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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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The use of the word aware here is proper, for it pertains more to a mechanical response that a conscious response.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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I like where you're going with this, Jgill. Nicely presented.
This kind of thinking is not necessarily connected to reality as much as it is with a sense of craft, not unlike what Largo and Ward and Syncorax are referring to, no?
For my part, things of beauty are their own rewards. An idea or concept can be beautiful.
I am not saying that what you are offering / presenting is true or not true. I honestly don't know.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Me neither, Mike. Just playing around here. Too bad Rgold and Yanqui don't participate. Their knowledge of abstract math is way ahead of mine!
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 10, 2016 - 08:11am PT
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Could there be a homeomorphism between the electrical activity in these devices we use to communicate with each other on Supertopo, and what we see on our screens? If so, what would compose the sets in the domain and range, if the previous example can be followed?
edit: Not all the devices, just pick one.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 10, 2016 - 08:48am PT
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Ed: it [a scientific field of study called, “Everything”] is referred to as physics...
:-D
That is funny.
(What a strange notion "funny" is.)
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 10, 2016 - 01:40pm PT
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Look at the painting of a single pixel. Ultimately, a certain electrical impulse or set of impulses paints the pixel. Does a separate electrical impulse set have the same effect? Those of you in computers chime in. So there may be the rudiments of a 1:1 function here. The same is not true of computer programs and images. I can write several different BASIC programs that paint the same image, say a circle. The more interesting question is the relationship between those pixel-painting impulses and what you experience subjectively looking at the image on the screen.
A metric is possible for those impulses, but is a metric possible for your subjective experiences in this regard? I doubt it. So, one topological space (TS) has as elements various electrical impulses, and the open sets derive easily from a metric. The other tentative TS is a whole other ball game and probably doesn't allow a simple metric, so that the open sets there would have to be determined some other way. A suggestion would be welcome here. Remember, all unions (of open sets) are open sets and finite intersections are open sets.
In meditation certain brain waves as measured by EEGs correspond to certain internal experiences. For instance, theta waves are associated with drowsiness and meditative states. Those waves can be characterized by their frequencies - number of cycles between consecutive peaks per second. A simple metric would simply look at the (positive) differences in frequencies. This vastly oversimplifies the situation, of course. But, again, there is the question of devising open sets of meditative experiences.
I'm kinda out of my depth here!
(If you're interested, a metric space is a set of elements and a non-negative function that mimics "distance" between elements: d(x,y)>=0,d(x,x)=0, d(x,y)=d(y,x), d(x,y)<=d(x,z)+d(z,y).
form {y:d(x,y)<r} for all x and r>0. Then take unions and (finite) intersections to get open sets.)
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Dec 10, 2016 - 05:36pm PT
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Too bad Rgold and Yanqui don't participate.
I'm checking in from time to time but I really need to finish up the real deal (an article I'm writing with my office mate) so I can get it sent off before I head out on summer vacation. Good luck with the mind thing!
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 10, 2016 - 06:17pm PT
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Good luck with "the real deal."
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 10, 2016 - 06:36pm PT
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It isn't important if we reach a goal here, here, jgill, but it is fun to explore possibilities for progress. Thanks for your ideas.
I can see great difficulties in trying to match brain activity with what I understand some posters here to mean by experience. In one sense, experience is a seamless whole, or so it appears sometimes, and there might be objection to breaking it up into pieces, as in elements of a set.
If you were trying to align brain activity with so-called subjective experiences, how would you attempt to assess the subjective experiences? By asking for a running account from the subject?
Back in the 80s a European researcher put micro-electrodes into a nerve in the arm of volunteers. The nerve was known anatomically to connect sensory endings in the skin with the spinal cord and brain. By stimulating the whole nerve at a distance from the micro-electrode while using a micro-manipulator to move the micro-electrode he could isolate the signal from a single axon. Then he would stimulate the skin area innervated by the nerve until he had located the sensory receptor and determined the stimulus it was specialized for: heat, pressure, pain, etc. This could be done while the subject reported their sensations.
However, it would be far more difficult to keep track of the millions of sensory inputs to the brain, and the brain's own internal whirlpools of thought, if that were necessary to compare subjective experience with brain activity in real time.
Even if we had this:
Implants digitize thoughts and affect, routing them through the worldwide web. All knowledge is instantly accessible, every person a thought away.
How would you know that the thoughts you received were the ones that were sent? Would there be a translation problem? Everyone has a different history of life experiences, which may color their feelings about any particular experience.
But if it were possible, why stop with humans? Why not wire other creatures into your web?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 10, 2016 - 08:20pm PT
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From the staggering complexity you have described, I suspect any valid attempt to identify topological spaces and concurrent homeomorphisms would spin off into strange intellectual territory, like the following:
Probabilistic Topological Spaces
And that's just the simple objective side.
Tononi's Phi function (Integrated Information Theory) wanders around in a miasma of probability and is non-computable as well.
IIT addresses the mind-body problem by proposing an identity between phenomenological properties of experience and causal properties of physical systems: The conceptual structure specified by a complex of elements in a state is identical to its experience (Wiki)
Tononi has been working on this since 2004 and I don't think it has put a dent in the "Hard Problem." Too much for me.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 11, 2016 - 10:31am PT
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When it comes to brain, we are still unable to look at large numbers of neurons while keeping track of each neuron's activity and its effect on the activity of other neurons.
Simulations that capture some of what neurons do have promise for answering questions relevant to perception, categorization, and memory.
However, it seems unlikely that there would be any point in trying to simulate human feelings in neural networks.
By accident I recently came across a curious sign of our times called a DARPA challenge. The 2015 challenge was to construct a human-like robot. It was not required that the robot should pass a Turing test or give care to nursing home residents. The successful robot should be able to:
1. Get into a standard human vehicle and drive it to a specified location.
2. Get out of the vehicle and travel across rubble.
3. Clear obstacles from a doorway.
4. Open the door, and enter the building.
5. Find a leaking pipe and close the associated valve.
6. Reconnect a hose or cable.
7. Climb a ladder.
8. Grab a tool from the site, break through a concrete wall and exit.
I like number 8, but I believe the 2015 DARPA Challenge found no robot able to perform the simple tasks above.
But if we ever do get a way to look at human brain activity with high resolution in space and time, it may still be possible to explore the connection between that brain activity and 1st person subjective experience. One approach might be to record the brain activity in a person whose behavior is considered to be closely connected to subjective feelings. Perhaps a composer, a conductor, a pianist, a dancer, an artist, a jazz musician. Then there might be a way to look for the sort of correspondences which jgill is talking about.
Of course, we might need to rely on good machines and software to do the analysis.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 11, 2016 - 11:27am PT
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There are formidable challenges to trying to bridge the gap between 1st and 3rd person phenomenon, including the methods we use, seeming that most if not all known investigative modes derive exclusively from one or the other perspective, and use the criteria of a given perspective to evaluate success. What's more, the language and actual phenomenon are so qualitatively different that if there is a way to talk about both at the same time, that way is anything but clear. It only confuses the issue when one or the other camp insists that they ARE talking about both 1st and 3rd person phenomenon while camped in one or the other mode. Ergo inflation, or non-statements like "you only think 1st person experience exists." Bicker the point if you want, but it doesn't lead to new insight nor yet any breakthroughs.
Several obvious things to consider: No one can directly observe, from a 3rd perspective, the subjective life of anyone person. We can't read minds or feel what Ed is feeling or dream his dreams and understand his fears and desires and so forth. Not directly. And 3rd person inquiries are by design inquiries geared to frame external objects and phenomenon at mind-independent. So if we are trying to quantify or even "see" what is unseen, with a method geared to ignore the unseen "observer" and focus on the tangible, we are really up against it.
Even more difficult and the cause of all manner of confusion and conflation is the crucial difference between content and awareness, the crucial component is sentience and mind. 3rd person investigations can go far if not all the way in quantifying the process by which subjective content (feelings, thoughts, sensations, memories, etc) arises, but the mere process and existence of this content makes no matter unless a subject is aware of it happening. And the most crucial error made here (IMO) is that the default position is normally to posit awareness in terms of functionalism, a phenomenon that itself is task oriented and is entirely beholden to tasks - to doing this or that and responding to stimulus in determined ways. This is not at all true, but this can only be understood and made clear by doing some subjective adventures and empirically learning as much.
I think that one possible angle at starting to bridge the gap is tackle so called detection theory or signal detection theory - an attempt to quantify the ability to discern between information-bearing patterns - called stimulus in living organisms, and signal in machines. From a third person persepctive (note Ed's example of the driverless car) they look one and the same. But as you bore in and start comparing and contrasting, the stark differences start to shine through, and they are not issues of content or tasks at all, rather about awareness itself.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 11, 2016 - 01:20pm PT
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We can't read minds or feel what Ed is feeling or dream his dreams and understand his fears and desires and so forth.
how do you know that "Ed" has feelings, dreams, fears, desires and so forth?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 11, 2016 - 01:49pm PT
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From my 3rd person perspective, since there is no external object to measure per your direct experience, only the subject (you) can "know" in the way your are presenting this. But one wonders if there is such a thing as 3rd person knowing. Screwy question since there is no 3rd person, it's just what the 1st person does when discursively wrangling content, data, etc.
But how do You know you have impulses to ask that question and the experience of typing on the keyboard? Or do you "only think" you have the impulses, the self-awareness of same, and the experience of typing on the keyboard?
If you only think you do (experience = brain output), what criteria would you require to prove it was so - that you actually do have the impulses, the self awareness and the experience of typing?
CONFLATION WARNING! "What is REALLY going on is that the neuro substrate...." After all, what isn't physical? From the 3rd person perspective, what chance do you have of seeing anything BUT the physical, especially using a modality that seeks observer independent data? You're asking an apple to be an orange, and when it can't be one, instead of recognizing the limitations of a perspective, you cram it into square hole and say, Viola, THAT'S what IT is: Physical functioning. We just THINK we have experience.
Just note the switch from 1st to 3rd person, and the focus on content.
As I said, the machine model is a form of functionalism, built only to wrangle intake, processing, behavior and responses. Only when we start contrasting a sentient human being and a super duper Frankenstein AI "dood" do the difference hove into view, but it's not easy to do.
Basically the challenge, as mentioned, is to dive into detection theory or signal detection theory (information-bearing patterns), surveying the stimulus in living organisms, and the signal in machines, and the "awareness" involved, and only then do the differences start showing up.
JL
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 11, 2016 - 05:05pm PT
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As I said, the machine model is a form of functionalism, built only to wrangle intake, processing, behavior and responses. Only when we start contrasting a sentient human being and a super duper Frankenstein AI "dood" do the difference hove into view, but it's not easy to do.
Indeed.
What is it you propose to use as contrast in the sentient human being?
And where is this super duper Frankenstein AI "dood?"
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 11, 2016 - 05:58pm PT
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Largo, was that an answer to my question?
maybe you could spend a little more time and make it a bit more understandable if it was...
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 11, 2016 - 06:17pm PT
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maybe the premise of the story, the discovery of the "life force" and its use to "animate" the "creature" isn't very interesting...
...although it seems a concept very much alive in this thread...
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 11, 2016 - 07:46pm PT
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MH2: it seems unlikely that there would be any point in trying to simulate human feelings in neural networks.
This would be an ignorant thing to say, especially for someone who knows about neuroscience research.
Maybe I don't understand what you wanted to say. I hope you are not saying that feelings are useless, irrelevant, or unimportant.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 11, 2016 - 08:32pm PT
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are there any female scientists posting to this thread?
probably shows better judgement that there are none.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 11, 2016 - 08:40pm PT
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Surely you science sausages . . .
Clearly an inability to imagine females as scientists, after all the efforts to recruit them into those disciplines. Women should probably read and write poetry - a higher calling.
;>)
Is it possible to dissect an experience? Even in a broad sense? An experience takes place over a span of time, and at each instant there is a kind of snapshot of the overall thing. Like Zeno's Arrow or freezing the film of a movie nothing occurs in each instant, although reintroducing the flow of time animates the process. An experience is like a function of many, many variables, some independent, others not so, F(x,y,z,...) where x=x(t), y=y(t), z=z(t), ...
More likely than not an experience is a continuous function, without dramatic changes from instant to instant. There are , however, what Rene Thom called "catastrophes" (Catastrophe Theory) where abrupt transitions do occur, or at least from our human perspective they seem abrupt. Is there any such thing in the real world as "completely abrupt", phenomena dramatically changing on the finest possible time scale?
It is easy to devise a mathematical function that does this. E.g., F(t)=0 if t<1 and F(t)=1 otherwise. However, reality may not work that way. If we were to freeze an experience at each instant (don’t ask me to be precise) and obtain a sequence of snapshots, could we call these slices “elements” of the experience? And if so, could we then begin to speculate on “open sets” of an experience? Could we then do a similar thing to the physical mechanisms of the experience, create a metric, and define open sets there? Then look for a homeomrphism?
Just BS ramblings.
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