
to have a body attached to it which helps it move around in the
universe.
It's important to grasp that when we look around the room and "see"
stuff like the computer monitor in front of me, we aren't actually
"seeing" the monitor. We are "seeing" brain behavior. Just like
when you play a video game and "see" a monster running at you, we are
not "seeing" a monster, we are seeing the behavior of a bunch of
transistors. Our brain is connected to those transistors with the
help of wires, and a monitor, and a light link to our eyes, and an
optic nerve to our brain. But it is the signal created by the
behavior of the transistors and the way those signals are represented
in the brain that makes us "see it" as a monster.
Our universe is whatever our brain decides it is. Our ability to
understand the universe, including our ability to understand ourselves
(since we are nothing more than more stuff in the same universe the
brain is trying to understand), is limited by what our brain can
understand about the universe. By exploring what our own brain (say
through meditation) we are in fact exploring our universe - the
universe as defined for us by how our brain works. This makes it very
hard to tell the difference between the real universe, and the
universe created for us by the way the brain works. We can't compare
the two side by side. We are stuck only seeing the shadows in Plato's
cave and we never get to see the real thing and compare it to what the
brain makes of it. This faith of being stuck with one view of
reality, the view our brain creates for us, is why so many people
can't understand consciousness, and they confuse the things which
happen in their brain, with the things happening in the universe
outside our brain.
I'm actually heading towards explaining the illusion of consciousness,
and I'm getting there...
The brain, as a sensory data processing device which allows us to
react in intelligent ways to our environment (run away from the
predictor, and run towards the food, reproduce when not running and
not hungry), has one very big problem it must solve in order to do
this fairly straight forward job. It can't make the arms and legs
move us away from danger, and towards the good stuff, if it can't
first transform the raw sensory data into a representation of the the
"things" out there. You can't run away from a tiger, if you can't
first recognize that all the raw data flowing in from the sensors
represents a tiger, and not a hamburger.
Now, we never think twice about our power to recognize all the objects
around us. We do it without thinking. We just look at the desk and
see the pen and never think twice about what must have happened in the
brain for that to work. But for anyone that has studied the problem
of programming a computer to perform a task like image recognition,
you know this is far from being a trivial data processing task. To
this day, after half a century plus of working on the problem, no one
has yet built hardware that it's good at doing this task as a human
brain is. But we get closer every day, and the fact that the brain
can do it, is not a mystery at all. Ouir machines can do it as well,
just not as good as the brain can yet.
But, however the brain does it, it's the result of that processing
that allows us to interpret this virtual universe the brain creates
not as one large flow of complex data, but instead, we see it as world
full of "stuff", a universe full of objects. We don't see the pen as
a separate object from the keyboard because it _is_ a separate object.
We see it like that because that's how the brain has broken up the
sensory data it is receiving. There are endless examples of visual
illusions where the way the brain breaks up, and interpreters the
sensory data is inconsistent with the way it "actually is" out there
in the universe. We call it an illusion when the brain's
interpretation is inconsistent with the way things actually are in the
universe. However, the only reason we know the illusion is wrong, is
because we have ways to change the world that creates an inconsistency
that allows us to know that something is wrong.
If you see a mirage in the desert, it's easy to believe we are looking
at water. But if we walk towards the water, we never find the water.
That's the inconsistency that allows us to know something is wrong.
It allows us to know that what the brain determined was the truth, was
in fact, not the truth. If you put a stick in a glass of water, it
will look bent. But if you move your head, the amount of bend
changes, it even looks straight if you look at it straight on. And if
you pull the stick out, you see it's not bent. So either moving our
head causes the stick to bend into different shapes, (which is
inconsistent with everything we know about sticks), or the brain is
being fooled. We figure out at the bent stick is just an illusion
because of this.
But what happens when we are exposed to an illusion, and there's now
way to change the world to show that it's an error? The answer is
that we never see it as an illusion. We would see it as fact. We see
it as the way the world is. If the only time we saw a stick, was in
the water, and if we couldn't change how much it was bent by moving
our head, because we were forced to view it from only one angle, we
would never know it was an illusion. We would just just accept as
fact that the stick was bent. For example, imaging someone who was
forced to spend their entire life in prison, and never had a glass of
water to put something in - all there water came from a crack in the
wall which had water slowly dripping out of it. But out the window,
was a lake, with a pipe in it. But the person couldn't change their
view of the pipe in the water, and the water level never changed. To
this person, in this limited environment, they would just think the
pipe was bent where it entered the water, and they would never think
twice about it. It would just be a fact of his life. They would grow
old and die having no clue the pipe was actually straight and that the
view they had was just an illusion. We can only recognize an
illusion, if we can see that it creates an obvious inconsistency in
our environment. Otherwise, it's not an illusion, it's just the way
things are. But the "way things are" has little to do with the
actually environment, it's the way the brain interprets the sensory
data that flows into it.
So how does the brain turn raw sensory data into "objects"? Well, no
one knows for sure yet, but lots of people have been working on it and
we know a lot. And I have a simplified theory of what I think the
brain does. Many people believe that evolution has simply evolved
complex neural networks for processing the data for us. They believe
we have one type of neural circuits for processing visual data,
another type of special hardware for processing sound, and others for
each of the senses. But I don't believe that. I believe evolution
created for us a generic "objectification" system. I believe the same
basic type of data processing is done on all the different types of
sensory data, including the cross modal aspects of the data where the
brain has to combine data from multiple sensory systems and still make
sense of it. I think the brain ends up configuring itself to
correctly recognize the different types of objects that tend to show
up in our environment. I don't think it needs to be "told" what a dog
looks like for example by our DNA. It figures that out on its own,
through a life time of experience receiving sensory data.
I believe the key is all hidden in the temporal predictive nature of
real sensory data. That is, if there's an object out in the universe
affecting what sensory data we receive (say a dog is out there and
it's in our visual field so we can currently see him), then that dog
will be the cause of predictable changes to the sensory data over
time. If we see a dog ear, and a dog nose, one second, there's a very
high probability that we we see a dog tail, the next moment. The
odds that the dog head will suddenly be replaced by an image of a pink
elephant for a second, and then turn back to a dog head, is near zero.
Objects out in the environment tend to create predictable patterns of
change in our sensory data over time. I believe it's these temporal
associations that are the key to how the brain is able to wire itself,
to learn to correctly recognize objects, like dogs. I believe this is
why the brain doesn't come pre-wired for detecting all the objects we
may need to deal with in our life. Instead, the brain wires itself
from experience, to detect all the stuff that actually exists in our
environment - so that it can then learn which objects to run away
from, and which to run towards (look, doughnuts, um good).
But if this is how the brain works (and I'm very sure it actually is),
think about what it means. It means that the reason we see a world
full of objects, is because our brain has built a large set of object
recognition circuits based on the temporal correlations that existed
in the sensory data the brain receives, not on some other underlying
fact of existence in the universe. We "see" the objects the brain has
decided is there, and it decided what was there, based on extended
periods of being exposed to the data.
This doesn't just work for things like dogs. It works the same way for
all our sensory data. This is why a nearly continuous string of
changing sounds doesn't seem to be continuous at all, but instead, is
perceived by us as a string of distinct words - aka distinct objects.
When we listen to a foreign language which we have had little exposure
to, we don't hear it as words. We can't even begin to tell how many
words the person just spoke. It just sounds like string of basic
sounds which we do parse as "objects" because they are shared by the
language we do speak and which our brain has built a nice collection
of "object recognizers" for.
There is nothing about spoken English that tells us where the words
start and stop. If an alien from another planet who had never heard
the language, or never seen humans and the types of sounds they make,
were to receive a short 1 minute recording of English, it would be
nearly impossible to correctly identify where in the recording the
words stopped and started. Or, just play a recording of English
backwards, and see if you can count the words or correctly identify
where the words stop and start.
The brain learns how to parse sensory data into objects, based on the
temporal predictive nature of the data. Words are short sound
sequences that get repeated over and over again in our language. The
brain learns to see those short sequences as an "object" because once
the sequence starts, the brain can make good predictions how it will
progress based on all the sound patterns it has seen in the past.
The net result of all this, is how we see the world, is a function of
not what the world actually is, but what the brain decides it is. And
the brain decides what it is, based simply on the characteristics of
the sensory data that is fed to it.
This objectification process the brain performs has another important
characteristic however. It's hierarchical. The brain first finds
short temporal patterns, and turns them into objects, and then joins
the short patterns together to create larger objects, and on and on.
Just like short sound sequences become the phonemes of speech, they
are combined to create words, words are combined to create phrases,
phrases are combined to create thoughts. And for the visual system,
pixels are combined to form lines, lines to form shapes, lines to form
textures, shapes and lines and textures to form faces, and dog legs,
and dogs, and houses. Everything gets linked together by their
temporal associations into larger and larger perceptual objects. The
linking isn't a simple tree however, it's a large and complex mesh of
associations - all predicting what is likely to happen next in the
world. The more these are associated, the more it looks to us as a
single "object". The less the association, the less they look like
one object, and the more we perceive it as two separate objects. Our
whole perception of reality, and in what's part of what, is created by
the temporal correlations that the brain is able to find in the
sensory data streams that exist in the brain.
Almost there....
Not only is the brain receiving sensory data from the outside world
and analyzing it for correlations to build this network to parse it
into objects, but it's also generating data internally with the help
of feedback loops in the brain. Without having to answer the question
of how or why this happens, we can just accept it does, and know it
does, because of the fact we are able to perceive things that aren't
happening anywhere except in our own brains. We have thoughts and
memories that are not correlated to what is happening in the external
universe. We can think about that trip to the shore without actually
being at the shore. Though a lot of what happens in our brain is a
direct result of the sensory data being fed into it (we are "aware" of
the contents of that constant flow of sensory data), other stuff
happens as well at times - we have private brain activity where we
talk to ourselves, or think about things that happened in the past.
There's no reason for me to suspect that this private brain activity
is any less associated with the automatic process of identifying
correlations, and building object detectors than any other brain
process, so I have to assume it is. This just means we have the same
power to understand the "objects" which make up our private thoughts
as we do to understand the objects that make up our direct interaction
with the real world. And like all the objects the brain associates
with all this brain activity, they are being related to each other
based on their correlations. We walk out of the office, into the
hall, and every time we do that, the objects of the office, "follow"
(in time) our perception of the objects in the hall. This temporal
association is what gets linked together to form the larger object we
think of as our home. we know we are in our home, because the "office
object" always acts as a predictor of the "hall object" when it's part
of the "home" object. All the objects of the physical world tend to
get linked together like this because of the temporal correlations
they share. Objects close together in space, tend to "show up" up
together close in time, forming one large mesh of an object we think
of as "physical reality". All the objects that we think of as
physical objects, are closely tied to each other.
But how do the objects of our private thoughts correlate in time to
the objects of physical reality? Well, they don't. At least not very
well. I can be thinking about fishing, when I'm sitting in my office,
then the next minute, I might be thinking about eating a sandwich. A
few second later, I'm thinking about going to bed. Later, when I'm in
bed, I'll think about fishing again. Without the physical world to
constrain the temporal characteristics of the brain activity which
makes up our thoughts, it turns out that our thoughts don't have any
good correlations with the objects of the physical world. And without
consistent correlations, the brain does what it always does, it treats
the data patterns of our private thoughts as separate objects. It
doesn't link them together with the data objects of the physical world
- which are in themselves, all cross linked by their likely
associations in time - by how close they tend to be to each other in
space into one huge mesh of an object we perceive as physical reality.
So, in this huge model of objects and there associations with each
other the brain builds, where in this space do the objects of our
thoughts fall? They fall outside of physical reality, because they
have few if any links to the objects the brain has created to
represent what we call physical reality.
Let me repeat this because it's the big point to all this.
We are just aware of the objects of physical reality as we are aware
of the objects of our private thoughts. All of this (by everything we
know about the brain), is all just some type of brain activity. But
as the brain turns all that raw data flowing in our brain into
"object" by building networks of data pattern recognition circuits, it
will separate all the physical "objects" into one cross connected
domain we think of physical reality, simply because they all tend to
be cross connected by the constraints physical reality creates. But
because the objects of our private thoughts, don't have consistent
strong correlations in time to that huge sets of objects we think of
as physical reality, they don't get linked into that mesh of reality.
The are left out in the cold (so to say).
So, what does this create for us? It creates our perception of realty
(the only reality we can ever know) because our perception of reality
is defined by how the brain operates, by how the brain turns data into
objects. But what type of reality is that? It's a reality where
mental activity doesn't seem to be physical. It's a reality where the
mental activity we sense happening in us, doesn't seem to be connected
to physical reality. It's a reality where we can't figure out where
mental objects "connect" to physical reality. It's a split reality,
where the objects of the physical world seem to exist on one side of
tracks, and the objects of our mental reality seem to exist on the
other side of the tracks.
And in this reality, where is the object we think of as us? As ourselves?
We end up with two of them. We end up with the part that lives on one
side of the tracks, which we call the body. It's a collection of
objects defined for us by the operation of the brain splitting up all
our sensory perception of our own body. And these objects, like all
physical objects, get all sorts of connections to other physical
objects, like my current connection from my fingers to the keyboard as
I write this hideously long message that should be an essay on my web
site but isn't.
The other other "us", is the collection of all the mental objects.
The mental objects are part of "us" because none of the other bodies
in the physical world are able to report on their existence, but the
physical body which is us can report on their existence. They are
part of the same "us" as the body, because there are many weak
connections to the body. The mental objects predict that the arm will
move, and then the arm moves. The mental objects report on what has
happened to the body in the past so there's a connection there. The
connection is weak because the temporal associations between the
mental objects and the body objects is weak (only small amounts of
predictability exist) - but they exist.
This split view of reality leaves us with a clear and very strong
perception that mental activity is not physical. But that is just an
illusion. It's an illusion created by the brain for very simple and
obvious reasons if you can accept the idea I put forth above about
how, and why, the brain decomposes sensory data into objects (so we
can learn to react in different ways, to different objects). But,
sadly, it's an illusion we have (almost) no power to escape from. We
can't look at reality from a different direction and see a
contradiction like we can with the bent stick illusion. It's an
illusion we are stuck with, and can't escape from. We can't see the
world any other way (without the help of some brain changing events at
least - or maybe some meditation?).
The physical universe we all exist in is not actually split as the
illusion makes it seem to us. There is just one physical reality, and
our body and brain are part of that reality. The brain, which acts as
an information processing device which is not all that different from
our computers and electronics, has created this split view of the data
simply by the generic algorithm it uses to parse sensory data into
objects.
This split view of reality is the foundation of all the confusion over
consciousness, and it's the foundation, and cause, of the mind body
problem from philosophy.
Before we had the knowledge of modern science, this split reality was
interpreted as the soul of man. Physical reality is where our body
existed, but our mental objects existed somewhere else, we called that
collection of objects (and the thing we thought was producing it) our
soul. And since we didn't like the thought of dieing, we made stories
that sounded very good to us about how the soul could leave the body
and live on after the body was gone. And everything was simple and
good and it all made sense.
We used or power of language to give everything in this split reality
names. We made up names for the domain of the physical objects, and
we called it the world, or the universe, or physical reality. And we
made up a name for the location of the mental objects, we called it
the mind. We classified the objects by type as well. The objects in
the physical world became known as tangible objects, and the objects
in the mental realm become intangible objects. We made up thousands
and thousands of names for these objects the brain defined for us. We
have the dogs and the cats, and we have thoughts and memories, we have
cars and running, and we have feelings and desires. Our entire view
of reality is split right down the middle, and all our words act as
labels for these objects on one side of the tracks or the other. The
human view of reality is a split view created by an illusion. Reality
isn't really split, it just seems like it is to us.
But then along came science, and materialism, and after years of work,
these "mental objects" which exist in a non-physical domain just make
less and less sense to us. We can't believe in the soul anymore, but
we have a clear and strong sense that mental objects aren't physical,
so what are they? We make up stores left and right to try and explain
it. No matter how much the cold hard facts of science tells us
reality is not split, and that all human behavior is just the physical
result of biological process at work, all acting according to the
rules of physics, we are still left with the feeling that something
else is with us - these mental objects just can't be physical brain
activity - can they? We aren't just a physical body (as science tells
us), we have a mind as well! We have all this non-physical stuff
happening as part of us which is what makes us special, and different
from the rocks, and different from the computers - they are just
physical things and they don't act like humans, so they must not have
this non-physical stuff we are filled with. Right? But all that is
just an illusion which we have no easy way to escape from.
Today, all the best thinkers of our time are split into many different
camps trying to understand the basic nature of reality. Science tells
us reality is not split. Personal perception tells us it is. But
what's the nature of the split? Why does it exist if science tells us
it's not there? Some people choose to believe science, and ignore
their perception. Some choose to believe their perception, and ignore
science. Most try to make up stores that allow both to be correct.
The above is my story and I'm sticking to it (until I think up
something better). :)
The ramification of my story, is that humans are just machines, and
when AI technology advances to the point of duplicating the algorithms
that the brain uses for data classification and learning, that we will
not only have machines which act like humans, but they will have that
same split-view of reality that we have which makes us walk around
talking about being conscious. At that point, we will have conscious
machines. I believe we are at most only a few decades away from that
point.
Talking about a "conscious" universe, doesn't make much sense to me,
unless you limit your view of "universe" to the virtual reality
created in our brains. It's not unreasonable to do that since for
each of us, our reality _is_ limited to the models created by our
brains.
Talking about the physical universe being information based also
doesn't do much for me. It's information based only in the fact that
all our understanding of the universe is limited to what our
information processing brain is able to model. So it's not that the
universe is information based as much as our perception of it is
forced to be limited to an information perspective. But maybe it's
pointless to pretend the universe could be something else if we have
no access to any other form of it???
But to me, this adds up to the idea that meditation, and things like an
out of body experience, is nothing more than a person exploring
aspects of their own brain that most people don't normally get to
explore and experience.
If you want to explore the universe, study physics, or build a space
ship, or build AIs and get them to explore it for you. :)
--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
cu...@kcwc.com http://NewsReader.Com/
Immortalist
> I'm actually heading towards explaining the illusion of consciousness,
> and I'm getting there...
>
I agree with much of what you say. But why is consciousness an
illusion? Is the quality of "wettness" of hydrogen and oxygen
molecules enmass, an illusion? No it is a quality of these atoms
interacting in changing relationships over time.
If you simulate water on a computer it still may not "feel" wet. I
think it is possible to create the qualities of experience by
manipulating matter but it may not be possible for circuits to
actually "feel" alive. Then again maybe it is possible, but I think
that if we want to simulate and emulate subjective experience we might
have to create some sort of wetware that produces fields and charges
like a brain does.
I think Penrose is a little extreme with his microtubules and how they
manipulate quantum forces, but if we can take a rock and anylize its
mineral structure and arrange minerals in a similar way, then we also
will produce the field and quantum situation of the original rock.
Comes along with original materials organization.
-------------------------------
for example;
Microtubules are cylindrical molecules made by gluing together 13
strands of the protein, tubulin, to make a tube 25 nanometres across,
with a central channel about 15 nanometres wide. Each microtubule is
covered by a fuzz of protein stubs, known as MAPs (microtubule
associated proteins), and these can be used to hook clusters of
microtubules together into larger lattices. Both microtubules and MAPs
seem to be capable of a certain amount of movement, meaning that they
can be woven into plastic structures, able to give and bend.
The structural properties of microtubule assemblies make them a
valuable building material within cells. For example, a bundle of 20
microtubules form the beating, hair-like cilia that coat the surface
of many small single-celled animals, allowing them to swim. However
the main use for microtubules appears to be to make an internal
skeleton for cells-an intricate scaffolding that gives a cell its
shape but also can deform and bend enough to allow it to move.
The existence of the microtubule cytoskeleton was discovered only
relatively recently in the 1970s-previously the fixative chemicals
used in electron microscopy was having the unfortunate effect of
dissolving the tubules-so biologists still have much to learn about
what the cytoskeleton does and how it operates. Yet biologists believe
that it not only holds a cell in shape but also plays an important
role in cell metabolism, acting as a piping system or an internal
highway to move plasma and other essential cell products about the
cell. Some have suggested microtubules might do this by using their
MAP spurs to drag cell protoplasm along, hand over hand, in a
miniature bucket brigade running up the sides of a tubule.
There is also evidence that the cytoskeleton could serve as a
primitive brain. Biologists have long been puzzled how a simple single-
celled animal, like the slipper-shaped paramecium, could behave so
intelligently when it has no nervous system. A paramecium is
surprisingly nimble as it swims about in pond-bottom detritus,
twisting in and out of tight spaces in search of its dinner. Somehow
the protozoan manages to respond swiftly to information coming in from
a light-sensitive eyespot and its touch-sensitive cilia to co-ordinate
its swimming action. Several biologists have speculated that the
cytoskeleton could serve as the communication and information
processing link needed to organise such relatively complex behaviour.
This suggestion that the cytoskeleton could be a "brain within a
brain" has particularly excited the quantum theorists. In casting
around for a suitable cell structure to operate as a go-between,
connecting the sub-atomic realm with the macroscopic world of firing
brain cells, some theorists had considered that the membranes at the
synaptic junctions between nerve cells might be the site of quantum
interactions. Others had wondered whether the ion channels down the
flanks of neurons could be ruled by quantum effects. But quickly,
microtubules began to look a far better bet. While microtubules are
not unique to neurons, they are found there in particular abundance (a
fact that does not surprise neurologists given that nerve cells are so
metabolically-active and microtubules seem essential to metabolic
activity). Furthermore, the speed at which microtubules can switch
state between relaxation and contraction is believed to be of the
order of a nanosecond. This may be slow by the usual time scales of
quantum events, but it is about a million times faster than the cell
firing events usually believed to underlie consciousness and so at
least appears to get the biology of the system within striking
distance of a quantum explanation.
http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_quantum%20mind.html
http://www.dichotomistic.com/
Entertained by my own EIMC
one that expresses confidence in us being able to build sufficiently
complex and correctly adaptively self-organizing (brain mimicking)
machines in only two decades. The only chance that we may do so may be
in 50 to hundred years is if we find a way to 'let lose' a rapidly
automatically evolving AI-algorithmic entities that would then
necessarily/inevitably also endanger us slowly primarily/originally
evolved critters. ;>
Secondly I simply feel that you kept pushing a too polemic position by
overstating that reality is created by our brains - though I must admit
that you eventually began to compensate for this initially created
imbalance. :)
Thirdly and lastly, I think you don't give your self enough credit for
being able to quite "Efficiently Philosophically (and theoretically)
Transcend" (hence I have some hope that you could one day turn out to be
almost as "EPT" a thinker as I am :>) the limitations that keeps so many
people locked into 'loops of imbecilic (or irrational) ideation'.
Appreciatively yours,
Peter
Michael Gordge
> If we are to discuss intelligence, we must first make our peace with
> the relationship between body and soul. Some, of course, are not aware
> that there is a problem.
My feet always go where my head tells them to go, so where's your
problem? Do your feet go south when your mind instructs them go north?
MG
Tim Tyler
> Hubris R US :
>
> http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_10.html
>
> <begin quote>
> NICHOLAS HUMPHREY
> Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, The Mind Made Flesh
>
> I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick,
> designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an
> inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing
> it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to
> bolster human self-confidence and self-importance-so as to increase
> the value we each place on our own and others' lives.
Humphrey, whose views I agree with, also wrote a book called "Seeing Red".
--
__________
|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ t...@tt1lock.org Remove lock to reply.
Brian Fletcher
"turtoni" <tur...@fastmail.net> wrote in message
news:38d7cb82-9581-4ad0...@s50g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
soul = consciousness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conciousness
Until one starts to |"know ones self", speculation is wide and varied.But
that "all there is"...
BOfL
Brian Fletcher
"Immortalist" <reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:4c10b35e-5092-4501...@e6g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
> >
>> I'm actually heading towards explaining the illusion of consciousness,
>> and I'm getting there...
>>
>
> I agree with much of what you say. But why is consciousness an
> illusion? Is the quality of "wettness" of hydrogen and oxygen
> molecules enmass, an illusion? No it is a quality of these atoms
> interacting in changing relationships over time.
It is only when one looks through 'non relative eyes' does the illusion
become apparent.Knowing a brick is made up of vibrating energy doesnt dampen
the pain when it drops on your foot.
At a more subtle and powerful level, the 'state of mind' people have, such
as victim consciousness (relationships are dominated by this state) can be
seen clearly as illusion. Made real by the observer.(s)
Below you make references to some amazing scientific speculations, with
tuble construction etc...but makes no progress into the 'reality of life'.
BOfL
zinnic
>
> - Show quoted text -...
Bravo! Great post Curt. A breath (nay, a gale) of fresh air that
should do much to blow away the cobwebs of mystical minds that cling
to the anthropo(ec)centricity that they represent unique and special
gifts to the universe.
Zinnic
Curt Welch
> >
> > I'm actually heading towards explaining the illusion of consciousness,
> > and I'm getting there...
> >
>
> I agree with much of what you say. But why is consciousness an
> illusion?
Well, the post was my attempt to answer that. If you think I didn't
already answer it that in the post, it's obvious I need to keep working on
it. :)
Consciousness is not the illusion. The illusion is the disconnect we all
sense between our perception of physical events outside the head, and
physical events inside the head.
> Is the quality of "wettness" of hydrogen and oxygen
> molecules enmass, an illusion?
No, it's not an illusion in any sense. That's just our brain's response to
the sensory signals produced by water.
> No it is a quality of these atoms
> interacting in changing relationships over time.
>
> If you simulate water on a computer it still may not "feel" wet.
If you connected that simulation directly into your neural pathways, it
would feel wet to you. That's my belief. You would be unable to tell it
was a simulation - you would know you were feeling real water. This is
because your perception of wetness is as much a simulation effect happening
in your brain as it is in the computer. The wetness we feel is not in the
water, it's in our brain - which is why we should be able to create it by
stimulating our brain with transistors instead of with hydrogen and oxygen.
> I
> think it is possible to create the qualities of experience by
> manipulating matter but it may not be possible for circuits to
> actually "feel" alive.
Based on the logic I put forth in the post, I don't agree with that. the
feeling of being alive in the machine will be just like (or similar enough
at least) to our feeling of being alive if you get the processing correct.
It's possible that the signal processing produced by neurons and the
biological processes happening in the brain just can't easily be duplicated
by transistors and electrons, but I've not yet seen any evidence to make we
want to suspect that is the case.
The resistance most people seem to have to the notion seems to come from
their self perception - they don't feel like they have something in common
with transistors and computers so they don't feel like a computer could
have the same _feeling_ of being alive as a human does. But really, is it
surprising that people don't connect to a PC in the same way they connect
to another human? PCs don't act or feel(to our touch) anything like humans
so why would we think of them as human-like? But imagine how much of that
perception would change if it did start to act like a human? Really, think
of how we would view our PCs if it acted exactly as if it were or human,
but that it was stuck with the body of a PC? I think most of us would end
up seeing the machine as being conscious, even though it had a very
different body from ours.
We can't switch the chemistry of biology for electrons in wires if the
function we are trying to duplicate is the transport of oxygen, but the
only function of the brain that we currently understand is a signal
processing function - to translate sensory data into muscle control
signals, and everything we currently know about signal processing tells us
that transistors and wires will actually work far better than what
evolution was able to produce with biology. Evolution was stuck with the
requirement that the system had to grow itself and be self reproducing. We
are not. And the end result is that our signal processing system will most
likely be many orders of magnitude better than the brain. That's what I
see all the current evidence pointing to.
> Then again maybe it is possible, but I think
> that if we want to simulate and emulate subjective experience we might
> have to create some sort of wetware that produces fields and charges
> like a brain does.
Normally, when I see people thinking along those lines, my reaction is to
believe they are being drawn towards the ideas like "fields" and "charges"
because these simply they are a closer match to _our_ _perception_ of our
own mind. As I outlined in my post, I strongly believe that our perception
of our own mind is a huge illusion. Just because it feels like some
"wholeness" doesn't mean it's anything like that.
However, it's possible that there's some significant computational savings
happening in the brain by using fields and charges to direct the constant
growth and rewiring of the brain which will prevent us, because of scaling
constraints, to implement the same computational result using traditional
computer circuits. But I see this only as a practical engineering issue
and not an issue of consciousness. Even if we can't scale to the
functional equal of the brain using standard computer hardware, the small
version of the system will still be conscious - it just won't have the same
level of awareness and complexity of behavior the larger version would
have.
I can certainly agree with the idea that the level of abstraction we may
have to move to in order to understand how the brain works will be lower
and more complex than the level of neurons and simple neuron to neuron
chemical signaling - and that might require us to build a much larger
machine than we currently are speculating when we take a wild guess at how
many transistors are needed to equal a brain. But I don't believe it's
going to change anything other than size of the machine, and how long it
will take us to figure out how to build it. I think the odds of
consciousness being nothing more than a signal processing function is still
a very good one.
The desire for people to find a way to connect our consciousness to a
different realm (like the quantum realm) I believe is all an extension of
our desire to explain the illusion I talked about. We feel like we are more
than just a physical brain because we have this innate built-in illusion
that our thoughts are not physical. People I suspect feel that if they
were to accept the position of materialism, they would be giving up this
feeling of being more than just a physical body - they would be denying
what they know to be true - that they are more than just a physical body.
Humans are reinforcement learning machines built for the purpose of
constantly trying to maximize rewards. We are driven, by our design, to
always try to make life better for us. As such, we are innately attracted
to anything that we think will make life better for us. We can't resist
it. This not only includes the normal material things in life, but it also
includes any idea which creates the belief that things could be better. We
like action hero moves because we like to fantasize about having extra
powers to make our life better for us - to be able to overcome our
limitations and constraints which are holding us back from a better life.
Gee, if we could only fly, wouldn't life be great! We can't even resit
being attracted to the the _thought_ of a better life.
As such, in the opposite direction, we also play the denial game with
ourselves. Not only are we attracted to thoughts that imply a better life,
we attempt to avoid thoughts that imply a worse life. We do whatever we
can to avoid bad things, including not thinking about them. Only when we
believe not thinking about it will make life worse, do we manage to face
bad things.
We made up the stories about the soul simply because this was a thought
which turned us into an action hero. It gave us super powers to survive
death - one of the most scary things there is for us. We are attracted to
ideas like the soul, and an after life, just like we are attracted to
movies and books that tell of people with supper powers to make things
better.
This illusion of having something in us which is separate from physical
reality is a very seductive illusion. It makes us believe we are something
more than a physical body - that maybe we have a hidden super power in us
waiting to be uncovered. Even if modern science has killed our ability to
believe in the soul, we can still cling to the hope that our super power is
hidden in some other form - maybe our super power is our ability to connect
with the quantum domain! Maybe we don't even really exist in this body,
but that it's just acting as a gateway to our real existence in the quantum
realm! These are very suductive thoughts that people have a hard time
resisting.
The alternative to all these wonderfully seductive super hero thoughts is
the possibility that we are nothing more than a frail, weak body which will
quickly turn to dust if we are denied oxygen for a few minutes. This is
not an attractive idea for us. It's down right scary as hell to most
people. As such, they will cling disparately to any possibility that it's
not true. Add to this picture the very strong, and very real illusion that
we have something non-physical in us, and you find a never ending trend in
society to cling to the ideas of conscious as something "special" in us -
our hidden super power which makes us so much more than just a cold hard
physical machine.
I can face this scary possibility easier than most, because I'm trying to
build AI. I believe my life will be better if I can solve AI. I believe I
could be very rich and famous if only I could figure out the missing pieces
of this AI puzzle. The thought of solving AI is my hidden super-hero power
thought which makes it easy for me to deny the illusion which is so
seductive to so many other people and which so many other people cling to
as their last hope of being more than just a frail body.
People don't get excited talking about (or reading about) microtubules
because there is scientific or engineering evidence that they have
something significant to do with our mental powers. They do it because it
helps them keep their dream of super powers alive and it helps them to
continue to deny the fact that we are nothing more than a frail and weak
body. It's just a defensive mechanism.
rp
> "Immortalist" <reanimater_2...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>
> - Show quoted text -
In simple terms I can say that I as an organism am conscious to some
extent while I am alive and will be dead when the consciousness is
absent even in the most primitive form. That beings are conscious is
merely a proof if you need one that life is the essence of
manifestation.
Curt Welch
> I the only statements of yours that I can't entirely concur with is your
> one that expresses confidence in us being able to build sufficiently
> complex and correctly adaptively self-organizing (brain mimicking)
> machines in only two decades. The only chance that we may do so may be
> in 50 to hundred years is if we find a way to 'let lose' a rapidly
> automatically evolving AI-algorithmic entities that would then
> necessarily/inevitably also endanger us slowly primarily/originally
> evolved critters. ;>
A few decades are optimistic, but I'm an optimist on this subject.
I put the possibility of such a short time frame on my estimate because of
my beliefs about the basic function of the brain. Though our behavior is
extremely complex (far more so than any machine man has built yet), I
happen to believe it's driven by a far simpler underlying process. I
believe it's a fairly simple learning process. Not so simple that it's
obvious how to duplicate this learning process in a machine, but one which
will be uncovered in time, and which will be seen as extremely simple
compared to the extreme complexity of behavior it has the power to create.
I see human intelligence as a fairly simple reinforcement learning process,
implemented with large amounts of learning memory space, placed into a
highly complex environment. The net result of this combination is the
highly complex human behavior we call intelligence. The complexity really
comes from the environment, not from the brain. The brain just creates the
complex behavior as a way of dealing with the complex environment.
I think we are not as far from uncovering the mystery's of this learning
process as most might assume. And I think our hardware technology is
already to the level required. It might still take a room full of machines
to equal a human brain with today's technology, but I think if we knew what
to build, it would be well within our power to build it today.
This approach is not that far off from what you are thinking. Instead of
creating the great complexity of human behavior by hand, we let it evolove
on it's own. But instead of your vision where I believe you are thinking
we need to duplicate the work work billions of years of evolution before we
will have created a machine so complex that it is equal the power of the
brain, I believe the key to intelligence is far simpler, it's not the
complex behavior we see in humans which we need to duplicate, it's our
power to learn complex behavior we need to correctly duplicate, and that's
not complex, that's just operant and classical conditioning. But
implementing those simple ideas correctly requires us to find the right
medium for the complex behavior to "grow" in. The right learning hardware,
which can create every increasing complexity of behavior through
experience. I don't think that medium has been found yet (outside of the
human brain), but I think we are not far away from finding it, which is why
I can talk about decades instead of centuries.
> Secondly I simply feel that you kept pushing a too polemic position by
> overstating that reality is created by our brains - though I must admit
> that you eventually began to compensate for this initially created
> imbalance. :)
>
> Thirdly and lastly, I think you don't give your self enough credit for
> being able to quite "Efficiently Philosophically (and theoretically)
> Transcend" (hence I have some hope that you could one day turn out to be
> almost as "EPT" a thinker as I am :>) the limitations that keeps so many
> people locked into 'loops of imbecilic (or irrational) ideation'.
>
> Appreciatively yours,
>
> Peter
Thanks for the thoughts!
Tim Tyler
> I the only statements of yours that I can't entirely concur with is your
> one that expresses confidence in us being able to build sufficiently
> complex and correctly adaptively self-organizing (brain mimicking)
> machines in only two decades. The only chance that we may do so may be
> in 50 to hundred years is if we find a way to 'let lose' a rapidly
> automatically evolving AI-algorithmic entities that would then
> necessarily/inevitably also endanger us slowly primarily/originally
> evolved critters. ;>
The "intelligence explosion". How do you think that could be avoided?
http://alife.co.uk/essays/the_intelligence_explosion_is_happening_now/
Alpha
"Brian Fletcher" <bigf...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:47f0cef3$0$8090$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au...
<snip>
> soul = consciousness
Soul DNE consciousness thus rendering the remarks based on that fanciful
notion erroneous. Conflating two terms with obviously different meanings,
now that we have made some progress in the sciences and also analysis of
what soul-speak meant in the past, is where some tend to end the argument
because they are unable to argue the merits of the case.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
Alpha
>
> "Immortalist" <reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:4c10b35e-5092-4501...@e6g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
>> >
>>> I'm actually heading towards explaining the illusion of consciousness,
>>> and I'm getting there...
>>>
>>
>> I agree with much of what you say. But why is consciousness an
>> illusion? Is the quality of "wettness" of hydrogen and oxygen
>> molecules enmass, an illusion? No it is a quality of these atoms
>> interacting in changing relationships over time.
>
> It is only when one looks through 'non relative eyes' does the illusion
> become apparent.
WTF does that mean!?
>Knowing a brick is made up of vibrating energy doesnt dampen the pain when
>it drops on your foot.
Has nothing to do with the above. Both the belief that it is made of
"vibrating energy" and the pain are both experiences.
>
> At a more subtle and powerful level, the 'state of mind' people have, such
> as victim consciousness (relationships are dominated by this state) can be
> seen clearly as illusion. Made real by the observer.(s)
You seem to dismiss some experiences and reify others with no basis.
>
> Below you make references to some amazing scientific speculations, with
> tuble construction etc...but makes no progress into the 'reality of life'.
Just what is the :"reality of life"?
BTW, the info on cytoskeletal functionality is spot on. Proto-cell to
biological cell transformations involved autopoietic emergences; one such
structure that emerged inside the cell was a cytoskeleton that helps a
single-celled alive organisms to, for example, seek a goal state and swim
towards the source of a sucrose gradient for example.
Alpha
"Tim Tyler" <seem...@cyberspace.org> wrote in message
news:qL0Ij.61324$w51....@fe2.news.blueyonder.co.uk...
> Sir Frederick wrote:
>
>> Hubris R US :
>>
>> http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_10.html
>>
>> <begin quote>
>> NICHOLAS HUMPHREY
>> Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, The Mind Made Flesh
>>
>> I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick,
Tricks still are existents. So now we have to try and discover why it seem
so prevalent and so tied to our capabilities awareness and experiences;
without it we would be zombies, all function and no experience.
>
>> designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an
>> inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing
> > it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to
>> bolster human self-confidence and self-importance-so as to increase
>> the value we each place on our own and others' lives.
Quite a "purpose" to imput to blind forces! Anthropomorphizing natural
selection now - a blind statistical *effect* (a change in allell
distributions) of evolution, as NS acts *after* phenotypic novelties have
already arisen due to: mutation/crossover or enviromentally-drive
developmental contingencies/alterations.
>
> Humphrey, whose views I agree with, also wrote a book called "Seeing Red".
> --
> __________
> |im |yler http://timtyler.org/ t...@tt1lock.org Remove lock to reply.
--
Alpha
"turtoni" <tur...@fastmail.net> wrote in message
news:38d7cb82-9581-4ad0...@s50g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
Turtoni: Maturana and Varela[11] showed
that the brain is massively involved with creating worlds of
experience for us with meager input from the senses.
Alpha: He does envision, I believe, a VR approach to constructing models of
worlds.
Turtoni: Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins[12] sums up the interactive
view of experience: "In a way, what sense organs do is assist our
brains to construct a useful model and it is this model that we move
around in. It is a kind of virtual reality simulation of the world."
The enactive approach is not inconsistent with that, even though Dawkins is
mistaken in other areas.
Alpha
> the relationship between body and soul. Some, of course, are not aware
> that there is a problem. Let them be happy in their ignorance. Do not
> disturb.
>
> Others are aware of a pseudo-problem that they lay to a poor choice of
> words, a misuse of language. They tend to be very, very clever. They
> turn on a spigot, and a rush of words befogs the question.
>
> Soul (spirit, essence, psyche, mind, consciousness, awareness,
> intelligence, intellect, mentality, self, individuality, persona,
> personality, conscious mental field, self awareness, sentience,
> executive function).
Conflating the parenthetical words (except spirit and possibly essence)
with "soul" is a big logical typing error and renders the rest of your
position incoherent.
>
> All these words imply an uneasiness with soul. All these words imply
> an object, or something approaching an object.
What is a object? A time-sliced convenience (like an atom) of a process of
course.
> Something we might
> carry about in a watch pocket and take out for display at an
> appropriate time.
Consciousness, at least self-consciousness implies a subject, the content of
which are sometimes called objects (to engender the separation between
subject-object.)
>
> Such a diarrhea of the mouth. There is no talking to them. They have
> surrounded themselves with such a fortress of words that they cannot
> hear.
>
> ---- ---
>
> Definition of soul:
>
> 1. (philosophical) the immaterial essence, animating principle, or
> actuating cause of an individual life.
> 2. (theological) the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all
> rational and spiritual beings, or the universe.
And neither of those defintions is what we re talkin about vis
"consciousness".
>
> --- ---
>
> In more recent metaphysics less has been heard of the soul and more of
> the mind; the old problem of the relationship of soul and body is now
> that of the relationship of mind and body.
>
> A few have carefully parsed the question: Chalmers, an optimist, says
> we need a new physics. McGinn, a pessimist, replies, "Save your
> breath".
>
> The practical issue, in questions of intelligence, arises when we ask,
> "Does the soul (mind) have causal powers?"
Question contain two conflated terms and is thence nonsense.
> The scientist demands,
> "No!"
Hmmm - many of the interpretations of physics at the QM level of
description, by creators of such, posit an observer as central to the whole
mess. I suppose those were not real scientists though - right?!
> The religionist asserts, "Yes!" Descartes said, "Yes". The
> Princess Elizabeth said, "No". There it rests.
Gee - that is the extent of your analysis?
>
> The late Sir Francis Crick looked for the neural correlate of
> consciousness (NCC). He failed, but not for lack of trying.
We already have several potential correlates (or subsets of correlates) of C
inferred from experiments with anesthesia, analysis of the physiology of
NREM sleep and dreaming sleep, Koch's work etc.
>
> If we should isolate a neuron, such that every time it burst you
> should experience a patch of blue, a quale, and if we should go
> further, and connect a button to the neuron so that every time you
> pushed the button, you should be aware of a patch of blue, would you
> feel in touch with your soul? Most would say, "No!"
I would feel in touch with my mind though- my thoughts that produce the
visualization of blue in the first place.
>
> Would you even feel that you understood why you experienced the blue?
> Again, Chalmers says, "We need a new physics to understand the
> experiencing". Again, McGinn replies, "Saved your breath".
>
> You, a soul, experience a world. You know not why.
>
> Let us explain intelligence as a circuitry of neurons. Let us put
> qualia one side as a matter of religion.
Intelligence and consciousness are two different phenomena; C does enable or
assist certain aspects of intelligence however.
>
> ray
Entertained by my own EIMC
> Entertained by my own EIMC wrote:
>
>> I the only statements of yours that I can't entirely concur with is your
>> one that expresses confidence in us being able to build sufficiently
>> complex and correctly adaptively self-organizing (brain mimicking)
>> machines in only two decades. The only chance that we may do so may be
>> in 50 to hundred years is if we find a way to 'let lose' a rapidly
>> automatically evolving AI-algorithmic entities that would then
>> necessarily/inevitably also endanger us slowly primarily/originally
>> evolved critters. ;>
>
> The "intelligence explosion". How do you think that could be avoided?
>
> http://alife.co.uk/essays/the_intelligence_explosion_is_happening_now/
Even though I don't believe there is reasonable to fear such a
speculative (and sloppily conceived and stated) scenario, let's for
entertainment's sake imagine the 'existence of an untapped potential for
a phase-shift/transition produced (out of a sufficiently technologically
advancing civilization) evolutionary emergence of an mobile,
manipulation-capable, adaptive and self-sufficient, self-replication
capable, "individual" composed of one or more non-cytochemical
functional units.
[Apropos which, I think you are correctly recognizing that a gradual
(though remarkably rapid against the timescale of our ""naturally"
naturally selected" phylogeny) cyborg-oriented evolution is already
manifest.]
I can more easily imagine that we make ourselves go extinct by polluting
ourselves by nano-particles that compounds with already ticking
timebombs of already dumped, and yet to be dumped and spewed out,
poisonous and hormone-mimicking man-made molecules than by being
murdered or 'naturally selected into' some would-be now considered
non-human bionic form.
This especially since people are these days tending to focus their fears
on the false threat of the world 'turning into a furnace' because of us
folk fumigation ourselves with the most harmless and natural of
molecules (CO2)! ;-(
This potential can thus then also only be taken to become 'finally
tapped' through the pre-evolution of a formulation and a by
"naturally-not-so-intelligent" human intent initiated first physical
fabrication of such a new (energy/matter-self-supplying and actually
_relatively sustainably_ self-replication-capable) kind of machine.
If that would happen, only then would 'we' need to worry where this
(such a) AI-machine starts to quarry in order to quell its inbuilt
cravings (or to meet its needs by its "evolutionary aspirations" and
metabolism driven motivations).
I don't believe that are much configuration space to
spare for speciation of such a 'prototype'.
On a more realistic and serious note:
By "naturally-not-so-intelligent" (above) I was chiefly referring to
that the typical human phenotype is both naturally 'selectively mentally
blind' and uniquely Elaborately Perverted 'Thanks to' a (sub)principle
of the principle of natural selection [first and foremost of fauna] - a
subprinciple that I like to express
by the approximative acronym "AEVASIVE"; most especially by this
acronym's first two or
three letters for ~= "Ambiadvantageous[ly adaptive]" Evolutionary
Vantage'....[etcetera].
N.B., "perverted" is here to be interpreted *Intelligently*. That is,
with sufficiently sweeping percEPTiveness and dEPTh of relevant
knowledge, and insight not just into evolutionary psychobiology type
topics (and ditto natural trends and thematicity) but also
knowledge/insight entailing, encouraged by, and explained by, primal
theory/therapy.
However, even if a pioneering motile/self-motivated/replicating
AI-machine - one capable of cutting itself off
from (being independent of) its human ancestors - could come into
existence it would then not escape the 'AEVASIVE principle' (my
observation of a psychophysiology organizing
ordering or patterning of things) any more than it would remain
unaffected by the force of gravity.
That is, part of its and its descendants
character will have to be a capacity to reroute internal motivational
energy towards preoccupations of opportunity-taking type *whilst*
automatically preventing a paying of actention to (preoccupation with)
current and/or with reverberating recordings of no longer current
inescapable predicaments.
This since any readily available internal means for
a 'straight' or direct response to such predicaments does of course tend
to be self-defeating - *by defintion*, and because a parallel taking of
available environmental opportunities rather than passively (generally)
hibernating is, perfectly obviously, often the most adaptive coping
strategy.
P