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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Aug 18, 2012 - 07:19pm PT
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I rescued the June 2012 Scientific American from next to the crapper, and there is a nice article in it about the HBP, or Human Brain Project.
The point was that the reductionist approach won't work, so they are building a digital brain.
I have no clue if it will work or not, but it does cover a fair amount of neuroscience that I knew nothing about. Such as how much work it took to model the activity of a single neuron in 2005. Computational power increased and they then modeled 10,000 neurons in 2008. In 2011, they modeled one million neurons.
These are models, but the computers as they move forward will be built in ways that incorporate what it known about brain anatomy and function.
In 2014 they will have the computational power to run a rodent brain, 200 million neurons. The Human Brain has 89 billion neurons.
It is pretty interesting. Right off the bat the guy says to toss out the reductionist method when approaching the brain.
It is about five pages long, and Scientific American isn't a journal. It is just something that is being worked on. Their current computer is an IBM machine called Blue Gene, and has 300,000 processors which take up a volume of 72 refrigerators.
It goes on to say that the next generation of supercomputers will take the power of a small town to run them. The brain operates on 40 watts.
Pretty interesting read.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 18, 2012 - 07:29pm PT
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I don't think that will work, particularly...
...the point of abstraction is to find the fundamental properties of what you are studying... while the brain design might be difficult to understand due to its the "evolutionary" architecture, thinking that you can emulate the brain on a computer might not succeed if you miss the essential points.
Things are still early in the science.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 18, 2012 - 09:15pm PT
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Reductionist biology—examining individual brain parts, neural circuits and molecules—has brought us a long way, but it alone cannot explain the workings of the human brain, an information processor within our skull that is perhaps unparalleled anywhere in the universe. We must construct as well as reduce and build as well as dissect. To do that, we need a new paradigm that combines both analysis and synthesis. The father of reductionism, French philosopher René Descartes, wrote about the need to investigate the parts and then reassemble them to re-create the whole.
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http://vimeo.com/42757347
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Markham voices some interesting and to me, valid beliefs about how the brain creates our reality, that the "world" we known does not "exist" separate from mind, but that it is a totally brain created phenomenon.
But what he is studying is mechanistic processing, not consciousness. That much seems clear.
He and others believe that consciousness naturally arises from complexity, meaning that the fundamental stuff are the atoms (energy), off which the mind "emerges" as a second-order gizmo, the first order being the atomic stuff (energy), which apparently is not molecular wood or rock or an atomic spread like marmalade, but is merely energy bonded this way and that.
Of course Markam's approach will never discover "mind" because it assumes that the whole is the sum of the parts and no more, which is a way to say that fundamental reality IS parts and only parts.
To me, the interesting thing is that while the "only parts" reductionist model is totally and unequivocally junked in the Sci Amer. article, and apparently all the people associated with the project, yet there is no coherent reason why they feel bottom up reductionism cannot explain "everything." To me, expecting as much is like expecting a wave to provide proof about particles, or for my Uncle to be evidence of my Aunt.
But I have no philosophical or professional need to believe that fundamental properties all need to be the same - objective, subjective, particle, wave, wood, stuff, "matter," cheese, atoms, fields, a partridge or a pear tree.
JL
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 18, 2012 - 11:22pm PT
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I found this paper called "The Error of Reductionism" which seems to have a few interesting observations that perhaps underscore what the Sci. Amer. article was saying per junking reductionism as viable model to study brain function. I like it because it has the kind of good humor that Freyman had in some of his material.
A physicist, an engineer, and a psychologist are called in as consultants to a dairy farm whose production has been below par. Each is given time to inspect the details of the operation before making a report.
The first to be called is the engineer, who states: ”The size of the stalls for the cattle should be decreased. Efficiency could be improved if the cows were more closely packed, with a net allotment of 275 cubic feet per cow. Also, the diameter of the milking tubes should be increased by 4 percent to allow for a greater average flow rate during the milking periods.”
The next to report is the psychologist, who proposes: “The inside of the barn should be painted green. This is a more mellow color than brown and should help induce greater moo juice flow. Also, more trees should be planted in the fields to add diversity to the scenery for the cattle during grazing, to reduce boredom.”
Finally, the physicist is called upon. He asks for a blackboard and then draws a circle. He begins: “Assume the cow is a sphere . . .”
This old joke, if not very funny, provides an allegory for thinking simply about the world, and it allows me to jump right in to a relevant idea: Before doing anything else, abstract out all irrelevant details!
Reductionism means to reduce the problem being studied down to its component parts. Then by understanding the behavior of the parts, you can assemble an understanding of the behavior of the whole.
Historically science has divided Nature into parts in order to study natural phenomena. Some of these parts – light, particles, atoms, molecules, plants, animals, and humans– form the focus for the classical sciences such as optics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.
But what we have called parts of the structure, we are now learning are in fact “wholes,” or stages of process. Some of these stages of process are simpler–light, particles, atoms, small molecules, and some of these stages of process are more complex–large molecules, plants, animals, galaxies and humans. Sciences focused on simpler stages of process have most benefited from the reductionist strategy. Those scientists studying the evermore complex stages of process have found reductionism less useful. M. Mitchell Waldropwriting in Complexity, said:
Complexity theory attempts to provide a general scientific understanding of complex systems, both in nature and in the human world - ant colonies, immune systems, brains, economies, and human cultures. Though these examples seem very different on the surface, they share a number of properties that make them alike at a deeper level.
Complex systems typically contain many interacting parts. Thus, a brain consists of billions of interacting neurons, and an economy consists of millions of people and thousands of firms. Many other complicated objects, such as computers, also have multiple parts, but in a complex system there is nothing like a computer´s central processing unit. Moreover, the components often are not only leaderless, they also are active in the sense that they constantly adapt their behavior in response to what is going on around them. Thus, animals in an ecosystem will change their foraging behavior when their customary food grows scarce, and consumers in an economy will change their purchasing plans when facing a recession.
Even with no one in charge, complex systems will spontaneously shape themselves into highly organized patterns and structures. When weather conditions are right, for example, randomly moving molecules of air and water vapor above the Gulf of Mexico will organize themselves into a hurricane. When technological conditions were right for the personal computer industry to emerge twenty five years ago, hundreds of new start-up firms organized themselves into a few locations.
Finally, complex systems never seem to settle down to a state of equilibrium. Upheaval and change are the norm.
This all makes complex systems impossible to understand by reductionistic methods. Physics and chemistry, in particular, have achieved enormous success over the centuries by dividing up the world into comparatively simple pieces to study with mathematical precision. With complex systems this strategy has not led to many meaningful conclusions, though not for lack of trying. The interactions are as important as the individual pieces, and all of them have to be taken into account at once.
In the past we have referred to the sciences of Physics and Chemistry as the hard sciences and Biology, Psychology and Sociology as the soft sciences. Mathematicians insisted that the soft sciences lacked the precision and rigors of their hard sciences. In fact even cosmologists have simply been focusing on the “shallow” physical “parts” of the universe, while the psychologist has been focusing on the deeper and more complex “process.”
But now we finally are seeing that artificially labeling stages of process as “parts” of reality represents an even larger error. The stages of process are not “parts,” they are “wholes” requiring an inclusive approach diametrically opposed to reductionism.
Innovation and invention occurs when we see the whole first. This fact is lost on most reductionists, who believe that the discoverer simply assembles the “parts” into mechanistic “wholes” – whether they be postulates of a theory or pieces of a new widget. Arthur Young , inventor of the Bell helicopter, addressed the “shallow view” in the Reflexive Universe:
“There are no helicopter ‘parts,’ until after you first create the concept of the whole helicopter. Then you make the parts to achieve the whole. The whole is the original invention, meaning the whole comes before the parts. There is something extra in the whole that contains the purpose and function, neither of which can be determined by examining the parts of the mechanism alone.”
Since purpose is in the whole and not in the parts, the whole is therefore greater than the parts. From a reductionistic point of view this is not true, focused as they are on mass, length, and time, which are all parts. Lost on them are two fundamental truths, bore out in the real world: the whole cannot function when divided, and function is exactly that aspect or “cause” which is not in the parts. This leads to a basic postulate: The parts are derived from the whole, and not the whole from the parts.
Our main strategy with classical science has been reductionistic - breaking phenomena into parts for examination and experimentation. This method has wrought marvelous discoveries in the physical sciences, including energy. But this method focuses on the part to the exclusion of the whole, and by reducing the data being examined, it is by design and definition, incomplete, blind as it is to the whole (synergy).
This is not to proffer the absurd claim that reductionistic science is "wrong" or has no value. But rather that we must use it cautiously, accepting it’s proven limits.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 19, 2012 - 12:16am PT
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I think that "reductionism" is not breaking a problem down to parts, necessarily, but reducing the problem to its essential components. These are not the same thing...
Further, "complexity theory" has not successfully been used to explain any system that I know of, if you know of a success it would be interesting to learn about.
While the joke about the "spherical cow" is well told, one wonders what it is about... but in the limit where the actual shape of the cow can be shown to be irrelevant, it is a perfectly acceptable assumption. In other words, where the essential features of the problem you are trying to explain does not depend on the three dimensionality of the cow, a one dimensional cow (in spherical coordinates) reduces the problem to something tractable without sacrificing any essential feature.
That is "reductionism" in my mind, understanding what the important features are in what you are explaining and what the irrelevant features are; pertinent to our discussion of mind, a physical theory will throw out many irrelevant features of mind, consciousness, etc. In doing so, this "reduction" will be subject to the criticism that the baby has gone with the bath water... that there isn't anything interesting left.
We'll see.
Main point here, don't confuse scientific "reductionism" with the philosophical item, they're different.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 19, 2012 - 12:35am PT
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While the joke about the "spherical cow" is well told, one wonders what it is about... but in the limit where the actual shape of the cow can be shown to be irrelevant, it is a perfectly acceptable assumption. In other words, where the essential features of the problem you are trying to explain does not depend on the three dimensionality of the cow, a one dimensional cow (in spherical coordinates) reduces the problem to something tractable without sacrificing any essential feature.
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Only one, Ed, and that is the cow is not a sphere at all, but livestock, as in "alive." If the physicist was only interested in examining the cow as so many Chuck roasts, spherical would be fine. But taking the whole bovine into account, "considering" Besse as a sphere is committing the error the biologist warned about - that unless you worked down from the whole, you miss the living animal, and swap it out for a circular object, good for measuring, but maybe less than the totality of the beeve itself.
I think the point of the guy (a biologist himself) was that a merely physical theory (the "shallow view") is based on the parts "creating" the whole, which itself must be physical, whereas complex systems cannot be understood is such superficial terms because they do not behave like classical mechanisms.
Perhaps when you are requesting that "complexity theory" explain a system, you are again searching for a botton up causal definition, the very one the guy was saying was not forthcoming, and is lacking to ever explain things such as mind. IE: the bottom up approach, by this view, doesn't work for complex systems, but in terms of the Scientific America piece, they did not comprehensively say WHY it didn't work, or why they have not followed the belief that the system is in the pieces. But since my work is top down, I am only mildly curious about what seems pretty obvious - that the whole is more than the parts. We experience this directly all day every day but most of us miss it, I think.
When the digital model never snaps "awake," not now or in 1,000 years (It's alive!"), we will indeed "know."
A bonus quote (physics):
Complexity is the result of the failure of the Newtonian Paradigm to be generic.
The success of the Newtonian Paradigm cannot be ignored. Most of modern science and technology is the result of it. For that reason alone it is difficult to suggest that it has limits and to then make that suggestion stick. Not only does the paradigm have limits, but also those limits are what gave rise to a concept like complexity.
Complex systems and simple systems are disjoint categories that encompass all of nature.
The world therefore divides naturally into those things that are simple and those things that are complex. The real world is made up of complex things. Therefore the world of simple mechanisms is a fictitious world created by science or, more specifically, by physics as the hard version of science. This is the world of the reductionist. It is modeled by the Newtonian Paradigm and simply needs sufficient experimentation to make it known to us. Those experiments involve reducing the system to its parts and then studying those parts in a context formulated according to dynamics.
JL
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 19, 2012 - 01:27am PT
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I felt like digging into this stuff tonight so I actually did find a blurb that possibly explains the assertion in the Scientific America article that reductionism is the "wrong" way to look at "consciousness." The writer is a Professor of physiology.
How is this “brain science” done? Much the same as regular science, but updated to fit the subject. Understand there is nothing else in observable Nature remotely like consciousness, so modeling consciousness as we might model quantum fields or wave formation has not proven useful. The challenge is broadly called “complexity.”
Standard science is a combination of using our senses to observe the world around us and then to use some mental activity to make sense out of that sensory information. The process is called the modeling relation. If we call the world we are observing and trying to understand the Natural System and the events that make it change as we observe causality, then that represents our object of study.
We mentally encode the natural system into another system of our making or choosing. i.e., a formal system. Once we have chosen a formal system, we can manipulate it in various ways with the objective of mimicking the causal change in the natural system. These manipulative changes in the formal system we call implication. Finally, once we think we have an appropriate formal system and have found an implication that corresponds to the causal event in nature, we must decode from the formal system in order to check its success or failure in representing the causal event.
If for instance, 1 = 2 + 3 + 4, we say that the diagram commutes and we have a model. A model of the world is the outcome of a successful application of the scientific method, but it can also arise in other, less formal ways. Whenever someone tries to make rational sense of the world, they are trying to construct a successful modeling relation, or a model.
Now the world, from which we single out some smaller part, the natural system, is converted into a formal system that our mind can manipulate and we have a model. The world is complex, so the formal system we chose to try to capture it can only be partially successful.
For decades we were satisfied with the Newtonian Paradigm as the formal system, forgot about there even being and encoding and decoding, and gradually began to change the ontology so that the Newtonian Paradigm actually replaced or became the real world (at least as seen through the eyes of science). As we began to look more deeply into the world we came up with aspects that the Newtonian Paradigm failed to capture. Then we needed an explanation. Complexity was born! (as well as many new models). This easily can be formalized. It has very profound meaning.
Complexity is the property of a real world system that is manifest in the inability of any one formalism being adequate to capture all its properties. It requires that we find distinctly different ways of interacting with systems. Distinctly different in the sense that when we make successful models, the formal systems needed to describe each distinct aspect are NOT derivable from each other.
Rosen spent his life refining this idea. But there is far, far more to it, and if brain research shows us nothing more, it might help assuage our lingering “Cartesian hangover,” and answer some rather towering questions about complex systems.
Note how he mentioned that "the Newtonian Paradigm actually replaced or became the real world - at least as seen through the eyes of science. Here, perhaps, lies the origin of the magical thinking insisting that the "map is the territory."
JL
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Aug 19, 2012 - 01:28am PT
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Look. There are some very basic facts that we are missing here.
Number One is that we are only talking about the human brain, as if the human brain is the only way to study consciousness.
The Human Mind is the result of at least 500 million years of evolution, if you want to go back to the earliest organisms that had a brain.
The point that I want to raise is that the brain, and its adaptation in various forms over such a long period gives us a hell of a lot of examples of brain anatomy and function in a wide variety of animals.
I like looking at the mosquito. The mosquito is born with the map and the territory hard wired in. Nobody teaches it how to fly, nobody teaches it how to find food, and nobody teaches it how to find a mate or how to mate.
This leads us to a study of Humans. A human is born with very few survival skills and must be taught over a number of years to be able to compete with its kin in order to pass on its DNA. That is pretty weird. I can't think of an animal, offhand, that takes that long to become an adult.
Human babies are born with very little ability. A year to walk, 2 years to talk. I have read that the human brain doesn't fully develop until the late teens, which I find amazing considering the very short life expectancy of humans only a few thousand years ago. I know that I would not have survived until my first birthday without modern medicine. Same with my son, who had a very scary delivery. He's all fine and smart as a calculator now.
Even recently there were many cultures who had to practice infanticide, simply because a child was a heavy burden if the parents and group were under stress in which having a child present put the whole group at risk.
So we obviously learn a lot from experience and observation.
I meant to reply to one of Largo's posts a while back, but got tied down with work. On one hand, he dislikes the idea of a mechanisitic brain. In the same post he chided me for breaking a couple of "Laws of Mind." Well, I found it odd that he dismissed a purely mechanisistic mind, limited to the natural laws of physics, chemistry, wha wha, while at the same time stating that the non-mechanistic mind had laws of its own.
I still don't know what the Laws of Mind are.
Now here I am stepping out on things I have been just pondering. We are bombarded by information every second. Our senses are bombarded with information. Most of this information gets tossed into the recycle bin, while others sink in. Using that, as well as the mosquito analogy leads me to think that this isn't an either/or argument. The brain, or mind, has a method to process information in a certain way. Save some info, toss some, follow certain rules, such as stopping at a red light, all without what I would call direct conscious thought or analysis.
So to me, the entire subjective/objective, mechanistic/spiritual(?) model is a sorry over simplification. We can work on both levels. Think about it. Can you remember every bit of information from exactly 24 hours ago? Ten years ago? Why not? Because it doesn't provide any advantage in a practical sense, and who we are is totally defined by "A practical sense," if you look at it from an evolutionary, adaptative perspective.
Hey. We should be talking about mosquito minds right along with human minds. I think that it is pretty obvious that in some circumstances we operate on a very objective level, but only on the "important things."
Mosquitos are very successful animals, if you rank success on species longevity.
I no longer see this argument as an either/or argument. The map and the territory are sometimes hard wired into our minds at birth. If you have ever cared for a baby, you will understand how fast they learn, and how quickly they change.
Another point that I would like to make is that there isn't an expert neuroscientist in this discussion, so making statements about what is or is not understood is anecdotal. Like watching a one hour program on the science channel and thinking you know something.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 19, 2012 - 01:54am PT
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in terms of a success in complexity theory, I merely require that it be predictive... so far there are no such successes
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Aug 19, 2012 - 02:16am PT
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Ed is correct about the meaning of "reductionism" in respect to the brain project. Reductionism works very well in certain parts of science.
In the Scientific American article it is meant in a different way. The point was that they had already done the work on the structure and function of neurons. To kickstart it into a functioning system required building a system and then studying it.
The reductionism has already been done. Neurons are understood. Groups of neurons have already been artificially created.
So they did take a reductionistic approach first. It is like anything. You have to understand how the components of how each part of an engine works before you can understand completely how to build an engine.
You don't have to be a mechanic to know how an internal combustion engine works. There was a time in camp 4 where everyone was a decent Volkswagon mechanic.
Drawing these hard lines in the sand can be counter productive to the discussion. If you are going to put down "Laws," then you had better be able to understand them and explain them to others.
edit: Ed. Weather is complex. Far more complex than can actually be measured completely and economically. Upper air data is taken twice per day around the world from sondes, but they are far too coarse to be able to see everything.
In the plains states we have some vertical wind profilers, which use radar to give you a profile of windspeed and direction above the site.
During the massive OKC tornado a while back, the day started out as a slight risk day until a narrow part of the jet was seen coming in over the White Sands profiler. It was then updated to high risk (which is seldom done), and within a few hours one of the most devastating tornado outbreaks in the state kicked off.
The widely spaced sounding data was too coarse to pick up the fine nature of the upper air distribution that day. It looked like flow aloft was too low and their wouldn't be enough shear or vorticity to even intitiate convection, much less support supercells. Once that data was picked up, it went bonkers.
It would be great if there was a fine data grid, but it is too expensive. Even the profilers are always undergoing funding problems on a regular basis.
They are pretty cool. One of them is just south of me on a guy's farm. He was a great, eccentric, and retired meterologist who loved to entertain. I think the profiler was the first one.
Point being, weather modeling is getting super good. People who say otherwise haven't been paying attention.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Aug 19, 2012 - 11:29am PT
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Many will disregard the source, but I like Rupert Sheldrake's idea of the mind projecting a field around itself that extends outside the brain (thanks for the video Donald!) and would explain many of the interesting things experienced in meditation as resulting from the interactions of the field rather than the physical brain. I know physical reductionists will immediately jump down my throat about ether being a wrong idea. Personally I think we have just not far been able to measure this field yet. It exists at a much more subtle level than what we are looking at, if we're looking at all.
Many spiritual traditions say that a more advanced person can use their mind to affect the mind of someone else who is willing for this to happen as in the guru student relationship. Here's one experience. I was once meditating in a Japanese Buddhist temple while my Japanese meditation master was sitting in an office off to the side doing temple paperwork not appearing to be meditating at all. I felt that I was in an elevated state but still conscious of my surroundings.
Someone came to the temple door and called to the priest who then walked toward the door. As he moved past me I had the distinct sensation that I was connected to him by a rubbery sort of material extending from my back where the heart chakra is. As he walked further away this stretchy connection became more and more taut like a rubber band. Just as he stepped over the temple threshold, it came flying back toward me and whopped me on the back so hard that even though I was sitting crossed legged on the floor my upper body was thrust forward until my forehead almost hit the floor.
So what to make of an experience like that? I have never read of such an experience anywhere so I was not referring back or anticipating a particular outcome, or even sure what happened. Of all the explanations so far however, Sheldrake's mental fields that can overlap makes the most sense to me - even if those fields sometimes seem like a stretchy rubber band.
Sheldrake believes by the way that intuitions and experiences that would normally be classified as some form of esp have a material explanation derived from evolution and the various needs of survival. They apparently lie dormant in modern people but can be reactivated under certain conditions.
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jstan
climber
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Aug 19, 2012 - 12:16pm PT
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This leads us to a study of Humans. A human is born with very few survival skills and must be taught over a number of years to be able to compete with its kin in order to pass on its DNA. That is pretty weird. I can't think of an animal, offhand, that takes that long to become an adult.
Reports I have seen suggest Turkana Boy was thought to have reached already at 11 the state that we reach by 18.
Of course the 18 year old threshold is now reached by 30 in the USA, but that data point is aberrant.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 19, 2012 - 12:25pm PT
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BASE SAID:
So they did take a reductionistic approach first. It is like anything. You have to understand how the components of how each part of an engine works before you can understand completely how to build an engine.
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The key here is the world "before," which betrays the reductionistic point of view. Of course we cannot suppose to posit this perspective as anything objective, since others, especially those working with practical concerns, see the same reality in altogether different terms. Case in point below, where the whole, NOT the parts, are envisioned first, whereby innovation follows:
"Innovation and invention occurs when we see the whole first. This fact is lost on most reductionists, who believe that the discoverer simply assembles the “parts” into mechanistic “wholes” – whether they be postulates of a theory or pieces of a new widget. Arthur Young , inventor of the Bell helicopter, addressed the “shallow view” in the Reflexive Universe:
“There are no helicopter ‘parts,’ until after you first create the concept of the whole helicopter. Then you make the parts to achieve the whole. The whole is the original invention, meaning the whole comes before the parts. There is something extra in the whole that contains the purpose and function, neither of which can be determined by examining the parts of the mechanism alone.”
BASE also wrote:
I found it odd that he (JL) dismissed a purely mechanisistic mind, limited to the natural laws of physics, chemistry, wha wha, while at the same time stating that the non-mechanistic mind had laws of its own.
I still don't know what the Laws of Mind are.
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You missed the gist of the argument, BASE. What I was saying is that there are some who hold onto the notion that a bottom-up causal model will fully "explain" mind - once the data is in. That means, in so many words, that we can start with atoms and follow a mechanical causal chain right up to mind. This allows us to say that mind is nothing more than a physical phenomenon, and that atoms and mind are just various parts of one mechanical/physical spectrum. Put differently, mind IS brain, as some like to say. Since brain is physical, it is subject to physical laws. Since mind is also physical/mechanical, according to the physicalists, it follows that it MUST also be subject to laws.
My point was that you can't have it both ways. You can't say mind is a mechanical/physical thing, all of which are subject to laws, and also say mind is NOT subject to laws. It follows that mind MUST be subject to laws, if as you insist, it is purely mechanical/physical. I was merely saying that since a mechanistic view of mind must include laws, what were they? So far none of the physicalists have ponied up any answers.
So far as Ed saying that to be a successful description of something, it has to be predictive, I think he is referring to being able to predict the velocity, location, and so forth of the parts. But maybe I am missing his point.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 19, 2012 - 12:37pm PT
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So what to make of an experience like that?
I asked up above, but perhaps it wasn't noticed, the related question: "what sets your point-of-view"
There was some discussion, but obviously we notice that our POV is set near our eyes, yet we also learn to extend that to our limbs... but many of us experience the phenomena referred to as "disassociation" where our consciousness seems displaced from our bodies... it is an odd feeling and usually memorable.
Given the perceptual range of our physical senses, and the extension by our mind, why couldn't you experience the world from other POVs and make that just as common as our conventional POV?
MH2 points out that our genetic inheritance from early sharks, the cerebellum, allows finely coordinated muscle motion with our senses, all the better to eat you with, my dear! This evolutionary development certainly conveyed a huge advantage when hunting for food with a much less coordinated central nervous system and musculature.
I don't find disassociation strange, rather, I find the normal "association" something even more interesting, obviously the internal wiring of the cerebellum puts us "here" and not "there," obvious only because it is the most economical use of that organ, since most of our motion has to be coordinated first around our center-of-gravity, then upon the rotational effects of an extended body, finally the finesse of a non-rigid extended body where we can control the rigidity and thus execute exquisite motion: think John Gill "dynamic" boulder moves (which are not so dynamic as they are 6-D kinematic) or a Gabby Douglas vault.
As "athletes" we work to refine non-POV thinking, usually through a lot of training exposing us to an environment that requires non-POV perspective... look at that next section of a climb, how do I approach it, physically?
While there is a limit to the extent with which we can disassociate, the various facilities for "mapping" and "visualization" allow us to have experiences at varying degrees of verisimilitude of being "out of our body." I don't see any real problem with this... how would we know the difference?
Extending this along the Largo path, one might ask: at what point is the "mind" (we really mean perception) independent of the physical constraint of the body? But that might be too large a leap to make in the sense that our perception of being in the body is based on the identical "reduction of sensory information" as being outside the body, which requires a place for the perception to be formed, i.e. the brain (and probably specifically the cerebellum).
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 19, 2012 - 12:55pm PT
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re: reductionism...
A major part of Newton's description of planetary motion involved his "reduction" of large, extended, spherical objects (like the Earth, Moon, Sun, etc.) to point-masses.
This formal process is subject to a tortuous geometric proof in Principia due to the fact that few people, at that time, understood the rather simple method of using the calculus to demonstrate the same thing.
That is not important here. What is important is that the rather unrealistic notion that a planet like Earth could be represented as an infinitesimal point with the mass of the Earth suffices for the purpose of creating highly accurate predictions of the planetary motions.
That is, the extent of the actual Earth is irrelevant, its actual physical instantiation, does not effect our ability to calculate an ephemeris.
As the accuracy of that ephemeris increases, the detailed shape of the Earth becomes more important... yet that detail is still abstract compared to the "real deal."
This underlines my point, made many times above, that our physical theories do not have to be "realistic" to be predictive.
A note to Largo: to be predictive does require quantification of the system being studied, at least in physics (and most physical sciences, though I'd require it as a definition of science as a whole). There is too much "wiggle room" in a description that is unquantified to be of use, in my mind... even simple observation where we "predict" and then "test" that prediction is quantifiable in one's simple, innate, sense of probability, that is: "in D number of situations I thought x would happen N times, when I measured it I find the probability N/D for x..." that's quantification...
My criticism of the "complexity theory" is that it hasn't (nor did chaos theory, nor other types of "non-linear" theories so far) been a useful tool in predicting the outcome of experiments, and as such are generally not useful for understanding physical systems. I do believe that some theory will be necessary to analyze those systems (and "life" is one such system) in a way that is scientifically meaningful, that is, predictive.
Complex systems are largely simulated on very power computers, which oversee the interaction of many pieces, often in abstract ways (reduced to their presumed essential elements for the problem being studied), and the behavior of this simulation (a model) used to inform our theoretical (and experimental) thinking. They may actually "predict" the behavior of a complex system. This method is emerging as science methodology, but we are back at the time of Newton and Leibniz vis-a-vis the calculus, still struggling to apply what seems to be overly detailed and sometimes "unrealistic" abstractions to get physical insight. Time will tell... but the largest share of understanding complex systems come from such simulations.
The outcome of such a theory would explain why life on Earth seems so robust, but it would not necessarily explain the details of how life arose on Earth. It would also, therefore, provide a calculation basis for estimating the extent of life in the universe, the variety of what life could be, and perhaps more importantly, what the definition of life is... though this all would be very abstract and perhaps lack philosophical satisfaction...
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Aug 19, 2012 - 04:56pm PT
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If for instance, 1 = 2 + 3 + 4, we say that the diagram commutes and we have a model . . .
I hope that's the royal "we".
Whenever someone tries to make rational sense of the world, they are trying to construct a successful modeling relation, or a model.
Complexity was born!
There's some heavy lifting going on here.
;>)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 19, 2012 - 05:18pm PT
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My wild guess about the brain modeling going on was that most of the people working on it were using a reductionistic bottom-up strategy by which they could predict "mind" from the atomic level stirrings and induce it or have it simply "emerge" once the machine got sufficiently fancy and freighted with streaming data. then the man said, " . . . with a real world system, to capture all its properties requires that we find distinctly different ways of interacting with systems. Distinctly different in the sense that when we make successful models, the formal systems needed to describe each distinct aspect are NOT derivable from each other."
This suggests to me that we probably can't "build forward," or forward-engineer to mind, not because we'll reach some unbridgable gap in the mechanical causal chain, but rather, mind is not the "product" of that chain in the first place. On the other hand, perception and processing are almost certainly and entirely brain produced.
Dude, is it hot here in my crib. I went riding all morning after an early session in the Zendo but it's blazing now. Takes the wind out of ranging on about this stuff.
JL
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TGT
Social climber
So Cal
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Aug 19, 2012 - 05:40pm PT
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You don't have to be a mechanic to know how an internal combustion engine works.
But you have to understand how an internal combustion engine works to be a mechanic.
I think that's where Largo was going with the helicopter analogy.
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Some Random Guy
Trad climber
San Francisco
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Aug 19, 2012 - 07:05pm PT
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mind is...never matter
matter is...never mind
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 19, 2012 - 09:13pm PT
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My wild guess about the brain modeling going on was that most of the people working on it were using a reductionistic bottom-up strategy by which they could predict "mind"
I don't think that's a good guess... usually we'd use the simulation to help guide our physical ideas about the system, associating aspects of the simulations behavior with the actual phenomena and go from there. The idea would be to help strip away the stuff that isn't relevant.
And this wouldn't be at the atomic level since the prevailing thoughts about brain-mind function does not require quantum simulations, it would simulate neuron function in the abstract...
...but that's my guess.
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