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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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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Dec 20, 2016 - 05:49pm PT
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Holy crap, nice TED talk link, HFCS! I've been kind of afraid to admit this but I've suspected for some time that my latest (LG) TV is smarter than me. It's not hard for me to extrapolate. I'm almost afraid to click on your second link.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 20, 2016 - 08:05pm PT
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I hear you, just be sure you cover your smart tv's so-called "ambient light sensor" with a piece of duct tape - it's also a camera to the cloud and beyond. You never know who's watching! :)
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 20, 2016 - 08:28pm PT
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sorry for writing a complicated sentence poorly...
'The "hard problem" addresses the perception we have of "consciousness" which is a functional approximation, largely focused on mediating our social interactions. '
our perception is a functional approximation to whatever "consciousness" is... and this perception is the mediator of social interactions...
I put consciousness in quotes as we have used it in place of mind, etc... in many places...
my main point is that whatever that is, it is unlikely to be exactly like our perception of it... which is also incomplete, as the discussion of "unconscious thought" seems to demonstrate.
But I don't need a some mystical purpose of spiritual affirmation to define "what I am," and even if physical reality is "all there is" it hardly diminishes "me."
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 21, 2016 - 08:47am PT
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Ed:
Thanks. Well, that’s helpful You bring up a few ideas:
(i) consciousness is unclear or currently indescribable
(ii) perception is a mediator between social interactions and (indescribable) consciousness
(iii) unconscious thought—although apparently unavailable to consciousness—demonstrates that one’s perception is not equivalent to consciousness / mind.
There are some other ideas that might help to clarify this morass that you describe.
(A) I don’t think it’s unconscious thought. "Thought" here is not really the right idea from my experience. It’s more like an image, more of a symbol than a sign. You’ve heard of a picture being worth 10,000 words. It’s sort of like that. An image arises in a mindstream as a daydream, a perspective one has of him or herself, a reverie, an instantaneous emotion that seems to put everything in its place, a synchronicity with no apparent physical cues that one can point to, etc.
We dismiss these images because they are not rational. They flit through our minds like starlings in a hurry. They are here, and then they are gone in a millisecond. We can’t articulate them, or even know what they mean. (Interpreting images seems exactly the wrong thing to do.) They are simply displays.
Left alone, our body seems to know what needs to be done (even aesthetically), and just does it. A great deal of it is not rational in any strict sense (not discursively weighing facts, generating options, making calculable decisions), even though I’m sure folks could claim it’s “evolution” at work. (Somehow that response tells us almost nothing. If everything is the result of evolution, then nothing is the result of evolution. There would seem to be a need for discrimination in any theory / idea / framework.)
(B) Just how perception functions as a mediator, between what we think we are aware of and with what we cannot say (what consciousness is), seems poorly specified.
(C) Why would you say that perception *only* mediates social interactions, but not physical interactions? What is it about social phenomena that is so very different than physical phenomena? If I understand your writing correctly, you are implying that our perceptions cannot be wrong about physical phenomena, but they can be wrong about social phenomena. Aren’t they both phenomenological, perceptual?
Again (hate to make a pest of myself here on this topic), the idea that an affinity for spiritual things or views must only be upward-oriented, ascetic, pure, higher functioning, good or ethical, clear, metaphorical, psychically uplifting, sexless, ecstasy, unitary, etc. presents a bias that excludes much of what most of us know as life and living.
The ugly, the bad, the messy, the mundane, the soiled and smelly, materialism, sadness and depression, an apparent lack of the good, the salt of living (blood, urine, sweat) that comes from dissolutions are all equal parts of life as we know it. Nirvana comes with samsara. There is no difference, really.
Nothing that we can describe seems to move us or the world forward, constantly building to greater munificence and sophisticated complexity. Everything seems chaotic, impermanent, dissolving, breaking-down. It appears that dissolution is the only way that anything can get resolved, recreated, or reformed. Chaos begets creativity, and vice verses. Perhaps we could consider the Myth of the Phoenix re-labelled as “evolution.”
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 21, 2016 - 09:03am PT
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As we have seen, since its appearance in 1980 the Chinese Room argument has sparked discussion across disciplines. Despite the extensive discussion there is still no consensus as to whether the argument is sound.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
'This work investigates the feasibility of building high-level features from only unlabeled data. A positive answer to this question will give rise to two significant results. Practically, this provides an inexpensive way to develop features from unlabeled data. But perhaps more importantly, it answers an intriguing question as to whether the specificity of the “grandmother neuron” could possibly be learned from unlabeled data. Informally, this would suggest that it is at least in principle possible that a baby learns to group faces into one class because it has seen many of them and not because it is guided by supervision or rewards.'
http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/unsupervised_icml2012.pdf
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Dec 21, 2016 - 10:48am PT
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There is a nice article in last Sunday's NY Times Magazine, Going Neural, that describes how Google is using AI, mainly with respect to speech translation, and references a few of the researchers in Ed's last link. Neural networks seem to be coming into their own and appear to be the future of machine learning.
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