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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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Dec 14, 2011 - 01:03am PT
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MH2,
That was a very interesting post. You have a PhD in neuro from Univ of Chicago? I believe I asked you this before, once upon a time, but I never heard an answer.
You mentioned cats, auditory and visual systems, nucleii, control engineering, etc.. Interesting. The names Schatz, Baylor, Knudsen, Newsome mean anything to you? I know a few pages back you mentioned Hubel and Wiesel. Just curious.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Dec 14, 2011 - 03:42am PT
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MH2: He further thinks that consciousness arises from small-scale oscillations in the membrane voltages of neurons which synchronize like a chorus of frogs or cicadas on a summer's eve.
This is pretty much a circuit-level version of what I proposed with my 'fractal wavefront' conjecture.
So no one picked up on my aside of where the words come from when we hear someone speak, but I'll pick it back up given your auditory research descriptions. I brought it up because of long personal experience which has made (forced) me to realize consciousness is composite and hierarchical in nature.
I lost a great deal of discrimination in my hearing during a year of six-hours-on / six-hours-off in a 5" naval gun turret in Vietnam. A curious long-term result of that hearing loss is it exposed a bit of how our "mind" works. Specifically, it has provided me glimpses of our language processing facilities you would normally never be conscious of because its so automagically well-integrated into our 'mind'.
When we hear speech, our conscious mind is 'handed' the result of an amazing amount of physical and subconscious processing prior to the hand-off. And all that processing - filtering, shaping, prioritizing, characterizing, recognizing, contextualizing, and giving 'meaning' - happens in the fraction of a second between the time the sound waves reach your ear and your conscious mind becomes aware of what was said.
Your subconscious speech processing facility gives your conscious mind its 'best effort' in handing off to you fully contextualized words. By 'fully contextualized', I mean you don't just get words - you get time, distance, direction, identity, emotion, threat-level, relevance AND meaning. Quite the trick given the timespan involved. By 'best effort', I mean your subconscious speech facility does the best it can with poor input by doing a great deal of extrapolation, fitness testing, and sometimes just outright guessing.
As I said, this hand-off of fully-contextualized speech to your conscious mind is something most of us are never conscious of, or at least I never was before having my hearing scrambled. But because I do have this problem, my subconscious speech facility has to work overtime and sometimes comes up short, and I don't mean off by a little, I mean off by a mile. In noisy environments my subconscious now sometimes hands me speech that is so outlandishly contextualized that I can't help but burst out laughing because, whatever the person said, it wasn't what my subconscious speech facility handed me.
I mean, no one walks up to you and says, "pink whales love martinis" or "Lincoln stages a comeback act" or any other of a myriad of nonsensical 'best guesses' my subconscious has handed me over the years. And when that happens you have precious little time to go back and do a conscious re-processing and analysis of the original speech sounds to derive what the person standing there waiting for a response actually said. So you do it quick and sometimes you can actually pull it out by consciously (manually) working backwards from the current context to the sound and re-validating all the potential word combinations against the context - something your subconscious speech facility obviously can't do. (Sometimes I fail miserably at the reprocessing which is usually obvious to the person from the confused look on my face or the time it's taking me to respond).
And given how bad 'eyewitness' testimony can be, I can only assume a similar subconscious visual facility also lurks just behind the curtain along with any number of other subconscious facilities (subsystems) which continuously stream feeds to our 'mind' where raw sensory input has been highly filtered, processed, contextualized, and staged for our 'consumption'.
As I said, the experience has left me convinced that, if nothing else, our 'mind' is a composite of streams from any number of hierarchically organized hybrid facilities that encompass both brain and 'mind'. I'm further convinced our 'mind' is constantly changing its composition - what it 'is' - from millisecond to millisecond.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Dec 14, 2011 - 04:32am PT
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Lovegasoline,
With regard to Baudrillard's "precession of simulacra"; I personally think he layers on quite a lot of [value] judgment around how humans naturally contextualize their lives both as individuals and societies. Social organisms have to have a shared context for otherwise subjective experience or they wouldn't be able to communicate or coexist with one another. That shared context has to take some form and I don't know how 'reality' can be other than a shared 'simulation'. One can certainly cast value judgments on peoples lives but I think it's easy to lose sight of what's going on when one is caught up in that much judgment.
There is a very interesting (but pay-walled) article in the July 2011 issue of Scientific American on the physical limits of intelligence which basically talks about the diameter, length, and electro-chemical noise constraints on axons which roll up to the conclusion we aren't going to develop any more raw brain capacity. But the author ends with a little conjecture that, given the limitations of individual brains, the future of human development may be collective, rather than individual with the development of writing and the Internet as nascent steps in that collective evolution.
Who knows, it could very well be what Baudrillard casts a lot of value judgment around in "precession of simulacra" are in fact key organizing constructs necessary for birthing a 'collective consciousness' that would be the next step in human evolution. Sure, it ain't pretty from the perspective of individuals, but maybe it's the cat's meow for some future collective.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Dec 14, 2011 - 04:47am PT
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Healyje
if nothing else, our 'mind' is a composite of streams from any number of hierarchically organized hybrid facilities that encompass both brain and 'mind'. I'm further convinced our 'mind' is constantly changing its composition - what it 'is' - from millisecond to millisecond.
MikeL
An emerging state of consciousness today seems to be one that allows everything to be or have a place, equally. Pluralism, multiculturalism, different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, these are all good and all have a place. Validity is perspectival, and so is verification. Truth is not a single, binary determination.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but these two statements seem to be pointing in the same direction???
Meanwhile I doubt that the human brain is going in a more collective direction since the evolution of thinking and behavior has gone toward more individualism rather than less over time as denoted by MikeL.
I do see a lot of collective behavior in Japan, but it is not based on reasoning. Rather it's a very subtle use of culturally conditioned body language and intuition which operates from the unconscious mind rather than the rational one.
If the human behavior goes more in a collective direction in the future I'm betting that it will be with the aid of computers more than other humans, or groups of humans communicating with others, all backed up by their computers for extra memory.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Dec 14, 2011 - 04:59am PT
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Jan, I'd say those two statements are so many layers of abstraction (of consciousness) apart that the similarities are less of substance than of form.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Dec 14, 2011 - 05:00am PT
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And this one's for John Gill.
A summary of mind without any words at all.
Taken from http://www.komarandmelamid.org/chronology.html
and referred from the measuring art project mentioned by lovesgasoline.
Every major philosophical stance represented on this thread is contained in this one painting - at least for me.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Dec 14, 2011 - 05:02am PT
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But isn't the form of the mind/brain what's being discussed here?
While substance is either being labeled science or religion and yet both come
from the same meat brain form?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Dec 14, 2011 - 05:16am PT
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Jan, my take on that quote is that MikeL is talking about a collective / cultural / societal 'consciousness' which is so many layers of abstraction above the more immediate organization of an individual 'mind'. The 'pattern' in use in both quotes is similar, but the context and meaning radically different. To some extent I view it as a matter of entirely different scales and context.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Dec 14, 2011 - 05:20am PT
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Agreed, it is different scales and context. But if the meat brain is all there is, doesn't it make sense that human society will reflect the current state of self knowledge of the meat brain? What is the collective but a mass of subjective perceptions that are shared?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Dec 14, 2011 - 05:23am PT
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I don't necessarily disagree with you, Lovegasoline or Baudrillard relative to how we share [subjective] experience - it is necessarily an abstraction or we'd all be physically wired together like an Aspen grove.
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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Dec 14, 2011 - 05:29am PT
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hey there say, jan... as to this part of your quote:
I do see a lot of collective behavior in Japan, but it is not based on reasoning. Rather it's a very subtle use of culturally conditioned body language and intuition which operates from the unconscious mind rather than the rational one.
body language among close knit family, animal groups, and culture, here as you mentioned, sure can be powerful... for good or bad (meaning for functioning great, as a unit... or bad, as when folks manipulate others, etc)...
also, in the sense where you see it as 'cultural conditioned' as well, it can be good or bad, even as language itself is...
both can take over and speak volumes to those that know the 'underlying' of what each 'movement' (or in speak, each 'empasis' or 'non')is based on--when you know the 'group' or culture...
oh well, none of this really goes with what all you all are talking about, but i just find it fascinating as to how the brain and spirit and soul, work so close together and such vaious realms... :)
i love how the animals, (my buddies horses) or here in my home, MY dog, can know 'exactly' (so it seems) what i am up to... and when a certain movenment means i'm about to do something that she is mighty interested in, or, when that same movement means NOTHING to her... (couse, she has no idea of the vast number of thoughts going through my brain at that moment, that may be connected with what i am just starting to do (that is triggering her, or not) but in her case it does not matter...
we relate on a different 'frequenceies'... :))
little does she know that one strong thought, something that i FORGOT to do, will suddenly change the very 'action' that she always knows means: let's go eat, or let's go outside, or etc, etc, as the case may be...
in some cultures, or home, some things never change much... it is when one is in the situations where all kinds of new 'winds' trigger the ol' brain, that the pot really gets stirred into making not only folks, but animals suddenly take note and stop and reservey, :O
very interesting stuff, :)
making it more complex, my cats read me very differnt then the dog does, :O
see... makes one wonder what THEY are basing the 'learned culture' of my home life here, :))
and how their brains and learning is different... wow, wonder what my horse would think about all this--well, if i HAD one, :))
last note:
after getting all through these little notes (meaning mine, here, just now), can you see the awful things that little children go through, and all due to how their parents abuse power through the tools that the good lord has given them, to function with? and thus, the connection of this brain-tool, as to the actions that these kids READ from their parents... oh my... and copy-cat behaviour, as they learn to do this to others--UNLESS good morals come into a play, and certain children decide for themself, later, after breaking free from what has overpowered the home, that there is much more to do with oneself, than to be a 'collective copy cat'... :O
one can try walking in life, with their own brain... :)
edit:
oh by the way, i just stepped in and have only read what jan posted, so don't get confused as to why i posted all this in your ongoing workmanship here... i was just noted about what was so interesting, that she had shared, ...
:)
carry on... think of this as a commercial, :))
night, all... :)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 14, 2011 - 06:38am PT
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Dec 13, 2011 - 06:15pm PT
del cross: Demonstrating that thought, perception, memory, and emotion are contained in the brain isn't the same as demonstrating that subjective experience is contained there.
What is meant here by subjective experience? In what way is it separate from or different than thought, perception, memory, and emotion?
Hard t make the statement that subjective experience is "separate from" qualia, meaing the elements of and the experiencing of the elements OF experience. But if you try and consider qualia (thought, perceptions, memories, et al) as discrete THINGS, in the 3rd person, you get a functional analysis everytime. What you miss, of course, is all of this qualia coming alive, and the dynamic, kinetic flow of same in 1st person subjective experiencing.
So in one sense your question is a non-starter if you are asking: Give me a 3rd person objectification or "meaning" (measurement or quantification) of a 1st person subjective reality. Well, you can't, because the moment you try and reverse engineer subjective experience to objective functioning, for example, it vanishes into the atoms - if you happen to be from the "emergent" camp of consciousness (I am not).
So what you're asking, in one sense, is to take that lion over there and break it down in zebra terms so I can understand it, seeming that my beliefs in "knowing" anything insist that knowledge comes exclusively from zebras.
And so this is the circle that we keep moving around in. Again, if you are an "emergent" fan of consciousness, believing that consciousness somehow jumps off atomic level activity, or that atoms "create" consciousness in a forward trajectory causal model, at some time you will have "something extra" happening above and beyond the atomic activity. That is, if your uncle moves around in a certain way, your aunt emerges from your uncle WITHOUT your uncle vanishing. You you have both your uncle AND your aunt on hand - or your evolved brain AND your subjective experience. Remember, materialists insist that this is all forward causation, meaning A leads to B leads to C and so forth. So If we reverse the process, from having both your uncle AND your aunt, to where you only have Uncle Tom (sans cabin), consciousness is nowhere to be found. You can be left alone to "study" what is not, in fact, there, and talk about how superfluous it is to study "something extra" (your aunt), but you've missed the very subject of your study because your aunt ain't there.
JL
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Dec 14, 2011 - 12:00pm PT
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Jan:
I'm not sure what Healyje means when he talks about "streams" or "facilities." They sound like materially functioning processes. I am hesitant to go there ultimately. As for minds constantly changing--oh gosh, yes, of course. Borrowing from Lovesgasoline, one can't step into the same river twice. Healyje's use of the word "I'm" in the sentence, however, betrays that he's not convinced of his own writing. The "I" there suggests an identity is independent, stable, and existent. He can't have it both ways logically. On the other hand, if he's willing to throw out logic, . . . .
As for my own quote, it refers to an evolutionary state of consciousness that isn't quite here, yet. But it can be seen from here. The crises of incommensurability and warring disciplines and cultures demand a shift in overall consciousness in order to move forward. It's likely that things will have to get even worse before people reach an impasse and are forced to become different beings.
Mankind will have to pull itself up by its bootstraps to get there, though. In my mindstream, it's always been a challenge for the theory of evolution to explain how something lower evolves into something higher. Self-organization as a mechanical process cannot logically explain how lesser organization changes into a higher or more complex organization--that is, given the principle of entropy. There would seem to be some kind of transcendence needed to move from lower to higher. Oh-oh, that won't do for most people's beliefs: "nothing transcendent!" Hmmmmm, well the alternative seems to be that the higher was there embedded (but not realized) all along. Whoops, that won't fly with most folks either, especially here on ST.
It does for me, though.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 14, 2011 - 12:10pm PT
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There is no reason to suppose that a valid scientific theory has to be mechanistic.
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MH2
climber
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Dec 14, 2011 - 12:30pm PT
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MikeL: it's always been a challenge for the theory of evolution to explain how something lower evolves into something higher. Self-organization as a mechanical process cannot logically explain how lesser organization changes into a higher or more complex organization--that is, given the principle of entropy.
Quite so, from the thermodynamics we may have been taught in High School.
However, there is more to it than that:
A dissipative structure is characterized by the spontaneous appearance of symmetry breaking (anisotropy) and the formation of complex, sometimes chaotic, structures where interacting particles exhibit long range correlations. The term dissipative structure was coined by Russian-Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977 for his pioneering work on these structures. The dissipative structures considered by Prigogine have dynamical régimes that can be regarded as thermodynamically steady states, and sometimes at least can be described by suitable extremal principles in non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
Simple examples include convection, cyclones and hurricanes. More complex examples include lasers, Bénard cells, the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, and living organisms.
One way of mathematically modeling a dissipative system is given in the article on wandering sets: it involves the action of a group on a measurable set.
 from the Wikipedia entry on dissipative structures
Yes, Healyje! There is a HUGE amount of processing everywhere you look in the brain and it seems, to us anyway, inexplicably fast even though largely "parallel". My computer science friend and climbing mentor Bill Thompson worked on image analysis and to him and his colleagues the brain as an example was no more useful than "existence" proofs in mathematics: there is a way to do it, but we don't know what it is.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 14, 2011 - 01:00pm PT
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MikeL wrote: Self-organization as a mechanical process cannot logically explain how lesser organization changes into a higher or more complex organization--that is, given the principle of entropy.
this statement is wrong on many levels
first MikeL has not defined "lesser" and "higher" levels of complexity
and even more importantly, he has not provided a calculation of how that complexity relates to the thermodynamic quantity of entropy
whether entropy increases or decreases, and in what system it happens, and whether or not it violates any thermodynamic laws, depends on the details of these quantitative definitions
Evolution has no problem in this regard.
MikeL has fallen into the trap of "folk physics" which sounds like he's talking science when he is, at best, parroting something he's heard someplace and appropriated without any critical thought.
If the rest of his scholarship is based on similar "careful" considerations, then my point is made regarding the value of endless philosophical discussion being any more than a way for people to have an extended bullshit session with little or no real content.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Dec 14, 2011 - 01:02pm PT
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MikeL: I'm not sure what Healyje means when he talks about "streams" or "facilities." They sound like materially functioning processes. I am hesitant to go there ultimately.
I thought I described the 'facility' for speech reasonably clearly. Describing a subconscious facility that delivers a continuous stream of fully contextualized words to your conscious mind as a "materially functioning process" seems a bit strange to me given it does do the contextualizing.
As for having it both ways, 'I' think not...
And invoking entropy to discount evolution? Seems to me the fact you manage to get out of bed every morning would fly in the face of that kind of logic.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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Dec 14, 2011 - 01:03pm PT
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MH2,
You don't want to tell us if you have an advanced degree in neuroscience or not?
Are you a doctorate in neurobiology or what?
C'mon man, share.
......
my point is made regarding the value of endless philosophical discussion being any more than a way for people to have an extended bullshit session with little or no real content.
I know, it's sad, isn't it. Not for too long though.
One door closes, another opens.
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 14, 2011 - 01:12pm PT
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Bullsh!t is real.
The content of Bullsh!t is real.
Whether the actually Bullsh!t pertains to the real truth is what matters.
Anything in this whole thread needs scrutiny against a bonafide absolute reference.
You have none!
All theory against theory.
It's not even bullsh!t yet .....
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Dec 14, 2011 - 04:59pm PT
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Werner: "mechanistic" meant physical and causal.
MH2: Dissipative structures, as a theory, really went nowhere, and physicists are mixed about the theory. It sounds good, but I am unaware of any scientific proof of the theory. Just another theory. (Prigogine wouldn't think so.) Good job cutting and pasting from wikipedia, though.
Well, I just knew I shouldn't have expressed doubt about evolution theory. I should have know it would draw angst and ire. Funny, that.
My idea of entropy is simply that left alone, systems lose their energy (and organization). I think desribes most things in the universe, in general. Buddhists call it impermanence. I'm surprised people have any arguments here.
I continue to have two qualms about the theory of evolution. Both relate to mind.
One, I am not aware that evolutionary theory says that species get more complex beyond random chance. It's a pretty simple theory. All that that it argues is that mutations produce variants, and some variants are better suited to a changed environment. I can understand how a mutation may lead now and then to more complexity in species, but I see no reason why it must do so consistently. Change need not be towards more complexity. It could just as well lead to simpler variants. Perhaps folks are exempting statistical probabilities here. Change? Oh, sure. Increasing complexity? Not necessarily. So why would mind emerge at all? It wouldn't seem to be necessary.
Two, the theory of evolution argues that a variant of a species is rewarded with more resources environmentally (munificence). A more suitable variant will thus reproduce at a higher rate, and it will then out-compete other variants of the same species for available resources. So, in a sense, the environment chooses species' variant by rewarding it.
Our particular species is today in a postion to create its environment, and it has been for some time. That capability demands amendments to the theory if we want to continue to use it to frame conversations about Mankind's evolutionary trajectory.
Baudrillard and Lovegasoline come back to mind. The environment we live in is a reflection of Man's thinking, his values, beliefs, norms of behavior, technologies, etc. To what extent should we continue argue that environment choses more suitable variants of Mankind? Ethics, art, culture, religion, even scientific theories themselves constitute the topology of our environment. They are our environment to a great extent.
What is mind? Would mind not be a reflection of reality? If so, what reality are we talking about? The one we've made? The one we didn't make?
One aside. People exhibit a tendency to put the theory of evolution first before data. Some trait or behavior is the point of discussion, and before one knows it, people begin arguments that "there must be a useful reason for a trait or behavior according to the theory of evolution." Let's not do that here.
Ed said: MikeL has fallen into the trap of "folk physics" which sounds like he's talking science when he is, at best, parroting something he's heard someplace and appropriated without any critical thought."
Jeez, let's try to be civilized, Ed. I haven't been throwing any aspersions at you.
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