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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Jun 20, 2018 - 04:34pm PT
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Actually, I would say that it is the programming along with the actual playing out of the program on the world stage, which includes other actors along with little bits of randomness (to make things interesting) that gives a better flavor of empiricism.
Sure, but that's not the "microcode" vs. "programming" divide I'm talking about. Your above summary is still in the "programming" side of that dichotomy.
What I'm talking about in the sense of "microcode" is the set of "rules" that define what thinking and experience even is for us. Kant provides a compelling account of why experience for us cannot in principle be explained in terms of experience.
It (“microcode”) is genes, period. These genes evolved to be what they are. There is no mystery here.
There is a mystery here. Genes "work" according to how they are "interpreted." It's a chicken/egg problem with vast implications. The "mystery of life" can be encapsulated as "the mystery of genetics."
It's not just that we don't understand how genes are interpreted in context. It's more profound than that. It's literally a book-length project to go into the various ways that genes are "interpreted" in various "contexts," yet those interpretations presume "rules" that cannot in principle be contained in the genes themselves.
There is "information" there in a robust sense. But all information only is such according to rules, and by definition such rules cannot be in the information that is being interpreted.
So, geneticists help themselves to "rules" that they not only do not understand but that, worse, the very existence of which they presume exist in the very information needs interpretation according to the rules that cannot in principle exist in the information.
This same chicken/egg problem exists in languages. So, just appealing to "genes... there's no mystery" is staggeringly simplistic. I'm not saying that in a pejorative sense; I'm saying that such an "account" literally doesn't even get started.
Hmmm, how about linguists like Steven Pinker rather than philosophers of language?... Again, that might be what you read about in philosophical journals, but I don’t believe that this is the consensus among linguists.
You seem to be presuming that linguistics is now "different" from the philosophy of language from which it emerged or that philosophy of language is derivative from linguistics. Neither is the case.
Linguistics is a derivative of philosophy of language, but now linguists are more "macro" in their thinking than philosophers of language.
The relation is akin to biology's relation to physics. Biology operates without needing to solve the same problems facing, say, particle physicists. Biologists, being more "macro" in their thinking, are able to presume that either "relevant" problems in particle physics are solved or that they will be solved. Whether or not a Higgs boson were ever "revealed" experimentally is pretty irrelevant to a biologist. Even whether or not the standard model is "true" (as opposed to some alternative) is pretty irrelevant to a biologist.
By the same token, whether or not the existence of universals is ever empirically explained by philosophers of language is pretty irrelevant to a linguist. A linguist can employ a macro level of analysis of universals without any appeal to the philosophy of language implications of their presumptions.
But for people trying to give a purely naturalistic account of "all that there is," problems in particle physics and philosophy of language are relevant in ways that biologists and linguists don't need to grapple with.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Jun 20, 2018 - 04:36pm PT
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Madbolter, do you think you could have a mind without language?
That depends upon what you mean by "language."
I would argue that, in essence, a "language" is a set of rules by which informational relations can be performed as processes. It could be argued that DNA is a language.
In this broad sense of "language," I believe that a mind cannot exist (functionally) without a language.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 20, 2018 - 05:26pm PT
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I'm too lazy (not to mention in charge of dinner) to tackle more than this.
You seem to be presuming that linguistics is now "different" from the philosophy of language from which it emerged or that philosophy of language is derivative from linguistics. Neither is the case. Really? You can't see how the natural progression of languages is a reflection of actual history? That philosophical reflection can only come after the fact? Sheesh!
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Jun 20, 2018 - 05:34pm PT
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Really? You can't see how the natural progression of languages is a reflection of actual history? That philosophical reflection can only come after the fact? Sheesh!
Well, I don't know how to respond to this other than: No, I don't.
This "philosophical reflection" that you say came "after the fact" isn't the point. "Mathematical reflection" came "after the fact" too, but that doesn't mean that mathematics doesn't depend upon relations and entities that are non-empirical. Mathematics has an objectivity that is not mere intersubjectivity, and explaining the origins of mathematical facts, that we merely discover, isn't done by just asserting "Sheesh! It came after the fact."
You seem to be conflating "the investigative process" with "the thing that is being investigated."
Dinner here too. Have a great one!
:-)
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 20, 2018 - 05:44pm PT
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As Tony Montana famously said, "this is fun for me" (I think -- again the whole lazy thing).
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 20, 2018 - 06:45pm PT
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MB1: Just because we can "deconstruct" the deep-structure of a particular sentence now does not mean that it could have originally been built up from its constituent parts over long spans of time.
This is the problem of all theory. One *can* construct a feasible explanation for behavior, but that’s only an interpretation, and there are a great many of those. More germane, imo, is that there is meaning, seemingly. This is what self-aware beings do at our level of consciousness. Or at least this is what we seem to do nonstop: we create meaning. (It’s unfortunate that it’s also fun.) You might call it microcode.
Would “self-reflection” be an instantiation of a microcode that is species-specific? Or would not any aware being become reflexive as a natural matter of course?
Here we come back to the question: what is mind? The very question seems to be the very answer.
Be well.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Jun 20, 2018 - 07:43pm PT
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madbolter, I would love it if you could give some universal examples of microprogramming that are something other than so simple as to be almost meaningless.
Also, how to explain that some languages have only two terms for color - light and dark - with the third color if added, always red? Are they stuck with the original simple micro grammar that even the apes might have or did they have a complete set and then deteriorated to a simpler one?
As for nafod's question of can you have mind without language, the answer is of course. That's what all the belabored descriptions of no mind and no thing ness are about. Your dreams while mostly symbolic, are certainly part of your mind since the mind is multifaceted, only one portion of which is connected to language. Even then, not all written languages are processed in the same part of the brain. Americans who have a stroke on the left side of the brain lose the ability to speak, read and write, whereas Japanese lose the ability to speak and to write in alphabetic or syllabary systems, but can still do Chinese characters which are processed in the opposite side of the brain. They also retain the ability to calculate which is lost to westerners, because they have been taught the abacus and can visualize the beads flying up and down.
I say all aspects of mind may or may not be evolved (I still like the idea of a part of our mind interfacing with the Cosmic mind), but language in all its variety, seems to me to be evolved.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Jun 20, 2018 - 08:20pm PT
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madbolter, I would love it if you could give some universal examples of microprogramming that are something other than so simple as to be almost meaningless.
Not sure what you mean by this. See, the problem I'm talking about is the emergence of meaning in the first place. So, "microcode" IS "meaningless" in that it is itself contentless. It is the "rules" by which meaning, thinking, and experience emerges.
Here's an example in terms of information theory.
Please tell me the meaning of the following string of characters:
T9OYDLuNBSqpCdQzWMsUtD97ypkj1/DfRoQ9LoVZq+bZ6up9DU1IZS34trGQxlo
YSScnGyKngmD5TEGY4r1pBRDpAtFDoTyM5izfnZpET2gPa2lGCkM3paQhRmkdyA
sXwWfq7APEp43FWRlot3F6v/uyL223ucDLLcQJzJ56YBiobfT4cAg7yRUXVNu+h
mwfB2tnGkxWxMbRU+RxVh/XYAMDBsqpaiBnFheduMYY/9hm/8mpZlbm87bo5mBDBkbR
(I've broken it up to make it fit the page better, but think of it as a continuous string.)
I hope you'll recognize that this is a purely random string of characters generated by a random number generator. Hence, it is "meaningless" on the face of it, conveying nothing meaningful, containing no information, particularly if the information-theory account of entropy is correct.
Okay, but that "realization" of meaninglessness is entirely mistaken.
In fact, in the context of an SSL certificate, this string is profoundly meaningful and is in fact a machine-specific unique identifier. Its profound meaningfulness emerges FROM its randomness, and it literally could not convey the meaning it does if it were not rigorously random. (Of course I'm not providing the entire cert here for obvious reasons, and the point remains for the entire cert.)
So, you cannot "just look and see" if anything is "information-laden" or "meaningless." Meaning only emerges when something (a gene, or a random string) is "processed" according to rules. Thus, the meaning inheres IN the rules, because meaning is a function of rules or the lack thereof. There is no information IN the string above in a ruleless vacuum.
There is ONLY information in the string above WHEN the string is processed according to rules. Thus, regarding information, the rules are logically prior to the "thing" that supposedly conveys the information. The rules are not themselves information, and without content they have no "meaning." But there IS no meaning without them.
But the rules themselves imply both a "container" and a "processor." Neither of those can be the rules themselves, nor can "the string" act in either of those roles.
The "microcode" to which I refer is the set of rules that produce mind and experience. The Kantian "I think" is the "container" and "processor" that employs the rules to process raw content (that is forever inaccessible to us "directly"). Brain states and neural inputs are the "information" like the above string. Brain states "preserve" the "inputs" much like a cert "preserves" the "information" conveyed by it. And the brain indeed is affected by the world, such that its "information" is modified by the world.
However, just as in my cert example, "the information" is nothing without the microcode, without the interpretational rules. And, I believe that Kant demonstrated that this cannot be inherent "in" the brain itself anymore than the interpretational rules of SSL certs can be "in" the certs themselves.
"Information" presumes a processor that is not IN the "information" itself. So, even granting that the brain "is" the "information," it is "meaningless" apart from the processor, and if Kant is correct, as I think he is, the brain is NOT the processor, much as empiricists like to think of it as such.
The "microcode" and the "processor" on the Kantian model is necessarily non-empirical and not accessible to empirical representation, and that is because thinking and experience (the empirical realm) presupposes the activity of a "pre-empirical" processor using "microcode" (the most fundamental rules) that cannot be accounted for WITHIN experience and the thinking about experience.
In other words, by the time you are talking about (analyzing) the brain and its "contents," SO much processing according to rules has ALREADY taken place that you are left talking about the "cert" rather than the "processor" or the "rules" by which the cert came to be meaningful and an object of experience.
So, I have not directly answered your question. Instead I have somewhat recast the question into one I think is answerable, namely, what is the nature of "meaningful" in the first place.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 20, 2018 - 09:38pm PT
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"Information" presumes a processor that is not IN the "information" itself.
The processor is God.
If the living entity desires to be st00pid (illusion) God gives you the intelligence to do so.
If the living entity desires to become intelligent (truth) he gives you the intelligence to do so.
God is the ultimate processor.
The living entity is not the processor ever but always subordinate that follows .....
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 20, 2018 - 09:50pm PT
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9th Circuit has no real power.
They only have very limited power over the material.
They have no real power over life itself .......
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 20, 2018 - 10:46pm PT
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it's deeply question-begging to say "there it is" must be interpreted in evolutionary terms as opposed to acting as an evidence against the evolutionary account.
I think we have a long way to go before we understand what we call evolution, whether on the level of molecules, species, or behaviour such as language. I hope we can go further than we have. There are many interacting variables, but also a reasonable facsimile of purpose, which I hesitate to mention let alone regard as evidence.
Let each of us try to take small steps on whatever path looks likely to us, and if we happen to scale what appear to be heights, let's not become giddy.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Jun 20, 2018 - 11:45pm PT
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^^^ Always good advice.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 21, 2018 - 07:40am PT
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I think the idea of "rules" (or "laws") is something that humans apply to try to understand what is going on.
The "law" of gravitation, Newton's theory, can be stated in a causation neutral manner and loose none of its "authority."
The way we think about atoms (and just about everything else) is that there are no "global rules" to apply, just local rules. The way that valance electrons respond to configurations of atoms (charges) locally determines what overall configuration of the atoms will be.
This "locality" is an important part of physics, and why physicists are loathe to loose it (as in debates regarding quantum mechanics).
The atoms don't "think of the big picture," they just "worry about" what is happening right in front to them at that moment.
Sound's like they listened to MikeL.
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i-b-goB
Social climber
Wise Acres
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Jun 21, 2018 - 08:04am PT
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My Life Is about My Relationships… You will never find yourself in a point in time when the subject of relationships is not an active part of your now experience, for everything you perceive or notice or know is because of your relationship with something else. Without a comparative experience, you would be unable to perceive or focus any kind of understanding within yourself. Therefore, it is accurate to say that without relationships you could not exist at all.
Excerpted from The Vortex on 8/31/09
Our Love
Esther (Abraham and Jerry)
...everything is in relationship, that's why in si-fi if you could time travel to the past and you changed anything that would change the future!
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 21, 2018 - 08:30am PT
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As an undergraduate lit major (& phil), I took courses in syntax, linguistics, and semiotics. In one class we would take a section or two of a famous poem, and try to determine rules by which we understood its generally agreed upon meaning. Fascinating, but maddening that we could never come down hard on a set of linguistic rules for meaning. Everything we came up with (we’re talking weeks on a single Frost poem) ended up to be, at best, a guideline. It was that course that led me into cognitive science in grad school at UIUC. I appreciate what Jan reports somewhat globally about Eastern language behaviors, but I suspect there are no 1:1 associations there in those languages either. If language is one of the things that make the human species remarkable (perhaps not unique), then we are left with a huge mystery.
One of the points that I tried to make above is that all of the interesting things that we see in front of us can be explained in so many ways. There seems to be something about reality that is inherently ill-specified or loosely structured—as if consciously designed in such a way as to “operate” in many different fluid ways. Our explanations are many and varied, and there seems to be more degrees of freedom in any phenomena than what would be stipulated by the number of variables we think are important in outcomes. No matter what small task I seem to undertake (and project expectations in my mind), things *always* come out different specifically. (Or maybe I just don’t project expectations with enough detail.) Generalities, sure. Specifics, no, not really.
Everything seems totally fluid to, or in, my consciousness. Everything in front of me looks ambiguous. (Maybe I’m just not trying hard enough—and therein might be a pointer to what’s going on.)
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Jun 21, 2018 - 09:39am PT
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Or is it the backdrop of the universe, this reality we inhabit, that contains the rules by which the language of matter is interpreted and arranged?
Just as there can be information in a random string, depending upon the overarching context and interpretation according to rules, there can be information in the arrangement of atoms or even sub-atomic particles. Indeed, various information storage methods at the atomic level and below are under development, not to mention the whole field of quantum computing.
However, as in my cert example above, the information is not inherent "in" the storage or medium.
The problem with the idea that "the processor" and/or "the rules" are just part of the universe itself is that it's the empirical universe that we're talking about.
There are quite apparently "rules" that govern the behavior of atoms and sub-atomic particles, as well as stars and planets. Those are the scientific "laws" that we all refer to. However, there's no reason to believe that those "rules" govern "information."
For example, imagine that you are flying far above over a supposedly deserted island. You look down and clearly see the word "HELP" spelled out in gigantic letters in the sands below. Shocked, you determine to come back as soon as possible in a helicopter to rescue whoever scrawled that message.
Returning in the early evening, the lighting is much different. The shadows fall the opposite direction as before. You are able to fly much closer and see details. Now you clearly see that "HELP" was an illusion produced by a small stream down one side of the "H," some trees that had fallen, sand dunes, etc. There was no message. There was only the pseudo-random positioning of things and the particular lighting.
Now, in one (mistaken) sense it might be thought, "There really was a 'HELP' message there, although it was naturally produced and not intended." But if that's really all that "message" or "information" refers to, then literally reality itself is what "message" means, and that account conflates distinctions that are critical to actual information-recognition and processing. Had you known that "HELP" was entirely naturally produced when you first flew over, you would not have later returned to rescue "someone."
Genuine information implies genuine intentionality, and on the purely empirical model, the universe has none. So, the empirical universe is not "rule laden" in the relevant sense. Thus, it's not the empirical universe itself that is handing us "the rules" by which we recognize and process genuine information. The opposite is the case: WE manipulate the universe in ways that enable us to produce, store, and process information, when none of that is inherent in "the universe itself," nor can it be.
This leads into very deep waters regarding human free will, intentionality, and so on. The nutshell I take from these interlocking subjects is that what "we" really are has some features that are not part of the empirical universe and cannot be explained in empirical terms.
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Jim Clipper
climber
from: forests to tree farms
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Jun 21, 2018 - 09:50am PT
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One more for the evolutionary biologists at heart.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070316-gorilla-lice.html
Also, an anecdote, but a man who rescued gorillas said that they would embrace him in big bear hug when he entered their "home/enclosure". He said they would try to pull out his eyelashes with their mouths. He said that they always seemed to enjoy it when they got one, and it hurt!
I wouldn't want to test it, but would a Silverback give a roaming stonemaster, the same embrace or a beatdown? I would bet that Hank would be cool. Live and learn.
One last link for the milk eye faction:
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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