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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Feb 22, 2017 - 04:56pm PT
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Is it Mike or Jacques with the bouffant?
So, it seems to me to be a ridiculous stance to denigrate modeling. Every single moment that we are alive we are modeling. What is expectation if not something that arises from our current model of the world? Your sister has not arrived yet. You expect her to arrive (a model of the world). She arrives or doesn't.
So, where does one jump from this everyday modeling to the kind of deep, whatever modeling alluded to by MikeL?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 22, 2017 - 04:59pm PT
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Jacques. :)
Enormous puffery!!
To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
Sound familiar?
Every single moment that we are alive we are modeling.
Of course. One shouldn't need to have 20 science and engineering courses under his belt to completely understand this.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 22, 2017 - 05:07pm PT
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Fruity, do you do anything else but self-reinforcement exercises - aside from trying to lash every damn thing under the sun to Abrahamic religion? And trying to lash Princeton PHD physicist to Abrahamic religious bunkum and "ghost in the machine" models is beneath even you. Back in the corner with the pointy hat.
He wrote: Largo, I'm curious, do you believe that awareness existed, say, 4 billion years ago (post planet, pre-life) or 10 million years ago (post mammal, pre-homo)? Is awareness only accessible to humans? Would you surmise that Neanderthals had awareness? Or am I somehow getting it wrong even asking these questions?
This would help me a lot in trying to understand your position.
Very fair questions, but please give me a little more time to formulate my answers. I've almost got the outlines of a model worked up.
But for the moment - anything with sentience of any kind or flavor has awareness, from a fruit fly to Neanderthals to you and me and even Fruity - the Gomer Pyle of this entire thread (but he does keep it lively and I've learned a lot from reviewing his links - even from Dennett, that veritable font of late 20th century philosophical blunders).
What differentiates us humans from other species is our brains, or more specifically, the emergent faculties of our minds. They are what generate the content of awareness, the stuff, the Big 3 (memories, thoughts and sensations) which, owing to their richness and complexity, allow us to experience a subtler and more nuanced "reality" than a hamster or a bullfrog.
Awareness is the blank screen, blank canvass, or empty field in which the stuff or our experiences arises. This is an opposite take than someone like Michael Graziano, who considers awareness to be information. In my model, he has conflated content with awareness.
It is categorically ridiculous to look to so-called wisdom traditions for insight about the quantitative stuff in reality. That's what science does. But one thing that subjective adventurers have done a wonderful job of clarifying is the nature of awareness itself, and at the rarefied level, they all say the same thing: Awareness itself is infinite and dead ass empty. But not empty in the normal sense of the word. But more on this latter. It's just when people ask honest questions I fell obliged to try and say something about my position. Thanks for asking.
And John, what did you dog say?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 22, 2017 - 05:11pm PT
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The ghost in the machine concept has its roots in religion.
True? False?
Let's keep it real!!
Review your posted video of Wolf.
...
Let's play Devil's Advocate...
Consider this: Were there in reality any Chopra-style consciousness (or awareness) component to humanity or else living things in general... would this "type" of consciousness also not be mechanistic in other words structured in some way and rule bound in terms of causation?
So really, just as Harris or others have pointed out, even yours truly on this site over the years, some Universal Consciousness as a fundamental is no escape (eg. toward what your Abrahamic supernaturalists seek). Just sayin.
What we humans value are our traits like competence, character, uniqueness, loving kindness, appearances, sexuality, etc. How could any Universal Consciousness, amorphous as it apparently is or is presumed to be, have what it takes to contribute in any meaningful way to these traits?
Instead of vain verbiage, show me the model.
Show me the model of the Chopra Universal Consciousness. Or,
Show me the model of the Largo Awareness.
Maybe it starts with... Dark Energy?
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Feb 22, 2017 - 05:22pm PT
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So,here are my take-home points (your words). I think we're getting somewhere.
Anything with sentience of any kind or flavor has awareness, from a fruit fly to Neanderthals to you and me ...
What differentiates us humans from other species is our brains, or more specifically, the emergent faculties of our minds. They are what generate the content of awareness, the stuff, the Big 3 (memories, thoughts and sensations) which, owing to their richness and complexity, allow us to experience a subtler and more nuanced "reality" than a hamster or a bullfrog.
Awareness is the blank screen, blank canvass, or empty field in which the stuff or our experiences arises.
Damn! I only now realize that of 3 major points in our world view, we agree on two of them. I couldn't have presented your first two positions any better. And you give me pause on the third.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 22, 2017 - 05:27pm PT
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Fruity, Wolfe is using figurative language with his "magical" or ghost cracks about consciousness. He is not suggesting there is an actual ghost in the machine. If you look at what he is saying per hard core QM here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ7rMR7KtfE
It is obvious that he is in a sense deconstruction staunch reductionism, which implies that if we keep reducing, we will finally get down to the fundamental stuff, whereas Wolfe is saying that the fundamental phenomenon is not stuff at all, but rather fields. Type A materialists will lose their very minds over this but as Wolfe noted, it is axiomatic that this group will be the ones he described at not wanting to even look at what does not contribute to an ordered and predictable objective world. It is interesting to note that reductionism, according to Wolfe (imagine how many people will stomp up and down that he is wrong or at least not certainly right), reduces materialism away in the process and leaves you with nothing to hold onto.
And you have to unpack your terms. When you say, Chopok style consciousness I believe you are refering to spiritual content, not sentience of same. Different issues.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 22, 2017 - 05:39pm PT
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But one thing that subjective adventurers have done a wonderful job of clarifying is the nature of awareness itself, and at the rarefied level, they all say the same thing:
All? Roughly how many is all?
How do they know what is experienced by others, when you at least have said this is impossible to know?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Feb 22, 2017 - 05:40pm PT
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And John, what did your dog say?
Foxy Loxy tells me she knows her name and has a great memory, but she is a bit confused about her self-image. Maybe in another few thousand years those problems will be ironed out in the doggy world. She is super smart, however.
Awareness itself is infinite and dead ass empty
And so, what is it exactly that makes it a focus of intellectual inquiry? I do think it is the empty stage, as I have said before. But it seems to me to be about as intriguing as an in depth study of the number zero, and I've never known a mathematician who devoted his energies specifically to that subject.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 22, 2017 - 06:33pm PT
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How do they know what is experienced by others, when you at least have said this is impossible to know?
You're still thinking in terms of "what" (content) is experienced. The what can always be misinterpreted. Not so the absence of content. This absence is not some thing you can be wrong about, and investigating it is not the intellectual investigation of zero, though I can understand that you would speculate in that direction from a 3rd person perspective. So far as finding something that does not bore you, this searching for some "thing" is, ironically, the very thing that keeps the discursive mind churning away and the content flowing into awareness. Letting the beast settle is the battle we all wage. What you find is the missing piece, undetectable from the outside, that allows you to have some idea about what mind and consciousness - and human existence - actually is beyond a functional machine.
Mike is probably a better source of the esoteric literature than I am but emptiness, void, and so forth are basic themes in all the texts because that's what it all comes down to. Here's a taste:
nyat;” (Sanskrit noun from the adj. nya: “zero, nothing”) is usually translated as “emptiness“. It is the noun form of the adjective nya” (Sanskrit) which means “empty” or “void”, hence “empti”-“ness”
It’s difficult for the reasoning mind to comprehend no-thing, or emptiness. The mind always wants to fill emptiness with something. However, emptiness— the void, is really the constant feature of consciousness—it is the container of the contents that the mind seeks to fill in. Emptiness’s presence is like a zero resistance electric current that is instantaneously transmitted and available everywhere; it is the vacuum of nothingness.
It is through this void, or emptiness that we feel connection with others.
I understand that a far stronger case needs to be made for this phenomenon but now is not the time.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 22, 2017 - 06:47pm PT
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Sometimes one has to read between the lines, else the (gomer pyle) rhetoric...
"I've learned a lot from reviewing his links - even from Dennett..."
Note now how Largo's arranged his forum droppings such that he's practically sitting with drop-knee right on top of the mind-brain science model of cognition, consciousness, sentience, awareness, etc...
Chances are, if current trend continues, next year 'Mind is what brain does' is likely to be this Franco Columbu's mantra.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 22, 2017 - 06:59pm PT
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eeyonkee, if you pick up Harari's Homo Deus, be sure to note in reading through it chapter after chapter just how many DOZENS of interesting topics he describes, alludes to or imagines. All as part of or related to a modern scientific and historical understanding (or model) of how the world works, how evolved living things work, how humanity works.
Any of these topics would make for an interesting (not tedious) discussion here or on related science, H. sapiens or belief threads. Imo.
This is a 'Mind' thread - and yet where is all the interesting, thought-provoking, self-reflective Evolutionary Psychology content? Hmm...
...
"do you do anything else... aside from trying to lash every damn thing under the sun to Abrahamic religion?"
Would you be suggesting I am repetitive? if not tediously reiterative?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Feb 22, 2017 - 07:03pm PT
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So Paul, it's not that the brain is the mind, it's that the brain gives rise to mind.
That's right. But the mind is separate as a product of the brain in the same way the light is separate (a product) of the bulb. What consciousness, awareness, intelligence, knowing are is a mystery to science.
And the many possibilities surrounding consciousness, as well, are beyond our current understanding. Whether consciousness is a structure, thing, entity, force or whatever, beyond the structure of brain is simply unknown and mysterious and only speculative in the scientific community.
We read it (consciousness) intuitively as something beyond the structure of the body. It has been read intuitively as beyond the body for centuries by virtually every culture on planet earth precisely because it feels that way to us, presents itself to us in this intuitive manner.
For me this has nothing, repeat nothing to do with religion, spirituality, ghosts or anything of the kind.
In fact, the vestige of religious practices exist here in that element of the scientific community that finds humanity nothing but a source of evil on this planet and simply another speck of matter set in a vast indifference. This, as Nietzsche proclaimed of Christianity, is simply a practice of self loathing and servitude from which the individual is released from responsibility into the vacuum of incapacity.
I think we can do better. Conscious awareness may be the pinnacle of all that is, the ability to know, comprehend, understand, to move and be moved through experience, these things should be celebrated for what they are: miraculous.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 22, 2017 - 07:07pm PT
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"Over-post, over-post, over-post. If you take up most of the thread's acreage, you must be right."
Careful, that's almost irksome.
Can you say "I am a dominating white male" any louder?
eeyonkee, we are white male science types, perhaps we should check our privilege?
...
Ha!
For me this has nothing, repeat nothing to do with religion, spirituality, ghosts or anything of the kind.
If this consciousness were to live on after the body dies, and if, say, in your case, it were to meaningfully represent Paul in any meaningful way then it would have EVERYTHING to do with religion, spirituality, ghosts as traditionally conceived.
Let's be intellectually honest here.
Many in and out of science think consciousness, in particular sentience, feeling, self-consciousness, memory - all the basic faculties that make us people and provide us character and competence - have to do with discrete atoms and molecules or else derive somehow from some unknown goings-on at the level of atoms and molecules. For the record, I think this is wrong, as I've stated here before. From my lifelong interest, tracking and experience, my own bet is that it is NOT complexity, NOT some unknown re atoms and molecules, NOT biochemistry but... circuitry. There are literally dozens if not hundreds of different kinds of circuitry (from differentiators and integrators to clocks and oscillators and resonators to memory elements and filtering mechanisms, etc etc etc... and out of this font (or Cookbook) Mother Nature derives by way of our kind of perceiving and talking what we call consciousness. Evolution by natural selection constructs in a manner categorically different and even inconceivably different from how human engineers construct. Therein lies the mental block we experience in figuring out the so-called Hard Problem.
If you think about it, Biology amounts to Reverse Engineering of Living Things. We are figuring it out bit by bit, block by block. That is pretty cool.
We sometimes speak of "cred" or "credentials" here on these threads. Now Paul if you had many years of building "stuff" in an engineering lab or labs (not unlike say, Dean Kamen) - and these labs were stocked with personal notebooks and cookbooks of this great incredible mind-boggling workable stuff you've designed and built - and in turn this was all backed by years of chemistry and bio know-how, then this would be GREAT Cause to consider your generic posts with more cred and consideration. But, unf, it is my understanding I don't think you've got this background and experience (please correct me if I'm incorrect) which, imo, IS essential to addressing these topics and making serious and bona fides claims concerning them.
Starting perhaps with photons and a light bulb.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Feb 22, 2017 - 07:53pm PT
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If this consciousness were to live on after the body dies, and if, say, in your case, it were to meaningfully represent Paul in any meaningful way then it would have EVERYTHING to do with religion, spirituality, ghosts as traditionally conceived.
Let's be intellectually honest here.
I'm all for intellectual honesty, but perhaps more important an issue here is reading comprehension. I never said the individual soul lives on after death. If you read that it was, you're under the influence. You, in fact, are the one claiming consciousness can survive in a non living entity, not me.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 22, 2017 - 08:03pm PT
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well I did state "if" in there, a couple times even.
nor have I ever claimed that consciousness or sentience or qualia can be generated from a human-engineered machine.
I would have no basis, certainly no evidence or qualifications or special insight, for making such a claim.
fun to speculate/hypothesize about though. Right?
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 22, 2017 - 08:05pm PT
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Just another mini Hiranyakashipu .....
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Feb 22, 2017 - 08:11pm PT
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Sorry to butt in.
Earlier, I mentioned the Three Body Problem as a Chinese book title. I'm reading the English translation.
I checked out the Wiki page for the actual Three Body Problem. There is also quite a bit about its history in the book itself, although it is much weirder than just that.
So Ed and John,
Is there a real solution to the Three (or n body) Problem?
I'm sure that it can be modeled, but it is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. It might not exactly be chaos, which I see in certain natural systems, like Brownian Movement, but from a math standpoint, is it solvable, for all initial conditions?
To the others: The Three Body Problem can be thought of as 3 stars orbiting each other. It is very difficult to predict the motion after a period of time, except in certain instances. It is very sensitive to initial conditions.
Then you can toss in some more bodies, like say, planets around each star, tugging just a little, and it will get even tougher.
I know that we regularly do multiple gravity assists with spacecraft, to gain speed and save fuel, so navigators must be able to solve it for a certain amount of time. Can they do it for an infinite amount of time is the question. Right now they are dealing with no more than one orbit, it seems.
A simple problem. Easy to understand, but difficult to solve.
Brownian Movement is harder. You can see it with a decent microscope. As molecules vibrate, they cause larger structures to move. A nightmare for an absolutely deterministic Universe. It is totally random. Or seems to be. Remember: Complicated Systems are highly dependent on initial conditions. The "Butterfly Effect."
But what do I know? I'm not a mathematician, or a physicist. What I learned in school has regrettably waned from disuse. I can run what used to be difficult reservoir engineering problems on industry software now.
I've never read a book like it. I have a Chinese next door neighbor who already has an advanced degree in Artificial Intelligence. She is now going back to school to get a degree in English Literature. We trade book ideas. She says that Chinese is a much more descriptive language than English.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Feb 22, 2017 - 08:21pm PT
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To have a deterministic view of the Universe, as is done with Free Will, you have to tag onto the notion that EVERYTHING in nature is predictable, at least in principle. Everything obeys the laws of nature, and can in principle be determined mathematically.
At least that is one side of it. I believe it was Dennett who espoused that, but I could be wrong. It has been a while since I watched all of those youtube lectures regarding Free Will.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 22, 2017 - 08:27pm PT
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BASE, I have memory of moose explaining it to you, eeyonkee explaining it to you and hfcs explaining it to you. Over years now. What gives? Seriously, what gives?
Here it is one last time...
Predictability is not a requirement of causal deterministic systems. (!!!!)
You must dispense with Laplace's Demon.
(Remember we've posted about that? this Demon? Several times now?)
That is a different "kind" of determinism. The modern
world has moved on from this "kind" of determinism.
....
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/science/trappist-1-exoplanets-nasa.html
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