Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Nov 16, 2017 - 06:07pm PT
|
I kind of like this, from Richard in that link:
It takes both the data-stream (presumably from the physical senses) and the synthesizing of that raw data into coherent packets to produce our "experiences" . . .
So, there is no "empty awareness" (which is a contradiction in terms) or any "awareness of emptiness" in Kant. The process is an all or nothing deal. If any part fails or is lacking, you simply don't get "anything" to experience; there can be no awareness of anything at all.
And then, from another expert (JL) on the same page:
I believe Kant would say, Most excellent. Just understand that there is more to the game than what you can see and measure and predict, and none of the extra is magic, but the foundation and means by which we see and measure and predict any thing in the first place - that is, the a priori. Not a mystical, divine set of things or postulates (which refer to things), but rather the basis for every thing
|
|
yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
|
|
|
Nov 16, 2017 - 06:44pm PT
|
Well I don't have a Ph.D in analytical philosophy and I only studied Kant for a quarter or two as an undergraduate (but I had a very capable guide).
I do have a little anecdote about the difference between what we might "take" from what someone says and what that person actually says. The story was told to me by Argentine mathematicians and also appears in the New York Times:
Alberto Calderon was an Argentine civil engineer who worked for a local oil company. He had always been interested in mathematics but his father had convinced him that engineering was the better choice because making a living as a mathematician could prove difficult. In 1948, Antoni Zygmund came to the University of Buenos Aires to give a seminar on Harmonic Analysis and Calderon participated. After one talk, Calderon conversed with Zygmund about a proof he had given (due to Marcel Riesz) from his classic book on Fourier Series. Calderon asked why the proof given in the seminar was so much more complicated than the one from the book. Zygmund said he didn't know what Calderon meant. So Calderon showed him the simple and elegant proof. Zygmund was suprised. "That's not from my book!" It turned out that when Calderon read books in mathematics, instead of studying the proofs given, he would try to devise his own proofs, to understand the material better. In the process, he had devised a much simpler and more elegant proof than the one given by Marcel Riesz (and repeated by Zygmund in his book) for an important result in Fourier Series. Zygmund, being duly impressed, invited Calderon to the University of Chicago, where he finished his work for the Ph.D in one year. At the time of his death, Calderon was generally recognized as one of the most important mathematicians of the second half of the 20th century. His obit in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/20/us/alberto-calderon-77-pioneer-of-mathematical-analysis.html
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Nov 16, 2017 - 06:57pm PT
|
Quite a few levels of interest in that anecdote.
I think it was while at Chicago I heard about the person who would rather spend a day deriving a result rather than spend 2 hours at the library looking it up.
Today I guess it would only take 0.2 sec to look it up.
I think anyone who has read Kant is worth listening to. I have no way of judging madbolter1's analyses, other than that he expresses himself clearly, and he once told us that it took him a long time to understand what he thought was the true sense of some of Kant's arguments. I don't expect every good idea to be easy to understand.
|
|
healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
|
|
|
Nov 16, 2017 - 06:59pm PT
|
Summary from a Scientific American article on quantum computing:
By David Deutsch, Artur Ekert on May 21, 2013
...
...
Beyond Bad Philosophy
If quantum mechanics allows new kinds of computation, why did physicists ever worry that the theory would limit scientific progress? The answer goes back to the formative days of the theory.
Erwin Schrödinger, who discovered quantum theory's defining equation, once warned a lecture audience that what he was about to say might be considered insane. He went on to explain that when his famous equation describes different histories of a particle, those are “not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously.” Eminent scientists going off the rails is not unknown, but this 1933 Nobelist was merely making what should have been a modest claim: that the equation for which he had been awarded the prize was a true description of the facts. Schrödinger felt the need to be defensive not because he had interpreted his equation irrationally but precisely because he had not.
How could such an apparently innocuous claim ever have been considered outlandish? It was because the majority of physicists had succumbed to bad philosophy: philosophical doctrines that actively hindered the acquisition of other knowledge. Philosophy and fundamental physics are so closely connected—despite numerous claims to the contrary from both fields—that when the philosophical mainstream took a steep nosedive during the first decades of the 20th century, it dragged parts of physics down with it.
The culprits were doctrines such as logical positivism (“If it's not verifiable by experiment, it's meaningless”), instrumentalism (“If the predictions work, why worry about what brings them about?”) and philosophical relativism (“Statements can't be objectively true or false, only legitimized or delegitimized by a particular culture”). The damage was done by what they had in common: denial of realism, the commonsense philosophical position that the physical world exists and that the methods of science can glean knowledge about it.
It was in that philosophical atmosphere that physicist Niels Bohr developed an influential interpretation of quantum theory that denied the possibility of speaking of phenomena as existing objectively. One was not permitted to ask what values physical variables had while not being observed (such as halfway through a quantum computation). Physicists who, by the nature of their calling, could not help wanting to ask tried not to. Most of them went on to train their students not to. The most advanced theory in the most fundamental of the sciences was deemed to be stridently contradicting the very existence of truth, explanation and physical reality.
Not every philosopher abandoned realism. Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper were notable exceptions. Not every physicist did, either. Albert Einstein and David Bohm bucked the trend, and Hugh Everett proposed that physical quantities really do take on more than one value at once (the view we ourselves endorse). On the whole, however, philosophers were uninterested in reality, and although physicists went on using quantum theory to study other areas of physics, research on the nature of quantum processes themselves lost its way.
Things have been gradually improving for a couple of decades, and it has been physics that is dragging philosophy back on track. People want to understand reality, no matter how loudly they may deny that. We are finally sailing past the supposed limits on knowledge that bad philosophy once taught us to resign ourselves to.
What if the theory is eventually refuted—if some deeper limitation foils the attempt to build a scalable quantum computer? We would be thrilled to see that happen. Such an outcome is by far the most desired one. Not only would it lead to a revision of our fundamental knowledge about physics, we would expect it to provide even more fascinating types of computation. For if something stops quantum mechanics, we shall expect to have an exciting new whatever-stops-quantum-mechanics theory, followed by exciting new whatever-stops-quantum-computers computers. One way or another, there will be no limits on knowledge or progress.
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Nov 16, 2017 - 09:26pm PT
|
I've mentioned this before, but when I arrived at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1958 I was surprised to hear that the physics department had just decided to teach all the math courses physics students would need for their degrees. Draw your own conclusion.
|
|
yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
|
|
|
Nov 17, 2017 - 04:53am PT
|
Draw your own conclusion.
How could we draw any conclusion (except a trivial one) from the given information?
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Nov 17, 2017 - 07:45am PT
|
Anyone can find anyone else to be whatever they deem. Unfortunately, there’s no hard and fast measure and test to tell who has a handle on Truth.
I’d say that anyone who is not an honest solipsist is dogmatic in one form or another.
I, too, have a degree in philosophy, and I can’t say that it ever showed me what was true. Once I read a little article by Hegel falsifying the Law of Identity, it was off-to-the-races using my own lights to see what I could see for myself, on my own.
If one holds that his or her beliefs are true, then *that* would be a reasonable definition of dogma in my view.
But, . . . it’s only my view, as you know.
Deutsch’s and Ekert’s summary of their argument in Scientific American is simply their opinion, and as everyone knows, everyone has their own.
No one needs to be a philosopher or have a Ph.D. in any field of study to do solid inquiry into reality.
What is it that people think they must have from anyone else or from anywhere else to make their own investigations? Even the Buddha advised people to come to their own conclusions through their own capabilities.
It *could* be possible that all views are true.
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Nov 17, 2017 - 08:15am PT
|
Deutsch’s and Ekert’s summary of their argument in Scientific American is simply their opinion
A man had a dream in which Aristotle appeared. Aristotle explained his entire philosophy but the man raised an objection which Aristotle could not answer. The great philosopher disappeared but Plato appeared in his place. Plato gave his philosophy but the man raised the same objection and Plato also couldn't answer it and disappeared.
All the famous philosophers of history appeared and the man refuted all of them with the same objection. After the last philosopher disappeared, the man said to himself, "I know I'm asleep and dreaming, yet I've found a universal refutation for all philosophical systems! Tomorrow when I wake up, I will probably have forgotten it."
The man forced himself awake, went over to his desk, and wrote down his universal refutation. With relief he returned to bed and sleep. In the morning he went back to the desk to see what he had written. It was, "That's what you say!"
from
5,000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies
Raymond Smullyan
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Nov 17, 2017 - 08:39am PT
|
I am glad to see the post from Randy. Shortly after asking his whereabouts I found recent ST posts from him on other threads.
I would hope that this forum is a place where we can kid around and get away from work and other serious concerns.
Chinese in 10 Minutes a Day seems funny. I don't remember where it came from. I unearthed it the other day while going through shelved collections of our children's early productions.
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Nov 17, 2017 - 08:02pm PT
|
By the way, what ever happened to his carpool buddies? Did they graduate and move on to the MetaMind project?
Well, I sure hope not. They would still be out there beating the bushes trying to find it!
How could we draw any conclusion (except a trivial one) from the given information?
The trivial one is probably accurate. Too much theoretical stuff from the math department and a perspective that didn't jibe completely with a physics viewpoint, including notation perhaps. I wasn't studying math while there so I'm not certain. Could be some personality conflicts as well.
As a freshman at Ga Tech in 1954 I was placed in an experimental beginning calculus section for a couple of quarters. There were about fifteen of us and we plunged right in on epsilons and deltas and no textbook, which cleared the sinuses quickly. The third quarter I was back in the regular engineering oriented calculus, with the book used there, and was amazed how easy it seemed.
|
|
Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
|
|
|
Nov 18, 2017 - 05:59am PT
|
MikeL
It *could* be possible that all views are true.
*could* amuses me. Under such a scenario even the words view and true are uncertain. The mind can endlessly entertain just about any idea as if ...such & such were the case. Some of us call it dreaming?
Even the Money Changers knew that if they slept on $500 before going to bed they should have $500 in the morning [persistence of the world] -- little science existed then? Knowing they had $500 was based on a measurement. If they woke up and measured $400 they would suspect that either the missing $100 was nearby or someone pilfered it while they were sound asleep. Embedded here in their naive realism is the idea of locality and becoming. Locality -- The $100 had to disappear across some nearby boundaries -- through the wall or doors of the bedroom. Becoming is about how things change form. The missing $100 could have become ashes. Looking for the ashes would be the testing of a hypothesis.
Is it likely the money changers would just think God took the $100? Some people know non-sense when they hear it. And almost always some nonsense is uttered after being dreamed up.
The world does have some persistence of structure[we no longer get reports of people vaporizing in ordinary air] and some of the forms of the things within it are in a state of becoming -- Changing, we of calculus say.
|
|
Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
|
|
|
Nov 18, 2017 - 08:07am PT
|
MikeL
Dingus: Damasio . . . contends that with every thought comes a feeling module . . . .
Might I suggest reading up on combat-experienced men and women who have PTSD? You might also note that many people who are highly analytically oriented exhibit significant lack of emotive connection. Cognition is only one means of knowing, and I would say that it is unusual that people have integrated knowing. There is, for example, knowledge that is known only physically, some known only cognitively, some known only emotionally, some known only spiritually, and so forth.
Emotive connections are an integral part of Damasio's ideas of mind which is mostly concerned with with very low level raw-unmodified thoughts -- awareness from the subconscious to conscious awareness. Thoughts are any activity here and not just what one might call thinking.
You suggest looking at both traumatised people and then highly analytically oriented people that exhibit significant lack of emotive seemingly as to suggest some counter instances of what Damasio's theory declares as the attachment of feeling modules to every thought.
People are very capable of developing habituated responses and these habituations are not created at the raw-unmodified low level of the birth of thoughts into conscious awareness with feeling modules. What you have suggested is a 3rd party observation of what is outwardly manifested as behavior and that is not what is going on before habituation.
I have taken a few personality tests from the internet and one of the sections was titled Empathy and Agency. I scored 96% agency and 4% empathy. After taking this test someone ask if had no feeling for other people. In every question asked I felt some empathy but upon thinking about the situation they proposed I would asked myself what I am in control of to change in this scenario. And usually I would not do what was the empathetic thing to do. Asking myself what I could do to change the scenario is an habituated response.
Drugs, stimulants, depressants, natural body hormones, excessive neurotransmitters and problem framing can drive the outward behavior into far different directions that what the low level thought/feeling module was as when first observed in the 1st person sense.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Nov 18, 2017 - 08:24am PT
|
I can’t say anything about a test from the internet characterizing personality. (It wouldn’t it have been Meyer’s Briggs, would it?) I guess I’d be hesitant about self-interpretations outside one’s field of expertise. (I *would* put some faith in the MMPI, though. It takes a few hours and a trained psychologist to interpret it.)
At large: Is it possible that all views *could* be true?
David Bohm employed many different analogies to illustrate how apparent contradictions and incommensurabilities might simply be something we can’t perceive or understand. One example was about higher order dimensionality. Fish are televised in a fish tank at right angles to one another. There appears to be an interacting relationship between the images, but they are not two independently existent realities. It’s simply one, a common ground for both. The two dimensional projections are only abstractions, but the reality is beyond both. (See, Bohm’s, “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” and other writings.)
My point here is that what appears to be obvious, logical, rational, reasonable could easily be biased by singular viewpoints. According to Bohm, for example, ignorance is a matter of closed-mindedness, which deflects insight. The opposite of a closed mind is an openness to interiority (or at least so says Bohm).
Many other writers beyond Bohm have said similar things.
(IMO, Bohm’s writings on The Implicate Order is in some ways surprisingly similar to what Werner writes here in this thread—albeit with much more technical and theoretical explanation.)
Seeing from multiple perspectives—maybe even all perspectives simultaneously—could well be indicative of understanding of reality by reality itself. That is, consciousness becoming aware of consciousness. There is no need for theories, even Bohm’s.
|
|
Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
|
|
|
Nov 18, 2017 - 08:33am PT
|
MikeL
I guess I’d be hesitant about self-interpretations outside one’s field of expertise. (I *would* put some faith in the MMPI, though. It takes a few hours and a trained psychologist to interpret it.)
To begin at the beginning of this post you said,
I can’t say anything about a test from the internet characterizing personality. And then shortly later you did day something which is the top quote on this post.
Yet just a few posts back you said,
No one needs to be a philosopher or have a Ph.D. in any field of study to do solid inquiry into reality.
Could it also be that no one needs to be a psychologist or have a Ph.D. in any field of study to do solid inquiry into reality? the reality of MMPI?
You seem to think you can play both hands of deck and not get noticed?
When you behave this way your advice becomes meaningless. Or is this bifurcation just your Seeing from multiple perspectives? And may I add with the idea that anything is possible ?
Get a Grip Dude!
|
|
Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
|
|
|
Nov 18, 2017 - 08:51am PT
|
MikeL,
whatever things Bohm said for the quantum world, those concepts are far more rational than saying anything is possible.
There is and it has been observed that there is some measurable form of persistence in this world. Maybe there are many worlds in the elsewhere/multiverse like ours but this world does not flip flop into another world where instantaneously things are different. Did the value of Pi change this month?
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Nov 18, 2017 - 09:46am PT
|
I kant help myself...
Science 27 Oct 2017:
Vol. 358, Issue 6362, pp. 486-492
DOI: 10.1126/science.aan8871
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6362/486.full
What is consciousness, and could machines have it?
Stanislas Dehaene, Hakwan Lau, Sid Kouider
Abstract
The controversial question of whether machines may ever be conscious must be based on a careful consideration of how consciousness arises in the only physical system that undoubtedly possesses it: the human brain. We suggest that the word “consciousness” conflates two different types of information-processing computations in the brain: the selection of information for global broadcasting, thus making it flexibly available for computation and report (C1, consciousness in the first sense), and the self-monitoring of those computations, leading to a subjective sense of certainty or error (C2, consciousness in the second sense). We argue that despite their recent successes, current machines are still mostly implementing computations that reflect unconscious processing (C0) in the human brain. We review the psychological and neural science of unconscious (C0) and conscious computations (C1 and C2) and outline how they may inspire novel machine architectures.
...
Concluding remarks
Our stance is based on a simple hypothesis: What we call “consciousness” results from specific types of information-processing computations, physically realized by the hardware of the brain. It differs from other theories in being resolutely computational; we surmise that mere information-theoretic quantities (76) do not suffice to define consciousness unless one also considers the nature and depth of the information being processed.
We contend that a machine endowed with C1 and C2 would behave as though it were conscious; for instance, it would know that it is seeing something, would express confidence in it, would report it to others, could suffer hallucinations when its monitoring mechanisms break down, and may even experience the same perceptual illusions as humans. Still, such a purely functional definition of consciousness may leave some readers unsatisfied. Are we “over-intellectualizing” consciousness, by assuming that some high-level cognitive functions are necessarily tied to consciousness? Are we leaving aside the experiential component (“what it is like” to be conscious)? Does subjective experience escape a computational definition?
Although those philosophical questions lie beyond the scope of the present paper, we close by noting that empirically, in humans the loss of C1 and C2 computations covaries with a loss of subjective experience. For example, in humans, damage to the primary visual cortex may lead to a neurological condition called “blindsight,” in which the patients report being blind in the affected visual field. Remarkably, those patients can localize visual stimuli in their blind field but cannot report them (C1), nor can they effectively assess their likelihood of success (C2)—they believe that they are merely “guessing.” In this example, at least, subjective experience appears to cohere with possession of C1 and C2. Although centuries of philosophical dualism have led us to consider consciousness as unreducible to physical interactions, the empirical evidence is compatible with the possibility that consciousness arises from nothing more than specific computations.
[emphasis added]
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Nov 18, 2017 - 10:04am PT
|
David Bohm employed many different analogies to illustrate how apparent contradictions and incommensurabilities might simply be something we can’t perceive or understand.
Bohm's thinking was based on physical principles that, at the time, were possible, but have later shown to be incorrect. I think that John Stewart Bell (of Bell's theorem fame) had hoped that something like Bohm's ideas would prevail. But experimental investigation points rather convincingly to that not being the case.
That's the way it goes in science, good ideas may not have anything to do with the way the universe is... no crime in having the ideas, only in the inability to abandon them when they are shown to be wrong.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Nov 18, 2017 - 12:12pm PT
|
Ed:
You seem to be concerned with whether or not Bohm is right, accurate, complete, final, etc. My point of bringing up Bohm is not whether he is right but more to his use of an analogy or a narrative, not unlike Einstein employed.
It seems we continue to run into the problem of pointing at the moon and people talking about the finger that’s pointing. I’d say not everything needs to be literal, nor should it be. You might demur.
Dingus,
You are the one that brought up a test. I responded that if it’s a test you want or believe in, then you might be interested in other tests that have tended to have more credibility among professionals. If not, then not.
It’s difficult to talk about anything if one must be consistent, logical, rational, literal, and an expert in the field of study. I realize this. We’re just talking, you know? I don’t think there’s any reason to get snippy.
My comment about investigating reality should probably be read to refer not to your ego or personality. I don’t know you, and couldn’t make a comment about a characterization of your personality. On the other hand, I’ve had a fair amount of psychological counseling over the years (failed marriages, PTSD) as well as some academic training in some of these matters (org behavior, which I’ve taught). This much I can say with a relative amount of assurance: Meyer’s Briggs has very little empirical and predictive substantiation, while the MMPI does. Of course, psychology is socially constructed, perhaps more than other fields of study; however I’d say that psychologists say that the psyche will not be seen or understood by looking at neurons and neural networks.
The problems we tend to have here with our conversations that must be literal and technical might suggest that perhaps AI *is* an appropriate model of mind—but, please, not Marvin Minsky’s “meat machine” that simply runs sets of algorithms computationally. That models seems to imply that we MUST be completely logical, rational, physical / materialistic, literal, technical etc.
It can be very helpful to be far more open to intuition, to creativity, to innovation that challenges what was beforehand obvious, rational, logical, etc.
Roger Schank and John Owen think that they’ve devised an algorithmic definition for creativity! For them, the skill of creativity is the ability to misapply things and ideas—to something in a previously undiscovered manner. Near misses, modification of inappropriate patterns, metaphors of all sorts, imaginative fantasies, symbolism, even myths—such as might come out of a dream or an unexplainable sense of deja vu or Jung’s collective unconsciousness—often lead to completely new understandings and views.
All of this requires a sense of wide-openness, a lack of closure and bias, a relegation of hard-and-fast definitions and rules, more than simply a tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty.
At least that will generally be my view. I understand it may not satisfy you.
|
|
yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
|
|
|
Nov 18, 2017 - 12:49pm PT
|
Personally I think Kant got that lying thing wrong. Which is strange, because he wrote the book on the categorical imperative. I don't see any reason why "If you think you can save someone's life, then you should lie to an axe murderer" can't be universalized (any rational person should do that). It seems to me the categorical nature of morality is that something is morally permissible when you can allow that any "rational" person should be able to do. The only tricky point might be: can I will that "If I'm the axe murderer then anyone should lie to me to save the life of a potential victim"? I really don't have a problem with that (I mean: allowing that people should treat me that way). Of course, I'm not an axe murderer. However, in terms of Kant's own wording, it seems to me, that axe murderers, as a whole, have already stepped way out-of-bounds, in terms participating in his "Kingdom of Ends" (which is supposed to consist of rational beings).
Which just goes to prove, either I really don't get what Kant was trying to say, or else he did have some interesting things to say, he just wasn't the sharpest cookie in the cutter.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!