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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 8, 2011 - 07:25pm PT
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Healyje -You misconstrue what I was suggesting. I was speaking of how consciousness / subjective awareness is likely organized under the hood; something that is not open to 'work' or 'consolidation'. What you are talking about would be more a matter of 'calming' and 'focusing' for a simpler, cleaner illusion.
I'm saying is there likely is no monolithic subjective awareness of any kind, but rather a coherent, self-organizing, standing wavefront of many elements of 'awareness' acting as an integrated [fractal] whole and constantly churning (reorganizing) at a sub-millisecond speed. The coherence and self-organized integration results in the illusion of a monolith subjective awareness.
This might make sense from a digital processing model, but from a Zen model, for example, you have jumbled raw awareness with discursive processing and your subjective awareness, monolith or otherwise, is tied to interpretative functioning - a minor part of mind. What´s more, under the hood can represent your genetic predisposition, or nature, while environmental and intentional factors would represent nurture in the old language. Both factor into the opera.
JL
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MH2
climber
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The history of potato clocks is the subject of Dobson's magnificent pamphlet On The History Of Potato Clocks. Sadly, it is out of print. Those of you lucky enough to have read it will know that it caused a good deal of controversy among the experts, sharply dividing the world of potato chronometry into two hostile camps. Broadly speaking, there were the potato-ists, who held that the defining characteristic of the potato clock is its “potato-ness”, vying with the clockists, who are wedded to the idea that the keeping of accurate time is the crux of the matter. Dobson himself refused to take sides, arguing with some elegance that both potato and clock are equally important in what it means to be a potato clock.
The pamphleteer, thundered one anonymous correspondent, claims that he knows what it is like to be a potato clock. This is arrant twaddle. A potato clock is made of potatoes and a few bits of wire and other things. Dobson is simply a flawed biped, and one whose brain is obviously not working properly.
Where does this leave us? We stand at the dawn of a new millennium, one in which the potato clock will have a decisive part to play, even if we do not yet know with any precision what that part will be. Is our perception of time, as measured by potatoes, qualitatively different, better or worse than other methods of keeping time, more or less attuned to nature, to the cycle of the seasons, to the sun and the moon and the stars, to the tides of the sea and the life cycle of beings both tiny and huge? We need to answer these questions with some urgency, and that is why I propose that we storm the gates of all those remote and secretive buildings where so-called atomic clocks with their pinpoint accuracy are ticktocking away, and we wrench them from their fixtures and stamp them to bits under our big boots, and we replace them all with potato clocks. I, for one, foresee our triumph.
Thank you. My next lecture will take place in the pie shop annexe where I will be addressing the exciting topic Measuring Distance By Laying Celery Sticks End To End.
http://hootingyard.org/archive/apr06.htm#2006-04-10-1
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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healyje: wave of fractal awarelets
jogill: Having trouble wrapping my mind around this one. Fractals are very popular right now, like cellular automata a few years ago. Wolfram thought CA explained everything. In the long run fractals may tend to be seen as a little too regular and simplistic. Pretty pictures, though! (and of course, as is frequently the case, I could be wrong!)
jogill, my interest in the topic goes back to the 80's when I was at DEC's R&D Lab and later influenced by some of Bart Kosko's early work. I could probably explain the premise better, but I'm your basic bit wrangler and no doubt lack the requisite physics and math to succinctly explain myself to the likes of you, Ed, and RGold (though I do think maybe Tom picked up on the gist of what I was saying).
Again, I personally don't think anything about the brain or mind is monolithic in any respect (except of course discrete, atomic components like neurons, ganglia, glands and perhaps the brainstem). That both, along with Largo's 'subjective experience' are actually more a constantly recomposing symphony (think 'swarm') of what I'm calling 'awarelets'. I don't really want to describe those as a 'unit of awareness' as "unit" is a bit too binding of a term for what I'm thinking of in the same way 'bit' doesn't really quite do justice to a qubit. In the scenario I see you can recurse from the organized whole down through 'awarelets' on across the mind-brain mapping and through the brain itself, hence the sideways recursion reference to 'fractal'.
And given the last few years conjecture around the role of quantum coherence in photosynthesis I can't help wonder if we won't find it also plays a role in how the brain operates as well. We are gaining some understanding around how Purkinje and Glial cells assist in the physical wiring of the brain, but the sheer numbers of axon connections in the resulting network[s] lead me to wonder if coherence doesn't play a role in how the overall network operates. I also wonder if the 'network architecture' isn't incredibly hierarchal, distributed and organized 'fractally' in the sense of its self-assembly.
healyje: You misconstrue what I was suggesting. I was speaking of how consciousness / subjective awareness is likely organized under the hood; something that is not open to 'work' or 'consolidation'. What you are talking about would be more a matter of 'calming' and 'focusing' for a simpler, cleaner illusion.
I'm saying is there likely is no monolithic subjective awareness of any kind, but rather a coherent, self-organizing, standing wavefront of many elements of 'awareness' acting as an integrated [fractal] whole and constantly churning (reorganizing) at a sub-millisecond speed. The coherence and self-organized integration results in the illusion of a monolith subjective awareness.
Largo: This might make sense from a digital processing model, but from a Zen model, for example, you have jumbled raw awareness with discursive processing and your subjective awareness, monolith or otherwise, is tied to interpretative functioning - a minor part of mind. What´s more, under the hood can represent your genetic predisposition, or nature, while environmental and intentional factors would represent nurture in the old language. Both factor into the opera.
What I'm suggesting has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that could in any remote way be characterized by a "digital processing model". But, your vision of what computing is, and must be, appears quite digital, and limited. Also, I'm not at all convinced it's even possible to develop an inorganic emulation of what I have in mind. We are in the fetus stage of computational biomimetics and building lego block emulations of neurons (even petabytes of them) doesn't even get our foot in the door of what's likely really going on (and I suspect the physical architecture of the brain is the dead simplest part of the whole affair).
P.S. Cintune, that's sure a cool eye fossil...
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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You folks need to go watch The Matrix and then read some Phillip K. Dick novels.
Really. How do you know that you aren't insane and are hallucinating your life while locked up in a room?
Werner. When I said knowing the limits of what you know is important, it is because people take a little data and then jump to all kinds of crazy conclusions. A little critical thinking helps with that.
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WBraun
climber
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Base -- "Really. How do you know that you aren't insane and are hallucinating your life while locked up in a room?"
That's not far from the truth. Actually pretty accurate.
That's why it's so important to actually understand and learn the "Absolute Truth".
Once one gets a glimpse of that then your statement can be seen as true too .....
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Yes, Werner, I believe the need for teachers, too. Overcoming a few million years of karmic, emotional, cogntive, habitual obscurations and afflictions is, well, . . . a little challenging. A couple of years ago I came out of a 30-day private retreat only to realize that I didn't really want out of cyclic existence--I'm too attached to my wife. (The mahasiddhas kept regular, even married, lives in society, though. That encourages me.)
MH2: Potato time. That's seriously hilarious. (Why NOT "potato time?")
Base: We ARE insane and locked up in a room. ("We have met the enemy, and . . . .") Reading and watching fiction will cure us? You couldn't be more ironic if you tried. We created fictions, we live in them, and someone like you asks if we are insane, locked up in a room.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 9, 2011 - 09:23am PT
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What I'm suggesting has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that could in any remote way be characterized by a "digital processing model".
My point here is that you are discussing an objective functional model by which you believe mind and probably subjective experience are created, or at any rate the wavelets and gizmos that are the unerpinnings of subjective experience. Another machine, basically, just more better and with fancier terms random and chaos and QM factors tossed in for good measure. All good, but I am just reminding us that this model is NOT experience itself. It is a picture of objective functioning, and to avoid needless muddling, we need to keep those separate.
JL
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Meatbird
Social climber
Lindsay, OK
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As I noted about 1000 posts ago, this topic is fascinating and entertaining for a variety of reasons. I've continued to follow the discussion off and on, and while I haven't read all the posts, I have learned a lot and mostly have grown to appreciate the depth of thinking within the climbing community. Its rare to see such expression in other sports.
For me the question of mind still remains a linguistic conundrum that distorts as well as explains our experience. Haven't heard anyone untangle too much of the puzzle we have created. We still tend to bump up against the limits of language and then do an incredible job of defining and clarifying the problems but little happens in asking something different. I'm not saying I can do it either but I do like a quote that points at what seems like the right direction, at least for me. Here it is for anyone who might feel the same.
"The words fever, inflammation, and the names of diseases in general have no meaning at all in themselves...Our language, in fact, is only approximate, and even in science it is so indefinite that if we lose sight of phenomena and cling to words, we are speedily out of reality. We, therefore, only injure science by arguing in favor of a word which is now merely a source of error, because it no longer expresses the same idea for everyone. Let us therefore conclude that we must always cling to phenomena." Claude Bernard.
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Hey, just a minute. Those aren't potato clocks; those are potato batteries.
I thought someone was recognizing another metric for time (e.g., astrological, astronomical, seasonal, yearly, daily, chronological, human-lifetime, timelessness), but instead, they're just batteries. I thought someone was recognizing the artificiality of time (Bergson).
Potatos have stored energy? What doesn't?
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Meatbird: "words . . . have no meaning at all in themselves."
In meditation one can watch the vast and endless parade of thought and emotion in a mindstream. Every mindstream exhibits infinite creative energies. Sort of like a potato. Left to its own devices, the mind makes-up infinite number of worlds. Harness that energy with industrial grade cables, and one can escape eons of obscurations to a base awareness of immediate experience.
We are distracted from immediate experience, though, by those same creative energies of our minds--viz., mainly thoughts. But there is a nature of mind that lies beyond the mind which is not meditation. It's called contemplation. Contemplation is the non-dual awareness that is beyond mind, potato time, conditioning, and causality. It's not an experience, it's a state of being.
This is why immediate experience / subjectivity are so worthy of discussion, and why the mind is constantly in the way. It's also why work on the mind is the way.
Ancient India first developed meditation, yoga, and the science of the mind to an extraordinary degree. (They got there before Largo.) Buddhist approaches are especially psychological, practical, and accessible to Westerners because they are empirical and based upon immediate experience of individual mindstreams. One does not have to accept a faith of some transcendent God. Buddhism is humanistic, not theistic. It always points to immediate experience in life. Personal experience is always the touchstone. One can begin by noticing one's own (The) human condition. The investigation CAN be supplemented by science. In the end it's a personal yet empirical journey.
One should first notice that life in this world is ultimately dissatisfactory and frustrating ("duhkha"): there's sickness, illness, death, old age (especially on this site). These come from ignorance, unawareness, craving, and desire.
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MH2
climber
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One should first notice that life in this world is ultimately dissatisfactory and frustrating ("duhkha"): there's sickness, illness, death, old age (especially on this site). These come from ignorance, unawareness, craving, and desire.
MikeL, have you read The Path of the Mountain, by Wojciech (or Voytek) Kurtyka? He describes a state of mind brought about by difficult ascents, a state of mind in which many of the things we find hardest to accept, such as pain and suffering, are somehow necessary. When I try to imagine climbing in which there is no chance of death or injury, I can see that removing all the bad stuff would drastically change the experience, perhaps for the worse. But on the other hand I can see that my perspective is limited and selfish. Do you suggest that we would be better off completely free of sickness, illness, death, and old age? Or would we have lost an important part of what it is like to be human? Not that being human is the center of the universe.
Healyje,
Are you talking about what the philosophers call "the binding problem?"
There is a school of thought that since quantum mechanics is the foundation of a lot of physics, and physics underlies biology, then biology will not be fully understood until the role of quantum phenomena is taken into account. Another view is that organisms, or at least nervous systems, have had to find ways to buffer themselves from microscopic and sub-microscopic noise in their components. I don't think there is any compelling evidence of quantum-scale neurophysiology, but it shouldn't be ruled out:
"I will not argue here that we are compelled by any version of the binding
problem to invoke quantum mechanics in the brain, although I suspect that
such arguments can and will be substantiated, particularly in light of the
significant subtlety of our experience, not to mention interlinkages such
as mutual understanding, empathy, and so forth.
But the thrust of the remarks I am making here is that coherent quantum
phenomena is in fact a natural and ubiquitous aspect of the universe, and
is therefore quite likely found upon turning over many a stone..."
 Rhett Savage
http://nonlocal.com/hbar/explanations.html
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MH2
climber
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And for Largo,
Sometimes a thing is plain, sometimes a thing is unknowable, and sometimes, somewhere between first person raw experience and 3rd person objective quantifying, it is better not to ask.
It was blue, it rotated, and it smelled of birds. The blue was cerulean, the rotation was slow and juddery. It was a general sort of bird smell, one could not with any certainty say ‘ostrich!’ or ‘guillemot!’, much as one might wish to. That slow, juddery rotation was accompanied by a very faint clanking noise, so faint that a passer-by, huffing and puffing up the hill, might think he imagined it, as he reached the top, put down his bag, and lit his pipe, perplexity furrowing his forehead as he puffed on the savagely bitter cheap Serbian tobacco, the flesh around his piggy eyes crinkling. If moles or other burrowing creatures had created a temporary tussock on the hilltop, the passer-by might sit on it a while to rest his legs, perhaps take off his big boots and socks, and pick in a desultory way at the sock wool before examining his feet with greater diligence. Flesh the colour of curd, little red sores on his toes, but his eyes would be drawn to that cerulean blue, and he would forget his feet. His socks were blue, too, but that was just a coincidence. His boots were dappled and dun, like a cow's colouring might be, in a land where there were cows to be seen, unlike this land.
If fog came down and swirled about our passer-by, he would be reluctant to move. With his piggy-eyed vision occluded, that clanking noise would seem less faint, as his hearing grew sharper. Perhaps, too, once he had tapped out his pipe on a stone and the last wisps of the acrid Serbian smoke dispersed, he would become aware of the smell of birds, where there were no birds' nests.
At the bottom of the hill there is a sordid tavern where miscreants and ne'er-do-wells plot acts of the utmost fiendishness, and cackle as they do so. The tavern's walls are trimmed with gimp passementerie. It is Shrove Tuesday, so pancakes are being served. Unfortunately, the pancakes have been made with contaminated flour, and in days to come this scene will be referred to as The Mass Poisoning Horror Of Cackpod, Cackpod being the name of the village at the bottom of the hill, or one of its names, for it has others, in other tongues, this being a country of ten different languages, some of them spoken by only a smattering of citizens, and that smattering in its collective dotage.
Our traveller, with his foul pipe tobacco, is not in his dotage, and he crashes excitedly through the tavern door, having scurried down the hillside at the first hint of the fog lifting. There is something in his manner that suggests he is unused to the company of ruffians. There is a throbbing in his pituitary gland and beads of sweat upon his brow. He has of course put back on his socks and boots, and tucked his pipe into the breast pocket of his Austrian Postal Service jacket. Standing at the bar of this repulsive tavern, he asks the landlady for a refreshing, minty potage, with foam on top. He is thinking about cerulean blue, juddery rotation, and the smell of birds, and in his frazzled mind he is swept back to that day years and years ago when he danced a fandangoid hoocha with a floozie who wore a cerulean blue frock and span around like a wild thing as she danced, and though she did not smell of birds she had something of the look of a crow, bright black eyes and a corvine nose, and, yes, her hat was made of feathers, was it not?
The ne'er-do-wells ignore the newcomer, for they are too busy gobbling down the poisoned pancakes which, within hours, will find them writhing and groaning in the sawdust of the tavern floor. Emboldened by the first few sips of his foamy potation, however, the traveller asks the landlady, “I say, what is that thing on top of yon hill, that blue rotating thing that smells of birds?”
His voice is loud, and resounds in the stifling fug of the tavern, and there is a sudden silence. The landlady busies herself, pointedly polishing a tankard with a rag. Every single rapscallion stops chewing on his pancake. A dog that had been curled asleep at the foot of the pianola gets to its feet and pads slowly out of sight into a dark back room. The clock above the bar stops ticking. All is still, and silent, and heavy with menace.
Eventually - it seems as if hours have passed - the ancient dog reappears, and lies down in the doorway. The sounds of chewing and munching and clinking tankards start up again. The landlady flings her rag on to the floor and dishes up more plates piled with pancakes. Queasily aware that he has said something untoward, the traveller slurps down his potage and takes his leave, edging past the sleeping hound. He does not know that within hours all the pancake eaters will be dead and gone, that the dog is tormented by nightmares, that the tavern will be condemned and fall to ruin.
He steps outside. The sky is black. He peers with piggy eyes up to the top of the hill, but the blue rotating thing that smells of birds is engulfed in darkness and no longer visible. He turns to trudge towards Cackpod railway station. The image of that floozie flickers before him, and now he remembers how she winched him onto a ship from the rock where he had been abandoned for forty days, and how they danced and danced the tarantella, and how her frock was blue, and how she span, and how as midnight struck on the tavern clock she turned into a crow.
http://hootingyard.org/archive/jul06.htm#2006-07-14-1
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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MH2: I would basically agree with Rhett Savage in that I would suspect any role quantum coherence plays would likely be 'mechanical' in nature and more related to the organization, optimization and performance of brain resources rather than the basis for 'consciousness' though, like him, I wouldn't dismiss such a role out-of-hand either. And if it does play such a role there, I would assume it would be in the context of an active 'fabric' (think a network of instantaneous 'switches' / 'routers') in the 'mind' overlay mapping of the brain.
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krutley
climber
here, now
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MikeL - Only "know thyself" said I. "Easy" not I said. Agree, I do, with you and Werner. Maybe "mind" not so important after all. Not my mind, after all...
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Largo: My point here is that you are discussing an objective functional model by which you believe mind and probably subjective experience are created, or at any rate the wavelets and gizmos that are the unerpinnings of subjective experience. Another machine, basically, just more better and with fancier terms random and chaos and QM factors tossed in for good measure. All good, but I am just reminding us that this model is NOT experience itself. It is a picture of objective functioning, and to avoid needless muddling, we need to keep those separate.
Personally, in the end, I fall into the camp who thinks "mind" is a philosophers' problem and not really a hard or all that interesting one, or even one with much validity - i.e. I don't buy into qualia or the camp that derives from it. For myself I think self-assembly, recursion, and contextual framing by themselves amply provide for 'minds' to emerge over evolutionary time scales. In other words, I think it's impossible "to keep those separate".
I find the hard and binding problems and homunculitic hand-wringing to be entertaining, but in the way other puzzles are. I also consider these 'problems' very anthropomorphically 'top-down' and somewhat self-absorbed, if not Victorian, and unavoidably part-and-parcel with ludicrous conjecture about whether species besides man are conscious.
I have just enough background in microbiology foisted upon me to have a perspective which requires I validate everything through a non-anthropomorphic lens of all life from viruses on up and to do so with one eye on evolution. And when you look at the topic that way (bottom-up), it becomes more a matter of emergent behavioral expression and behavioral evolution. From that perspective - looking at behavioral expression within species over time and across the spectrum of species - it becomes inescapably obvious 'mind' is a fundamental, emergent property of life.
Piecing together the exact details of the implementation certainly make entertaining research and conversation, but past that I don't think there is any need for a great deal of hand wringing around the topic unless one is so inclined as most philosophers are. Sure, it's a great 'puzzle', but I don't see any rotifers or spirochetes stopped in their wake waiting for an answer. I also don't feel any need whatsoever to fill our lack of implementation details with religious or new age conjecture or constructs.
[ P.S. I find this discussion quite similar to those which wrestle with the question of exactly where behavior, knowledge, and 'intelligence' reside in our genome. ]
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Dingus, thanks. Kind of jealous of some of the folks here in that I wish I had more knowledge, education, and vocabulary to work with in expressing myself. But then I've never been disciplined or organized enough to manage play vs. work as well such folk to make that happen. Sigh.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 9, 2011 - 04:07pm PT
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Personally, in the end, I fall into the camp who thinks "mind" is a philosophers' problem and not really a hard or all that interesting one, or even one with much validity - i.e. I don't buy into qualia or the camp that derives from it.
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This is a very common response from those who have not bothered to investigate thee issues of mind, and consider them only from a fixed quantitative POV. The give away that Healyj has not boned up on the nuances is the I don´t buy into qualia comment.
Qualia, though it has been described various ways, is simply a generic term denoting the 1st person, subjective experiencing of our physical, instinctual, emotional, cognitive, and for some, their spiritual lives. No human being ever has, is, or ever will know anything except through experience. Period. The fact that a person doesn´t BUY INTO their experience has nothing to do with their fundamental human reality, which is experiential. The notion that "I don´t buy into qualia" IS qualia of the cognitive variety. It exists nowhere else but in his experience and the experiencing of said qualia is the only way Healyj would ever know he even had such a daft belief. We cannot input or download or be aware of any aspect of mind but through qualia because it is the subjective data stream itself.
Healyj´s ideas, while rather staid, reflect nothing about human reality but plenty about a certain kind of psychological style that cannot accept anything as real - even his own direct experience - unless they can quantify it. And since qualia is not quantifiable in the regular way, the extreme answer is to simply say that our subjective experience, including all of our divine numbers, does not, in fact exist. That´s one way to make a problem go away or to write it off as "simple."
We used to see that kind of logic in grad psych school whenever gay rights came up. The only folks dumb enough to argue over this issue these days are fundamentalist religios. When pressed, all of their arguments boil down to the belief that gays don´t actually exist. The Bible, ergo God, says so, so the only thing that truly exists are us straight folk, of which gays are a distortion. Gays, therefore, are simply straight folks who don´t know themselves, their true natures, or were driven there through ... Of course not one single gay ceased to exist because of this belief, though many were driven to suicide though being systematically dissed their whole lives. And now some come along and say they don´t even exist. Nice . . .
So while people write off qualia, they also write off their own direct experience, which is all they ever have or know. But the fact that you might write yourself out of existence doesn´t alter the fact that ou´re still here, and the writing and the belief that drove it are themselves all we know . . . that pesky qualia.
JL
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Yep, that pesky impenetrable qualian event horizon that just HAS to separate pristine minds from all those nasty bodies. And lowrdy, if it ain't a mystery how all dem cats and dogs gets da ideas in dar hayds.
Thank god more studied and nuanced 'souls' than myself also dismiss qualia and [separate] subjective experience as hokum with the sole purpose of erecting an impenetrable event horizon behind which one can sing and dance to pretty much any tune they like (oh, le mystère joyeux...!)
I'm also told certain detritivores double over in laughter when faced with such logical constructs, but then promptly roll up and die once they realize they've actually lost [track of] their 'minds' in the process.
[ Again, the fact we can't put a collective finger on exactly where or how 'instinct' is conveyed by DNA doesn't mean it ain't in there. It just means we don't currently understand it. This 'problem' is no different... ]
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jstan
climber
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Would that we could devote similar penetrating analysis to our healthcare and all the other debacles.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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re: health care and other debacles
re: reality bites
Part of the problem is that once we counter - or countervail - the shortcoming (poor vision with corrective lenses, e.g., inguinal hernia with repair, etc.) evolution via natural selection no longer selects against it- so it spreads, gets ever worse. Damn. Reality bites.
Along similar lines, were there a cure tomorrow for cancer to alzheimer's to heart disease to aging in general think what that would do to the population numbers - esp with the Duggars on the loose and their mentality praised, promulgated. Nothing new here, though, reality bites per usual, thought I'd something more to say.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 11, 2011 - 12:58pm PT
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good question DMT:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/organism
or·gan·ism noun \ˈȯr-gə-ˌni-zəm\
Definition of ORGANISM
1: a complex structure of interdependent and subordinate elements whose relations and properties are largely determined by their function in the whole
2: an individual constituted to carry on the activities of life by means of organs separate in function but mutually dependent : a living being
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