What is "Mind?"

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eeyonkee

Trad climber

Golden, CO

Dec 20, 2016 - 05:49pm PT

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.

High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber

Dec 20, 2016 - 08:05pm PT

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! :)

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Dec 20, 2016 - 08:28pm PT

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."

MikeL

Social climber

Southern Arizona

Dec 21, 2016 - 08:47am PT

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.”

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Dec 21, 2016 - 09:03am PT

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

eeyonkee

Trad climber

Golden, CO

Dec 21, 2016 - 10:48am PT

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.

jgill

Boulder climber

The high prairie of southern Colorado

Dec 21, 2016 - 03:25pm PT

If we are a mathematical universe, there could be never-ending subdivision

Omnifurcation at every instant. Perhaps our consciousness allows us to follow a path through this bewildering process. If so, do those alternate universes "exist" in some sense and are accessible to us only through our imaginations?

On another topic: I was talking with a couple of ex-academics (Wife, Nancy, a former HS English teacher, and a retired math professor and old colleague) about whether Critical Thinking can be taught. A brief search via Google shows a wide array of positions on the subject. Any thoughts here, among the citizens of the thread?

eeyonkee

Trad climber

Golden, CO

Dec 21, 2016 - 03:39pm PT

Consciousness is something that has evolved. It's not magic. It's the science itself -- the way the universe works -- that is the magic. We are puppets in the magic theatre. We aren't the Wizard of Oz (actually, if you're familiar with the ending, I guess we are).

Not to say that consciousness can't do a lot of creative things.

Oh yeah, jgill, in spite of my belief that we don't have free will, I'm going to go with "Yes" on the critical thinking skills.

Also, I don't believe that we are a "mathematical universe". I do believe that we live in a universe that exists independently of my (or Largo's or MikeL's) perception of it.

eeyonkee

Trad climber

Golden, CO

Dec 21, 2016 - 04:12pm PT

I want to throw out something a little different. I'm interested in why we believe as we do. It occurred to me that determining this in the most parsimonious manner possible would be a worthwhile goal. Here's my take with respect to positions on this thread.

1. Religion; Yes/No
2. Liberal Arts vs. Science Education

WBraun

climber

Dec 21, 2016 - 04:13pm PT

Nothing in the universe is fully independent ever as everything within the universe is part parcel of that whole and thus the part parcels have only minute independence completely ultimately dependent on that whole ........

MH2

Boulder climber

Andy Cairns

Dec 21, 2016 - 04:31pm PT

Was Iggy Pop a climber?

He was a couple years after Antonioni.

[Click to View YouTube Video]

edit:

And about a decade before Bryan Burdo's route on South Early Winters Spire.

eeyonkee

Trad climber

Golden, CO

Dec 21, 2016 - 04:51pm PT

If he wasn't, I'd wager he'd be climbing better than me with about two month's training.

MH2

Boulder climber

Andy Cairns

Dec 21, 2016 - 05:38pm PT

Wonders never cease.

High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber

Dec 21, 2016 - 07:19pm PT

the output of an automaton - past, present and future...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html

Google’s decision to reorganize itself around A.I. was the first major manifestation of what has become an industrywide machine-learning delirium.

What is at stake is not just one more piecemeal innovation but control over what very well could represent an entirely new computational platform: pervasive, ambient artificial intelligence.

The Thinking Machine...

[Click to View YouTube Video]

The kinds of jobs taken by automatons will no longer be just repetitive tasks that were once — unfairly, it ought to be emphasized — associated with the supposed lower intelligence of the uneducated classes. We’re not only talking about three and a half million truck drivers who may soon lack careers. We’re talking about inventory managers, economists, financial advisers, real estate agents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aygSMgK3BEM

MikeL

Social climber

Southern Arizona

Dec 21, 2016 - 07:29pm PT

eeyonkee:

Look at your own thoughts and try to follow them. Report what you see in their emergence, their existence, and their dissolution to be. Forget content. Quit trying to put everything into categories and polarities.

Do that and you will provide your own answers. They happen to be the only ones that really matter.

jgill

Boulder climber

The high prairie of southern Colorado

Dec 22, 2016 - 07:18pm PT

Regarding AI and its putative dangers, why be concerned if robots have consciousness, when the real challenge is whether they will have free will?

Are we absolutely certain that free will ⇒ consciousness?

Suppose, as a machine, I am faced with deciding to take path A or path B. I am not conscious, but my very sophisticated computer brain analyzes the question and "makes a decision" which to an onlooker seems an exercise in free will.

Consciousness ⇒ free will remains open to debate.

MH2

Boulder climber

Andy Cairns

Dec 22, 2016 - 08:21pm PT

I seem to remember a person of curiosity who had themselves committed to a mental institution to see if they could demonstrate sufficient evidence of sanity to the doctors monitoring the patients to get a discharge. It was not easy to prove one's mental normalcy once one was on the inside.

This issue has no doubt been covered on WestWorld, though I wouldn't know, but if you were to be put amongst a group of convincingly human-like artificial intelligences, how would you convince someone else you were human and not a machine? Maybe an x-ray would be enough, but what if you had to do it just by talking?