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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Jul 10, 2017 - 05:18pm PT
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Greg...the brain is the main computer, the nervous system it the network that carry messages back and forth from the brain.
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I could be wrong. :-)
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 10, 2017 - 05:28pm PT
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the brain itself, can reasonably be thought of as the CPU
Then there is a designer and programmer for that CPU.
Oh wait ... the modern boob will say it just happened by chance out of nowhere just like a modern computer built itself out of nowhere .....
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jul 10, 2017 - 05:29pm PT
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I think that you are right Bob, but the bigger message is in incorporating human emotions into mind, in my opinion.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jul 10, 2017 - 05:33pm PT
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Werner, I may be a boob, but I'm not modern anymore. I'm already an old fogey. So, you must not be referring to me.
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 10, 2017 - 05:36pm PT
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Not referring to you ....
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Flip Flop
climber
Earth Planet, Universe
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Jul 10, 2017 - 05:41pm PT
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What is a dogs mind?
65% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Your mind is about 75% Visual.
A dog's mind is mostly scent.
What does that look like?
And you can smell layers in time.
Fun
I just saw 2 young bucks swim the Merced River at the El Cap Bridge.
And maybe a Catfish?
Talk amongst yourselves
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 10, 2017 - 05:49pm PT
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I've never seen catfish in the Merced river in Yosemite.
But huge sucker fish are there especially down by steamboat (cookie cliff area).
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Taos, NM
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Jul 10, 2017 - 05:57pm PT
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You believe in evolution Werner?
Yes or No.
You are always a little testy...chant and be happy.
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 10, 2017 - 05:59pm PT
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I don't "believe" in evolution.
Evolution is a bonafide fact .... and no belief is required .....
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jstan
climber
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Jul 10, 2017 - 06:06pm PT
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We need to say "think" instead of "believe". The meaning of "believe" has changed.
As I understand it, for the visual system processing also occurs in the neural pathways before it gets to the brain.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jul 10, 2017 - 06:51pm PT
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Just to be clear, although I emphasized the purely input pathways, I believe that parts of the nervous system, residing outside of the brain, are capable of storing information. Muscle memory may be an example. There's no reason to believe that the primary storage isn't more local to the muscle than the brain. I could easily be wrong on this one.
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Flip Flop
climber
Earth Planet, Universe
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Jul 10, 2017 - 07:58pm PT
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Must have been a sucker fish
A name I've called myself
More than once.
What about those segmented critters
In the water falls at the devil's bathtub?
And what are the things erupting out of the mud
Where the Merced overflows into the meadow?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 10, 2017 - 09:10pm PT
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Just to be clear, although I emphasized the purely input pathways, I believe that parts of the nervous system, residing outside of the brain, are capable of storing information.
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In the philosophy of mind, what you are talking about is not information, but data. And in the case of unconscious processes, a body (brain/nervous system) can be conditioned or "entrained" to perform an output, an "instinctive (automatic) response." That's how biofeedback and neurofeedback works.
Information is a refinement of mere data. Put differently, information is the value a conscious mind can extract from data. Black dots on a page represent data. A conscious mind can extract music from the dots. The music (information) does not exist on the page, but in the observers consciousness. A machine, programmed BY a conscious observer, can interpret the dots "as" music, but has no awareness, understanding or semantic sense of what it is mechanically doing.
Getting straight on all of this is a reason to, early on, get straight on the huge differences between the processes of a machine programmed by a conscious observer, and how a conscious observer handle data.
Point being, an unconscious machine cannot extract value nor yet meaning from data.
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 10, 2017 - 09:33pm PT
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DMT
I'm gonna have to say right now "You're sooo full of sh!t!"
Straighten up now, will ya for a change .......
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jul 10, 2017 - 09:37pm PT
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Information is a refinement of mere data. Put differently, information is the value a conscious mind can extract from data. Black dots on a page represent data. A conscious mind can extract music from the dots. The music (information) does not exist on the page, but in the observers consciousness. A machine, programmed BY a conscious observer, can interpret the dots "as" music, but has no awareness, understanding or semantic sense of what it is mechanically doing
Not bad, Wizard.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jul 10, 2017 - 09:55pm PT
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Largo: Put differently, information is the value a conscious mind can extract from data.
Actually, it is the subconscious mind that does almost all that value extraction / creation. By the time you're conscious mind gets the information it has already been extracted and assembled from the data, monitored for threats and dangerous environmental conditions, and more or less fully contextualized and associated with existing information - all by the subconscious...
...with no subjective experience or involvement by your conscious mind - how can that possibly be (inquiring minds and all)?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Jul 10, 2017 - 11:48pm PT
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On the other hand, eyonkee's ideas about the nervous system and its relation to the brain sounds a whole lot like the ancient Indian ideas of chakras and nadis.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Jul 11, 2017 - 02:17am PT
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Ok eeyonkee, obviously I didn't have time enough to read the book, but I did look at some of the ideas (in particular Hamilton's rule) and learned enough (I hope) to get the gist. I do have some comments about the difficulties applying these ideas to "explain" human behavior (in particular I'm thinking about evolutionary psychology). That these difficulties exist, is evidenced by this recent paper:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3982664/
which catalogs justs 10 empirical tests of the rule (all in nonhuman populations) over the past 50 years, with somewhat mixed results.
As an aside comment, E.O Wilson believes groups play a role in the evolutionary scheme of things, and Dawkins denies this (only genes, says Dawkins). Personally, I don't see any reason to to accept one over the other or even to deny the possibility that both might play a role. There just doesn't seem to be enough testable evidence in any of this to make any kind of reasonable decision.
Anyways, allow me to take jstan's case in point of US Marines as an example of altruistic behavior. This fits Dawkin's sense of the word because Marines can get killed, which certainly limits their ability to pass on their own genes.
Marines have codes of conduct, for example:
http://www.usmcpress.com/heritage/code_conduct.htm
and
http://peopleof.oureverydaylife.com/marine-corps-code-ethics-7435.html.
They also go through extensive training. Except in a few extreme outlying cases, no one can tell by looking at a one-year-old baby (even by looking at their genome, at least yet) whether or not they have the right stuff (psychologically speaking) to be a Marine. All this leads me to think that the altruism practised by Marines is primarily learned. On the other hand, I'm willing to admit there may be an important genetic component involved in being a successful Marine. I mean this in the sense that the genetic makeup of a successful Marine might well be distinguishable from, say, the genetic makeup of a good hedge fund manager or, say, the genetic makeup of a successful politician. The problem could be we just don't yet understand the genome sufficiently well to see these distinctions.
So where does that put us in terms of Hamilton's rule? Well it just may be the case that the genetic makeup that goes into being a Marine is sort of uniformly distributed in the population. So there's nothing too important in the genome of individual one-year-old babies which predisposes them to be good Marines (I'm talking about primarily psychological traits, here). Being a good Marine is essentially learned and so these behavioral traits can continue on, no problem, for human beings, because we learn them.
On the other hand, it could be the case that there is an important genetic component to the self-sacrificing psychology that is required by a good marine. In this case we could ask two questions (both highly speculative, not knowing what that genetic component is): (1) Where did it come from? and (2) Where is it going? To some extent, to answer these questions, I believe something like Hamilton's rule has to be true, since genes are passed on by sex. For the instances of gene destruction by self-sacrificers, there should be some compensating benefits to other members of the population with that same genetic component, or the trait would disappear.
What freaks me out more is (2). If people ever come to understand the genome well enough to recognize the psychology of self-sacrifice in its structure (assuming it's even there) then the next obvious step is engineering. I doubt I'll be around long enough to see if that scenario ever plays out.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Jul 11, 2017 - 03:36am PT
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Healjye
Largo: Put differently, information is the value a conscious mind can extract from data.
Actually, it is the subconscious mind that does almost all that value extraction / creation. By the time you're conscious mind gets the information it has already been extracted and assembled from the data, monitored for threats and dangerous environmental conditions, and more or less fully contextualized and associated with existing information - all by the subconscious...
...with no subjective experience or involvement by your conscious mind - how can that possibly be (inquiring minds and all)?
Largo, do you get it? At 7 bits conscious awareness can not do shite of the task you artitraily assign to it. Get a clue?
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