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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Aug 19, 2012 - 09:48pm PT
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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?
This is exactly what various meditation systems purport to do. This is also how people who claim esp see the world. Personally I think it's worthwhile to look at both the neurons and unusual experiences for an understanding of how the mind works. One thing that Sheldrake notes in his many experiements with esp is that it works much better if the people or people and animals involved, have an emotional connection. Perhaps that's one of the reasons such research is rejected, as the reductionist method is based on non emotional "objectivity". The very method of the research limits what it can find.
On the other hand, anyone can demonstrate that there is somehow an energetic connection between people by just staring at the back of someone in a crowd and watching them turn around to see who's looking at them.
Such a capability is of course a great survival mechanism and the cultivation of that awareness is one of the capabilities manifested by advanced martial artists. Perhaps one way of looking at the powers/capabilities of the mind would be to think of oneself as a hunter gatherer and ask what abilities would be useful for survival and then see if one could relate them to unusual experiences reported in meditation and sometimes as spontaneous events.
I had a student once who had many unusual experiences who told me that he gave up hunting because his intuition and sensitivities became so keen from martial arts, that he had too much of an advantage over the animals and it wasn't a fair challenge anymore.
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Todd Gordon
Trad climber
Joshua Tree, Cal
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Aug 19, 2012 - 11:43pm PT
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Aug 19, 2012 - 11:57pm PT
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Whatever it is, exactly, it is most certainly a product of biological evolution. I would guess that in another ten to twenty years evolutionary biologists working with neurologists and scientists in related disciplines will get pretty close to nailing this down. There will be essentially nothing new that pure philosophy will have to contribute.
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MH2
climber
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Aug 20, 2012 - 11:53am PT
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Do we need to explain ramen, too?? Can't ve chust eat?
My neuroscience background is far behind me and only really dealt with levels below the cerebrum and cerebellum. It is a brave soul who ventures into those "higher regions."
Hubel and Wiesel and their kind had followed visual information as far as the visual cortex and they described central neurons that responded preferably to horizontal or vertical lines, etc., and they or others had speculated that bits and pieces of information got put together again, and somewhere in your brain there might be a neuron that lit up when your grandmother showed up in your field of vision. However, there was no good evidence from single-neuron recording that any particular cell in your brain or any group of 200 or so cells was doing any useful job.
In the mid-70s a rumor reached us that a neuron had been found performing a useful function in between the sensory and motor parts of the nervous system where most of the brighter investigators had focused their effort. That was the "place neuron" of the hippocampus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_cell
As individuals living in subjective worlds we aren't often confronted with the objective difficulties of keeping track of where we are. We can get up out of the easy chair, walk to the kitchen, and put the noodles on to boil with little in the way of subjectively experienced mental effort. Large amounts of computation are needed, nevertheless. Try to get a machine to do your housework and cook for you. A machine could locate itself by GPS? Okay, but how do people know where they are?
How you know where you are is an example of a question we may have a modest hope of getting an answer to. The answer would not reduce every part of the processes to first causes. It would just take us from where we are now, in our knowledge of the way things work, to a new and interesting place.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 20, 2012 - 12:21pm PT
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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...
So we're saying that the reductionistic model is followed, but up to a point. Meaning the transition from neuron function down to quantum level would bungle the process. That would have to mean that the direct causal link would no longer hold between the two.
If the link were broken going down, perhaps there would be another transition area going up the ladder, where the causal link was also broken, or irrelevant, such as when bio-matter "becomes" conscious.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 20, 2012 - 01:00pm PT
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no, it means that the details of quantum mechanics are not necessary in the abstract description of how a neuron and a neural net work... that is, the essential function of the neuron need not include the details of how all the atoms and electrons interact to provide an explanation.
Those details may be buried in "chemistry" for instance.
The concept of "neuron" is reduced to the essential attributes needed to explain the function.
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MH2
climber
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Aug 20, 2012 - 03:32pm PT
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Ed knows 'Rome.'
JL, please tell us more about 'Jakarta' and less about 'Rome.'
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 20, 2012 - 03:40pm PT
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The slide rule lab coats have not yet realized that life is a different entity than normal physics and chemistry.
Thus they are still living in the dark age of poor knowledge .......
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 20, 2012 - 04:01pm PT
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The slide rule lab coats have not yet realized that life is a different entity than normal physics and chemistry
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My hunch is, and has been, that they are not actually studying life at all, but objective functioning, believing they are the same "things."
The next few years should be interesting. Ed says that real world reductionism is the process of reducing something to the essential elements and then following the unbroken causal chain up to "mind," in this case. People (mainly biologists) from the "complexity" camp insist that no such causal chain exists, that upper order phenomenon are not classically derived from the lower order though they haven't said how or why. I suspect these issues will take on added significance when the mechanistic approach shows some progress with sentience. Or not.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 20, 2012 - 04:06pm PT
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The slide rule lab coats have not yet realized that life is a different entity than normal physics and chemistry.
well, I did say above that, in my opinion, our current understanding of physics is insufficient to account for life in a predictive manner...
...interestingly, developments in network analysis in condensed matter physics has lead to some very interesting applications in cell biology, (the recent notice on the Cell article describing the genetic code derived behavior of a simple bacteria, A Whole-Cell Computational Model Predicts Phenotype from Genotype J.R. Karr et al. Cell 150, 389–401, July 20, 201) gets you to a relatively simple place which could explain metabolism, for instance... but how these chemical reactions occur in essentially non-equilibrium states exploiting energy sources has no predictive results, so far as physical theory is concerned. We do know that such systems are possible (that is, they're not ruled out by physical principle). We don't have a theory that describes the fundamental properties of these very interesting class of phenomena.
Don't use a slide rule anymore... Werner... but I have one at home (the last time I used one was to make logarithmic graph paper, don't need to do that anymore).
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 21, 2012 - 02:34am PT
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The Mundaka Upanisad states:
eso 'nurātmā cetasā veditavyo
yasmin prānah pańcadhā samviveśa
prānaiś cittam sarvam otam prajānām
yasmin viśuddhe vibhavaty eśa ātmā
"The conscious self is atomic in size and can be perceived by perfect intelligence.
This atomic self is floating in the five kinds of air [prāna, apāna, vyāna, samāna, and udāna], is situated within the heart, and spreads its influence all over the body of the embodied living being.
When the self is purified from the contamination of the five kinds of air, its spiritual influence is exhibited."
We note that the jīvātmā is said to be extremely minute in size, and to be located in the region of the heart (rather than in the brain).
However, the jīvātmā does not interact directly with the gross physical structures of the body.
Rather, it interacts with subtle material elements, and these in turn interact with gross matter in accordance with principles that have yet to be discovered by present-day physicists and chemists.
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MH2
climber
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Aug 21, 2012 - 10:39am PT
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Good, Werner.
Here's a song from a man whose mother's self was purified by memory loss but she did not lose her ability to love or be loved.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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jstan
climber
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Aug 21, 2012 - 11:18am PT
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Here you can get the article Ed cited.
http://covertlab.stanford.edu/publicationpdfs/mgenitalium_whole_cell_2012_07_20.pdf
Once the model was implemented and all parameters were
reconciled, we verified that the model recapitulates key features
of our training data. We simulated 128 wild-type cells in a typical
Mycoplasma culture environment, with each simulation predict-
ing not only cellular properties such as the cell mass and growth
rate but also molecular properties including the count, localiza-
tion, and activity of each molecule (Movie S1 illustrates the life
cycle of one in silico cell). We found that the model calculations
were consistent with the observed doubling time (Figures 2A and
2B), cellular chemical composition (Figure 2C), replication of
major cell mass fractions (Figure 2D), and gene expression
(R2 = 0.68; Figure S1A). .........
The model further predicts that the chromosome is explored
very rapidly, with 50% of the chromosome having been bound
by at least one protein within the first 6 min of the cell cycle
and 90% within the first 20 min (Figure 3B). RNA polymerase
contributes the most to chromosomal exploration, binding
90% of the chromosome within the first 49 min of the cell cycle. ......
In short, using plausible models for how these complex structures interact the authors obtained predictions of observables, such as replication rate, that agree with actual data.
By doing so the authors have indicated how we may further shrink the space in which a "ghost" may exist.
This process has been unfolding for the past 400 years. Ultimately we will have to unwind the brain and discover why the need for a ghost was ever encountered at all.
When that has been accomplished, Galileo will be free at last.
I hate to tell you this Werner. Some of the most powerful materialistic reasoning ever, was from Japan, China, and India. What you take as the source, has been expressed in people everywhere.
No one is special.
Take a look at some of Spencer Wells' work.
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WBraun
climber
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Aug 21, 2012 - 11:22am PT
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This process has been unfolding for the past 400 years.
Only for the western gross materialists.
The science of the soul has been around since day one .......
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 21, 2012 - 12:18pm PT
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By doing so the authors have indicated how we may further shrink the space in which a "ghost" may exist.
Are you thinking that sentience is a "thing" that is in, but separate from, the host brain? Like a Pilot Fish in a shark's mouth? Or are you saying that matter organized itself into sentience (very slowly - Sagan cuts in here with his "billions and billions of years") and that owing to yet unobserved mechanisms, is simply capable of being aware of itself, that sentience is what the brain "does."
And when those from the complexity camp say things about the sum being greater than the parts, does this get any traction with you guys? What do yo think they were talking about?
Also, Ed said:
no, it means that the details of quantum mechanics are not necessary in the abstract description of how a neuron and a neural net work... that is, the essential function of the neuron need not include the details of how all the atoms and electrons interact to provide an explanation.
I suppose that we need not go down into QM to study sentience, but if we were studying reductionism itself we'd have to go there otherwise the model wouldn't hold up owing to unbridgable gaps in the causal chain - and there can be no gaps for absolute reductionism to be a viable theory. Everything has to be sourced by and be reduceable to antecedent and smaller units.
JL
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MH2
climber
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Aug 21, 2012 - 01:10pm PT
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Everything has to be sourced by and be reduceable to antecedent and smaller units.
That's what Hilbert thought, too.
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hunter
Trad climber
NYC
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Aug 21, 2012 - 02:33pm PT
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Yes, and Godel demonstrated Hilbert was wrong.
By which I mean that if you are arguing against this sort of reductionism, you are arguing with an 80 year old corpse.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Aug 21, 2012 - 03:56pm PT
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and there can be no gaps for absolute reductionism to be a viable theory
I think that may be an overstatement of the general idea... and perhaps it is the difference between a scientific (or physicist's) view of reductionism and a philosophical view. The language is very much a philosophers, as I said, physicists are open to the idea that the "real world" might actually be different from the current, provisional model we have adopted.
Instead, you look for reasonable physical explanations which link the "lower order" to the "higher order." Quantum mechanics is a good example, the question being just when does a system cease exhibiting quantum behavior and become describable by a "classical" system.
Quantum behavior is exhibited in our definition of the system's state, and that state actually is defined in Hilbert space, operate in Hilbert space and appear to us in our "regular space" as intensities... which we interpret as probabilities.
This allows the quantum interference effects to take place, the "spooky behavior" that Einstein referred to, in the abstract Hilbert space... with measurable consequences in our space. But when this quantum coherence is not established, there is no "spooky behavior" and everything is classical. One can then describe the system in our "classical" description without having to resort to quantum mechanics... we say that quantum mechanics "goes over to" classical mechanics...
It is a physically describable limit, having to do with decoherence times in the quantum states that are related to interactions of the "isolated system" with the rest of the world.
Similarly one could view Thermodynamics as some limit of statistical mechanics. All sorts of delicious problems arise, for instance, how do you define the states: gas, liquid, solid at the level of groups of individual atoms? Certainly one should be able to identify these Thermodynamic concepts in a more "fundamental" way, with precision and accuracy (which has been the program of statistical mechanics since Maxwell and Boltzmann, note this is before the current atomic theory was devised).
So interestingly, physicists would presume the existence of these connections and then look for them, based on their understanding of the phenomena. Finding that there is no connection would be a very big deal... as such, physicists out to make a name for themselves would be very interesting to find evidence to the contrary. Nothing yet...
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 21, 2012 - 04:08pm PT
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Everything has to be sourced by and be reduceable to antecedent and smaller units.
That's what Hilbert thought, too.
Yes, and Godel demonstrated Hilbert was wrong.
By which I mean that if you are arguing against this sort of reductionism, you are arguing with an 80 year old corpse.
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One of the reasons that I keep boring into this is that a mechanistic approach has huge loop holes in it when it comes to "creating" things quanitatively different. My sense of it is that the so-called "start," "beginning," and "creation" of things is itself a false concept in any fundamental way.
JL
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