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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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DMT said
Eeyonkee I think you missed Paul's point.
Extend evolution out into the future, 4 billion years more, and reconsider Paul's statement in that context? My point is that there are several lineages of intelligence, not just one. Intelligence is not the goal of evolution. It is a byproduct. In the distant future, will our line of intelligence be nearly indistinguishable from what we would call god-like today? Maybe.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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I would name this, Between The Lobes...
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Good observation, DMT, but there are lots of exceptions. The basic shark has not changed much in 200 million years. Why? Apparently because it didn't have to.
The fact that environments on earth do change through time is always providing the opportunity to evolve to keep up. And evolution can only work with what you have to start with. I think that complexity just naturally arises from this condition.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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There is thought, and there is Thought Form, and there is Manifestation. Manifestation is always in the eye of the beholder. So this time-space-reality that everyone is perceiving is nothing more than vibrational interpretation.
So the Thought Form of that which is man was set forth from Broader Perspective, and has continued to evolve by the experience of those who were having the experience here on the planet. And what you actually see as man or human is vibrational interpretation.
Now, did man come from ape? No, man was a different idea. So how does the idea of evolution occur? And we say: because the idea of each species was set forth, and as the experience of the species is lived, the idea expands. So the expansion is happening from the Leading Edge place and is supported from the Source Energy that flows everywhere the idea goes.
Excerpted from Billings, MT on 6/21/03
Our Love
Esther (Abraham and Jerry)
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jan: Cockroaches of course have a numbers over quality adaptation as do many others.
Love you. :-)
eeyonkee: And neither do I. This thread is about mind. That's why intelligence is relevant.
This is what mind is to you? Intelligence? Like IQ or something? Let me guess: the ability to make keen decisions through analysis?
Again, check your assumptions. “Intelligence” presents a very narrow view of mind. But again, this is typical of moderns. Rationality gone hegemonically nuclear.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Can't really post much, but it is correct that every extant species is the result of the full measure of evolution. The reason for all the diversity and the range of complexity from simple to highly complex is due to the fact that nature abhors a vacuum with regards to un- or under-utilized ecological niches. Every species is optimized and specialized in every respect with regard to capitalizing on some ecological niche or another. That's why so many species can coexist in close proximity with one another.
Also keep in mind with regard to 'complexity' that there are quite a few other organisms with much larger genomes than our own. Measuring 'complexity' is itself a complex affair by any measure.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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This is what mind is to you? Intelligence? Like IQ or something? Let me guess: the ability to make keen decisions through analysis?
Again, check your assumptions. “Intelligence” presents a very narrow view of mind. But again, this is typical of moderns. Rationality gone hegemonically nuclear. Sheesh, MikeL! You are exasperating. No, that is NOT what mind is to me. But intelligence is certainly an attribute of mind. I mean c'mon, I've pointed out that what makes OUR minds different is our self-directed imaging apparatus. That is not intelligence. It's equipment.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 6, 2017 - 10:00am PT
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Healje goes a way in describing the so-called "complexity argument," but fails to mention that the complexity of an organism, especially when contrasted with the computer analogy of processing power (the processing of information or experiential content) is not, de facto, related to the fact that we are cognizant of said info/content. That in my view is the fatal error in expecting evolution to "explain" why we are sentient: Trying to tie content to awareness. Investigate the arguments and you'll find log jams at every turn of this argument.
Eeeyonkee wrote: Sheesh, MikeL! You are exasperating. No, that is NOT what mind is to me. But intelligence is certainly an attribute of mind. I mean c'mon, I've pointed out that what makes OUR minds different is our self-directed imaging apparatus. That is not intelligence. It's equipment.
I agree intelligence is an attritubute of mind, though I generally see 'mind' as an umbrella term that includes brain function, awareness/sentience, and the fruit of that interface: consciousness.
Eeeyonkee has taken a content-centered tact where self-directed imaging is the chief feature, as sourced by human-brain specific "equipment." In other words, he/she (I don't know Eeeyonkeee, though I was just at AAC HQ in Golden) is focused on an evolved, external mechanism (the brain) and extrapolates from there about the internal phenomenon (intelligence).
The danger here is in conflating syntactic (equipment related) with semantic realities. These can all sound academic till you really dig into what is happening and start looking at the logical coherence of what is implied.
An interesting question to Eeyonkee might be: What is "mind" to you, and how do you see the difference between the light sensor in my back yard (equipment) and human consciousness?
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WBraun
climber
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But intelligence is certainly an attribute of mind.
NO .... it's an attribute of the soul, the self itself.
The mind can not exist without the living being itself, the soul/self .....
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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An interesting question to Eeyonkee might be: What is "mind" to you, and how do you see the difference between the light sensor in my back yard (equipment) and human consciousness? First of all, John, I'm Greg Cameron -- you know, the LA Chimney guy.
Mind to me is a manifestation of consciousness, which is something that developed in many organisms on this planet. Consciousness includes awareness and the ability to act on receiving outside stimuli.
The difference between a light sensor and mind is that mind is the result of evolution; a light sensor is not, at least directly. Now if you were to ask me the difference between a simple organism that just had some kind of light-sensitive apparatus and the minds that humans have, I would say that these are things that could be on a continuum.
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WBraun
climber
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The mind has always been there since day one, the first living entity, Brahmā.
The modern mind has severally devolved .......
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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There are examples of species who have lost or diminished something but not many. Some aquatic dwellers have atrophied legs inside their bodies from the days they lived on land, but remnants are still there. The human genome contains lots of unnecessary DNA.
Maybe evolution isn't tending toward complexity so much as not having a mechanism for getting rid of the unnecessary (a lot like government bureaucracy it seems).
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 6, 2017 - 12:06pm PT
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Hi Greg. For the record, I have always placed Greg's on-sight free solo of the Lost Arrow Chimney as one of the boldest performances of any climber from my generation. Maybe THE boldest. And in Greg's typical low-key way, he never said much about it to anyone.
Anyhow, Greg said:
Mind to me is a manifestation of consciousness, which is something that developed in many organisms on this planet. Consciousness includes awareness and the ability to act on receiving outside stimuli.
The difference between a light bulb and mind is that mind is the result of evolution; a light bulb is not. Now if you were to ask me the difference between a simple organism that just had some kind of light-sensitive apparatus and the minds that humans have, I would say that these are things that could be on a continuum.
Allow me to give you my take on this.
Consciousness "includes" awareness/sentience in the sense that a planet includes space. It is not my belief that awareness is a kind of mechanical sub-plot of consciousness because there's no evidence to suggest that it is.
When I started looking closely at what all these terms actually meant, I could make no sense of any of it so long as I tried to categorize things and phenomenon without separating them into external and internal aspects.
The next step was to acknowledge the categorical difference between a syntactic engine - a programmed machine that could register an impulse and respond, according to a program or algorithm, with an output - and the conscious process that happens internally with a sentient human being.
The way you have it described, the fact that the human brain evolved goes no distance in explaining the difference between the light sensor in my back yard and your own conscious process. You posit them strictly in terms of registering an input and responding with an output, without going on to explaining WHAT, exactly, exists on a continuum.
This would seem to hark back to the old behaviorist model that ignores internal (conscious) phenomenon and looks only at external processing - inputting stimulus and responding with an output according to evolved coding. In this sense, you could swap out human being for zombie, since there is no accounting for the fact that the human is aware of movement in my back yard, and the light sensor is not. It just mechanically registers movement.
What makes this a tricky one in terms of human sentience is the overwhelming majority of human functioning happens below awareness, where the organism automatically responds to external and internal stimulus. The mistake I think many make is to look at this automatic "machine registration" going on in the organism, and surmise that when it reaches a certain threshold of complexity, awareness suddenly jumps off the "dancing electrons." In this way people come to equate awareness with content - the more complex the content, the greater the need for awareness. This leads people like Tinoni to actually believe that the brain "ascribes" or "assigns" awareness to itself, as though the brain could magically assign or ascribe to itself a quality that it doesn't already have.
If it could - if the brain actually does assign itself awareness - where did it come from, since in theory we can reverse engineer all mechanical output to prior, more fundamental external objects and phenomenon that in some way sources same.
If you believe that brain come up with the idea and the experiential fact of sentience, by way of objective functioning, in order to ascribe it to itself, you have Chalmers asking: How? And in what way is this logically coherent.
Another way to illustrate the impossibility of this ever happening is to play out the scenario in reverse. That is, instead of having an external object or force concocting, then ascribing, what it didn't previously have, look at the case of an external object - say a computerized super investigative tool that can look at the brain down to the quantum level -
trying to "discover" sentience in the brain of a human being, having no programming whatsoever about internal, experiential reality.
That is, the investigative machine is not itself sentient ergo it can only look at the brain in terms of objective functioning. It can investigate the external brain for 100 years and it will never "see," nor would it ever suspect there was a internal aspect involved because the machine can only postulate what it has, and has been programmed to find: Mechanical processing. Mechanisms. Inputs and outputs.
Obviously this can get very muddled very quickly. That's why I think it is crucial to start with a simple task like the light sensor registering an input (movement in my back yard), and mechanically responding with an output (flipping on the light), and contrasting this process with the what happens when a conscious human being encounters the same phenomenon/task.
The differences with only considering the external processes seem slight. But when taking account of the internal, we can easily acknowledge a few simple facts.
One, few of us would claim that the light sensor is cognizant of movement in the back yard, or for that matter, is cognizant of a back yard in the first instance. Nor does the sensor have a conscious experience of movement. What's more, the sensor has no semantic understanding of any part of the process because it is a dedicated SYNTACTIC (machine/unaware) engine. Nor does the sensor have a choice to either turn on the light or leave it dark.
One can argue that the human brain automatically generates the choices for the sentient human to consider, and if you misinterpret Benjamin Libet's classic experiments, your choice is made before you know it. Except we have the option of ignoring all options that the brain gives us.
This ignoring function is, for example, key in developing for people to do automatic pattern interrupts in order to break habits like drinking or whatever. The impulses come hard and fast but we need not blindly obey. We can simply watch the impulse arise and fall away. The sensor cannot watch anything. It's on autopilot.
This is just a quick look at the differences between machine registration and conscious experience.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Well, thanks John. I DO try to understand what you write, but it just seems like we are coming at this from such different starting points. I'm basically saying that I am not that different from my cat in that we both have minds. My cat is good at anticipating mice and humans. On the other hand, she doesn't seem to be aware of herself like I am of myself.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Largo:
we have the option of ignoring all options that the brain gives us.
All?
Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?
Why doesn't all this information-processing go on "in the dark", free of any inner feel?
At the end of the day, the same criticism applies to any purely physical account of consciousness. For any physical process we specify there will be an unanswered question: Why should this process give rise to experience?
When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field.
from
http://consc.net/papers/facing.html
I don’t trust Chalmers’ bloodless academic mutterings.
When I sit at the computer going over the last week’s photos, a woman comes behind me, grips my elbow, and whispers in my ear. I forget to breathe, yet somehow scents are “physically processed.”
Chalmers cites no work earlier than 1972. He should go back to Pavlov. After the bell has become associated with food, do you think that when the dog hears the bell the dog has no inner experience, no feeling for or anticipation of food?
It is not a mystery how external stimuli become connected to, “what it is like to be [whatever it is that you are].”
It is not a mystery why a physical process gives rise to experience.
The wonderful thing is the great number and variety of external and internal signals that influence your moment-to-moment experience, and how you have learned to prioritize them.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 6, 2017 - 03:28pm PT
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It is not a mystery how external stimuli become connected to, “what it is like to be [whatever it is that you are].”
It is not a mystery why a physical process gives rise to experience.
Chalmers is only answering the assertion that an external physical mechanism gives rise to inner experience. And the Hard problem asks: How?
That the entire sphere of consciousness is seamless and NOT a dualistic system is obvious to anyone who has studied and looked into this. But "connected" to and "give rise to" (source/create/etc) are not remotely the same processes.
Again, go to any leading neuroscientist and ask them to explain the mechanism that gives rise to experience and the fact that you are sentient of same. There is no explanation, but plenty of speculations.
I consider this a false mystery, not because it is understood, as you claim, but rather it assumes that mechanical brain function "creates" awareness, and we only need more data per external objects and forces before the mystery is solved. But I can't cotton to the idea that this false mystery has been solved because you say it simply is not there, sans providing some proof of your claims.
One gets the feeling that at some point, many people just say, I don't need to know HOW the brain creates awareness, I only need to hold out the hope that it does. Did physicists go through the same kind of struggle when the weak and strong forces were determined to be fundamental? When they could not be proved to be the artifact or product of more basic mechanical operations, did that axiomatically mean said forces were sourced by magic?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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if the brain actually does assign itself awareness - where did it come from, since in theory we can reverse engineer all mechanical output to prior, more fundamental external objects and phenomenon that in some way sources same
"in theory we can . . ." wildly understates the actual accomplishment of this feat. If a single molecule is at a particular place at a particular time, can we "reverse engineer" its position a few seconds back? You assume that since we are not able to describe a physical process producing awareness at present, we will never be able to. However, there are those on this site who believe human intelligence will rise to god-like levels.
When someone comes out of anesthesia and regains consciousness there is an accompanying increase in brain function. It seems likely at some point scientists will be able to specifically define the physical processes that produce awareness. If this happens it will not satisfy you I'm sure. There will remain that break between what we experience as subjective and physical.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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eeyonkee: Sheesh, MikeL! You are exasperating. No, that is NOT what mind is to me.
(I didn’t know you were famous. Kudos.)
Watch where you’re walking. I baited you. I apologize.
When we begin to admit that mind (and it’s development) is more or something other than simply intelligence (reason, rationality, ratiocination, mental modeling, data collection and analysis, logic, metrics / measurements, etc.), it opens the door to things that we cannot or do not understand rationally. What things are and how they work might be pointed to, but it will not necessarily be things that we understand.
As you might imagine, there could be significant implications . . . like, for example, dropping the idea of computer analogies for mind, or religion or spirituality being silly because we can’t come up with constructs, theories, metrics, and hypotheses testing. Or even focusing on what is objective, external, and empirically tangible.
BTW, I don’t mean to be exasperating. Exasperation is something that *you’re* experiencing. I don’t cause it. We’re just talking. It doesn’t mean anything.
Be well.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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That the entire sphere of consciousness is seamless and NOT a dualistic system is obvious to anyone who has studied and looked into this.
Are seamless and dualistic the only two possibilities?
go to any leading neuroscientist and ask them to explain the mechanism that gives rise to experience and the fact that you are sentient of same. There is no explanation, but plenty of speculations.
Leading in what sense? If you want to know what gives rise to experience, look into it. That's what neuroscientists do.
I can't cotton to the idea that this false mystery has been solved because you say it simply is not there, sans providing some proof of your claims.
Where is the proof of your claims?
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