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WBraun
climber
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MH2 -- Cats and dogs I look up to as examples of how to live.
Cats and dogs eat their own sh!t.
You'll love it.
Rolls eyes.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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All heroes have their flaws.
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Jim Clipper
climber
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^ we all is human. some have done rad stuff.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Do cats and dogs eat their offspring too
Or only Excrement ?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Canine and Feline interest in a Breakfast of Heroes.
Probably a good source of gut flora. For Intestinal Fortitude.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Largo,
The Feynman video was enjoyable to watch. He made some excellent points, imo, too.
eeyonkee,
You generate some interesting conversations here, even though I often find counterpoints to make about them.
You write about Kandel’s theories and your own experiences. You and Kandel focus on how memory works. I, on the other hand, look at my subjective experience in memories. You seem to imply that memory concerns events and information about things that occurred in the past. I would submit that after looking at the experience of memory, I find memories are mainly a regeneration of a given set of emotions and that I have a tendency to fill-in so-called factual information about the events and things in the past. I’ve recently had the opportunities to return to places the I haven’t been in 50 years, and I've been taken with how factually wrong my memories were—or that is to say, that my memories were primarily emotional rather than being “true” to material details. It’s led me recently to question my memories of the most recent events (like even yesterday’s occurrences). I don’t think these observations arise because I’m old.
These differences about how you and I think about memory expose the striking differences between many of us here on this thread. Some of us are oriented to material, operational, causal, objective, instrumental, “factual,” dynamics of the world, whereas some others of us are oriented to the subjective observations of lived experience. You almost continually report that you’ve “been thinking a lot about X,” whereas a few of us report that we've been closely observing X.
Those approaches appears to be generating very different conversations that are not coming together very much.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Mike, in rereading Kandel I had forgotten how learning and memory are built right into neural cells. The simplest invertebrates are capable of memory and learning. Ours has evolved from this most basic architecture.
Mind is a big subject, and it is clear that we approach it in different ways. I have always been most interested in how it all came about; you seem to be most interested in your subjective experience related to mind.
Because I am both a geologist and a software engineer, I bring some perspectives with a different focus than others on this thread. The parallels between life and computers are profound, IMO. Here are some obvious ones.
DNA = design-time code
Gene replication = copy
Neurons = circuits
Synapse = transistor
Short-term memory = RAM
Long-term memory = hardware storage
Consciousness = operating system?
Brain (distributed) = CPU
On the other hand, I for one, do not think that we will ever be able to make a computer conscious without introducing a bunch of chemical steps. Circuits are not like neurons. Signalling across synapses is chemical, not electrical. I think that this is critical.
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WBraun
climber
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you don't even know what life is yet and just plain making up a bunch bullsh!t masquarding it as some horsesh!t science.
Life is not anywhere close to a computer period.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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eeyonkee,
I like your list very much. The similarities, in both ways, appear analogical. The nice thing about metaphors (analogies are subcategories) is that they allow logic to jump to new spaces. No analogy maps 100% from a base domain to a target domain, of course, but they do excite neighboring neurons of one to another (as it were) and makes new or additional connections that wouldn’t have normally existed.
When we say that atoms are like solar systems (or vice versa), the obvious mapping from one to another is not what’s interesting but rather the new associations that come to mind.
One should be careful, however. I remember when the internet was first becoming known popularly; “the information superhighway” helped people understand what might be at-hand, and it encouraged folks to think of new ideas—not all of which were helpful or finally came to pass. In automobile super highways, off-ramps are important planning elements, but hardly for the internet. Metaphors can lead to dead-ends in content as often as they generate content insights.
For my money, metaphors are most interesting for the energy they generate. Since analogical mapping is never 1:1 in a metaphor, there are always various contradictions to be found between a target domain and the base domain. Contradictions, er . . . , bother us. They generate energy, and energies fuel activities.
Further afield (for this crowd), the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God is most purely conceived simply as a state of pure potentiality—doing nothing: that is, simply “Being” not moving. (Yahweh self-reference was: “I AM.”) From that pure Being of potentiality arises creative dynamic energies in all directions and dimensions, not unlike the Big Bang (supposedly).
The First Law of Thermodynamics might well hold for the objective, physical, material universe, but I’d say it doesn’t seem to hold for the subjective universe. One can generate energy simply from thoughts and feelings. Contradictions, paradoxes, and conundrums are powerful “strange attractors.”
(I may have mixed too many metaphors here.)
Cheers.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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On the other hand, I for one, do not think that we will ever be able to make a computer conscious without introducing a bunch of chemical steps. Circuits are not like neurons. Signalling across synapses is chemical, not electrical. I think that this is critical.
I think this is probably the most insightful statement on the whole issue. I think it also applies to our speculations about life on other planets. There could yet be other forms signaling.
As for God being potentiality, that makes a lot of sense also, given the patterns we find in our universe including mathematical relationships. A really profound step away from the old man in the sky.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Atypical Endocannabinoid Signaling Initiates a New Form of Memory-Related Plasticity at a Cortical Input to Hippocampus
Abstract
Endocannabinoids (ECBs) depress transmitter release at sites throughout the brain. Here, we describe another form of ECB signaling that triggers a novel form of long-term potentiation (LTP) localized to the lateral perforant path (LPP) which conveys semantic information from cortex to hippocampus. Two cannabinoid CB1 receptor (CB1R) signaling cascades were identified in hippocampus. The first is pregnenolone sensitive, targets vesicular protein Munc18-1 and depresses transmitter release; this cascade is engaged by CB1Rs in Schaffer–Commissural afferents to CA1 but not in the LPP, and it does not contribute to LTP. The second cascade is pregnenolone insensitive and LPP specific; it entails co-operative CB1R/β1-integrin signaling to effect synaptic potentiation via stable enhancement of transmitter release. The latter cascade is engaged during LPP-dependent learning. These results link atypical ECB signaling to the encoding of a fundamental component of episodic memory and suggest a novel route whereby endogenous and exogenous cannabinoids affect cognition.
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/28/7/2253/3829386
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Yeah, I meant to correct that statement about synapses to most synapses use chemical rather than electrical signalling. It's not just the chemicals associated with the synapses but algorithms that result in chemicals being produced here and there throughout the body. I just can't help but think that this is important to consciousness. We feel pain. We feel love. We feel consciousness. I can imagine an organism much smarter than us -- having more intelligence; but without the feeling of consciousness. I can also imagine a robot like this (which scares me).
Btw, I apologize to Ed for saying that he was full of himself in an earlier post. I just don't like being pigeon-holed as someone who just reads "popular" science and, is (consequently) not serious. As a matter of fact, I think that the subject of mind really does call for thinking broadly across a wide range of disciplines. Here's the current list of books that I am actively reading about this subject.
* The Search for Memory -- Eric Kandel (Nobel Prize winner)
* DNA -- James Watson (Nobel Prize winner)
* The Selfish Gene -- Richard Dawkins
* How the Mind Works -- Steven Pinker
I just ordered Stuart Kauffman's Origin of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution. So far, I am skeptical.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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I can imagine an organism much smarter than us -- having more intelligence; but without the feeling of consciousness. I can also imagine a robot like this (which scares me).
Without consciousness?
Without the feeling of consciousness?
Without either?
What scares you? That the organism or robot would be a threat to us? What would it stand to gain from hurting us? What if it were like us versus bacteria: unaware of or indifferent to our own "feelings" and having no qualms about getting rid of us if we irritated it.
These possibilities have been well explored in speculative fiction, as far as humans can currently go, at least.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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What scares you? That the organism or robot would be a threat to us? Yes. I'm thinking of HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Why the need for consciousness? Intelligence doesn't need consciousness (exhibit one; AlphaOne).
Maybe ants or The Borg will take over some day. Survival algorithms do not require consciousness.
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WBraun
climber
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Intelligence doesn't need conscioness.
You keep proving that you are making up bullsh!t.
Keep proving you know absolutely nothing at all what conscioness is perid.
You proving you really have no clue at all to life, conscioness, and intelligence period.
You just don't care at all and just throw out statements for the pure hell of it disguised as science.
You are perfect representation of scientism gone amok .......
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Thinking of consciousness as a feeling doesn't seem quite right, although consciousness appears to be a necessary condition for feeling.
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