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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 17, 2017 - 07:25am PT
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Ed: more indicative of “the actual world” [science and its relationship with commerce].
Right on.
This was handled brilliantly (IMO) by Cohen, March, and Olsen (1972) with the simplest computer program.
Look at: http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/encyclop/garbage_can.html (It's barely a couple of short paragraphs in explanation.)
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 17, 2017 - 09:02am PT
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You guys talk about everything but the mind.
It shows you're not in control of your minds on this subject matter.
Only Largo seems to keep his focus on that narrow beam.
It shows that your mind is controlling YOU according to the consciousness you've developed.
The intelligent class controls the mind which is flickering between accepting and rejecting.
Intelligence comes from the soul and never from the brain .......
(This post is not approved by the gross material mental speculators)
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Apr 17, 2017 - 09:17am PT
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A story about complicated thinkers
A man in the city Merv, known for it's complicated thinkers, one night ran around in the streets of the city shouting: "Thief! Thief!"
People collected around him and asked: "Where is the thief?"
In my house, he answered.
Did you see him?
No.
Was anything stolen?
No.
How do you then know that there was a thief?
I lay in my bed and suddenly I realised that thieves break into houses in absolute silence and that they move extremely silently.
I was not able to hear anything, so I understood that there had to be a thief in the house.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Apr 17, 2017 - 09:47am PT
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Yes, the crystal heaven above (concrete Heaven) and the crystal heaven inside (abstract Mind) ...
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Apr 17, 2017 - 10:46am PT
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I figured Ed would mention the math is beauty thread from the NYT before I did. Imagine how brightly the prefrontal cortex lights up for someone (not me) who can appreciate both the math and the art of jgill's creations?
There is nothing like that bright moment when someone makes a new discovery or solves a long worked on puzzle. I had one such moment this weekend when I finally solved a genealogy puzzle for someone by putting together DNA findings and sociological reasoning. Solving a problem by combining two very different lines of reasoning is really the most interesting challenge, similar to participating in two cultures or two different languages at once.
And then there is the mysterious process, whereby certain discoveries seem to happen through random luck or fate or chance, whatever you want to call it. While skimming 300 names for chromosome matches, I just happened to stop at a particular place about the middle of the list and thought why not check here? Lo and behold I found an amazing match which enabled the right thought combination regarding the years- long puzzle to then appear. It's so interesting how the human mind works. And also the role of random chance, statistical anomalies and personal coincidence.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 17, 2017 - 10:53am PT
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I just happened to stop at a particular place about the middle of the list and thought why not check here?
funny, your discursive mind couldn't explain why to "stop there" so it confabulated a story of enchantment and mystery... I suspect your "non-discursive mind" rolled its eyes...
...when I'm working out such a puzzle the process is similar to working out a boulder problem or a hard crux, you repeat moves over and over again, "wiring" the sequence which in the end unfolds to completion.
Mentally this happens by expanding your view of the interrelationships by running scenarios over and over again... testing the outcome... the feeling is sort of the same, and the sequence unlocking the solution can appear mysterious because we are so used to the directive of the "thought process" we can explain, and so unused to the process we don't access directly.
But that is just me...
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Francis Sanzaro
climber
Carbondale, Colorado
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Apr 17, 2017 - 12:04pm PT
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Searle on Supertopo. Was told to check this out. Would love to discuss Kant, though Aristotle haunts his epistemology so much it's hard to take it seriously, as it's quite mechanical. Kant's metaphysics is like a well-oiled German Panzer. His aesthetics and ethics are solid. I'd say the best philosophers of mind are in AI fields and analogous tech/code/and BCI start-ups, and not philosophy departments, despite having worked in one myself.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Apr 17, 2017 - 12:22pm PT
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I AM, sure, IS-ness is God's business! (sorry jgill wrong topic post again : )
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Apr 17, 2017 - 12:38pm PT
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After 3 years the Carnegie Mellon team gave up. The complexity of the knowledge the man had could not be captured. People simply know more than they can say.
This is exactly the reason behind the rise of machine learning. The 'AI' approach was about talking with the man and then coming up with a machine/algorithms that 'think' like him; the machine learning approach just observes the man's behavior and learns it.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 17, 2017 - 01:01pm PT
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Mentally this happens by expanding your view of the interrelationships by running scenarios over and over again... testing the outcome... the feeling is sort of the same, and the sequence unlocking the solution can appear mysterious because we are so used to the directive of the "thought process" we can explain, and so unused to the process we don't access directly.
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The key here, in terms of the idea of free will, is "expanding your view of the interrelationships," or put differently, consciously working up options that the brain mechanically presents. The "expanding" part is a managing process that the brain cannot do by itself in terms of creating seemingly new material, at least not in the way that, say, a driverless car negotiates the road. In terms of negotiating external outputs (actions), a syntactic machine can manage certain tasks far better than a human - and they will only get better. But the creative process, unless you are satisfied with mere re-combinations of existing data, is a totally different deal.
It is helpful to untangle rote, mechanical data processing, from conscious thinking, or the latter will always look like the former. Remember, the process that "we cannot access directly" does not have a sentient "mind of it's own," or any mind at all. It is an entirely unconscious engine working exclusively from algorithms and a memory bank.
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Byran
climber
Half Dome Village
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Apr 17, 2017 - 01:24pm PT
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But the creative process, unless you are satisfied with mere re-combinations of existing data, is a totally different deal.
Can you think of a single example of human "creativity" that isn't merely a novel recombination of existing data?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 17, 2017 - 01:27pm PT
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Yep. But your discursive mind can't, because it only deals with linear outputs, so everything now was vectored off then (past).
People get hung up on thinking of the creative process as simply a matter of evoking cognitive data. When your creative writing teacher says, "Go deeper," she's saying to find another data stream above and beyond the 1s and 0s in your cognitive brain.
Try and write a poem. And watch your process very carefully.
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Byran
climber
Half Dome Village
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Apr 17, 2017 - 01:55pm PT
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So do you have an example of a poem that isn't just a recombination of existing data?
Computers are pretty decent at writing poetry btw...
"A thousand pictures on the kitchen floor,
Talked about a hundred years or more."
That's probably better than anything my meat brain could come up with.
Sort of unrelated, but still on the topic of mind:
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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Francis Sanzaro
climber
Carbondale, Colorado
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Apr 17, 2017 - 02:58pm PT
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Lots of talk out there about automating creativity, which essentially means hacking the mind. Of course, this means we have settled on a definition of what it means to be creative, which we haven't. Neurons and computer circuits are not the same thing, but they can generate the same outputs. Creativity to the Greeks reflects nothing of what it means today, especially with all the materials-first theories of creativity, i.e., see Reister and Umemoto's "Atlast of Novel Tectonics" for how creativity works in applied industries. Creativity is not mono-cultural. But, if you follow the trends, yes, computers will soon be better "creative" thinkers than us, if only because we have lowered the bar for what passes off as creative thinking.
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Francis Sanzaro
climber
Carbondale, Colorado
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Apr 17, 2017 - 03:00pm PT
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Bryan--see Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" about possible combinations of thought. Lots there.
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Byran
climber
Half Dome Village
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Apr 17, 2017 - 03:36pm PT
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if you follow the trends, yes, computers will soon be better "creative" thinkers than us, if only because we have lowered the bar for what passes off as creative thinking. In what way have we lowered the bar? Or I guess a better question is, what is an area of "higher" creative thinking in which computers will never be able to match humans? Does such an area exist? A similar sort of argument has been around for a long time now. Back in the early 70's people would say, ah well computers are great at making lots of calculations and keeping track of numbers, but they'll never be able to beat a human grand master in chess. To do so would require strategy, predicting your opponent, and creativity. By the late 90's, computers could regularly beat any human opponent. And these days even programs running on non-specialized low-powered hardware (like a mobile phone) can beat nearly any human opponent. It seems that when you get down to it, things like strategy and creative thinking aren't so different from making lots of calculations and keeping track of numbers.
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Francis Sanzaro
climber
Rock and Ice Magazine
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Apr 17, 2017 - 04:10pm PT
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Well, I'll first say that I loath the idea of software stealing creative jobs. It's an effin tragedy. Part of the problem is that there might be no such thing as "higher" order creativity; that's an old Platonic notion of creativity from the Symposium--you know, a pure type of mind-generated creativity, ala the Muses or something. I'd like to think it's more messy, never just existing in a vacuum, i.e. the mind....it's basically impossible to create without "importing" history, memory, past creative stuff, and etc.
But I guess as far as what is getting automated today--software can write music that musicians can't tell was automatically generated; bots are writing for the AP news service, mainly finance and sports, and an average reader wouldn't know; they are designing and composing photographs without human intervention; working as psychologists and therapists (not bullshitting here); they are beginning to write fiction; it's like, damn, what's left....this has been an area of study of mine for the past few year, and it dovetails right into the "what is mind" question since for so long it was thought that the only thing that was "ours" was being creative. We shall retreat into climbing and we are safe.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Apr 17, 2017 - 04:14pm PT
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Francis, good to see you on the thread. Hope you are doing well. Finally, an actual academic philosopher here! Pay attention, Sycorax.
Can you think of a single example of human "creativity" that isn't merely a novel recombination of existing data?
I think this largely depends upon what you consider "data." In math research, even the minor stuff I still do, numerical data is occasionally used, but the creative aspect involves flights of imaginative fancy. A lot of ideas just percolate up from the subconscious. Aha! moments. Numbers are plugged in now and then as an aid.
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