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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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It isn't a question.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Not a bad post, MikeL. I'll take your word for it about Google Scholar. I can see now that I should have been more clear. I really haven't been espousing so much that mind is like a computer. In fact, I've noted on several posts that how mind functions is a bit of a mystery, involving a combination of neural network processing (of which I have only the most general knowledge of), processing of "regular" algorithms, and who knows what. The post of mine referring to CRUD and "computer type knowledge" was really more general than mind as computer -- more like life as algorithm. And when I say algorithm I really mean a hierarchy of algorithms. Every facet of life involves algorithms. Organisms inherit -- I don't know, 100's of thousands of them or something, and then, as their lives play out, orders of magnitude more are ultimately generated and followed. That's more along the lines of where I was going.
By the way, I always think of myself as a geologist first. Computer-related ideas are an add-on for me.
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WBraun
climber
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So Sorry
But!!!!!
Life itself has absolutely zero to do with anything to do material or computers.
ZERO
Because you have absolutely zero knowledge of what life itself is to begin with you come up with these
ridiculous speculations fermenting in your mind that you have no real control over.
The very first step is to control the mind which is the original method started here to understand the mind itself.
The gross materialist never do instead they let it run uncontrolled .....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Life itself has absolutely zero to do with anything to do material or computers.
An interesting statement to ponder when dealing with the IRS or CRA.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Computer metaphors can be avoided.
The brain is a field for anatomy.
The mind comes under physiology.
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WBraun
climber
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when dealing with the IRS or CRA they are only dealing with your coat (material body) not you yourself which they have absolutely no power over ever ........
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 2, 2018 - 06:22pm PT
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Eyeyonkee, you always have insightful things to say from your perspective. If you ever get a chance to talk to Mike on the phone, it's a joy. Well spoken, sincere, humble and sharp as a needle.
One of the interesting aspects about studying mind, at least to me, is to use both quantitative approaches and pure introspection - at the same time. Simple to very involved neurofeedback and even biofeedback devices can give you real time data on everything from Alpha wave coherence to various skin temp, available by simply buying a 10 dollar indoor/outdoor thermometor at Radio Shack. These are invaluable exercises and fascinating because you get to immediately see not only the fluid interface between body and mind, but you learn in a way that is not debatable and this tends to shift and expand your perspective.
For example, when you're running a neurofeedback program, measuring your EEG in real time, perhaps one designed to entrain your bran waves at a certain lobe in a certain frequency, your brain will not respond if you are not paying attention. Also, any attempt to "try" for a result impedes the results.
Very quickly you realize that the brain is on full auto pilot and has no idea or consciousness per what it is doing. It simply chooses what it does from your genetic makeup, continually updated by conditioning. Once the brain gets feedback per what it is doing, and is instructed to do something else, it will start doing so. Holding intention and paying attention is all that is required.
What's more, it's fascinating to see how radically your brain patterns change according to what perceptual space you consciously maintain. And how simply things like keeping your eyes open or closed also changes your brain activity.
Strangely, increased concentration, or diffused attention (without mind wandering) results in decreased brain wave amplitude across the spectrum, with resultant changes in phase and coherence.
Cool stuff, if you're into that kind of thing.
Heart coherence is another thing that is a trip to do. Once you learn to modulate your heart coherence, your parasympathetic nervous system kicks in and remarkable things happen. But Heartmath (the company that did the initial work here) has piled on such a load of woo and hogwash onto the protocols that some are put off on the whole thing. My approach has always been to try the stuff on for size and be my own judge on evaluating same. But I'm skeptical by nature.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Don't trust the talkers. See what they do... Use scientific method with skill.
An example of scientific method used with skill: The Garbage Project and the Lean Cuisine Syndrome etc (1992)
To an archaeologist, ancient garbage pits or garbage mounds, which can usually be located within a short distance from any ruin, are always among the happiest of finds, for they contain in concentrated form the artifacts and comestibles and remnants of behavior of the people who used them. While every archaeologist dreams of discovering spectacular objects, the bread-and-butter work of archaeology involves the most common and routine kinds of discards. It is not entirely fanciful to define archaeology as the discipline that tries to understand old garbage.
But when all the piles have been sorted and counted and weighed and all that data has been entered into computer databases, there is a payoff: facts. ``Garbage . . . represents physical fact, not mythology,`` the authors write. Garbage offers a reality-check, a chance to place what we do against what we think we do.
For example, there is what the Garbage Project calls the Lean Cuisine Syndrome: When people are asked about their eating habits, they say one thing. When you examine their garbage, you find out something else.
``People consistently underreport the amount of regular soda, pastries, chocolate, and fats that they consume; they consistently overreport the amount of fruits and diet soda,`` Rathje and Murphy note.
People tend to underestimate their intake of sugar by 94 percent, chips and popcorn by 81 percent and candy by 80 percent. They tend to overestimate their intake of tuna by 184 percent, liver by 200 percent and cottage cheese by 311 percent.
And when people get the advice to reduce fat intake by eating less fat by cutting away fat from red meat, they do so, but at the same time they start eating more sausage (high on fat).
Given the heightened health awareness in the U.S., such self-deception is probably understandable. But the Garbage Project has also come up with findings that fly in the face of what you`d expect.
For example, when an item, like red meat or sugar, is in short supply, you`d think that people would be especially careful not to waste it. But the opposite turns out to be true. During a beef shortage in the early 1970s, ``people wasted three times more beef when it was in short supply than they did when it was plentiful.``
Why? Apparently, because of the shortage, people ``were buying up all the beef they could get their hands on, even if some of the cuts were unfamiliar.`` But they didn`t know how to cook those unfamiliar cuts and didn`t like the way they tasted. Thus, more garbage.
What is the lesson to be learned on the Mind thread?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Eeyonkee,
Cheers. I think I understand what you were going for. Largo's repeated insistence to look at Searle's argument can be enlightening. Check out "Chinese Room" on Wiki. (Warning: it's a bit long, but fairly comprehensive.)
Werner: The very first step is to control the mind which is the original method started here to understand the mind itself.
Hmmm, “control”. . . well, at least to observe experience closely (honestly). “Aids” or practices can assist in the experience of observation of mind: rituals, mantras, myths, meditation, various tantric practices of visualization, imagination, socially unacceptable experiences as means to challenge conventional mindsets, looking at the stages of thought emergence and dissolution, pulling apart interpretations from felt-emotional energies and then surfing those energies (jumping with abandonment into passionate experiences), seeing deities as different personifications, sexual yogas, conversations (satsangs) with gurus; and on and on.
Marlow: What is the lesson to be learned on the Mind thread?
Answer your own question. Should I guess you would say for yourself, “nothing?”
There doesn’t need to be any “lesson to be learned.” Reality doesn’t seem to be the kind of place that’s designed or organized to lesson-giving. Generating or finding lessons appears to be entirely a human affair. (Why must there be lessons? Isn’t that somehow a religious view?) When you meet with your mother after not being with her for a while, what is the lesson that you take away from a conversation? What is the lesson that you take from looking at Picasso’s “Guenica” or listening to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony? What lesson do you take from the experience of being alive? There’s just living. Jump into that.
“Lessons” might be an indication of instrumentalism, of looking at the world as a compilation of things to manipulate, as a place to get things done. But, it’s arguable that nothing needs to “get done.” Everything is exactly as it is, as it must be, perhaps due to causes and conditions. Not one thing is out of place. (Would this be a lesson, and if so, what is to be done with it then?)
Dialogue can be a joyful, aesthetic experience. It doesn’t need to get any of us anywhere.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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And have fun.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 3, 2018 - 11:11am PT
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Agreed. It's just a discussion among climbing board friends. We need not solve the great mysteries, to enjoy some words and thoughts.
Furthering Dingus' point, it's instructive to understand or get some feel for what most here consider in terms of "solving" a mystery. This is underscored by Nagel's credo that understanding mind is not a causal question. Obviously, this notion is ignored by those who insist that "solving" any question about reality IS a matter of demonstrating how this object or phenomenon was "created," birthed, arose from, or in some wise was output by way of physical causation, however you might define that term.
When people here harp and complain that the conversation is not "leading" anywhere, is going nowhere, they typically mean - we are not arriving at a causal explanation, this being, from their perspective, the only means of knowing, of understanding, of grasping some phenomenon. That, and predicting what it will do. While physics has never been asked to "describe" anything remotely like consciousness, the bottom-up, bit-torrent method of investigation has worked on every other phenomenon in physical nature, so why not here. Mysterious things (all physical) once thought to be products of spirits and gods have now been "explained" by way of physical causes, runs the argument. Even the Hard Problem of consciousness (Chalmers) posits the question of mind as the product of physical causation - it's just so "hard" to demonstrate how sentience derives from this first assumption.
Most of the challenge derives from what's called elimination logic - whereby if you take away this, that ceases to be as well. No brain, no mind. So the investigation focuses on the brain as the causal agent of mind - except all that ever discloses is objective function. The default position to this is that it's all objective functioning, we just don't realize as much. This is, in Aristotle's words, a case of holding to a premise at all costs.
The shame, in my view, is that the causal search lets people off the hook from ever looking at mind directly, while sticking with the object they believe gives rise to it. Sense data has all the gravity in this regards. The fact that sense data is perceptual output (there is no green "out there") derived from pixy dust particles blipping in and out of a void, for no determined cause at all, is rarely something considered.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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So the investigation focuses on the brain as the causal agent of mind - except all that ever discloses is objective function.
An example of the harping you mention.
What do you mean by 'causal agent?' It sounds as though you imagine a line of dominos toppling in succession and are asking, "What made the first one fall?"
Objective functions are not so simple and you don't show a deep understanding of how they are described in relation to mind.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 3, 2018 - 12:47pm PT
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Objective functions are not so simple and you don't show a deep understanding of how they are described in relation to mind.
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This is another take on the "complexity argument." That is, if we only understood how complex neural patterns are, then it follows that it is not so incredible that mind should arise from same.
Problem is complexity of any kind, in any form whatsoever, has never been shown to be associated with ANYTHING but complex physical systems. Some argue that THIS physical system is different (that is, the brain). It's the particular ARRANGEMENT of the parts, the quantum factors operating below the hood, the emergence of informational systems, the cha cha cha. But all of these speculations assume a linear progression in which the brain appears first, and as a consequent, mind follows.
The problem, of course, in the threshold in which an objective object "becomes" or produces phenomenological experience. No one has any idea about how a physical model can be conceived that would "explain' how to cross this threshold.
Curious to know what "deep understanding" of physical systems you believe is lost on me which "explains" your point, and moreover, what "future experiments" and future data will clear this up.
Again, Nagel said that mind is not a causal question. I agree. Others don't. But the fact remains that others beholden to the causal camp are primarily looking at brain, not the mind that the question pertains. You can believe they are the same, which underscores how persistent and hypnotic and inborn is our fealty to the creation model, upon which functionalism rests.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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DMT wrote:
Agreed. It's just a discussion among climbing board friends. We need not solve the great mysteries, to enjoy some words and thoughts. I agree with the first part. As to the second, I'm sorry, I AM trying to solve the mystery of mind, thank you very much. It's my geological training more than my software training that predisposes me to this stand, I would have to think. For sure, my mind is nothing special.
Geology is all about determining algorithms based on physical evidence. I've just been reading John McPhee's, Assembling California. It's a great case study in this sort of thing. The physical evidence, in this case, supports the algorithm of plate tectonics.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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The problem, of course, in the threshold in which an objective object "becomes" or produces phenomenological experience. No one has any idea about how a physical model can be conceived that would "explain' how to cross this threshold.
Sorry John, I call bullshit on this statement. The "of course" makes it particularly objectionable to me (you do that a lot).
Add on: On the other hand, I am glad that you brought up the word "object". It's the perfect word to convince you and Mike that computer terms are obviously relevant to the real world. Certain terms, particularly those under the umbrella of "Object-Oriented Programming" (OOP), are nothing more than a mapping of real life to something we can work with as coders. More than anything, it's the idea that objects have beginnings, middles, and ends. In OOP, that amounts to the "CRUD" I mentioned, up-thread; Create/Update/Delete.
Because we are modeling evolution, tree structures are a really important additional, part of the story. You have a mother and a father and you may have siblings. Your mother and father also had their mother and father and siblings. Each "object" here can be connected to the other via a simple tree structure, where the object is a node.
See, this is more logic than specialized, computer sh#t.
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WBraun
climber
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I AM trying to solve the mystery of mind, thank you very much.
Your way is guaranteed failure and has been a failure all along.
Because you refuse to listen to the owner of the mind itself.
YOU are NOT the owner ......
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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JL: "But all of these speculations assume a linear progression in which the brain appears first, and as a consequent, mind follows."
The alternative to this linear causation model might be interesting. Mind is not created by brain activity? I acknowledge that consciousness may not be in a category with physical systems.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Interesting and beautiful. A good visual metaphor for life itself.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Aug 3, 2018 - 05:27pm PT
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The problem, of course, in the threshold in which an objective object "becomes" or produces phenomenological experience. No one has any idea about how a physical model can be conceived that would "explain' how to cross this threshold.
Sorry John, I call bullshit on this statement. The "of course" makes it particularly objectionable to me (you do that a lot).
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You call bullsh#t, then revert directly back to beginning, middle, and end, like a rat returns to a whole.
Call bullshit all you want, but if you do so, the onus is on your to demonstrate, even by a theoretical model, how a physical object "becomes" or produces phenomenological experience.
All of your examples you give per modeling the "real world" are drawn from physical objects begetting physical results we can get hold of with sense data, as stuff "out there." As mentioned, physics nor yet computer science has ever been asked to scientifically describe a phenomenon as singular as phenoemological experience. If you think someone has remotely show how this might be possible, show us.
And Dingus, it's downright screwy that you have no issue with directing your attention to externals, but when invited to shift your attention to internal phenomenon, your mind immediately jumps to navel gazing, religion, woo, gods, dragons, and so forth. Look at it this way, perhaps. If your husband asked you - How you doing today, Dingus. Whatever method you would use to evaluate your own current state, use that. But take your time. No gods of dragons needed, though you can go there if that's your thing. It ain't mine.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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the onus is on your to demonstrate, even by a theoretical model, how a physical object "becomes" or produces phenomenological experience.
Okay. But we could use some help on what it is you wish us to demonstrate.
Are humans the only organisms that have phenomenological experience?
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