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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Sep 15, 2017 - 09:59am PT
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Largo,
But you still have an external object/force, ie, molecules, however altered. Do yo see the challenge here?
Yes, I do see the challenge here. You apparently cannot grasp the Damasio model. You have a lack of understanding systems & how information is contained in state variables. There is more to that system than molecules. i.e. the platform & other modules.
And yes molecules are the substances that make up the cells of the brain. Welcome to type A materialism.
In my view you have half of the equation sorted, but not the awareness part. Still conflating with content (including feelings).
What is the other half?
I got about as far as Metzinger does as to what goes on during meditation. And you? Even so I am not one to take first person testimony as the final say as to what does really happen. Those experiences during meditation yield what is happening during meditation and it does not lead to seeing or devising a model of how the brain works. It seem you are guilty of taking the map as the territory?
The brain is aware of many things, most of which is unconscious. The situation is how to get it to the data to self and motivated. The method is an awareness as feelings. You do not like. Then tell us a better method.
What you are really rooting for here is emersion by way of systems theory, whereby awareness is a "sub set." Challenge is that emersion is not an explanation.
No Largo, get it right, it is a Damasio system not a Google found Emerson system.
At the root I think you have the wrong idea of what awareness is about. And we will never know what your idea of it is as you haven't ever produced a shred of anything to date.
Again
What you are really rooting for here is emersion by way of systems theory, whereby awareness is a "sub set." Challenge is that emersion is not an explanation.
No Largo, get it right, it is a Damasio system not a Google found Emerson system of industrial electronic design.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Sep 15, 2017 - 10:05am PT
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MikeL,
Nah, Damasio doesn’t attempt to say what feelings are.
Yes he does. I am tired of taking a stuffed headed academician by the hand to topics that he claims to have good familiarity of their content. Mike L, how about this time getting off you lazy A and looking for it? I will post the place of it location when and after I think you have made an honest search.
MikeL, after you find that bit of Damasio's data we can compare notes of our interpretations. Okay?
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Sep 15, 2017 - 03:35pm PT
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Jethro Bidine
It's bodine, BOdine, BODINE!
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Sep 16, 2017 - 07:02am PT
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Largo,
I would say that in some forms of meditation most of the Damasio feeling modules drop away and we are left with the awareness feeling module.
Damasio postulates 3 types of consciousness one of which is self awareness C-III. We have access to consciousness II [C-II] but none directly to C-I [homeostasis]. It seems C-III produces no original awareness but interprets C -I and C -II and we experience the modified brain language to say/experience, "I am aware of such & such.... Maybe the feeling awareness module aids in that translation from C-I and C-II to C-III?
Some time ago I had a period where I did meditation. My thought on doing meditation was why not try to develop a mind skill such that while in wakefulness I could zoom to the mental likeness of deep meditation for short duration? In some fashion I have gained such a skill with one obvious difference. I am not sitting. I have said Zen is not the only skill in town but Who Knows, that skill is maybe doing Zen?
the slave of no master in this endeavor
Largo, I am a fiddle player too and I will give the Devil his due ...
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Sep 16, 2017 - 07:27am PT
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MikeL
Second, roughly between the ages of 1 1/2 and 4-5, a child’s brain is supposedly flooded with a certain set of chemicals that spawn a very wide and highly connected inchoate neural network. At 4-5, the chemistry comes back to much lower levels, and those connection sets that are used often (fired) will remain to be further developed. Those that are not, will recede / disappear. It is for this primary reason that parents are encouraged to expose infants and children to many different experiences (music, languages, art, eye-hand coordination activities). The greater variety of experiences in early development will tend to permanently broaden their abilities and minds.
Chicken? Egg?
Perhaps neither brain nor mind. See Brain Trust How Poverty hurts Kids Brains, p44 + ScAm March 2017.
How about environment?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Sep 16, 2017 - 08:57am PT
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Dingus: Welcome to type A materialism.
I think I missed a post. What is “type A materialism?”
Look, if you can’t say what you’re claiming Damasio’s point is, maybe you don’t understand it well enough to articulate it.
I’ll choose one of Damasio’s publication because it’s publicly available. In 2004, from his paper at the Amsterdam Symposium, Damasio talks about the feelings of an emotion—not generally what the entire category of feelings constitute.
1. Please also note that his notion of feelings are very broad (joy, sorrow, jealousy, awe, cold, heat, hunger). He also seems to suggest that they tend to be singularly appearing.
Is this what you find in your life? Don’t you find yourself often in psychological and physical conflict, in psychic states of ambiguity, in situations where you are not at all sure what you’re feeling? When you look at the spectrum of feelings, do you see a few, or do you see an infinite number of colors? (Shouldn’t we simply conclude that Damasio is saying that feelings are experiences?)
2. Damasio says feelings are mental representations of psychological changes that occur in an emotion. (This seems a bit circular or perhaps conflated.) Specifically, Damasio says feelings are: the mapping of a given state of experience; in appropriate places in the brain; that sense body changes; which also evokes cognitions / thoughts congruent within a given state of being. As a structuralist, Damasio describes mechanical connections. (A connects to B and C, which leads to D.)
If I were to lay-out the parts and their connections to an auto, would you know what an automobile IS? If there is a part missing, is it no longer an auto? Is not Damasio talking about mechanical functions when he’s talk about feelings? Is that what we are talking here about mind? (Some of us here are, and others are not—see below.)
3. On page 56 Damasio says that now that correlates (associations) that have been observed, researchers can now look further for underpinnings of feelings (what’s he then claimed above??), and finally concludes that feelings are (flat-out) objective—and not subjective, private, elusive, intangible, or indefinable.
Well, . . . OK!
Has Damasio defined what feelings are for you—as *you experience them*—in your life?
For my money, Damasio has a long, long way to go. Most importantly (and here’s the rub IMO) he has to connect the subjective experience of feelings (whatever they are *as felt*) with his structuralist descriptions neurobiologically. It’s this thorn that continues to prick materialists within the puzzle of the experience of consciousness. This is “the hard problem” of consciousness. This is the problem that Largo continues to try to make some people aware of.
Few people would argue that conscious beings don’t experience feelings. Materialists say subjective feelings are neurobiological (brain), and in so claiming they point to very general and loose correlations between brain activity and subjective reports from people.
Or, people like Damasio assume away the problem by saying that there are no subjectivities, just objectivities.
People need to say (i) what the subjectivity of feelings *are,* as they are felt (are they pure illusions—and if they are, what are experiences?). They also need to say (ii) how experiences are connected and translated from physical processes through in a body.
The only theories / explanations that seem that have attempted to suggest a comprehensive explanation of (i) and (ii) might be found from Prinz, and from Barsalou. Very briefly, there is a transduction issue in taking physical sensations derived from the body and translating how they becomes mental representation that provide rich meanings that are perceived and understood by beings that have them.
You probably think that Damasio does that. He doesn’t in my book. He’s missing many pieces and detail that turns a set of physical sensations into a very specific and detailed set of meanings such as you are now undertaking at this very moment of reading. You see squiggles, and you are experiencing complex meaning and a feelings you can’t quite put your finger on in all their richness. (Remember how I said I thought feelings were textures?)
Looking at the puzzle of consciousness from that view, Damasio’s model is interesting but very partial. You, on the other hand, seem to suggest that Damasio’s got feelings all figured-out.
A few other important and larger questions are going unanswered in this conversation (as suggested by the articles I posted above from the New York Times and The Guardian).
Furthermore, I’ll say again that studying failures and defective brains may not be the best idea to base a theory of consciousness on.
I think you’d also see a couple of thing in the evolution of Damasio’s work. First, initially Damasio wrote in books and invited paper publications (non-peer reviewed), and in those venues his writing was comprehensive and general. (For example the paper above that I’ve analyzed is barely 8 pages long with 8 citations). More recently, however, Damasio’s work shows up increasingly in peer-reviewed journals, with other authors, with far more detail, but in much narrower topic areas. The point is that the more specific and detailed one does empirical research, the less one can say anything broadly and systematically. Research is far more incremental and almost narrowly trivial.
Sources:
Damasio, A. R.
2004 Emotions and feelings, in Feelings and emotions: the Amsterdam symposium. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Prinz, J.J.
2002 Furnishing the Mind: concepts and their perceptual basis. Boston: MIT Press.
Barsalou, L.W.
1999 “Perceptual Symbol Systems.” Brain and Behavioral Science, 22(4): 577-660.
Barsalou, L.W., and K. Wiemer-Hastings
2005 “Situating abstract concepts.” In D. Pecher and R. A. Zwaan (eds.), Grounding cognition: the role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking: 129-163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 16, 2017 - 09:15am PT
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How about environment?
And differing personal histories in the same or different environments.
Researchers at Stanford University claimed to have found that computer algorithms could accurately predict the sexuality of people from photographs of their faces.
If the program could predict sexuality from the faces of babies that would be impressive. Between babyhood and the development of sexuality a child's face will get responses from adults and other children that will affect the child's behavior. Whether those effects play any part in the child's eventual sexual behavior is an open question as far as I know.
How much of any connection between face and sexuality is nature and how much is nurture?
The author of the article in The Guardian seems to disregard the influence of nurture:
if this research is replicated it will provide strong evidence that sexual orientation (for many) is biologically innate
It isn't easy to do careful research on people. There are too many variables to control. As in the example here, appearance may tell us something about behavior, but behavior could in turn be shaped by the ways a person's appearance influences the treatment they get from other people.
edit:
I am only being pedantic, here. People whose sexuality conflicts with what their environment expects of them will go through Hell to follow what they feel inside them, making a pretty strong case for sexuality having a biological not a social basis. Not that it should matter. People's self-determination should be respected either way.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Sep 16, 2017 - 03:05pm PT
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MH2: It isn't easy to do careful research on people.
+1!!
Futhermore, it’s now an ethical minefield. In university, one’s research design (mainly data collection) has to pass muster from some office in the organization tasked with making sure that all political sensibilities are "right" and potentially appropriately assuaged. Ye Gods!
(BTW, the AI research you refer to strikes me as offensive and ethically questionable. I’m glad you brought it back up. On another thread here in ST, someone brought up the wrong research claim that pedophilia recidivism was frightfully high. What seems to have been frightful is government's wont to take that claim and enact many penal policy decisions that seem remarkably inappropriate. It's these kinds of stories that show that research can be used inappropriately and unethically by people who claim they know what science is and how it gets done.)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 16, 2017 - 06:56pm PT
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Ha-ha-ha-ha. Good one!
I am also serious.
My Mom once sent me an article written by a young woman who had done volunteer work in a nursing home. In that setting, staff are often trying to engage residents in activity of some sort. The young woman came to believe that residents who only sat doing nothing could be quite content doing that. The young woman sensed that these old people were in wordless communion with something, somehow.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Sep 16, 2017 - 09:31pm PT
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^^^ At 80 I can attest to this.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Sep 17, 2017 - 04:05am PT
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MikeL,
Thanks for prompt response.
Type A Materialism looks to be a creation & label of Chalmers. FFYI: It is googleable. Largo has applied the label to some of us.
Subjectivity, I ask are you tied up in the Chalmers knot of non-conceivability? The brain is engaged in the flow of information by the way it encodes it and uses it. Subjectivity is the flow of one's personal experiences meshed with their feeling modules. It is a given person's background [memories of situations] joined with some feeling module(s) and for a given replay part of the feedback from the tight brain body loop is added to that information.
So a given person's subjectivity is a replay of a quasi fixed set of information. I can see how Damasio might say that subjectivity is mostly objective as to what information is used to make the feeling & emotions of a "subjective experience".
The problem is not conceiving of how subjectivity would happen but nature of feelings.
Damasio:
There are certain action programs that are obviously permanently installed in our organs and in our brains so that we can survive, flourish, procreate, and, eventually, die. This is the world of life regulation—homeostasis—that I am so interested in, and it covers a wide range of body states. There is an action program of thirst that leads you to seek water when you are dehydrated, but also an action program of fear when you are threatened. Once the action program is deployed and the brain has the possibility of mapping what has happened in the body, then that leads to the emergence of the mental state. During the action program of fear, a collection of things happen in my body that change me and make me behave in a certain way whether I want to or not. As that is happening to me, I have a mental representation of that body state as much as I have a mental representation of what frightened me.
Before I started mentioning Damasio's theory in this forum, I search this forum for the name Damasio and got 2 entries. It seems few here had heard of him but he has some scientific backed processes in his theories of consciousness. He and Metzinger have scientifically based theories that deny existence of the dreamed up problems posed by the hard problem. The hard problem has a life of its own for those that cannot think of how subjectivity could arise. Are you one of this those?, Mr. Mike?
Largo is a loggerheaded steamroller with little understanding of systems and the flow of information that has latched onto a form the hard problem -- the conceivability problem. He also makes up a part of the backing he uses for his comebacks--fabrication. Is this fabricator worthy of a reply? What do you do with a stuck record?
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 17, 2017 - 08:18am PT
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There are certain action programs that are obviously permanently installed in our organs and in our brains
That means someone had to install them .......
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Sep 17, 2017 - 10:16am PT
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Researchers at Stanford University claimed to have found that computer algorithms could accurately predict the sexuality of people from photographs of their faces.
Yes, I heard that news several days ago. Apparently the computer was more accurate with men, getting their sexuality right 81% of the time; women 74%.
It isn't easy to do careful research on people. There are too many variables to control. As in the example here, appearance may tell us something about behavior, but behavior could in turn be shaped by the ways a person's appearance influences the treatment they get from other people.
The idea of a social feedback loop of the sort suggested never occured to me and would be very interesting if such a thing were proven valid-- which I tend to doubt.
I think this could be so because, at least at this stage, I am generally comfortable in considering sexuality as being very largely determined by innate genetic factors and therefore such things as facial appearance to be well within the scope of organically developed secondary sexual characteristics.
Nevertheless from time to time my imagination runs to speculation: such as homosexuality playing some evolutionary role in the history of our species in some as yet undetermined way.
If this is true then it should follow that it occurs at a more or less specific genetic frequency. Furthermore, that some collection of epigenetic factors at play in the modern world has substantially increased that frequency over the last 150 years.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 17, 2017 - 02:35pm PT
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MH2 has had a lot of experience about what is mind
Thank you, Jim.
I have been troubled by my foolish simplification of dogs and cats as creatures mainly interested in what's to eat. Their minds go well beyond that and I should not have slighted them. It could be that I was projecting my own mind on them.
Yesterday as I was sitting here feeling sorry for myself, Sheryl MacKay said on the radio that CBC North by Northwest had just been sent this photo:
What is this dog thinking?
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Sep 17, 2017 - 03:00pm PT
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What is this dog thinking?
I think he is not thinking. He looks frustrated. Maybe he was trained by a human to not do things that a dog would instinctively do without thinking and it kinda pisses him off. I imagine he would just bite that skunk and maybe shake it around a bit. Maybe he has been sprayed by a skunk before or that skunk is a pet that he has learned to tolerate. Either way he doesn't look happy.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Sep 17, 2017 - 04:07pm PT
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In old age you don't have to be lapsing into senility to enjoy just sitting quietly and watching the world go by. I suppose it's a form of meditation.
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Wayno
Big Wall climber
Seattle, WA
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Sep 17, 2017 - 04:16pm PT
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How old is old?
I would say that it is certainly meditation.
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 17, 2017 - 05:52pm PT
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The gross materialists always meditate on sh!t that has no lasting benefit to their real selves.
Thus they continue rebirths in the cycle of birth, death, disease and old age in material bodies on different planets according to their developed consciousness in their previous lives ......
The modern foolish deluded theory there is only one life and death is just that, made by clueless gross materialist so called scientists.
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 17, 2017 - 06:48pm PT
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I typed it and didn't speak so you are wrong as usual which is normal for being a gross materialist mental speculator that you are ......
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 17, 2017 - 07:09pm PT
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In old age you don't have to be lapsing into senility to enjoy just sitting quietly and watching the world go by.
Indeed. Lapsing into retirement may help, but so might meditation, as long as you disengage when the bell for the next round rings, so to speak.
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