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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 26, 2017 - 07:43am PT
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Anyways, it seems to me, if what we mean by "unconscious" is what happens when we get knocked out in the boxing ring, or anesthetized, or end up in coma, I don't think the "unconscious" mind is gonna do much creative mathematics
Agreed. Anesthesia and getting knocked out are ways to examine our ideas and choice of language when we consider our notions of the differences among varieties of consciousness.
I do wonder if the "subconscious" is made less conscious by anesthesia, and I doubt whether the fMRI gazers can tell us much about that. Some day we may get better tools.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Nov 26, 2017 - 08:33am PT
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John, I certainly vividly recall watching you making moves that seemed to defy the laws of physics. And I can still feel the effects on my hand of your Cut Finger Crack route. And I did manage to do a couple of your no hands routes...I don't recall Robbins or Chouinard or anyone else getting very far with any of your Gill Eliminates routes...We all thought we were pretty good climbers right up until you kept showing us how it could be done. Yvon and I were sharing shelter under the CCC incinerator as neither of us could afford a tent...and there was that little girl going around telling everyone she was going to marry you...starting by getting good at cooking oat meal in the morning...Royal and Jane Taylor and I did a few ambitious routes together...Jane and I played the Bach Violin Double Concerto together...Ken Weeks did a fast appearance and faster disappearance...Royal offended the Valley insiders by inviting me to do El Cap with him...
Ooops, are you sorry you asked...
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Nov 26, 2017 - 01:38pm PT
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Jgill: Do fractals lead to hyperdimensional infinities?
I don’t see that anything is necessary; instead, all things are possible all the time.
What would you make of things when you couldn't predict them?
Your assertion about straight lines, . . . that’s not definitional, is it?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Nov 27, 2017 - 07:13am PT
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Jgill,
Mmmm.
In a world with no empirical reference points (no things that one can perceive through the senses), it’s difficult to say what’s what or what’s going on. You might say that there is no question about what a “1” is or stands for, but I think it’s a convenience used to talk about things.
If a great or grand author creates an entire world out of his or her imagination—completely internally consistent—then how could one find fault or error with it? It would constitute a language, and it seems that all languages make sense among those who speak it. Could one say the language is real if it hangs together internally consistent? The language *would* be real itself, but what it refers to would not necessarily be so. You get my drift here? It’s a question of referents. There are numbers, but what do the numbers refer to? Themselves? (If they do, if they are self-referential only, then you are embracing something very postmodern.)
Sorry to bring back the metaphor of a dream. Dreams *seem* to make sense when we are in them, but when we come out of them, then we say we see all the parts that tell us that the dream was not real.
Thx.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 27, 2017 - 12:06pm PT
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The language *would* be real itself, but what it refers to would not necessarily be so
Yes. To me (and to Yanqui, Rgold, and others) mathematics is 'real' even when there is little correlation to the physical world. As a matter of fact, when I started at GaTech in 1954 what I encountered in my calculus class seemed more 'real' than what was in my physics class. Weird, huh? At present I am toying with non-real, imaginary time, and finding it is stretching my imagination!
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Nov 27, 2017 - 12:52pm PT
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jgill, it would be interesting to see what you think after reading the five little books by Preston Nichols with Peter Moon: 'The Music of Time' etc.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Nov 27, 2017 - 04:32pm PT
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So, I realize that my evolution-related posts aren't generating much interest, but I'm going to post another one because this is the storage area for my thoughts on this subject (sorry).
My last post about our hominid cousin genera and species that didn't make it, and what consciousness was like for them got me to thinking about consciousness and it's relationship to morality. Scientific research suggests that there is a more or less universal human morality, at least from a statistical standpoint. It crosses ethnic and religious groups. It's literally written in our genes.
Well what if we could somehow capture the conscious states of non-human hominids that have gone extinct? Let's say, Jurassic Park-like, we were able to resurrect several sets of related, extinct hominids and run them through the same gamut of tests that we use for determining human morality? I would bet that we would see a relative continuum of moral viewpoints along any particular branch of the hominid evolutionary tree.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 27, 2017 - 06:27pm PT
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Let's say, Jurassic Park-like, we were able to resurrect several sets of related, extinct hominids
Do you see ethical problems with doing this? It is fun to speculate, and it would be worth knowing what kind of speech and language skills previous hominids had, but would it be worth the likely suffering of the resurrected into a time, place, and society they might not be able to live a natural life in?
Not that we humans live natural lives.
Some of this discussion brings back the time paul roehl was lauding the accomplishments and successes of humans, compared, for example, to ants or bees. If your measure of success is the number of extant species, we humans are far down the scale.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Nov 27, 2017 - 08:45pm PT
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Jgill,
That’s ok by me.
(Pssssttttt! Where’s our “common ground?”)
eeyonkee: I'm going to post another one because this is the storage area for my thoughts on this subject (sorry).
Yo, brother, that would be a mis-appropriation of resources. F-O-R-U-M. Don’t be surprised if no one gets or hears you. The tender is interest.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 27, 2017 - 08:52pm PT
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Awareness is non-other than the activity of consciousness.
Again .... without consciousness period the material body will collapse and fall to the ground.
Consciousness itself IS the most important aspect of life and knowledge far more than "What is Mind".
Without consciousness itself .... there would never be a mind period ......and what to speak of life itself.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 28, 2017 - 10:54am PT
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I have been interested in what yanqui posted about the physics of epilepsy. I once helped a neurologist do research on seizure-like activity in slices of hippocampus.
I put some time in, but cannot find much. It would surely be interesting if algebraic topology could tell us something important about epilepsy that we did not already know.
Superficially, it looks to me that people have thought, "We have this cool technique. Let's find a place to apply it." It is better if people first find an important question and then ask, "How do we get an answer to this?"
A search for 'algebraic topology epilepsy' led here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120797/
Human behaviour in various circumstances mirrors the corresponding brain connectivity patterns, which are suitably represented by functional brain networks. While the objective analysis of these networks by graph theory tools deepened our understanding of brain functions, the multi-brain structures and connections underlying human social behaviour remain largely unexplored.
Anatomical connections are chiefly investigated by diffusion tensor imaging. The functional brain connectivity, on the other hand, can be detected at different spatial and temporal scales. In this regard, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) captures synchronisation among blood-oxygenation-level-dependent signals at a good spatial resolution and low frequency
Not impressive.
Looking into the phrase 'functional connectivity':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_functional_connectivity
Several researchers have argued that DFC may be a simple reflection of analysis, scanner, or physiological noise. Noise in fMRI can arise from a variety of different factors including heart beat, changes in the blood brain barrier, characteristics of the acquiring scanner, or unintended effects of analysis. Some researchers have proposed that the variability in functional connectivity in fMRI studies is consistent with the variability that one would expect from simply analyzing random data.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 28, 2017 - 12:11pm PT
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Fun quote from a paper I was just reading:
The measurement problem is what appears to render the the idea of the universe being partly “physically undetermined” possible. There is just a huge awning gap between the ordinary level of our experience and the laws of quantum mechanics, and no-one can be sure about what’s in that gap.
Faced with this gap, some are tempted to suspect that anything other than determinism is the same as superstition. I think this is like someone from a thousand years ago looking at a TV set and saying “I can only understand how it works if there are tiny people in it, therefore there are tiny people in it. Anything else is ridiculous superstition.”
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Nov 28, 2017 - 01:20pm PT
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It was pure speculation, of course, MH2. I'm outta here for awhile.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 28, 2017 - 07:02pm PT
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some are tempted to suspect that anything other than determinism
Is Free Will? Is Free Will a superstition?
You are chasing your own superstition, JL.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 28, 2017 - 07:15pm PT
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you'd have to go over to quora to get the answers, MH2...
where the quote comes from (apparently).
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 28, 2017 - 07:29pm PT
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It was pure speculation
Trying to bring back a Passenger pigeon or wooly mammoth has been speculated about, too.
There doesn't seem to be a good reason for such a project.
However, the idea lets us look at how much we don't know. If we did get the entire genome of an extinct species, could we really produce a live one?
Dolly the cloned sheep lived a relatively short life. There seemed to be a problem with her telomeres or her telomerase. But sheep cloned from Dolly lived much longer,
Getting back to how much we don't know: we have good and increasingly better computer models of many things. How much of an organism's adult size, shape, and behavior could we predict given just the DNA sequence?
Next to nothing would be my guess, but where do the problems lie? What is it that we don't know?
We already have enough ethical problems with genome editing, The ethical questions about resurrecting an extinct hominid may take a long time to come to the fore.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 28, 2017 - 07:32pm PT
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Thanks, Ed.
From quora:
At the moment, we do know that we are conscious
Who are this we?
Where am I?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 28, 2017 - 08:26pm PT
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"Because much of what we experience in the world around us and in our own inner life makes a lot more sense if we assume we are conscious"
There are some lulus on that page.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Nov 29, 2017 - 07:20am PT
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MH2: Superficially, it looks to me that people have thought, "We have this cool technique. Let's find a place to apply it."
Ha-ha. No disrespect intended, but this reminds me of one of the classical articles in managerial decision making (a very simplified computer model), called "The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice."
http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/org_site/encyclop/garbage_can.html
“The garbage-can theory (Cohen, March, and Olsen 1972) adds that an organization "is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work". Problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities flow in and out of a garbage can, and which problems get attached to solutions is largely due to chance.”
You have a “solution” or tool (you think), and you go around looking for a problem to solve. Basically, it’s a very inefficient way of resource allocation.
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