What is "Mind?"

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MH2

Boulder climber

Andy Cairns

Jun 10, 2017 - 12:26pm PT

[Click to View YouTube Video]

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Jun 10, 2017 - 01:04pm PT

How so? Consider the promise of the reductionist is that the decomposition of causes into mechanisms might ground out in some basic, lowest-level causal notion that is primitive and so not analyzable into other causal mechanisms. However this belief violently confronts the widely touted absence of causation in the theories of fundamental physics: at very small size scales, classical conceptions of objects and properties no longer seem to apply, making it nigh impossible to point to mechanisms at work.

I think this is a very strange statement which is incorrect.

First, scientists don't adopt "reductionism" as a philosophy at the onset, and apply as dogma. It is better to think of it as a consequence of understanding some phenomena, and trying to see what of the many factors that may be a play, would be the most important, then "piecing" the problem into parts.

While this could be called by a philosopher of science as an "ism" it is the consequence of a understanding, scientifically, what is going on. Were their "holistic" ways of doing this they might be applied. And while some in science have advocated for this point-of-view, they haven't come up with workable methodologies. Though Largo can correct me if I'm wrong.

One way one might think of this, though, is in the application of effective fields, where the itty-bitty details are swept up into some average field that serves as a "background" and interacts with the objects of the investigation in particular ways. This technique has a very broad application in physics and is used in many sub-disciplines, you can start with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_field_theory

Largo also states that "causality" is absent in the quantum regime, but the most precise quantum theory we have, Quantum ElectroDynamics, has at its very heart causality, it is a local, relativistic field theory. We often speak of a particular "mechanism" as a description of how elementary particles interact, so at least to the practicing scientist in these fields, the appropriation of classical terms applied to quantum phenomena has happened, largely due to their vast experience, built up over a 100 years that forms the foundation of our knowledge of the sub-atomic domain.

Finally, it is also recognized that the "causal notion" is only a particular way of looking at a physical situation. I tried to point this out up thread, but apparently Largo didn't understand it at all. But once again, there are ways of formulating physics (for instance) that do not require the notion of "causal" in the way that Largo implies, the most fundamental is the difference between differential and integral formulations.

This difference has been greatly developed over a long time, the initial work by Hamilton, Green and that ilk of mathematical physicists was thought to be irrelevant in their time. But the differences in the approaches, differential and integral, lead to the different initial formulations of quantum mechanics, the particles of Dirac, the fields of Schrödinger which are shown to be mathematically equivalent, something that happens when this comes up again and again, that is, if two different theories calculate the identical outcome of experiment, it is because they are equivalent theories. Here is the origin of the "spooky" quantum mechanical "wave-particle duality," but it is a nonissue, the two views are equivalent.

So the physicists' idea of what is "causal" is probably different from the notion that Largo holds, Lago's is largely the bias of being a human and the way humans interpret the physical world around them (and primates, see the linked Science article above). Our perception of causes is a part of our brain, wired in, and shared with other primates.

Finally, the "promise of reductionism" isn't just a promise, it has been the work horse of scientific research, a very successful way of looking at the world, perhaps the most successful if you are to judge how altering science, and the consequential technologies, have been to the human condition.

jgill

Boulder climber

The high prairie of southern Colorado

Jun 10, 2017 - 04:01pm PT

"Exploring" might be a better way of looking at the investigation of mind

And here, I think, you are on safe ground. For then your meditative trance experiences are an aspect of mind that need not be quantified, but, nevertheless, can be enjoyed. However, you bear some responsibility for the apparent dichotomy by continuing to cite analogies from physics. You might be better off using religious interpretations for then there would be no conflict with science.

Keep in mind that your inner explorations revolve about the mind trying to perceive itself - a hopeless and confusing task in my opinion. We have awareness and consciousness, but when we try to isolate these conditions we place them in the intellectual arena, where they do not belong. The "Hard Problem" is a philosophical phantasy.

MikeL

Social climber

Southern Arizona

Jun 10, 2017 - 07:15pm PT

Jgill: we try to isolate these conditions we place them in the intellectual arena, where they do not belong. The "Hard Problem" is a philosophical phantasy.

You can have the first without incurring the second.

I think you’re exactly right about mind not being amenable to the intellect. The intellect seems to me to be a subset. Mind appears to be more than that, considerably.

That does not make it a fantasy, John. I’d say a fantasy is pure imagination without any sensation. If you sit still and be quiet, I don’t think you’ll find that you are completely divorced from any sensation (bodily or cognitively). Those things still go about, but your attitude becomes one of “come and go.” They arise and fall, and you don’t take any particular notice of the arising or falling.

jgill

Boulder climber

The high prairie of southern Colorado

Jun 10, 2017 - 09:42pm PT

It's the "Hard Problem" that I call a phantasy, not the mind.

You seem to be a calming influence on Craig Fry on the other thread, Mike. Well done. Those guys get all lathered up.

Dingus McGee

Social climber

Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace

Jun 11, 2017 - 04:37am PT

jgill,

there is a TED TAlk with Chalmers [Hard Problem idea originator] , "How do You Explain Consciousness?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhRhtFFhNzQ

Seeing this fellow talk gives one insight as to the who-ness of this visionary.

yanqui

climber

Balcarce, Argentina

Jun 11, 2017 - 07:59am PT

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.

I was interpreting the word "progress" in a qualitative (not quantitative) way. That seemed to make more sense to in the context of the conversation with Largo. To illustrate what I mean, I might say: "Construction progresses" (i.e. the construction of buildings for human use). By that I might mean something like buildings are becoming more energy efficient, more environmentally friendly, more functional for human beings, more aesthetically pleasing, more durable and resistant to natural disasters, etc. Or I might mean something completely different like: construction is become less expensive and making more money for investors. The point is my idea of "progress" depends on a certain collection of values, a philosophy of construction, if you like.

On the other hand if all I mean by "construction progresses" is that there are more buildings being built than before, because there are more people (even though the those buildings are ticky-tack) then that's something else, all together.

Mathematicians (and scientists, I suppose) who are working sincerely (not cynically) in their field need to make value judgements every day about the work that goes on. Not only questions like "is it true?" or (in the case of science) "can we verify this experimentally?" but also: "is this interesting?" "is this important?". Maybe scientists are pure cynics, I don't know (but I don't believe it). The pure cynic asks "How can I use this to further my career?". However, I don't get that vibe from you, at all.

In my case, I do my job as best I can (I have other interests, after all) in a very limited institutional framework. At this point I know I will not do great things to contribute to the advancement of the human race (and I never had that ambition, in the first place). What I can do is try to "contribute" (every now and then, anyways) to some very specialized areas, a few results to that seem interesting to me. Can this task be aided by philosophy? I doubt it. But that's partly because my job is already framed in a very limited institutional setting. I suppose I could get ambitious and try to redefine my job from the inside out, but I'd rather go climbing. Bye!

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Jun 11, 2017 - 10:12am PT

I think progress is difficult to measure at any instant of time, largely because you do not know if something you have done can affect someone else's thoughts and work.

At a time when there were few people working on these matters the ability to identify an exceptional person could have depended on that person's individual contribution to the field. But many other factors are important too, such as the opportunity of those individuals to be able to work on the various problems, and their ability to make progress on those problems.

The possibility of collaboration, though recognized as important and enabling, was limited.

The increased number or people has an effect on the "quality" of the research as well as its "quantity." There are more people capable of making quality contributions, they have more time to do so, the networks interconnecting collaborations are more extensive and effective.

We are having such a collaborative discussion on the internet using the protocols of the "World Wide Web" that were developed specifically to support international collaboration; this was essentially the product of CERN in the 1990s. While at the time I wondered why this particular interface was necessary, the expansion that the "idea" undertook certainly affirms the "rightness" of it.

On the Wiki entry for WWW there is the image of the corridor at CERN:
it's a pity that there are no images of the table with a computer sitting on it and the sign "Try the World Wide Web!" that I saw on one of my visits there at the time.

Though my thoughts on this seem to wander, the question of why "progress in science" appears to be exponential has occupied me for these last few years. The thoughts were inspired by my attempt to calculate the "maximum achievable climbing grade" which resulted in something close to a logistics function.

Well, that was one possible description. The "maximum climbing grade" has been going up with time, but not exponentially, as one might expect if it were a matter of population size. And the logistics curve is one way of functionally representing the limiting behavior.

But it isn't just about fitting convenient functions, it is about interpreting the physical aspects of the function, that is, what systems give rise to what characteristic time dependences. As you may know, systems that are described by logistics functions are limited by resources, the classical example is in ecology.

This leads to a hypothesis about climbing that we could generalize to other human activities that require the acquisition of skill to pursue. The hypothesis is that the "limiting resource" in climbing is the number of people capable of undergoing the training regime necessary to climb at "the next higher grade."

In some sense this is just a reformulation of Gould's popular work on the performance of baseball players and how the statistics became limited in a finite population over time.

So getting at the question, "what is the hardest grade that can be climbed" is approached not by explaining the limits of friction, strength, etc., but by the simple fact that a climber cannot train arbitrarily hard for the time required to master that grade. In the end you are limited by the number of people who occupy that part of the population that is capable, and at some point you find that that number is vanishingly small.

Of course there were many objections to this when I posted it on SuperTopoForum, but it provides a prediction, including the grade and the date of the "asymptote." And I am sufficiently confident of the result and the reasoning that I stand by that prediction.

But one wonders if this isn't more general, and that to embark on even more difficult skilled tasks, that at some point you run out of people capable of "training" for those tasks. At a time of expanding populations, more and more people are capable, but at some point the limit is reached and "progress" declines, and I am generalizing this here for progress to mean both "quantity" and "quality."

In a decreasing population the implications are very interesting, and in particular, since there is no long term adaptive advantage to being skilled in these ways the occurrence of "skill-capability" is distributed randomly throughout the population. And finally, with productivity gains being finite, the ability of a particular population to support those people practicing their skills decreases, further eroding "progress."

Anyway, this is where thinking about "progress" lead me...

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Jun 11, 2017 - 10:19am PT

Ethics is a branch of philosophy? Customer service requires ethics. Rhetoric is a branch of philosophy. In serving your customers you employ the art of persuasion utilizing rhetorical devices. So yeah. Philosophy has no place.

I was somewhat taken aback that the UCB Engineering department had courses on "Ethics for Engineers."

My surprise wasn't about the relevance of ethics in engineering, it is very relevant, but that at an institution like UCB, the Philosophy Department seemed none-responsive to the needs of the Engineering Department. (A quick look at the UCB course catalog shows many "ethics" classes offered in PHILOS, though perhaps not directly relevant to the issues confronted by engineers?).

Given the direction at UCB and other schools into STEM areas, this would seem a collaborative opportunity for the Philosophy Dept.

But maybe I have an incomplete understanding of what goes on in the academy these days.

paul roehl

Boulder climber

california

Jun 11, 2017 - 10:37am PT

It would be so much more well rounded and complete if it were STEAM instead of STEM.
IMVHO.

MH2

Boulder climber

Andy Cairns

Jun 11, 2017 - 10:49am PT

I'd rather go climbing. Bye!

Nice progression. Or from a different point of view, regress.

yanqui

climber

Balcarce, Argentina

Jun 11, 2017 - 02:12pm PT

My surprise wasn't about the relevance of ethics in engineering, it is very relevant, but that at an institution like UCB, the Philosophy Department seemed none-responsive to the needs of the Engineering Department. (A quick look at the UCB course catalog shows many "ethics" classes offered in PHILOS, though perhaps not directly relevant to the issues confronted by engineers?).

Given the direction at UCB and other schools into STEM areas, this would seem a collaborative opportunity for the Philosophy Dept.

In this one I agree 100%!

yanqui

climber

Balcarce, Argentina

Jun 11, 2017 - 02:21pm PT

Rhetoric is a branch of philosophy.

I was under the impression that Plato had put the sophists in their place about 2500 years ago and philosophy had moved on.

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - Jun 12, 2017 - 12:20pm PT

Horse feathers, Ed. You know perfectly well that you reduce a discrete external object or force, so to speak, to parts and seek a mechanism to explain a given force or phenomenon. Your reduction might not grind out into some unreducible cause, but the reduction of the big to the small, from the "all" or discernable, to parts, is axiomatic to your investigations.

You might work "top down" during an investigative phase, but when looking to explain anything, you reduce and look for physical associations. Of course you can redefine "cause" a million different ways, and you have. None of it is in principal hard to understand. I'm sure the fine points are - they are in any field.

Chalmers Hard Problem invites anyone to demonstrate, by way of a physical mechanism, how an internal subjective phenomenon arises from purely physical processes. Claiming, as John does, that the hard problem is a fantasy is to grossly misunderstand the question Chalmers is actually asking.

What's more, Ed can rebrand "cause" and reduction any way he chooses, but if you asked him straight up if the brain was not the cause or source of awareness and sentience, we all know he would say, "yes."

We also know that most would wonder that if the brain is NOT the cause (however you want to define it) or source of sentience, then mind is somehow "magic." This too is seeking a cause, or a source, but here, a magic one.

I simply am asking, what else might be an option beside physical causation and magic/gods/etc.

The sticky part for Ed and other Type A physicalists is the philosophical corner they put themselves when they ask, "What isn't physical?"

If you say that awareness itself is physical, then brain and brain states are selfsame. That nixes all recourse to mechanisms because awareness has to be an inherent property of brain, not an output, otherwise brain states and brain itself can't be "the same," that is,"identical."

If you say, the brain sources sentience, or sentience issues from brain, or that sentience is "what the brain does," then you have to demonstrate not just how content is produced via neurology, but how awareness and subjectivity is as well, and you are left, without question, with the Hard Problem.

Ain't no way around it but double talk and facile and mindless denials.

But what, exactly does this all boil down to? I believe the confusion arises from people making statements, or holding positions and beliefs that are logically incoherent.

For example, Ed says: What isn't physical?

One is quite right to wonder if their own experience is itself an external physical object or phenomenon, since none of us can hold up out experience and say, "Here it is. Behold this as sense data. This right here is my experience, a physical thing, or phenomenon or force."

This is absurd - we can easily see why.

So Ed or others say, "Well, ancient man used to BELIEVE mind was some separate thing or phenomenon, but that was before we had proper science to tell us it is not."

Tha is, we only thought sentience was something different then external physical object or forces, but now neuroscience has show us otherwise, that the physical substrate of the brain is in some way responsible for mind. Entirely."

But in what way does, "in some way is responsible" normally understood?

It is normally understood that the brain causes or sources the inner experience we all have. And it is only a matter or time, the thinking goes, that neuroscience will show us how."

And how might neuroscience "show us?" By being able to graph out and demonstrate, mechanistically, how mind arises from brain function. That mechanism might be a kind of wholistic functuionality drawn from global feedback loops, etc., but the promise of the physicalist is that brain function will entirely "explain" mind, mechanistically. No "magic."

The problem, in a nutshell, is that a mechanistic explanation has never been tasked with having to demonstrate how external physical forces or mechanisms (brain) source, cause, or are in some wise give rise to an internal phenomenon like experience or awareness, which cannot be demonstrated as themselves being external physical forces or objects we can measure. This usually leads to several untenable declarations:

There is no external or internal. They are the same.

Or, there is only brain. Experience is not "real" (physical).

Or some might say that mind is an emergent phenomenon of the brain, but that leaves them with Chalmers Hard Problem, of showing how mind emerges, mechanistically. Such "explanations" are always bound up with trying to demonstrate how sentience is somehow tied to data processing, memory, and so forth. Of course all this can lead to is the description of a zombie, with awareness left out. This is basically behavioralism applied to mind. Inputs, processing, outputs. That's called machine registration, not consciousness.

Again, if you hold that all there is, is brain, then you are left with the brain itself BEING conscious. NOT producing consciousness, which by definition would include a phenomenon more than just the functioning of physical parts. In this case you are admitting that matter, in the case of brain, is inherently conscious. IOWs, you can't say there are only the parts - or the whole - of the brain, while admitting to your own experience, which is not observable IN the parts or the whole. If you point to either parts or to global brain activation and say, "That IS consciousness," then brain and consciousness are selfsame = inherent property.

We can redefine "mechanism" this way and that but we are still left with brain sourcing or giving rise to mind, according to a physicalist model.

MH2

Boulder climber

Andy Cairns

Jun 12, 2017 - 02:59pm PT

If you say that awareness itself is physical, then brain and brain states are selfsame.

How much do you know about the brain?

If you want to deny that awareness is physical, you should at least look closely at the evidence.

You seem to want to skip that Hard Problem.

jgill

Boulder climber

The high prairie of southern Colorado

Jun 12, 2017 - 03:26pm PT

Claiming, as John does, that the hard problem is a fantasy is to grossly misunderstand the question Chalmers is actually asking

I think the Hard Problem is pretty simple to understand, but is more semantics than substance. It's made a huge impression on you because of your meditative recognition of "empty awareness", convincing you that consciousness is a kind of "thing" that must have existence separate from brain function though derived from same. Sadly, you are deluded. Seek help from Uncle Dennett.

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - Jun 12, 2017 - 03:29pm PT

MH2. Demonstrate that awareness itself is physical. Not CAUSED by physical processes, but is itself physical.

If you say that awareness is sourced by brain, then you have to demonstrate the mechanism and process by which this is so.

If you say that awareness and brain are selfsame (say you point to the frequencies on a qEEG or the hot spots on an MRI and say, "That IS awareness"), you are admitting that awareness is an inherent property of matter.

There's no wiggle room for you on this one, at least none that will render a logically coherent statement.

WBraun

climber

Jun 12, 2017 - 03:35pm PT

A dead stone has no awareness but a living being can be aware of a dead stone.

Since the living being is ultimately non-physical then awareness does not originate in the brain or the mind.

The non-physical living entity becomes consciously aware of the material energies thru the use of its material brain, mind, and senses ........

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - Jun 12, 2017 - 04:21pm PT

I think the Hard Problem is pretty simple to understand, but is more semantics than substance.

---

Now you're just blowing smoke, John.

The Hard Problem simply asks, in so many words, "By means of what physical mechanism does consciousness exist."

Exactly what strain of semantics are you referring to that gives you the false impression that this question is, itself, a "fantasy." And in what manner does this question - which science routinely asks per the physical existence of any and all external forces and objects - suddenly morph into a "sematic" question when applied to consciousness, but is perfectly clear and agreed upon by all when applied to how light and moisture, say, gives rise to a rainbow, or how gravity bends space.

I consider the Hard Problem to be a trick question and in fact a sucker's question because of it's basic assumption: That physical forces or mechanisms MUST and CAN "explain" consciousness. If you believe so, you merely have to demonstrate how. No semantics required.

It is curious how otherwise intelligent folks do all manner of duck diving and equivocation in trying to deny, write off and otherwise shuck and jive their way past the Hard Problem. The rare honest fellow will tackle the problem straight on, instead of attacking what by any definition is a clearly straightfoward scientific challenge: Show how an external object (brain) gives rise to sentience. Without fail, those with the wherewithal and spine to rise to the question get mired in processing babble or silly complexity double talk.

Your Uncle Dennett did the greatest duck dive of them all: Rather than even sac up for the question, he did an end run, saying, consciousness itself is not real, so there is no need to have to "explain" it.

We can easily see the poor old duffer hiding his head in the sand on this one.

Let it be true because it is.