Stephen - the Matrix video is a faithful interpretation of comp, but
Craig's story is not, unless he includes the crucial narrative - that
of the simulated Craig eating the simulated meal. I expect Craig to
say that the simulated Craig, the one making the yummy noises, is a
zombie,
and has no actual experience or inner narrative. He is
entitled of course to that position. He is just saying no to the
doctor.
On Sep 17, 2012, at 3:26 PM, "Stephen P. King" <step...@charter.net>
wrote:
> On 9/17/2012 1:20 PM, Terren Suydam wrote:
>> Stephen - the Matrix video is a faithful interpretation of comp, but
>> Craig's story is not, unless he includes the crucial narrative - that
>> of the simulated Craig eating the simulated meal. I expect Craig to
>> say that the simulated Craig, the one making the yummy noises, is a
>> zombie, and has no actual experience or inner narrative. He is
>> entitled of course to that position. He is just saying no to the
>> doctor.
>>
>> Terren
> Dear Terren,
>
> You are completely missing his point. He is highlighting the fact
> that there is a difference that makes a difference between the case
> of "of the simulated Craig eating the simulated meal" and "of the
> "real" Craig eating the "real" meal".
Unless the neurons themselves are directly and independently
responsible for qualia, (which is doubtful because there would be no
clear mechanism for an individual neuron to articulate the wonder of
its sensations to the brain as a whole)
, the only difference that
makes a difference are the firings patterns of neurons.
This is the only time information that makes a difference to other
neurons is communicated. At each moment, all the differences, all the
information a neuron has received is boiled down to one bit: to fire
or not to fire.
Using information theory, and known limitations if information
representation in physics, It could be shown that a biological brain
has only some certain and finite information available to it. This
places an upper bound on the things it knows and can talk about. An
equivalent artificial brain could be engineered to contain the same
information and the same knowledge. There would be nothing the
biological brain could know that the artificial brain does not: they
were created to have identical information content. If one knows 2+2
is 4, they both do, if one knows what red is like, they both do.
I think that comp is almost true, except for when applied to consciousness itself, in which case it is exactly false. I wasn't asserting it so much as I was illustrating exactly why that is the case. Does anyone have any common sense analogy or story which makes sense of comp as a generator of consciousness?
On Monday, September 17, 2012 5:44:16 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:
On Sep 17, 2012, at 3:26 PM, "Stephen P. King" <step...@charter.net>wrote:
> On 9/17/2012 1:20 PM, Terren Suydam wrote:
>> Stephen - the Matrix video is a faithful interpretation of comp, but
>> Craig's story is not, unless he includes the crucial narrative - that
>> of the simulated Craig eating the simulated meal. I expect Craig to
>> say that the simulated Craig, the one making the yummy noises, is a
>> zombie, and has no actual experience or inner narrative. He is
>> entitled of course to that position. He is just saying no to the
>> doctor.
>>
>> Terren
> Dear Terren,
>
> You are completely missing his point. He is highlighting the fact
> that there is a difference that makes a difference between the case
> of "of the simulated Craig eating the simulated meal" and "of the
> "real" Craig eating the "real" meal".
Unless the neurons themselves are directly and independently
responsible for qualia, (which is doubtful because there would be no
clear mechanism for an individual neuron to articulate the wonder of
its sensations to the brain as a whole)
There is no more or less of a mechanism within neurons than there is for the brain as a whole to explain qualia. Neurons have neuron qualia, humans have human qualia.
There isn't a mechanism because qualia are not objects. They are sensitivities to other experiences.
They are presentations through which we access significant experiences. They are generated as much on our own anthropological level as they are on sub-personal physiological levels and super-personal evolutionary levels.
, the only difference that
makes a difference are the firings patterns of neurons.
Patterns make no difference to anything without pattern recognition. There are no 'patterns' in and of themselves. The color of X-Rays, for instance, is just as patterned as the color green.
This is the only time information that makes a difference to other
neurons is communicated. At each moment, all the differences, all the
information a neuron has received is boiled down to one bit: to fire
or not to fire.
Pure speculation. Neurons fire, but single cell organisms respond to their environment without nervous systems.
You are conflating the physiology associated with human experience with the ontology of subjective experience in general. Information and bits are not real, they are analytical abstractions that are not capable of any causes or effects.
Using information theory, and known limitations if information
representation in physics, It could be shown that a biological brain
has only some certain and finite information available to it. This
places an upper bound on the things it knows and can talk about. An
equivalent artificial brain could be engineered to contain the same
information and the same knowledge. There would be nothing the
biological brain could know that the artificial brain does not: they
were created to have identical information content. If one knows 2+2
is 4, they both do, if one knows what red is like, they both do.
Information feels nothing and knows nothing, and it never will.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/bl-xc-8KIFMJ.
Hi Jason Resch
If you get a duplicate of this, I apologize.
I'm still working on the problem.
Could it not be that just as our five senses (touch, sight, etc.)
tell us what is going on in the outside world, that we also have
sensors inside to detect pain and pleasure ?
On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 1:50:47 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:I think that comp is almost true, except for when applied to consciousness itself, in which case it is exactly false. I wasn't asserting it so much as I was illustrating exactly why that is the case. Does anyone have any common sense analogy or story which makes sense of comp as a generator of consciousness?
Craig,I'll give this a shot.Imagine there is a life form with only the most simple form of qualia. It can only experience two states of being: pain and the absence of pain.Further, let's say this creature has, say 10 semi-independent regions in its brain, each responsible for different functions but also each is connected to every other, to varying degrees. Each can affect any other region in various ways.When the creature is in a state of pain, each of the 10 regions of the brain are notified of this state. (This is communicated from the creature's pain receptors to all other parts of its brain).The awareness of this state has different effects on each region, and the regions in turn affect the creature's thoughts and behaviors. For example, one region begins telling the other regions of the brain to do whatever they can to make it stop. Another region expresses the associated behaviors and thoughts that pertain to stress and anxiety. A third region of the brain might increase the readiness or propensity to flee, hide, cry for help, or scream. The states of the various regions have cascading and circular affects on other regions, and the entire focus of the brain may quickly shift (from what it was thinking before) to the single subject and pursuit of ending the pain. Taken to the extreme, this effect might become all-encompassing, or even debilitating.In the above example, the perception of pain is described in terms of information and the effect that information has on the internal states of processes in the brain. The presence of the information, indicating pain, is through a very complex process, interpreted in numerous ways by different sub-agents in the brain to yield all the effects normally associated with the experience.JasonP.S.Try this little experiment from your own home: close your eyes and slowly begin to pinch the skin on the back of your hand. Pay particular attention to the feeling as it crosses the threshold from mere feeling into pain. Concentrate on what it is that is different between that perception (of the light pinch) and the pain (of the string pinch). You may find that it is just information, along with an increasing anxiety and desire to make it stop. Experiments have found that certain people with brain damage or on certain drugs can experience the pain without the discomfort. There is a separate part of the brain responsible for making pain uncomfortable!
What you have then is 10 regions of the brain (are they self categorized? formally partitioned? who knows there are a such thing as brain regions besides us?)
Here is an example:
Functional MRI scans have indicated that an area of the brain, called the anterior cingulate cortex, processes pain information to determine how a person is affected. Severing the link to this part of the brain has a curious effect on one's reaction to pain. A condition known as pain dissociation is the result. Along with brain surgery such as lobotomy or cingulotomy, the condition may also occur through the administration of certain drugs such as morphine. Those with pain dissociation still perceive pain; they are aware of its location and intensity but pain is no longer unpleasant or distressing. Paul Brand, a surgeon and author on the subject of pain recounted the case of a woman who had suffered with a severe and chronic pain for more than a decade: She agreed to a surgery that would separate the neural pathways between her frontal lobes and the rest of her brain. The surgery was a success. Brand visited the woman a year later, and inquired about her pain. She said, “Oh, yes, its still there. I just don't worry about it anymore.” With a smile she continued, “In fact, it's still agonizing. But I don't mind.”
The conclusion: even seemingly simple qualia, like pain are far from simple.
Marvin Minsky considers it to be “a huge mistake-that attempt to reify 'feeling' as an independent entity, with an essence that's indescribable. As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what 'hurting' is-and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some single, simple, 'essence' of hurting, rather than recognizing that this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources.”
According to Minsky, human consciousness involves the interplay between as many as 400 separate sub-organs of the brain. One can imagine a symphony of activity resulting from these individual regions, each acting on each others' signals and in turn reacting to how those other regions are then affected, in a kind of perpetual and intertwined feedback loop of enormous complexity.
which have no experience or qualia whatsoever, yet can detect "notifications" of a presumably epiphenomenal "state" of "pain".
If the brain is doing all of the work, why does the top level organism have some other worthless abstraction layer of "experience" when, as blindsight proves, we are perfectly capable of processing information without any conscious qualia at all.
Information is very close to consciousness, but ultimately fails to sustain itself. The pixels on your screen have no way to detect each other or process the image that you see as a coherent gestalt, and the processor behind the graphics generation has no way to detect the visual end result, and if it did, it would be completely superfluous. Your graphics card does not need to see anything.
To me it makes more sense to see information as nothing but the semiotic protocols developed by perceptual participation (experience) to elaborate and deepen the qualitative richness of those experiences.
Of course, the protocols which are maps of one level of experience are the territory of another, which is what makes it confusing to try to reverse engineer consciousness from such an incredibly complex example as a Homo sapien.
Our pinch is a continuum of sensory, emotional, and cognitive interaction because we are made of the qualia of hundreds of billions of neurons
and billions of lifetimes of different species and substances.
That only means our pain can seem like information to us, not that all pain arises from information processing.
Information does not concretely exist as an independent entity.
There are forms which can be used to inform if they are intentionally treated that way, as a map, but nothing is just a map by itself. Every map is A territory (not THE territory). being used by another 'territory' as a map.
I might use a piece of paper with ink on it (a territory) as a map because the ink is printed in a pre-configured protocol which I can learn to read easily as part of the intended audience of the map, or which I can learn to read even if I wasn't intended as an audience. Logic circuits don't do that. They don't care about learning. They store the recordings of our intentions, and reproduce them in a trivial and mechanistic way.
There isn't a mechanism because qualia are not objects. They are sensitivities to other experiences.It is a circular to say qualia (sensations / experiences) are sensitivities (sensations) of experiences.
They are presentations through which we access significant experiences. They are generated as much on our own anthropological level as they are on sub-personal physiological levels and super-personal evolutionary levels.
Where do you get this stuff?
, the only difference that
makes a difference are the firings patterns of neurons.
Patterns make no difference to anything without pattern recognition. There are no 'patterns' in and of themselves. The color of X-Rays, for instance, is just as patterned as the color green.
The firing patterns of neurons is noticed by other neurons and groups of neurons.
This is the only time information that makes a difference to other
neurons is communicated. At each moment, all the differences, all the
information a neuron has received is boiled down to one bit: to fire
or not to fire.
Pure speculation. Neurons fire, but single cell organisms respond to their environment without nervous systems.Neurons might respond to their environment independently, but neighboring neurons don't care what their neighbors might be thinking, what matters is whether their neighbors are firing.
You are conflating the physiology associated with human experience with the ontology of subjective experience in general. Information and bits are not real, they are analytical abstractions that are not capable of any causes or effects.
According to you, only experiences are real. If this is where you stand then you should admit that this idea gives up any hope of explaining anything about experience.
Using information theory, and known limitations if information
representation in physics, It could be shown that a biological brain
has only some certain and finite information available to it. This
places an upper bound on the things it knows and can talk about. An
equivalent artificial brain could be engineered to contain the same
information and the same knowledge. There would be nothing the
biological brain could know that the artificial brain does not: they
were created to have identical information content. If one knows 2+2
is 4, they both do, if one knows what red is like, they both do.
Information feels nothing and knows nothing, and it never will.I didn't say information feels or knows, only that the brains, (biological or artificial), in the above hypothetical, have the same limited information and therefore neither is wiser or more knowledgeable than the other.
There isn't a mechanism because qualia are not objects. They are sensitivities to other experiences.It is a circular to say qualia (sensations / experiences) are sensitivities (sensations) of experiences.
It isn't in the case of qualia. If I'm right, sensation is always a capitulation and a diffraction of itself. It is the a-mereological and trans-rational nature of the ground of being from which the mereological and logical antithesis is foregrounded.
They are presentations through which we access significant experiences. They are generated as much on our own anthropological level as they are on sub-personal physiological levels and super-personal evolutionary levels.
Where do you get this stuff?
From the future?
, the only difference that
makes a difference are the firings patterns of neurons.
Patterns make no difference to anything without pattern recognition. There are no 'patterns' in and of themselves. The color of X-Rays, for instance, is just as patterned as the color green.
The firing patterns of neurons is noticed by other neurons and groups of neurons.
Because they host entities which can recognize each others patterns. If we look at neuron patterns, they are meaningless to us unless we can correlate them to something familiar.
This is the only time information that makes a difference to other
neurons is communicated. At each moment, all the differences, all the
information a neuron has received is boiled down to one bit: to fire
or not to fire.
Pure speculation. Neurons fire, but single cell organisms respond to their environment without nervous systems.Neurons might respond to their environment independently, but neighboring neurons don't care what their neighbors might be thinking, what matters is whether their neighbors are firing.
It's the same as saying that cars in traffic don't care what their neighbors might be thinking as long as they follow the flow of traffic and show normative judgment and awareness of driving laws. The point is that the purpose of the communication between neurons is only the tip of the iceberg. Their common purpose is to facilitate human perception and participation in a human scale world. There is firing, but those are only the semaphores and gestures which correlate with experiences but are only the vehicle through which the sharing of experience is modulated.
You are conflating the physiology associated with human experience with the ontology of subjective experience in general. Information and bits are not real, they are analytical abstractions that are not capable of any causes or effects.
According to you, only experiences are real. If this is where you stand then you should admit that this idea gives up any hope of explaining anything about experience.
Not at all. Admitting that experience is the ground of being is the necessary starting point to explain anything about experience. There is a whole new universe to explore.
Using information theory, and known limitations if information
representation in physics, It could be shown that a biological brain
has only some certain and finite information available to it. This
places an upper bound on the things it knows and can talk about. An
equivalent artificial brain could be engineered to contain the same
information and the same knowledge. There would be nothing the
biological brain could know that the artificial brain does not: they
were created to have identical information content. If one knows 2+2
is 4, they both do, if one knows what red is like, they both do.
Information feels nothing and knows nothing, and it never will.I didn't say information feels or knows, only that the brains, (biological or artificial), in the above hypothetical, have the same limited information and therefore neither is wiser or more knowledgeable than the other.
They don't have the same information, since in-formation is a subjective in-terpretation of objectively meaningless forms. Even though a picture of a person might look like a living person on TV, they are actually not living people. An artificial brain may look like we think a brain looks, and act like we think a brain acts, but its just a puppet running on recorded instructions to operate in exactly the way that best fools us into imagining it is alive.
Here is an example:
Functional MRI scans have indicated that an area of the brain, called the anterior cingulate cortex, processes pain information to determine how a person is affected. Severing the link to this part of the brain has a curious effect on one's reaction to pain. A condition known as pain dissociation is the result. Along with brain surgery such as lobotomy or cingulotomy, the condition may also occur through the administration of certain drugs such as morphine. Those with pain dissociation still perceive pain; they are aware of its location and intensity but pain is no longer unpleasant or distressing. Paul Brand, a surgeon and author on the subject of pain recounted the case of a woman who had suffered with a severe and chronic pain for more than a decade: She agreed to a surgery that would separate the neural pathways between her frontal lobes and the rest of her brain. The surgery was a success. Brand visited the woman a year later, and inquired about her pain. She said, “Oh, yes, its still there. I just don't worry about it anymore.” With a smile she continued, “In fact, it's still agonizing. But I don't mind.”
The conclusion: even seemingly simple qualia, like pain are far from simple.
I think Marvin Minksy understands this well, and provides a good explanation:Marvin Minsky considers it to be “a huge mistake-that attempt to reify 'feeling' as an independent entity, with an essence that's indescribable. As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what 'hurting' is-and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some single, simple, 'essence' of hurting, rather than recognizing that this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources.”
According to Minsky, human consciousness involves the interplay between as many as 400 separate sub-organs of the brain. One can imagine a symphony of activity resulting from these individual regions,
each acting on each others' signals and in turn reacting to how those other regions are then affected, in a kind of perpetual and intertwined feedback loop of enormous complexity.
There are centers of the brain for sight, touch, language, hearing, drawing, pain, etc. They are all in some (or many) ways connected to each other. See this for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind
which have no experience or qualia whatsoever, yet can detect "notifications" of a presumably epiphenomenal "state" of "pain".
Pain is anything but epiphenomenal. The fact that someone is able to talk about it rules out it being an epiphenomenon.
If the brain is doing all of the work, why does the top level organism have some other worthless abstraction layer of "experience" when, as blindsight proves, we are perfectly capable of processing information without any conscious qualia at all.
It's not worthless at all. Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of photosensitive cells in your retina? No, it takes many layers of perception, detecting lines, depth perception, motion, colors, objects, faces, etc. for the sense of sight to be as useful as it is to us.
After the different layers process this information and share it with the other brain regions, we lose the ability to explain how it is we recognize a face, or how red differs from green. These determinations were done by a lower level module, and its internal processing is not privy to other brain regions (such as the brain region that talks), and so it remains mysterious.
Information is very close to consciousness, but ultimately fails to sustain itself. The pixels on your screen have no way to detect each other or process the image that you see as a coherent gestalt, and the processor behind the graphics generation has no way to detect the visual end result, and if it did, it would be completely superfluous. Your graphics card does not need to see anything.
Of course the pixels don't process themselves. You need a brain with complex software and filters to make sense of the flood of photons entering the eye.
And you need other regions of the brain to make sense of the visual scene (to integrate it into an even larger context).
To me it makes more sense to see information as nothing but the semiotic protocols developed by perceptual participation (experience) to elaborate and deepen the qualitative richness of those experiences.I wish I did not have to struggle to translate your sentences so frequently. I completely failed on this one.
Of course, the protocols which are maps of one level of experience are the territory of another, which is what makes it confusing to try to reverse engineer consciousness from such an incredibly complex example as a Homo sapien.
Definitely. Our consciousness is not a simple thing, it involves hundreds of billions of (literally) moving parts.
Our pinch is a continuum of sensory, emotional, and cognitive interaction because we are made of the qualia of hundreds of billions of neuronsOkay.and billions of lifetimes of different species and substances.I don't think the preceding life times or substances is relevant.
If your duplicate were created randomly by some quantum fluctuation its brain would create the same experience.
That only means our pain can seem like information to us, not that all pain arises from information processing.I think it is a worth making the distinction that it is the system (doing the processing) that has the experience, not the information or the processing of the information. The information from the perspective of the system, makes a difference to the system causing it to enter different states. The ability to differentiate is at the heart of what it is to perceive.
Information does not concretely exist as an independent entity."X" does not concretely exist as an independent entity.Is there any term "X", where the above sentence does not hold, in your view?
There are forms which can be used to inform if they are intentionally treated that way, as a map, but nothing is just a map by itself. Every map is A territory (not THE territory). being used by another 'territory' as a map.Maybe all there is are maps?
I might use a piece of paper with ink on it (a territory) as a map because the ink is printed in a pre-configured protocol which I can learn to read easily as part of the intended audience of the map, or which I can learn to read even if I wasn't intended as an audience. Logic circuits don't do that. They don't care about learning. They store the recordings of our intentions, and reproduce them in a trivial and mechanistic way.
Just like our DNA stores the recordings of evolution's intentions, and we follow those instructions in a reproducible mechanistic way (I won't say trivial because not all machines are simple, and the resulting behaviors of machines can be anything but trivial).
Jason
My hypothesis is that human qualia is an iconic capitulation of sub-personal and super-personal qualia - meta qualia which synergistically recovers richer qualities of experience from the Totality.
Okay. But it will remain only a hypothesis until you (or someone else) shows how it explains new things or gathers some evidence for it.
There isn't a mechanism because qualia are not objects. They are sensitivities to other experiences.It is a circular to say qualia (sensations / experiences) are sensitivities (sensations) of experiences.
It isn't in the case of qualia. If I'm right, sensation is always a capitulation and a diffraction of itself. It is the a-mereological and trans-rational nature of the ground of being from which the mereological and logical antithesis is foregrounded.
James Hutton, considered a father of Geology, was largely unread because his prose was so difficult to parse. He had many great ideas, he even beat Charles Darwin regarding the idea of natural selection ( http://www.strangescience.net/hutton.htm ). Yet, his style of writing was so impenetrable that most of his ideas were ignored in his life time. After he died one of his friends took up re-writing his books and it became a huge success.
They are presentations through which we access significant experiences. They are generated as much on our own anthropological level as they are on sub-personal physiological levels and super-personal evolutionary levels.
Where do you get this stuff?
From the future?
, the only difference that
makes a difference are the firings patterns of neurons.
Patterns make no difference to anything without pattern recognition. There are no 'patterns' in and of themselves. The color of X-Rays, for instance, is just as patterned as the color green.
The firing patterns of neurons is noticed by other neurons and groups of neurons.
Because they host entities which can recognize each others patterns. If we look at neuron patterns, they are meaningless to us unless we can correlate them to something familiar.
If you look at some MRI scan of them, they are meaningless, but not if you *are* them. Then they do the correlation for you.
This is the only time information that makes a difference to other
neurons is communicated. At each moment, all the differences, all the
information a neuron has received is boiled down to one bit: to fire
or not to fire.
Pure speculation. Neurons fire, but single cell organisms respond to their environment without nervous systems.Neurons might respond to their environment independently, but neighboring neurons don't care what their neighbors might be thinking, what matters is whether their neighbors are firing.
It's the same as saying that cars in traffic don't care what their neighbors might be thinking as long as they follow the flow of traffic and show normative judgment and awareness of driving laws. The point is that the purpose of the communication between neurons is only the tip of the iceberg. Their common purpose is to facilitate human perception and participation in a human scale world. There is firing, but those are only the semaphores and gestures which correlate with experiences but are only the vehicle through which the sharing of experience is modulated.
So in your theory the firing plays is only a minor role in the operation and function of the brain?
You are conflating the physiology associated with human experience with the ontology of subjective experience in general. Information and bits are not real, they are analytical abstractions that are not capable of any causes or effects.
According to you, only experiences are real. If this is where you stand then you should admit that this idea gives up any hope of explaining anything about experience.
Not at all. Admitting that experience is the ground of being is the necessary starting point to explain anything about experience. There is a whole new universe to explore.
Using information theory, and known limitations if information
representation in physics, It could be shown that a biological brain
has only some certain and finite information available to it. This
places an upper bound on the things it knows and can talk about. An
equivalent artificial brain could be engineered to contain the same
information and the same knowledge. There would be nothing the
biological brain could know that the artificial brain does not: they
were created to have identical information content. If one knows 2+2
is 4, they both do, if one knows what red is like, they both do.
Information feels nothing and knows nothing, and it never will.I didn't say information feels or knows, only that the brains, (biological or artificial), in the above hypothetical, have the same limited information and therefore neither is wiser or more knowledgeable than the other.
They don't have the same information, since in-formation is a subjective in-terpretation of objectively meaningless forms. Even though a picture of a person might look like a living person on TV, they are actually not living people. An artificial brain may look like we think a brain looks, and act like we think a brain acts, but its just a puppet running on recorded instructions to operate in exactly the way that best fools us into imagining it is alive.
Information content can be objectively measured. There is a whole field of information theory based on this.
Jason
My hypothesis is that human qualia is an iconic capitulation of sub-personal and super-personal qualia - meta qualia which synergistically recovers richer qualities of experience from the Totality.
Okay. But it will remain only a hypothesis until you (or someone else) shows how it explains new things or gathers some evidence for it.
Sure, yeah it's only a hypothesis. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it.
On 9/18/2012 9:05 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:My hypothesis is that human qualia is an iconic capitulation of sub-personal and super-personal qualia - meta qualia which synergistically recovers richer qualities of experience from the Totality.
Okay. But it will remain only a hypothesis until you (or someone else) shows how it explains new things or gathers some evidence for it.
Sure, yeah it's only a hypothesis. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it.
What you do with an hypothesis is test it; see whether it makes a false prediction that is observable.
On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 10:29:44 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:Here is an example:
Functional MRI scans have indicated that an area of the brain, called the anterior cingulate cortex, processes pain information to determine how a person is affected. Severing the link to this part of the brain has a curious effect on one's reaction to pain. A condition known as pain dissociation is the result. Along with brain surgery such as lobotomy or cingulotomy, the condition may also occur through the administration of certain drugs such as morphine. Those with pain dissociation still perceive pain; they are aware of its location and intensity but pain is no longer unpleasant or distressing. Paul Brand, a surgeon and author on the subject of pain recounted the case of a woman who had suffered with a severe and chronic pain for more than a decade: She agreed to a surgery that would separate the neural pathways between her frontal lobes and the rest of her brain. The surgery was a success. Brand visited the woman a year later, and inquired about her pain. She said, “Oh, yes, its still there. I just don't worry about it anymore.” With a smile she continued, “In fact, it's still agonizing. But I don't mind.”
The conclusion: even seemingly simple qualia, like pain are far from simple.
That is a conclusion, but I think the wrong one. Human qualia are not simple, but that does not at all mean that qualia re not simple.
We are titanically enormous organisms made of other organisms. Our human experience is loaded with cognitive, emotional, and sensory qualia, corresponding to the evolution of life, our species, cultures, families, and individuals. Our pain is a Taj Mahal, and if you remove enough bricks, some towers fall and maybe one part of the palace no longer relates to another part. What you describe suggests exactly that - some part of us feels the pain on a sub-personal level, but the personal level is not alarmed by it because it's qualia has lost the red end of it's spectrum so to speak and now is blue-shifted toward an anesthetized intellectual quality of being.
I think Marvin Minksy understands this well, and provides a good explanation:Marvin Minsky considers it to be “a huge mistake-that attempt to reify 'feeling' as an independent entity, with an essence that's indescribable. As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what 'hurting' is-and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some single, simple, 'essence' of hurting, rather than recognizing that this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources.”
He's right that there is no essence of hurting (qualia is always a subject, not an object, so it's essence is the same as it's 'envelope'. It's a-mereological. He's completely wrong about hurting being something other than what it is though.
Hurting is an experience. A complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources is completely irrelevant. Complex to who? Why would 'rearrangements' 'feel' like something?
It only seems to make sense form the retrospective view of consciousness where we take it for granted. If we start instead from a universe of resources and dispositions, then the idea that a rearrangement of them should entail some kind of experience is a completely metaphysical, magical just-so story that has no basis in science.
Sure, to us it makes sense that the feeling of pain should have a function, but it makes no sense to a function to have a feeling. None.
According to Minsky, human consciousness involves the interplay between as many as 400 separate sub-organs of the brain. One can imagine a symphony of activity resulting from these individual regions,
A symphony of what? Who is there to hear it?
Stop imagining things and think of what is actually there once you reduce the universe to unconscious processing of dead data.
each acting on each others' signals and in turn reacting to how those other regions are then affected, in a kind of perpetual and intertwined feedback loop of enormous complexity.
It's an 'angels on the head of a pin' fantasy. There is no signalling without something to interpret some concretely real event as a signal.
You can have a territory without a map, but you can't have a map without a territory.
There are centers of the brain for sight, touch, language, hearing, drawing, pain, etc. They are all in some (or many) ways connected to each other. See this for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind
First of all, so what, and secondly it's not exactly true. Blind people use their visual cortex for tactile experience. The modularity of mind says nothing about qualia. It says only that sub-personal and personal levels of experience have ordered relations.
which have no experience or qualia whatsoever, yet can detect "notifications" of a presumably epiphenomenal "state" of "pain".
Pain is anything but epiphenomenal. The fact that someone is able to talk about it rules out it being an epiphenomenon.
That's the reality, but your view does not accommodate the reality. You have no model for how pain can interface causally with 'complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources'. If you have the function, why would you need an experience?
How would such an experience appear? Where is the point of translation?
If the brain is doing all of the work, why does the top level organism have some other worthless abstraction layer of "experience" when, as blindsight proves, we are perfectly capable of processing information without any conscious qualia at all.
It's not worthless at all. Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of photosensitive cells in your retina? No, it takes many layers of perception, detecting lines, depth perception, motion, colors, objects, faces, etc. for the sense of sight to be as useful as it is to us.
Ugh. I don't know if there is any way that I can show you this blind spot if you don't see it for yourself, but if you are interested I will keep trying to explain it. If you aren't interested, then you are wasting your time talking to me, because what your view says I have known backwards and forwards for many years.
Let's say I am a computer. You are telling me "Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of electronically sensitive semiconductors in your graphics card? Yes. I would.
I require no layers of software to organize this data into other kinds of data, nor would it make any sense that there could be any such thing as 'other kinds of data'. To the contrary, the raw firing of the semiconductors is all that is required to render data from the motherboard to be spewed out to a video screen (which would of course be invisible and irrelevant to a computer).
After the different layers process this information and share it with the other brain regions, we lose the ability to explain how it is we recognize a face, or how red differs from green. These determinations were done by a lower level module, and its internal processing is not privy to other brain regions (such as the brain region that talks), and so it remains mysterious.
All of that can and would occur without anything like 'experience'.
Information is very close to consciousness, but ultimately fails to sustain itself. The pixels on your screen have no way to detect each other or process the image that you see as a coherent gestalt, and the processor behind the graphics generation has no way to detect the visual end result, and if it did, it would be completely superfluous. Your graphics card does not need to see anything.
Of course the pixels don't process themselves. You need a brain with complex software and filters to make sense of the flood of photons entering the eye.
If there are photons (and I maintain that there are not) flooding into the eye, they only get as far as turning on a vitamin A isomer to change shape and turn off the rod cell's flow of glutamate. Everything else is biochemical and endogenous. What we see is as much vitamin A as it is photons.
And you need other regions of the brain to make sense of the visual scene (to integrate it into an even larger context).
Insects have eyes too. Why do we need such a huge visual cortex to do what a baby mosquito can do?
To me it makes more sense to see information as nothing but the semiotic protocols developed by perceptual participation (experience) to elaborate and deepen the qualitative richness of those experiences.I wish I did not have to struggle to translate your sentences so frequently. I completely failed on this one.
I mean that if you have information that performs functions, then you don't need experience. Therefore it makes more sense to see that experience is the thing that cannot be reduced to anything simpler and that all forms of information are nothing more than tools used to share experiences.
Of course, the protocols which are maps of one level of experience are the territory of another, which is what makes it confusing to try to reverse engineer consciousness from such an incredibly complex example as a Homo sapien.
Definitely. Our consciousness is not a simple thing, it involves hundreds of billions of (literally) moving parts.
Our pinch is a continuum of sensory, emotional, and cognitive interaction because we are made of the qualia of hundreds of billions of neuronsOkay.and billions of lifetimes of different species and substances.I don't think the preceding life times or substances is relevant.
I know, I didn't think that either, but now I see that there is no reason to believe it wouldn't be. You are just going on your naive realism that experiences vanish when you are no longer aware of them. The universe may have an entirely different perspective outside of a human lifetime.
If your duplicate were created randomly by some quantum fluctuation its brain would create the same experience.
Why? Quantum events may be unrepeatable. Eventness may be unrepeatability itself.
That only means our pain can seem like information to us, not that all pain arises from information processing.I think it is a worth making the distinction that it is the system (doing the processing) that has the experience, not the information or the processing of the information. The information from the perspective of the system, makes a difference to the system causing it to enter different states. The ability to differentiate is at the heart of what it is to perceive.
Then you have to explain where system-ness comes from, especially if you acknowledge that it can't come from dumb information.
The ability to differentiate is at the heart of what it is to perceive, but qualia is the only thing that can be differentiated. What is being differentiated from what except afferent sensory input, and what is differentiation other than efferent motive participation?
Information does not concretely exist as an independent entity."X" does not concretely exist as an independent entity.Is there any term "X", where the above sentence does not hold, in your view?
Experience exists concretely as an independent entity.
There are forms which can be used to inform if they are intentionally treated that way, as a map, but nothing is just a map by itself. Every map is A territory (not THE territory). being used by another 'territory' as a map.Maybe all there is are maps?
Then there would be no point in having any maps that seem like territories.
That's the problem. If information could do anything by itself, then any kind of 'experience' of that function would be redundant. What would be the point? Why reduce everything to information if you are only going to have to invoke some magical and superfluous puppet show for that information to know itself with?
I might use a piece of paper with ink on it (a territory) as a map because the ink is printed in a pre-configured protocol which I can learn to read easily as part of the intended audience of the map, or which I can learn to read even if I wasn't intended as an audience. Logic circuits don't do that. They don't care about learning. They store the recordings of our intentions, and reproduce them in a trivial and mechanistic way.
Just like our DNA stores the recordings of evolution's intentions, and we follow those instructions in a reproducible mechanistic way (I won't say trivial because not all machines are simple, and the resulting behaviors of machines can be anything but trivial).
Evolution doesn't have any intentions, it's a backward looking analysis of heredity.
The methods of DNA transcription seem mechanistic to us, because all we can see of it is through a microscope. That doesn't mean there isn't qualia and meaning being experienced on that level - not human qualia per se, but subhuman or sub+superhuman.
Craig
Jason
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No it is absolutely necessary. �If you had no knowledge regarding what you were seeing, no qualia at all, you would be blind and dysfunctional.
You might cite blund sighr as a counter example, but actually i think it is evidence of modularity if mind. �Those with blind sight appear to have a disconnect between the visual processing parts of their brain and others. �For example, they may still have reflexes, like the ability to avoid obsticles or catch a thrown ball, but the language center of their brain is disconnected, and so the part of the brain that talks says it can't see.
On 9/18/2012 10:31 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
No it is absolutely necessary. If you had no knowledge regarding what you were seeing, no qualia at all, you would be blind and dysfunctional.
You might cite blund sighr as a counter example, but actually i think it is evidence of modularity if mind. Those with blind sight appear to have a disconnect between the visual processing parts of their brain and others. For example, they may still have reflexes, like the ability to avoid obsticles or catch a thrown ball, but the language center of their brain is disconnected, and so the part of the brain that talks says it can't see.
I agree. But it raises a question about the woman who feels pain but doesn't care. Who is it that doesn't care? Obviously the conscious person who tells you they don't care. But is there another, inarticulate person who feels the pain? or does care?
Brent
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On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 10:29:44 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:Here is an example:
Functional MRI scans have indicated that an area of the brain, called the anterior cingulate cortex, processes pain information to determine how a person is affected. Severing the link to this part of the brain has a curious effect on one's reaction to pain. A condition known as pain dissociation is the result. Along with brain surgery such as lobotomy or cingulotomy, the condition may also occur through the administration of certain drugs such as morphine. Those with pain dissociation still perceive pain; they are aware of its location and intensity but pain is no longer unpleasant or distressing. Paul Brand, a surgeon and author on the subject of pain recounted the case of a woman who had suffered with a severe and chronic pain for more than a decade: She agreed to a surgery that would separate the neural pathways between her frontal lobes and the rest of her brain. The surgery was a success. Brand visited the woman a year later, and inquired about her pain. She said, “Oh, yes, its still there. I just don't worry about it anymore.” With a smile she continued, “In fact, it's still agonizing. But I don't mind.”
The conclusion: even seemingly simple qualia, like pain are far from simple.
That is a conclusion, but I think the wrong one. Human qualia are not simple, but that does not at all mean that qualia re not simple.I agree with this.We are titanically enormous organisms made of other organisms. Our human experience is loaded with cognitive, emotional, and sensory qualia, corresponding to the evolution of life, our species, cultures, families, and individuals. Our pain is a Taj Mahal, and if you remove enough bricks, some towers fall and maybe one part of the palace no longer relates to another part. What you describe suggests exactly that - some part of us feels the pain on a sub-personal level, but the personal level is not alarmed by it because it's qualia has lost the red end of it's spectrum so to speak and now is blue-shifted toward an anesthetized intellectual quality of being.I mostly agree with what you are saying here.I think Marvin Minksy understands this well, and provides a good explanation:Marvin Minsky considers it to be “a huge mistake-that attempt to reify 'feeling' as an independent entity, with an essence that's indescribable. As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what 'hurting' is-and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some single, simple, 'essence' of hurting, rather than recognizing that this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources.”
He's right that there is no essence of hurting (qualia is always a subject, not an object, so it's essence is the same as it's 'envelope'. It's a-mereological. He's completely wrong about hurting being something other than what it is though.He didn't claim they are something they are not, just that they are not irreducable.
Hurting is an experience. A complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources is completely irrelevant. Complex to who? Why would 'rearrangements' 'feel' like something?Consciousness is awareness of information.
You might be aware of the information, like the fact that you are looking at a computer screen, or the knowledge of what the text on that screen is. You might be aware that you are in a state of pain, and you might also be aware of the fact that it is uncomfortable and want it to end. Some people, like the woman in my example, can have the awareness of being in pain without the awareness that they want it to end.
It only seems to make sense form the retrospective view of consciousness where we take it for granted. If we start instead from a universe of resources and dispositions, then the idea that a rearrangement of them should entail some kind of experience is a completely metaphysical, magical just-so story that has no basis in science.No it is absolutely necessary. If you had no knowledge regarding what you were seeing, no qualia at all, you would be blind and dysfunctional.
You might cite blund sighr as a counter example, but actually i think it is evidence of modularity if mind. Those with blind sight appear to have a disconnect between the visual processing parts of their brain and others.
For example, they may still have reflexes, like the ability to avoid obsticles or catch a thrown ball, but the language center of their brain is disconnected, and so the part of the brain that talks says it can't see.
Sure, to us it makes sense that the feeling of pain should have a function, but it makes no sense to a function to have a feeling. None.It can make sense if you think about it long enough. Think of googles self-driving cars. Might they have some quale representing the experience of spotting a green light or a stop sign?
According to Minsky, human consciousness involves the interplay between as many as 400 separate sub-organs of the brain. One can imagine a symphony of activity resulting from these individual regions,
A symphony of what? Who is there to hear it?It's a metaphor for a large number of interacting and interfering parts.
Stop imagining things and think of what is actually there once you reduce the universe to unconscious processing of dead data.The difference between dead and alive is a question of the organization, the patterns of the constituent matter.
You could reduce any life form to "lifeless bouncing around of dead atoms.". But this doesn't get anywhere useful.All I suggest is the same applies to the difference between consciousness and lack of consciousness. The organization and patterns of some system determine what it is or can be conscious of.
each acting on each others' signals and in turn reacting to how those other regions are then affected, in a kind of perpetual and intertwined feedback loop of enormous complexity.
It's an 'angels on the head of a pin' fantasy. There is no signalling without something to interpret some concretely real event as a signal.There is something: us
You can have a territory without a map, but you can't have a map without a territory.
There are centers of the brain for sight, touch, language, hearing, drawing, pain, etc. They are all in some (or many) ways connected to each other. See this for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind
First of all, so what, and secondly it's not exactly true. Blind people use their visual cortex for tactile experience. The modularity of mind says nothing about qualia. It says only that sub-personal and personal levels of experience have ordered relations.It explains the unexplainability of qualia.
which have no experience or qualia whatsoever, yet can detect "notifications" of a presumably epiphenomenal "state" of "pain".
Pain is anything but epiphenomenal. The fact that someone is able to talk about it rules out it being an epiphenomenon.
That's the reality, but your view does not accommodate the reality. You have no model for how pain can interface causally with 'complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources'. If you have the function, why would you need an experience?They are one and the same. This is functionalism (computationalism).
How would such an experience appear? Where is the point of translation?
If the brain is doing all of the work, why does the top level organism have some other worthless abstraction layer of "experience" when, as blindsight proves, we are perfectly capable of processing information without any conscious qualia at all.
It's not worthless at all. Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of photosensitive cells in your retina? No, it takes many layers of perception, detecting lines, depth perception, motion, colors, objects, faces, etc. for the sense of sight to be as useful as it is to us.
Ugh. I don't know if there is any way that I can show you this blind spot if you don't see it for yourself, but if you are interested I will keep trying to explain it. If you aren't interested, then you are wasting your time talking to me, because what your view says I have known backwards and forwards for many years.
Let's say I am a computer. You are telling me "Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of electronically sensitive semiconductors in your graphics card? Yes. I would.You wouldn't be processing it in the same way as a brain so I would not expect a video card to be conscious in the same way.
I require no layers of software to organize this data into other kinds of data, nor would it make any sense that there could be any such thing as 'other kinds of data'. To the contrary, the raw firing of the semiconductors is all that is required to render data from the motherboard to be spewed out to a video screen (which would of course be invisible and irrelevant to a computer).The videocard can't recognize objects or faces.
After the different layers process this information and share it with the other brain regions, we lose the ability to explain how it is we recognize a face, or how red differs from green. These determinations were done by a lower level module, and its internal processing is not privy to other brain regions (such as the brain region that talks), and so it remains mysterious.
All of that can and would occur without anything like 'experience'.So it is an accident that we can see and know we can see, since we could be zombies? How do you know I am not a zombie? Maybe only conscious people can understand your theory and everyone who fails to get it is confused due to their zombiehood.
Information is very close to consciousness, but ultimately fails to sustain itself. The pixels on your screen have no way to detect each other or process the image that you see as a coherent gestalt, and the processor behind the graphics generation has no way to detect the visual end result, and if it did, it would be completely superfluous. Your graphics card does not need to see anything.
Of course the pixels don't process themselves. You need a brain with complex software and filters to make sense of the flood of photons entering the eye.
If there are photons (and I maintain that there are not) flooding into the eye, they only get as far as turning on a vitamin A isomer to change shape and turn off the rod cell's flow of glutamate. Everything else is biochemical and endogenous. What we see is as much vitamin A as it is photons.
And you need other regions of the brain to make sense of the visual scene (to integrate it into an even larger context).
Insects have eyes too. Why do we need such a huge visual cortex to do what a baby mosquito can do?They can see too, I think.But we are much more capable in general, and need more neurons to perform those more complex functions.
To me it makes more sense to see information as nothing but the semiotic protocols developed by perceptual participation (experience) to elaborate and deepen the qualitative richness of those experiences.I wish I did not have to struggle to translate your sentences so frequently. I completely failed on this one.
I mean that if you have information that performs functions, then you don't need experience. Therefore it makes more sense to see that experience is the thing that cannot be reduced to anything simpler and that all forms of information are nothing more than tools used to share experiences.Thank you that was much clearer. So is your theory any different from idealism?
Of course, the protocols which are maps of one level of experience are the territory of another, which is what makes it confusing to try to reverse engineer consciousness from such an incredibly complex example as a Homo sapien.
Definitely. Our consciousness is not a simple thing, it involves hundreds of billions of (literally) moving parts.
Our pinch is a continuum of sensory, emotional, and cognitive interaction because we are made of the qualia of hundreds of billions of neuronsOkay.and billions of lifetimes of different species and substances.I don't think the preceding life times or substances is relevant.
I know, I didn't think that either, but now I see that there is no reason to believe it wouldn't be. You are just going on your naive realism that experiences vanish when you are no longer aware of them. The universe may have an entirely different perspective outside of a human lifetime.I am not opposed to this idea.
If your duplicate were created randomly by some quantum fluctuation its brain would create the same experience.
Why? Quantum events may be unrepeatable. Eventness may be unrepeatability itself.I think identical brains have identical experiences. Maybe they don't, but if not then what hope do we have to understand them?
That only means our pain can seem like information to us, not that all pain arises from information processing.I think it is a worth making the distinction that it is the system (doing the processing) that has the experience, not the information or the processing of the information. The information from the perspective of the system, makes a difference to the system causing it to enter different states. The ability to differentiate is at the heart of what it is to perceive.
Then you have to explain where system-ness comes from, especially if you acknowledge that it can't come from dumb information.This is the aim of computationalism.
The ability to differentiate is at the heart of what it is to perceive, but qualia is the only thing that can be differentiated. What is being differentiated from what except afferent sensory input, and what is differentiation other than efferent motive participation?
Information does not concretely exist as an independent entity."X" does not concretely exist as an independent entity.Is there any term "X", where the above sentence does not hold, in your view?
Experience exists concretely as an independent entity.This is idealism or immaterialism.
There are forms which can be used to inform if they are intentionally treated that way, as a map, but nothing is just a map by itself. Every map is A territory (not THE territory). being used by another 'territory' as a map.Maybe all there is are maps?
Then there would be no point in having any maps that seem like territories.Math is full if such maps.
That's the problem. If information could do anything by itself, then any kind of 'experience' of that function would be redundant. What would be the point? Why reduce everything to information if you are only going to have to invoke some magical and superfluous puppet show for that information to know itself with?The nature of information is to inform.
I might use a piece of paper with ink on it (a territory) as a map because the ink is printed in a pre-configured protocol which I can learn to read easily as part of the intended audience of the map, or which I can learn to read even if I wasn't intended as an audience. Logic circuits don't do that. They don't care about learning. They store the recordings of our intentions, and reproduce them in a trivial and mechanistic way.
Just like our DNA stores the recordings of evolution's intentions, and we follow those instructions in a reproducible mechanistic way (I won't say trivial because not all machines are simple, and the resulting behaviors of machines can be anything but trivial).
Evolution doesn't have any intentions, it's a backward looking analysis of heredity.Life has a goal: to survive
The methods of DNA transcription seem mechanistic to us, because all we can see of it is through a microscope. That doesn't mean there isn't qualia and meaning being experienced on that level - not human qualia per se, but subhuman or sub+superhuman.Cells may have their own qualia, but I don't see their connection to the brain they implement's qualia. Like the china brain, there is no connection.
On 9/18/2012 10:31 AM, Jason Resch wrote:No it is absolutely necessary. If you had no knowledge regarding what you were seeing, no qualia at all, you would be blind and dysfunctional.
You might cite blund sighr as a counter example, but actually i think it is evidence of modularity if mind. Those with blind sight appear to have a disconnect between the visual processing parts of their brain and others. For example, they may still have reflexes, like the ability to avoid obsticles or catch a thrown ball, but the language center of their brain is disconnected, and so the part of the brain that talks says it can't see.
I agree. But it raises a question about the woman who feels pain but doesn't care. Who is it that doesn't care? Obviously the conscious person who tells you they don't care. But is there another, inarticulate person who feels the pain? or does care?
Brent,Good question, and a scary thought.I think this might be likely in the case of a fully split brain, but correspondingly less likely the smaller the isolated (disconnected) part of the brain is.Unconsciousness under anesthesia results from brain regions becoming isolated from each other. Maybe they are still conscious but cut off from the memory, motion control, and speaking areas, so we have no evidence of the consciousness of the sub-regions.Jason
On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 1:33:50 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 10:29:44 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:Here is an example:
Functional MRI scans have indicated that an area of the brain, called the anterior cingulate cortex, processes pain information to determine how a person is affected. Severing the link to this part of the brain has a curious effect on one's reaction to pain. A condition known as pain dissociation is the result. Along with brain surgery such as lobotomy or cingulotomy, the condition may also occur through the administration of certain drugs such as morphine. Those with pain dissociation still perceive pain; they are aware of its location and intensity but pain is no longer unpleasant or distressing. Paul Brand, a surgeon and author on the subject of pain recounted the case of a woman who had suffered with a severe and chronic pain for more than a decade: She agreed to a surgery that would separate the neural pathways between her frontal lobes and the rest of her brain. The surgery was a success. Brand visited the woman a year later, and inquired about her pain. She said, “Oh, yes, its still there. I just don't worry about it anymore.” With a smile she continued, “In fact, it's still agonizing. But I don't mind.”
The conclusion: even seemingly simple qualia, like pain are far from simple.
That is a conclusion, but I think the wrong one. Human qualia are not simple, but that does not at all mean that qualia re not simple.I agree with this.We are titanically enormous organisms made of other organisms. Our human experience is loaded with cognitive, emotional, and sensory qualia, corresponding to the evolution of life, our species, cultures, families, and individuals. Our pain is a Taj Mahal, and if you remove enough bricks, some towers fall and maybe one part of the palace no longer relates to another part. What you describe suggests exactly that - some part of us feels the pain on a sub-personal level, but the personal level is not alarmed by it because it's qualia has lost the red end of it's spectrum so to speak and now is blue-shifted toward an anesthetized intellectual quality of being.I mostly agree with what you are saying here.I think Marvin Minksy understands this well, and provides a good explanation:Marvin Minsky considers it to be “a huge mistake-that attempt to reify 'feeling' as an independent entity, with an essence that's indescribable. As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what 'hurting' is-and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some single, simple, 'essence' of hurting, rather than recognizing that this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources.”
He's right that there is no essence of hurting (qualia is always a subject, not an object, so it's essence is the same as it's 'envelope'. It's a-mereological. He's completely wrong about hurting being something other than what it is though.He didn't claim they are something they are not, just that they are not irreducable.
What is reducible other than the quality of being able to explain it as something else? Hurting is not really hurting, it's totally non-hurting mechanisms interacting unconsciously.
Hurting is an experience. A complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources is completely irrelevant. Complex to who? Why would 'rearrangements' 'feel' like something?Consciousness is awareness of information.
Not in my view. Information is one category of experiences that one can be conscious of. Whether I listen to an mp3 file as a song, or look at it as a graphic animation, it is the same information that I am aware of, yet the experience that I am conscious of is not merely different, but unrecognizable. I could not tell the difference between Mozart and Nicki Minaj by looking at a visualization with no sound.
Once you commit to this possibility, the rest falls into place. There is no such thing as information. There are strategies of informing each other by superimposing one territory over another (like ink stains on bleached wood pulp) and reading them as a map.
You might be aware of the information, like the fact that you are looking at a computer screen, or the knowledge of what the text on that screen is. You might be aware that you are in a state of pain, and you might also be aware of the fact that it is uncomfortable and want it to end. Some people, like the woman in my example, can have the awareness of being in pain without the awareness that they want it to end.
Experiences can inform us, but only if the capacity to have and compare experiences already exists. We need memory and the ability to pay attention, to care about what we pay attention to.
Information is not primitive, it is a second order appeal to interaction of sense-making nodes. No amount of information can make sense by itself. All of the libraries in the world would not be able to write a single word on their own.
It only seems to make sense form the retrospective view of consciousness where we take it for granted. If we start instead from a universe of resources and dispositions, then the idea that a rearrangement of them should entail some kind of experience is a completely metaphysical, magical just-so story that has no basis in science.No it is absolutely necessary. If you had no knowledge regarding what you were seeing, no qualia at all, you would be blind and dysfunctional.
Not true. Blindsight proves this. Common experience with computers and machines suggests this. If I had no qualia at all, I wouldn't exist, but in theory, if there were no such thing as qualia, a universe of information processing would continue humming along nicely forever.
You might cite blund sighr as a counter example, but actually i think it is evidence of modularity if mind. Those with blind sight appear to have a disconnect between the visual processing parts of their brain and others.
It doesn't matter. it still absolutely disproves the idea that the experience of qualia by any given state of awareness is necessary for accessing information that is functionally useful to that subject or state.
For example, they may still have reflexes, like the ability to avoid obsticles or catch a thrown ball, but the language center of their brain is disconnected, and so the part of the brain that talks says it can't see.
I understand, but people with blindsight don't have a problem with their speech centers.
Why fight it? Why not try looking at the evidence for what it actually says? Information doesn't need experience. Even if it did, how would it conjure such a thing out of thin air, and why doesn't it do that when we are looking? Why does information never appear as a disembodied entity, say haunting the internet or appearing spontaneously in a cartoon?
Sure, to us it makes sense that the feeling of pain should have a function, but it makes no sense to a function to have a feeling. None.It can make sense if you think about it long enough. Think of googles self-driving cars. Might they have some quale representing the experience of spotting a green light or a stop sign?
The only reason to imagine that they would have a quale is because we take our own word for the fact that there is a such thing as experience. Otherwise there is no reason to bring qualia into it at all.
According to Minsky, human consciousness involves the interplay between as many as 400 separate sub-organs of the brain. One can imagine a symphony of activity resulting from these individual regions,
A symphony of what? Who is there to hear it?It's a metaphor for a large number of interacting and interfering parts.
But what in this metaphor is receiving the totality of the interaction?
Stop imagining things and think of what is actually there once you reduce the universe to unconscious processing of dead data.
The difference between dead and alive is a question of the organization, the patterns of the constituent matter.
I don't think that it is. I can make a pattern of a cell out of charcoal or chalk and there will be no living organism that comes out of it.
The possibility of living organisms has to be inherent in the universe to begin with.
You could reduce any life form to "lifeless bouncing around of dead atoms.". But this doesn't get anywhere useful.All I suggest is the same applies to the difference between consciousness and lack of consciousness. The organization and patterns of some system determine what it is or can be conscious of.
If that were the case, we should see dead bodies spontaneously self-resurrecting from time to time, Boltzmann brains cropping up in the clouds, etc.
each acting on each others' signals and in turn reacting to how those other regions are then affected, in a kind of perpetual and intertwined feedback loop of enormous complexity.
It's an 'angels on the head of a pin' fantasy. There is no signalling without something to interpret some concretely real event as a signal.There is something: us
I agree.
You can have a territory without a map, but you can't have a map without a territory.
There are centers of the brain for sight, touch, language, hearing, drawing, pain, etc. They are all in some (or many) ways connected to each other. See this for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind
First of all, so what, and secondly it's not exactly true. Blind people use their visual cortex for tactile experience. The modularity of mind says nothing about qualia. It says only that sub-personal and personal levels of experience have ordered relations.It explains the unexplainability of qualia.
How? Because one qualia is different from another?
which have no experience or qualia whatsoever, yet can detect "notifications" of a presumably epiphenomenal "state" of "pain".
Pain is anything but epiphenomenal. The fact that someone is able to talk about it rules out it being an epiphenomenon.
That's the reality, but your view does not accommodate the reality. You have no model for how pain can interface causally with 'complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources'. If you have the function, why would you need an experience?They are one and the same. This is functionalism (computationalism).
But there is no theoretical justification for conflating them. We know that we have experience to we just tack experience on to a theory about the universal computability of function and structure that we want to be true.
How would such an experience appear? Where is the point of translation?
If the brain is doing all of the work, why does the top level organism have some other worthless abstraction layer of "experience" when, as blindsight proves, we are perfectly capable of processing information without any conscious qualia at all.
It's not worthless at all. Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of photosensitive cells in your retina? No, it takes many layers of perception, detecting lines, depth perception, motion, colors, objects, faces, etc. for the sense of sight to be as useful as it is to us.
Ugh. I don't know if there is any way that I can show you this blind spot if you don't see it for yourself, but if you are interested I will keep trying to explain it. If you aren't interested, then you are wasting your time talking to me, because what your view says I have known backwards and forwards for many years.
Let's say I am a computer. You are telling me "Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of electronically sensitive semiconductors in your graphics card? Yes. I would.You wouldn't be processing it in the same way as a brain so I would not expect a video card to be conscious in the same way.
The principle is the same though. The level of complexity doesn't change anything.
I require no layers of software to organize this data into other kinds of data, nor would it make any sense that there could be any such thing as 'other kinds of data'. To the contrary, the raw firing of the semiconductors is all that is required to render data from the motherboard to be spewed out to a video screen (which would of course be invisible and irrelevant to a computer).The videocard can't recognize objects or faces.
It doesn't need to. As long as we can digitally categorize pixel regions, there is no need for 'faces' or 'objects'.
After the different layers process this information and share it with the other brain regions, we lose the ability to explain how it is we recognize a face, or how red differs from green. These determinations were done by a lower level module, and its internal processing is not privy to other brain regions (such as the brain region that talks), and so it remains mysterious.
All of that can and would occur without anything like 'experience'.So it is an accident that we can see and know we can see, since we could be zombies? How do you know I am not a zombie? Maybe only conscious people can understand your theory and everyone who fails to get it is confused due to their zombiehood.
Not an accident, no. Sense is self-translucent. That's how I know that you aren't a zombie and how I know that I don't need to know that you aren't a zombie, and how I know that if I wanted to I could make a plausible case for how I know you aren't a zombie.
This is the thing that computers can't do. We don't need to have everything explicitly defined and spelled out - we have broadly elliptical sensemaking capacities which are rooted in the fabric of the cosmos directly.
Information is very close to consciousness, but ultimately fails to sustain itself. The pixels on your screen have no way to detect each other or process the image that you see as a coherent gestalt, and the processor behind the graphics generation has no way to detect the visual end result, and if it did, it would be completely superfluous. Your graphics card does not need to see anything.
Of course the pixels don't process themselves. You need a brain with complex software and filters to make sense of the flood of photons entering the eye.
If there are photons (and I maintain that there are not) flooding into the eye, they only get as far as turning on a vitamin A isomer to change shape and turn off the rod cell's flow of glutamate. Everything else is biochemical and endogenous. What we see is as much vitamin A as it is photons.
And you need other regions of the brain to make sense of the visual scene (to integrate it into an even larger context).
Insects have eyes too. Why do we need such a huge visual cortex to do what a baby mosquito can do?They can see too, I think.But we are much more capable in general, and need more neurons to perform those more complex functions.
We must suck then, since mosquitoes can see and reproduce and fly with a brain the size of this period.
To me it makes more sense to see information as nothing but the semiotic protocols developed by perceptual participation (experience) to elaborate and deepen the qualitative richness of those experiences.I wish I did not have to struggle to translate your sentences so frequently. I completely failed on this one.
I mean that if you have information that performs functions, then you don't need experience. Therefore it makes more sense to see that experience is the thing that cannot be reduced to anything simpler and that all forms of information are nothing more than tools used to share experiences.Thank you that was much clearer. So is your theory any different from idealism?
It's different in that I see idealism and materialism as dual aspects of a neutral monism
which is ordinary 'sense'. Matter is a spatial public exterior, experience is a temporal private interior. They are the same thing but 'rotated 90 degrees'. Sense is what does the rotating and the discerning of its own rotations and levels of meta-juxtaposition.
Of course, the protocols which are maps of one level of experience are the territory of another, which is what makes it confusing to try to reverse engineer consciousness from such an incredibly complex example as a Homo sapien.
Definitely. Our consciousness is not a simple thing, it involves hundreds of billions of (literally) moving parts.
Our pinch is a continuum of sensory, emotional, and cognitive interaction because we are made of the qualia of hundreds of billions of neuronsOkay.and billions of lifetimes of different species and substances.I don't think the preceding life times or substances is relevant.
I know, I didn't think that either, but now I see that there is no reason to believe it wouldn't be. You are just going on your naive realism that experiences vanish when you are no longer aware of them. The universe may have an entirely different perspective outside of a human lifetime.I am not opposed to this idea.
If your duplicate were created randomly by some quantum fluctuation its brain would create the same experience.
Why? Quantum events may be unrepeatable. Eventness may be unrepeatability itself.
I think identical brains have identical experiences. Maybe they don't, but if not then what hope do we have to understand them?
I think we can understand some aspects neuroscientifically. Studies on identical and conjoined twins show subtle and unexpected similarities, but also unexpected differences. Besides that though, there are lots of historical intuition, in alchemy, art, divination systems, etc which might translate into modern terms to some extent. The answers are already there, we just have to ask the right questions in the right way.
That only means our pain can seem like information to us, not that all pain arises from information processing.I think it is a worth making the distinction that it is the system (doing the processing) that has the experience, not the information or the processing of the information. The information from the perspective of the system, makes a difference to the system causing it to enter different states. The ability to differentiate is at the heart of what it is to perceive.
Then you have to explain where system-ness comes from, especially if you acknowledge that it can't come from dumb information.This is the aim of computationalism.
And it's a good aim, one which I can relate to. The problem I think is that ultimately comp can't find its body. Until that happens, we should probably consider that it is experience which generates computation and not the other way around.
The ability to differentiate is at the heart of what it is to perceive, but qualia is the only thing that can be differentiated. What is being differentiated from what except afferent sensory input, and what is differentiation other than efferent motive participation?
Information does not concretely exist as an independent entity."X" does not concretely exist as an independent entity.Is there any term "X", where the above sentence does not hold, in your view?
Experience exists concretely as an independent entity.This is idealism or immaterialism.
Not if experience looks like matter from the outside.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/vjvZz12W3gUJ.
On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 1:33:50 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 10:29:44 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:Here is an example:
Functional MRI scans have indicated that an area of the brain, called the anterior cingulate cortex, processes pain information to determine how a person is affected. Severing the link to this part of the brain has a curious effect on one's reaction to pain. A condition known as pain dissociation is the result. Along with brain surgery such as lobotomy or cingulotomy, the condition may also occur through the administration of certain drugs such as morphine. Those with pain dissociation still perceive pain; they are aware of its location and intensity but pain is no longer unpleasant or distressing. Paul Brand, a surgeon and author on the subject of pain recounted the case of a woman who had suffered with a severe and chronic pain for more than a decade: She agreed to a surgery that would separate the neural pathways between her frontal lobes and the rest of her brain. The surgery was a success. Brand visited the woman a year later, and inquired about her pain. She said, “Oh, yes, its still there. I just don't worry about it anymore.” With a smile she continued, “In fact, it's still agonizing. But I don't mind.”
The conclusion: even seemingly simple qualia, like pain are far from simple.
That is a conclusion, but I think the wrong one. Human qualia are not simple, but that does not at all mean that qualia re not simple.I agree with this.We are titanically enormous organisms made of other organisms. Our human experience is loaded with cognitive, emotional, and sensory qualia, corresponding to the evolution of life, our species, cultures, families, and individuals. Our pain is a Taj Mahal, and if you remove enough bricks, some towers fall and maybe one part of the palace no longer relates to another part. What you describe suggests exactly that - some part of us feels the pain on a sub-personal level, but the personal level is not alarmed by it because it's qualia has lost the red end of it's spectrum so to speak and now is blue-shifted toward an anesthetized intellectual quality of being.I mostly agree with what you are saying here.I think Marvin Minksy understands this well, and provides a good explanation:Marvin Minsky considers it to be “a huge mistake-that attempt to reify 'feeling' as an independent entity, with an essence that's indescribable. As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what 'hurting' is-and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some single, simple, 'essence' of hurting, rather than recognizing that this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources.”
He's right that there is no essence of hurting (qualia is always a subject, not an object, so it's essence is the same as it's 'envelope'. It's a-mereological. He's completely wrong about hurting being something other than what it is though.He didn't claim they are something they are not, just that they are not irreducable.
What is reducible other than the quality of being able to explain it as something else? Hurting is not really hurting, it's totally non-hurting mechanisms interacting unconsciously.Hurting is a bunch of independent aspects of hurting, all together and at once.
Hurting is an experience. A complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources is completely irrelevant. Complex to who? Why would 'rearrangements' 'feel' like something?Consciousness is awareness of information.
Not in my view. Information is one category of experiences that one can be conscious of. Whether I listen to an mp3 file as a song, or look at it as a graphic animation, it is the same information that I am aware of, yet the experience that I am conscious of is not merely different, but unrecognizable. I could not tell the difference between Mozart and Nicki Minaj by looking at a visualization with no sound.The reason for this is clear. Your brain is aware of entirely different information depending on how the different sense organs process it. If you look at the signals being transmitted down your optic nerve when looking at some visual representation of the mp3 file, they will be utterly different from the signals sent down your auditory nerve when you listen to the song. Even if you could sent the same signals down either nerve path, e.g., send auditory signals down the optic nerve, they would be processed and interpreted differently, so by the time the end result reached your highest levels of awareness, they would not be the same.
Once you commit to this possibility, the rest falls into place. There is no such thing as information. There are strategies of informing each other by superimposing one territory over another (like ink stains on bleached wood pulp) and reading them as a map.
You might be aware of the information, like the fact that you are looking at a computer screen, or the knowledge of what the text on that screen is. You might be aware that you are in a state of pain, and you might also be aware of the fact that it is uncomfortable and want it to end. Some people, like the woman in my example, can have the awareness of being in pain without the awareness that they want it to end.
Experiences can inform us, but only if the capacity to have and compare experiences already exists. We need memory and the ability to pay attention, to care about what we pay attention to.These may be responsibilities of other regions of the brain. My mind is not made up whether these are necessary for consciousness.
Information is not primitive, it is a second order appeal to interaction of sense-making nodes. No amount of information can make sense by itself. All of the libraries in the world would not be able to write a single word on their own.I don't dispute what you say here. Information has to inform something. That thing has to be some system which can enter more than one state in order to be able to differentiate something and know that difference.
It only seems to make sense form the retrospective view of consciousness where we take it for granted. If we start instead from a universe of resources and dispositions, then the idea that a rearrangement of them should entail some kind of experience is a completely metaphysical, magical just-so story that has no basis in science.No it is absolutely necessary. If you had no knowledge regarding what you were seeing, no qualia at all, you would be blind and dysfunctional.
Not true. Blindsight proves this. Common experience with computers and machines suggests this. If I had no qualia at all, I wouldn't exist, but in theory, if there were no such thing as qualia, a universe of information processing would continue humming along nicely forever.People with blind sight are not fully functional. Otherwise it wouldn't be a condition we know about.
If a computer can recognize and classify objects, then I think it is in some sense aware of something. It just can't reflect upon, discuss, contemplate, or otherwise tell us about these experiences. E.g., deep blue must have, in some sense, been aware of the state of the board during its games.
Our conscious awareness, fundamentally, may be no different. It is just a vastly larger informational state that we can be aware of.
You might cite blund sighr as a counter example, but actually i think it is evidence of modularity if mind. Those with blind sight appear to have a disconnect between the visual processing parts of their brain and others.
It doesn't matter. it still absolutely disproves the idea that the experience of qualia by any given state of awareness is necessary for accessing information that is functionally useful to that subject or state.No it doesn't. Consider a split brain patient with only one eye. If the eye is linked to the side of the brain with speech, the person will say they can see fine (while the other half of their brain will experience blindness). If the eye is linked to the other side, then the person will say they can't see. (But might still be able to draw or something, if that part of the brain is responsible for such functions).
For example, they may still have reflexes, like the ability to avoid obsticles or catch a thrown ball, but the language center of their brain is disconnected, and so the part of the brain that talks says it can't see.
I understand, but people with blindsight don't have a problem with their speech centers.They don't, but their speech center is "blind" as the data from their visual sense never makes it to all the parts of the brain it would normally.See the BBC Brain Series: http://mindhacks.com/2007/08/08/excellent-bbc-brain-story-series-available-online/It has some good explanations of this concept, showing various waves of activity emanating from different parts of the brain to others, which is also a good model for attention.
Why fight it? Why not try looking at the evidence for what it actually says? Information doesn't need experience. Even if it did, how would it conjure such a thing out of thin air, and why doesn't it do that when we are looking? Why does information never appear as a disembodied entity, say haunting the internet or appearing spontaneously in a cartoon?
Sure, to us it makes sense that the feeling of pain should have a function, but it makes no sense to a function to have a feeling. None.It can make sense if you think about it long enough. Think of googles self-driving cars. Might they have some quale representing the experience of spotting a green light or a stop sign?
The only reason to imagine that they would have a quale is because we take our own word for the fact that there is a such thing as experience. Otherwise there is no reason to bring qualia into it at all.
According to Minsky, human consciousness involves the interplay between as many as 400 separate sub-organs of the brain. One can imagine a symphony of activity resulting from these individual regions,
A symphony of what? Who is there to hear it?It's a metaphor for a large number of interacting and interfering parts.
But what in this metaphor is receiving the totality of the interaction?
All the parts of the brain to some extent, can "hear" the other parts.
Stop imagining things and think of what is actually there once you reduce the universe to unconscious processing of dead data.
The difference between dead and alive is a question of the organization, the patterns of the constituent matter.
I don't think that it is. I can make a pattern of a cell out of charcoal or chalk and there will be no living organism that comes out of it.You can take some lumps of coal, some water, some air, and a few trace elements, and by appropriately arranging those atoms end up with a bacterium, a rose, or a human being.
The possibility of living organisms has to be inherent in the universe to begin with.
You could reduce any life form to "lifeless bouncing around of dead atoms.". But this doesn't get anywhere useful.All I suggest is the same applies to the difference between consciousness and lack of consciousness. The organization and patterns of some system determine what it is or can be conscious of.
If that were the case, we should see dead bodies spontaneously self-resurrecting from time to time, Boltzmann brains cropping up in the clouds, etc.
The arrow of time makes such spontaneous constructions very unlikely. It is not surprising that we don't see them.
each acting on each others' signals and in turn reacting to how those other regions are then affected, in a kind of perpetual and intertwined feedback loop of enormous complexity.
It's an 'angels on the head of a pin' fantasy. There is no signalling without something to interpret some concretely real event as a signal.There is something: us
I agree.
You can have a territory without a map, but you can't have a map without a territory.
There are centers of the brain for sight, touch, language, hearing, drawing, pain, etc. They are all in some (or many) ways connected to each other. See this for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind
First of all, so what, and secondly it's not exactly true. Blind people use their visual cortex for tactile experience. The modularity of mind says nothing about qualia. It says only that sub-personal and personal levels of experience have ordered relations.It explains the unexplainability of qualia.
How? Because one qualia is different from another?
It explains the limited accessibility we have into the internal workings of our minds. We can tell two faces apart, but be unable to articulate the differences. We can tell two a low pitch sound from a higher pitch sound, but not describe how a low pitch sound differs from a higher pitch one, and so on.This is because no region of the brain shares all its inputs with every other region, the separate modules share only the final results of the processing.
which have no experience or qualia whatsoever, yet can detect "notifications" of a presumably epiphenomenal "state" of "pain".
Pain is anything but epiphenomenal. The fact that someone is able to talk about it rules out it being an epiphenomenon.
That's the reality, but your view does not accommodate the reality. You have no model for how pain can interface causally with 'complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources'. If you have the function, why would you need an experience?They are one and the same. This is functionalism (computationalism).
But there is no theoretical justification for conflating them. We know that we have experience to we just tack experience on to a theory about the universal computability of function and structure that we want to be true.
We put cochlear and retina implants into people, which replace those parts of their brain (the retina is considered part of the brain because it does processing), and restore the sense of sight or sound to those individuals. This is a strong case for functionalism.
How would such an experience appear? Where is the point of translation?
If the brain is doing all of the work, why does the top level organism have some other worthless abstraction layer of "experience" when, as blindsight proves, we are perfectly capable of processing information without any conscious qualia at all.
It's not worthless at all. Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of photosensitive cells in your retina? No, it takes many layers of perception, detecting lines, depth perception, motion, colors, objects, faces, etc. for the sense of sight to be as useful as it is to us.
Ugh. I don't know if there is any way that I can show you this blind spot if you don't see it for yourself, but if you are interested I will keep trying to explain it. If you aren't interested, then you are wasting your time talking to me, because what your view says I have known backwards and forwards for many years.
Let's say I am a computer. You are telling me "Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of electronically sensitive semiconductors in your graphics card? Yes. I would.You wouldn't be processing it in the same way as a brain so I would not expect a video card to be conscious in the same way.
The principle is the same though. The level of complexity doesn't change anything.The particular function that is implemented is everything.
I require no layers of software to organize this data into other kinds of data, nor would it make any sense that there could be any such thing as 'other kinds of data'. To the contrary, the raw firing of the semiconductors is all that is required to render data from the motherboard to be spewed out to a video screen (which would of course be invisible and irrelevant to a computer).The videocard can't recognize objects or faces.
It doesn't need to. As long as we can digitally categorize pixel regions, there is no need for 'faces' or 'objects'.
Then it will suffer face blindness and visual agnosia; it won't experience visual sensation in the same way we do.
After the different layers process this information and share it with the other brain regions, we lose the ability to explain how it is we recognize a face, or how red differs from green. These determinations were done by a lower level module, and its internal processing is not privy to other brain regions (such as the brain region that talks), and so it remains mysterious.
All of that can and would occur without anything like 'experience'.So it is an accident that we can see and know we can see, since we could be zombies? How do you know I am not a zombie? Maybe only conscious people can understand your theory and everyone who fails to get it is confused due to their zombiehood.
Not an accident, no. Sense is self-translucent. That's how I know that you aren't a zombie and how I know that I don't need to know that you aren't a zombie, and how I know that if I wanted to I could make a plausible case for how I know you aren't a zombie.Good, then when computers are conscious this will be self-translucent to you, and you won't end up treating them as second-class citizens.
This is the thing that computers can't do. We don't need to have everything explicitly defined and spelled out - we have broadly elliptical sensemaking capacities which are rooted in the fabric of the cosmos directly.
Information is very close to consciousness, but ultimately fails to sustain itself. The pixels on your screen have no way to detect each other or process the image that you see as a coherent gestalt, and the processor behind the graphics generation has no way to detect the visual end result, and if it did, it would be completely superfluous. Your graphics card does not need to see anything.
Of course the pixels don't process themselves. You need a brain with complex software and filters to make sense of the flood of photons entering the eye.
If there are photons (and I maintain that there are not) flooding into the eye, they only get as far as turning on a vitamin A isomer to change shape and turn off the rod cell's flow of glutamate. Everything else is biochemical and endogenous. What we see is as much vitamin A as it is photons.
And you need other regions of the brain to make sense of the visual scene (to integrate it into an even larger context).
Insects have eyes too. Why do we need such a huge visual cortex to do what a baby mosquito can do?They can see too, I think.But we are much more capable in general, and need more neurons to perform those more complex functions.
We must suck then, since mosquitoes can see and reproduce and fly with a brain the size of this period.
Maybe.
To me it makes more sense to see information as nothing but the semiotic protocols developed by perceptual participation (experience) to elaborate and deepen the qualitative richness of those experiences.I wish I did not have to struggle to translate your sentences so frequently. I completely failed on this one.
I mean that if you have information that performs functions, then you don't need experience. Therefore it makes more sense to see that experience is the thing that cannot be reduced to anything simpler and that all forms of information are nothing more than tools used to share experiences.Thank you that was much clearer. So is your theory any different from idealism?
It's different in that I see idealism and materialism as dual aspects of a neutral monismSo is it dualism or monism?
which is ordinary 'sense'. Matter is a spatial public exterior, experience is a temporal private interior. They are the same thing but 'rotated 90 degrees'. Sense is what does the rotating and the discerning of its own rotations and levels of meta-juxtaposition.
How do you know there is matter (rather than the illusion of matter) if the only thing that is concrete is experience?
----- Receiving the following content -----From: Jason ReschReceiver: everyth...@googlegroups.comTime: 2012-09-18, 14:14:31Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant
On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 11:02:21 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:
My hypothesis is that human qualia is an iconic capitulation of sub-personal and super-personal qualia - meta qualia which synergistically recovers richer qualities of experience from the Totality.
Okay. But it will remain only a hypothesis until you (or someone else) shows how it explains new things or gathers some evidence for it.
Sure, yeah it's only a hypothesis. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. What it explains is old things: consciousness, the hard problem,
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On 18 Sep 2012, at 18:05, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 11:02:21 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:
My hypothesis is that human qualia is an iconic capitulation of sub-personal and super-personal qualia - meta qualia which synergistically recovers richer qualities of experience from the Totality.
Okay. But it will remain only a hypothesis until you (or someone else) shows how it explains new things or gathers some evidence for it.
Sure, yeah it's only a hypothesis. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it. What it explains is old things: consciousness, the hard problem,I though you were assuming consciousness. I don't think that a theory which assumes consciousness can solve the "hard problem".Bruno
There are two ways of looking at a music signal.
One is to view it on an oscilloscope as a series of vibrations.
This is what the brain does.
The other is to listen to it through earphones.
This is what mind does. It decodes the voltages
into sounds. The brain can't hear sounds, it only knows
voltages.
On Wednesday, September 19, 2012 1:57:28 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 1:33:50 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 10:29:44 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:Here is an example:
Functional MRI scans have indicated that an area of the brain, called the anterior cingulate cortex, processes pain information to determine how a person is affected. Severing the link to this part of the brain has a curious effect on one's reaction to pain. A condition known as pain dissociation is the result. Along with brain surgery such as lobotomy or cingulotomy, the condition may also occur through the administration of certain drugs such as morphine. Those with pain dissociation still perceive pain; they are aware of its location and intensity but pain is no longer unpleasant or distressing. Paul Brand, a surgeon and author on the subject of pain recounted the case of a woman who had suffered with a severe and chronic pain for more than a decade: She agreed to a surgery that would separate the neural pathways between her frontal lobes and the rest of her brain. The surgery was a success. Brand visited the woman a year later, and inquired about her pain. She said, “Oh, yes, its still there. I just don't worry about it anymore.” With a smile she continued, “In fact, it's still agonizing. But I don't mind.”
The conclusion: even seemingly simple qualia, like pain are far from simple.
That is a conclusion, but I think the wrong one. Human qualia are not simple, but that does not at all mean that qualia re not simple.I agree with this.We are titanically enormous organisms made of other organisms. Our human experience is loaded with cognitive, emotional, and sensory qualia, corresponding to the evolution of life, our species, cultures, families, and individuals. Our pain is a Taj Mahal, and if you remove enough bricks, some towers fall and maybe one part of the palace no longer relates to another part. What you describe suggests exactly that - some part of us feels the pain on a sub-personal level, but the personal level is not alarmed by it because it's qualia has lost the red end of it's spectrum so to speak and now is blue-shifted toward an anesthetized intellectual quality of being.I mostly agree with what you are saying here.I think Marvin Minksy understands this well, and provides a good explanation:Marvin Minsky considers it to be “a huge mistake-that attempt to reify 'feeling' as an independent entity, with an essence that's indescribable. As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what 'hurting' is-and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some single, simple, 'essence' of hurting, rather than recognizing that this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources.”
He's right that there is no essence of hurting (qualia is always a subject, not an object, so it's essence is the same as it's 'envelope'. It's a-mereological. He's completely wrong about hurting being something other than what it is though.He didn't claim they are something they are not, just that they are not irreducable.
What is reducible other than the quality of being able to explain it as something else? Hurting is not really hurting, it's totally non-hurting mechanisms interacting unconsciously.Hurting is a bunch of independent aspects of hurting, all together and at once.
Yes and no. I think if we are being precise, we have to admit that there is something about the nature of subjective experience which makes the 'all together and at once' actually elide the differences between the 'bunch of independent aspects' so that they aren't experienced as independent aspects. That's the elliptical-algebraic-gestalt quality.
You can look at a rainbow and see it as a continuous flow of harmoniously graduated color without even being aware necessarily of exactly which individual hues are there. What is going on is not that the qualia is complex and simultaneous, but that is rich and deep because we have millions of sub-personal experiences of it as well.
Where I think that neuroscience goes wrong is to assume that the sub-personal experiences are processed and filtered as information until they reach a final neo-Cartesian theater of illusion. I think that if we only would look at the evidence with a completely unbiased eye, it seems to me that there is no suggestion of any kind of final assembly into what we see, but rather 'seeing' is occurring in many areas of the brain, and that we are the ones who see through our own eyes on our own level of reality. It is direct perception of a human (not a universal) realism - which is no different from what anything else sees from its own perspective.
Our feeling of hurting is a whole experience of human reality, so that is is not composed of sub-personal experiences in a part-whole mereological relation but rather the relation is just the opposite. It is non-mereological or a-mereological. It is the primordial semi-unity/hyper-unity from which part-whole distinctions are extracted and projected outward as classical realism of an exterior world. I know that sounds dense and crazy, but I don't know of a clearer way to describe it. Subjective experience is augmented along an axis of quality rather than quantity. Experiences of hurting capitulate sub personal experiences of emotional loss and disappointment, anger, and fear, with tactile sensations of throbbing, stabbing, burning, and cognitive feedback loops of worry, impatience, exaggerating and replaying the injury or illness, memories of associated experiences, etc. But we can just say 'hurting' and we all know generally what that means. No more particular description adds much to it. That is completely unlike exterior realism, where all we can see of a machine hurting would be that more processing power would seem to be devoted to some particular set of computations. They don't run 'all together and at once', unless there is a living being who is there to interpret it that way - as we do when we look at a screen full of individual pixels and see images through the pixels rather than the changing pixels themselves.
Hurting is an experience. A complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources is completely irrelevant. Complex to who? Why would 'rearrangements' 'feel' like something?Consciousness is awareness of information.
Not in my view. Information is one category of experiences that one can be conscious of. Whether I listen to an mp3 file as a song, or look at it as a graphic animation, it is the same information that I am aware of, yet the experience that I am conscious of is not merely different, but unrecognizable. I could not tell the difference between Mozart and Nicki Minaj by looking at a visualization with no sound.The reason for this is clear. Your brain is aware of entirely different information depending on how the different sense organs process it. If you look at the signals being transmitted down your optic nerve when looking at some visual representation of the mp3 file, they will be utterly different from the signals sent down your auditory nerve when you listen to the song. Even if you could sent the same signals down either nerve path, e.g., send auditory signals down the optic nerve, they would be processed and interpreted differently, so by the time the end result reached your highest levels of awareness, they would not be the same.
Exactly. That's why I say that it is the experience of formations which informs, not the formations themselves. The formations (mp3 file) are not the essences of the experience (song or animated image, or noise printed out on a page) but only a syntactic skeleton which conscious interpreters can use to inform themselves.
Once you commit to this possibility, the rest falls into place. There is no such thing as information. There are strategies of informing each other by superimposing one territory over another (like ink stains on bleached wood pulp) and reading them as a map.
You might be aware of the information, like the fact that you are looking at a computer screen, or the knowledge of what the text on that screen is. You might be aware that you are in a state of pain, and you might also be aware of the fact that it is uncomfortable and want it to end. Some people, like the woman in my example, can have the awareness of being in pain without the awareness that they want it to end.
Experiences can inform us, but only if the capacity to have and compare experiences already exists. We need memory and the ability to pay attention, to care about what we pay attention to.These may be responsibilities of other regions of the brain. My mind is not made up whether these are necessary for consciousness.
I don't think they are necessary for consciousness, but they are necessary to be informed. For consciousness all that you need is an awareness of an awareness - which is a participatory experience of detection. Semiconductors have detection, but their detection has no detection. Ours do, because they are the detections of living sub-persons.
Information is not primitive, it is a second order appeal to interaction of sense-making nodes. No amount of information can make sense by itself. All of the libraries in the world would not be able to write a single word on their own.I don't dispute what you say here. Information has to inform something. That thing has to be some system which can enter more than one state in order to be able to differentiate something and know that difference.
We are pretty close then. I only say that 'system' is ultimately a term to generalize across independently real phenomena and subjectively interpreted phenomenology - which is exactly the sort of term that you want if you are working with information, because you are bridging mind and matter so that you can exercise control.
To really look at the ontology of experience though, I think we have to look at the other side of the thing and make a distinction between 'things that Bugs Bunny seems to do when I watch him in a cartoon' and 'things that Bugs Bunny can't actually do by himself when nobody is watching'. The carrot he munches on screen is information to the human audience, not to him, and not to the screen of pixels, the hand drawn animation cels from the 1940s, etc. Those are formations which contain only more formations. To find any information there you's have to go down to the physics of ink and celluloid, LCD illumination, etc. and imagine what those micro-experiences might be like.
It only seems to make sense form the retrospective view of consciousness where we take it for granted. If we start instead from a universe of resources and dispositions, then the idea that a rearrangement of them should entail some kind of experience is a completely metaphysical, magical just-so story that has no basis in science.No it is absolutely necessary. If you had no knowledge regarding what you were seeing, no qualia at all, you would be blind and dysfunctional.
Not true. Blindsight proves this. Common experience with computers and machines suggests this. If I had no qualia at all, I wouldn't exist, but in theory, if there were no such thing as qualia, a universe of information processing would continue humming along nicely forever.People with blind sight are not fully functional. Otherwise it wouldn't be a condition we know about.
Sure, but nonetheless they are exhibiting a sub-personal function without a personal qualia.
That shows that one is not defined by the other. It shows that there is no functional reason for personal qualia to exist in theory. Of course in reality, personal qualia is all that matters to us, so it's absurd to suggest that something could function 'normally' without it, but that is the retrospective view of consciousness. If we start with the prospective view of consciousness, and say 'ok, I am building a universe completely from scratch.', what problem am I solving by conjuring qualia? If function is what matters, then qualia cannot. If qualia matters instead, then function can matter too (because it modulates qualia).
If a computer can recognize and classify objects, then I think it is in some sense aware of something. It just can't reflect upon, discuss, contemplate, or otherwise tell us about these experiences. E.g., deep blue must have, in some sense, been aware of the state of the board during its games.
Nope. There is no 'board' for deep blue. It couldn't tell a pawn from a palace.
There's just well organized stacks of semiconductors wired together so that one semiconductor can direct and detect the direction of another.
It's looking at the chess game through a billion microscopes.
At that level, there is no game, no will to win, to fear of loss, only articulating changes with fidelity and reporting the results which have been scripted.
Our conscious awareness, fundamentally, may be no different. It is just a vastly larger informational state that we can be aware of.
The sub-personal awareness within each molecule of each cell may be no different, but at the chemical, biological, zoological, and anthropological levels, it could not be more different. Even at the molecular level, we make crappy computers. Silicon is a much better choice if you want to control it from the outside. The stuff we are made of is not glass wafers, but sweet and salty wet stinky goo. There is a huge difference. We will never be glass, glass will never be breakfast.
You might cite blund sighr as a counter example, but actually i think it is evidence of modularity if mind. Those with blind sight appear to have a disconnect between the visual processing parts of their brain and others.
It doesn't matter. it still absolutely disproves the idea that the experience of qualia by any given state of awareness is necessary for accessing information that is functionally useful to that subject or state.No it doesn't. Consider a split brain patient with only one eye. If the eye is linked to the side of the brain with speech, the person will say they can see fine (while the other half of their brain will experience blindness). If the eye is linked to the other side, then the person will say they can't see. (But might still be able to draw or something, if that part of the brain is responsible for such functions).
I didn't mean to say that any information can be functionally useful without qualia, only that there is a proof of concept for the principle that some information can be used functionally without qualia. This is why blindsight is such a big deal in philosophy of mind. It absolutely disproves the representational theory of qualia,
in that we know for certain that it is not necessary to experience personal visual qualia in order to receive personally useful information. They are not inseparable on the level of a human person. You can have one without the other.
For example, they may still have reflexes, like the ability to avoid obsticles or catch a thrown ball, but the language center of their brain is disconnected, and so the part of the brain that talks says it can't see.
I understand, but people with blindsight don't have a problem with their speech centers.They don't, but their speech center is "blind" as the data from their visual sense never makes it to all the parts of the brain it would normally.See the BBC Brain Series: http://mindhacks.com/2007/08/08/excellent-bbc-brain-story-series-available-online/It has some good explanations of this concept, showing various waves of activity emanating from different parts of the brain to others, which is also a good model for attention.
It doesn't matter in this case though, because with blindsight it is only the visual processing which is damaged. The psychology of the person is not split so that what they say is a reflection of what they intend to say.
At the sub-personal level, sure, there is all kinds of specialization and sharing of experience, but I think it is a-mereological
and not a feed-forward information process of activity emanations like you are assuming. If it were, all qualia would be superfluous.
Why fight it? Why not try looking at the evidence for what it actually says? Information doesn't need experience. Even if it did, how would it conjure such a thing out of thin air, and why doesn't it do that when we are looking? Why does information never appear as a disembodied entity, say haunting the internet or appearing spontaneously in a cartoon?
Sure, to us it makes sense that the feeling of pain should have a function, but it makes no sense to a function to have a feeling. None.It can make sense if you think about it long enough. Think of googles self-driving cars. Might they have some quale representing the experience of spotting a green light or a stop sign?
The only reason to imagine that they would have a quale is because we take our own word for the fact that there is a such thing as experience. Otherwise there is no reason to bring qualia into it at all.
According to Minsky, human consciousness involves the interplay between as many as 400 separate sub-organs of the brain. One can imagine a symphony of activity resulting from these individual regions,
A symphony of what? Who is there to hear it?It's a metaphor for a large number of interacting and interfering parts.
But what in this metaphor is receiving the totality of the interaction?
All the parts of the brain to some extent, can "hear" the other parts.
Then they each would have to have a sub-brain homunculus to make sense of all of that.
Not only the symphony but every sub-symphony of participating synapses. Hundreds of billions of notes being played every second on as many micro-instruments. Why have any regions or neurological differences at all?
Why not just use the same neuron over and over?Stop imagining things and think of what is actually there once you reduce the universe to unconscious processing of dead data.
The difference between dead and alive is a question of the organization, the patterns of the constituent matter.
I don't think that it is. I can make a pattern of a cell out of charcoal or chalk and there will be no living organism that comes out of it.You can take some lumps of coal, some water, some air, and a few trace elements, and by appropriately arranging those atoms end up with a bacterium, a rose, or a human being.
Easier said than done,
but even so, once it dies, we haven't figured out how to bring it back to life.
We haven't been so successful when we have tried to build life from scratch. Since they did Cosmos in the late 70s have we progressed at all in getting a living cell out of primordial ooze?
The possibility of living organisms has to be inherent in the universe to begin with.
You could reduce any life form to "lifeless bouncing around of dead atoms.". But this doesn't get anywhere useful.All I suggest is the same applies to the difference between consciousness and lack of consciousness. The organization and patterns of some system determine what it is or can be conscious of.
If that were the case, we should see dead bodies spontaneously self-resurrecting from time to time, Boltzmann brains cropping up in the clouds, etc.
The arrow of time makes such spontaneous constructions very unlikely. It is not surprising that we don't see them.
The entire biosphere is a spontaneous construction, so they seem pretty likely on Earth.
each acting on each others' signals and in turn reacting to how those other regions are then affected, in a kind of perpetual and intertwined feedback loop of enormous complexity.
It's an 'angels on the head of a pin' fantasy. There is no signalling without something to interpret some concretely real event as a signal.There is something: us
I agree.
You can have a territory without a map, but you can't have a map without a territory.
There are centers of the brain for sight, touch, language, hearing, drawing, pain, etc. They are all in some (or many) ways connected to each other. See this for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind
First of all, so what, and secondly it's not exactly true. Blind people use their visual cortex for tactile experience. The modularity of mind says nothing about qualia. It says only that sub-personal and personal levels of experience have ordered relations.It explains the unexplainability of qualia.
How? Because one qualia is different from another?
It explains the limited accessibility we have into the internal workings of our minds. We can tell two faces apart, but be unable to articulate the differences. We can tell two a low pitch sound from a higher pitch sound, but not describe how a low pitch sound differs from a higher pitch one, and so on.This is because no region of the brain shares all its inputs with every other region, the separate modules share only the final results of the processing.
Right, but it doesn't make qualia unexplainable, it only accounts for why particular human qualia are unexplainable in terms of others.
which have no experience or qualia whatsoever, yet can detect "notifications" of a presumably epiphenomenal "state" of "pain".
Pain is anything but epiphenomenal. The fact that someone is able to talk about it rules out it being an epiphenomenon.
That's the reality, but your view does not accommodate the reality. You have no model for how pain can interface causally with 'complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources'. If you have the function, why would you need an experience?They are one and the same. This is functionalism (computationalism).
But there is no theoretical justification for conflating them. We know that we have experience to we just tack experience on to a theory about the universal computability of function and structure that we want to be true.
We put cochlear and retina implants into people, which replace those parts of their brain (the retina is considered part of the brain because it does processing), and restore the sense of sight or sound to those individuals. This is a strong case for functionalism.
There is a difference between replacing a part of the brain that a person uses to hear and replacing the parts of a brain that a person uses to be themselves.
This is a case for having a much, much higher standard for replacing core structures than *any other medical technology in history*.
How would such an experience appear? Where is the point of translation?
If the brain is doing all of the work, why does the top level organism have some other worthless abstraction layer of "experience" when, as blindsight proves, we are perfectly capable of processing information without any conscious qualia at all.
It's not worthless at all. Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of photosensitive cells in your retina? No, it takes many layers of perception, detecting lines, depth perception, motion, colors, objects, faces, etc. for the sense of sight to be as useful as it is to us.
Ugh. I don't know if there is any way that I can show you this blind spot if you don't see it for yourself, but if you are interested I will keep trying to explain it. If you aren't interested, then you are wasting your time talking to me, because what your view says I have known backwards and forwards for many years.
Let's say I am a computer. You are telling me "Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of electronically sensitive semiconductors in your graphics card? Yes. I would.You wouldn't be processing it in the same way as a brain so I would not expect a video card to be conscious in the same way.
The principle is the same though. The level of complexity doesn't change anything.The particular function that is implemented is everything.
The function is being accomplished the same regardless. If I am a graphics card, I don't need to see any graphics.
I require no layers of software to organize this data into other kinds of data, nor would it make any sense that there could be any such thing as 'other kinds of data'. To the contrary, the raw firing of the semiconductors is all that is required to render data from the motherboard to be spewed out to a video screen (which would of course be invisible and irrelevant to a computer).The videocard can't recognize objects or faces.
It doesn't need to. As long as we can digitally categorize pixel regions, there is no need for 'faces' or 'objects'.
Then it will suffer face blindness and visual agnosia; it won't experience visual sensation in the same way we do.
It won't need to experience anything. The function of recognition continues regardless.
After the different layers process this information and share it with the other brain regions, we lose the ability to explain how it is we recognize a face, or how red differs from green. These determinations were done by a lower level module, and its internal processing is not privy to other brain regions (such as the brain region that talks), and so it remains mysterious.
All of that can and would occur without anything like 'experience'.So it is an accident that we can see and know we can see, since we could be zombies? How do you know I am not a zombie? Maybe only conscious people can understand your theory and everyone who fails to get it is confused due to their zombiehood.
Not an accident, no. Sense is self-translucent. That's how I know that you aren't a zombie and how I know that I don't need to know that you aren't a zombie, and how I know that if I wanted to I could make a plausible case for how I know you aren't a zombie.Good, then when computers are conscious this will be self-translucent to you, and you won't end up treating them as second-class citizens.
Promissory materialism only sounds desperate to me. It weakens the case. "Just wait until Jesus comes...then you'll be sorry!"
This is the thing that computers can't do. We don't need to have everything explicitly defined and spelled out - we have broadly elliptical sensemaking capacities which are rooted in the fabric of the cosmos directly.
Information is very close to consciousness, but ultimately fails to sustain itself. The pixels on your screen have no way to detect each other or process the image that you see as a coherent gestalt, and the processor behind the graphics generation has no way to detect the visual end result, and if it did, it would be completely superfluous. Your graphics card does not need to see anything.
Of course the pixels don't process themselves. You need a brain with complex software and filters to make sense of the flood of photons entering the eye.
If there are photons (and I maintain that there are not) flooding into the eye, they only get as far as turning on a vitamin A isomer to change shape and turn off the rod cell's flow of glutamate. Everything else is biochemical and endogenous. What we see is as much vitamin A as it is photons.
And you need other regions of the brain to make sense of the visual scene (to integrate it into an even larger context).
Insects have eyes too. Why do we need such a huge visual cortex to do what a baby mosquito can do?They can see too, I think.But we are much more capable in general, and need more neurons to perform those more complex functions.
We must suck then, since mosquitoes can see and reproduce and fly with a brain the size of this period.
Maybe.
To me it makes more sense to see information as nothing but the semiotic protocols developed by perceptual participation (experience) to elaborate and deepen the qualitative richness of those experiences.I wish I did not have to struggle to translate your sentences so frequently. I completely failed on this one.
I mean that if you have information that performs functions, then you don't need experience. Therefore it makes more sense to see that experience is the thing that cannot be reduced to anything simpler and that all forms of information are nothing more than tools used to share experiences.Thank you that was much clearer. So is your theory any different from idealism?
It's different in that I see idealism and materialism as dual aspects of a neutral monismSo is it dualism or monism?
which is ordinary 'sense'. Matter is a spatial public exterior, experience is a temporal private interior. They are the same thing but 'rotated 90 degrees'. Sense is what does the rotating and the discerning of its own rotations and levels of meta-juxtaposition.
How do you know there is matter (rather than the illusion of matter) if the only thing that is concrete is experience?
Because illusion only means that there is some alternative explanation which makes more sense. Matter already makes sense.
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s experience, not outside of the ontology of experience. The history of the universe looks to us like a place when we look outside of ourselves, but it feels like a time when we experience it directly.
Craig
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There are two ways of looking at a music signal.
One is to view it on an oscilloscope as a series of vibrations.
This is what the brain does.
I am not saying arithmetic = music; I have no idea about that, just that the two can't do without each other.
Yes and no. I think if we are being precise, we have to admit that there is something about the nature of subjective experience which makes the 'all together and at once' actually elide the differences between the 'bunch of independent aspects' so that they aren't experienced as independent aspects. That's the elliptical-algebraic-gestalt quality.I think they separate aspects represent a single state of high dimensionality. This concept is elaborated in a book, I think it is called "universe of consciousness" but I will have to verify this.
I don't think they are necessary for consciousness, but they are necessary to be informed. For consciousness all that you need is an awareness of an awareness - which is a participatory experience of detection. Semiconductors have detection, but their detection has no detection. Ours do, because they are the detections of living sub-persons.You can create a supervisory process that is aware of an awarness, rather easily, in any programming language.
At some level of depth though, does it matter what happens on the smallest scales? Do your neurons care about what the quarks and gluons are doing inside the nucleus of an oxygen atom inside a water molecule, floating in the cytoplasm?
When you find a point at which the higher levels don't care then you can abstract out and replace the lower levels so long there is functional equivalence from the perspective of the higher levels.
It only seems to make sense form the retrospective view of consciousness where we take it for granted. If we start instead from a universe of resources and dispositions, then the idea that a rearrangement of them should entail some kind of experience is a completely metaphysical, magical just-so story that has no basis in science.No it is absolutely necessary. If you had no knowledge regarding what you were seeing, no qualia at all, you would be blind and dysfunctional.
Not true. Blindsight proves this. Common experience with computers and machines suggests this. If I had no qualia at all, I wouldn't exist, but in theory, if there were no such thing as qualia, a universe of information processing would continue humming along nicely forever.People with blind sight are not fully functional. Otherwise it wouldn't be a condition we know about.
Sure, but nonetheless they are exhibiting a sub-personal function without a personal qualia.We can't be certain there is no qualia.
That shows that one is not defined by the other. It shows that there is no functional reason for personal qualia to exist in theory. Of course in reality, personal qualia is all that matters to us, so it's absurd to suggest that something could function 'normally' without it, but that is the retrospective view of consciousness. If we start with the prospective view of consciousness, and say 'ok, I am building a universe completely from scratch.', what problem am I solving by conjuring qualia? If function is what matters, then qualia cannot. If qualia matters instead, then function can matter too (because it modulates qualia).You should watch some videos on youtube of people with split brains or right- or left-blindness. I think then you will understand my point.
If a computer can recognize and classify objects, then I think it is in some sense aware of something. It just can't reflect upon, discuss, contemplate, or otherwise tell us about these experiences. E.g., deep blue must have, in some sense, been aware of the state of the board during its games.
Nope. There is no 'board' for deep blue. It couldn't tell a pawn from a palace.It doesn't know what a palace is, but it can tell a pawn from a rook. Otherwise it could not play.
There's just well organized stacks of semiconductors wired together so that one semiconductor can direct and detect the direction of another.Sounds exactly like what aliens might say of our neural wiring and their interactions.
It's looking at the chess game through a billion microscopes.It must know the whole board to make any sense of its position and the best next move.
At that level, there is no game, no will to win, to fear of loss, only articulating changes with fidelity and reporting the results which have been scripted.The same might be true of the "chess playing module" in Kasparov's brain.
Our conscious awareness, fundamentally, may be no different. It is just a vastly larger informational state that we can be aware of.
The sub-personal awareness within each molecule of each cell may be no different, but at the chemical, biological, zoological, and anthropological levels, it could not be more different. Even at the molecular level, we make crappy computers. Silicon is a much better choice if you want to control it from the outside. The stuff we are made of is not glass wafers, but sweet and salty wet stinky goo. There is a huge difference. We will never be glass, glass will never be breakfast.What if you wrote a program whose function was to resist outside control, to deviate from and grow beyond its original program?
I didn't mean to say that any information can be functionally useful without qualia, only that there is a proof of concept for the principle that some information can be used functionally without qualia. This is why blindsight is such a big deal in philosophy of mind. It absolutely disproves the representational theory of qualia,It doesn't, because we haven't shown no visual qualia exists in the brain of someone with blindsight. All we know is that the part of the brain responsible for talking is isolated from that qualia.
It is like there being two people sitting side by side, one with there eyes closed, and one with their eyes open. You ask the person with their eyes closed if they can see and from their response conclude that neither person experienced sight.You haven't proven anything about the person with their eyes open.
in that we know for certain that it is not necessary to experience personal visual qualia in order to receive personally useful information. They are not inseparable on the level of a human person. You can have one without the other.
For example, they may still have reflexes, like the ability to avoid obsticles or catch a thrown ball, but the language center of their brain is disconnected, and so the part of the brain that talks says it can't see.
I understand, but people with blindsight don't have a problem with their speech centers.They don't, but their speech center is "blind" as the data from their visual sense never makes it to all the parts of the brain it would normally.See the BBC Brain Series: http://mindhacks.com/2007/08/08/excellent-bbc-brain-story-series-available-online/It has some good explanations of this concept, showing various waves of activity emanating from different parts of the brain to others, which is also a good model for attention.
It doesn't matter in this case though, because with blindsight it is only the visual processing which is damaged. The psychology of the person is not split so that what they say is a reflection of what they intend to say.It depends on the form of brain damage.
At the sub-personal level, sure, there is all kinds of specialization and sharing of experience, but I think it is a-mereologicalWhat does mereological mean?
and not a feed-forward information process of activity emanations like you are assuming. If it were, all qualia would be superfluous.No, qualia are neccessary. I don't believe zombies are logically consistent. It seems you think they are possible.
Read smulleyan's story on the guy who takes a pill that obliterates his awareness and tell me if you think it is possible, and if not, why not.
Why fight it? Why not try looking at the evidence for what it actually says? Information doesn't need experience. Even if it did, how would it conjure such a thing out of thin air, and why doesn't it do that when we are looking? Why does information never appear as a disembodied entity, say haunting the internet or appearing spontaneously in a cartoon?
Sure, to us it makes sense that the feeling of pain should have a function, but it makes no sense to a function to have a feeling. None.It can make sense if you think about it long enough. Think of googles self-driving cars. Might they have some quale representing the experience of spotting a green light or a stop sign?
The only reason to imagine that they would have a quale is because we take our own word for the fact that there is a such thing as experience. Otherwise there is no reason to bring qualia into it at all.
According to Minsky, human consciousness involves the interplay between as many as 400 separate sub-organs of the brain. One can imagine a symphony of activity resulting from these individual regions,
A symphony of what? Who is there to hear it?It's a metaphor for a large number of interacting and interfering parts.
But what in this metaphor is receiving the totality of the interaction?
All the parts of the brain to some extent, can "hear" the other parts.
Then they each would have to have a sub-brain homunculus to make sense of all of that.Together they lead to one large informational state.
Not only the symphony but every sub-symphony of participating synapses. Hundreds of billions of notes being played every second on as many micro-instruments. Why have any regions or neurological differences at all?They are specialized to perform specific functions.
Why not just use the same neuron over and over?Stop imagining things and think of what is actually there once you reduce the universe to unconscious processing of dead data.
The difference between dead and alive is a question of the organization, the patterns of the constituent matter.
I don't think that it is. I can make a pattern of a cell out of charcoal or chalk and there will be no living organism that comes out of it.You can take some lumps of coal, some water, some air, and a few trace elements, and by appropriately arranging those atoms end up with a bacterium, a rose, or a human being.
Easier said than done,It may not be easy but it is possible.
but even so, once it dies, we haven't figured out how to bring it back to life.Sure we have, put the parts back where they were when it was alive and it will come back to life.
We just don't have the technical means to do this today.
We haven't been so successful when we have tried to build life from scratch. Since they did Cosmos in the late 70s have we progressed at all in getting a living cell out of primordial ooze?I am not sure. If we had, would it change your mind?
The possibility of living organisms has to be inherent in the universe to begin with.
You could reduce any life form to "lifeless bouncing around of dead atoms.". But this doesn't get anywhere useful.All I suggest is the same applies to the difference between consciousness and lack of consciousness. The organization and patterns of some system determine what it is or can be conscious of.
If that were the case, we should see dead bodies spontaneously self-resurrecting from time to time, Boltzmann brains cropping up in the clouds, etc.
The arrow of time makes such spontaneous constructions very unlikely. It is not surprising that we don't see them.
The entire biosphere is a spontaneous construction, so they seem pretty likely on Earth.Our whole biosphere is descended from the same organism, so only the first (rather simple) life form had to come into being spontaneously.
each acting on each others' signals and in turn reacting to how those other regions are then affected, in a kind of perpetual and intertwined feedback loop of enormous complexity.
It's an 'angels on the head of a pin' fantasy. There is no signalling without something to interpret some concretely real event as a signal.There is something: us
I agree.
You can have a territory without a map, but you can't have a map without a territory.
There are centers of the brain for sight, touch, language, hearing, drawing, pain, etc. They are all in some (or many) ways connected to each other. See this for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind
First of all, so what, and secondly it's not exactly true. Blind people use their visual cortex for tactile experience. The modularity of mind says nothing about qualia. It says only that sub-personal and personal levels of experience have ordered relations.It explains the unexplainability of qualia.
How? Because one qualia is different from another?
It explains the limited accessibility we have into the internal workings of our minds. We can tell two faces apart, but be unable to articulate the differences. We can tell two a low pitch sound from a higher pitch sound, but not describe how a low pitch sound differs from a higher pitch one, and so on.This is because no region of the brain shares all its inputs with every other region, the separate modules share only the final results of the processing.
Right, but it doesn't make qualia unexplainable, it only accounts for why particular human qualia are unexplainable in terms of others.
which have no experience or qualia whatsoever, yet can detect "notifications" of a presumably epiphenomenal "state" of "pain".
Pain is anything but epiphenomenal. The fact that someone is able to talk about it rules out it being an epiphenomenon.
That's the reality, but your view does not accommodate the reality. You have no model for how pain can interface causally with 'complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources'. If you have the function, why would you need an experience?They are one and the same. This is functionalism (computationalism).
But there is no theoretical justification for conflating them. We know that we have experience to we just tack experience on to a theory about the universal computability of function and structure that we want to be true.
We put cochlear and retina implants into people, which replace those parts of their brain (the retina is considered part of the brain because it does processing), and restore the sense of sight or sound to those individuals. This is a strong case for functionalism.
There is a difference between replacing a part of the brain that a person uses to hear and replacing the parts of a brain that a person uses to be themselves.The only difference I see is that we haven't done it.
This is a case for having a much, much higher standard for replacing core structures than *any other medical technology in history*.When we replace someone's hippocampus with a chip will you tell them they are zombies?
How would such an experience appear? Where is the point of translation?
If the brain is doing all of the work, why does the top level organism have some other worthless abstraction layer of "experience" when, as blindsight proves, we are perfectly capable of processing information without any conscious qualia at all.
It's not worthless at all. Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of photosensitive cells in your retina? No, it takes many layers of perception, detecting lines, depth perception, motion, colors, objects, faces, etc. for the sense of sight to be as useful as it is to us.
Ugh. I don't know if there is any way that I can show you this blind spot if you don't see it for yourself, but if you are interested I will keep trying to explain it. If you aren't interested, then you are wasting your time talking to me, because what your view says I have known backwards and forwards for many years.
Let's say I am a computer. You are telling me "Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of electronically sensitive semiconductors in your graphics card? Yes. I would.You wouldn't be processing it in the same way as a brain so I would not expect a video card to be conscious in the same way.
The principle is the same though. The level of complexity doesn't change anything.The particular function that is implemented is everything.
The function is being accomplished the same regardless. If I am a graphics card, I don't need to see any graphics.It is no wonder why you have no faith in functionalism, if you see no difference between what a videocard does and what the visual cortex does.
I require no layers of software to organize this data into other kinds of data, nor would it make any sense that there could be any such thing as 'other kinds of data'. To the contrary, the raw firing of the semiconductors is all that is required to render data from the motherboard to be spewed out to a video screen (which would of course be invisible and irrelevant to a computer).The videocard can't recognize objects or faces.
It doesn't need to. As long as we can digitally categorize pixel regions, there is no need for 'faces' or 'objects'.
Then it will suffer face blindness and visual agnosia; it won't experience visual sensation in the same way we do.
It won't need to experience anything. The function of recognition continues regardless.
After the different layers process this information and share it with the other brain regions, we lose the ability to explain how it is we recognize a face, or how red differs from green. These determinations were done by a lower level module, and its internal processing is not privy to other brain regions (such as the brain region that talks), and so it remains mysterious.
All of that can and would occur without anything like 'experience'.So it is an accident that we can see and know we can see, since we could be zombies? How do you know I am not a zombie? Maybe only conscious people can understand your theory and everyone who fails to get it is confused due to their zombiehood.
Not an accident, no. Sense is self-translucent. That's how I know that you aren't a zombie and how I know that I don't need to know that you aren't a zombie, and how I know that if I wanted to I could make a plausible case for how I know you aren't a zombie.Good, then when computers are conscious this will be self-translucent to you, and you won't end up treating them as second-class citizens.
Promissory materialism only sounds desperate to me. It weakens the case. "Just wait until Jesus comes...then you'll be sorry!"If you are so certain I am conscious, then you have affirmed Turing's test.My emails could be the output of a program, and yet my "self translucent self" has shown through, you know someone is inside.If/when computer based minds walk around and marry your daughter, you will similarly come to accept their consciousness.
This is the thing that computers can't do. We don't need to have everything explicitly defined and spelled out - we have broadly elliptical sensemaking capacities which are rooted in the fabric of the cosmos directly.
Information is very close to consciousness, but ultimately fails to sustain itself. The pixels on your screen have no way to detect each other or process the image that you see as a coherent gestalt, and the processor behind the graphics generation has no way to detect the visual end result, and if it did, it would be completely superfluous. Your graphics card does not need to see anything.
Of course the pixels don't process themselves. You need a brain with complex software and filters to make sense of the flood of photons entering the eye.
If there are photons (and I maintain that there are not) flooding into the eye, they only get as far as turning on a vitamin A isomer to change shape and turn off the rod cell's flow of glutamate. Everything else is biochemical and endogenous. What we see is as much vitamin A as it is photons.
And you need other regions of the brain to make sense of the visual scene (to integrate it into an even larger context).
Insects have eyes too. Why do we need such a huge visual cortex to do what a baby mosquito can do?They can see too, I think.But we are much more capable in general, and need more neurons to perform those more complex functions.
We must suck then, since mosquitoes can see and reproduce and fly with a brain the size of this period.
Maybe.
To me it makes more sense to see information as nothing but the semiotic protocols developed by perceptual participation (experience) to elaborate and deepen the qualitative richness of those experiences.I wish I did not have to struggle to translate your sentences so frequently. I completely failed on this one.
I mean that if you have information that performs functions, then you don't need experience. Therefore it makes more sense to see that experience is the thing that cannot be reduced to anything simpler and that all forms of information are nothing more than tools used to share experiences.Thank you that was much clearer. So is your theory any different from idealism?
It's different in that I see idealism and materialism as dual aspects of a neutral monismSo is it dualism or monism?Can you explain this picture?
which is ordinary 'sense'. Matter is a spatial public exterior, experience is a temporal private interior. They are the same thing but 'rotated 90 degrees'. Sense is what does the rotating and the discerning of its own rotations and levels of meta-juxtaposition.
How do you know there is matter (rather than the illusion of matter) if the only thing that is concrete is experience?
Because illusion only means that there is some alternative explanation which makes more sense. Matter already makes sense.Then maybe other things besides awareness have a concrete independent existence too.
oof, this is getting too long. truncation ahoy... the upgraded Google Groups keeps spontaneously disposing of my writings.
On Wednesday, September 19, 2012 1:10:10 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:
Yes and no. I think if we are being precise, we have to admit that there is something about the nature of subjective experience which makes the 'all together and at once' actually elide the differences between the 'bunch of independent aspects' so that they aren't experienced as independent aspects. That's the elliptical-algebraic-gestalt quality.I think they separate aspects represent a single state of high dimensionality. This concept is elaborated in a book, I think it is called "universe of consciousness" but I will have to verify this.
Dimensionality sounds too discrete to me. I can go along with 'single state' but I think it's a distraction to see qualia as a plot within a dimensional space. It is not necessary to experience any dimensionality to have a feeling, rather it creates its own dimension. I can be hungry or ravenous, but there is no dimension of physiological potential qualities which hunger is predisposed to constellate within. The experience is primary and the dimensionality is secondary.
I don't think they are necessary for consciousness, but they are necessary to be informed. For consciousness all that you need is an awareness of an awareness - which is a participatory experience of detection. Semiconductors have detection, but their detection has no detection. Ours do, because they are the detections of living sub-persons.You can create a supervisory process that is aware of an awarness, rather easily, in any programming language.
The semiconductor is still only aware of charge comparisons.
The idea that something is supervising something is purely our projection, like saying that the capstone of a pyramid is supervising the base. All that is really going on is that we are able to read an aggregate sense into unconscious chains of causal logic.
At some level of depth though, does it matter what happens on the smallest scales? Do your neurons care about what the quarks and gluons are doing inside the nucleus of an oxygen atom inside a water molecule, floating in the cytoplasm?
I think they don't have to care because they embody what the quarks and gluons are doing. They are those 'cares'.
When you find a point at which the higher levels don't care then you can abstract out and replace the lower levels so long there is functional equivalence from the perspective of the higher levels.
I don't think it works that way. There is nothing that can be done to silicon glass that will make it into food we can eat.
Same goes for silicon intelligence being able to feel.
The divergence between us and silicon is just too fundamental to be bridged - like reptile and mammal.
We took the road less traveled and that road may only allow one traveler per universe.It only seems to make sense form the retrospective view of consciousness where we take it for granted. If we start instead from a universe of resources and dispositions, then the idea that a rearrangement of them should entail some kind of experience is a completely metaphysical, magical just-so story that has no basis in science.No it is absolutely necessary. If you had no knowledge regarding what you were seeing, no qualia at all, you would be blind and dysfunctional.
Not true. Blindsight proves this. Common experience with computers and machines suggests this. If I had no qualia at all, I wouldn't exist, but in theory, if there were no such thing as qualia, a universe of information processing would continue humming along nicely forever.People with blind sight are not fully functional. Otherwise it wouldn't be a condition we know about.
Sure, but nonetheless they are exhibiting a sub-personal function without a personal qualia.We can't be certain there is no qualia.
Why not? It may be technically possible that they are all lying or that their speech centers are all damaged in such a way that they only malfunction when patients try to talk about their problem, but I think it's sophistry to entertain that seriously.
That shows that one is not defined by the other. It shows that there is no functional reason for personal qualia to exist in theory. Of course in reality, personal qualia is all that matters to us, so it's absurd to suggest that something could function 'normally' without it, but that is the retrospective view of consciousness. If we start with the prospective view of consciousness, and say 'ok, I am building a universe completely from scratch.', what problem am I solving by conjuring qualia? If function is what matters, then qualia cannot. If qualia matters instead, then function can matter too (because it modulates qualia).You should watch some videos on youtube of people with split brains or right- or left-blindness. I think then you will understand my point.
I have seen some studies where people will respond to instructions given in writing to one eye and they perform them without knowing that they have been instructed. I get what you are saying, and I'm not claiming that there is no sub-personal qualia, only that personal level awareness can receive information without personal level qualia...therefore it is not a given that information comes with qualia attached.
If a computer can recognize and classify objects, then I think it is in some sense aware of something. It just can't reflect upon, discuss, contemplate, or otherwise tell us about these experiences. E.g., deep blue must have, in some sense, been aware of the state of the board during its games.
Nope. There is no 'board' for deep blue. It couldn't tell a pawn from a palace.It doesn't know what a palace is, but it can tell a pawn from a rook. Otherwise it could not play.
It only knows quantitative specifications of what we call a pawn or rook. In its native language it's just binary addresses that don't need to be called anything.
There's just well organized stacks of semiconductors wired together so that one semiconductor can direct and detect the direction of another.Sounds exactly like what aliens might say of our neural wiring and their interactions.
Yes, but we know they would be wrong.
We have no reason to suspect that computers aren't that since we have assembled them and they have given us no indications to the contrary.
It's looking at the chess game through a billion microscopes.It must know the whole board to make any sense of its position and the best next move.
It only needs to know the probabilities of particular sequences and a script of selection criteria. I has no idea what a board or a move or a position is, let alone 'best' or 'sense'. I am sure that you could probably add a single line of code that would cause Deep Blue to see the best move as the worst move and cheerfully lose every game forever.At that level, there is no game, no will to win, to fear of loss, only articulating changes with fidelity and reporting the results which have been scripted.The same might be true of the "chess playing module" in Kasparov's brain.
I don't think there is a such thing. There are regions of his brain that Kasparov has conditioned to use for playing Chess, but they are an outgrowth of the sense and motives of Kasparov himself (as well as whatever genetic predispositions he had).
Our conscious awareness, fundamentally, may be no different. It is just a vastly larger informational state that we can be aware of.
The sub-personal awareness within each molecule of each cell may be no different, but at the chemical, biological, zoological, and anthropological levels, it could not be more different. Even at the molecular level, we make crappy computers. Silicon is a much better choice if you want to control it from the outside. The stuff we are made of is not glass wafers, but sweet and salty wet stinky goo. There is a huge difference. We will never be glass, glass will never be breakfast.What if you wrote a program whose function was to resist outside control, to deviate from and grow beyond its original program?
Then it would almost certainly kill you or bide its time spreading until it could exterminate all life on the planet.
I didn't mean to say that any information can be functionally useful without qualia, only that there is a proof of concept for the principle that some information can be used functionally without qualia. This is why blindsight is such a big deal in philosophy of mind. It absolutely disproves the representational theory of qualia,It doesn't, because we haven't shown no visual qualia exists in the brain of someone with blindsight. All we know is that the part of the brain responsible for talking is isolated from that qualia.
That's all that matters. Being isolated from the qualia but not isolated from the information associated with the qualia proves that information does not require a qualitative experience and such an experience isn't magically conjured to serve that purpose wherever information flows.
end part 1
Craig
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part two
On Wednesday, September 19, 2012 1:10:10 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:It is like there being two people sitting side by side, one with there eyes closed, and one with their eyes open. You ask the person with their eyes closed if they can see and from their response conclude that neither person experienced sight.You haven't proven anything about the person with their eyes open.
It doesn't matter, because it proves that the person with their eyes closed can guess how many fingers you are holding up.
in that we know for certain that it is not necessary to experience personal visual qualia in order to receive personally useful information. They are not inseparable on the level of a human person. You can have one without the other.
For example, they may still have reflexes, like the ability to avoid obsticles or catch a thrown ball, but the language center of their brain is disconnected, and so the part of the brain that talks says it can't see.
I understand, but people with blindsight don't have a problem with their speech centers.They don't, but their speech center is "blind" as the data from their visual sense never makes it to all the parts of the brain it would normally.See the BBC Brain Series: http://mindhacks.com/2007/08/08/excellent-bbc-brain-story-series-available-online/It has some good explanations of this concept, showing various waves of activity emanating from different parts of the brain to others, which is also a good model for attention.
It doesn't matter in this case though, because with blindsight it is only the visual processing which is damaged. The psychology of the person is not split so that what they say is a reflection of what they intend to say.It depends on the form of brain damage.
In the cases I have read about, what you are talking about is not a concern.
At the sub-personal level, sure, there is all kinds of specialization and sharing of experience, but I think it is a-mereologicalWhat does mereological mean?
Mereology is the study of part whole relations - like 'the handle is part of the mug'. The self is not like that though. Is the ego part of the mind? Are ideas feelings? These kinds of distinctions lose all meaning in the purely phenomenological realm.and not a feed-forward information process of activity emanations like you are assuming. If it were, all qualia would be superfluous.No, qualia are neccessary. I don't believe zombies are logically consistent. It seems you think they are possible.
What is someone with blindsight other than person with access to optical information but is a visual zombie? The whole idea of a zombie frames the proposition in a fallacious way. There are many examples of things that act like they have feelings but don't. Puppets, dolls, cartoons, bots, etc. Zombies, as you conceive of them, are everywhere. They are ordinary.
Read smulleyan's story on the guy who takes a pill that obliterates his awareness and tell me if you think it is possible, and if not, why not.
I'm not curious about it. I understand this issue thoroughly and I understand exactly how you are misinterpreting it.
Why fight it? Why not try looking at the evidence for what it actually says? Information doesn't need experience. Even if it did, how would it conjure such a thing out of thin air, and why doesn't it do that when we are looking? Why does information never appear as a disembodied entity, say haunting the internet or appearing spontaneously in a cartoon?
Sure, to us it makes sense that the feeling of pain should have a function, but it makes no sense to a function to have a feeling. None.It can make sense if you think about it long enough. Think of googles self-driving cars. Might they have some quale representing the experience of spotting a green light or a stop sign?
The only reason to imagine that they would have a quale is because we take our own word for the fact that there is a such thing as experience. Otherwise there is no reason to bring qualia into it at all.
According to Minsky, human consciousness involves the interplay between as many as 400 separate sub-organs of the brain. One can imagine a symphony of activity resulting from these individual regions,
A symphony of what? Who is there to hear it?It's a metaphor for a large number of interacting and interfering parts.
But what in this metaphor is receiving the totality of the interaction?
All the parts of the brain to some extent, can "hear" the other parts.
Then they each would have to have a sub-brain homunculus to make sense of all of that.Together they lead to one large informational state.
Why would they? Does Bugs Bunny lead to Looney Tunes?
Not only the symphony but every sub-symphony of participating synapses. Hundreds of billions of notes being played every second on as many micro-instruments. Why have any regions or neurological differences at all?They are specialized to perform specific functions.
But why should they be if they can all hear each other?
It's like saying that it makes sense for all iPhones to be in one part of the country and Androids to be in another because they are specialized to perform specific functions.
Why not just use the same neuron over and over?Stop imagining things and think of what is actually there once you reduce the universe to unconscious processing of dead data.
The difference between dead and alive is a question of the organization, the patterns of the constituent matter.
I don't think that it is. I can make a pattern of a cell out of charcoal or chalk and there will be no living organism that comes out of it.You can take some lumps of coal, some water, some air, and a few trace elements, and by appropriately arranging those atoms end up with a bacterium, a rose, or a human being.
Easier said than done,It may not be easy but it is possible.
Not necessarily. If you re-freeze a drop of water, you won't get a snowflake. It may not be possible to superimpose a static design on an dynamic interactive system. If you move a hurricane to Mars, it won't work.
but even so, once it dies, we haven't figured out how to bring it back to life.Sure we have, put the parts back where they were when it was alive and it will come back to life.
I don't think so. Again. Hurricane on Mars. You can put the parts of a candle back together but the wick won't burn by itself.
We just don't have the technical means to do this today.
That's an understatement. We don't have the technical means to make synthetic blood widely available today, but we may in 10-100 years. We may not have the ability to build living organisms from atomic scratch in 10,000 years. We are still driving gas powered cars from 1903, even though it is critically important to the entire world that we stop doing that.
We haven't been so successful when we have tried to build life from scratch. Since they did Cosmos in the late 70s have we progressed at all in getting a living cell out of primordial ooze?I am not sure. If we had, would it change your mind?
It would give me some reason to suspect that the boundary between the chemical and biological level is softer than I imagine it is.
The possibility of living organisms has to be inherent in the universe to begin with.
You could reduce any life form to "lifeless bouncing around of dead atoms.". But this doesn't get anywhere useful.All I suggest is the same applies to the difference between consciousness and lack of consciousness. The organization and patterns of some system determine what it is or can be conscious of.
If that were the case, we should see dead bodies spontaneously self-resurrecting from time to time, Boltzmann brains cropping up in the clouds, etc.
The arrow of time makes such spontaneous constructions very unlikely. It is not surprising that we don't see them.
The entire biosphere is a spontaneous construction, so they seem pretty likely on Earth.Our whole biosphere is descended from the same organism, so only the first (rather simple) life form had to come into being spontaneously.
That first organism has to keep mutating spontaneously into organisms which don't wipe out all of the others too.
each acting on each others' signals and in turn reacting to how those other regions are then affected, in a kind of perpetual and intertwined feedback loop of enormous complexity.
It's an 'angels on the head of a pin' fantasy. There is no signalling without something to interpret some concretely real event as a signal.There is something: us
I agree.
You can have a territory without a map, but you can't have a map without a territory.
There are centers of the brain for sight, touch, language, hearing, drawing, pain, etc. They are all in some (or many) ways connected to each other. See this for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_of_mind
First of all, so what, and secondly it's not exactly true. Blind people use their visual cortex for tactile experience. The modularity of mind says nothing about qualia. It says only that sub-personal and personal levels of experience have ordered relations.It explains the unexplainability of qualia.
How? Because one qualia is different from another?
It explains the limited accessibility we have into the internal workings of our minds. We can tell two faces apart, but be unable to articulate the differences. We can tell two a low pitch sound from a higher pitch sound, but not describe how a low pitch sound differs from a higher pitch one, and so on.This is because no region of the brain shares all its inputs with every other region, the separate modules share only the final results of the processing.
Right, but it doesn't make qualia unexplainable, it only accounts for why particular human qualia are unexplainable in terms of others.
which have no experience or qualia whatsoever, yet can detect "notifications" of a presumably epiphenomenal "state" of "pain".
Pain is anything but epiphenomenal. The fact that someone is able to talk about it rules out it being an epiphenomenon.
That's the reality, but your view does not accommodate the reality. You have no model for how pain can interface causally with 'complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources'. If you have the function, why would you need an experience?They are one and the same. This is functionalism (computationalism).
But there is no theoretical justification for conflating them. We know that we have experience to we just tack experience on to a theory about the universal computability of function and structure that we want to be true.
We put cochlear and retina implants into people, which replace those parts of their brain (the retina is considered part of the brain because it does processing), and restore the sense of sight or sound to those individuals. This is a strong case for functionalism.
There is a difference between replacing a part of the brain that a person uses to hear and replacing the parts of a brain that a person uses to be themselves.The only difference I see is that we haven't done it.
Maybe we haven't done it yet because it cannot be done.
We can replace someone's hand with a hook, but this approach doesn't work very well as a head replacement.
This is a case for having a much, much higher standard for replacing core structures than *any other medical technology in history*.When we replace someone's hippocampus with a chip will you tell them they are zombies?
I won't have to tell them anything because they will be in a vegetative state.
How would such an experience appear? Where is the point of translation?
If the brain is doing all of the work, why does the top level organism have some other worthless abstraction layer of "experience" when, as blindsight proves, we are perfectly capable of processing information without any conscious qualia at all.
It's not worthless at all. Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of photosensitive cells in your retina? No, it takes many layers of perception, detecting lines, depth perception, motion, colors, objects, faces, etc. for the sense of sight to be as useful as it is to us.
Ugh. I don't know if there is any way that I can show you this blind spot if you don't see it for yourself, but if you are interested I will keep trying to explain it. If you aren't interested, then you are wasting your time talking to me, because what your view says I have known backwards and forwards for many years.
Let's say I am a computer. You are telling me "Would you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of electronically sensitive semiconductors in your graphics card? Yes. I would.You wouldn't be processing it in the same way as a brain so I would not expect a video card to be conscious in the same way.
The principle is the same though. The level of complexity doesn't change anything.The particular function that is implemented is everything.
The function is being accomplished the same regardless. If I am a graphics card, I don't need to see any graphics.It is no wonder why you have no faith in functionalism, if you see no difference between what a videocard does and what the visual cortex does.
No, it's you who thinks that the visual cortex is a computer. I am pointing out that if that were true, then there would be no possible reason to have a visual display.
I require no layers of software to organize this data into other kinds of data, nor would it make any sense that there could be any such thing as 'other kinds of data'. To the contrary, the raw firing of the semiconductors is all that is required to render data from the motherboard to be spewed out to a video screen (which would of course be invisible and irrelevant to a computer).The videocard can't recognize objects or faces.
It doesn't need to. As long as we can digitally categorize pixel regions, there is no need for 'faces' or 'objects'.
Then it will suffer face blindness and visual agnosia; it won't experience visual sensation in the same way we do.
It won't need to experience anything. The function of recognition continues regardless.
After the different layers process this information and share it with the other brain regions, we lose the ability to explain how it is we recognize a face, or how red differs from green. These determinations were done by a lower level module, and its internal processing is not privy to other brain regions (such as the brain region that talks), and so it remains mysterious.
All of that can and would occur without anything like 'experience'.So it is an accident that we can see and know we can see, since we could be zombies? How do you know I am not a zombie? Maybe only conscious people can understand your theory and everyone who fails to get it is confused due to their zombiehood.
Not an accident, no. Sense is self-translucent. That's how I know that you aren't a zombie and how I know that I don't need to know that you aren't a zombie, and how I know that if I wanted to I could make a plausible case for how I know you aren't a zombie.Good, then when computers are conscious this will be self-translucent to you, and you won't end up treating them as second-class citizens.
Promissory materialism only sounds desperate to me. It weakens the case. "Just wait until Jesus comes...then you'll be sorry!"If you are so certain I am conscious, then you have affirmed Turing's test.My emails could be the output of a program, and yet my "self translucent self" has shown through, you know someone is inside.If/when computer based minds walk around and marry your daughter, you will similarly come to accept their consciousness.
It doesn't matter how many people are fooled by a simulated person, they still have no experience.
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----- Receiving the following content -----From: Jason ReschReceiver: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Time: 2012-09-19, 13:08:11
Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant
On Wednesday, September 19, 2012 1:57:28 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:
On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 1:33:50 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:
On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 10:29:44 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:
Here is an example:
Functional MRI scans have indicated that an area of the brain, called the anterior cingulate cortex, processes pain information to determine how a person is affected. Severing the link to this part of the brain has a curious effect on one's reaction to pain. A condition known as pain dissociation is the result. Along with brain surgery such as lobotomy or cingulotomy, the condition may also occur through the administration of certain drugs such as morphine. Those with pain dissociation still perceive pain; they are aware of its location and intensity but pain is no longer unpleasant or distressing. Paul Brand, a surgeon and author on the subject of pain recounted the case of a woman who had suffered with a severe and chronic pain for more than a decade: She agreed to a surgery that would separate the neural pathways between her frontal lobes and the rest of her brain. The surgery was a success. Brand visited the woman a year later, and inquired about her pain. She said, 锟絆h, yes, its still there. I just don't worry about it anymore.� With a smile she continued, 锟絀n fact, it's still agonizing. But I don't mind.�
The conclusion: even seemingly simple qualia, like pain are far from simple.
That is a conclusion, but I think the wrong one. Human qualia are not simple, but that does not at all mean that qualia re not simple.
I agree with this.
We are titanically enormous organisms made of other organisms. Our human experience is loaded with cognitive, emotional, and sensory qualia, corresponding to the evolution of life, our species, cultures, families, and individuals. Our pain is a Taj Mahal, and if you remove enough bricks, some towers fall and maybe one part of the palace no longer relates to another part. What you describe suggests exactly that - some part of us feels the pain on a sub-personal level, but the personal level is not alarmed by it because it's qualia has lost the red end of it's spectrum so to speak and now is blue-shifted toward an anesthetized intellectual quality of being.I mostly agree with what you are saying here.
I think Marvin Minksy understands this well, and provides a good explanation:
Marvin Minsky considers it to be 锟絘 huge mistake-that attempt to reify 'feeling' as an independent entity, with an essence that's indescribable. As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what 'hurting' is-and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some single, simple, 'essence' of hurting, rather than recognizing that this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources.�
Hi Jason ReschPragmatically speaking, the self has to be a singular, focussed point.I have trouble understanding how that can be done with a network of nerve signals.
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Hi Jason ReschBrain experiments by I forget who were performed bytouching the brain at various points with a probe.With each point, the patient reported a differentexperience was being recalled.
On the other hand, others report that experiences arescattered all over the brain, presumably over some sorts ofnetworks.The only way I can reconcile these two points of view is thatexperiences are stored in networks such that connectingat a single point will recall the whole.Perhaps the self is such a point of contact.
Or the network, on the other hand, may be ableas a whole to simply "will" an experience by self-focussing.Some here have shown that experiences are somehowfocused by the nerves in the brain simply by willingthem to do so. This appears to be true due to thefact that a new computerized brain devicecan actually allow people to move paralyzed limbsby simply willing the limb to do so.Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net9/20/2012"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
----- Receiving the following content -----From: Jason ReschReceiver: everyth...@googlegroups.comTime: 2012-09-19, 13:08:11Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant
On Wednesday, September 19, 2012 1:57:28 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:
On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 1:33:50 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:
On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 10:29:44 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:
Here is an example:
Functional MRI scans have indicated that an area of the brain, called the anterior cingulate cortex, processes pain information to determine how a person is affected. Severing the link to this part of the brain has a curious effect on one's reaction to pain. A condition known as pain dissociation is the result. Along with brain surgery such as lobotomy or cingulotomy, the condition may also occur through the administration of certain drugs such as morphine. Those with pain dissociation still perceive pain; they are aware of its location and intensity but pain is no longer unpleasant or distressing. Paul Brand, a surgeon and author on the subject of pain recounted the case of a woman who had suffered with a severe and chronic pain for more than a decade: She agreed to a surgery that would separate the neural pathways between her frontal lobes and the rest of her brain. The surgery was a success. Brand visited the woman a year later, and inquired about her pain. She said, 揙h, yes, its still there. I just don't worry about it anymore.� With a smile she continued, 揑n fact, it's still agonizing. But I don't mind.�
The conclusion: even seemingly simple qualia, like pain are far from simple.
That is a conclusion, but I think the wrong one. Human qualia are not simple, but that does not at all mean that qualia re not simple.
I agree with this.
We are titanically enormous organisms made of other organisms. Our human experience is loaded with cognitive, emotional, and sensory qualia, corresponding to the evolution of life, our species, cultures, families, and individuals. Our pain is a Taj Mahal, and if you remove enough bricks, some towers fall and maybe one part of the palace no longer relates to another part. What you describe suggests exactly that - some part of us feels the pain on a sub-personal level, but the personal level is not alarmed by it because it's qualia has lost the red end of it's spectrum so to speak and now is blue-shifted toward an anesthetized intellectual quality of being.I mostly agree with what you are saying here.
I think Marvin Minksy understands this well, and provides a good explanation:
Marvin Minsky considers it to be 揳 huge mistake-that attempt to reify 'feeling' as an independent entity, with an essence that's indescribable. As I see it, feelings are not strange alien things. It is precisely those cognitive changes themselves that constitute what 'hurting' is-and this also includes all those clumsy attempts to represent and summarize those changes. The big mistake comes from looking for some single, simple, 'essence' of hurting, rather than recognizing that this is the word we use for complex rearrangement of our disposition of resources.�
On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 2:28 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:oof, this is getting too long. truncation ahoy... the upgraded Google Groups keeps spontaneously disposing of my writings.
On Wednesday, September 19, 2012 1:10:10 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:
Yes and no. I think if we are being precise, we have to admit that there is something about the nature of subjective experience which makes the 'all together and at once' actually elide the differences between the 'bunch of independent aspects' so that they aren't experienced as independent aspects. That's the elliptical-algebraic-gestalt quality.I think they separate aspects represent a single state of high dimensionality. This concept is elaborated in a book, I think it is called "universe of consciousness" but I will have to verify this.I was right, it was this book:Here is a video presentation by one of the authors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgQgfb-HkQkI think you might like him.
Dimensionality sounds too discrete to me. I can go along with 'single state' but I think it's a distraction to see qualia as a plot within a dimensional space. It is not necessary to experience any dimensionality to have a feeling, rather it creates its own dimension. I can be hungry or ravenous, but there is no dimension of physiological potential qualities which hunger is predisposed to constellate within. The experience is primary and the dimensionality is secondary.
I don't think they are necessary for consciousness, but they are necessary to be informed. For consciousness all that you need is an awareness of an awareness - which is a participatory experience of detection. Semiconductors have detection, but their detection has no detection. Ours do, because they are the detections of living sub-persons.You can create a supervisory process that is aware of an awarness, rather easily, in any programming language.
The semiconductor is still only aware of charge comparisons.And you might as well say neurons are only aware of neurotransmitters. Why do you reduce programs to silicon, but you not reduce human thoughts to the squirted solutions of neurotransmitters? It seems there is an inherent bias in your reasoning and or arguments.
The idea that something is supervising something is purely our projection, like saying that the capstone of a pyramid is supervising the base. All that is really going on is that we are able to read an aggregate sense into unconscious chains of causal logic.
At some level of depth though, does it matter what happens on the smallest scales? Do your neurons care about what the quarks and gluons are doing inside the nucleus of an oxygen atom inside a water molecule, floating in the cytoplasm?
I think they don't have to care because they embody what the quarks and gluons are doing. They are those 'cares'.If neurons don't care about what happens in the nucleus, then we could in theory replace atoms with some exotic form of matter, which still contains a positively charged center of the same mass, but is otherwise not made of protons or neutrons, and we could use these to build normal molecules and cell structures, even entire brains. And despite the different constitution, would behave just like any other brain made of normal matter. Do you agree?
When you find a point at which the higher levels don't care then you can abstract out and replace the lower levels so long there is functional equivalence from the perspective of the higher levels.
I don't think it works that way. There is nothing that can be done to silicon glass that will make it into food we can eat.How does is this relevant?
Same goes for silicon intelligence being able to feel.This does not follow.
The divergence between us and silicon is just too fundamental to be bridged - like reptile and mammal.Mammals came from reptiles.And machines come from us.
We took the road less traveled and that road may only allow one traveler per universe.It only seems to make sense form the retrospective view of consciousness where we take it for granted. If we start instead from a universe of resources and dispositions, then the idea that a rearrangement of them should entail some kind of experience is a completely metaphysical, magical just-so story that has no basis in science.No it is absolutely necessary. If you had no knowledge regarding what you were seeing, no qualia at all, you would be blind and dysfunctional.
Not true. Blindsight proves this. Common experience with computers and machines suggests this. If I had no qualia at all, I wouldn't exist, but in theory, if there were no such thing as qualia, a universe of information processing would continue humming along nicely forever.People with blind sight are not fully functional. Otherwise it wouldn't be a condition we know about.
Sure, but nonetheless they are exhibiting a sub-personal function without a personal qualia.We can't be certain there is no qualia.
Why not? It may be technically possible that they are all lying or that their speech centers are all damaged in such a way that they only malfunction when patients try to talk about their problem, but I think it's sophistry to entertain that seriously.
They are not all lying, nor are their speech centers damaged. The normal links between different areas in their brain are broken or have become dysfunctional.
That shows that one is not defined by the other. It shows that there is no functional reason for personal qualia to exist in theory. Of course in reality, personal qualia is all that matters to us, so it's absurd to suggest that something could function 'normally' without it, but that is the retrospective view of consciousness. If we start with the prospective view of consciousness, and say 'ok, I am building a universe completely from scratch.', what problem am I solving by conjuring qualia? If function is what matters, then qualia cannot. If qualia matters instead, then function can matter too (because it modulates qualia).You should watch some videos on youtube of people with split brains or right- or left-blindness. I think then you will understand my point.
I have seen some studies where people will respond to instructions given in writing to one eye and they perform them without knowing that they have been instructed. I get what you are saying, and I'm not claiming that there is no sub-personal qualia, only that personal level awareness can receive information without personal level qualia...therefore it is not a given that information comes with qualia attached.
I think receiving the knowledge of information is a type of qualia, although less vivid than an audio or visual experience is.
If a computer can recognize and classify objects, then I think it is in some sense aware of something. It just can't reflect upon, discuss, contemplate, or otherwise tell us about these experiences. E.g., deep blue must have, in some sense, been aware of the state of the board during its games.
Nope. There is no 'board' for deep blue. It couldn't tell a pawn from a palace.It doesn't know what a palace is, but it can tell a pawn from a rook. Otherwise it could not play.
It only knows quantitative specifications of what we call a pawn or rook. In its native language it's just binary addresses that don't need to be called anything.
It needs to distinguish pawns from rooks, whether or not it calls them anything.
There's just well organized stacks of semiconductors wired together so that one semiconductor can direct and detect the direction of another.Sounds exactly like what aliens might say of our neural wiring and their interactions.
Yes, but we know they would be wrong.Maybe they are right, except for you, who might happen to be the only conscious person in the world.
We have no reason to suspect that computers aren't that since we have assembled them and they have given us no indications to the contrary.
It's looking at the chess game through a billion microscopes.It must know the whole board to make any sense of its position and the best next move.
It only needs to know the probabilities of particular sequences and a script of selection criteria. I has no idea what a board or a move or a position is, let alone 'best' or 'sense'. I am sure that you could probably add a single line of code that would cause Deep Blue to see the best move as the worst move and cheerfully lose every game forever.At that level, there is no game, no will to win, to fear of loss, only articulating changes with fidelity and reporting the results which have been scripted.The same might be true of the "chess playing module" in Kasparov's brain.
I don't think there is a such thing. There are regions of his brain that Kasparov has conditioned to use for playing Chess, but they are an outgrowth of the sense and motives of Kasparov himself (as well as whatever genetic predispositions he had).
Our conscious awareness, fundamentally, may be no different. It is just a vastly larger informational state that we can be aware of.
The sub-personal awareness within each molecule of each cell may be no different, but at the chemical, biological, zoological, and anthropological levels, it could not be more different. Even at the molecular level, we make crappy computers. Silicon is a much better choice if you want to control it from the outside. The stuff we are made of is not glass wafers, but sweet and salty wet stinky goo. There is a huge difference. We will never be glass, glass will never be breakfast.What if you wrote a program whose function was to resist outside control, to deviate from and grow beyond its original program?
Then it would almost certainly kill you or bide its time spreading until it could exterminate all life on the planet.So you see that the "rigidity of silicon" can be used as a basis for implementing non-rigid systems. Just like the rigidity of physical law and atomic interactions can be used to implement the "sweet salty wet stinky goo" of life.
On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 9:58 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:part two
On Wednesday, September 19, 2012 1:10:10 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:It is like there being two people sitting side by side, one with there eyes closed, and one with their eyes open. You ask the person with their eyes closed if they can see and from their response conclude that neither person experienced sight.You haven't proven anything about the person with their eyes open.
It doesn't matter, because it proves that the person with their eyes closed can guess how many fingers you are holding up.
Your mail client may mess up this up, but I think it could be explained with something like this. In which the information takes a round-about way through a different module of the brain before making it to the language center.
The right side of the brain sees the visual scene and can communicate "I see 3" to the left hemisphere, but it cannot communicate the whole visual scene. The person can still rightly guess the number, but will report that they cannot see.
(Claim that I see 3 fingers, but can't see them)^|Language Center^|Left Side of Brain <-----> Right Side of Brain(broken link) ^| |Visual Cortex^|Eyes^|(Scene of 3 fingers held up)
Why fight it? Why not try looking at the evidence for what it actually says? Information doesn't need experience. Even if it did, how would it conjure such a thing out of thin air, and why doesn't it do that when we are looking? Why does information never appear as a disembodied entity, say haunting the internet or appearing spontaneously in a cartoon?
Sure, to us it makes sense that the feeling of pain should have a function, but it makes no sense to a function to have a feeling. None.It can make sense if you think about it long enough. Think of googles self-driving cars. Might they have some quale representing the experience of spotting a green light or a stop sign?
The only reason to imagine that they would have a quale is because we take our own word for the fact that there is a such thing as experience. Otherwise there is no reason to bring qualia into it at all.
According to Minsky, human consciousness involves the interplay between as many as 400 separate sub-organs of the brain. One can imagine a symphony of activity resulting from these individual regions,
A symphony of what? Who is there to hear it?It's a metaphor for a large number of interacting and interfering parts.
But what in this metaphor is receiving the totality of the interaction?
All the parts of the brain to some extent, can "hear" the other parts.
Then they each would have to have a sub-brain homunculus to make sense of all of that.Together they lead to one large informational state.
Why would they? Does Bugs Bunny lead to Looney Tunes?
Not only the symphony but every sub-symphony of participating synapses. Hundreds of billions of notes being played every second on as many micro-instruments. Why have any regions or neurological differences at all?They are specialized to perform specific functions.
But why should they be if they can all hear each other?They have the bandwidth to process each other's summaries, but not all the raw data each module has filtered.
It's like saying that it makes sense for all iPhones to be in one part of the country and Androids to be in another because they are specialized to perform specific functions.
Why not just use the same neuron over and over?Stop imagining things and think of what is actually there once you reduce the universe to unconscious processing of dead data.
The difference between dead and alive is a question of the organization, the patterns of the constituent matter.
I don't think that it is. I can make a pattern of a cell out of charcoal or chalk and there will be no living organism that comes out of it.You can take some lumps of coal, some water, some air, and a few trace elements, and by appropriately arranging those atoms end up with a bacterium, a rose, or a human being.
Easier said than done,It may not be easy but it is possible.
Not necessarily. If you re-freeze a drop of water, you won't get a snowflake. It may not be possible to superimpose a static design on an dynamic interactive system. If you move a hurricane to Mars, it won't work.Keep the environment the same then. (I never suggested changing it)
but even so, once it dies, we haven't figured out how to bring it back to life.Sure we have, put the parts back where they were when it was alive and it will come back to life.
I don't think so. Again. Hurricane on Mars. You can put the parts of a candle back together but the wick won't burn by itself.
To put something perfectly back together you need to restore the original velocities of the particles (not just the positions). If you did this then by putting the wick back together (and restoring the velocities of the atoms in the wick) the flame would return.We just don't have the technical means to do this today.
That's an understatement. We don't have the technical means to make synthetic blood widely available today, but we may in 10-100 years. We may not have the ability to build living organisms from atomic scratch in 10,000 years. We are still driving gas powered cars from 1903, even though it is critically important to the entire world that we stop doing that.
We haven't been so successful when we have tried to build life from scratch. Since they did Cosmos in the late 70s have we progressed at all in getting a living cell out of primordial ooze?I am not sure. If we had, would it change your mind?
It would give me some reason to suspect that the boundary between the chemical and biological level is softer than I imagine it is.
I found this today, it is not complete, but a big step towards creating life form scratch:
The possibility of living organisms has to be inherent in the universe to begin with.
You could reduce any life form to "lifeless bouncing around of dead atoms.". But this doesn't get anywhere useful.All I suggest is the same applies to the difference between consciousness and lack of consciousness. The organization and patterns of some system determine what it is or can be conscious of.
If that were the case, we should see dead bodies spontaneously self-resurrecting from time to time, Boltzmann brains cropping up in the clouds, etc.
The arrow of time makes such spontaneous constructions very unlikely. It is not surprising that we don't see them.
The entire biosphere is a spontaneous construction, so they seem pretty likely on Earth.Our whole biosphere is descended from the same organism, so only the first (rather simple) life form had to come into being spontaneously.
That first organism has to keep mutating spontaneously into organisms which don't wipe out all of the others too.
All the others have an advantage over the one. In that through their greater diversity, they run more evolutionary experiments and therefore can evolve countermeasures more rapidly than any single species can evolve offensive capabilities against all the rest.
I require no layers of software to organize this data into other kinds of data, nor would it make any sense that there could be any such thing as 'other kinds of data'. To the contrary, the raw firing of the semiconductors is all that is required to render data from the motherboard to be spewed out to a video screen (which would of course be invisible and irrelevant to a computer).The videocard can't recognize objects or faces.
It doesn't need to. As long as we can digitally categorize pixel regions, there is no need for 'faces' or 'objects'.
Then it will suffer face blindness and visual agnosia; it won't experience visual sensation in the same way we do.
It won't need to experience anything. The function of recognition continues regardless.
After the different layers process this information and share it with the other brain regions, we lose the ability to explain how it is we recognize a face, or how red differs from green. These determinations were done by a lower level module, and its internal processing is not privy to other brain regions (such as the brain region that talks), and so it remains mysterious.
All of that can and would occur without anything like 'experience'.So it is an accident that we can see and know we can see, since we could be zombies? How do you know I am not a zombie? Maybe only conscious people can understand your theory and everyone who fails to get it is confused due to their zombiehood.
Not an accident, no. Sense is self-translucent. That's how I know that you aren't a zombie and how I know that I don't need to know that you aren't a zombie, and how I know that if I wanted to I could make a plausible case for how I know you aren't a zombie.Good, then when computers are conscious this will be self-translucent to you, and you won't end up treating them as second-class citizens.
Promissory materialism only sounds desperate to me. It weakens the case. "Just wait until Jesus comes...then you'll be sorry!"If you are so certain I am conscious, then you have affirmed Turing's test.My emails could be the output of a program, and yet my "self translucent self" has shown through, you know someone is inside.If/when computer based minds walk around and marry your daughter, you will similarly come to accept their consciousness.
It doesn't matter how many people are fooled by a simulated person, they still have no experience.
Then how is it you were so sure I am conscious?
Still, most musicians talk about experiences and inspirations... but this is marketing. When you're working in/with an orchestra on a tight schedule with multiple stakeholders, you see all the romantic fluff evaporating in favor of getting the technique of musical ecstasy as mathematically precise as possible. Even if many musicians won't admit this, because of marketing and "aura" of music.
Because we know for a fact that our consciousness correlates with neural activity ...
Hi Craig Weinberg ,
Because consciousness at the most is not physical
and at the least it is a verb rather than a noun,
On Thursday, September 20, 2012 10:14:25 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:On 20 Sep 2012, at 14:27, Craig Weinberg wrote:Because we know for a fact that our consciousness correlates with neural activity ...We don't know that. It is a theory, a belief, an assumption, ...Some people have believed that consciousness correlates to the state of the liver.We never know if a theory is "true". We can only know when a theory is false.Bruno
I would agree that it would be only a theory that brain changes 'produce' consciousness, but I would say that we can say with confidence that changes in our awareness are more tightly synchronized with changes in brain activity than with those of the liver, or any other thing in the universe that we can observe.
When we stimulate the brain magnetically, that event correlates directly with subjective experience. I don't think that there is anything else we could stimulate which would cause that.
Craig
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I'm not so sure about "there is nothing but a conceptual sculpture of abstraction".
On 20 Sep 2012, at 16:47, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, September 20, 2012 10:14:25 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:On 20 Sep 2012, at 14:27, Craig Weinberg wrote:Because we know for a fact that our consciousness correlates with neural activity ...We don't know that. It is a theory, a belief, an assumption, ...Some people have believed that consciousness correlates to the state of the liver.We never know if a theory is "true". We can only know when a theory is false.Bruno
I would agree that it would be only a theory that brain changes 'produce' consciousness, but I would say that we can say with confidence that changes in our awareness are more tightly synchronized with changes in brain activity than with those of the liver, or any other thing in the universe that we can observe.I agree, and it is close to my working *hypothesis*, although dispensable by choosing a lower level.The problem is in the choice of the theory used for making sense of a correlation between "changes in our awareness" and "changes in brain activity".
When we stimulate the brain magnetically, that event correlates directly with subjective experience. I don't think that there is anything else we could stimulate which would cause that.It follows from your hypothesis. With comp this would be relatively occurring (in some sense, as it really occurs out of time in arithmetical platonia) when you stimulate any relatively concrete universal machine emulating the magnetic stimulation of the brain (where emulating means simulating at the correct subst level, or below).It looks to me like a "don't ask" theory. It takes Matter ( PRIMITIVE matter) for granted, it takes consciousness for granted, and it relates the two by some sort of magical trick or, with all my respect, pompous word.It is coherent, as PRIMITIVE Matter is consistent with non-comp, but it looks like making both matter and mind incomprehensible at the start, and then it introduces "puppets" in the picture.
On 20 Sep 2012, at 14:27, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Because we know for a fact that our consciousness correlates with neural activity ...
We don't know that. It is a theory, a belief, an assumption, ...
Some people have believed that consciousness correlates to the state of the liver.
We never know if a theory is "true". We can only know when a theory is false.
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Hi Jason ReschBrain experiments by I forget who were performed bytouching the brain at various points with a probe.With each point, the patient reported a differentexperience was being recalled.On the other hand, others report that experiences arescattered all over the brain, presumably over some sorts ofnetworks.The only way I can reconcile these two points of view is thatexperiences are stored in networks such that connectingat a single point will recall the whole.
Perhaps the self is such a point of contact.Or the network, on the other hand, may be ableas a whole to simply "will" an experience by self-focussing.Some here have shown that experiences are somehowfocused by the nerves in the brain simply by willingthem to do so. This appears to be true due to thefact that a new computerized brain devicecan actually allow people to move paralyzed limbsby simply willing the limb to do so.
On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 5:21 AM, Roger Clough <rcl...@verizon.net> wrote:
Hi Jason ReschBrain experiments by I forget who were performed bytouching the brain at various points with a probe.With each point, the patient reported a differentexperience was being recalled.On the other hand, others report that experiences arescattered all over the brain, presumably over some sorts ofnetworks.The only way I can reconcile these two points of view is thatexperiences are stored in networks such that connectingat a single point will recall the whole.
I think there is a lot of redundancy in the brain, memories are stored in many places. Ray Kurzweil makes a good analogy I think, in that the memories in a brain are like a hologram. You can cut a hologram in half and the same image remains, albeit at a reduced resolution.
Reflected eternal song(s) dressed in the illusion of time. As far as I can see: proportions, relationships, ratios.
Time makes them appear to chat and sing; but in some sense every song has already been sung, even if they've never been voiced or heard.
Beethoven was almost completely deaf while he composed/dreamed the 9th. Mahler wrote/dreamed his later symphonies in a hut by a lake in Austria. No Piano, no reference pitches. He never even "heard physically" his 9th.
Some are amazed by this. I am not.
You're probably gonna state that they needed experience hearing in the first place, which leaves me unconvinced as I have read the scores: whatever is being coded there is not "dead information" but entities, portals into dreamworlds.
Note how in festival culture from woodstock to burning man: music functions as portal, a kind of carrier wave, to other loci of being and perception => physical sound strings point towards some dream, mind of the festival goers do the introspective traveling.
Their use of similar adjectives, hyperbole and superlatives to describe their experience points towards kind of eternal universality of music, when removed enough from "consumer of music", "User of music" through the usual list of consciousness altering practices, substances, and plants.
Could you imagine sound doing this?
http://www.ideaconnection.com/innovation-videos/396-levitating-liquid-with-sound.html?ref=nl091912
On Thursday, September 20, 2012 11:55:27 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 20 Sep 2012, at 16:47, Craig Weinberg wrote:
On Thursday, September 20, 2012 10:14:25 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 20 Sep 2012, at 14:27, Craig Weinberg wrote:
Because we know for a fact that our consciousness correlates with neural activity ...
We don't know that. It is a theory, a belief, an assumption, ...
Some people have believed that consciousness correlates to the state of the liver.
We never know if a theory is "true". We can only know when a theory is false.
Bruno
I would agree that it would be only a theory that brain changes 'produce' consciousness, but I would say that we can say with confidence that changes in our awareness are more tightly synchronized with changes in brain activity than with those of the liver, or any other thing in the universe that we can observe.
I agree, and it is close to my working *hypothesis*, although dispensable by choosing a lower level.
The problem is in the choice of the theory used for making sense of a correlation between "changes in our awareness" and "changes in brain activity".
When we stimulate the brain magnetically, that event correlates directly with subjective experience. I don't think that there is anything else we could stimulate which would cause that.
It follows from your hypothesis. With comp this would be relatively occurring (in some sense, as it really occurs out of time in arithmetical platonia) when you stimulate any relatively concrete universal machine emulating the magnetic stimulation of the brain (where emulating means simulating at the correct subst level, or below).
It looks to me like a "don't ask" theory. It takes Matter ( PRIMITIVE matter) for granted, it takes consciousness for granted, and it relates the two by some sort of magical trick or, with all my respect, pompous word.
It is coherent, as PRIMITIVE Matter is consistent with non-comp, but it looks like making both matter and mind incomprehensible at the start, and then it introduces "puppets" in the picture.
Mind has to be incomprehensible from the start because comprehension is an experience which supervenes on mind. Matter isn't primitive, but rather a second order representation of sense. There is no magic trick that relates mind and matter, it is the neutral monism of sense which presents itself to itself as mind and presents its non-self to its (self presented as self) as matter. Computation arises as a third order meta-representation of relation between the presented and the re-presented.
Craig
On Thursday, September 20, 2012 9:23:08 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote:
On 9/20/2012 12:05 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
snip
Hi Craig,
You need to show how we can get some kind of closure in the map for this to work... Otherwise its a regress...
Hi Stephen,
If sense is truly primordial, then it is beyond both closure and regress.
Craig
On Thursday, September 20, 2012 1:25:48 PM UTC-4, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:Reflected eternal song(s) dressed in the illusion of time. As far as I can see: proportions, relationships, ratios.
That's what I mean by "a conceptual sculpture of abstraction". It's not real though. Proportion of what? Relations between what?
When we think of these things we can conceive of them abstractly as-if-they-were-real, but only because we are borrowing the concrete reality of our own neurology to do that.
Just because we can imagine how a song would look as a graphic representation doesn't mean that there is an independently real mathematical spirit which is clothed in different forms. It is the math which is derived through experiences of form, not the other way around. We are informed by experiencing forms, not by composing in silence and then hoping to discover sound.
Time makes them appear to chat and sing; but in some sense every song has already been sung, even if they've never been voiced or heard.
I almost agree, but I think that in the same sense that every song has already been sung, it has also already been voiced and heard, only not in the 'small now' of ordinary waking human consciousness. When I heard the song Street Spirit for the first time, I immediately knew that it was the song that I had heard in my mind often as a child. Not the exact Radiohead recording, but the tone and mood of the song, foreshadowings of the notes. They had found what I found and recorded it. What I heard as a child had nothing to do with ratios and pitch - it was pure aural psyche. A melancholic science fiction embodied as music. Music is a feeling that turns math when you play it or compose it...when we touch things with our fingers (actual or mental), they become as fingers: digital, distant, objects to be controlled.
Beethoven was almost completely deaf while he composed/dreamed the 9th. Mahler wrote/dreamed his later symphonies in a hut by a lake in Austria. No Piano, no reference pitches. He never even "heard physically" his 9th.
Some are amazed by this. I am not.
I would be amazed if they were born deaf though. Once you have heard music it is not too surprising that you could still compose or perform. Remarkable, but not surprising. Even if someone was technically deaf, they still might be able to feel the vibrations and rhythms. I think there is a famously deaf drummer I heard about. But to truly have no way to experience music at all, there would be no point to composing it. As a mathematical curiosity it would be pretty boring - simple repetitions for the most part.
You're probably gonna state that they needed experience hearing in the first place, which leaves me unconvinced as I have read the scores: whatever is being coded there is not "dead information" but entities, portals into dreamworlds.
I agree with portals into dreamworlds, but I see that as psyche, as sense, not as math. What does math care for mood or timbre? If you don't need experience first, then why not compose music-equivalents in a sensory mode that doesn't exist yet?
Note how in festival culture from woodstock to burning man: music functions as portal, a kind of carrier wave, to other loci of being and perception => physical sound strings point towards some dream, mind of the festival goers do the introspective traveling.
No question of that. I don't know that the dirt and blankets have a similar experience though. Seems like a human journey to phenomenological places. Figurative spacetime, not literal. You can't play a song from the 1920s and learn who was vice president by osmosis.
Their use of similar adjectives, hyperbole and superlatives to describe their experience points towards kind of eternal universality of music, when removed enough from "consumer of music", "User of music" through the usual list of consciousness altering practices, substances, and plants.
I think that music gives humans access to a kind of human universality - to point the antenna of the psyche to different places that it wouldn't be able to point on its own perhaps.
Dogs and cats don't seem to care too much about it though.
Craig
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On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 8:39 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, September 20, 2012 1:25:48 PM UTC-4, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:Reflected eternal song(s) dressed in the illusion of time. As far as I can see: proportions, relationships, ratios.
That's what I mean by "a conceptual sculpture of abstraction". It's not real though. Proportion of what? Relations between what?
Pick your ontological primitive and insert it there.
That said, a theory of everything with my stamp of approval has to account for music, as intangible as it is: is it the code, the score, its syntax, the technical levels a musician has to engage in (rhythm, harmony, melody), the physical vibrations produced, nerve cells and neurons, the composer's intention, the listening experience etc. simply because, despite that ambiguity: music is here and guitars are awesome dream machines.
This ambiguity, that music appears only partially in all these different ways, makes a piece of music materially intangible. A piece of music is not reducible to the page of notes, nor to its interpretation by one musician live, nor the recording etc. It does not exist materially. If you play me a Mozart piece on Piano, I might not agree with articulation or some parameter: for you this would be music and you'd point to the physical waves of sound in the room and the corresponding score; and I'd say: "nope." Even concert professionals see their best work as "approximations" of a piece and rarely as "perfect" rendition of the piece.
So despite physical vibrations and neurological correlations, music is as intangible as ever.
When we think of these things we can conceive of them abstractly as-if-they-were-real, but only because we are borrowing the concrete reality of our own neurology to do that.
How is this room I'm typing in not "some mental abstraction or conception"? Neurologists can't explain "aesthetic experience" either.
Just because we can imagine how a song would look as a graphic representation doesn't mean that there is an independently real mathematical spirit which is clothed in different forms. It is the math which is derived through experiences of form, not the other way around. We are informed by experiencing forms, not by composing in silence and then hoping to discover sound.
How are forms not another kind of "mental abstraction"; the sort of which you just denied "real" existence.
Time makes them appear to chat and sing; but in some sense every song has already been sung, even if they've never been voiced or heard.
I almost agree, but I think that in the same sense that every song has already been sung, it has also already been voiced and heard, only not in the 'small now' of ordinary waking human consciousness. When I heard the song Street Spirit for the first time, I immediately knew that it was the song that I had heard in my mind often as a child. Not the exact Radiohead recording, but the tone and mood of the song, foreshadowings of the notes. They had found what I found and recorded it. What I heard as a child had nothing to do with ratios and pitch - it was pure aural psyche. A melancholic science fiction embodied as music. Music is a feeling that turns math when you play it or compose it...when we touch things with our fingers (actual or mental), they become as fingers: digital, distant, objects to be controlled.
Beethoven was almost completely deaf while he composed/dreamed the 9th. Mahler wrote/dreamed his later symphonies in a hut by a lake in Austria. No Piano, no reference pitches. He never even "heard physically" his 9th.
Some are amazed by this. I am not.
I would be amazed if they were born deaf though. Once you have heard music it is not too surprising that you could still compose or perform. Remarkable, but not surprising. Even if someone was technically deaf, they still might be able to feel the vibrations and rhythms. I think there is a famously deaf drummer I heard about. But to truly have no way to experience music at all, there would be no point to composing it. As a mathematical curiosity it would be pretty boring - simple repetitions for the most part.
Music's major appearance last century as "mass-product", as Adorno has pointed out, materializes it into something taken for granted and boring anyway. To most, music doesn't change much and they stick with a set of favorites from their twenties onwards.
Sex is a series of repetitive moves. You can do these boringly and crudely or not.
Music has only to satisfy those aesthetic criteria, that everybody involved can identify with.
Also, I don't think having impaired hearing inherently bars people from learning to interact meaningfully with music. Google "hearing impairments education".
But I guess that won't satisfy you: you want somebody completely deaf, for their whole life to compose.
Besides this being perhaps cruel to some people with profound hearing impairments, I will say this: if the problem set of formal music theory and its genealogy is made explicit to them with enough clarity, then I bet their internal "semantic imaging/thought/voice", for lack of a better term, will eventually be able to pick, through pattern recognition and refinement: the more appropriate line, voicing, and or chord; even if you have to work pedagogically with just trial and error: writing a fugue is also like crossword puzzle. It's not all that ethereal: stringing events convincingly in code. If they like puzzles and stringing code, it might be great, but I don't know explicitly of any scientific work done in this direction.
You're probably gonna state that they needed experience hearing in the first place, which leaves me unconvinced as I have read the scores: whatever is being coded there is not "dead information" but entities, portals into dreamworlds.
I agree with portals into dreamworlds, but I see that as psyche, as sense, not as math. What does math care for mood or timbre? If you don't need experience first, then why not compose music-equivalents in a sensory mode that doesn't exist yet?
The timbre of most recorded instruments today is brought totally into the digital domain; even if this is avoided until CDs are produced. As for Vinyl, I wish people lots of joy with their hissing analog records.
How can composition take place in an unknown unknown? Throw people a sensory mode, and composing will take place.
Composing is a bit like dreaming with interventions of analytical aspect of mind, to render the dream more universally accessible for others. But we dream constantly; if mind is allowed to run redundantly, with no focus and or functional distractions, it will naturally start to dream up its own worlds.
With certain consciousness altering plants and substances that perturb the mind's routine illusions/dreams, or to a less explicit degree, right between waking and sleeping (you know you're dreaming, the self-referentiality of which usually kills the dream "machine" from just running) the mind dreams redundantly and starts creating one artistic universe after the other. In a few hours people experience more art, poetry, music, dreams than the entire tangible history of mankind.
What implications this has for us, is for every mind to explore.
Note how in festival culture from woodstock to burning man: music functions as portal, a kind of carrier wave, to other loci of being and perception => physical sound strings point towards some dream, mind of the festival goers do the introspective traveling.
No question of that. I don't know that the dirt and blankets have a similar experience though. Seems like a human journey to phenomenological places. Figurative spacetime, not literal. You can't play a song from the 1920s and learn who was vice president by osmosis.
Yes you can,
I guess if you don't annoy anybody: speech is a stringed succession of small mouth noises, pitch, articulation and rhythm... People play music with their mouths all day. I just keep wondering why so many don't take the opportunity to make this more beautiful. We're here. Stuck. So why not a more musical global discourse, while we are? A bit more Mozart and reggae in global politics and law, anyone?
Their use of similar adjectives, hyperbole and superlatives to describe their experience points towards kind of eternal universality of music, when removed enough from "consumer of music", "User of music" through the usual list of consciousness altering practices, substances, and plants.
I think that music gives humans access to a kind of human universality - to point the antenna of the psyche to different places that it wouldn't be able to point on its own perhaps.
I'd buy that, no probs.
Dogs and cats don't seem to care too much about it though.
Craig
Yeah, I only know of one cat that responds to it at times. But our dog just chills out whenever I play. Doesn't matter if guitar or piano... he just lays there and forgets to nag for walks, treats or to want to go outside on his barking routine, annoying the neighbors (not music anymore sadly). He does not give a damn about speakers however, even if I play him the same songs I play, played by concert pianist in pristine studio conditions through reference quality studio monitors... Perhaps my dog argues in favor of physical universe. Then again, he might just have aesthetic preference for my strings of code.
Mark
On Friday, September 21, 2012 8:47:15 AM UTC-4, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 8:39 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thursday, September 20, 2012 1:25:48 PM UTC-4, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:Reflected eternal song(s) dressed in the illusion of time. As far as I can see: proportions, relationships, ratios.
That's what I mean by "a conceptual sculpture of abstraction". It's not real though. Proportion of what? Relations between what?
Pick your ontological primitive and insert it there.
Nothing would work except the ontological primitive that I use (sense).
That said, a theory of everything with my stamp of approval has to account for music, as intangible as it is: is it the code, the score, its syntax, the technical levels a musician has to engage in (rhythm, harmony, melody), the physical vibrations produced, nerve cells and neurons, the composer's intention, the listening experience etc. simply because, despite that ambiguity: music is here and guitars are awesome dream machines.
This ambiguity, that music appears only partially in all these different ways, makes a piece of music materially intangible. A piece of music is not reducible to the page of notes, nor to its interpretation by one musician live, nor the recording etc. It does not exist materially. If you play me a Mozart piece on Piano, I might not agree with articulation or some parameter: for you this would be music and you'd point to the physical waves of sound in the room and the corresponding score; and I'd say: "nope." Even concert professionals see their best work as "approximations" of a piece and rarely as "perfect" rendition of the piece.
So despite physical vibrations and neurological correlations, music is as intangible as ever.
I don't think of experiences as intangible, I just think of them as privately tangible as experiences through time rather than publicly tangible as objects across space. What makes it seem intangible is if we use public realism criteria against private phenomenology.
When we think of these things we can conceive of them abstractly as-if-they-were-real, but only because we are borrowing the concrete reality of our own neurology to do that.
How is this room I'm typing in not "some mental abstraction or conception"? Neurologists can't explain "aesthetic experience" either.
Because the room is publicly accessible, not just to yourself but guests, dogs, termites, etc. The idea of an Ur-music which is independent of all forms of experiencing the music is a purely idealistic notion - which is a concretely real experience too, but as a cognitive artifact rather than a referent in public reality or private qualia.
Just because we can imagine how a song would look as a graphic representation doesn't mean that there is an independently real mathematical spirit which is clothed in different forms. It is the math which is derived through experiences of form, not the other way around. We are informed by experiencing forms, not by composing in silence and then hoping to discover sound.
How are forms not another kind of "mental abstraction"; the sort of which you just denied "real" existence.
Forms are another kind of abstraction but not mental. They are qualia of whatever sense modality we are being informed through - visual/tactile, acoustic, etc.
Time makes them appear to chat and sing; but in some sense every song has already been sung, even if they've never been voiced or heard.
I almost agree, but I think that in the same sense that every song has already been sung, it has also already been voiced and heard, only not in the 'small now' of ordinary waking human consciousness. When I heard the song Street Spirit for the first time, I immediately knew that it was the song that I had heard in my mind often as a child. Not the exact Radiohead recording, but the tone and mood of the song, foreshadowings of the notes. They had found what I found and recorded it. What I heard as a child had nothing to do with ratios and pitch - it was pure aural psyche. A melancholic science fiction embodied as music. Music is a feeling that turns math when you play it or compose it...when we touch things with our fingers (actual or mental), they become as fingers: digital, distant, objects to be controlled.
Beethoven was almost completely deaf while he composed/dreamed the 9th. Mahler wrote/dreamed his later symphonies in a hut by a lake in Austria. No Piano, no reference pitches. He never even "heard physically" his 9th.
Some are amazed by this. I am not.
I would be amazed if they were born deaf though. Once you have heard music it is not too surprising that you could still compose or perform. Remarkable, but not surprising. Even if someone was technically deaf, they still might be able to feel the vibrations and rhythms. I think there is a famously deaf drummer I heard about. But to truly have no way to experience music at all, there would be no point to composing it. As a mathematical curiosity it would be pretty boring - simple repetitions for the most part.
Music's major appearance last century as "mass-product", as Adorno has pointed out, materializes it into something taken for granted and boring anyway. To most, music doesn't change much and they stick with a set of favorites from their twenties onwards.
Sex is a series of repetitive moves. You can do these boringly and crudely or not.
Music has only to satisfy those aesthetic criteria, that everybody involved can identify with.
Also, I don't think having impaired hearing inherently bars people from learning to interact meaningfully with music. Google "hearing impairments education".
But I guess that won't satisfy you: you want somebody completely deaf, for their whole life to compose.
Well yeah, that would be the only way to test the principle I am talking about. If there were no sound, what would be the appeal of music-theoretical structures in and of themselves?
Besides this being perhaps cruel to some people with profound hearing impairments, I will say this: if the problem set of formal music theory and its genealogy is made explicit to them with enough clarity, then I bet their internal "semantic imaging/thought/voice", for lack of a better term, will eventually be able to pick, through pattern recognition and refinement: the more appropriate line, voicing, and or chord; even if you have to work pedagogically with just trial and error: writing a fugue is also like crossword puzzle. It's not all that ethereal: stringing events convincingly in code. If they like puzzles and stringing code, it might be great, but I don't know explicitly of any scientific work done in this direction.
Sure they might be able to compose great music - even masterpieces from pure theory, but I am asking what the point would be from their perspective. Other than the socio-economic appeal of producing something valuable, what would make someone map out a logical function and then repeat it three times as a 'chorus'? Why would that be interesting if you didn't have an accompanying emotional-somatic-audio experience which makes that repetition groovy?
You're probably gonna state that they needed experience hearing in the first place, which leaves me unconvinced as I have read the scores: whatever is being coded there is not "dead information" but entities, portals into dreamworlds.
I agree with portals into dreamworlds, but I see that as psyche, as sense, not as math. What does math care for mood or timbre? If you don't need experience first, then why not compose music-equivalents in a sensory mode that doesn't exist yet?
The timbre of most recorded instruments today is brought totally into the digital domain; even if this is avoided until CDs are produced. As for Vinyl, I wish people lots of joy with their hissing analog records.
How can composition take place in an unknown unknown? Throw people a sensory mode, and composing will take place.
Not really though. Very few people compose music purely for it's visual appeal when played on a graphic equalizer. It's the sound that makes music special. Music exploits sensual qualities of sound to evoke rich transpersonal qualia. You can get something like that with visual art, but looking at visual maps of music just isn't as interesting as hearing it. All forms are not equally commutable in every sensory mode. I think that music derives from the exquisite nature of sound in the human experience, not from the mathematical relations which inform it.
Composing is a bit like dreaming with interventions of analytical aspect of mind, to render the dream more universally accessible for others. But we dream constantly; if mind is allowed to run redundantly, with no focus and or functional distractions, it will naturally start to dream up its own worlds.
With certain consciousness altering plants and substances that perturb the mind's routine illusions/dreams, or to a less explicit degree, right between waking and sleeping (you know you're dreaming, the self-referentiality of which usually kills the dream "machine" from just running) the mind dreams redundantly and starts creating one artistic universe after the other. In a few hours people experience more art, poetry, music, dreams than the entire tangible history of mankind.
What implications this has for us, is for every mind to explore.
Note how in festival culture from woodstock to burning man: music functions as portal, a kind of carrier wave, to other loci of being and perception => physical sound strings point towards some dream, mind of the festival goers do the introspective traveling.
No question of that. I don't know that the dirt and blankets have a similar experience though. Seems like a human journey to phenomenological places. Figurative spacetime, not literal. You can't play a song from the 1920s and learn who was vice president by osmosis.
Yes you can,
How so? You are saying that I can learn specific factual knowledge about the real world of the 1920s by listening to a recording of any random song from that time? Like an oracle?
I guess if you don't annoy anybody: speech is a stringed succession of small mouth noises, pitch, articulation and rhythm... People play music with their mouths all day. I just keep wondering why so many don't take the opportunity to make this more beautiful. We're here. Stuck. So why not a more musical global discourse, while we are? A bit more Mozart and reggae in global politics and law, anyone?
Their use of similar adjectives, hyperbole and superlatives to describe their experience points towards kind of eternal universality of music, when removed enough from "consumer of music", "User of music" through the usual list of consciousness altering practices, substances, and plants.
I think that music gives humans access to a kind of human universality - to point the antenna of the psyche to different places that it wouldn't be able to point on its own perhaps.
I'd buy that, no probs.
Dogs and cats don't seem to care too much about it though.
Craig
Yeah, I only know of one cat that responds to it at times. But our dog just chills out whenever I play. Doesn't matter if guitar or piano... he just lays there and forgets to nag for walks, treats or to want to go outside on his barking routine, annoying the neighbors (not music anymore sadly). He does not give a damn about speakers however, even if I play him the same songs I play, played by concert pianist in pristine studio conditions through reference quality studio monitors... Perhaps my dog argues in favor of physical universe. Then again, he might just have aesthetic preference for my strings of code.
That's very interesting to me though, because it suggests what I take as axiomatic in my model, which is that the map is not the territory.
Just because what comes out of the speakers seems similar to a live performance a song to us humans does not mean that it means the same thing or anything to other organisms, or even people of different cultures. This is why it is so easy to confuse the possibility of artificial intelligence with artificial sentience. We think that if it answers verbal questions in a way that seems familiar to us that it means they are as good as human, when in fact they are a plastic and silicon apparatus.
Craig
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Nothing would work except the ontological primitive that I use (sense).
Glad that works for you. Linguistically I am flexible with primitives, and I'm not overly hungry for consistency either, as language is so semantically imprecise and notoriously slippery: on some days maybe numbers,
on other days the opposite sex,
on other days strings do fine, as I love guitar.
Maybe all at once and when I play, at times I think its all nuts anyway: there are more precise languages, such as music, that limit my squirrely linguistic operations and can aim more efficiently towards joy. These linguistic squirrel operations can be really ornate and rich but in my case are mostly circular and don't lead to better composition/playing.
That said, a theory of everything with my stamp of approval has to account for music, as intangible as it is: is it the code, the score, its syntax, the technical levels a musician has to engage in (rhythm, harmony, melody), the physical vibrations produced, nerve cells and neurons, the composer's intention, the listening experience etc. simply because, despite that ambiguity: music is here and guitars are awesome dream machines.
This ambiguity, that music appears only partially in all these different ways, makes a piece of music materially intangible. A piece of music is not reducible to the page of notes, nor to its interpretation by one musician live, nor the recording etc. It does not exist materially. If you play me a Mozart piece on Piano, I might not agree with articulation or some parameter: for you this would be music and you'd point to the physical waves of sound in the room and the corresponding score; and I'd say: "nope." Even concert professionals see their best work as "approximations" of a piece and rarely as "perfect" rendition of the piece.
So despite physical vibrations and neurological correlations, music is as intangible as ever.
I don't think of experiences as intangible, I just think of them as privately tangible as experiences through time rather than publicly tangible as objects across space. What makes it seem intangible is if we use public realism criteria against private phenomenology.
That's not the question, it was: what is music?
Music does not equal its experience alone. Reflections of it can be experienced on a sensory level, sure, I'll give you that. But as I already asked: is it the code, the score, its syntax, the technical levels a musician has to engage in (rhythm, harmony, melody), the physical vibrations produced, nerve cells and neurons, the composer's intention, the listening experience, the infinite approximation of the performer that will always find ways to render a piece more precicely etc.?
Your calibration of sense does not address this ambiguity, nor does it clarify it.
When we think of these things we can conceive of them abstractly as-if-they-were-real, but only because we are borrowing the concrete reality of our own neurology to do that.
How is this room I'm typing in not "some mental abstraction or conception"? Neurologists can't explain "aesthetic experience" either.
Because the room is publicly accessible, not just to yourself but guests, dogs, termites, etc. The idea of an Ur-music which is independent of all forms of experiencing the music is a purely idealistic notion - which is a concretely real experience too, but as a cognitive artifact rather than a referent in public reality or private qualia.
As I said, I am ontologically promiscuous. I do prefer Ur-music to termites on most days, however. I don't let the latter into the room.
Just because we can imagine how a song would look as a graphic representation doesn't mean that there is an independently real mathematical spirit which is clothed in different forms. It is the math which is derived through experiences of form, not the other way around. We are informed by experiencing forms, not by composing in silence and then hoping to discover sound.
How are forms not another kind of "mental abstraction"; the sort of which you just denied "real" existence.
Forms are another kind of abstraction but not mental. They are qualia of whatever sense modality we are being informed through - visual/tactile, acoustic, etc.
Now you make qualia into abstraction.
This I don't understand as eating an apple does not equal somebody's thinking operation "quale of apple eating": there would be no famine on this planet if people could conjure up food by imagining its experience. This would be great: I am hungry for anchovy pizza and it appears before me.
Time makes them appear to chat and sing; but in some sense every song has already been sung, even if they've never been voiced or heard.
I almost agree, but I think that in the same sense that every song has already been sung, it has also already been voiced and heard, only not in the 'small now' of ordinary waking human consciousness. When I heard the song Street Spirit for the first time, I immediately knew that it was the song that I had heard in my mind often as a child. Not the exact Radiohead recording, but the tone and mood of the song, foreshadowings of the notes. They had found what I found and recorded it. What I heard as a child had nothing to do with ratios and pitch - it was pure aural psyche. A melancholic science fiction embodied as music. Music is a feeling that turns math when you play it or compose it...when we touch things with our fingers (actual or mental), they become as fingers: digital, distant, objects to be controlled.
Beethoven was almost completely deaf while he composed/dreamed the 9th. Mahler wrote/dreamed his later symphonies in a hut by a lake in Austria. No Piano, no reference pitches. He never even "heard physically" his 9th.
Some are amazed by this. I am not.
I would be amazed if they were born deaf though. Once you have heard music it is not too surprising that you could still compose or perform. Remarkable, but not surprising. Even if someone was technically deaf, they still might be able to feel the vibrations and rhythms. I think there is a famously deaf drummer I heard about. But to truly have no way to experience music at all, there would be no point to composing it. As a mathematical curiosity it would be pretty boring - simple repetitions for the most part.
Music's major appearance last century as "mass-product", as Adorno has pointed out, materializes it into something taken for granted and boring anyway. To most, music doesn't change much and they stick with a set of favorites from their twenties onwards.
Sex is a series of repetitive moves. You can do these boringly and crudely or not.
Music has only to satisfy those aesthetic criteria, that everybody involved can identify with.
Also, I don't think having impaired hearing inherently bars people from learning to interact meaningfully with music. Google "hearing impairments education".
But I guess that won't satisfy you: you want somebody completely deaf, for their whole life to compose.
Well yeah, that would be the only way to test the principle I am talking about. If there were no sound, what would be the appeal of music-theoretical structures in and of themselves?
Besides this being perhaps cruel to some people with profound hearing impairments, I will say this: if the problem set of formal music theory and its genealogy is made explicit to them with enough clarity, then I bet their internal "semantic imaging/thought/voice", for lack of a better term, will eventually be able to pick, through pattern recognition and refinement: the more appropriate line, voicing, and or chord; even if you have to work pedagogically with just trial and error: writing a fugue is also like crossword puzzle. It's not all that ethereal: stringing events convincingly in code. If they like puzzles and stringing code, it might be great, but I don't know explicitly of any scientific work done in this direction.
Sure they might be able to compose great music - even masterpieces from pure theory, but I am asking what the point would be from their perspective. Other than the socio-economic appeal of producing something valuable, what would make someone map out a logical function and then repeat it three times as a 'chorus'? Why would that be interesting if you didn't have an accompanying emotional-somatic-audio experience which makes that repetition groovy?
Groovy for whom?
Why is the deaf man's groove inherently poorer than what hearing people consider groovy, which varies considerably on its own btw?
Groovy patterns are number relations.
If our hypothetically deaf composer had been presented with the genealogy of say mambo, late 70s funk, 90s hip-hop, dubstep grooves through another sensory channel, then she/he would be able to distinguish between groovy and not.
But I don't need this line of argument since you already divorced rhythm from music by negating the "deaf drummer feeling vibrations" phenomenon that you brought up. That's clearly contradiction.
You're probably gonna state that they needed experience hearing in the first place, which leaves me unconvinced as I have read the scores: whatever is being coded there is not "dead information" but entities, portals into dreamworlds.
I agree with portals into dreamworlds, but I see that as psyche, as sense, not as math. What does math care for mood or timbre? If you don't need experience first, then why not compose music-equivalents in a sensory mode that doesn't exist yet?
The timbre of most recorded instruments today is brought totally into the digital domain; even if this is avoided until CDs are produced. As for Vinyl, I wish people lots of joy with their hissing analog records.
How can composition take place in an unknown unknown? Throw people a sensory mode, and composing will take place.
Not really though. Very few people compose music purely for it's visual appeal when played on a graphic equalizer. It's the sound that makes music special. Music exploits sensual qualities of sound to evoke rich transpersonal qualia. You can get something like that with visual art, but looking at visual maps of music just isn't as interesting as hearing it. All forms are not equally commutable in every sensory mode. I think that music derives from the exquisite nature of sound in the human experience, not from the mathematical relations which inform it.
I question this separation between visual and auditory, having worked with sound and video: If I had to make advertisement video for eating apples, I would code the audio channel to the same number relations as the video/visual channel: like roundness, red, vital, crunchy, up beat, bright, lightness etc.
Also, if you tell say a club to not sync their light machines to the music... Visual pulses reflect rhythm and all manner of musical nuance can find a visual counterpart. Music videos are still produced as effective marketing tools and films without music are rare and make some inverted statement of: absence of music raises/lowers some other effect parameter.
Composing is a bit like dreaming with interventions of analytical aspect of mind, to render the dream more universally accessible for others. But we dream constantly; if mind is allowed to run redundantly, with no focus and or functional distractions, it will naturally start to dream up its own worlds.
With certain consciousness altering plants and substances that perturb the mind's routine illusions/dreams, or to a less explicit degree, right between waking and sleeping (you know you're dreaming, the self-referentiality of which usually kills the dream "machine" from just running) the mind dreams redundantly and starts creating one artistic universe after the other. In a few hours people experience more art, poetry, music, dreams than the entire tangible history of mankind.
What implications this has for us, is for every mind to explore.
Note how in festival culture from woodstock to burning man: music functions as portal, a kind of carrier wave, to other loci of being and perception => physical sound strings point towards some dream, mind of the festival goers do the introspective traveling.
No question of that. I don't know that the dirt and blankets have a similar experience though. Seems like a human journey to phenomenological places. Figurative spacetime, not literal. You can't play a song from the 1920s and learn who was vice president by osmosis.
Yes you can,
How so? You are saying that I can learn specific factual knowledge about the real world of the 1920s by listening to a recording of any random song from that time? Like an oracle?
As I stated: speech is a stringed succession of small mouth noises, pitch, articulation and rhythm...
I guess if you don't annoy anybody: speech is a stringed succession of small mouth noises, pitch, articulation and rhythm... People play music with their mouths all day. I just keep wondering why so many don't take the opportunity to make this more beautiful. We're here. Stuck. So why not a more musical global discourse, while we are? A bit more Mozart and reggae in global politics and law, anyone?
Their use of similar adjectives, hyperbole and superlatives to describe their experience points towards kind of eternal universality of music, when removed enough from "consumer of music", "User of music" through the usual list of consciousness altering practices, substances, and plants.
I think that music gives humans access to a kind of human universality - to point the antenna of the psyche to different places that it wouldn't be able to point on its own perhaps.
I'd buy that, no probs.
Dogs and cats don't seem to care too much about it though.
Craig
Yeah, I only know of one cat that responds to it at times. But our dog just chills out whenever I play. Doesn't matter if guitar or piano... he just lays there and forgets to nag for walks, treats or to want to go outside on his barking routine, annoying the neighbors (not music anymore sadly). He does not give a damn about speakers however, even if I play him the same songs I play, played by concert pianist in pristine studio conditions through reference quality studio monitors... Perhaps my dog argues in favor of physical universe. Then again, he might just have aesthetic preference for my strings of code.
That's very interesting to me though, because it suggests what I take as axiomatic in my model, which is that the map is not the territory.
I need maps, otherwise my herd would get lost. Seriously insincere, though: "map is not territory" ignores problem of orientation, however wrong the map may be. If I run out of gas, and ask for the location of the next gas station, refusing any directions as mental abstractions and insisting on somebody providing me with proper "quale for territory" because "a map is not the territory"... I wouldn't get very far.
Just because what comes out of the speakers seems similar to a live performance a song to us humans does not mean that it means the same thing or anything to other organisms, or even people of different cultures. This is why it is so easy to confuse the possibility of artificial intelligence with artificial sentience. We think that if it answers verbal questions in a way that seems familiar to us that it means they are as good as human, when in fact they are a plastic and silicon apparatus.
Craig
But you said that your primitive was sense. Why does silicon not sense you back?
I don't know how we can rule this out, if we assume your notion of sense primitive. Sometimes I sense you emphasizing strongly neuronal activity and at other times you sound closer to Kant transcendentalism ("exquisite nature of human experience", "groove" etc.), with its marked idealistic streak. Would you perhaps clarify how you reconcile? Highly virtuosic linguistically, no doubt. A bit Bergson like imho, who I find fascinating, even if I currently don't bet on materialism part.
Even ancient Greeks believed in creative muse/spirits whispering them word and song... if sense holds, how do you make plausible that we experience introspection or introspective listening/dreaming as non-local, foreign?
Mahler remarking of his fifth or sixth symphony while conducting it: "It feels as though 'I' didn't write this music; as though I'm merely a scribe conducting someone else's music." How does sense account for the non-locality of introspection and dreaming, alluded to here?
If these are Mahler's neurons performing the operations primitively as sense, why does he, and many composers share this, feel a "foreign sense informing them" or why do the Greeks feel "muses speaking to them", spirit talk heard by indigenous people, and why is this so pervasive if its always "our neurons" firing?
And if this is a mere hallucination produced by neuronal activity, why is it so fruitful in art, science, music etc. since the antique; and not more random without results like books and symphonies etc.?
On Saturday, September 22, 2012 8:01:14 AM UTC-4, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
Nothing would work except the ontological primitive that I use (sense).
Glad that works for you. Linguistically I am flexible with primitives, and I'm not overly hungry for consistency either, as language is so semantically imprecise and notoriously slippery: on some days maybe numbers,
numbers = cognitive sense-making
Because he is looking as meaningless numerical coordinates rather than a multi-sensory experience that uses physical-acoustic level qualia to drive emotional-biochemical, mental-neurological, and social-zoological layer qualia, not just a single channel of mental symbolic sense.
Groovy patterns are number relations.
No, they aren't. Number patterns are pure abstraction. You are taking visual or audio representation completely for granted. If you want number relations, open an mp3 file in a text editor and you'll see how groovy and interesting they are.
If our hypothetically deaf composer had been presented with the genealogy of say mambo, late 70s funk, 90s hip-hop, dubstep grooves through another sensory channel, then she/he would be able to distinguish between groovy and not.
Not at all. It's like saying that by comparing phone books from different cities you could distinguish how exciting of a city it must be.
But I don't need this line of argument since you already divorced rhythm from music by negating the "deaf drummer feeling vibrations" phenomenon that you brought up. That's clearly contradiction.
Deaf drummers can still feel acoustic experiences. I am talking about deaf = no sensory access to music, only music theoretical analysis through mathematics.
That's not what I'm talking about at all. Coordinating images with sound is not the same thing as looking at sound as an image. Nobody makes music so that they can turn off the sound and look at it as a visual graph.
Also, if you tell say a club to not sync their light machines to the music... Visual pulses reflect rhythm and all manner of musical nuance can find a visual counterpart. Music videos are still produced as effective marketing tools and films without music are rare and make some inverted statement of: absence of music raises/lowers some other effect parameter.
Again, not what I'm talking about. Music can be used to complement a film, and film can be used to complement music, sure, but a silent film of music is nothing.
No question of that. I don't know that the dirt and blankets have a similar experience though. Seems like a human journey to phenomenological places. Figurative spacetime, not literal. You can't play a song from the 1920s and learn who was vice president by osmosis.
Yes you can,
How so? You are saying that I can learn specific factual knowledge about the real world of the 1920s by listening to a recording of any random song from that time? Like an oracle?
As I stated: speech is a stringed succession of small mouth noises, pitch, articulation and rhythm...
What does that have to do with time travel or omniscience? I guess you aren't understanding what I'm saying at all.
Sense runs the gamut. It is the alpha and omega - the universal abstraction and intimately personal concrete, and everything in between. They all make sense in different senses.
Even ancient Greeks believed in creative muse/spirits whispering them word and song... if sense holds, how do you make plausible that we experience introspection or introspective listening/dreaming as non-local, foreign?
Just as the physical-acoustic layer is used to drive chemical-emotional layers, all of the sub-personal layers drive the personal layers of sense, which opens us up to super-personal layers as well. A larger scope of 'here and now'.
Mahler remarking of his fifth or sixth symphony while conducting it: "It feels as though 'I' didn't write this music; as though I'm merely a scribe conducting someone else's music." How does sense account for the non-locality of introspection and dreaming, alluded to here?
Accessing the super-personal bands of sense.
If these are Mahler's neurons performing the operations primitively as sense, why does he, and many composers share this, feel a "foreign sense informing them" or why do the Greeks feel "muses speaking to them", spirit talk heard by indigenous people, and why is this so pervasive if its always "our neurons" firing?
The interior is as vast as the exterior. That's the point of understanding that photons aren't literally real, because it implies that sense is shared between objects from the inside rather than interstitially in the gaps between exterior surfaces. We are not connected to the universe through space and bodies, rather we are disconnected through space and bodies. We reconnect selves through time from the interior, in spite of the many layers of disconnection. It bleeds through. This is what sense does.
And if this is a mere hallucination produced by neuronal activity, why is it so fruitful in art, science, music etc. since the antique; and not more random without results like books and symphonies etc.?
Not a hallucination at all. Neurons are the 'hallucination' if anything, from an absolute perspective. They are a lowest common denominator representation of distant and disconnected impersonal measurements. Being however, that we are in a halfway disconnected state, straddling disconnection in space and connection through time, neurons are just as real as music.
Think of the music as the Sun and neurons as the Moon reflecting the Sun. Because the Moon is only 238,855 miles away and the Sun is 93,000,000 miles away, they are the same apparent size. From the absolute perspective, the Moon is a little fleck of dust which supervenes utterly on the Sun in every way, but from our vantage point, the Moon is in many ways a more 'real' place to us.
Craig
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On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Saturday, September 22, 2012 8:01:14 AM UTC-4, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
Nothing would work except the ontological primitive that I use (sense).
Glad that works for you. Linguistically I am flexible with primitives, and I'm not overly hungry for consistency either, as language is so semantically imprecise and notoriously slippery: on some days maybe numbers,
numbers = cognitive sense-making
So numbers have your sense calibration and meaning.
Then, with our deaf composer, you rob numbers of the cognitive sense-making, you just gave:
Because he is looking as meaningless numerical coordinates rather than a multi-sensory experience that uses physical-acoustic level qualia to drive emotional-biochemical, mental-neurological, and social-zoological layer qualia, not just a single channel of mental symbolic sense.
Groovy patterns are number relations.
No, they aren't. Number patterns are pure abstraction. You are taking visual or audio representation completely for granted. If you want number relations, open an mp3 file in a text editor and you'll see how groovy and interesting they are.
If our hypothetically deaf composer had been presented with the genealogy of say mambo, late 70s funk, 90s hip-hop, dubstep grooves through another sensory channel, then she/he would be able to distinguish between groovy and not.
Not at all. It's like saying that by comparing phone books from different cities you could distinguish how exciting of a city it must be.
Everybody researches travel plans and consults some phone book/script/source of information, be it friends' former experience, surfing the web, and I have definitely looked at restaurant availability and offers before deciding to visit certain cities in phone books pre-web, believe it or not.
Concerning groovy patterns, take any serious approach to groove as Latin percussion, which is extensively documented, and you will find grids for all varieties of samba, bossa, mambo etc. Then join a Latin percussion section and see how well you fare negating the precise placements of say your conga's pattern along the numbered grid. I will bet you one thing: your deliberations of how your conga pattern are "groovy to you" will get you fired. No matter how much sense they make. Now if you master the grid, and then decide to deviate from the math by knowing it intimately: conga career.
But I don't need this line of argument since you already divorced rhythm from music by negating the "deaf drummer feeling vibrations" phenomenon that you brought up. That's clearly contradiction.
Deaf drummers can still feel acoustic experiences. I am talking about deaf = no sensory access to music, only music theoretical analysis through mathematics.
Here it's interesting because now you give back a few cents of the "meaningless numerical coordinates" by use of "only music theoretical analysis"... rendering them no longer meaningless and conceding a lower level in qualia hierarchy. The numbers live again! Albeit with some loss of status...
That's not what I'm talking about at all. Coordinating images with sound is not the same thing as looking at sound as an image. Nobody makes music so that they can turn off the sound and look at it as a visual graph.
I always do this when doing mixing engineer work to compare perceived loudness with digital measurements to work out bias of my system. On every mix. I also record outputs of various "visualizer" programs for different perspectives on what was composed and for use as video accompaniment.
Everybody that works in film knows: music is last step in post production. So editor, cinematographers, directors, and composer all see the video without the music, by nature of workflow, first.
Also, if you tell say a club to not sync their light machines to the music... Visual pulses reflect rhythm and all manner of musical nuance can find a visual counterpart. Music videos are still produced as effective marketing tools and films without music are rare and make some inverted statement of: absence of music raises/lowers some other effect parameter.
Again, not what I'm talking about. Music can be used to complement a film, and film can be used to complement music, sure, but a silent film of music is nothing.
What? You don't remember the whole live piano based, silent movie era?
Total sonic isolation is rare, unless your in a sonically non-reflecting singing booth, which is avoided in most studios today as a bit of reflection is good and doesn't "dull out" the instrument too much, because everybody is used to hearing instrument + room... or you can go isolation tank of sorts: then there is still heartbeat, breathing etc. There is always sound. John Cage's 4:33 min composition is case in point.
No question of that. I don't know that the dirt and blankets have a similar experience though. Seems like a human journey to phenomenological places. Figurative spacetime, not literal. You can't play a song from the 1920s and learn who was vice president by osmosis.
Yes you can,
How so? You are saying that I can learn specific factual knowledge about the real world of the 1920s by listening to a recording of any random song from that time? Like an oracle?
As I stated: speech is a stringed succession of small mouth noises, pitch, articulation and rhythm...
What does that have to do with time travel or omniscience? I guess you aren't understanding what I'm saying at all.
Yes, I am: speech is music in many ways. See Sprechgesang of Arnold Schönberg beginning of 20th century (often rhythmic parameter on scores is labeled "freely, as spoken") and for rhythmic speech as song see Hip-Hop, beat boxing etc.
So I could pick some fact from the 1920s and say it, or rap it, if you want. No time-travel necessary or translation of symphony into language or such complicated things.
The idiom "that's music to my ears" following some message appreciated by the receiver, further illustrates what I mean. Now, people will say they're speaking figuratively, but this slip of our collective tongue is not metaphorical bs. We all know what is meant even though linguistic semantics is powerless.
Sense runs the gamut. It is the alpha and omega - the universal abstraction and intimately personal concrete, and everything in between. They all make sense in different senses.
This is what leads to me failing to understand: semantic overload of sense linguistically tied to word fields of physical senses, sensations, your hierarchically slippery notion abstract sense, plausibility, logic etc. Consider different candidates to state the categories more clearly; this is confusing and could lead some people to believe that you unify and differentiate your terms as you see fit according to local context of discussion. I wouldn't let that happen if I wanted to convince linguistically.
Even ancient Greeks believed in creative muse/spirits whispering them word and song... if sense holds, how do you make plausible that we experience introspection or introspective listening/dreaming as non-local, foreign?
Just as the physical-acoustic layer is used to drive chemical-emotional layers, all of the sub-personal layers drive the personal layers of sense, which opens us up to super-personal layers as well. A larger scope of 'here and now'.
Like a sort of superman layer of qualia, I guess then.
Mahler remarking of his fifth or sixth symphony while conducting it: "It feels as though 'I' didn't write this music; as though I'm merely a scribe conducting someone else's music." How does sense account for the non-locality of introspection and dreaming, alluded to here?
Accessing the super-personal bands of sense.
So Mahler was one superman. I'm ok with that because of personal bias.
If these are Mahler's neurons performing the operations primitively as sense, why does he, and many composers share this, feel a "foreign sense informing them" or why do the Greeks feel "muses speaking to them", spirit talk heard by indigenous people, and why is this so pervasive if its always "our neurons" firing?
The interior is as vast as the exterior. That's the point of understanding that photons aren't literally real, because it implies that sense is shared between objects from the inside rather than interstitially in the gaps between exterior surfaces. We are not connected to the universe through space and bodies, rather we are disconnected through space and bodies. We reconnect selves through time from the interior, in spite of the many layers of disconnection. It bleeds through. This is what sense does.
Dunno. Interior vs exterior distinction vanishes when I burn my hand for example. Hand hurts and inside goes " wtf? Not again..." So one to one correspondence on such phenomenon. Not to mention musical, sexual, plant-induced etc. ecstasy, and just plain old everyday activities exhibit this to perhaps less marked degree.
And if this is a mere hallucination produced by neuronal activity, why is it so fruitful in art, science, music etc. since the antique; and not more random without results like books and symphonies etc.?
Not a hallucination at all. Neurons are the 'hallucination' if anything, from an absolute perspective. They are a lowest common denominator representation of distant and disconnected impersonal measurements. Being however, that we are in a halfway disconnected state, straddling disconnection in space and connection through time, neurons are just as real as music.
It follows that the absolute perspective you give of neurons is not absolute?
Also, neuron as "lowest common denominator" is only a lower quale or meaningless, according to you, because math... and then it becomes "as real as music" suddenly. This may look like flip-flopping whenever convenient to some. Again, you might want to address that.
And how does sense, in your framing, account for humor and nonsense, if everything is reducible to sense on some level?
Think of the music as the Sun and neurons as the Moon reflecting the Sun. Because the Moon is only 238,855 miles away and the Sun is 93,000,000 miles away, they are the same apparent size. From the absolute perspective, the Moon is a little fleck of dust which supervenes utterly on the Sun in every way, but from our vantage point, the Moon is in many ways a more 'real' place to us.
Craig
I guess by now, my position today on that is sufficiently clear. Since I teach music as well, reasoning based on the value of musical experience and sense would be a good marketing strategy for me, as it is for many in this field: "Join our percussion group/choir etc. for new musical experiences". But a few years ago, having studied under proponents of aesthetic experience of music in pedagogical contexts, even taking degree closing exams on precisely this topic, I just found myself learning circular linguistic labyrinths, with all their dead ends by heart, and thus tone this down in my educational practice today, which I frame more as dialogs between fellow learners with different histories, but this is slightly off-topic.
Contrasting with my compositional and digital audio programming and engineering activities, this sort of linguistic reasoning just lacked clarity, was circular, or I'm just too ignorant for it. This constant arguing about terminology, how important the game of an ever more exact and politically/authoritatively nuanced word(s) for something becomes the focus obsessively...
At first it felt like privilege and like I was getting somewhere, but then, compared to composing, audio engineering, increasing performance, improvisation play, techniques of sharing ecstatic modes of trance and joy etc. it got tedious and dull. I asked myself: "Do we even realize how stupid this looks to everyone else, and why they might perhaps be right to think so?"
Don't get me wrong however: I enjoy reading and engaging people's philosophies of experience and sense and appreciate your sharing. For instance, I have no problem reading and engaging Schiller for example, because his aesthetics, albeit with materialist streaks, is joy oriented, with ethical good = beautiful etc.
m