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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jan 19, 2017 - 11:33pm PT
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not reality, but an adequate approximation to it...
No, reality. How could evolution which bestows upon us through natural selection the devices we find necessary to survive allow us anything but senses that directly indicate the reality around us necessary to that survival? Not so much an approximation as an exacting structure of indicators reflecting the surrounding environment, reflecting reality in a language understandable to the mind.
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TWP
Trad climber
Mancos, CO & Bend, OR
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Jan 19, 2017 - 11:54pm PT
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Would any one "mind" if I just said I really enjoy this thread?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 20, 2017 - 07:51am PT
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You recognize the consciousness of your dog and you're damn sure that dog feels something in a very similar way to the way that you do and you don't need some test to make sure of that, and it's done through your intuitive understanding and recognition of the "other" in that animal.
Your intuition here is bolstered by genetics and biology we share with dogs.
Dogs have also been selectively bred by humans to be simpatico with humans, starting from wolves whose social behavior had similarity to that of humans.
It is a far wider gulf between organisms and machines, but it was shown long ago that machines can reproduce themselves and that a machine could produce a more complicated machine than itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_constructor
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jan 20, 2017 - 08:04am PT
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Many things fit underneath the label “intuition,” “hot cognition” being one of them. Underneath that particular label we can find autonomic processing, emotion, instinct, hard-wired responses, and inculcated cultural institutionalization and socialization. Look at what all psychology refers to in personality and behavior. What is love, infatuation, anger, surprise, sadness, satisfaction, etc?
I understand how it might be difficult to verify and validate intuition in any of these forms.
You look at your dog or cat, and you “know” where they’re at, even if they don’t. That’s been one of the terrific things that came out of all of the work on facial recognition (Navarro (an FBI profiler), Ekman’s work, and others). People can “read” other people’s disposition, not know how they are doing it, and the person whose disposition is being read doesn’t even know that they are in a particular state of being.
“NO, I’M NOT ANGRY WITH YOU!” ((Yeah, . . . sure you aren’t.))
We somehow “measure” facial configurations (underlied by 150 muscles—half of which are consciously uncontrollable); and we know. The number of interpretations / speculations about how that happens is perhaps beyond measurement.
That thing with your dog . . . that’s relatively easy.
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jstan
climber
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Jan 20, 2017 - 12:32pm PT
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Ed:you're eyes fake you out... your ears fake you out... nearly every perception you have is fake.
You really can see very little in the center of your field of view where the retina connects to the optic nerve. How is it then that we have the perception of a continuous image? It is known that our visual system employs distributed processing to fill in that dead area. Where there has been recent processing of images from the periphery those memories are extended into the dead area to give the perception of a continuous real time image. Remember those of our antecedents who could not function using milliwatts to provide images in milliseconds ended up providing food for creatures who did have this capability.
Now suppose ones age is such that this visual extrapolation is impeded to the degree that it cannot be performed in the required time. One might reasonably expect the system will then patch in some other data designed to extend survival. That data might well center on possible dangerous creatures and moving ones. After all, children awakening at night do seem to see dragons crawling under their bed.
My short term memory is not what it once was. So I actually expect some of the phenomena I now observe. Immediately upon awakening from deep sleep in a dark room where the visual system has no recent peripheral data, I occasionally think I can see another person - who is moving. It is perhaps better described as a perception and goes away in a couple of seconds, but it really is a trip.
Over the past five million years or so the design work that went into us went through thousands of iterations and came out with a final device far better than one might have expected. This is also why we in our daily activities depend critically upon confirmations of our sensory and intellectual outputs. Galileo was pretty smart.
Confirmations, unfortunately, are rare to nonexistent on ST.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jan 20, 2017 - 12:37pm PT
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Yeah, they are, Ed.
(Or, perhaps you loaded that script into your brain at 6 months.)
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jan 20, 2017 - 12:51pm PT
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Over the past five million years or so the design work that went into us went through thousands of iterations and came out with a final device far better than one might have expected. This is also why we in our daily activities depend critically upon confirmations of our sensory and intellectual outputs. Galileo was pretty smart.
We do depend on a rational critique of our sensory input and we recognize through that critique when that sensory input fails us. What is optimal is a balance between a rational, sensory and emotional structure with which we can live the best life. When the compass is drawn too aggresively in any one direction (as in the absolute authority of science) things become problematic.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 20, 2017 - 01:34pm PT
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How is it then that we have the perception of a continuous image?
the perception is based on a model that presumes that the visual field is continuous, and that it changes relatively slowly... humans also have the habit of moving their visual field around and scanning... which takes time.
It is well known that you can make changes around the visual field that are not perceived if you have someone looking at one area in that field... you have to do it quickly enough...
http://www.testvision.org
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jstan
climber
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Jan 20, 2017 - 02:13pm PT
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P/R:What is optimal is a balance between a rational, sensory and emotional structure with which we can live the best life. When the compass is drawn too aggresively in any one direction (as in the absolute authority of science) things become problematic.
I need help on this. Problematic? How so?
First of all, science is not "absolute". Science can tell us rain is fifty percent likely today. It can never tell us something is certain. About the best that has been achieved is calculation and agreement with material world events out to ten decimal places. This is exceptional however.
Paul if you are implying we should expect events in the material world to attempt to satisfy our needs for subjective emotional balance, I have bad news for you. If you want to predict how the material world will behave, use science.
Your emotions are simply potentials running around in your brain. Those potentials are highly subjective. I can make sense of your quote above if I assume you worry you will, one day, have your head plugged into a computer to give you the balance you desire.
My suggestion? As to desires- don't be so picky. Balance is something YOU will have to find when you have need of it.
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WBraun
climber
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Jan 20, 2017 - 05:14pm PT
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If you want to predict how the material world will behave, use science.
But we living beings ourselves are NOT and never ever material.
Therefore you are only studying your dress and never Yourselves as you really are.
Thus .... the sum substance of your so called science never ultimately does anything for you except to fall further into the material illusionary energies .....
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jstan
climber
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Jan 20, 2017 - 06:42pm PT
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While I do not always agree with Werner, I have the highest regard for what he has done over the last fifty years.
W/B: But we living beings ourselves are NOT and never ever material.
Let me tell a story, if you will. While scouting cliffs near Mouth of Seneca I once stepped through a barbed wire fence. I thought nothing was amiss until I looked down and saw a hole in the ground eight inches in diameter and shaped like a hoof print. Looking up I beheld a two ton bull at full gallop coming towards me. Now there is no first principle calculation based on a firm model allowing us to predict what a bull will do. But we do have considerable statistics. Based upon those satistics and my concept that imprisoning a two ton animal used to roaming square miles in search of mates will be pissed. Pretty generally pissed, I thought it best to make my own tracks back across the fence, which this writing should indicate to you, I accomplished successfully.
Those parts of the material world for which we do not have a firm model are subject every day, to statistical analysis. I hope I have addressed Werner’s valuable comment.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jan 21, 2017 - 07:44am PT
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Jstan: Your emotions are simply potentials running around in your brain.
Where in the heck did you get this idea?
. . . to satisfy our needs for subjective emotional balance, . . . .
This is a conceptualization of something that science does not have a good handle on. To state that there are emotions and that they somehow stipulate a need or give rise to an imbalance is a purely psychological point of view. (Psychology comes from the Greek notion of a psyche; and a psyche is not a tangible or material thing. It, too, is another concept, a model, a notion that tends to similarity, but never exactly.)
Oh, yeah: there is chemistry, and the chemistry has been associated with behaviors. Cause and effect? (Look, everything is associated with everything else. When you come to an R-Square close to 1.0, then you might have isolated a cause. No field of study provides those kinds of numbers.)
Like most things in science, we don’t know what these “things” (emotions) really are, but we act as though we do because we can simulate them in an artificial environment and run models to see if they mimic what we see. (Not unlike the script that Ed provided “showing” what “intutition” is. The pointer only showed us what it *could be.*) Those artificial environments are almost purely mental constructs (imagination) “validated” by variables driving a model based upon further speculation. There is no hard and fast starting place, nor is there a final finding that stands the test of time.
Got an emotion? Great. Bring it out so that we can all examine and measure it.
(Can’t do that? Then, what the heck is being talked about?)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 21, 2017 - 08:27am PT
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Like most things in science, we don’t know what these “things” (emotions) really are
Science is not a method for finding out what a thing is.
But if you did not have potentials running around in your brain, you would not have emotions.
We do learn about things when we ask good questions.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jan 21, 2017 - 10:26am PT
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Like most things in science, we don’t know what these “things” (emotions) really ar
Perhaps. But "we" have some darn good ideas. For those of you who normally begin an inquiry of fundamental human traits in general by considering somewhere else other than humans as biologic entities, you are at a severe disadvantage. You are likely taking the long way home.
Let me indulge in a bit of reductionism and evolutionary determinism and boldly suggest that emotions are primary survival tools prompting precipitous action on behalf of a naked ape in the face of environmental change and opportunity.
Subsequent developments in the story of emotion across the history of our species is a "downstream effect."
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jan 21, 2017 - 10:42am PT
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Love, beauty, the sublime, virtue: reduce the emotional experience of these things to the vestiges of primary, evolutionary survival tools and I think you begin to lose something. Their profundity in terms of our experience and culture led directly to the scientific method after all. What is the engine of human knowledge if not an emotion insisting on the end of mystery?
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jan 21, 2017 - 10:59am PT
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I think you begin to lose something
Not me personally. If anything I gain, and have gained a clearer understanding and a much deeper appreciation of the nature of emotion. When embarking upon a productive inquiry of such a thing as emotion one must begin at the fundamental stages. If on the other hand you begin at the lofty feelings encountered by gazing up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel then your understanding of emotion is truncated to that experience. It would be like starting at differential calculus and working your way backwards to a discovery of counting bean bags in kindergarten.
Which is of course possible. Maybe that's how Erdos did it. Ask JGill .
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jan 21, 2017 - 11:38am PT
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It would be like starting at differential calculus and working your way backwards to a discovery of counting bean bags in kindergarten.
I can't imagine someone describing the equivalency of bean bag counting and calculus. And I certainly can't imagine someone describing the aesthetic equivalency of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling and the "sexy Bowerbird."
I just don't buy the bit that humanity and "Humanity's Mind" is simply another corporeal speck of irrelevance in a vast and indifferent universe.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 21, 2017 - 11:44am PT
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And I certainly can't imagine someone describing the aesthetic equivalency of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling and the "sexy Bowerbird." '
I'm sure the bowerbirds don't imagine that the Sistine Chapel is aesthetically equivalent to their bower, either...
yet we both occupy the Earth at the same time. Imagine that.
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