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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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transcendental aspects of the origin of the math
The gods whispering into the ear of Euclid?
Tachyon impulses through the aether from Alpha Centauri?
Ralph Waldo Emerson et al?
Johnny Walker?
;>)
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The linked article describes the current nature of computers. After all, computer means to compute, mindless calculations. On the other hand, none of us can predict how "computers" will change in the future. Simple but extensive calculations will remain a part of these machines, but they may become much, much more. To argue based on what they are at present simply predicts the present state will remain unchanged. Algorithm processing may transition to something unimaginable.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I think we have a perspective that definitely warps our view of computers and mind...
The first "computers" were people, people who were adept at doing mathematical computations. This period is not so long ago... and has been an interesting focus of a number of recent books and a movie,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures
which is, once again, a dramatization, and an interesting spotlight on the role of African-American women played at NACA/NASA, originally during WWII but later during the space program.
The original "computer" was ubiquitous at the major R&D centers during the war as the transition was being made from people to machines. Richard Feynman famously "organized" the computers at Los Alamos in T-5 (a section of the theory group).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer
So here, we find, that essentially throughout WWII human computers kept up with the mechanical versions, and slowly, after the war, the human computers who stayed in the various organizations became the programers for the machines.
Whether or not the machines "know" what they are computing, they do it better than the humans.
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jstan
climber
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consciousness involves both machine like functioning that is governed by physical laws, and phenomenon that impossible to wrangle with metaphorical or even symbolic language because it is not "like" any other phenomenon in reality.
The green door is brought into use once more. Something, anything, outside of physical reality.
Not necessary at all. How else? Easy.
We forget that a human has a yuuge library on which to draw. Really really yuuge. All that one has heard, read, or heard discussed. After that metaphorical connections to both personal experience and other phenomena can be mined. What one had for breakfast can even come into play. All of these things, in a pinch, can be used to answer a question or guide one's action.
I was once induced to have my approach to a manufacturing process embedded in an AI app. Even simple problems can run into a bewildering number of decision branches, all of which have to be faithfully rendered. And that is for an easy problem. Difficult problems involve decisions that have to be made where there is no certainty or specific knowledge. Then a human can take the option of "guessing" based upon god knows what, that can be delved up from their memories.
I tried reading Schulman but his obvious pleasure at hearing himself, convinced me he would never actually say how a computer is different from a human. Here is one way.
A computer manipulates bits with near absolute precision.
Humans act and reach decisions with a process having little or no precision. It is all a guess and no one can specify with absolute precision how the guess was arrived at.
While programming better in process test software for my employer's product I got into heavily re-entrant do loops. I actually got the computer to act like a human. You never got the same answer twice. And you had no way of tracing what had been done to get any of the answers. Very human. Very human. (You see I can learn!)
As soon as I made the code less re-entrant the problem went away. Very computer-like. The new code prevented the needless scrapping of hardware worth millions each month. Mind you I had to do all of this at three in the morning as it was not my job. I finally figured out my programming at that time of day had not been sufficiently "computer-like".
And so it goes.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 2, 2017 - 04:20pm PT
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Ed seemingly can't look past processing so is satisfied that the better processor is the highest ideal. John can't read the article, but offers nothing that either addresses the issues or offers alternative interpretations, merely rags on me about "non-physical" illusions. Fruity cites Dennett as a cutting edge thinker, even though his ideas about consciousness are tired 3rd person makeovers of stuff that's been around for decades.
Right or wrong, this jabbering offers nothing in terms of a model that we can discuss, and instead gets mired in the details. Some months ago I was determined to leave off this wagon-circling because it was actually anathema to presenting a model of consciousness which can possibly lead somewhere. I need to get back to my notes and offer up something instead of just dragging my feet on this. I delivered the book I needed to get done so soon as I find some time I'll try and offer up something.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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I need to get back to my notes and offer up something
Ah well, for us all some sweet hope lies,
Deeply buried from human eyes
W. H. Hardy was once a tiger, too.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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W. H. Hardy
I know. I spent my summers in Gulfport when I was a child.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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But enough of this frivolity. We need to turn those circling wagons into ideas that spiral in to an attractor that clarifies our thinking. We await your summons, Wizard.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Here you go, Largo, last chance.
READ THESE WORDS as many times as necessary...
"It was thought by many distinguished philosophers, such as John Searle and Thomas Nagel, that Mr. Dennett was abandoning the first-person experience of consciousness, the personal nature of it, the qualia. He wasn’t at all. He never doubted consciousness itself." -Michael S. Gazzaniga
https://www.wsj.com/articles/daniel-dennett-explains-it-all-1486149888
...
False (and dangerous?) assumption: "assuming that holding a deterministic view of the brain forces you to abandon the idea of free will entirely."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 4, 2017 - 10:13am PT
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Fruity, we have all read and looked at the Dennett videos. I actually like the grousey old fart, and respect him for taking the whole consciousness thing seriously. However in my view and in my experience he has made a few tactical errors that has led him to conclude that while first person experience certainly SEEMS real, it is only an illusion.
This actually takes some pretty serious work to unpack, but the mistake Dennett made, in my view, is that he staked his opinions on content (the WHAT we experience) instead of sentience, the fact that we are AWARE, be it we are aware of unicorns or Venus and Mars. But I'll get to that later once I finish working up a tentative model.
For the moment, chew on this per free will, one of the most misunderstood concepts in all of consciousness studies.
There is an entire school of folks hooked on the philosophical belief that consciousness, in both epestemic and ontological terms, can be conclusively known and described in terms of pure functionality and content - the very stuff of which we are aware, what I call Experiential Content: people, places, things and phenomena.
It is a fatal error to anchor any theory of consciousness on content, on states, on the stuff of awareness, but you have to work your way there to ever see why. Moving on:
Staunch functionalists try and posit all aspects of mind in terms of functions geared at or involved with tasking, doing, action, and so on. And these functions are commonly posited as strictly mechanical and determined, with consciousness taking no causal part in the process. Ergo the machine is running on auto pilot with us tagging along as observers who merely believe we have some modicum of free will per how our lives unfold, but who actually have none.
At least part of this mistaken claim comes from a bastardization of Benjamin Libet's experiments, and was succinctly summarized by Michael Egnor, as follows (in 2014 ). While Egnor is rather harsh on the hapless materialists, his salient points are well taken:
Says Egnor:
Materialists often invoke the experiments of Benjamin Libet when they deny free will. Libet was a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Francisco during the latter half of the 20th century who did pioneering research on the neurobiology of consciousness.
Specifically, Libet was interested in the correspondence of electrical signals from the brain (measured by electrodes taped to the intact scalp in awake volunteers) and the contents of consciousness. His most famous experiments involve measuring electrical activity in the brain when volunteers were asked to move their wrist.
The volunteer would look at a moving clock and note the exact time (to the millisecond) that he consciously decided to move his wrist. Libet compared the timing of the brain activity with the timing of the volunteer's decision to move. He consistently found that the brain activity (he called it the readiness potential) preceded the conscious awareness of a decision to move by a couple hundred milliseconds. The timing typically went like this:
Readiness potential... 400 milliseconds... awareness of intent to move... 200 milliseconds... move wrist.
Other researchers have repeated Libet's experiments, with similar results, and recently researchers have used fMRI to carry out Libet-like experiments. The fMRI studies show that there are often brain activations that precede the conscious decision by several seconds.
Free will-deniers like Jerry Coyne have cited Libet's experiments as "scientific evidence" that free will is an illusion, and that "voluntary" decisions are really generated by electrochemical processes in the brain, without our consent or knowledge. Our sense of free will is thus only a post-hoc belief imposed by our brain, which is really "making the decisions."
Says Coyne:
The experiments show, then, that not only are decisions made before we're conscious of having made them, but that the brain imagery can predict what decision will be made with substantial accuracy. This has obvious implications for the notion of "free will," at least as most people conceive of that concept. We like to think that our conscious selves make decisions, but in fact the choices appear to have been made by our brains before we're aware of them.
The implication, of course, is that deterministic forces beyond are conscious control are involved in our "decisions," i.e. that free will isn't really "free." Physical and biological determinism rules, and we can't override those forces simply by some ghost called "will." We really don't make choices -- they are made long before we're conscious of having chosen strawberry versus pistachio ice cream at the store.
On this, materialists such as Coyne couldn't be more mistaken.
Libet himself was a strong defender of free will, and he interpreted his own experiments as validating free will. He noted that his subjects often vetoed the unconscious "decision" after the readiness potential appeared.
Says Libet:
Do we have free will?
I have taken an experimental approach to this question. Freely voluntary acts are preceded by a specific electrical change in the brain (the 'readiness potential', RP) that begins 550 ms before the act. Human subjects became aware of intention to act 350-400 ms after RP starts, but 200 ms. before the motor act.
The volitional process is therefore initiated unconsciously. But the conscious function can still control the outcome; it can veto the act. Free will is therefore in no way excluded. These findings put constraints on views of how free will may operate; it would not initiate a voluntary act but it could control performance of the act.
But the deeper question still remains: Are freely voluntary acts subject to macro-deterministic laws or can they appear without such constraints, non-determined by natural laws and 'truly free'? I shall present an experimentalist view about these fundamental philosophical opposites...
Potentially available to the conscious function is the possibility of stopping or vetoing the final progress of the volitional process, so that no actual muscle action ensues. Conscious-will thus affects the outcome of the volitional process even though the latter was initiated by unconscious cerebral processes. That is, conscious-will can block or veto the process, so that no act occurs.
The existence of a veto function is not in doubt. The subjects in our experiments at times reported that a conscious wish or urge to act appeared but that they suppressed or vetoed that. In the absence of the muscle's electrical signal when being activated, there was no trigger to initiate the computer 's recording of any RP that may have preceded the veto; thus, there were no recorded RPs with a vetoed intention to act.
We were, however, able to show that subjects could veto an act planned for performance at a pre-arranged time. They were able to exert the veto within the interval of 100 to 200 msec. before the pre-set time to act (Libet et al., 1983b). A large RP preceded the veto, signifying that the subject was indeed preparing to act, even though the action was aborted by the subject...
The role of conscious free will would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act, but rather to control whether the act takes place. We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as a myriad of options 'bubbling up' in the brain. The conscious-will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action or which ones to veto and abort, with no act appearing.
Libet concludes:
My conclusion about free will, one genuinely free in the non-determined sense, is then that its existence is at least as good, if not a better, scientific option than is its denial by determinist theory. Given the speculative nature of both determinist and non-determinist theories, why not adopt the view that we do have free will (until some real contradictory evidence may appear, if it ever does). Such a view would at least allow us to proceed in a way that accepts and accommodates our own deep feeling that we do have free will. We would not need to view ourselves as machines that act in a manner completely controlled by the known physical laws. The experiments clearly admit as much.
Coyne and his allies radically misrepresent Libet's findings. Libet concluded from his experiments that we do have free will -- the ability to veto pre-conscious intentions -- and he noted that the veto appeared to be freely chosen, without any neurophysiological evidence for neurophysiological determinism.
Libet's finding that there appear to be pre-conscious intentions that sometimes precede conscious intentions is unsurprising. We experience such intentions constantly. We walk from place to place without consciously thinking of the intricate details of the walk -- the path, the coordination of muscles, etc. We often get where we're going with remarkably little conscious attention to the process -- think of how often you drive home from work without consciously thinking much about the route, or even about other cars, traffic signals, etc.
When we type, as I am doing now, we typically don't think about the individual motion of our fingers. In fact, performing a skillful act like typing or playing a musical instrument or driving requires that our actions be automatic and unconscious. That doesn't mean that our typing or walking or driving is not freely chosen. It means that much of our deliberate behavior is the result of a combination of a free choice to act and an elaborate preconscious and unconscious system of intentions that enable the freely chosen act to happen efficiently.
Libet proposes (based on his work) a common-sense model of free will: our unconscious is a bubbling sea of velleities. We freely choose the impulses we wish to enact by prescinding from a veto, and we freely choose the impulses we wish to suppress by vetoing the act. Libet found experimental traces of the unconscious impulses (the readiness potential) and experimental confirmation of the freely chosen veto (the conscious choice unaccompanied by corresponding electrophysiological activity).
You may ask, at this point: why do Coyne and other materialists utterly misrepresent Libet's experiments? Why would materialists cite the work of a researcher who scientifically confirmed free will? Why would materialists cite experiments that confirm the opposite of their claims? Perhaps materialists don't understand the science, or perhaps they never bothered to try.
Whatever their reason for misrepresenting Libet's work, materialists' invocation of research that validates free will is likely a consequence not of their acquaintance with the science itself (Coyne seems blissfully unaware of Libet's actual experiments and conclusions), but a consequence of the metaphysical biases that materialists bring to the issue.
While I don't agree with all of the above, it shows, in some cases, how doggedly a staunch materialist will cling to the drift wood of determinism on strictly philosophical grounds. An example is found in the preposterous refutations of the above article, a last-ditch effort to even try and make the decisions to NOT Do itself be a determined non-act generated by the brain, as though a machine would generate an output simply to exercise its ability to nix it. The amazing thing is that any sober person would believe such nonsense, or could fob it off as being scientific.
But again, these arguments tend to be circular, and till that time we have a model to work off, these and other discussion are merely intellectual curiosities.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Largo wrote,
"Staunch functionalists try and posit all aspects of mind in terms of functions geared at or involved with tasking, doing, action, and so on. And these functions are commonly posited as strictly mechanical and [causally] determined, with consciousness [according to the epiphenomenalist hypothesis] taking no causal part in the process. Ergo the machine is running on auto pilot with us tagging along as observers who merely believe we have some modicum of free will per how our lives unfold, but who actually have none."
(brackets mine)
(1) Many a mind-brain mechanist aka "staunch functionalist" (Largo) aren't smitten w the epiphenomenalist hypothesis. I am one.
The mind-brain perceptions I perceive - from my perception generator (iow, my brain) - are my system processing. They take an integral "causal part" in the process. Yes the machine physiology is running on auto mechanistic pilot - yes 100% obedient to the physical chemical biologic rules - yes 100% obedient to system inputs from environment - and not unlike a computer the decision making (the choice points, etc) is integral to all of it.
(2a) Language what it is, "free will" has several definitions and not just one. I recognized this a long long time ago now and so for me (like Dennett) it's no longer a personal issue, only a social one.
(2b) Thought and belief what they are, "free will" has several contexts (eg, demonic possession of the will via religion) and not just one. I recognized this a long long time ago now and so for me (like Dennett) it's no longer a personal issue, only a social one.
(3) If it's helpful, though I count myself a fan, I don't entirely agree with Coyne's take on "free will." (I have read him and followed him a long time now.) It seems he's "choosing" to only consider the subject from a physical (i.e., physics) context and not a systems context.
From a "systems context", computers (eg, playing chess) choose, they make decisions. Likewise, from a systems context, so do living things, all living things, and so do we humans.
(4) The Libet experiment, imv, is so over-rated as to be a distraction and unhelpful. (Yes, even Harris agreed with me.) One really only needs to be thoroughly ensconced in basic physics, chemistry, biology (cellular, physiologic, evolutionary) and systems and control engineering to garner the cornucopia of facts underlying our mechanistic (rule-bound) systems nature that precludes so-called "libertarian" "free will".
Speaking of Coyne...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGzvinJki_k
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Two good posts. Informative for this noob. JL, it would help if you used quotation marks when quoting others. Sometimes it's hard to tell where they leave off and where you begin.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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jgill:
The speaker is irrelevant if you are a scientist. Focus on the data, the hypotheses, and the theories jockeying for position. God, Darwin, or Largo, . . . makes no difference.
HFCS is putting some fine points on free will. Before you know it, he'll be creating a field of study. That might be academic.
What do you see for yourself?
It's been my brief experience in this universe (especially after some training of mind) that if you think or believe that you can somehow will events to happen (or not), you're in delusion. None of us have that kind of control, even over ourselves. As my teacher has pointed me to, there is influence. One can influence the same kind of control as one can have avoiding collisions walking in a large transportation terminal. One bends.
One of the ways that one bends is noticing. Simply recognize what one is noticing at the moment. Shift what one is noticing changes everything. It creates a new universe ("Hello, Mr. Bell.") I've found it's a very subtle thing in practice.
"I feel X." Ok, but there is much more going on than that, but the "I" has ignored or subordinated it. Simply look at something else, closely. Another world.
I'd say it's not much good to recognize that there are other views of consciousness--but rather to have a miniscule influence on what's happening. If I understand correctly, we have absolute "influence," but we don't see "the controls." (Funny if they didn't "look" like controls, huh?")
This is you learning to recognize the full extent of "you."
(It's a joke.)
The point is not to stretch your imagination but rather to intensify what you notice. It's not the content.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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With all the words expended, it may be useful to add Daniel Dennett's analysis of the Libet experiment:
Libet tells when the readiness potential occurs objectively, using electrodes, but relies on the subject reporting the position of the hand of a clock to determine when the conscious decision was made. As Dennett points out, this is only a report of where it seems to the subject that various things come together, not of the objective time at which they actually occur.
Personally, I would not trust any EEG study. They don't have good resolution in time or space. The readiness potential is detected by averaging (usually) dozens to hundreds of trials. I don't see how much of a case could be made for or against deterministic behavior on the basis of such weak evidence. Wouldn't you want a closer look with finer timing and better localization where the electrical signals are generated?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jgill: Wouldn't you want a closer look with finer timing and better localization where the electrical signals are generated?
Sure, if it's available.
That makes the assumption that "cause" precedes "effect." Although it makes mandatory sense to you, that assumption is not unassailable. If you live in a universe where everything is inter-correlated fully (there is only "now"), then precedence could simply be a mere appearance.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jgill: Wouldn't you want a closer look with finer timing and better localization where the electrical signals are generated?
Too many glasses of wine, MikeL!
God, Darwin, or Largo, . . . makes no difference
Comedy Central here. Make up your own joke.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jgill: Too many glasses of wine, MikeL!
Could be. But you get what I’m saying I hope. I’m not saying that God, Darwin, or Largo are the same. (Ha-ha.) I’m merely trying to avoid an ad hominem.
(“The joke” is a kosmic one, BTW.)
Hi, Jim:
What’s being suggested is that reality presents something like a grand matrix / correlation to us. No object exists on its own “independently.” Every object relies / is connected to / exists in conjunction with every other object *momentarily.* Nothing can be or move or change without every other thing being effected. We might “bracket” one appearance or object (distinguish, discriminate, point at) from another appearance or object, but if everything is correlated with every other thing, then every object is a mental artifact, the result of an operation of the mind. There is just one thing. If there is just one thing, then there cannot be much real meaning in a notion of causality. It’s just one grand image that is forever changing.
When one says “X happened” and then afterwards “Y occurred,” we often infer some sense of causality (“post hoc propter hoc”). Precedence does not mean causality— nor does correlation. It just looks that way. (One could possibly argue that causality is a form of superstition, but then we’d have a hornet’s nest of consternation here).
If you look out from where you are sitting or standing right now, you could probably see many “objects” in front of you. Are those objects correlated? Is any one of them “causing” any other one of them—or is the spaciousness, the unity, the spontaneity, and the absence of substantiality of the very moment making it appear as though things are happening? You know, when we watch a old film, it looks as though there is motion on a screen, and we get embroiled in a narrative. We forget that we are watching static images 24 frames per second.
I’m working on a painting trying to express some of these conundrums.
I can tell you that the three panels are cut from the same sheet of plywood. You might be able to see that in the above image. Even when placed fairly close together, they appear to be radically different.
I’ve traced-out what seems to me to be the primary striations with a transparent acrylic, and I’m painting-in the spaces with cascading tonal opaque colors. There are many decisions made and yet to make in this work. I’m considering two more panels to add to these three panels when I finish them: both would be horizontal panels, one pure shiny white placed above the three, and one pure flat black placed below them.
One thing that I can do with the work (if it turns out), is that I can display the three pieces in at least 3! ways: each panel can be turned upside down and sequentially rearranged—yet it is really the same piece of wood. In other words, I can suggest 24+ different narratives from bracketing and placement. There will be some commonalities among the pieces (the colors), but seeing them as one will probably depend upon how I hang them, right?
Hope this helps.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Me:
Wouldn't you want a closer look with finer timing and better localization where the electrical signals are generated?
MikeL:
Sure, if it's available.
Optical recording and stimulation of neurons:
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/popup/audio/listen.html?autoPlay=true&mediaIds=859297859543
Another thing I would like is some more weighty decision than when to push a button, as in the Libet paradigm, if you are going to make any conclusion about the ancient question of whether people have free will. Button-pushing doesn't cut the mustard.
Also, the Libet studies may or may not take into account delays. The so-called readiness potential is detected by electrodes on the scalp. The electrical signal has travelled mainly through the electrolyte-filled extracellular fluid of the brain, and largely around rather than within the axons specialized for propagating action potentials and keeping signals separate from each other during neuron-to-neuron communication. The time between a change in electrical potential at a source and its detection several centimeters away can be very short in a volume conductor like the brain's extracellular fluid.
In contrast to the EEG signal, the decision to push the button must travel to the finger along axons, and the report to the investigator of the awareness of the intention to push the button must likewise make its way from its mysterious source to the lips of the subject. Axonal conduction speeds are very slow compared to the spread of EEG potentials and can introduce delays of tens to hundreds of milliseconds. The Libet experiment would need to account for these delays.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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in brief, I find that the attempt to define "mind" by any philosophical method is bound to fail for the very reason that the empirical approach is best adapted to succeed.
that is, we cannot imagine what the answer to the OP title is, yet.
While many who post here (Werner being the most constant) would say we have already imagined the answer, I (and many others) find those answers greatly lacking, mostly due to the very limited nature of what was understood at the time of their offering.
Our empirical approach has essentially displaced the philosophical approach in many (I'd say most) other areas of thought, and forms the basis of our modern view of the universe, including the humans' role in it. Many consider this modern view as a depauperate philosophy, which it is, though it was never intended to be a philosophy; attempts to make it so, e.g. the bandied about term scientism, construct a false equivalent by those who are threatened by science, for which the practice of empiricism is a central tenant.
The failure to resolve the OP question over centuries of philosophical discussion is an empirical demonstration that the philosophical resolution is not possible.
Once the scientific approach succeeds in sharpening that question, and provides answers on an empirical foundation, philosophies will respond.
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WBraun
climber
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Once the scientific approach succeeds in sharpening that question, and provides answers on an empirical foundation ....
Empirical evidence, also known as sense experience, is the knowledge or source of knowledge acquired by means of the senses,
Real knowledge comes from beyond the sense experience.
Knowledge acquired thru the material senses (empirical foundation) is always incomplete and defective.
That is why modern material science is incomplete and defective cave man knowledge masquerading as the best there is and the only one that can really know (scientism).
Only thru the soul and supersoul comes true complete knowledge beyond the jurisdiction of the limited senses of the material scientists.....
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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It case you haven't noticed, you quoted the wrong person, Mike.
I like your art project. There are 48 ways to arrange the panels, as you describe it.
And Andy makes a really good point on EEG experiments, one I had not considered. I did wonder about the practice of the subject pushing a button. Considering the very small intervals of time involved it seemed inappropriate.
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