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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jul 24, 2016 - 07:54am PT
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Oh Gawd.
He used the simple use of map as metaphor, and you have to turn it into an English writing class, MikeL.
Just let it go. Nobody wins a gold ring around here.
I state that the brain is an incredibly complicated connection of neurons. It is the most complicated organ or device that science has seen.
How you guys can day by day discount neurons baffles me.
Since you don't think consciousness resides in neurons, I propose a test. Let's say that Largo asks me to hit him in his pre-frontal cortex with a baseball bat. Three good swings. He'd have to sign a waiver not to sue, of course.
Now, having caused brain damage, how would his mind be different? I've seen it with stroke victims, and it ain't pretty. Aphasia may be the worst. You can't communicate because you can't find the words. I've had two friends taken down with Aphasia. One is in awful shape, and the other one recovered reasonably well, but he can't tell a joke anymore, and he was funny as hell.
So Largo, would you allow one of us to damage your brain, just to see what it did to your mind and personality?
For that matter, how do you explain Alzheimer's?
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jul 24, 2016 - 08:00am PT
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Sigh, If it's a symbol, which elements on maps are, then it is a metaphor
Map symbols are not metaphors. Symbols are shorthand. That is all that they are when you are discussing maps.
That is what I do for a living, and the number of symbols is in the hundreds. Without them, I would have to type a little explanation next to each well spot.
That is what I do. I make maps.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 24, 2016 - 08:15am PT
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I can see you making an argument about the definition of metaphor, I'm disagreeing that what Shakespeare wrote, a metaphor, is the same thing. I'm sure you can see that.
While we could broaden the definition of "metaphor" to mean any symbolic representation, which the scientists that MikeL linked would (as they appropriate the word to mean something different, and more precise than the word we learned in our English class) it causes no end of confusion.
We could define all abstractions, all symbols, all representations as "metaphor" as Paul and MikeL would have us, the meaning of metaphor is then diminished (not enlarged) as it becomes all encompassing...
...and to what end? as a debating point to provide mystery (along Paul's line of "argument") or approximation (thus not true along MikeL's) to our world.
To think of jgill as a master of metaphor does provide a chuckle, et tu, Johnny?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 24, 2016 - 09:36am PT
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We could define all abstractions, all symbols, all representations as "metaphor" as Paul and MikeL would have us, the meaning of metaphor is then diminished (not enlarged) as it becomes all encompassing...
...and to what end? as a debating point to provide mystery (along Paul's line of "argument") or approximation (thus not true along MikeL's) to our world.
Better still is to ask why such fear of a simple term? The value of a map isn't diminished by realizing what it is. I think science fears a diminished certainty which it finds in such terminology. Like all art all maps are metaphors distinguished from the sensory reality of first hand experience or as Joyce said, "The ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more thought through my eyes."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 24, 2016 - 10:27am PT
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Ed makes some valid points IMO. But it is also worth noting several key distinctions per the limitations of maps, to make sure that we don't expect maps to accomplish more than they can.
Take a topo map, since these are items with which we all understand through actual use. A topo map gives us a representation of the physical aspect of a given climb. The details might be specific: a 5.9 fingertip lyback; a 5.7 friction slab; a bombay chimney. IOWs, providing one understands what the symbols refer to (it will all be Greek to a landlubber), the topo gives us a sketch of the physical aspects of the climb, and the physical nature of the climbing itself.
The topo does not and cannot give us a representation of experience itself because the lines and numbers on the page lack the prime ingredients of all mind-independent representations: awareness and subjectivity. A sentient climber can project their past experience onto the lines and numbers and imagine what their future experience might be based on the topo data, but the lines and numbers are merely line and numbers sans any experiential quotient. An advanced Turing machine might input the topo and "know" what the data means in physical terms, but since it would have no experiential capacity to bring to the game, the crucial subjective projecting would be entirely lost on the machine. The machine has no internal (experiential) life. It only crunches the physical data.
Additionally, in Ed's flight simulator, the machine provides a simulation of sense data, but till a sentient pilot-in-training sits down and gets to work, there is no experience ergo the machine does not itself provide or simulate experience at all.
What's more, virtual reality does not furnish an experience either, only sensory data.
A map is a data source that describes physical reality. Good ones are invaluable.
And BASE, no one I've read on this thread has said that mind is separate from neurons or any thing else. Conversely, no thing is separate from mind. you and others struggle with this because what you are really angling for is a time-bound "explanation" of causality, whereby matter "creates" mind. From a first-order (physicalist) perspective, it makes perfect sense.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 24, 2016 - 10:39am PT
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How you guys can day by day discount neurons baffles me.
Don't know who is doing that, though perhaps it's better to think of neurons as a vehicle not a source. From the human mind comes truth, beauty, love and compassion insofar as neurons facilitate those emotions what's not to like?
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rbord
Boulder climber
atlanta
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Jul 24, 2016 - 04:08pm PT
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Our ability to perceive other people's ignorance is just so fascinating and revealing. When I ask myself am I right? - I answer yes definitely, I'm right! It's just so fascinating and revealing when other people can't see things the way I can - it just confirms my belief in my own awesome understanding and the correctness of my own perspective.
Alrighty then. Yea, what do you know, my mind works that way too.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jul 24, 2016 - 05:53pm PT
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A map is a data source that describes physical reality.
Not a bad answer to the question, "What is Mind?"
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cintune
climber
Colorado School of Mimes
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Jul 24, 2016 - 06:26pm PT
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Mind as map. Sort of the same thing as "the universe experiencing itself."
Seven billion and counting little maps of the universe that can interact with and influence each other. Lots more if you count the dolphins, chimps, corvids and their relatives.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 24, 2016 - 07:15pm PT
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But then a dolphin's map is not a metaphor provided you can find one.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jul 24, 2016 - 07:34pm PT
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Base: Oh Gawd. He used the simple use of map as metaphor, and you have to turn it into an English writing class, MikeL. Just let it go. Nobody wins a gold ring around here.
This is so typical on this website no matter which thread one observes.
On the one hand, we are all for science around here. Science is king. We love science, and we love to talk / speculate about theories from all venues. Hooray.
However, the talk tends to be cheap, superficial, and loose. If anyone brings in (or better yet summarizes) real research and says, “Yeah, here’s how people in the field are talking about this or that these days,”--without claiming that it IS the truth--. . . well, that person is conducting a writing class. Or maybe asking that people know the scientific process. Actually knowing what you are talking about doesn't diminish dialogue. Hell, you might learn some new ideas, even if you don't agree with them.
“Yeah I love science as long as it agrees with me and as long as no one gets too technical about it.”
Horse sh*t.
Superficial.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 25, 2016 - 06:27am PT
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Additionally, in Ed's flight simulator, the machine provides a simulation of sense data, but till a sentient pilot-in-training sits down and gets to work, there is no experience ergo the machine does not itself provide or simulate experience at all.
What's more, virtual reality does not furnish an experience either, only sensory data.
then why are flight simulators used so extensively in training flight crews? The experience is invaluable, and while actual flight time is necessary during training, much of that time is anticipated by the training done in the simulator.
To take it a step further, all modern commercial aircraft are designed in the computer. This includes putting the aircraft through all sorts of simulated situations and observing its response. It may be dismissed as "mere engineering" but these same simulated situations can be used in the flight simulator to design the flight deck to optimize for human performance, which can be tweaked in test flights, where those flights are largely simulated.
The computer programs that do this provide a rich sensory input to the human pilots. So rich that they have become invaluable in training.
If this training was not good enough to provide an experience as good as actual flight, they would not be used so extensively.
It is true that simulator training "is not the experience," but it is so close to it as to have become one of the essential steps in training the crews.
Finally, the "sentient crews" generally put the aircraft in autopilot for much of the flight. The autopilot is a computer, who can fly the plane. This is also designed using all that computer work done up to the actual building of the aircraft. Modern positioning technology exists which would allow the computer to fly the aircraft from terminal to terminal... replacing human performance issues with computer performance issues... the later something we can discuss with a degree of rationality, the former tends to veer off into all sorts of bizarre issues.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 25, 2016 - 07:40am PT
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Fascinating and revealing that you can't see this.
I liked this phrase, "...you can't see this" a metaphor, equating seeing with understanding...
nice choice in this discussion, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you actually thought of it when you wrote your reply.
So interesting, however, that you would disdain the discussion of the meaning of a word like "metaphor" in the thread. You have argued that the world is largely a human construction, and that the means of that construction is "a mystery" which can never be understood scientifically (in case you haven't looked it up, this is the "new mysterians" position).
And why the distinction of the more general "symbolic representation" from the literary "metaphor" (though such a great idea as to be stretched to other media, like art) is a discussion that takes on an important philosophical point, though perhaps an ancient one for people who sit in caves... (one wonders how Plato is read by people these days, metaphorically, no doubt).
Metaphor as a word originates from Greek, "to transfer" and so we see Willie the Shake transfer the world to a stage, and Paul understanding to seeing... but the work of Magritte "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." as a "visual metaphor" seems to be incorrect, and much better understood in terms of a number of apparent contradictions that arise in symbolic representation. One can look at the work of Gödel for a basic understanding.
In literary terms, the sentence: "this sentence is false" provides a closer analog to "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." than Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage." There are images that are metaphor, perhaps you can come up with a better example.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 25, 2016 - 08:07am PT
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MikeL has a "Truth/truth" thing... good luck to him, as I often wish in this thread, that is a whale I'm happy to let him hunt himself. Call me Ishmael (dibs on the survivor character!).
But in the sense of cognitive research and the extension of the idea of "metaphor," though generalized in meaning from the quaint 15th century literary meaning... one wonders if the phrase: "Fascinating and revealing that you can't see this." is actually more than a metaphor for "seeing" as "understanding."
If the process by which I "understand" a thing is to create an equivalent "image" in my mind of it, then the metaphor is a mental process.
Similarly, with map making, if the map has an internal mental process analog, then in the cognitive sense of "metaphor" has some relevance.
While many will object, this hypothesis can be tested, by looking at brain function. In particular, the brain map indicates the various parts of the brain active during various mental processes, do the visual regions participate in understanding the discussion related to "Paul's expansion of the meaning of metaphor"?
The map making at least has some recent science... in particular, the actual "map" that exists in rats, a neurological basis for the "cognitive map." While these are correlates (as I'm sure MikeL will be quick to point out, "thar she blows!") it is a compelling scientific hypothesis to explore, that the map is actually a part of brain function.
In this hypothesis, there is a deeper connection of the symbolic visual representation of geo-spatial relationships onto brain function, including the memorizing of the map as an actual physiological process.
Our experience of the territory (or anything else) totally depends on our memory of that experience, so here is an idea that runs counter to the overused saw "the map is not the territory" as an "argument" why content is not where it's at... but to the contrary, content is the only thing, the content of our memory.
In the time before written language was ubiquitous people actually had to remember things, and one technique used to memorize things was to use the "memory palace" the method of loci, which placed the thing to be remembered in a specific place, as if on a shelf in the palace. The recall would be to "walk through" the house and take the memory off the shelf, as it were (metaphorically).
This utilizes the particular trait of spatial memory, which may be a part of the architecture of the brain, a result of evolution, we share it with the rats.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 25, 2016 - 08:15am PT
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last post of the morning before my walk to work...
fMRI has become an important tool in studying the brain... and many criticism have appeared in this thread of the technique itself.
So it was interesting to see the article in last week's Science:
"Brain scans are prone to false positives, study says" referring to a PNAS article:
http://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7900.short
Cluster failure: Why fMRI inferences for spatial extent have inflated false-positive rates
Anders Eklunda, Thomas E. Nicholsd, and Hans Knutssona
Abstract
The most widely used task functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analyses use parametric statistical methods that depend on a variety of assumptions. In this work, we use real resting-state data and a total of 3 million random task group analyses to compute empirical familywise error rates for the fMRI software packages SPM, FSL, and AFNI, as well as a nonparametric permutation method. For a nominal familywise error rate of 5%, the parametric statistical methods are shown to be conservative for voxelwise inference and invalid for clusterwise inference. Our results suggest that the principal cause of the invalid cluster inferences is spatial autocorrelation functions that do not follow the assumed Gaussian shape. By comparison, the nonparametric permutation test is found to produce nominal results for voxelwise as well as clusterwise inference. These findings speak to the need of validating the statistical methods being used in the field of neuroimaging.
those claiming science is a religion have to at least admit that as a religion, it is open about its own beliefs and dogma... and openly critical about the techniques and interpretations of the dogma. I don't think any other religion shares this characteristic, which begs the question regarding the categorization of science as religion.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 25, 2016 - 10:11am PT
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Metaphor as a word originates from Greek, "to transfer" and so we see Willie the Shake transfer the world to a stage, and Paul understanding to seeing... but the work of Magritte "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." as a "visual metaphor" seems to be incorrect, and much better understood in terms of a number of apparent contradictions that arise in symbolic representation. One can look at the work of Gödel for a basic understanding.
The whole point of Magritte's painting is to demonstrate that representation in art is visual metaphor. The image becomes a comparison to the reality it represents. Again, that's why he called it The Treason of Images. A map is artifice in the same manner a painting is. When Jasper Johns played with this idea he painted pictures of maps and targets and in doing so the object depicted and the object itself were one in the same, and, theoretically, the metaphor was eliminated, funny, ironic and very clever.
What I meant as revealing earlier is the remarkable sanctity of data for science even if that data enjoys a certain distance from reality, an interesting idea.
And really, you misrepresent so much of what I've said, I wonder what has actually been read.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 25, 2016 - 10:44am PT
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If this training was not good enough to provide an experience as good as actual flight, they would not be used so extensively.
I actually agree with all you say here, Ed, except with this one statement, which is the key to a crucial distinction.
the simulator does not provide an experience. What it does do is provide sensory content that to the working brain is so close to physical reality that for all practical purposes, the brain can't tell the difference. So in this sense, we can mock up sensory data that is largely if not entirely indistinguishable from "true" reality which is up-loaded from our sense organs.
Being aware of and experiencing said sensory data is another issue altogether, and the machine doesn't provide that. Our mind does. In boning up on AI recently, this is one of the fatal mistakes that often occurs in the literature - the idea that if we can digitally replicate external physical reality, we have the AI thing dicked, as if the objects of consciousness and being conscious of said content were selfsame.
And by the way, I got my start with the whole "mind" investigating partly through working with EEG's and qEEGS during my undergrad days, seeing how consciously manipulating subjective states could effect the brain scan, and how entraining the brain waves changed my subjective states. I've always been intrigued how the causation goes both ways. This was my first introduction into the scientific method so valued on this thread. I have my own story about that which I have never bothered to mention here, but which provided quite an education.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jul 25, 2016 - 04:25pm PT
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I've learned a lot here. I had previously thought that we could objectively function. Take a concert pianist. She is just hitting keys in the way that the printed music presents a "map" for her to subjectively tap the keys.
The music could be the map. I don't have a problem with that. Like I said, It would take me 6 months to explain to another geologist what a relatively small area is without maps. Dude. Maps are my thing. I make them every day.
I think that we get a little egotistical in our arguments here. Not everyone, but some. To provide a little prospective, here is the Pale Blue Dot photograph that Voyager took of Earth from a distance of 3.7 billion miles. Everything you know, you knew, or experienced took place on that dot.
I've blown it up, and I can't see Largo's ego. There is a wonderful shot of Earth beneath Saturn's rings. You might see it there, but you would have to know where to look. There are bigger ego's than his.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 25, 2016 - 05:27pm PT
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I think that we get a little egotistical in our arguments here. Not everyone, but some. To provide a little prospective, here is the Pale Blue Dot photograph that Voyager took of Earth from a distance of 3.7 billion miles. Everything you know, you knew, or experienced took place on that dot.
I'm not sure how this lends perspective to the human condition. That minds are small in scale, that our environment is small compared to the universe, that doesn't really negate the power of the human mind, the important thing it can become, its potential.
Does it? Does it lessen our importance? Do we measure our importance in terms of scale, the scale of the universe? It seems to me like an irrelevant part of the calculus.
This notion of our unimportance based on scale is really a vestige of Christian notions of cosmic importance that for some individuals have failed and disapointed. But since our importance is actually a function of our relationship to each other, why does the size of the universe become any part of our understanding of mind and mind's importance?
Just think, it is mind, the human mind, that comprehends such photographs, that realizes and in a sense owns this vast space through that realization and I think that's pretty spectacular.
But then I think humanity is pretty great too.
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cintune
climber
The Model Home
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Jul 25, 2016 - 05:47pm PT
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Pretty sure Plato actually rounded up a bunch of people and chained them in a cave. It's the only way it makes sense.
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