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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 29, 2017 - 02:09pm PT
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And Dingus, my old friend Hugh Herr (double amputee) is working on this issue at MIT and I had a long conversation with him at a recent AAC dinner in Denver, when Hugh accepted an award for his groundbreaking work on prosthetics.
This is a truly fascinating area of study, and we can learn a shitload about mind in how this all plays out. But it was essential for Hugh to understand what has been discovered over the years from people working directly in biofeedback.
It was doing that biofeedback work that taught me a lot about the top-down mind-body connection and how it worked in the most practical terms and ways, since you get a bio metric in real time so you know at once what is effecting the biology and what is not, and can tweak the mind quotient accordingly.
This subject alone is rather mind boggling.
For example, while doing neurofeedback (EEG training), a field full of snake oil if ever there was one, the aim is to entrain a brain function like coherence, or Hi Beta waves, or reduce the spiking (mental white noise) of a chaotic brain. When your patterns improve you receive a reward tone or maybe you are looking at a program of racing a car on a track, and the car moves forward when your brain hits the target, and stops or goes backward when you don't.
When you "try" and make the car move you only muck up the progress. You have to trust that your brain will learn how to do the task according to the reward, and it will. The key is paying close attention to the task. If you mind wander, the brain stops making progress. Stay focused, and the brain learns. This is an especially effective treatment for ADD.
More on this later. Gotta deadline.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Mar 29, 2017 - 03:32pm PT
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Hugh used to get around. I remember him climbing with a gang of us in Eldo. He showed off his various "feet." Edging feet, finger crack feet that had like a finger poking out the toe, and several others.
I remember saying,"Hey, that is cheating!."
He gave me a dirty look. I still had my feet, and I'm sure that he would have wanted his back. I had to clear it up. I shouldn't have said that, and apologized as quickly as possible. He was a nice guy, who was a super good climber. I've watched his professional career as he appears on TV now and then. A super smart guy.
As for hooking the brain up with a machine, in principle, I see nothing wrong with it, but of course who knows? The technology is either top secret, or not available yet. Possible? Yep, probably. It is hard to call anything impossible these days.
The Department of Defense has been working on this, at least a little.
Think about it, though. If you could really wire your brain to a machine, in principle, you could download memories and experiences. Everything that is contained in the brain.
It is a shortcut to A.I. You use a living brain rather than a purely machine intelligence. It will probably happen, maybe in our lifetimes.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 29, 2017 - 03:38pm PT
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Everything that is contained in the brain.
There is nothing in the brain except meat.
Memories are not stored in the brain.
Again, ... until you understand consciousness itself first you'll never understand the mind, brain, and memory.
But instead, you stick to your poor fund of knowledge always .....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 29, 2017 - 03:46pm PT
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You are not alone in being confused about what your own experience "means,"
Never thought I was.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 29, 2017 - 04:02pm PT
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JL: Any way you want. MRI, CAT scan, PET scan, EEG, surgical intervention, psychological testing, voodoo - any which way you want. And do you believe any of these would disclose what none of us can see of you from a distance, from outside your own subjectivity - the phenomenological dimension of your experience itself, of being you and knowing you are you in space and time, with all your thoughts and memories and sensations and hopes etc?
Maybe not the methods you mention, but yes, I believe it may become possible to see from a distance my subjectivity, the phenomenological dimension of my experience itself, of being and knowing who I am in space and time, though maybe not with all my thoughts and memories and hopes etc.
Why is that not possible?
Why does that matter to you?
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Mar 29, 2017 - 04:06pm PT
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Base said:
Think about it, though. If you could really wire your brain to a machine, in principle, you could download memories and experiences. Everything that is contained in the brain. I agree with memories, not with experiences. Experiences include our feelings. Our feelings and emotions, which we share with at least mammals, for sure, are this additional thing over and above the memory. In humans, memory probably invokes the feeling part of our system. To truly mimic what it is to be human, you need somehow to capture feelings and emotions, and tag them on to the memory.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Mar 29, 2017 - 05:28pm PT
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I'm a big fan of jgill's mathematical artwork, but his latest has me stumped. His mind looks like a crab with eyes on the end of antenna and it's emerging from Swiss cheese like holes in his pink colored brain? I'm not sure what mind is, but I don't think it's that.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 29, 2017 - 05:59pm PT
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JL: Any way you want. MRI, CAT scan, PET scan, EEG, surgical intervention, psychological testing, voodoo - any which way you want. And do you believe any of these would disclose what none of us can see of you from a distance, from outside your own subjectivity - the phenomenological dimension of your experience itself, of being you and knowing you are you in space and time, with all your thoughts and memories and sensations and hopes etc?
Maybe not the methods you mention, but yes, I believe it may become possible to see from a distance my subjectivity, the phenomenological dimension of my experience itself, of being and knowing who I am in space and time, though maybe not with all my thoughts and memories and hopes etc.
Why is that not possible?
Why does that matter to you?
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Let's take a look at this one: "I believe it may become possible to see from a distance my subjectivity, the phenomenological dimension of my experience itself, of being and knowing who I am in space and time..."
Why is this not possible?
...Well, MH2, the pressing question is - what would have to happen for this TO BE possible, since at this time no one far or wide can "see" what it's like to have your direct experience.
What can we say for certain about this, what no one can deny or argue about in any logical or rational or even conceivable way? Let's start there.
What we can definitively say is that at this time, no one CAN see your own phenomenal subjective experience. If anyone claims they can - of you or any other human on earth - we can instantly reality check and see if they are correct.
Of course we take it as axiomatic that anyone claiming to be able to actually "see" how MH2 is feeling or see his actually sensations or visualize his memories themselves - that person is drunk or deluded. Imagine a psychologist answering to a professional review board for claiming that he need no longer actually talk to a client, since now he can "see" their feelings or memories or any damn part of their phenomenal experience.
One wonders what, exactly would a 3rd party be able to see, and what would your sensations, themselves, look like? And in what sense does this even make sense?
But say this somehow DOES make sense. What would be necessary in order for anyone to "see" the actual subjective content of another human being?
Seeing, as we all know, requires an external object or phenomenon we can get hold of as sense data, so if we or anyone a million years from now has any hopes for "seeing" subjective experience itself, it would first have to exist both as the subjective, phenomenological stuff of the host subject, and also as an externalized object, force or phenomenon, which a 3rd party could optically detect.
Meaning experience itself would have to simultaneously exist as both internal and external, subjective and objective, as private and public.
Now we go right down the rabbit hole. But this is where the game really gets fun.
First, if MH2's experience was something a 3rd party could see, we quite naturally assume that the 3rd party is able to differentiate between who they are, and WHAT they are seeing, namely, MH2s experience. That is, when I'm looking at the moon, I know that I am NOT the moon itself. So if I were looking at MH2's direct experience, I likewise would know that experience was NOT ME.
But can we say the same for MH2 himself? Is MH2 inseparable from his own experience? Can he also look at his direct experience the same way that Dingus or Ed might look at it, if someday they can? (And have one big-ass Cartesian Theater, starring MH2!).
Now if MH2 can also look at his own experience as one would look at the moon, then whatever he and the others are looking at could by some magical device or process be downloaded into another carrier or host, say a computer.
Now does the original, observing MH2 also get downloaded in the process, or only his experience. If the experience and the experiencer are selfsame, MH2 would have to go along with the download to the external host.
If so, does that leave no one home in MH2's original corpus? Or is THAT observer also still there, whereby we now have two MH2s, one looking at his experience OUTSIDE of himself, while simulataneously having his own experience, while the other MH2, locked in the computer, is looking at the experience he was having before the brain download.
And what if you hooked up a camera to the computer so MH2 could look back at his previous self and THAT experience. When that happened, what would be the difference between the two experiences of two exact observers experiencing each other in real time?
But the real question is: What visible form would they be looking at, and how does this question make one bit of sense to any man, woman or dog on the face of the earth ...
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 29, 2017 - 06:27pm PT
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DMT: I suspect computer-self-learning systems will greatly hasten via brute-force evolution the capabilities as time goes on, with ever-increasing processing power.
Then you’ll be able to keep up with Alex Honnold solo’ing 5.12, eh?
Funny, . . . this idea. Although I am now officially “an old guy” in this thing I call my life (and feeling recurring aches and pains everyday), the increasing capabilities I’m more and more interesting and noticing are more the experiences that eeyonkee referred to—feelings and emotions, at increasingly subtle levels. Paul and Jan beautifully point us to those now and then. They are the kinds of things that come more from the humanities than from science. I’m tempted to call it “soul.”
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 29, 2017 - 06:48pm PT
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What we can definitively say is that at this time, no one CAN see your own phenomenal subjective experience.
Not all of it, but some of it, or you would not be talking to me.
In the future, who knows?
Your left and right cerebral hemispheres are independently conscious. This was discovered in cases where the corpus callosum had been surgically severed.
See:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness
If the left and right cerebral hemispheres can communicate, why can't different human brains do the same? Given technology of the future.
You are too quick to dismiss the possibility of subjective experience becoming sharable in different ways than we do it now.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Mar 29, 2017 - 09:21pm PT
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DMT, . . . sorry. It happens.
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Old Dude
Trad climber
Bradenton, FL
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Mar 29, 2017 - 09:50pm PT
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WB is right.
Consciousness - the creative ocean in which thought-filled minds are whirlpools - can never be studied, measured, described, named or predicted. Consciousness is not a subject of scientific study. It is not material and doesn't spontaneously spring from matter, but rather the other way around. it is the primary element, the source of all the activity we view as the actions of 'our' separate minds.
The rational, scientific mind is a fleeting product running on borrowed energy, not the vehicle for uncovering truth in this arena.
Seeking the truth about mind cannot be done with the mind. It requires dedication to something far more demanding than the hardest big wall - abandoning the carefully crafted individual 'self' and allowing what IS to be as it always IS.
There are many ways to do this - the trick is doing them rather than discussing them.
What you are looking for is what is looking.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 29, 2017 - 09:50pm PT
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What we can definitively say is that at this time, no one CAN see your own phenomenal subjective experience.
Not all of it, but some of it, or you would not be talking to me.
And exactly what part of your direct, 1st person experience am I purportedly able to see. If you told me what to look for I find have an easier time.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Mar 29, 2017 - 10:04pm PT
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His mind looks like a crab with eyes on the end of antenna and it's emerging from Swiss cheese like holes in his pink colored brain? I'm not sure what mind is, but I don't think it's that
As the Wizard has said, the mind is not an easy thing to grok. Things get slimy and messy as it is extracted from the fleshy brain. However, note the beautiful symmetry between its two poles (eyes) of love and hate.
Here is the mind of the Wizard as he experiences frustration at Ed and Andy for their lack of Noetic understanding:
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Old Dude
Trad climber
Bradenton, FL
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Mar 29, 2017 - 10:07pm PT
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You're looking from the rational projection of 'you' and 'me', based on separate physical bodies. Accepting that gives birth to all the variety of forms and thought we call the universe. We are all creating it.
There is one thing alone, ever, anywhere. It is not in time, has no present / past / future. The words we are producing and the universe we're producing them in is the sport of that. All forms, whether material, mental, or otherwise, spring from that.
It requires ultimate humility and a powerful desire for the truth to surrender the bonds of thought, personality, and all other fleeting, impermanent forms and allow what is to simply be.
The perceptual entity I call me has never been able to give itself up to it, but the process continues. Good luck with yours.
What you are looking for is what is looking. It's the most amazingly beautiful, infinite process.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Mar 29, 2017 - 10:16pm PT
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I’m more and more interesting and noticing are more the experiences that eeyonkee referred to—feelings and emotions, at increasingly subtle levels
Testosterone yields to estrogen as men age. I never thought I could cry at a Bronco's game - until last season. Buy some Kleenex and keep a stiff upper lip.
;>)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 30, 2017 - 09:00am PT
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And exactly what part of your direct, 1st person experience am I purportedly able to see. If you told me what to look for I find have an easier time.
You see that I have ideas about the mind and brain, and I see the same in you.
Also, don't forget that the words you and I and others have learned to communicate with are part of our direct 1st person experience.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Mar 30, 2017 - 09:18am PT
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 30, 2017 - 09:38am PT
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I asked: And exactly what part of your direct, 1st person experience am I purportedly able to see. If you told me what to look for I find have an easier time.
MH2 sez: You see that I have ideas about the mind and brain, and I see the same in you.
Also, don't forget that the words you and I and others have learned to communicate with are part of our direct 1st person experience.
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MH2, I don't "see" that you have ideas. That is, I don't physically see an object that is an idea in your experience.
I UNDERSTAND you have ideas by way of your communication. I SEE black dots on the screen, then my consciousness does its work and I understand what you are saying - at lease part of the time. It is all one unified process but there is a huge difference between the black dots on the screen and the subjective experience of having ideas - and I cant' physically "see" the later at all. It is strictly an internal process. What's more, the experience of ideas is not an inherent value in the black dots. Syntax is NOT semantics.
What you have done is conflate syntactic with semantic. You're doing the same with the "words" or symbols that we physically see. Those words are meaningless (NO semantic value) till they are mediated by mind, which as discussed, is also a quality we cannot physically see or "file share" with a computer.
BASE, IMO, is doing much the same thing (though in a different way) in believing that a brain-computer hook-up would, figuratively speaking, be able to communicate the semantic (subjective/experiential/meaning values) fro the brain to the computer simply by capturing what is essentially just the black dots. Look at it ...
BASE said: If you could really wire your brain to a machine, in principle, you could download memories and experiences. Everything that is contained in the brain. It is a shortcut to A.I.
Let's say this is true, that if we could get the wiring just so, we could "download memories and experiences," since "everything" that is, is contained in the physical brain.
Next step is that we'd have to isolate out the slice of the brain pie that is experience, and not bother to download all the other non-experiential bits. That would be getting the transfer protocol wired just so. And this implies that we have a target we want to download. IOW's, we're not file transferring the entire hard drive, just a slice of experience.
For the sake of this thought experiment, let's say we start off small, like we would likely do if this technology were possible, since in principal it is, says BASE.
OK, say we gave John G. a shiny apple, had him look at it for a beat, and then decided to file share John's immediate subjective experience of red.
What, exactly, would we be transferring off John's brain and transferring to the computer? And what are our assumptions about John's subjective experience of red that suggest it is some artifact or output that CAN be file shared in the manner BASE suggests?
The first assumption is that the subjective experience/memory of red exists as a composite of mechanical outputs that can be captured straight off the brain, in real time, as a kind of modular file, or physical output of SOME form, and then file shared across cyber space or through a wire and input into a computer.
The second assumption is that this subjective "file" or output (or use whatever word you want) exists separate from both awareness and the neural structures of the brain itself, much as a computer program or a Word file, say, exists separate from the hard drive on a computer, and can itself be downloaded or file shared across cyber space with a touch of a key.
But in fact if you look at the neurobiology, memory and experience are inexorably hooked up to neural structures formed DURING experience.
As we have experiences and form memories and develop as individuals, our brains change. These changes affect the brain's physical structure, changing its pattern of activity. Brains work by means of molecular machinery. Lasting changes in brain function involve lasting changes in this molecular machinery. Unlike a computer's memory, the brain is not designed to off load subjective content at a moment's notice, or at all. Personality and long-term memory are durable structures IN the brain. And short term memory and the experience of red are totally beholden to existing structures and brain patterns.
IOWs, the brain is not a hard drive and experiences/memories are not physical files that can be directly file shared with a computer.
This gets even clearer when we look a little closer at what is involved in John's conscious experience of red. Light, hitting the eye, triggers electrical signals which are sent to the brain. These are converted into other electrical signals or to chemical signals that are actually various protein molecules used for transferring information in the neural process.
So what do we have so far? Electromagnet waves in the frequency of 450 terra-hertz, electrical signals, molecules, brain cells and structures that are essentially also molecules and various biological substances. Here is a bio-machine that runs on physical laws. But where is the red?
"Red" is in fact light, an electromagnetic wave in the range of visible light with a frequency of 450 THz. But since light is essentially just forces of attraction and repulsion, where is the red? And why is it that when we change the frequency of the wave to say, 630 THz, this causes us to experience blue? So where is the experience of red?
For clarification, let's look at another example using a computational model, knowing our model is figurative.
When you take a picture and save it onto a computer, where is the picture? In the computer's memory, right? Not true. There is no image in the memory of the computer, which only stores a binary code, a long number consisting of 1's and 0's. For example 1000110110110101. All the files in the computer are stored in this way, be they images, music, text, etc. So we can hardly claim that 1000110110110101 is itself an image when it can equally be music, text or an image. In fact 1000110110110101 is neither a picture, music or text. It is just a code.
Point is, codes, and virtually all information are meaningful only in the presence of a decoding mechanism that has the capacity to take the information and turn it into something else. In this case, a picture. Without the decoding mechanism, 1000110110110101 is meaningless.
Similarly, everything in the brain - its cells, it's chemicals, and the electrochemical impulses in the neurons are just the interaction of forces and physical structures. These contain no experience or consciousness whatsoever. None of these have yet reached the level of information, because as yet they carry no meaning. They may serve as a code that triggers experience, but where is the decoding mechanism? Here, we have reached consciousness.
Point is, what is file shared when you hook electrodes up to the brain and feed the output into a computer is nothing but electrochemical artifact. You are not file sharing the person's subjective experience in this process because that lies neither in the electrochemical artifact nor yet in the brain's neural structures but in the unified real time fandango when all of these are simultaneously at play.
A person's subjectivity does not exist separate from the whole shizzle, as a physical modular output we can "see" and digitize, and it would have to if you ever wanted to file share it, transferring "it" from your brain to another computer.
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