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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Feb 22, 2019 - 01:36pm PT
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True fructose, but repetition is also how bias and dogma are incorporated as well. For every upside there is a downside. No free lunches.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 22, 2019 - 01:55pm PT
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So what are you saying, folks shouldn't go to church every week, the dogma might be reinforced? perhaps to a pathological degree?
You know, bias often gets a bad rap. Biases (tendencies) come in two basic forms: good and bad (desirable and undesirable). Without biases, we wouldn't be human. All living things have biases (leanings) in the form of attractions and repulsions.
It's too bad in our language, there aren't better ways to more easily and fully communicate this.. the nature of our biases.
Our necessary biases keep us alive.
No free lunches.
Ain't that the truth. To think once upon a time, prognosticators thought the internet would unify the whole world, everybody becoming one big family of brothers and sisters.
...
Hey can you imagine how useful "popular work" like Cosmos, Selfish Gene, Connections, Ascent of Man, Asimov, Attenborough, Wilson and others were to this darwinian naturalist growing up in the 1970s and 80s... becoming educated in the sciences and in engineering... and smitten with how the world works... in a time when benny hinn, jerry falwell, jimmy swaggart and billy graham - not to mention geller and popoff - were all the rage on broadcast tv and had umpteen millions convinced in regards to the claims of astrology, theology, telepathy, the Second Coming, exorcism, transubstantiation, etc.. Sure, it's 2020 now, easy to forget how it was back then, even moreso for those not yet born.
But perhaps Ed had in mind "popular work" of a different sort.
...
Here's something to sink your teeth into: The idea that internet podcasts and lectures - of which we are already getting a taste - are going to be revolutionizing education and the educational institutions as we've known them. I for one think it's all pretty exciting.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 22, 2019 - 02:21pm PT
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You've done no work.
All you do is talk, show youtube links to Joe Rogen and other gross materialists clueless mental speculators.
The actual work required to test the science of the soul you've never done any of it period.
All your talk is cheap .....
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 22, 2019 - 02:23pm PT
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* Mind
* Consciousness = Awareness
* Intelligence
* Instinct
* Feeling
* Biochemical algorithm
* Life (digital) => Agency
* Algorithm
* Not life (physical)
Eeyonkee, Jaynes would place language in your list before (self) awareness. But that could be considered part of intelligence. And is awareness=self-awareness? Also, can we be aware of something but not conscious of it? I recall experiments have indicated that is true in instances where a threat is registered, and one reacts, but one is not actually conscious of the threat until an instant later.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 22, 2019 - 02:25pm PT
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links to Joe Rogen...
Truth is, if you haven't listened to Brian Cox on JRE, you just don't know how he thinks that there might be just ONE civilization per galaxy... just ONE civilization - of our status - in the whole of the Milky Way. So really who has missed out?
Just imagine it: One civilization per galaxy. That's a rara avis to be sure.
And yet, if there are two trillion galaxies... oh my.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 22, 2019 - 04:58pm PT
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One civilization per galaxy.
Again you're dreaming and guessing again.
Like I keep saying you have no real clue.
Keep stirring your beaker .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 22, 2019 - 06:04pm PT
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for example, Weinberg's book The First Three Minutes was a popular account of the beginning of the Big Bang, as far as it was known in the early 1970s. Weinberg had completed his book Gravitation and Cosmology and wrote this popular account, having just thoroughly reviewed all what was known at the time.
Interestingly, he writes in the Introduction, that the "standard model... is a tribute to the essential objectivity of modern astrophysics that this consensus has been brought about, not by shifts in philosophical preferences or by the influence of astrophysical mandarins, but by the pressure of empirical data."
By 2008 he had completely rewritten the cosmology chapters of the previous book, and issued it as Cosmology, the gravity part had not changed. He didn't follow up on a popular update.
35 years is not such a long time, but cosmology has completely changed.
I suspect once the upgrades to LIGO are complete, and the other detectors come online in Germany, Italy and Japan, we will need to greatly expand the gravity sections of Weinberg's first book.
While The First Three Minutes was a very popular book, it was probably not a very well read book. But no matter, it would have presented what was known at the time as a deductive consequence from the presented empirical data, where the actual situation was the induction of the theory from that data.
And so the data also drove the rewriting of what we know as cosmology today, and will help us better understand gravity. I understand that from a pedagogical point of view that Weinberg's popular book told a good story, an even inspirational story, competing with Genesis.
But like the biblical account, it was only a story. The scientific account was not then, and is not now closed, and it changed quite a bit in fundamental ways in those 35 years.
I think the popular accounts of science, in general, miss the element of the adventure of science. And in particular, the intellectual risks taken, as exemplified by the recent work of Hossenfelder's NYTimes OpEd piece and her book Lost in Math... which muses about the choices made to search for Supersymmetry, the great non-discovery of the LHC.
One might get the impression from reading popular science accounts that research progresses inexorably from point A to point B, it seldom does, with consequences for those who choose what to spend their time on, as they must.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 22, 2019 - 07:45pm PT
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When applying for funding, most scientists make a case that there is a way from A to B that does not waste public money. They must tell a good story.
When actually doing research, it's important to forget the story and pay attention to the results, especially the surprises not expected on the way from A to B.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 23, 2019 - 08:52am PT
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Ed Hartouni wrote: ...highly parallel real-time architectures exhibit "behaviors" that are difficult (or possibly provably impossible) to predict.
I would again have to disagree - how do you think they were developed? It's akin to saying we don't understand how the NIF works and the "behaviors" of its lasers are difficult or impossible to predict.
For instance, Kaufmann's idea of criticality scales across biology from self-reproducing catalysts to planetary ecosystems. If that idea were correct, then there is a physical basis for complexity and order, and a definition of and foundation for complexity in evolution. A good place to work from because it provides rigorous predictions that can be tested.
I wholeheartedly agree with this, however.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 23, 2019 - 09:01am PT
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funny you should use that example, as I am now deep into trying to understand just that (about NIF).
It turns out that NIF is a very complicated laser, and what we know is based on some measurements and some models, the models are well motivated, but approximations to what is "actually" going on at the level we are sensitive to.
Same thing in real-time parallel computer architectures that I have been involved in designing, building and debugging. In the one that I had the most experience with, we had a synchronous system which moved stuff from register-to-register on a global clock. This lead to surprising enough behavior, though we had debugging tools that allowed us to follow what was going on cycle-by-cycle.
Moving that architecture to an asynchronous system would involve a tremendously more complex predictive tool.
In nervous systems the approximate three states of cell communication ("active","quiescent", "repose") throttles the flow, given even that simple model asynchronous neural nets would likely display behaviors not predictable from the simple rules.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 23, 2019 - 09:05am PT
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There's definitely nothing simple about the challenges involved but, aside from design flaws, manufacturing glitches, and software defects, it's all deterministic otherwise.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 23, 2019 - 09:19am PT
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"...it's all otherwise deterministic."
it is not clear, since there are non-linear effects that system. One can have a "chaotic" system where you might expect determinism, the result of very large sensitivity to initial conditions. In some systems you can show that in principle you cannot specify those initial conditions well enough to determine the subsequent behavior.
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capseeboy
Social climber
portland, oregon
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Feb 23, 2019 - 09:20am PT
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And so the data also drove the rewriting of what we know as cosmology today, and will help us better understand gravity.
Any predictions on when this full understanding of gravity might happen? I did not get anywhere on Google, I may have been incorrectly asking for the answer.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Feb 23, 2019 - 10:06am PT
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Back to eeyonkee's list and jgill's commentary. I can't agree with Jaynes that language precedes self awareness. So far now, apes, elephants, and crows have all demonstrated self awareness with the mirror test. In light of that I think that the list has to be revised.
Here's my latest suggestion.
* Rational Mind
* Language and math algorithms
* Emotional Consciousness
* Self Awareness
* Intelligence
* Instinct
* Sensing (I think the word feeling is too much associated with human emotions)
* Biochemical algorithm
* Life (digital) => Agency
* Algorithm
* Not life (physical)
I believe one can say that the individual sounds and grammars of the world's languages are kinds of algorithms that in turn color individual minds and how they perceive the world. Those minds however, have the ability to create and recombine those algorithms to a certain extent as in dialects and argots, and even sentences they've never heard before. In this sense, apes, probably cetaceans and corvids also, have a kind of pre language and one could argue, given enough evolutionary time, could develop complete languages and their own mind.
The mystery for humans meanwhile is how the mind is able to go beyond the algorithmic rules of language to create not only new forms of language but also a sense of self consciousness and reflectiveness and very abstract ideas. Partially, this seems to be the ability to combine/ integrate language based ideas with emotions and instinct. However, it seems to me at least, that there is something or several somethings more.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 23, 2019 - 12:36pm PT
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Good points, Jan. Jaynes' speculations regarding the Greek classics make for entertaining reading, but his ideas haven't prevailed. The animal world you cite is one of the reasons.
Mathematics is a kind of language that cuts across a broad spectrum of humanity. And there is no consensus about whether the concepts and theorems that arise are creations or discoveries, a distinction that is of little interest in the general community. I suspect they are varying combinations of both.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Feb 23, 2019 - 02:43pm PT
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can leap wirelessly from neurons in one section of brain tissue to another – even if they've been surgically severed.
Speaking strictly stereotaxically, are we talking AT&T wireless here?
"I've been studying the hippocampus, itself just one small part of the brain, for 40 years and it keeps surprising me."
At (@)AT&T, or was it General Electric, "progress is our most important product".
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Feb 24, 2019 - 07:34am PT
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Thanks jgill, I have added math to the language algorithm in my list.
Of course apes, elephants, cetaceans and crows have all demonstrated a knowledge of simple math as well.
As for whether math is inherent in the universe or a human construct, I'm told by another mathematician that most mathameticians are Platonists, believing that math is inherent to the structure.
This of course has huge philosophical implications - the dreaded universal consciousness or creative consciousness vs. the ordered structure of a supposedly random universe. Further, if developing math is an evolutionary trait that enables an animal species to understand and utilize the fundamental structure of the universe, how is it not logical to say that the same animal consciousness is also able at a certain evolutionary point to encounter and begin to comprehend the universal consciousness in that structure as some have maintained they do?
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