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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Perhaps the same can be said for fundamental properties or forces. If you believe that sentience is such a force or phenomenon . . .
What criteria would have to be met to qualify, for you, as evidence?
The implication is that you believe that sentience is a fundamental force. Your belief arises either from a non-logical conviction, as is experienced in religion, or there is some sort of evidence with which to reinforce your belief. As to the nature of this evidence, please present an argument that one could apply to any other fundamental force in the universe. If you cannot do this, then it is doubtful sentience is a "fundamental force" as the expression is normally applied. Thus sentience is derived from causal processes a step above fundamental forces.
Take your time.
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WBraun
climber
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The spiritual soul (atma) is that fundamental force that modern material science is clueless to.
It's not belief but total fact.
The foolish gross materialist scientists call it the ghost in the machine.
Stoopid!
A ghost has no power to manipulate the material realm as it only remains in the subtle material realm.
Only the life force itself, atma, can do so but still, it needs parmatma to actually make anything happen at all.
These are absolute facts.
The gross materialists can not understand this and therefore foolishly wave their hands claiming fantasy of which ultimately everything coming out of their dualistic minds is just that ....
a fantasy with an ultimate incomplete poor fund of knowledge.
Life comes from life ......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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it would be good to read the article, the first sentence of which is:
"Around the turn of the twenty-first century, what has come to be called the new mechanical philosophy (or, for brevity, the new mechanism) emerged as a framework for thinking about the philosophical assumptions underlying many areas of science, especially in sciences such as biology, neuroscience, and psychology."
I underlined what I think is the important point to keep in mind, that this is a philosophy which strives to describes the current state of science; it is not something that scientists adopt a priori to doing science.
A lot of the discussion on this thread confuses these two very different studies: science and the philosophy of science. Both of these are academic fields with relatively long histories (though not as long as the traditional academic fields of literature, history, religion, etc.).
What happens in practice in science is not informed in the least by what the philosophy of science finds. While biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists et al. may be doing what is described by what the philosophers of science call "the new mechanism", the scientists derive no benefit from that description, it does not help them do their science, and science is what they are interested in doing.
I don't question the validity of the philosophical work, it simply has no bearing on the science.
The basic problem with philosophizing on science is that science changes. While philosophers of science may find great value in understanding just what, exactly, Newton was thinking about something or another, very little time is spent in science explaining Newton in a way that Newton would understand. Newton is explained in the context of what we know now, but even the same words may mean something very different in the contemporary world view.
While the varying themes of the human condition have changed little since the beginning of literature, the transformations science has undergone are immense, so much so as to make it unrecognizable over history of literature.
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WBraun
climber
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They are not doing science.
They have abandoned all science except materialism.
Thus they are only doing scientism ......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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^^^they are practicing science,
you are labeling it as "materialism" or "scientism" without the slightest idea of what goes on...
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WBraun
climber
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Polio
Disease is still there.
You haven't cured disease yet, especially the disease of gross materialism ......
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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I bow to your wisdom, sycorax. My very first paper was on metaphors. (Well, . . . I’m talking from the more cognitive-science side of thing—which is particular.)
I took logic as a part of my UG major, and yes we did study symbolic logic. At the time I felt it must be true, but today it seems very narrow.
HFCS: Those "isms"!
Agreed.
You say things sometimes that get a rise out of me. I respond.
Ed: I underlined what I think is the important point to keep in mind, that this is a philosophy which strives to describes the current state of science; it is not something that scientists adopt a priori to doing science. . . . I don't question the validity of the philosophical work, it simply has no bearing on the science. . . . The basic problem with philosophizing on science is that science changes.
I’ll beg to differ.
Fish don’t know that they’re swimming in water. It’s far too obvious to them to make a distinction.
When science changes, one could say that it’s basically re-arranging the chairs on the Titanic. Nothing really changes. A change in content presents another interpretation . . . more accurate, I concede, but nonetheless another interpretation.
Science promotes a vision of what can and should count as the bases for the perception of reality. It’s pretty much taken for granted except in the rarefied air found in the most radical versions of spirituality and in post structuralism and postmodernism. What you see is what you get. What you see are simply images. That’s about all that anyone can honestly say.
The whole project of science makes grand assumptions about what counts as data, how to promote notions of what reality is or is not, and it is most certainly reliant upon what has been “discovered” (but not limited in the final analysis) by previous studies. As some proof, it is almost inconceivable to do completely original research and be recognized by the academy. They don’t know how to take it. I offer sociologist Erving Goffman as a prime example. There are always others to be found once one starts beating the bushes.
Be well.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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When science changes, one could say that it’s basically re-arranging the chairs on the Titanic. Nothing really changes. A change in content presents another interpretation . . . more accurate, I concede, but nonetheless another interpretation.
I think you make an erroneous statement, and the source of the error is undervaluing what it means to be more "accurate" (and/or more precise). In some sense achieving the increased accuracy/precision does much more than re-arrange ideas, new ideas are created, new ways are developed to look at the world, and everything changes.
These are all interpretations, to be sure, but an interpretation that provides the ability to predict better, and to explain more has a greater value than one that does less.
You can contemplate what it takes to provide you your GPS coordinates, the backdrop assumed by Newton is very different from that of Einstein, and your GPS needs Einstein. Those two universes are not just rearrangements of the same stuff.
Scientists make progress not by considering whether this or that philosophical approach is more valid, but by explaining what they "see" and the measure of a good explanation is its ability to predict the outcome of experiments and observations. These explanation can sometimes take a fundamentally different set of ideas than those that proceeded them.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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After thinking about this a bit more, I have to say I share some of the skepticism that mathematical models of specific brain functions can ever give a complete explanation of the mind. In this respect, my reasoning is not necessarily ontological, in the sense that I postulate the existence of some entity, namely "consciousness", that cannot be captured by mechanistic models. My reasoning is more mundane. It seems to me, that in order for us to understand each other and, perhaps even more importantly, in order to shape our lives in a meaningful way, we need stories. These stories are not just some pie in the sky abstraction. Learning someone's story (which evolves and changes with time) involves a real connection to the real world. It involves talking and listening, empathy and observation, analytical skills and critical thinking. Writing our own story is the project of our life. Understanding mathematical models for brain functions in macaques doesn't seem to play a key role (unless that's our chosen career).
In the article Ed Hartouni posted from "Cell" the authors claim that one a face is defined as a vector in a 50-dimensional "shape-appearance" inner product space then one can prove, mathematically, that approximately 200 cells can decode the face using a linear projection onto a single axis. But what happens if we define the face as the expression of a person's story? Perhaps not very scientific and apparently not mechanistic, but then I wonder: how many cells does it take to decode the face that interests me?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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how many cells does it take to decode the face that interests me?
As part of your story or as a question whose answer might be found through investigation?
Long ago a student in the Chicago lab said he felt that each group of a couple hundred neurons in the brain was doing, "it's own job."
That is the question for the neuroscientist: what is the brain doing and how?
In simple terms, we give the brain a signal and see how it responds. We don't investigate consciousness as such. Until we go senile, that is.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Fish don’t know that they’re swimming in water. It’s far too obvious to them to make a distinction.
a specious analogy as stated, perhaps you should try a bit harder to make your point.
Science does not "swim" in a medium defined by the philosophy of science, nor are the metaphysical constructs of that philosophy necessary antecedents to practicing science. What the philosophy of science attempts to do is provide a philosophical explanation of science, and it necessarily does so a posteriori.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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I can see that my choice of metaphors was not useful, perhaps taken a bit too literally.
My point was that there are many things that are taken for granted within various communities. For most physical scientists, I would suggest it looks something like naive realism (it’s a term, not meant to be disrespectful). Largo has talked about this time and time again, so I won’t review it.
It’s my limited experience that unless one talks “within” the confines of the dialogues of a discipline, it’s very difficult to get any attention or consideration. You can imagine why. People just don’t know what the heck you’re talking about (constructs, theories, variables, metrics, etc.). I think it’s fair to say that science proceeds incrementally, almost never radically, and at a snail’s pace.
These ideas are not irrelevant angels dancing on the head of a pin. They are fundamental, without which there can be no science as it is largely practiced today. (Of course there are exceptions, but they always seem to be located on the fringe. I guess that presents a tautology.)
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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perhaps you might try to formulate a short definition of "naive realism"
The SEP has an entry for Scientific Realism from which a useful definition can be found:
 Metaphysically, scientific realism is committed to the mind-independent existence of the world investigated by the sciences.
Semantically, scientific realism is committed to a literal interpretation of scientific claims about the world.
Epistemologically, scientific realism is committed to the idea that theoretical claims (interpreted literally as describing a mind-independent reality) constitute knowledge of the world.
there are philosophical challenges to these claims, of course, but once again, separating the practice of science from the philosophy of science is important. The outcome of the philosophical study will not affect the practice of science.
Scientific realists are "committed" to this world view because it has been very successful in describing nature in a way that enables technologies which are extremely useful. This is not a mere incremental advance, having taken place in the last 500 years of a species largely unchanged for millions of years.
If you wish to state, as you do, "angels dancing on the head of a pin," are just as relevant, you once again tread on specious analogies, after all, this phrase was a criticism of scholasticism, and by extension, idealism (naive idealism?) which attempts to derive knowledge by inferential argument alone.
This is relevant to the discussion, but not in the way I suspect you implied.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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This morning bracing for another assault upon the summit of Potato Mountain.( Tater Hill)
Pray for me.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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As part of your story or as a question whose answer might be found through investigation?
The question was rhetorical, which, perhaps, is nonsensical in science (or mathematics). On the other hand, rhetorical questions can make perfect sense, dare I say: in the "real" world. The precise answer to my question doesn't interest me and I'm not sure that it needs to. I'm not interested in seeing if I can build a robot that can do what I do and I don't need to publish articles in "Cell".
Did you take any interest in Honnold's recent free solo? So I was curious where his head was at. It seems to me the interview with Synnot and the short article by Caldwell were revealing. I'm not saying neuroscience has nothing to offer, but I am saying there are other ways to understand the mind. Biography, autobiography, interviews, historical interpretations, even fiction are all ways to understand the mind that are not mathematical descriptions of brain functions. I guess what I'm saying is even stronger. It seems to me people need these stories to make sense of their lives.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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It strikes me that the whole foundation of science as a developed methodology is based on (a product of) the desire to know. And yet knowing, what knowing is, how we can know, desire to know, desire itself, these things remain presently philosophical questions and in that sense science is but the yeoman to human philosophical needs. Science may find the structural sources or locations of sight and other senses in the brain but the real experience of vision or even the desire to know remain problematic for the scientific method. The structure is not the content and what that content is and what its function is becomes remarkably strange. It seems to me that laying consciousness, mind, awareness at the foot of evolution ignores completely that in this universe consciousness was available to evolutionary processes in the first place. And that, it seems to me, is the remarkable thing.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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On the summit the ignominious concrete pylon.
Notice the red dirt. Iron containing soil exposed to air as a result of fault-induced uplift and the consequent erosion.
Nothin' nada zero, no more folk art. The pity. The gaping emptiness:
Before long the deer flies ( aka ,sting flies, bane-o'-the-one-armed-belayer) sent us packin off the heat exposed ridges into the arms of thousands of swarming bees. I can never work up the courage to stop long enough for a photo in this area-- you'll just have to take my word for it.
Ah the chapparal warrens of the wicked and the wise:
Finally , the shelter of the oak and alder copses in the lower reaches of the canyon, and the stream that cools bare feet:
I'd love to reply to the points you've made Paul but I'm somewhere between the trailhead and base camp and got a trail-weary border collie in the hot car
In due course.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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No need to reply. Looks like a fine hike and it's true: without art there is an emptiness. But there's always the distraction that is the beauty of nature... "for it is only as an aesthetic experience that existence and the world are eternally justified."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 7, 2017 - 02:46pm PT
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Ed is basically ranting that "we don't need no stinking philosophy," unknowing, perhaps, that many if not most philosophers of science are themselves scientists or math buffs. It is mostly these scientists who do the heavy lifting in the philosophy of science. Some others would go so far as to say that going beyond the numbers is where you enter "poetry" or "literature," a pitiful description and evaluation withal, and a major dumbing down of lit, where the suppression of data, especially numbers, is a general principal.
Fruity swz: What, it appears Largo is distinguishing between "sentience" and "feeling" now? Interesting. In my world, they're synonyms, one's latinate the other anglican that's all.
I've been pretty consistent in pointing out the difference between content (feelings, thoughts, sensations, and memories) and being aware of same. Sentience, as I use it, refers to "being aware" or "conscious of" said content. Ergo a feeling (content) is in no wise "synonymous with" sadness, joy, exhilaration, boredom, etc.
I cited an earlier link to a person describing how compartmentalized branches of science can get till they are downright insular, basically working in a vacuum, and from the sounds Ed is making, he is championing that position pretty ardently. Like, keep your stinking hands off my figures. You simply don't understand the nuances cha cha cha.
Wonder where that all comes from?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Good to see that sentience is no longer called a "fundamental force."
It seems to me that laying consciousness, mind, awareness at the foot of evolution ignores completely that in this universe consciousness was available to evolutionary processes in the first place
OK, back to the mysterious fundamental force for which there is no evidence.
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