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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 19, 2016 - 12:49am PT
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"Repeatability through the scientific method is only realized in the subjective mind of the individual."
hmm.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 19, 2016 - 07:54am PT
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Ed: while we are allowed in our leisure to ponder the various philosophies, and our machines are built to serve our purposes (and usually not critical services) an organism faces no such leisure, it literally lives or dies as a consequence of what it does.
Not nearly so much anymore as a mere animal. Even homeless people have public services that largely ensure they will not suffer demise simply because they are without personal resources (which can include skills).
One can speculate that what was once physically necessary in an evolutionary sense is now more socially and psychically necessary. Human life still seems well described by evolution, but not with the same dire consequences as is typically argued here (alone, in the tall grass, while a hungry tiger searches one out). Writing sonnets could easily be more critical to a munificent survival than escaping from tigers.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 19, 2016 - 07:56am PT
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I don't have any idea what the answer is, but so far, everything we know about consciousness stems from brain function.
----
Bollocks. What you mean to say is that everything that we have gleaned from 3rd person perspectives per consciousness derives from brain function. Where else would it come from since 3rd person investigations are hidebound to material investigations.
You've simply reverted back to scienticism, implying that the 3rd person perspective is the whole shooting match per the "real deal." I basically had fed you a description that makes clear the difference between content and awareness and you have still failed to see the ramifications. That, in my opinion, is a fanatical fusion to content - a fanatic being someone who can't change the subject (content) and can't change their minds.
But even you have to admit that arguing back and forth like this has not expanded your knowledge of mind at all. You're simply digging in.
Time to look carefully into Dennett's Folly, Hard AI and see where the chips fall.
And when you say, for the 100th time, that the hard problem is irrelevant, what exactly do you mean by this. I have stated that I believe Chalmers and others flubbed positing the hard problem by anchoring it in content, which can be theoretically explained away by way of mechanical functioning. After all, neroscience has come along way in describing the way data is processed in the brain, but has made no headway whatsoever in providing a mechanical explanation of why matter is conscious.
Subtler thinkers realized ages ago that seeking a 3rd person explanation was irrelevant to the adventure. I disagree. But again, only by looking at Hard AI, Dennett's Folly, and other subjects does the picture start to come into focus.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 19, 2016 - 08:18am PT
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All knowledge is, in the ultimate sense, intimately, ours individually, alone.
Thank you for sharing yours.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 19, 2016 - 09:54am PT
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After all, neroscience has come along way in describing the way data is processed in the brain, but has made no headway whatsoever in providing a mechanical explanation of why matter is conscious.
you are so impatient...
anyway, the "hard problem" is irrelevant because it does not address the actual thing we are interested in: "consciousness."
The "hard problem" addresses the perception we have of "consciousness" which is a functional approximation, largely focused on mediating our social interactions.
You could ask me how to explain the physics of "hyperspace" in Star Wars, which I could not do, and then claim I had failed to answer this "hard problem." Of course, the problem addresses a fiction, so even if I could answer it:
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Hyperspace
it wouldn't have anything to do with physics, which is to say, it could not predict any observable phenomenon, and would be in direct contradiction with many other observations. The "consciousness" referred to in the "hard problem" is a literary device* (at best).
This is what I mean when I say the "hard problem" is irrelevant.
You, Largo, have mostly used it as a rhetorical device without getting into the substance of the argument.
*Hyperspace is a venerable literary artifice, deus ex machina, which brings the universe down to a manageable scale in which to recreate, apparently endlessly, those inspiring WWII Hollywood productions we (at least Largo and Ed) grew up with. It's a buzz-kill to say it, but it is not really going to ever happen...
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 19, 2016 - 11:31am PT
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Here are 12 talking points for the woo jockeys, courtesy of the Great Man, Deepak Chopra...
1. Everyday reality appears to be a given, but on investigation, it reveals itself as a human construct.
2. The building blocks of reality are not tiny physical objects (atoms, subatomic particles) but exist in our awareness, where everything begins and ends as an excitation (activity) in consciousness.
3. We know reality as the experience of observer and observed occurring in the now. The fundamental experience of both observer and observed is in the form of mental sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts (SIFT).
4. Sensations, images, feelings, thoughts are entangled modifications of awareness, the result of social and cultural conditioning and accepted systems of education. Our awareness gets deeply involved in many systems (education, politics, gender, religion, etc.).
5. Systems are arbitrarily made and changed. Therefore, no construct has a privileged position over another. Truth is always relative inside any system.
6. These constructs, however, are intensely real for the individual awareness embedded in it. We allow ourselves to be programmed by such systems and would feel naked and vulnerable without them. In the world's wisdom traditions, this is known as the state of bondage.
7. Excitations of awareness are not as basic as pure, timeless, dimensionless awareness. They modulate pure awareness like a switch that brings the familiar world into existence/experience.
8. Excitations or vibrations take place in the domain of time; in fact, they create the sensation of time itself. Pure awareness is timeless.
9. We are entangled in a vibrational reality that feels real on its own terms but is basically a mental construct, like a dream. To realize this is known as "waking up." To someone who is awake, everything in the phenomenal world exists on the same playing field. As constructs, the same status is shared by birth, death, body, mind, brain, universe, stars, galaxies, the big bang, and God or the gods.
10. Freedom lies in the experience of knowing yourself beyond all constructs. You are pure awareness before the subject/object split came about.
11. All human suffering is the result of attachment to a construct, including fear of the construct we call death. Death is only real within the limits of the construct we manufactured. It doesn't occur to the awareness that stands apart and sees all experiences rising and falling in the timeless moment of now.
12. The ultimate goal of all experience is the same: finding the "real" reality in one's own being.
Deepak Chopra
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/chopra/article/Everyday-Reality-is-a-Human-Construct-9984374.php
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 19, 2016 - 12:36pm PT
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Ed: The "hard problem" addresses the perception we have of "consciousness" which is a functional approximation, . . . .
“Functional.” “Approximation.”
My god, that’s hardly anything really important. I can’t believe that you think that’s what you are.
Stickmen.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 19, 2016 - 12:42pm PT
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HFCS:
I read the 12 points by Chopra. Sure, why not? Got anything to prove it isn’t this way? I mean truth with a capital T. Got any of those that you can be unequivocally sure of, with no wiggle room at all?
Take these 12 points and see if they contradict any part of with Nick Bostrom’s theory.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 19, 2016 - 06:50pm PT
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"I don't have any idea what the answer is, but so far, everything we know about consciousness stems from brain function"
Bollocks
Priceless. So much humor in one little word!
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 19, 2016 - 07:09pm PT
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"Many works of science fiction as well as some forecasts by serious technologists and futurologists predict that enormous amounts of computing power will be available in the future. Let us suppose for a moment that these predictions are correct. One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears. Because their computers would be so powerful, they could run a great many such simulations. Suppose that these simulated people are conscious (as they would be if the simulations were sufficiently fine-grained and if a certain quite widely accepted position in the philosophy of mind is correct). Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race. It is then possible to argue that, if this were the case, we would be rational to think that we are likely among the simulated minds rather than among the original biological ones. Therefore, if we don’t think that we are currently living in a computer simulation, we are not entitled to believe that we will have descendants who will run lots of such simulations of their forebears."
— Nick Bostrom, Are you living in a computer simulation?, 2003
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 19, 2016 - 07:28pm PT
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Are you living in a computer simulation?
Does this question need asking on SuperTopo?
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Dec 19, 2016 - 08:17pm PT
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 19, 2016 - 09:15pm PT
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My god, that’s hardly anything really important. I can’t believe that you think that’s what you are.
interesting and creative excerpt... maybe you should go back and read what was written...
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Dec 19, 2016 - 09:23pm PT
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I rather like the idea of consciousness as a functional approximation to Meta Mind. Now if the Wizard were to divulge info about that peculiar project I could start searching for a homeomorphism.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 20, 2016 - 08:19am PT
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One thing that later generations might do with their super-powerful computers is run detailed simulations of their forebears or of people like their forebears.
Then it could be the case that the vast majority of minds like ours do not belong to the original race but rather to people simulated by the advanced descendants of an original race.
 Nick Bostrom
And couldn't it also be the case that the simulated minds would conceive their own super-powerful computers and run detailed second-order simulations, and...?
Could Universe A simulate itself? Call the simulation A'. Then Universe A' could simulate Universe A'', and so on.
If we are a mathematical universe, there could be never-ending subdivision.
Or more symmetrically, Universe A' could return the favor and simulate Universe A.
Are we like the M.C. Escher hands drawing each other?
Are we like the character in the Robert Heinlein short story who was his own mother and father, through sex change and time travel?
And that is only the start of a long list of science fiction tropes dreamt up as questions about the nature of our reality, following an older idea about an old woman dreaming she is a butterfly, and the butterfly dreaming it is an old woman.
The real question, though, is how could such a question be answered.
Until we find a way to pull back the camera and see the stage our reality sits on, we will not know whether we are a shuffle of molecules that took place only a second ago, a dream, or a computer simulation.
I can't see later generations becoming completely free of klutziness. Even if we grant them super-computers, there would still be bugs in their software, and they would still spill coffee on the works now and then.
Our reality runs too smoothly to be a simulation.
edit:
A wonderful vignette, Dingus. Minds can share.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 20, 2016 - 11:09am PT
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HFCS:
Johnson to Berkeley: “I refute it thus!” (Argumentum ad lapidem.)
It didn’t for Johnson. Physical phenomena does not refute Bostrom’s or a postmodernist’s arguments. That’s due to the nature of reality and the capabilities of words.
Your cartoon is an empirical phenomena. Is IT reality?
Mind starts in the process of imagination. When sensing is not in imagining, then you would be right to call it pure fantasy. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. What you think is a dream (mine or yours) is not a coded message—but rather just a display.
Our lives are enactments of our dreams, and they are like theatre. The faith we put into those enactments are our investments, our commitments, to make something real. They increase their importance and give them substance.
Everything seems imaginal. Nothing that we can say about ourselves or our world can be taken at the level of historical fact, not what happened in childhood, not memories of love or hatred, not what is recalled or not recalled, not even one’s parents, as such. Mental configurations support our own mythologies.
Ed:
Don’t blame me for parsing your writing and making a comment. I quoted what you wrote.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 20, 2016 - 04:33pm PT
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Intelligence is already there perfectly.
All one needs is to sync with it.
Only the unintelligent will try to make something already perfect into something artificial.
The unintelligent do not know where perfect intelligence already exists.
Thus they artificially try to create and ultimately always fail ........
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