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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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so what do you get when there is no "I"?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 5, 2011 - 02:12am PT
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Ed,
Per Nazi, I borrowed that term and never should have. It was originally used in philosophy of science debates to denote a particular psychological style where a person's chosen mode of inquiry is deemed a kind of "master race" whereby everything else, being so much "bullsh#t," should be gassed. Bad choice of words and I hereby make amends for a graceless choice.
I was a big Boehm fan early on because in grad school the dood was Alfred North Whitehead and "Process Philosophy," so folks like Boehm and Pribrim and Alvarez and many others were always camping out on our campus. Heady times, but a lot of those ideas dead-ended into more mechanistic models. A lot of those old guys were polymaths, really dialed into the history of philosophy, so they know the trajectory or the big thoughts and big questions and could approach them with a wide scope.
JL
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jstan
climber
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Since the synapse is a chemical process that may be affected by detailed ionic concentrations in the primary cells and even in neighboring pipelines it seems plausible that the brain may not compute in binary. There may be logic states above and beyond 0 and 1. I took a look via Google and came up right away with very illuminating stuff. The cell may be much more powerful than we presently suspect.
http://www.novaspivack.com/science/new-finding-brain-computes-in-trinary-not-binary
MIT neuroscientist, Guosong Liu, has found that human neurons compute in trinary, using signals that are the equivalents of -1, 0 and 1. By contrast, all computers compute in binary, using just 0 and 1. Because the units of trinary computation can in some cases be additive (e.g. 1+1=2) or can "cancel out" (e.g. -1 + 1 = 0), the human brain is able to ignore information during computation, says Liu, something which present computers cannot do. Liu believes the ability for trinary computations to cancel out in some cases will enable next-generation computers to ignore information, and this will fundamentally change computing as we know it.
Additional material:
http://cbcl.mit.edu/cbcl/news/files/liu-tp-picower.html
Guosong Liu, a neuroscientist at the Picower Center for Learning and Memory at MIT, reports new information on neuron design and function in the March 7 issue of Nature Neuroscience that he says could lead to new directions in how computers are made.
While computers get faster all the time, they continue to lack any form of human intelligence. While a computer may beat us at balancing a checkbook or dominating a chessboard, it still cannot easily drive a car or carry on a conversation.
Computers lag in raw processing power--even the most powerful components are dwarfed by 100 billion brain cells--but their biggest deficit may be that they are designed without knowledge of how the brain itself computes.
While computers process information using a binary system of zeros and ones, the neuron, Liu discovered, communicates its electrical signals in trinary--utilizing not only zeros and ones, but also minus ones. This allows additional interactions to occur during processing. For instance, two signals can add together or cancel each other out, or different pieces of information can link up or try to override one another.
One reason the brain might need the extra complexity of another computation component is that it has the ability to ignore information when necessary; for instance, if you are concentrating on something, you can ignore your surroundings. "Computers don't ignore information," Liu said. "This is an evolutionary advantage that's unique to the brain."
Liu, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, said an important element of how brain circuits work involves wiring the correct positive, or "excitatory" wires, with the correct negative, or "inhibitory" wires. His work demonstrates that brain cells contain many individual processing modules that each collects a set number of excitatory and inhibitory inputs. When the two types of inputs are correctly connected together, powerful processing can occur at each module.
This work provides the first experimental evidence supporting a theory proposed more than 20 years ago by MIT neuroscientist Tomaso Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Brain Sciences, in which he proposed that neurons use an excitatory/inhibitory form to process information.
By demonstrating the existence of tiny excitation/inhibition modules within brain cells, the work also addresses a huge question in neuroscience: What is the brain's transistor, or fundamental processing unit? For many years, neuroscientists believed that this basic unit of computing was the cell itself, which collects and processing signals from other cells. By showing that each cell is built from hundreds of tiny modules, each of which computes independently, Liu's work adds to a growing view that there might be something even smaller than the cell at the heart of computation.
Once all the modules have completed their processing, they funnel signals to the cell body, where all of the signals are integrated and passed on. "With cells composed of so many smaller computational parts, the complexity attributed to the nervous system begins to make more sense," Liu said.
Liu found that these microprocessors automatically form all along the surface of the cell as the brain develops. The modules also have their own built-in intelligence that seems to allow them to accommodate defects in the wiring or electrical storms in the circuitry: if any of the connections break, new ones automatically form to replace the old ones. If the positive, "excitatory" connections are overloading, new negative, "inhibitory" connections quickly form to balance out the signaling, immediately restoring the capacity to transmit information.
The discovery of this balancing act, which occurs repeatedly all over the cell, provides new insight into the mechanisms by which our neural circuits adapt to changing conditions.
This work is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the RIKEN-MIT Neuroscience Research Center.
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WBraun
climber
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PSP -- "what do you get when there is no "I"?"
A dead body .......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Largo writes: but a lot of those ideas dead-ended into more mechanistic models. which actually was my interest in asking if you had read the rest of the book of Bohm Quantum Theory. In fact, Bohm was not saying that there is a non-physical model for mind, but that our concepts of what constitutes a valid physical model are incomplete, so much so that they will, in his view, eventually be replaced. Having made that claim, he had to support it by showing a reasonable way forward which was not in conflict with known physical observations and settled theory.
He argues in analogy that the mind and quantum mechanics are similar, but it is very possible that this analogy is false. It requires an understanding of both, Bohm certainly knew quantum mechanics, he states that much less is known about mind. I suspect that more is known now, I am not at all sure that his analogy stands, or that it is very useful.
I was intrigued to read in this quite unusual work about the ideas regarding the mechanism (sorry) he proposed that apparently lead him to the ideas of implicate order. He viewed the brain as a "medium" through which the sensory stimuli, and everything else, "moved" and were transformed. This medium was conjectured to have properties ordered like the larger universe, and the transformation of stimuli were thus like the transformation of, say the wave-functions of quantum mechanics, obeying the same deep properties. These properties were explicate upon our accessing them for communication, or for action, etc.
While I am not at all sure of Bohm's particular model, the idea of the organization of the brain as a "medium" is interesting and jstan mentions work that touches on this above. I became aware of this interesting aspect studying heart arrhythmia mechanisms... if you consider the heart muscle to be composed of cells that exist in three states: contracted, relaxed and inhibited, and a state transition that goes: relaxed->contracted->inhibited->relaxed, you have created a non-linear medium which supports wave propagation in one direction only... and the surface topology of the heart, propagates from the point of initiation to extinguish itself on the antipodal point... if you deaden parts of the surface you can get strange wave propagation which are recognizable disease symptoms.
This medium is like a burn front on a grassland fire, once it starts it moves towards fuel, it cannot move back through burned areas... another non-linear medium.
The point of all this is to illustrate the abstract properties of things like cells, which have definite biologically complex processes, but can also have collective abstract behavior that results in something hard to understand at the cellular or sub-cellular level.
It would not at all be surprising if such a mechanism were at work in the brain, producing memory, etc... where the medium, now the cellular tissues, are essentially volume connected, and the medium is altered to produce the strange wave interactions which cause death if they appear in the heart, but might be a part of the way the mind works.
Like so much of doing science, what appears to be your deepest insight at the time maybe wrong, as your apparently not-so-significant ideas take the center stage. It is a method that has a lot of "dead ends," nothing wrong with that...
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cintune
climber
Midvale School for the Gifted
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Quantum minds: Why we think like quarks:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128285.900-quantum-minds.html
It may sound preposterous to imagine that the mathematics of quantum theory has something to say about the nature of human thinking. This is not to say there is anything quantum going on in the brain, only that "quantum" mathematics really isn't owned by physics at all, and turns out to be better than classical mathematics in capturing the fuzzy and flexible ways that humans use ideas. "People often follow a different way of thinking than the one dictated by classical logic," says Aerts. "The mathematics of quantum theory turns out to describe this quite well."
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jstan
climber
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I once had an idea I thought quite amazing, till I read an account from 400BC, written better than my description of it. If you consider collective humanity to be a single organism, each of us being a substantially independent cell, we are hugely powerful, both for "ill" and for "good". Every evil thing that can be done, will be done; every good thing that can be done, will be done. History is both inspiring and depressing.
So much so you have to ask if all of nature is not a grand experiment in self-assembly.
Indeed this was what Darwin’s theory tells us, even as to life forms themselves.
Now that we have Google, we can find out very quickly, our ideas are not really only ours.
Like the article I excerpted above, Whiteside suggests the brain itself is composed of self-assembled components.
.A seminal article from Nature magazine.
Self-assembly at All Scales.
http://gmwgroup.harvard.edu/pubs/pdf/793.pdf
29 MARCH 2002 VOL 295 SCIENCE
There are several reasons for interest in self-assembly (1, 2). First, humans are attracted by the appearance of order from disorder. Second, living cells self-assemble, and understanding life will therefore require under- standing self-assembly. The cell also offers countless examples of functional self-assembly that stimulate the design of non-living systems.ponents. It thereby connects reductionism to complexity and emergence (3).
Is Anything Not Self-Assembly?
“Self-assembly” is not a formalized subject, and definitions of the term “self-assembly” seem to be limitlessly elastic. As a result, the term has been overused to the point of cliche ́ Fig. 2), the interactions responsible for the formation of structures or patterns between components only occur if the system is dissipating energy. The patterns formed by competition between reaction and diffusion in oscillating chemical reactions (6, 7 ) are
simple examples; biological cells are much more complex ones……………..
Self-assembly, as a field, originated in organ- ic chemistry. It has become a rapidly growing part of this field for two reasons. First, it is a concept that is crucial to understand many structures important in biology. Second, it is one solution to the problem of synthesizing structures larger than molecules. The stability of covalent bonds enables the synthesis of almost arbitrary configurations of up to 1000 atoms. Larger molecules, molecular aggre-
gates, and forms of organized matter more extensive than molecules cannot be synthesized bond-by-bond. Self-assembly is one strategy for organizing matter on these larger scales.
Although self-assembly originated in the study of molecules, it is a strategy that
is, in principle, applicable at all scales. We believe that some of the self-assembling systems that are most amenable to fundamental study, and that are also most readily applied, may involve components that are larger than molecules, interacting by forces (for example, capillarity) that have not commonly been used in synthesis or fabrication. Self-assembly thus provides one solution to the fabrication of ordered aggregates from components with sizes from nanometers to micrometers; these components fall awkwardly between the sizes that can be manipulated by chemistry and those
that can be manipulated by conventional manufacturing. This range of sizes will be important for the development of nanotechnology (and the expansion of microtechnology into areas other than microelectronics). It will also be an area in which understanding biological structures and processes, and using this understanding to design nonbiological mimics of them, will offer many opportunities to build systems with new types of function. In the emerging area of dynamic self-assembly, it is unclear whether the study of molecules, or of other types of components, will lead more efficiently to understanding. We understand very little about how dissipation of energy leads to the emergence of ordered structures from disordered components in these systems.
But we know that they are vitally important in the cell. That knowledge, by itself,
makes it worthwhile to study them.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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A dead body .......
So your saying "I" needs the body ; Some people would say that is attachment to form but if you say "I" isn't the body then that is attachment to emptiness. So what is "I"? When you watch "I" closely it is constantly trying to keep what it likes and push away what it doesn't like.
That's why meditation can be an effective tool because when your sitting in one place not talking just breathing, seeing ,hearing,smelling you get a chance to see how "I" wants to dominate the whole show . Eventually the thinking mind will get less dominate and then you can smell the flowers and hear the birds and the garbage trucks.
Correct meditation can act like a clear button on a calculator so that you can have a better chance of functioning from a clear place.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 5, 2011 - 02:40pm PT
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...awareness itself seems to have a crazy amount of valance or pure energy, I.e., a ray gun.
Language like this is worse than useless. If anyone can claim to understand the above, they're either stoned, or in high school.
Fort Mental, you have to quite eating broken glass and pestering stray dogs. It's making you cranky. I'm intentionally avoiding using any mind jargon or science speak to frame these ideas and going with images that anyone can understand at first blush, to use John's term.
Again, you raw awareness empowers and expands most of what it falls on. Notice whenever you focus on something, repeatedly, it lingers, it has a kind of mental slip stream, whereby an idea become a theme becomes a habit becomes an addiction, whereby we return to a mental sphere where a slew of associations accrue, rock and roll. And I don't mean that simply by appearing on the stage of awareness, qual are accentuated. There seems to be an energy transfer, from awareness to (fill in the blank).
In short, things loom large to the extend that we pay them attention. Try and recall the obverse, Fort, like that time you hounded that comely brunet with the chiseled brisket. She dissed you with so little regard, and you became nothing in her eyes even as you begged and pleaded. How you dreamed that the ray gun of her awareness would land on your withered corpus, attenuated from ten straight trips up El Capitan in a month's time.
But so it goes. No man can control another's ray gun.
JL
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Much of this is fascinating to read... but let's suppose a consciousness prior to matter, or a universal pre existing consciousness, an element found beyond the forms of sensibility, or the element we experience as "I" as something apart from the material or mechanistic.
The question is: what does that imply? Can we extrapolate from such a notion the reality of deity? Does it imply the possibility of miracles? The reality of soul?
It seems to me that consciousness, as in self awareness, is a remarkable mystery. It begs a fascinated speculation, but the plastic nature of that mystery and the resulting speculation is too often molded into the hard reality of religious doctrine and that, all too often, evolves into imposition.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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if you are going to hypothesis "consciousness before matter" doesn't the issue of "what is consciousness" become important?
otherwise the idea is not very interesting...
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Thread here.
The easiest way to get hold of this, IME, is to understand that all things within are not equal
Thanks dad, I needed that. Tough love is the best!
are you sure that you are not just indempotent?
When I asked old man Gill about this he grumbled something about me stopping asking him, for I would get the same answer every time. Clearly his days of coherant explication are nearing an end. He also said that if I continue to harp on this point I would become a repulsive fixed point! If I am going to belabor a point I would much prefer it to be considered attractive!
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jstan
climber
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It may be time to heed the sage who advised:
"insanity consists of doing the same thing many times in hopes of getting a different result."
Based upon historical data we will have a complete understanding of neurological processing and of human behavior long before this thread will achieve a result.
When that understanding becomes available to all, those preferring the discussion to the result will publish gospels.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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what are you attracted by, thread?
convergence is not guaranteed (and even seems unlikely)...
a little mapping by Banach
while contracting has its points
but neither complete nor metric panache
have you demonstrated in this joint
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I think the problem of qualia which Largo alludes to has to do with how familiar they are, yet how difficult it is to describe them out of more fundamental stuff, like the physical act of seeing, etc...
...qualia in many cases have an immediate familiarity to each of us, yet they are all slightly different, and impossible to describe in a linear fashion, their attributes derive from what appears to be more than just a set of sensations.
Given they are so familiar and seemingly necessary to be able to communicate appropriately, it would seem they are important elements of consciousness, yet they are notoriously difficult to corral.
Are they important or are they unimportant?
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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a little mapping by Banach
while contracting has its points
but neither complete nor metric panache
have you demonstrated in this joint
A metric that defines this site
Must common be
And very slight
So trivial it must imply
A Cauchy sequence
end and die
What metric fits the words above
I ask you,Ed . . . ?
From Thread, with love!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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if the distance between us be nill
would not that metric fit the bill?
though not a very interesting space,
it's starting to look a lot like this place.
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jstan
climber
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Amazing things to be discussed
But no, the thread leaves one nonplussed
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MH2
climber
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Thread, please quiet your evaluating mind and tell us of the quale in your field.
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Norwegian
Trad climber
Placerville, California
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a mind is the void,
a master of anti-dream,
all would-be fantasy
is chased clear by logic
and reason.
a shadow of the real beauty,
mind is the fall out
from love's implosion.
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