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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Paul,
Can you give me an idea of who would need existence and the world to be eternally justified?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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yanqui.
Robert and Sierra and I met Alex in the Valley a week before his solo of FR. We are overwhelmed by the event, and by the way he has responded in subsequent interviews. Do you know what his next goal is, according to him?
I'm not saying neuroscience has nothing to offer, but I am saying there are other ways to understand the mind.
even fiction are all ways to understand the mind that are not mathematical descriptions of brain functions
It seems to me people need these stories to make sense of their lives.
I agree.
Why do you say that people need to make sense of their lives?
Do you think any other species have this need?
Do you think that they might?
Do you think Alex does?
If so, what sense could be made of a free solo of Free Rider?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Can you give me an idea of who would need existence and the world to be eternally justified?
You'll have to ask Nietzsche.
OK, back to the mysterious fundamental force for which there is no evidence.
Well, consciousness itself, the fact that it is, isn't that a kind of evidence? Its existence indicates its nature as a possibility. We expect, considering the parameters of the universe, it exists in other places: why? What leads material to a state of consciousness?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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You'll have to ask Nietzsche.
"I will when I see him."
from Blood Simple
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WBraun
climber
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If so, what sense could be made of a free solo of Free Rider?
It is there and I must do it because it's there and I can do it.
There is magnetism drawing one in from previous lifetime.
Make lots of perfectly good sense to free solo it.
Modern science version is:
Duh duh duh, my neurons were firing ....... :-)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 7, 2017 - 05:56pm PT
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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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John, call awareness a fundamental phenomenon. Recall the pioneers of QM, who said that the existence of any thing "postulated consciousness." I would swap consciousness for awareness, but you get the idea.
The reason I asked you what criteria would meet your requirement for "proof," suspecting that what you were fishing for was a physical mechanism, or some physical verification of awareness, as you might find with fundamental forces.
In the quote above, per laying consciousness at the feet of evolution, many on this thread can only imagine awareness as a mechanical function or output, though nobody can begin to describe it in that regards save for bailing into content.
Conversely, awareness becomes even more pronounced once a person detaches from content, meaning its existence can be verified sans content. Put differently, in the space between thought, your awareness does not vanish. If awareness was an aspect of processing, this would not happen.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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in the space between thought, your awareness does not vanish. If awareness was an aspect of processing, this would not happen.
Or maybe awareness is a kind of thought. You seem lost in a thicket of words.
How are you sure that if awareness is an aspect of processing, it would not be lost in the space between thought? Are you that sure of what you mean by 'thought' and 'processing'?
Why is awareness not a form of thought?
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Why do you say that people need to make sense of their lives?
This thread is one piece of evidence among many
Do you know what his (Honnold's) next goal is, according to him?
In the interview he said he was interested in climbing 9a sport.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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I'll always take the medicine first
Neuroscience and Quantum Mechanics (or Mathematics. for that matter) are not theories of health and well-being.
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WBraun
climber
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Modern Chemistry and Physics is what gave mankind cancer to begin with.
There was no cancer until those fools started to play with sh!t they ultimately know nothing about .....
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 7, 2017 - 06:57pm PT
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Why is awareness not a form of thought?
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A common question. Answer, because awareness can not only exist, but becomes even more pronounced, sans thoughts (content).
As mentioned many times, conflating awareness with content (including thought), is IME, a fatal error. The challenge is that you cannot think or reason (thinking) your way to clarity in this regards. You have to go the opposite direction, which goes against our programming. If you believe otherwise, try and still your thoughts for five minutes. Chances are pretty much 100% that you will lose your self-awareness in no time and wake up a little while later having been shanghaied by a thought without you ever consciously knowing it. That's your machine literally taking you over.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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John, call awareness a fundamental phenomenon. Recall the pioneers of QM, who said that the existence of any thing "postulated consciousness." I would swap consciousness for awareness, but you get the idea
We can call it anything we wish, but wishing does not the truth reveal. Did all the pioneers of QM agree on that statement? I doubt it. Ed would know. To say that the existence of a physical object requires consciousness exist is highly debatable - but primarily in those philosophy department lounges, outside of which an independent reality continues to thrive.
Discussions in math lounges go off in flights of fantasy as well.
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WBraun
climber
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The existence of a physical object requires consciousness exist.
Yes .... 100% proven True for billions of years.
Not even debatable .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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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.
not what I said, but you certainly like to explain what I say...
I simply pointed out that science progresses without the need for a formal philosophical description of science, and observed that that description is always after the fact.
Further, Largo pulls out of thin air the factoid (at best) that "many if not most philosophers of science are themselves scientists or math buffs." And you got this statistic where? don't even bother to answer, we all know you aren't much for tracking down the "dusty facts."
As for the Copenhagen interpretation, there was not a universal acceptance at the time, and as I've pointed out, there are a large number of interpretations of quantum mechanics. Certainly this is a confusing situation, but the interpretation of quantum mechanics is not science... at least the Copenhagen interpretation is not, and its very premise is incorrect, which is that we have only "classical" language to describe "quantum" phenomena, which may have been true at the time but is far from true now.
The new language derives from our 100+ year experience with quantum mechanics, and we are now quite used to living in a quantum world. The burning issues that consumed Bohr are probably not important to physics, he was just thinking about it incorrectly. His "authority" as a founder of quantum mechanics doesn't mean that he could not be wrong, Largo, sticking to his story, would have Bohr's "experience" be the authority, in physics it is what you can calculate that sets that authority, and the test is comparison with measurement and observation.
Largo might present even one example where the Copenhagen interpretation lead to a prediction (a calculation) that was verified by experiment. [Perhaps an exercise for your car pool].
Now perhaps the most successful physicist to ponder these question since von Neumann (who you could argue was really a mathematician interested in physics) was Bell, and his work was extremely important, but probably not appreciated at the time he did it. He was one of MikeL's outliers in his time, but his work laid the modern foundations to quantum mechanics. Bell's inequality is testable, and the theory he provided has been extended. Bell himself didn't like the initial outcome, and he didn't live to see his work verify quantum mechanics with increasingly more stringent tests.
While he could be considered a "philosopher" he was not a "philosopher of science," he didn't do any work there, but he did a lot of thinking on quantum mechanics which would have been considered "philosophy," at least by physicists. He isn't remembered because of that, he is remembered because of his calculations, his physics.
In none of this were physicists at all concerned with the "philosophy of science," yet they seemed to make progress, and sometime after the science was done the philosophers of science could try to understand what the physicists did... in no way has a philosopher ever anticipated a scientific discovery, or a development of scientific methods. That's not what philosophy is about.
So confusing the "new mechanics" as a philosophical position adopted by, say, biologists, etc.. leads to the outraged incredulity that Largo often displays, yet the science goes on even without what he would consider coherent philosophical justification.
The philosophical discussion regarding "consciousness" is surely irrelevant to the science that is investigating that topic. It has long been recognized by philosophers that they cannot prove that consciousness requires a "non-material" explanation, and I doubt most scientists working in the field consult the philosophers regarding the direction of their research.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Yes, of course.
Chemistry and physics are mutually exclusive. I'll make sure any one of my loved ones or friends knows this before making an informed decision about cancer treatment...
I know from experience: informed decisions about cancer treatment are difficult and complicated. I would certainly try to get the best medical help available (which has gotten better, for sure, over the last century, thanks, in part, to some advances in physics and chemistry). On the other hand, I wouldn't turn off your own capacity for critical thought and imagine that everything going on in institutionalized science is there to improve your health.
So I have, what seems to me, an interesting story, that seems relevant. It's a brief history of the evolution of an important modern medical tool: the CT scan.
It turns out the mathematics behind the CT scan was developed decades before anyone thought about the possibility of using those ideas to build an imaging device. The mathematicians who worked on this (primarily Radon and Kacmarz) were interested in the kinds of things pure mathematicians are interested in (i.e. not medical applications) and they had no idea that what they were doing might someday be used in the health field. (The kinds of things mathematicians are interested in: now that could be a good topic for this thread). Of course, part of the problem was that the computational power for applications (i.e. digital computers) didn't exist yet.
Cut to nearly half a century later, where we find a particle physicist, working in South Africa, who has, almost as a hobby, a side interest in x-ray technology. Without being aware of Radon's transform, he independently develops the necessary mathematical ideas and applies them to theoretically design a medical imaging tool. About 7 years later he publishes the results, but at the time they generate no interest.
Meanwhile, an electrical engineer working in England, unaware of the work by the particle physicist, actually begins the task of trying to build a CT scanner. After more than a decade of effort, he comes up with a working prototype. 8 years later the electrical engineer (Hounsfield) and the particle physicist (Cormack) share the Nobel prize.
So where is the CT scan today? Well, generating some controversy, because its current use in the medical industry maybe causing an undue amount of cancers. There are strong indications that in some cases a CT scan maybe unwarranted and harmful. The industry is still trying to define the best use of this tool.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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science progresses
This sounds kind of philosophical to me, or is it a physical law that there is progress?
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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So I was thinking about this progress stuff a little bit (I prefer the word "evolution" but I'm not totally against the concept of progress) and the way science (more specifically math, because I know more about that) evolves. It's not hard to write true things in math. Even original true results are not hard to come by. What's hard to do in math is produce "interesting" results (that are also true and original, of course, but we could include these two parenthetical add-ons as part of the meaning of "interesting, for convenience's sake). "Interesting" is the main thing, when it comes to the way math evolves (or "progresses", if you like). I'm not cynical, I believe there is such a thing, but I'm not sure it's possible to give a precise definition. The (very) few times I've been asked to evaluate articles for a certain snooty. nose-in-the-air journal, I could never tell if the article was "of sufficient interest" for that journal or not. In one case I told that editor I didn't know what that meant. He wrote back: "YES YOU DO!". In spite of that, they sent me another article to evaluate. When I said I thought it was of sufficient interest, another referee and the editor (a different editor, this time) disagreed and the article wasn't accepted.
Another point is that fashion definitely plays a role in what gets counted as interesting. You can see this pretty clearly as general point-set topology burst onto scene towards the beginning of the 20th century, and then fizzled out as a viable research area, 30 or 40 years later, as the results became increasingly convoluted and esoteric.
On the other hand, I would agree that, for the most part (there are exceptions) the most interesting articles get published in the most prestigious journals (like the Princeton Annals). So there is something going on there.
I imagine something similar going on in science. I mean. how does one know if an article is of "sufficient interest" to get published in Cell? Here's an article I'd to see: "The code for the recognition of sufficient interest in scientific referees for the journal Cell". Once we had such a code, should we just let computers decide where science goes? Or is it a black box?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jim: Yeah, that's a good point but now we are able to cure cancer with radiation.
I’m laying concrete this morning while it’s still cool down here, but over a morning tea, I read your writing above.
I’ve had radiation, and so did my dad. He died from his treatment afterwards. Radiation burned his insides. From my own experience, there are some trade-offs, Jim. At the time I experienced mine (along with chemo), I gave thought to just dying from the cancer instead. Or letting a macrobiotic diet and my own immune system to take me to the end of the line.
It’s just not as simple as you make it out to be. Six years after my treatment, I live with almost hourly effects that sometimes are just disgusting.
Interesting conversations here, especially the ones about the importance of story (myth, too) in lives.
Hey, Ed, we’re really close. I won’t nitpick.
Be well.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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a computer code? perhaps the Nature article addresses the fantasy:
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1593650&msg=2967535#msg2967535
"It has been twenty-fives years since a report of original research was last submitted to our editors for publication, making this an appropriate time to revisit the question that was so widely debated then: what is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans?"
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v405/n6786/full/405517a0.html
This sounds kind of philosophical to me, or is it a physical law that there is progress?
it probably has more to do with the statistical distribution of populations, that is, when there are more people, there are more people doing science and so more science gets done.
This last 100 years has seen a rather large increase (two to three times) in the human population.
Combine that with the now nearly complete communication network and you get a lot of science done. I don't think that the correlation between the apparent "exponential growth" of knowledge and the exponential growth of people is accidental.
Eventually, machines doing science will expand it, and in ways similar to Chiang's story.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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With greater populations comes more science (eg, discovery of 300K yo H sapiens in Morocco) and more spectacle (eg, nudes climbing El Cap). It's a main reason I can't come down solidly on the side arguing for a smaller world population (eg, 1 billion).
Instead, what's possibly most robust for our descent line is a future series of lengthy ecological boom and bust cycles. After a dozen or so, say, our remote descendants might really have em - life and life wisdom, that is - really "dialed in"? We can hope.
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