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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Sep 22, 2017 - 01:33pm PT
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One can only wonder what it is that has the idea that we are aware if, in fact, we are not aware. A really nice solipsism you're working on I'd say.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Sep 22, 2017 - 05:49pm PT
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try harder Paul...
"don't believe everything you think"
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Sep 22, 2017 - 09:18pm PT
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The mind is a trickster that attempts to satisfy our yearnings. There have been times I have been certain of proofs of theorems, only to find my mind manipulated steps to give me positive results. Back to the drawing board.
In the Art of Dreaming, my mind tried to convince me I could surf the astral planes, uncovering hidden truths. Only to find I could not walk through a solid wall as my mind had suggested.
If I were placed under an hypnotic spell and told I was a chicken, I would avoid crossing the road while ruffling my feathers. I would also temper my disappointment upon rising from a chair and not finding an egg left behind.
If I were a Christian and had fallen under the spell of a charismatic preacher, and had, of a sudden, become "Born Again", I would take effort to puzzle over this enlightenment.
If I were a student of Zen and had been counseled by Masters over years to see through the sham of "I" and to glimpse empty awareness, I would be wise to question those epiphanies and how they relate to the nature of "Mind".
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Sep 22, 2017 - 10:29pm PT
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try harder Paul...
"don't believe everything you think"
Amazing, if we're experiencing an illusion of awareness then what is having that experience?
What is it that is experiencing awareness but something that is aware of its experience?
You're supporting a theory that spirals into nonsense.
Don't think I'm the one that needs to try harder, ha.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Sep 22, 2017 - 10:45pm PT
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Say,those last hurricanes sure provided some experiencial awareness didn't they!?
i am especially aware of those LA SAR guys down there with their dogs sniffing out people!
Is that some shared awareness or what??
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Sep 22, 2017 - 11:44pm PT
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Your supporting a theory that spirals into nonsense.
I don't think so, but if you believe that things like "awareness" and "experience" are what you learned them to be, then the "theory" would be nonsense.
But if those things you learned were not actually what you thought they were, then this wouldn't be nonsense at all. You would have no more awareness than Curiosity does on Mars, and perhaps no less.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Sep 23, 2017 - 05:32am PT
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But if those things you learned were not actually what you thought they were, then this wouldn't be nonsense at all. You would have no more awareness than Curiosity does on Mars, and perhaps no less.
If we started talking more seriously about the possible "more or less" aspects of awareness, as well as the posssible qualitative aspects of awareness, we might be able to say something meaningful about this.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Sep 23, 2017 - 06:15am PT
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MH2: I don't know the answers to your questions, but if you need help with irreducible representations of a reductive Lie group or finding boulder problems on La Barrosa, I'm right up your alley. In Wikipedia, about the original tests (starting from the early 1980s) it says this:
In this technique, a red odorless spot is placed on an anesthetized primate's forehead. The spot is placed on the forehead so that it can only be seen through a mirror. Once the individual awakens, independent movements toward the spot after seeing their reflection in a mirror are observed. During the Red Spot Technique, after looking in the mirror, chimpanzees used their fingers to touch the red dot that was on their forehead and,after touching the red dot they would even smell their fingertips
I don't see any reason to doubt that children typically develop fairly advanced motor skills (walking, identifying and picking up objects, etc.) before they begin to recognize themselves in a mirror. This certainly jives with my experience with my daughter. We had a large mirror in our living room and I remember (approximately) when she actually began to recognize herself. She would make faces of different emotional expressions (fear, happiness, etc) and put on my oversized shoes to shuffle over to the mirror and see how she looked. I also don't see any reason to doubt that certain primates and quite possibly dolphins and magpies can "naturally" (without lots of specific training) recognize themselves in a mirror while many other animlas can't. I don't take this to mean too much, it's just one of many possible indications (neither necessary nor sufficient, in my opinion) of a kind of "self-awareness". Like I said, it seems to me self-awareness, exists in a kind of spectrum and any meaningful attempt to clarify this concept should take this into account. Some developmental psychologists have apparently tried to do this, to some extent, by specifying "developmental stages" of self-awareness in humans.
BTW: how hard would it be to build a robot that could recognize itself in mirrors?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Sep 23, 2017 - 06:56am PT
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Ed,
What are you talking about? What do you think you’re talking about?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Sep 23, 2017 - 06:58am PT
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Paul: Your [sic] supporting a theory that spirals into nonsense.
I don't think there's a theory here.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Sep 23, 2017 - 07:53am PT
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But if those things you learned were not actually what you thought they were, then this wouldn't be nonsense at all. You would have no more awareness than Curiosity does on Mars, and perhaps no less.
Who/what's having the thought? How can you have a thought without being aware of it? Curiosity does not have thoughts I'm sure you agree. A human sent into space would actually have an experience in which they would have to subordinate a gamut of emotions to the duty at hand precisely because they were having an experience. Awareness, experience, thoughts these terms need definitions that are more precise for a conversation like this. And anyway: cogito ergo sum.
You know it strikes me that "mind" is such a difficult problem, a problem that implies all kinds of possibilities of an uncomfortable nature that some are willing to dismiss it (mind) as a nonexistent illusion. And in that there is a kind of comfort i suppose.
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 23, 2017 - 08:02am PT
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A robot can't see itself in the mirror because it can't see its own embedded operating firmware.
A living being started that firmware originally and NOT something material.
There was no robot in the beginning but only life.
Only life can beget life or build a st000pid robot that is not life ever.
The gross materialist mental speculators are the ones living in a dream and spiraling into nonsense.
A dream is not reality.
Reality is when the living entity is free from the cycle of birth, death, disease and old age ......
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 23, 2017 - 09:02am PT
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BTW: how hard would it be to build a robot that could recognize itself in mirrors?
Is there a prize for that? Possibly an Ig Nobel?
The mirror test surely means something, but just what that something is would be hard to pin down, considering the various possibilities of what the "self" could be.
Here is paul answering his own question above:
The observing entity within the mind that finds satisfaction in its knowing, that revels in a sure sense of epistemological certainty.
I believe that entity is the soul. I call it the soul for lack of a better term.
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1593650&tn=6732
I believe that it would be hard to build a soul into a robot.
A few weeks ago I failed a version of the mirror test. Turns out I needed a refresher course. I was shaving and noticed a brown spot on my cheek that I sometimes photoshop out of selfies. I recognized it but it was on the wrong side of my face. Then it came back to me that mirrors reverse left/right.
Are there studies in which a spot of color is applied to one ear of an ape? Does it reach for the wrong ear in the mirror test? Can it learn how the image in the mirror is different?
Another mirror-related behavior relevant to self-awareness: one-sided neglect in stroke patients. I first heard about it in class at University of Chicago where it was called hemi-agnosia.
Neglect patients may also ignore the contra-lesional side of their body; for instance, they might only shave, or apply make-up to, the non-neglected side. These patients may frequently collide with objects or structures such as door frames on the side being neglected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispatial_neglect
Awareness does not seem to be monolithic, indivisible, or impossible to analyze in finer detail.
It's fun to hear you describe your field. I had a Chicago roommate and climbing partner who described his thesis as harmonic analysis of semi-simple Lie groups.
I was an avid boulderer for much of my climbing career. I still do un-roped stuff that could be called bouldering but the days of short hard problems are behind, though brightly remembered. Thank you for your suggestion.
Ever climbed in the PNW?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Sep 23, 2017 - 09:55am PT
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Here is paul answering his own question above:
The observing entity within the mind that finds satisfaction in its knowing, that revels in a sure sense of epistemological certainty.
I believe that entity is the soul. I call it the soul for lack of a better term.
The question was rhetorical but I'll bet you knew that, then again maybe not. I'm sure the term soul is a product of the experience or our own being in which we perceive our individual awareness. Call it soul or ego or whatever you want but it's a fundamental human experience that we all share and we can assume animals share it as well. It's a sticky problem because the implications are uncomfortable for those wishing to dismiss or diminish the fundamental importance of human existence and the human conscious mind.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Sep 23, 2017 - 09:56am PT
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Curiosity does not have thoughts I'm sure you agree. A human sent into space would actually have an experience in which they would have to subordinate a gamut of emotions to the duty at hand precisely because they were having an experience. Awareness, experience, thoughts these terms need definitions that are more precise for a conversation like this. And anyway: cogito ergo sum.
let me, for the moment, put aside the issue of whether or not I agree about Curiosity (the martian rover).
My main line of argument here is to question whether or not our "theory of mind" is a precise enough theory to explain mind. My contention is that it is not, simply because its utility does not (and never did) try to address all the aspects of "mind" we have considered in this thread.
If you are unfamiliar with the notion of "theory of mind" (ToM) then you should look it up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
it is rather clear that some of us assert that, based on our common "theory of mind," we would all agree that we have a mind and that they (machines) do not. This assertion is based on an incorrect assumption: that we all agree on this. And Paul makes that assumption.
It turns out that "we" do not all agree on this (as is revealed by "experimental philosophy" studies, also known psychology).
What our ToM permits is exactly what theories are made for, predicting, and what it predicts is the behavior of other humans, an essential aspect to our propensity to form large social groups. It is apparently adequate for that purpose.
However, like all theories (formal or informal), its domain of applicability is limited. And these limitations are also readily apparent in our discussion on this thread. Formally, the discussion of qualia is one such indication of the limits of our ToM, that is, we cannot explain within that theory what generates qualia, yet we have a general agreement on qualia, we've made this about the color "red" which we all agree is more than the physical definition of that part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
These failures of our ToM are not unexpected. In the past (and as a representative of that we have Werner), the ToM would be buttressed with supernatural support. This is problematic to empirical demonstration, as the subjective evidence, in the form of "witnessing," are known to be difficult to distinguish between "actual witness" and mental disfunction. The validity of "witness" testimony has been problematic from the very beginning, what does the oath given in sworn testimony mean?
I swear that the evidence that I shall give, shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.
why would this oath be used to validate the testimony? It does appeal to a supernatural authority, the existence of which is currently debatable.
Now one could put the domains for which the ToM is invalid "off limits," there are a number of ways this is done, simply declaring that domain as an unknowable "mystery" is common.
One could also interpret various states as "visiting" these domains and attempt to interpret them as "no thing."
But another interpretation is that the ToM is limited, and does not represent the entirety of "mind." It does a good job in the social domain, but it fails outside of that. So applying it to define mind would lead to an overly limited restriction of what mind could be.
Mirror Perspective-Taking with a Humanoid Robot
If the machine has no "mind" then maybe we could conclude that the human doesn't, either. This would not violate our ToM, which is, after all, predictive.
Any good theory allows for the algorithmic application of the theory to produce results that "simulate" the subject of that theory. Newton's "Universal Law of Gravitation" makes a number of simplifying assumptions, but the theory can be put to use to calculate the positions of celestial bodies, and the trajectories of ballistic objects, and the results of those calculations checked against observations. That "bots" are indistinguishable from humans on social media is one "test" of the ToM, and a test that is passed.
If we agree that the "bots" have no mind, how can we assert that humans have a "mind?" To do so would be folly. Obviously, we have to admit that our ToM fails at some point, and that the "mind" referred to is a limited and incomplete representation of mind.
cogito, ergo sum cogito
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 23, 2017 - 10:14am PT
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Ed is left with his conclusions by default, issuing from his person maxim summed up in the statement: What isn't physical?
To such a belief, awareness HAS TO BE a physical function dealing with content. And so he posits awareness as a learned behavior with a task: process content. In this way, machine registration is basically the same as human awareness.
Except it's not.
What we learn, Ed, is to become conscious. Awareness was there all along, but until the brain learns how to construct consciousness, which is largely a mechanical, unconscious process, mind is a bucolic, fluid phenomenon.
And so we get the wonky statements that while we think we are aware, what really is happening is machine registration of inputs, processing, and predictable outputs (should we have all the relevant data).
Except "we only believe we are conscious," but are "really' something else, remains one of the most logically incoherent statements in all of philosophy.
As Paul pointed out, what might "real" awareness look like, if our version is an illusion? What criteria would have go be met for human awareness, as we experience it, to be genuine?
More on this fascinating topic later.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Sep 23, 2017 - 10:21am PT
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Largo has adopted a strict interpretation of Theory of Mind and does not admit its limited domain of applicability.
He goes on to conclude that those things not predicted by the ToM must lay outside of any current way of understanding.
It is a simple conclusion, but erroneous, as we are well aware of the limitations of ToM.
This is not arguing from a physicalist's point of view unless you wish to equate that pov with existence of logic and of simple empirical demonstration. We could throw both of those out, but the conversation would be very uninteresting (at least to some of us).
Conflating ToM with PoM (philosophy of mind) is why we are down this rabbit hole at all.
In this way, machine registration is basically the same as human awareness.
no, I have not made this conclusion at all, but what I am pointing out is that what some of us take as "human awareness" may not be what awareness is at all.
And I don't care if you take an oath regarding the authenticity of your experience.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Sep 23, 2017 - 10:31am PT
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Any good theory allows for the algorithmic application of the theory to produce results that "simulate" the subject of that theory. That "bots" are indistinguishable from humans on social media is one "test" of the theory, and a test that is passed.
If we agree that the "bots" have no mind, how can we assert that humans have a "mind?" To do so would be folly. Obviously, we have to admit that our ToM fails at some point, and that to insist that the "mind" referred to is a limited and incomplete idea.
This is just obfuscation of the obvious.
How can we assert we have a mind? Really? We have the immediate experience that declares in no uncertain terms we are aware and our minds are functioning.
That bots are indistinguishable from human beings on social media is a standard of such an artificial nature as to be irrelevant. On social media you are indistinguishable in a variety of ways from gender to name and that doesn't call into question the ultimate reality of who or what you, in fact, are. Social media is too often simply the playground of deceit.
One wonders how/why a theory of the human mind even addresses the notion of artificial intelligence as a means of ferreting out what it is to be aware in the human sense?
When did the quality of deception become the gold standard of the scientific method?
Turing! You gotta let him go.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 23, 2017 - 10:57am PT
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When did the quality of deception become the gold standard of the scientific method?
The question was rhetorical but I'll bet you knew that, then again maybe not.
paul is good at question-and-answer.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Sep 23, 2017 - 11:05am PT
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I think I addressed the issue of deceit upthread recently,
you seem to like to play the fool...
and you probably haven't read Turing (his papers that is), so you have little but hearsay to go on in making your arguments.
How can we assert we have a mind? Really? We have the immediate experience that declares in no uncertain terms we are aware and our minds are functioning.
Curiosity does so, also... but you have declared it to have no mind.
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