Bruno's Restaurant

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Craig Weinberg

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Sep 16, 2012, 9:29:20 AM9/16/12
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Background: After refusing to serve Bruno's brother in law with the simulated brain at my restaurant, I decide to make peace by inviting myself to go along with Brother in law B1ll to his favorite restaurant.

"It's the best in the city!", says B1ll.

"That sounds great, because I am really hungry.", I reply anxiously.

When we arrive we find a dark, silent building, full of empty seats. B1ll gestures for me to sit which I do and, it suddenly sounds like a restaurant. I hear sizzling and clanking for the kitchen and suddenly a waiter appears, offering me a menu. Just as I notice that the waiter bears a curious resemblance to Bruno, I wonder why he has not given B1ll a menu too.

"I've already ordered", says B1ll.

I look down at the menu, but I see only one item on it. It is called "The thing that you want to order". Wow. This is impressive. I look up and notice that what the waiter's nametag says.

"Ok, Brun-0, you win. I'll have a number not-not-one, with everything on it."

"Coming right up, monsieur. Would you like Löbian salad or Gödelian soup with that? The umlauts are excellent this time of year"

"Sure"

"Voila", Brun-0 exclaims.

Seeing the confusion on my face, he gestures at the menu in my hand with a gracefully circular extension of his fingers, over and over, rotating in space hypnotically, until I realize that he wants me to turn the menu over.

On the back of the menu is a beautiful HD video screen, which pops into life with a movie of someone sitting at...Hey!! It's Me!

It's a movie of me, rendered so perfectly it looks absolutely real. I am being served a giant silver domed platter, which is removed to unveil a beautiful...menu. The camera pans down the gorgeous menu of sumptuous sounding descriptions of food. As the camera zooms into a closeup on the calligraphy, it can be seen that each culinary turn of phrase is constructed of beautifully written formulas and equations like G and Gp where p is delicious and G = emulated gustatory resource and p = Non-regurgitation parameters'.

To my surprise, I now witness myself in the movie pick a fork and knife and begin eating the menu and thoroughly enjoying every bite. I seem to be making the exact yummy sounds and faces that I would expect.

Turning to B1ll, I ask,

"What did you order?"

"I already ate.", he replies.

As I look down at my clean plate and remember the great meal that I just had, I feel unusually satisfied. Curiously I can't remember exactly what it was that I ate, but I no reason to care. I can't care. I believe that I must have eaten exactly what I wanted.

Craig


Stephen P. King

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Sep 16, 2012, 12:32:51 PM9/16/12
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On 9/16/2012 9:29 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
> Background: After refusing to serve Bruno's brother in law with the
> simulated brain at my restaurant, I decide to make peace by inviting
> myself to go along with Brother in law B1ll to his favorite restaurant.
>
> "It's the best in the city!", says B1ll.
>
> "That sounds great, because I am really hungry.", I reply anxiously.
>
> When we arrive we find a dark, silent building, full of empty seats.
> B1ll gestures for me to sit which I do and, it suddenly sounds like a
> restaurant. I hear sizzling and clanking for the kitchen and suddenly
> a waiter appears, offering me a menu. Just as I notice that the waiter
> bears a curious resemblance to Bruno, I wonder why he has not given
> B1ll a menu too.
>
> "I've already ordered", says B1ll.
>
> I look down at the menu, but I see only one item on it. It is called
> "The thing that you want to order". Wow. This is impressive. I look up
> and notice that what the waiter's nametag says.
>
> "Ok, Brun-0, you win. I'll have a number not-not-one, with everything
> on it."
>
> "Coming right up, monsieur. Would you like L�bian salad or G�delian
Check out the Matrix version of this story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7BuQFUhsRM

--
Onward!

Stephen

http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html


Terren Suydam

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Sep 17, 2012, 1:20:05 PM9/17/12
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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

On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 12:32 PM, Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:
> On 9/16/2012 9:29 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>>
>> Background: After refusing to serve Bruno's brother in law with the
>> simulated brain at my restaurant, I decide to make peace by inviting myself
>> to go along with Brother in law B1ll to his favorite restaurant.
>>
>> "It's the best in the city!", says B1ll.
>>
>> "That sounds great, because I am really hungry.", I reply anxiously.
>>
>> When we arrive we find a dark, silent building, full of empty seats. B1ll
>> gestures for me to sit which I do and, it suddenly sounds like a restaurant.
>> I hear sizzling and clanking for the kitchen and suddenly a waiter appears,
>> offering me a menu. Just as I notice that the waiter bears a curious
>> resemblance to Bruno, I wonder why he has not given B1ll a menu too.
>>
>> "I've already ordered", says B1ll.
>>
>> I look down at the menu, but I see only one item on it. It is called "The
>> thing that you want to order". Wow. This is impressive. I look up and notice
>> that what the waiter's nametag says.
>>
>> "Ok, Brun-0, you win. I'll have a number not-not-one, with everything on
>> it."
>>
>> "Coming right up, monsieur. Would you like Löbian salad or Gödelian soup
> --
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Craig Weinberg

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Sep 17, 2012, 3:09:29 PM9/17/12
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On Monday, September 17, 2012 1:20:10 PM UTC-4, 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,

There is no simulated Craig. There is only an animated menu being interpreted by Craig as a simulation of himself. I'm demonstrating that the idea of there even being a zombie is superfluous. The map is not the territory. There is no such thing in a concrete and absolute sense as a map. The map is a subjective interpretation of interacting territories. A map is only a piece of paper with ink unless you assume a map reader. (It's not even that of course, since paper and ink are only concretely real to other large assemblies of molecules).
 
and has no actual experience or inner narrative. He is
entitled of course to that position. He is just saying no to the
doctor.

These words have no actual experience or inner narrative. If a doctor wanted me to replace my brain with these words, yes I would say no.

Craig
 

Stephen P. King

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Sep 17, 2012, 4:26:49 PM9/17/12
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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". There has to be a "grundlagen" level at
which there is not a "simulation", there has to be a "real thing" that
the simulations are some deformed copy of. I have postulated, following
an idea from Stephen Woolfram, that a physical system (in its evolution)
in the "real word" *is* the best possible "simulation" and thus it is
literally the "real thing" that all images that we might have of it in
our minds are mere simulations.
Craig is diving deep into this idea and looking at it "from the
inside" and reporting to us his observations.
>
> On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 12:32 PM, Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:
>> On 9/16/2012 9:29 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
>>> Background: After refusing to serve Bruno's brother in law with the
>>> simulated brain at my restaurant, I decide to make peace by inviting myself
>>> to go along with Brother in law B1ll to his favorite restaurant.
>>>
>>> "It's the best in the city!", says B1ll.
>>>
>>> "That sounds great, because I am really hungry.", I reply anxiously.
>>>
>>> When we arrive we find a dark, silent building, full of empty seats. B1ll
>>> gestures for me to sit which I do and, it suddenly sounds like a restaurant.
>>> I hear sizzling and clanking for the kitchen and suddenly a waiter appears,
>>> offering me a menu. Just as I notice that the waiter bears a curious
>>> resemblance to Bruno, I wonder why he has not given B1ll a menu too.
>>>
>>> "I've already ordered", says B1ll.
>>>
>>> I look down at the menu, but I see only one item on it. It is called "The
>>> thing that you want to order". Wow. This is impressive. I look up and notice
>>> that what the waiter's nametag says.
>>>
>>> "Ok, Brun-0, you win. I'll have a number not-not-one, with everything on
>>> it."
>>>
>>> "Coming right up, monsieur. Would you like L�bian salad or G�delian soup

Terren Suydam

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Sep 17, 2012, 5:41:12 PM9/17/12
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On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 4:26 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". There has to be a "grundlagen" level at which there is not
> a "simulation", there has to be a "real thing" that the simulations are some
> deformed copy of. I have postulated, following an idea from Stephen
> Woolfram, that a physical system (in its evolution) in the "real word" *is*
> the best possible "simulation" and thus it is literally the "real thing"
> that all images that we might have of it in our minds are mere simulations.
> Craig is diving deep into this idea and looking at it "from the inside"
> and reporting to us his observations.

Craig is just asserting that comp is false. The Matrix video only
makes sense if you assume comp. The fact that you called that video
the "matrix version of Craig's story" was confusing to me because the
two rest on different assumptions. The movie shows us the character
eating and enjoying the simulated steak. In Craig's story he has no
experience of it.

If you assume comp then there is no "primary real" version of anything
(by the movie graph argument). Real is only phenomenological, like a
dream. You can never know, not even in principle, whether you are the
"real" version, it doesn't even make sense to ask the question. Below
the substitution level, there are an infinite ocean of universal
machines that instantiate your current state.

Terren

Jason Resch

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Sep 17, 2012, 5:42:23 PM9/17/12
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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.

Jason
>>>> "Coming right up, monsieur. Would you like Löbian salad or Göd

Stephen P. King

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Sep 17, 2012, 6:37:37 PM9/17/12
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Hi Terren,

"Comp is false" is too strong. He is explaining how comp is
"incomplete". The movie graph argument is flawed.

Craig Weinberg

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Sep 17, 2012, 7:07:27 PM9/17/12
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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.

Craig
 

Craig Weinberg

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Sep 17, 2012, 7:10:46 PM9/17/12
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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

Terren Suydam

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Sep 18, 2012, 12:25:30 AM9/18/12
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On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 6:37 PM, Stephen P. King <step...@charter.net> wrote:
> Hi Terren,
>
> "Comp is false" is too strong. He is explaining how comp is
> "incomplete". The movie graph argument is flawed.

I'm not sure what that means, that comp is incomplete. You either
start from the assumption that your consciousness can be faithfully
preserved (or duplicated) by a brain transplant, or you don't. What am
I missing?

I admit I haven't followed all of the list postings lately, but I
haven't seen a coherent explanation of why the movie graph argument is
flawed... if I missed it, can you point me to where this was
articulated?

T

Terren Suydam

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Sep 18, 2012, 12:37:51 AM9/18/12
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I don't think there is much in the way of "common sense" if you want
an explanation of consciousness from comp. I think it is fairly
non-intuitive. The mainstream account which holds both comp and
materialism doesn't address it. The only account I know of that
explains consciousness from comp is Bruno's - and that is probably the
polar opposite to "common sense"!

Terren
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Jason Resch

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Sep 18, 2012, 1:50:45 AM9/18/12
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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.

Jason

P.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!

Jason Resch

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Sep 18, 2012, 2:02:19 AM9/18/12
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On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 6:07 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:


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.

While that may be, brains can only talk about brain qualia.  They are silent on neuron qualia, carbon atom qualia, or electron qualia.
 
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.
 
Jason

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/bl-xc-8KIFMJ.

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Stephen P. King

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Sep 18, 2012, 6:41:00 AM9/18/12
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Hi Terren,

I have no problem at all with the idea that my "consciousness can
be faithfully preserved (or duplicated) by a brain transplant" so long
as functional equivalence is exactly maintained. But the MGA seems to
neglect the very real possibility that consciousness seems to depend on
things that don't happen just as much as it depends on things that do
happen. Maudlin and Bruno are effectively arguing that "things that
don't happen" are thus irrelevant and should and even must be dismissed
in considering consciousness. We are being sold a bill of goods if we
continue to thing in terms of classical logic that does not look at both
sides of a set (the members, boundary and the set's complement) as
involved in a function.

Roger Clough

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Sep 18, 2012, 8:04:40 AM9/18/12
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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 ?


Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/18/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen


----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Jason Resch
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-09-18, 01:50:45
Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant





On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 6:10 PM, Craig Weinberg 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. ?t 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. ?ach 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. ?or example, one region begins telling the other regions of the brain to do whatever they can to make it stop. ?nother region expresses the associated behaviors and thoughts that pertain to stress and anxiety. ? third region of the brain might increase the readiness or propensity to flee, hide, cry for help, or scream. ?he 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. ?aken 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.


Jason


P.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. ?ay particular attention to the feeling as it crosses the threshold from mere feeling into pain. ?oncentrate on what it is that is different between that perception (of the light pinch) and the pain (of the string pinch). ?ou may find that it is just information, along with an increasing anxiety and desire to make it stop. ?xperiments have found that certain people with brain damage or on certain drugs can experience the pain without the discomfort. ?here is a separate part of the brain responsible for making pain?ncomfortable!

Craig Weinberg

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Sep 18, 2012, 8:31:40 AM9/18/12
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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?) 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.

Craig

Jason Resch

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Sep 18, 2012, 9:53:43 AM9/18/12
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Stephen,

I think I addressed this point in another thread.  Things do happen in what you and I might call "physical universes", and they do matter and are relevant for our experience.  Bruno's first point is only that due to indeterminacy, we never see any one physical universe underlying ourselves, but an infinite continuum.  His second point is that this makes physics explainable in terms of something else (physics is no longer the bottom layer in the sciences).

I don't see that you, Bruno, or I disagree regarding computationalism or arithmatical realism.

Jason

Jason Resch

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Sep 18, 2012, 10:00:26 AM9/18/12
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Roger,

Comments below:

On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 7:04 AM, Roger Clough <rcl...@verizon.net> wrote:
Hi Jason Resch

If you get a duplicate of this, I apologize.
I'm still working on the problem.

I did see some duplicates from you yesterday, but this message was not duplicated.  In general, I think there has also been an overall improvement to the formatting of your messages, I no longer see unrecognized characters, or long black lines, so whatever you have done on your e-mail client, it's created a big improvement.
 

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 ?

The sense of touch is complex, there are actually several different types of touch sensitive nerves.  Different cells detect: heat, cold, pressure, vibration, and chemical irritation.  However, this only constitutes information sent to the brain.  Whether it is interpreted as pain or pleasure depends not on the type of the nerve but on how the brain is set up to interpret those signals.

Jason

Jason Resch

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Sep 18, 2012, 10:29:42 AM9/18/12
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On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 7:31 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:


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.

Jason

P.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.


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 neurons

Okay.
 
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

Craig Weinberg

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Sep 18, 2012, 10:37:27 AM9/18/12
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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.

 
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.

Craig

Jason Resch

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Sep 18, 2012, 11:02:19 AM9/18/12
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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

Craig Weinberg

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Sep 18, 2012, 11:38:01 AM9/18/12
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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. 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 neurons

Okay.
 
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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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, explanatory gap, maybe some important things about physics (how quantum mechanics actually makes sense empirically). It's a way to interpret in a realistic way what we have until now accepted unrealistic interpretations of.

 

 
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.

It would be great to collaborate with someone who can write about it in a more accessible way. Sign me up.
 
 

 
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.

No, they're still meaningless. Just as an mp3 file that you look at visually is not the song that you think the file represents aurally. The file is just a form. You need perception to in-form your experience of the form (which itself is only a perception of a lower level of more physical-tangible qualia).
 
 
 
 
 

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?

It's the same role that traffic signals, airports, and harbors play in the operation and function of all of the cities on Earth. Minor in the sense that they aren't the purpose or the content of the cities, but not minor in the sense that malfunctions will be catastrophic. Our brains are civilizations of sub-persons. They do things together but they also experience things, which we experience as well but in this iconicized presentation. Our personal experience comes through our sub-personal experience, not through sub-personal functions. On the personal level, we perform functions because we are motivated to do so by the sense we make of ourselves and our environment. I am saying that dynamic goes all the way down, even if the sub-sub-personal motivations being experienced by molecules might be unfamiliar to us. Is it really any more unfamiliar than imagining what we already believe is there, in terms of millions of molecules making up every compound eye of every fly...each one in constant electromagnetic flux, changing states in response to temperature, velocity, other molecules, etc. All I suggest is that there is experience there too. How could there realistically not be if we have experience and are made of nothing more special than they are?

The only other option is that experience spontaneously appears for no reason at some level of description - which seems like a crutch to me. If we truly can get a sense of the depth of our own naive realism, and how we have even extended and exaggerated it to some degree by using instruments which favor tactile and optical sense, then there is no reason to hold on to human exceptionalism, and no reason to assume infocentric universality either. When we understand the totality of how sense shapes our experience of even fundamentals like time, space, pattern, and logic, then we should not be surprised at how truly bottomless cognitive bias is and how absolutely relativistic the cosmos can be. Sanity is not the only game the universe knows how to play.


 
 
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.

Objectively measured by what? Human minds using solid objects to interact in carefully controlled ways? Haha, totally objective. It's not a surprise that using this approach we find no trace of anything that has ever been important to the inner life of human beings.

Craig

 

Jason

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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.

Brent

Craig Weinberg

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On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 12:09:54 PM UTC-4, Brent wrote:
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.

I have been testing it in the sense that I can't come up with any counterfactuals, whereas I can with all of the other competing hypothesis. It's not the same thing as having a hypothesis about a particular phenomenon, because this phenomenon, if I am right, contains all others, including 'hypothesis testing' itself.

Craig
 

Jason Resch

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On Sep 18, 2012, at 10:38 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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. 

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 neurons

Okay.
 
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.

Jason



Craig
 

Jason

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meekerdb

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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

Jason Resch

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On Sep 18, 2012, at 12:53 PM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

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

Brent

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Craig Weinberg

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On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 1:33:50 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:


On Sep 18, 2012, at 10:38 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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 neurons

Okay.
 
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.
 


 
 
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.

Which is why I think its more of a sophisticated understanding among human minds than a universal fundamental.
 

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.

There are a lot of books sitting around that aren't going to inform anything unless someone reads them.
 


 
 
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

Then things which have never been alive in the first place are doing a lot better at achieving that goal.


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.

There isn't any difference between the qualia of the brain as a whole and the qualia of all of the neurons. They seem different on the matter-in-space side, but qualia is the opposite of that. It's like a story. Batman is Batman whether he is in a comic or a movie - but he's also not the same. It's subjective.

Craig

Craig Weinberg

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Sep 18, 2012, 4:51:39 PM9/18/12
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On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 2:16:25 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:


On Sep 18, 2012, at 12:53 PM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:

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

That's where the concepts of level and depth of qualia come in. For something to rise to the top level of human awareness means a lot. It may not mean as much to swat a mosquito. Would the experience of being a mosquito calibrate so that it's lifetime (short in our terms) seemed long to them? Do mosquito children mourn the loss of their swatted parents? I doubt it. They may very well have experiences that we wouldn't dream of, but the depth - the gravitas of human consciousness is either much greater than theirs is objectively, or it will just always seem that way anthropically from our perspective. Either way, we don't care about the mosquito so much, unless we take certain Eastern philosophies to their most literal extreme.

My guess is that their qualia is orders of magnitude less significant. They may feel pain, but like the woman whose experience of pain has been sub-personalized, they may not care so much. The cohesiveness of the qualia - the figurative height of the tower of privacy and the enormous history of intentional significance which built it since the beginning of time...that is what makes this whole thing liveable. That's what keeps us from weeping for the grated carrots and avoiding eating our own foot for a snack.

Craig

Jason Resch

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Sep 19, 2012, 1:57:26 AM9/19/12
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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 Sep 18, 2012, at 10:38 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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.


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 monism

So 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?
 
 


 
 
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 neurons

Okay.
 
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.
 

What is outside of experience?  I thought you said experience is the only concrete entity.
 
Jason

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Roger Clough

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Sep 19, 2012, 8:54:05 AM9/19/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg

Since there are so many pseudo pain centers (qualia) this suggests that
reduction of perceived pain to its pseudo-origins in the brain is
esssentially impossible. This means also that pragmatic logic
is in order, so that the meaning of the multiple qualia is in the single, unified qualia
we "feel".

Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/19/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen


----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Craig Weinberg
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-09-18, 16:06:41
Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant




On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 1:33:50 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:


On Sep 18, 2012, at 10:38 AM, Craig Weinberg 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, ?h, yes, its still there. I just don't worry about it anymore.? With a smile she continued, ?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 ? 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.?
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/vjvZz12W3gUJ.

Craig Weinberg

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Sep 19, 2012, 8:57:30 AM9/19/12
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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 Sep 18, 2012, at 10:38 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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.


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 monism

So 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.
 

Outside of an individual'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

Roger Clough

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Hi Jason Resch

My ionterpretation of the result of the brain splitting on
pain perception is that her "self" is on one side and
the feeling of pain is on the other. Thus she feels the pain,
but cannot associate to her self (doesn't care).


Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/19/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen


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Time: 2012-09-18, 14:14:31
Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant




Roger Clough

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Sep 19, 2012, 9:03:25 AM9/19/12
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Hi Jason Resch
 
 
Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/19/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
 
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Time: 2012-09-18, 14:14:31
Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant

Bruno Marchal

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Sep 19, 2012, 9:10:22 AM9/19/12
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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




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Craig Weinberg

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On Wednesday, September 19, 2012 9:10:43 AM UTC-4, Bruno Marchal wrote:

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


I think it solves the hard problem by

1) exposing the bigger picture, in which all problems are experiences within consciousness, including the hard problem.

2) With the understanding that sense is primordial, consciousness is inescapable and ubiquitous in all real universes and so needs no justification in any other terms (as all terms are only sub-ontological and a-posteriori to sense.)

The answer to "Why do we experience anything at all?" is "Because all there ever can be is experience."

Craig

Roger Clough

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Sep 19, 2012, 10:34:54 AM9/19/12
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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.

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.



Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/19/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen


----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Jason Resch
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Time: 2012-09-19, 01:57:26
Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant





On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:



On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 1:33:50 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:


On Sep 18, 2012, at 10:38 AM, Craig Weinberg 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?s 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, ?h, yes, its still there.?I just don't worry about it anymore.??ith a smile she continued, ?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 ? 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?urting, 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. ?our brain is aware of entirely different?nformation?epending on how the different sense organs process it. ?f 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. ?ven 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.
?

?ou 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. ?ou 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. ?ome 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. ?y 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. ?nformation has to inform something. ?hat 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. ?f 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. ?therwise 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. ?t just can't reflect upon, discuss, contemplate, or otherwise tell us about these experiences. ?.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. ?t 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. ?hose 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. ?onsider a split brain patient with only one eye. ?f 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). ?f 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).
?
?

?or 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?manating?rom 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. ?hink of googles self-driving cars. ?ight 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. ?he 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. ?t 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. ?hey are all in some (or many) ways connected to each other. ?ee 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. ?e can tell two faces apart, but be unable to articulate the differences. ?e 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. ?he 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. ?his 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. ?ould you still be able to function if all you knew were the raw firing data of the millions of photosensitive cells in your retina? ?o, 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.
?



?

?fter 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. ?hese 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? ?ow do you know I am not a zombie? ?aybe 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. ?ou 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.
?
?nd 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. ? 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. ?o is your theory any different from idealism?

It's different in that I see idealism and materialism as dual aspects of a neutral monism


So 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?
?
?




?

?
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. ?ur 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 neurons


Okay.
?
and billions of lifetimes of different species and substances.


I don't think the?receding?ife 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. ?aybe 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. ?he information from the perspective of the system, makes a difference to the system causing it to enter different states. ?he 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?oncretely?xist 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.
?


What is outside of experience? ? thought you said experience is the only concrete entity.
?
Jason





?

?
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.

Which is why I think its more of a sophisticated understanding among human minds than a universal fundamental.
?



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.

There are a lot of books sitting around that aren't going to inform anything unless someone reads them.
?




?

?
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?volution's?ntentions, and we follow those instructions in a?eproducible?echanistic 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

Then things which have never been alive in the first place are doing a lot better at achieving that goal.




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. ?ike the china brain, there is no connection.

There isn't any difference between the qualia of the brain as a whole and the qualia of all of the neurons. They seem different on the matter-in-space side, but qualia is the opposite of that. It's like a story. Batman is Batman whether he is in a comic or a movie - but he's also not the same. It's subjective.

Craig




Jason




Craig
?

Craig Weinberg

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Sep 19, 2012, 11:43:08 AM9/19/12
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On Wednesday, September 19, 2012 10:36:03 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote:
There are two ways of looking at a music signal.

I think it's a mistake to look at it that way. There is no such thing as a music signal. There is no such thing as a signal. They are abstract generalizations. Conceptual equivalences with no concrete reality.

What is a music signal? There is an experience of hearing music. There are experiences of remembering a song that is independent of the memory of the original circumstance of the listening event. There are experiences of feeling a speaker cone vibrate, or seeing neurological changes mapped with an electronic instrument, vibrating strings on a guitar or vocal chords, etc. These are all different concretely real experiences in the universe. Any continuity between them is inferred subjectively. All that a signal can actually be is an experience which is interpreted as having significance.
 

One is to view it on an oscilloscope as a series of vibrations.
This is what the brain does.


Whatever the brain does is also what we do. If we look at the brain with eyeballs or an EEG, then we can only see a tiny fraction of what the brain does - a fraction which does not overlap with the rest of what the brain-self does and is. If we use an oscilloscope to look at the brain, then we will think that he brain does what an oscilloscope 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.


I don't think anything is being decoded. There is an experience of music which is accessed through the overlap between sub-personal and super-personal experienced, which facilitates an irreducibly personal experience. The public and impersonal dual aspect of this experience looks like the activity of a brain when we find it outside of ourselves.

Craig
 

Jason Resch

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Sep 19, 2012, 11:47:15 AM9/19/12
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Hi Roger,

Did you mean to write something in your e-mail?  I didn't see anything in your reply besides "hi Jason Resch" and your woodey Allen quote.

Jason

Jason Resch

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Sep 19, 2012, 11:51:00 AM9/19/12
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On Sep 19, 2012, at 8:02 AM, "Roger Clough" <rcl...@verizon.net> wrote:

> Hi Jason Resch
>
> My ionterpretation of the result of the brain splitting on
> pain perception is that her "self" is on one side and
> the feeling of pain is on the other. Thus she feels the pain,
> but cannot associate to her self (doesn't care).
>

I would agree, but add that the self, in this case, is found in the
connected parts of the majority of her brain.

Jason

Jason Resch

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Sep 19, 2012, 1:08:11 PM9/19/12
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On Sep 19, 2012, at 7:57 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:



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 Sep 18, 2012, at 10:38 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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.

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.

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.

You can create a supervisory process that is aware of an awarness, rather easily, in any programming language.


 
 
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.

Okay nice.

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.

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? 


 
 
 

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,

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-mereological

What 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 monism

So 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.

Jason

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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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Platonist Guitar Cowboy

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On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:


On Wednesday, September 19, 2012 10:36:03 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote:
There are two ways of looking at a music signal.

I think it's a mistake to look at it that way. There is no such thing as a music signal. There is no such thing as a signal. They are abstract generalizations. Conceptual equivalences with no concrete reality.

What is a music signal? There is an experience of hearing music. There are experiences of remembering a song that is independent of the memory of the original circumstance of the listening event. There are experiences of feeling a speaker cone vibrate, or seeing neurological changes mapped with an electronic instrument, vibrating strings on a guitar or vocal chords, etc. These are all different concretely real experiences in the universe. Any continuity between them is inferred subjectively. All that a signal can actually be is an experience which is interpreted as having significance.
 

One is to view it on an oscilloscope as a series of vibrations.
This is what the brain does.



Have to chime in here as professional qualia producer.

Music = sound in time.

Sound is relationship between discrete pitches, that themselves can be broken down to partials/overtone-ratios => leads to tuning discussion, for which you can look up pythagorean comma etc. but out of topic; pitch is measured db amplitude and frequency Hz.

I have to admit, that I find the whole "musical taste/experience - to each their own" a dead end. Every time I had to submit composition for a job or at the conservatory, there is little disagreement between composers about the semantic content conveyed; whether it be for film, exams, advertising etc. it has to be appropriate to the experiential effect we're trying to get at, and mostly, when the results are in, every composer in the room basically agrees to who got it closest; or it's the boss' decision anyway and we serve our work up like buffet, and they pick and choose. If the boss has no capacity for deep musical introspection, he will sometimes be aesthetically stupid; but he has the right because he pays.

But among those that have a strong introspective relation to music, which conjures away the probabilistic/random assessments of music of everybody else that merely "likes" music (I mean, who doesn't?) and can give some impression or vague feeling, there is little room for disagreement about semantic content conveyed and the precise, even if there are many paths, means to arrive there. So common and deep is this understanding, that we rarely even talk about it.

Frequency ratios (= sound; all the way compounding into noise; even though your car motor noise will still have a dominating frequency) and rhythmical ratios (the time aspect) make up every song's unique sonic universe, that can all have different rules for conjunction/disjunction and consonance/dissonance.

Without bloating this post with discussions about time/process aspect, I suggest you see if you can convince yourself that a frequency ratio of:

1:1 or 1:2 = total harmony of octaves and unisons
3:2 = perfect fifth interval: from pre-renaissance (example Machaut: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Machaut_-_Missa_Notre_Dame_-_Kyrie.ogg) to today, the most harmonic, if somewhat bland and blockish kind of interval. Also carries an archaic and instinctual, even animal-like quality, as can be seen by its extreme usage in death metal, punk rock etc.

... I could carry on like this and discuss every interval but I just want to see if you can convince yourself that such ratios correspond to the effect of music, in that when we raise the arithmetic complexity of the ratios to something like 16:15 = dissonant minor second interval, which, handled with care (appropriate register, voicing, placement in song, rhythm) gives rise to, I'll just give one example: the heart of more sophisticated minor chords, expressing a very precise needle-like pain, which you can calibrate towards the intimate kind (orchestrate sparsely, like a solo guitar, without much richness in voicings) or the tragic grandiose, monumental pain of say depicting a hero's loss of their loved one in a movie.

This may not be taken too literal, as relations spring to my head which negate this... but you would hardly use a Bossa Nova "Girl of Ipanema" F major 7th or major 6/9 chord, which begins the song, to depict the hero's loss, because that would just be plain inappropriate.

Point in case: I think in ratios of integers/notes to get the set of qualia I want to depict in a song or musical fragment. I do not think of the tragic time when I lost a girlfriend... which is of relatively little use when applied to musical architecture. Of course, composing freely, you have some vague intuition of maybe an image or impression or feeling, but to be expressed in music effectively, there's no way around ratios, which is why I choose to see images, experiences, qualia and impressions as vague sums, containing infinite amounts of possible arithmetical ratios, and when translated into music by a competent architect: the point at which the precise set of qualia becomes clear.

In schools we are taught colors and our perception is biased towards visual. Semantics and taste of visual are therefore more intuitively graspable than sound. We are not taught deep musical introspection, and therefore people generally lack a sense of aesthetic judgement and, yes, refined sense of taste. Everybody only notices when something goes "wrong"; say a bad DJ-set transition or some wrong notes, because that is so obviously 1=2, but since few have the ability to count/meditate in a musically introspective sense, it's a bit silly: cut the DJ and the music student some slack. 

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.

I am not saying arithmetic = music; I have no idea about that, just that the two can't do without each other.

:) Back to my herd.

Craig Weinberg

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On Wednesday, September 19, 2012 1:41:33 PM UTC-4, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:


I am not saying arithmetic = music; I have no idea about that, just that the two can't do without each other.


I think that is true of any form of expression or communication, since the formations which are used to induce the experiences (of music, art, poetry, etc) in the audience are constructed from material manipulations in spacetime. Anytime something has to be expressed externally, it has to be packaged with arithmetically coherent protocols. That doesn't of course mean that music "is" those protocols, only that any production of music can be analyzed arithmetically. Without an experience of sound associated with the arithmetic, there is nothing but a conceptual sculpture of abstraction.

Craig

meekerdb

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On 9/19/2012 10:41 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
> 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.

And doesn't this imply that one could write a computer program to compose music to certain
emotive specifications?

Brent

Craig Weinberg

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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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Craig Weinberg

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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-mereological

What 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.
 



 
 
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 monism

So 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.

If there are, nothing will ever know about them.

Craig
 

Jason Resch

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Sep 20, 2012, 2:28:04 AM9/20/12
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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-HkQk
 
I 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.
 
 

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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Jason Resch

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Sep 20, 2012, 2:57:14 AM9/20/12
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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)

 

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-mereological

What 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.

I think in the first few days you were on this list I asked you if you believed in zombies and never got a straight answer.  I think the issue of zombies is the gorilla in the room that needs to be faced.  I found the story I was talking about it, it is worth reading (it is interesting in its own right):

An Unfortunate Dualist

Once upon a time there was a dualist. He believed that mind and matter are separate substances. Just how they interacted he did not pretend to know-this was one of the "mysteries" of life. But he was sure they were quite separate substances.
This dualist, unfortunately, led an unbearably painful life-not because of his philosophical beliefs, but for quite different reasons. And he had excellent empirical evidence that no respite was in sight for the rest of his life. He longed for nothing more than to die. But he was deterred from suicide by such reasons as: (1) he did not want to hurt other people by his death; (2) he was afraid suicide might be morally wrong; (3) he was afraid there might be an afterlife, and he did not want to risk the possibility of eternal punishment. So our poor dualist was quite desperate.
Then came the discovery of the miracle drug! Its effect on the taker was to annihilate the soul or mind entirely but to leave the body functioning exactly as before. Absolutely no observable change came over the taker; the body continued to act just as if it still had a soul. Not the closest friend or observer could possibly know that the taker had taken the drug, unless the taker informed him.
Do you believe that such a drug is impossible in principle? Assuming you believe it possible, would you take it? Would you regard it as immoral? Is it tantamount to suicide? Is there anything in Scriptures forbidding the use of such a drug? Surely, the body of the taker can still fulfill all its responsibilities on earth. Another question: Suppose your spouse took such a drug, and you knew it. You would know that she (or he) no longer had a soul but acted just as if she did have one. Would you love your mate any less?
To return to the story, our dualist was, of course, delighted! Now he could annihilate himself (his soul, that is) in a way not subject to any of the foregoing objections. And so, for the first time in years, he went to bed with a light heart, saying: "Tomorrow morning I will go down to the drugstore and get the drug. My days of suffering are over at last!" With these thoughts, he fell peacefully asleep.
Now at this point a curious thing happened. A friend of the dualist who knew about this drug, and who knew of the sufferings of the dualist, decided to put him out of his misery. So in the middle of the night, while the dualist was fast asleep, the friend quietly stole into the house and injected the drug into his veins. The next morning the body of the dualist awoke-without any soul indeed-and the first thing it did was to go to the drugstore to get the drug. He took it home and, before taking it, said, "Now I shall be released." So he took it and then waited the time interval in which it was supposed to work. At the end of the interval he angrily exclaimed: "Damn it, this stuff hasn't helped at all! I still obviously have a soul and am suffering as much as ever!"
Doesn't all this suggest that perhaps there might be something just a little wrong with dualism?

-Raymond M. Smullyan


While you may not believe such a medicine exists, you believe we could accomplish the same effect (annihilating a soul while leaving the externally visible behavior intact) by swapping out someone's brain for a silicon one.

 
 

 
 
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.
 
 


 
 


 

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.

No, our technology just isn't at that level yet, but it is quite close.
 
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.

LOL
 
 

 
 
 


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.
 

We would be blind if we could not see.
 


 
 
 

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?
What about the properties of the natural numbers?  Might they exist independently of us?

Jason 

Roger Clough

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Sep 20, 2012, 5:54:15 AM9/20/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg

My understanding of brain scans is that what they are seeing
when one listens to music are electromagnegtic signals. These
can be of some use, but how to interpret them as music
is beyond me. Materialism can monitor the effects of experiences,
which again can be of some use, but I for one would like to be
able to somehow connect directly to the experience in some way.

Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/20/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen


----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Craig Weinberg
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-09-19, 11:43:08
Subject: Re: music on my mind
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/M3Fss4sFbCMJ.

Roger Clough

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Sep 20, 2012, 5:56:56 AM9/20/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg

There are some descriptive theories of music but no prescriptive theories.



Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/20/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen


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From: Craig Weinberg
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-09-19, 13:56:06
Subject: Re: music on my mind




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Roger Clough

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Sep 20, 2012, 6:03:43 AM9/20/12
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Hi Jason Resch
 
 
Pragmatically 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.
 
Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/20/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
 
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Roger Clough

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Sep 20, 2012, 6:21:29 AM9/20/12
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Hi Jason Resch
 
Brain experiments by I forget who were performed by
touching the brain at various points with a probe.
With each point, the patient reported a different
experience was being recalled.
 
On the other hand, others report that experiences are
scattered all over the brain, presumably over some sorts of
networks.
 
The only way I can reconcile these two points of view is that
experiences are stored in networks such that connecting
at 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 able
as a whole to simply "will" an experience by self-focussing. 
Some here have shown that experiences are somehow
focused by the nerves in the brain simply by willing
them to do so. This appears to be true due to the
fact that a new computerized brain device
can actually allow people to move paralyzed limbs
by simply willing the limb to do so.
 
 
Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/20/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
 
----- Receiving the following content -----
Time: 2012-09-19, 13:08:11
Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant

On Sep 19, 2012, at 7:57 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:



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 Sep 18, 2012, at 10:38 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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.�

Roger Clough

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Sep 20, 2012, 6:33:55 AM9/20/12
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Hi Jason Resch

My speculation is that, if for no other reason than that it makes
sense, and from evidence of self-focussing of presumably complex
signals in spread-out networks to form a single experience such
as is demonstrated with a point brain probe, that these
49 ganglia synchronize or cooperate to form a single pain
signal. Think of a choir or an orchestra.

And again I raise the possibility that the self would be the conductor of
the choir or orchestra. That the self, as with other experiences, like
touching the brain with a point probe, organizes complex brainwaves
into a single unifed point of perception.

Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/20/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen

================================================


----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Jason Resch
Receiver: everyth...@googlegroups.com
Time: 2012-09-19, 13:08:11
Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant




On Sep 19, 2012, at 7:57 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:




On Wednesday, September 19, 2012 1:57:28 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:



On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:



On Tuesday, September 18, 2012 1:33:50 PM UTC-4, Jason wrote:


On Sep 18, 2012, at 10:38 AM, Craig Weinberg 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, ?h, yes, its still there. I just don't worry about it anymore.? With a smile she continued, ?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 ? 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.?

Bruno Marchal

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Sep 20, 2012, 7:33:10 AM9/20/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com
On 20 Sep 2012, at 12:03, Roger Clough wrote:

Hi Jason Resch
 
 
Pragmatically 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.

The semantic of all programs, like the so called denotational semantics, involves abstract points in abstract space.
We don't need physical or geometrical points as consciousness is related to the abstract emulation. You should not reduce a person to the network of its nerves, as the person is an immaterial entity, only using its brain, like you are using a computer right now. 

It might help you to understand that weak materialism (the doctrine asserting the existence of primitive substance) is not compatible with computationalism, so your network of nerves is mainly a fictitious way to describe the brain as an object. You are using a physical supervenience thesis which simply can't work once we assume comp (and don't throw consciousness in the trash).

Bruno





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Bruno Marchal

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Sep 20, 2012, 7:36:19 AM9/20/12
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On 20 Sep 2012, at 12:21, Roger Clough wrote:

Hi Jason Resch
 
Brain experiments by I forget who were performed by
touching the brain at various points with a probe.
With each point, the patient reported a different
experience was being recalled.

Penfield experiments.


 
On the other hand, others report that experiences are
scattered all over the brain, presumably over some sorts of
networks.
 
The only way I can reconcile these two points of view is that
experiences are stored in networks such that connecting
at a single point will recall the whole.
 
Perhaps the self is such a point of contact.

Yes, but in the meaning or semantical space associated with the software. It is not a point materially realized in the physical brain.

Bruno


 
Or the network, on the other hand, may be able
as a whole to simply "will" an experience by self-focussing. 
Some here have shown that experiences are somehow
focused by the nerves in the brain simply by willing
them to do so. This appears to be true due to the
fact that a new computerized brain device
can actually allow people to move paralyzed limbs
by simply willing the limb to do so.
 
 
Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/20/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
 
 
----- Receiving the following content -----
Time: 2012-09-19, 13:08:11
Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant



On Sep 19, 2012, at 7:57 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:



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 Sep 18, 2012, at 10:38 AM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> 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.�

Craig Weinberg

unread,
Sep 20, 2012, 8:27:01 AM9/20/12
to everyth...@googlegroups.com


On Thursday, September 20, 2012 2:28:05 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:


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-HkQk
 
I think you might like him.

Yes, I have seen him before. I think he is on the right track in that his model is panpsychist and that he sees the differences between assemblies and integrated wholes. Where he goes wrong, (as do most) is at the beginning where he assumes "information" states as a given rather than breaking that down to the capacity for afferent perception. Nothing can have an information state unless it can be informed. Once you have that capacity (sense), you already have consciousness of a primitive sort. Just as the camera can be divided, so too can the diode. He is arbitrarily considering the diode to be an integrated whole with two states, but it too as an assembly which we have manufactured.

The whole line of reasoning that stems from the assumption that information is an independently real phenomenon is incompatible with shedding light on consciousness. Assuming information is great for controlling material processes and transmitting experiences, but there isn't anything there so it can't create experiences. You already need to be able to read the CD as music to play the information on the CD as music. No amount of sophisticated encoding on a CD can make you hear music if you are deaf.

To us the diode seems like one thing with two functional states, but that's like saying that Tokyo has two states by averaging out the number of green traffic lights versus red traffic lights. Function is an interpretation, not an objective fact.


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.

Because we know for a fact that our consciousness correlates with neural activity (not caused but correlates) and we know that computers not only show no sign of having a consciousness that resembles that of any biological organism, but I understand that the behavior of computers of any degree of sophistication plainly reveals the precise absence of any biological personality traits and the presence of non-cohering impersonality.
 
 
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?

No, I don't think so. For the same reason that I can't make a model of a cell out of magnetic pellets and expect it to grow and divide and drink water. There is no reason to assume that this universe would suddenly support an alternate chemistry and alternate biology.  It's possible, if we stumble on something that happens to work, but we don't really know.

 


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?

How is it not? It establishes that fundamental and permanently insoluble differences between organic and inorganic substances routinely exist and are obvious and ordinary, requiring no special claim to support. It is the counterclaim that requires some backup.
 
 
Same goes for silicon intelligence being able to feel.

This does not follow.

Of course it does.
 
 
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.

Machines come from plastic and silicon, not from our bodies. If machines came from our bodies, we could not control them. They would be useless to us as machines.
 
 
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.

If they are not lying, then they do not have visual 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.

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.

I would say that it is not personal qualia until the experimenter asks the questions and they experience knowing the answers. It is qualia on the sub-personal level, but not on the personal level. That is the link that has been severed, between levels, not necessarily between steps in a linear process.
 
 


 

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.

No, it doesn't. You need to distinguish pawns from rooks. It need only distinguish the activity of one chain of transistors and another. The whole thing could be run on an abacus instead. Does the abacus know what a pawn is?

 

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.

That is a good example of something that seems like it could be true on an intellectual level, but under typical states of consciousness seems to be clearly untrue. Since we have the sense to turn one sense against another, we can create all kinds of possible seeming impossibilities.
 
 
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.

The rigidity of silicon may only be one obvious symptom of its nature. Another property of silicon may be a huge sign on its atomic forehead that says "Do not let this molecule participate in any living being".

Craig

Roger Clough

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Hi Bruno Marchal

You could be right, but as I see it,
organizing and focusing all of that complex network
of nerves and their signals into a singular mental point would
--to my mind at least-- be done by a singular intelligent agent.

A self, in other words. And an intelligent self
would act out of a center, which does the choosing,
in ideal space or in real space.

Call it a central processing unit if you prefer computer language.




Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/20/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen


----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Bruno Marchal
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-09-20, 07:33:10
Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant




On 20 Sep 2012, at 12:03, Roger Clough wrote:


Hi Jason Resch


Pragmatically 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.


The semantic of all programs, like the so called denotational semantics, involves abstract points in abstract space.
We don't need physical or geometrical points as consciousness is related to the abstract emulation. You should not reduce a person to the network of its nerves, as the person is an immaterial entity, only using its brain, like you are using a computer right now.


It might help you to understand that weak materialism (the doctrine asserting the existence of primitive substance) is not compatible with computationalism, so your network of nerves is mainly a fictitious way to describe the brain as an object. You are using a physical supervenience thesis which simply can't work once we assume comp (and don't throw consciousness in the trash).


Bruno











Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/20/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen


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Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant


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On Thursday, September 20, 2012 2:57:16 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:


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 language center has nothing to do with anything. Unless someone is having trouble speaking, the issue of blindsight has absolutely zero to do with language.

 
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.

They rightly report that they cannot see. There is nothing wrong with their ability to know about any of their other experiences or talk about them.
 

  (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)

I understand what you are saying, and I agree of course that the condition reflects a partial disruption on sub-personal levels which translates to a loss of access to some qualia and not others, but that doesn't change anything about the ontology of qualia. It still proves absolutely that we can be personally informed without having any personal qualitative experience of being informed, therefore information is not ontologically guaranteed to arrive with its appropriate qualia attached and representational qualia theory is false.
 

Not only do I believe that such a medicine could exist in fact, I understand why such a medicine could not ever exist. I do not believe that we could accomplish the same effect at all. What I say is that no silicon brain will ever experience human consciousness and therefore will never be able to adequately replicate a human identity 100%. There will always be a way to tell the difference, even if casual observation by humans is fooled. People will just wear Captcha amulets that beep when someone tests as authentically human.
 

 
 

 
 
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 the same with cell phones, but why have different cell phones restricted to different areas? It's just your naive realism expectations. By your assumption, hard disk sectors and memory should be specialized into contiguous blocks - but they don't have to be at all. They are randomly accessed as well. If you have logical function, you don't need any spatial pattern.
 
 
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)

There is no way to do that. The environment is always changing. The criteria of your presence has zero tolerance. It is either possible for you to be present or it isn't. Your presence cannot *almost* be 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.

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:


You underestimate the difference between taking a piece of something that is alive and creating something that lives from material which cannot ever live.


 

 

 
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.

There are no evolutionary experiments. Evolution is not teleological. What is lucky survives.
 

If we were a computer we wouldn't need to see. There wouldn't be a we, there would just be machines processing optical micro-acknowledgements into unconscious behaviors.

 


 
 
 

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?

I don't have to be sure of what I have no reason to doubt.
 

Absolutely, but not independent of the sense of matter.

Craig


Jason

Roger Clough

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Sep 20, 2012, 9:08:05 AM9/20/12
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Hi Craig Weinberg ,

Because consciousness at the most is not physical
and at the least it is a verb rather than a noun,
that fellow below, in his search for consciousness,
is like the early spanish explorers searching
for the lost seven cities of gold.



Roger Clough, rcl...@verizon.net
9/20/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen


----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Craig Weinberg
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-09-20, 08:27:01
Subject: Re: Bruno's Restaurant




On Thursday, September 20, 2012 2:28:05 AM UTC-4, Jason wrote:



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Platonist Guitar Cowboy

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Sep 20, 2012, 9:46:14 AM9/20/12
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I'm not so sure about "there is nothing but a conceptual sculpture of abstraction".

Recently, I stumbled on the similarity between how we're taught functions in school, like some input x goes through some process/steps of operation in a black box to turn into y, and how with set theory, the mapping is "instantly total", implying no process. 

Composing is similar. A score exists as complete set of assignments, outside of time, even though its strings have to be executed in order, for the totality to be made clear/communicable on sensory level.

Take Bach's well known fugues: as a beginning composition student, I marveled at the counterpoint techniques, the flexibility, inversions, complexity, and the craft. Today, I perceive the fugues to be timeless entities of arithmetic relations. They are just "out there or in there". And similar to induction proof: you're trying to get from a basis of induction (a set of notes, or assignments of frequency relation, meaning your bet from listening to "inner voice" generating instead of reproducing, reproducing like when you hum/whistle a tune you know) through some hypothesis "I bet I can build a triple fugue from this set of notes" to a valid proof of your subject/set of notes.

With some familiarity and my horrible student fugues behind me, I realize, it's the basis of induction that is so much harder to find than the actual operations of craft. Once understood, the operations are just a formality: This is subject or set of subjects, so episodes could be like such, so development like so is possible... so diminution... so augmentation... so inversion and other subjects etc. "it follows that and so on" until either, your basis of induction has fallen to pieces (most often the case with yours truly) or it proves itself. I marvel thus not at Bach's craft, but at how he formulated or "remembered" so many precise induction hypotheses that bore fruits. The Goldberg Variations are all based on the same ground bass movement, iterating itself with different surface perfumes but always the same fundamental movement in Bass. That's a fractal in sound, if you want. 30 completely different zooms into the same foundation set.

The statement "merely a conceptual structure of abstraction" ignores that once the key to a precise problem formulation or hypothesis, in our case a set of notes and rhythm, is remembered or discovered/found in its totality; its procedural expression in time, as physically perceived sound, is mere formality: a good hypothesis can be clothed to different appearances infinitely, I believe. This does not work the other way around unless you win the lottery. The precise dream of the totality of a musical song gives birth to the procedure/process to execute. Therefore good sonic architecture is to me the ability to dream deeply and freely.



On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 9:04 PM, meekerdb <meek...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 9/19/2012 10:41 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
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.

And doesn't this imply that one could write a computer program to compose music to certain emotive specifications?

Brent

Yes, and these programs exist as software synthesizers, software samplers, virtual mixing desks. But linguistic emotive specifications are lack precision. Often different composers program different patch names for sounds and the most intuitive thing is to use some corresponding quale, for example: I pulled out "glacier melting winds" for an ambient track out of my database yesterday; I know at some point, that I programed the virtual synth to output that particular sound... but can't remember if this was a sound based on some water drops sample recording I transfigured, whether I got some FM synth to produce its staple crystaly-bell like chime to capture some metallic coldness, whether there are barren/harsh wind timbres, that might have more or less "bite" etc. Upon opening the patch, you remember, and say "ah, yes I remember, THAT specific kind glacier melting winds". Trivially, at this level language is too blunt an instrument.

This video is old already (2009), but gives you some impression of how emotively rich the computer is becoming as an instrument; skip the advertising chatter to him playing examples.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF8SYLjl07g&noredirect=1

In terms of having the computer compose directly, yes this can be done with a variety of low-level languages. But as with any program, as soon as you finish writing or playing the damn thing, there are infinite things that can be optimized. You write an affirming dream, and find that it would get a little more real if it included some pain number relations, and a bit more sincere if it displayed sense of humor here and there, maybe also some amount of terror in the humor, in which there is some hope that recognition of that terror entails, in which there is wishful thinking etc. ad infinitum. You could work on one song your whole life in this way, but that isn't really well paid, these days. I haven't seen a program dream that way yet musically, I'll admit, then again, I haven't seen humans complete an infinite task either so... Nonetheless, the enterprise of music moves forwards all the time:

Could you imagine sound doing this?

http://www.ideaconnection.com/innovation-videos/396-levitating-liquid-with-sound.html?ref=nl091912

Bruno Marchal

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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


Bruno Marchal

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On 20 Sep 2012, at 14:59, Roger Clough wrote:

> Hi Bruno Marchal
>
> You could be right, but as I see it,
> organizing and focusing all of that complex network
> of nerves and their signals into a singular mental point would
> --to my mind at least-- be done by a singular intelligent agent.

No problem, the person is a singular agent, from his/her/it perspective.

Of course, with QM or comp, this becomes false from the 3p, or the 0p
perspective, but this concerns more appearances of bodies than person.



>
> A self, in other words.


All machine have a singular self, having nameable and non nameable
facets. And Löbian machine, that is those who have the cognitive
ability to know that they are (Turing) universal, knows that, at least
as far as they trust their own consistency or correctness.



> And an intelligent self
> would act out of a center, which does the choosing,
> in ideal space or in real space.

This is fuzzy, and can have many different interpretations in comp or
QM.



>
> Call it a central processing unit if you prefer computer language.

That would be misleading, and close to Searle type of error. The self
is a higher level program, most plausibly, distributed in a sort of
holographic way in the whole brain, with the reflexive self probably
maintained in the cortex.
Brains, like robots swarm, don't have a central processing unit.
Selves needs only higher level integrated functions.
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Craig Weinberg

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Sep 20, 2012, 10:47:24 AM9/20/12
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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
 

Craig Weinberg

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Sep 20, 2012, 10:53:15 AM9/20/12
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On Thursday, September 20, 2012 9:09:15 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote:
Hi Craig Weinberg  ,

Because consciousness at the most is not physical
and at the least it is a verb rather than a noun,

I think that consciousness includes the physical, the ideal, verbs, nouns, and the capacity to discern the differences.

Craig
 

Bruno Marchal

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Sep 20, 2012, 11:55:20 AM9/20/12
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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.

Bruno






Craig
 

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Craig Weinberg

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Sep 20, 2012, 12:00:14 PM9/20/12
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On Thursday, September 20, 2012 9:46:16 AM UTC-4, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:

 
I'm not so sure about "there is nothing but a conceptual sculpture of abstraction".


What would music be if there was no such thing as sound? What would you call it if it could not be expressed through a medium of sensation?

Craig

Craig Weinberg

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Sep 20, 2012, 12:05:01 PM9/20/12
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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

meekerdb

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Sep 20, 2012, 12:46:50 PM9/20/12
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On 9/20/2012 7:14 AM, 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.

But "correlates with" isn't a theory - it's closer to a fact; the sort of thing we use to find that a theory is false.

Brent

Platonist Guitar Cowboy

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Sep 20, 2012, 1:25:46 PM9/20/12
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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.


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Jason Resch

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Sep 20, 2012, 2:06:21 PM9/20/12
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On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 5:21 AM, Roger Clough <rcl...@verizon.net> wrote:
Hi Jason Resch
 
Brain experiments by I forget who were performed by
touching the brain at various points with a probe.
With each point, the patient reported a different
experience was being recalled.
 
On the other hand, others report that experiences are
scattered all over the brain, presumably over some sorts of
networks.
 
The only way I can reconcile these two points of view is that
experiences are stored in networks such that connecting
at 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.

Check out this video, it is fascinating:


Jason
 
Perhaps the self is such a point of contact.
 
Or the network, on the other hand, may be able
as a whole to simply "will" an experience by self-focussing. 
Some here have shown that experiences are somehow
focused by the nerves in the brain simply by willing
them to do so. This appears to be true due to the
fact that a new computerized brain device
can actually allow people to move paralyzed limbs
by simply willing the limb to do so.
 
 

meekerdb

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Sep 20, 2012, 2:36:07 PM9/20/12
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On 9/20/2012 11:06 AM, Jason Resch wrote:


On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 5:21 AM, Roger Clough <rcl...@verizon.net> wrote:
Hi Jason Resch
 
Brain experiments by I forget who were performed by
touching the brain at various points with a probe.
With each point, the patient reported a different
experience was being recalled.
 
On the other hand, others report that experiences are
scattered all over the brain, presumably over some sorts of
networks.
 
The only way I can reconcile these two points of view is that
experiences are stored in networks such that connecting
at 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.

A pleasant thought, but a very small localized stroke can cause one to lose memory of words or people.

Brent

Craig Weinberg

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Sep 20, 2012, 2:39:59 PM9/20/12
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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 

Jason Resch

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Sep 20, 2012, 2:54:07 PM9/20/12
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On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 8:46 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy <multipl...@gmail.com> wrote:


Thanks for that, it is really cool.  I like the top YouTube comment's post:

"God will fix this in the next patch." 

Jason

Stephen P. King

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Sep 20, 2012, 3:55:11 PM9/20/12
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On 9/20/2012 9:08 AM, Roger Clough wrote:
> Hi Craig Weinberg ,
>
> Because consciousness at the most is not physical
> and at the least it is a verb rather than a noun,
> that fellow below, in his search for consciousness,
> is like the early spanish explorers searching
> for the lost seven cities of gold.

Hi Roger,

I disagree. He has found a piece of the map.
--
Onward!

Stephen

http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html


Stephen P. King

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Sep 20, 2012, 9:23:11 PM9/20/12
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On 9/20/2012 12:05 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


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
   
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...

Craig Weinberg

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Sep 20, 2012, 9:45:39 PM9/20/12
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Hi Stephen,

If sense is truly primordial, then it is beyond both closure and regress.

Craig
 

Stephen P. King

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Sep 20, 2012, 11:15:36 PM9/20/12
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On 9/20/2012 9:45 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote:


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

    Fundamentally, yes I agree with you, but let's not disallow for a pull-back...

Platonist Guitar Cowboy

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Sep 21, 2012, 8:47:14 AM9/21/12
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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

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Craig Weinberg

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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


Mark

Platonist Guitar Cowboy

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Sep 22, 2012, 8:01:13 AM9/22/12
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On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 6:56 PM, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com> wrote:


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).

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.?

m
 


Mark

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Craig Weinberg

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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
 
on other days the opposite sex,

sex = zoological sensation & emotional sensitivity
 
on other days strings do fine, as I love guitar.

strings = tactile acoustic sensation

It's all sense.

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 is the expression of private human sense and motive through public acoustic dynamics. We can employ mathematical logic to control that expression intellectually, or we can employ emotional intuition.


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.

Music does equal its experience alone. Composing music is a different experience. Eating is an experience. Manufacturing things to eat is a different experience. Manufacturing food employs the same kind of mathematical industrial processes as manufacturing of any mass produced commodity. That doesn't mean that eating can be better understood as 'assimilation of a nutrient-dense industrial extrusion product'. You don't need advanced math to invent music. You need to be something that feels pleasure from rich sensitivity to sound. Acoustics require mathematical principles, but again, only as a way for dense forms to make sense of each other.
 
 
 
 
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.

Qualia isn't an abstraction, but abstraction is a category of qualia. Thoughts are the qualia of the intellect.
 
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.

You are flattening the layers of qualia. The psychological layers of the human self are much more interior than the zoological layers, and they have different qualia which all have different impressions of each other. We can react emotionally to thoughts or we can analyze emotions intellectually. We can desire sensations or we can sense our desires.

 
 

 
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?

For the composer.
 
Why is the deaf man's groove inherently poorer than what hearing people consider groovy, which varies considerably on its own btw?

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.
 
 
 
 

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.

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. There is no value to looking at a visual presentation of something that only makes sense as a listening experience, at least, not beyond the novelty of the first couple of minutes. Nobody runs a media player on their desktop just to see the patterns without the music to accompany 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?


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.
 
 
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.

Huh? The map is not the territory isn't a theory, it's an observation of fact. A picture of the city of Los Angeles is not Los Angeles. The mapping comes from our sense. We have the ability to map the marks on the sheet of folded paper with the experience of navigating a rat's nest of freeways. The map is useful to you and me, but it isn't useful to non-humans, just as music is not useful to non-humans. They are artifacts of our sense and motive.
 

 
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?

For the same reason that you can't eat glass for breakfast. Silicon does certain kinds of things and organic molecules do other kinds of things - or more accurately biological experiences have organic molecular shadows and geological experiences have inorganic molecular shadows. Different ranges and scope of sensitivity. Different histories of elaboration.
 
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.

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

 

Platonist Guitar Cowboy

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Sep 23, 2012, 9:08:13 AM9/23/12
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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

 
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Craig Weinberg

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On Sunday, September 23, 2012 9:08:14 AM UTC-4, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:


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.

Numbers don't exist on their own in real terms, but in the course of common sense negotiations between different levels of material structures, numerical protocols are used which bring out whatever common sense the material/experiential medium is capable of. I can get a cool cymatic pattern by vibrating some powder on a drum, but I can make the same pattern by hand and not have any sound vibrate out of it. The pattern can be made just by imitating and seeing, there is no counting necessary.
 

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.

I meant White Pages. A list of the names of residents of the town is not going to tell you if it's an exciting place to be.
 

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.

That's only telling us about skill and entrainment. It's true of any profession. It doesn't say anything about a purely mathematical spirit that manifests as music.
 


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...

The music theoretical analysis is meaningless without the music. That's my point. What are you anlayzing? Meaningless numerical coordinates.
 

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.

Ugh. Nobody seems to get this critically important concept of how to think of things prospectively rather than retrospectively. I am not talking about turning the sound off temporarily to verify and tweak musical compositions, I am talking about THE COMPLETE ABSENCE OF SOUND IN THE UNIVERSE. What are your digits measuring now? Why are the jumping LEDs interesting now?
 

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?

(See previous). Not silent movies of things people want to watch, silent movies of a multitrack display moving up and down, or just numerical values scrolling down the screen for two hours.
 

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.

You aren't getting what I am talking about at all. I am proving that music is nothing without sound. You are telling me that mathematics is somehow music without sound and now that there is always sound.

 

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.

Ugh. No. I am talking about hearing 'Brother Can You Spare A Dime' and being able to actually psychically describe details that you didn't know about the construction of the Empire State Building just by hearing the sound of that music.
 

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.   

You are listening to your own argument, not mine.
 


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.

Unfortunately it is our language that must accommodate the reality of the universe, not the other way around. I think that the reality is that if we put the entire universe under a single category that has any meaning, it has to be something like 'sense'.

 

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.

A super-now layer which bears superhuman promise.
 
 
 
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.

Some geniuses identify more personally with their skills than others.
 
 
 
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.

If you burn your hand there is the public reality of the hand that a doctor can see and treat, and there is the private phenomenology of the pain and emotion and thought. I don't see the confusion. The doctor doesn't feel your hand in pain directly and your pain is not described literally by the shape of the burned tissue of your hand.
 


 
 

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?

It's absolute in the sense that it is anchored in the Totality as a frame of reference, rather than a person's experience of it.
 

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.

Not flip flopping at all. Bodies in space are the lowest common denominator, but their universality has a quantitative value which is a fair substitute for realism.
 

And how does sense, in your framing, account for humor and nonsense, if everything is reducible to sense on some level?

Yes, nonsense is a category of sense. There are different subcategories of nonsense based on which sense expectations are not met. This ties into humor as jokes often play on certain sociological and psychological expectations which are suppressed from conscious awareness. By presenting a text which agrees with some expectations and not others, you foreground the nonsense of the suppressed irrationality and then, you laugh because you realize in some way, the limitations of your own sense of yourself and the world. You get a controlled dose of insanity and it homeopathically heals your sanity.

 
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


Cool, yeah I don't like arguing about terminology either. I am mainly concerned with getting a basic understanding of what we are and what is really going on.

Craig
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