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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Amazing how much difference in the last art of jgill, depending on the magnification.
The ST version looks like a photo I just saw of parts of the Amazon rainforest starting to grow back after clear cutting.
The more detailed version looks nothing like that.
There I see a butterfly in the center struggling to emerge ( from a polka dotted cocoon ?).
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Fascinating, Ed. Stranger than (sf) fiction. To me, anyway.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 6, 2019 - 11:06am PT
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Interesting stuff from Searl:
Information is one of the most confused notions in contemporary intellectual life. First of all, there is a distinction between information in the ordinary sense in which it always has a content — that is, typically, that such and such is the case or that such and such an action is to be performed. That kind of information is different from information in the sense of the mathematical “theory of information,” originally invented by Claude Shannon of Bell Labs. The mathematical theory of information is not about content, but how content is encoded and transmitted. Information according to the mathematical theory of information is a matter of bits of data where data are construed as symbols. In more traditional terms, the commonsense conception of information is semantical, but the mathematical theory of information is syntactical. The syntax encodes the semantics. This is in a broad sense of “syntax” which would include, for example, electrical charges.
...he continues:
The question then arises: What about information itself? Is its existence observer-independent or observer-relative? There are different sorts of information, or if you like, different senses of “information.” In one sense, I have information that George Washington was the first president of the United States. The existence of that information is observer-independent I have that information regardless of what anybody thinks. It is a mental state of mine, which while it is normally unconscious can readily become conscious. Any standard textbook on American history will contain the same information. What the textbook contains, however, is observer-relative. It is only relative to interpreters that the marks on the page encode that information. With the exception of our mental thoughts — conscious or potentially conscious — all information is observer-relative. And in fact, except for giving examples of actual conscious states, all of the examples that Tononi and Koch give of information systems — computers, smart phones, digital cameras, and the Web, for example — are observer-relative.
We cannot explain consciousness by referring to observer-relative information because observer-relative information presupposes consciousness already. What about the mathematical theory of information? Will that come to the rescue? Once again, it seems to me that all such cases of “information” are observer-relative. The reason for the ubiquitousness of information in the world is not that information is a pervasive force like gravity, but that information is in the eye of the beholder, and beholders can attach information to anything they want, provided that it meets certain causal conditions. Remember, observer relativity does not imply arbitrariness, it does not imply epistemic subjectivity.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Searle: "We cannot explain consciousness by referring to observer-relative information because observer-relative information presupposes consciousness already."
This borders on the problems with self-referential analysis. The same might be said of meditative approaches. That's the hard problem.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 6, 2019 - 04:44pm PT
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is borders on the problems with self-referential analysis. The same might be said of meditative approaches. That's the hard problem
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I agree in terms of WHAT we are looking at because we can go so wrong about so much. The looking itself or the consciousness OF content is another matter and if you want to get jiggy with that, you're left with direct observation. People look to the brain because we can't directly observe observation itself, changing the question to what they hope is a causal investigation. When that doesn't pan out (pending new data, of course), it becomes a "problem" for some because for some, epistemic certainty (knowing) demands a causal explanation, all else being "art."
It's interesting to note that this was one of the challenges to the group (I think from MIT) who some years ago set out to try and work up a model to approach the challenge of creating a conscious machine. They were NOT trying to build one, they were only trying to figure out how one would even start to do so, how you might possibly approach the challenge.
After long debates and study they finally agreed that what they were trying to do was to create what a Turing machine did not have - namely conscious awareness, that which allows the machine to not only be aware of information or content, but to be consciously aware of being a machine that was having an experience including that of processing information/content. Most hoped that if they only knew the mechanistic process by which consciousness emerged, they'd need only replicate that process digitally and viola, connsiousness would emerge. Since that mechanism was unknown, they couldn't go much further. Somewhat unexpectedly most of them agreed on one point: They could never program consciousness as a discrete function because awareness is not itself information. In many ways this remains the fly in the ointment per all discussions of mind, with bit-torrent camp trying the impossible: posit awareness anchored in content, or as information itself.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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We cannot explain consciousness by referring to observer-relative information because observer-relative information presupposes consciousness already. First of all, of course it is observer-relative. That's one of the few places I guess that I would agree with the rationalists. The rationalist would claim that his/her perception is preeminent. The empiricist (me and others) would also claim that his/her perception is preeminent -- but with this difference, that perception is caused by a real world out there.
The reason that observer-relative information makes sense is that observers are what evolved. Those observers are evolved creatures who evolved consciousness. No presupposing necessary. Searl doesn't understand evolution, that's my first impression of Searl.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 6, 2019 - 06:13pm PT
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https://www.nap.edu/read/18573/chapter/3
Calling Searle ignorant about evolution is a risky business.
That much said, Searle does seem to believe that the vocabulary of physical objects can be "translated" into the vocabulary of mental states, and consciousness, or worse, that there's a physical "super vocabulary" that covers all bases. Wittgenstein did that myth to death 7 decades ago.
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WBraun
climber
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Those observers are evolved creatures who evolved consciousness.
Good grief.
Consciousness can't be evolved by anyone as consciousness is the complete whole itself.
It's like saying light evolved which never happened ever either.
All anyone can do is to evolve is dovetail their own selves to that whole consciousness.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Calling Searle ignorant about evolution is a risky business.
He didn't call Searle ignorant of evolution. He questioned whether Searle understood evolution.
You make a lot of mistakes.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 6, 2019 - 07:12pm PT
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You didn't list what, specifically, it is about evolution that is lost on Searle. Sometimes the stuff on this thread goes no distance in supporting a thinking cap is used as instructed. Credible folks go to great pains to make their point clear, so far as possible. "You don't understand" is bong water.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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You didn't list what, specifically, it is about evolution that is lost on Searle.
Did you?
You don't go to great pains.
Your post above is an example.
edit:
and from your Searle link:
Aristotle thought there were such things
How could Searle know what Aristotle thought?
He should be more careful in his argument.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - May 6, 2019 - 07:56pm PT
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Here, specifically, is what Searle thinks. By the way, MH, one can accurately know what something thinks by what they say they think per SPECIFIC issues. What's more, "great pains" by your criteria will always be some form of materialist "explanation," and lacking that, a person is saying nothing at all. That, amigo, is the dark stuff of scientism - of that we may be sure.
Anyway, enough of that. Take a look at Searle's views. I disagree with one of his basic principals, but the man is thorough, and his reputation as one of our great scholars is well deserved.
THE “SCANDAL” OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Consciousness is something of a scandal because we do not have an adequate neurobiological theory of consciousness, and there are a rather large number of false claims made about it. Here, for a start, are half a dozen false claims made about consciousness in my intellectual lifetime. Several of these have been widespread and extremely influential.
Behaviorism
Consciousness as traditionally construed does not really exist, but rather there are just human and animal behaviors and dispositions to behavior (Skinner, 1992).
Computationalism (Strong Artificial Intelligence)
Consciousness as such does not really exist but is rather a program or a set of computer programs running in the brain (Minsky and Papert, 1987).
Epiphenomenalism
Consciousness does exist, but it cannot have any real effect on the world because it is a nonphysical phenomenon and as such cannot affect the physical world. It must be an epiphenomenon because the physical world is “causally closed.” From an evolutionary point of view, it has no function (Chalmers, 1996).
The Readiness Potential
Consciousness does exist, but it has very little importance because research on the readiness potential in the supplementary motor cortex shows that our actions are initiated before our becoming consciously aware of what we are doing. The brain decides to perform an action before the conscious mind can be aware of it (Libet et al., 1983).
Objectivity and Subjectivity
Consciousness is not a suitable subject for serious scientific investigation; it is better left to theologians and philosophers. The reason is that science is by definition objective, and consciousness is by definition subjective; therefore, there cannot be a science of consciousness. This view is part of the oral tradition. When I was first interested in the neurobiology of consciousness, I discussed the issue with several neurobiologists, in both Europe and the United States. Several assured me that consciousness is not a suitable subject for serious scientific investigation because of its subjectivity.
Materialism
If consciousness is real, it must really be something else because the final inventory of the basic ontology of the world—an inventory that includes subatomic particles, gravity, electromagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and other fundamental features of reality—is entirely material and so will not include consciousness (Dennett, 1991).
REFUTATION OF THE MISTAKEN VIEWS
I promised at least a brief refutation of the six mistaken theories of consciousness and we now have enough material to do that.
Behaviorism
It should be an embarrassment to us that behaviorism was so influential for so long because it is obviously false. It denies the subjectivity of consciousness. Each of us knows from his or her own experience that our pain is one thing and the observable pain behavior is something else.
Computationalism
We know that the implemented computer program is not by itself sufficient for mental processes, whether conscious or unconscious, because the program is defined purely syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation, whereas mental processes have actual content. Syntax by itself is not sufficient for semantic content. I demonstrated this a generation ago with the so-called Chinese room thought experiment (Searle, 1980). Imagine that you are carrying out the steps in a program for answering questions in Chinese or some other language you do not understand. You might give the right answers, but, all the same, you do not understand Chinese. Carrying out the computational steps is not sufficient for understanding.
I think the argument is conclusive, but the material in this chapter gives us a much deeper argument. Except for computations carried out by a conscious agent, computation is observer relative. You cannot explain consciousness as computation because a process is computational only relative to some conscious agent. Either a conscious agent is carrying out a computation, such as adding 2 + 2 to get 4, or a conscious agent is using or can use a piece of machinery such as a calculator where he can interpret the results as arithmetical. Such computations are always observer relative. And, remember, observer relativity does not imply epistemic subjectivity. It is an epistemically objective fact that I am writing this using the Word program and that the program is implemented electronically, but “Word program” does not name an electrical phenomenon.
Epiphenomenalism
We have literally thousands of years of experiences of human and animal consciousness causing behavior. The problem is to explain how it could, given its subjective ontology. Here is how it works. Consider a simple act like raising my arm. My intention-in-action causes my arm to go up. However, we know independently that anything that causes my arm to go up in that way must cause the secretion of acetylcholine at the axon endplates of the motor neurons. No acetylcholine, no arm going up. However, that means that the conscious intention-in-action has to be a biochemical phenomenon. There is no way it is going to produce the secretion of acetylcholine unless it is itself realized in a biological structure. One in the same event, my conscious intention-in-action has a level of description where it is qualitative, subjective, and part of a unified subjective conscious field, and another level of description where it is a neurobiological process realized in the brain.
Part of our difficulty in understanding this point is that we are stuck with the traditional vocabulary that contains the traditional mistakes, the vocabulary of the mind and body, and dualism and materialism. What I am trying to convey with this very simple example is that, even for very simple conscious activities like raising your arm, the traditional categories are obsolete because you have to have the concept of a single event that has both subjective, qualitative, mentalistic features and biochemical features. And this phenomenon is familiar in nature, that you have the same phenomenon, the same system, with different levels of description. My car engine has a level of description where explosions occur in the cylinder that drives the piston and another level of description where individual hydrocarbon molecules oxidize. We find it difficult to appreciate these levels where the mind is concerned because one of those levels of description has such a sordid history. The dualistic tradition has given the mental level of description a bad name because it makes it appear that our mental life is not part of our ordinary biological existence.
Readiness Potential
In these experiments, subjects were asked to perform a trivial act such as pushing a button and to observe on a clock exactly when they undertook to do it. Some 200–300 ms before they were aware they had decided to do it, there was an increased activity in the supplementary motor area. Incredible claims were made for these data, such as for example that they disproved free will and showed that our brain decides to perform actions before our conscious mind does (Koch, 2012). Recent experiments show that the original experiments were flawed. If you ask the subjects to look at a clock and decide not to perform an action, you get the same readiness potential. As far as we can tell, the readiness potential was produced by watching the clock. Take away the clock and there is no readiness potential (Trevena and Miller, 2010).
I believe the history of the readiness potential is an unfortunate chapter in recent scientific history and it raises the question: Why were people so eager to believe these implausible conclusions? The answer I think is that they wanted to discredit consciousness. Consciousness has typically been an embarrassment to the natural sciences, and, in these cases, it looks like we have scientific proof that consciousness does not really matter very much for our behavior.
Objective/Subjective Argument
This argument is an obvious fallacy of ambiguity over the two senses of objective and subjective that I have explained. Science is indeed epistemically objective. However, there is nothing in epistemic objectivity that prevents the investigation of a domain that is ontologically subjective.
Materialism
These categories of materialism, mentalism, dualism, etc. have all become obsolete. Of course, ultimate reality is as described by the natural sciences and thus is “material.” There is nothing in this concept of the material that prevents subjective, qualitative consciousness from being as much a biological phenomenon as digestion, mitosis, or photosynthesis.
THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION
A remarkable thing about the development of knowledge is that we get not just new explanations but new forms of explanation. And, to me, one of the most fascinating things about the Darwinian revolution is that we got a form of explanation that previously was unknown or certainly unappreciated. The idea was that, in addition to the level of explanation of traditional Aristotelian biology, where you had a teleological explanation of a phenotype, we substituted for that explanation two different levels. Aristotle thought there were such things as final causes, teleological causes, where the explanation is given by specifying the goal, aim, or telos of the phenomenon to be explained. So, if you want to explain why fish have the shape they do, why are fish not shaped the way a brick is shaped, or why plants turn their leaves toward the sun, you point out that the purpose of all of this is to enable the fish to swim better or enable the plant to survive. And it is this teleological goal that provides the explanation.
The Darwinian revolution produced a substitution of two different levels of explanation. Instead of saying the plant turned its leaves toward the sun because it has the goal of survival, we substitute two levels of explanation, a causal or mechanical explanation and a functional explanation. At the mechanical level, the plant has variable secretions of the growth hormone auxin, and these variable secretions of auxin turn the leaves toward the sun. And at the second functional level, plants that turn their leaves toward the sun are more likely to survive than plants that do not. Notice that survival still functions in the explanation, but survival is no longer the goal that the plant has; it is just something that happens. So, we have inverted the conditional. Instead of saying to survive, the plant has to turn its leaves toward the sun, we now say the plant will turn its leaves toward the sun because of the chemical secretions; and because it turns its leaves toward the sun, it is more likely to survive than if it did not.
For the traditional Aristotelian final cause, or teleological cause, you substitute two levels. Survival still functions, but it no longer functions as the goal that explains the phenomenon; it is just something that happens. This feature introduces another element to the explanation: the diachronic element. This kind of explanation works only over periods of time.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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On Largo's post re Shannon and Weaver:
Searle's musing is interesting, and far more technical than I had learned and used it. I taught my way through my graduate degrees in large part by teaching business and technical writing (and later advertising writing). Shannon and Weaver were a main model of our thoughts and teaching. Interpretation and being sensitive to others' take on a given message was a pretty big teaching point. It was packaged in those days as "You Attitude." You write for the reader and not to promote the content. The content would come along once a writer connected with the reader. Coding and decoding in the Shannon Weaver model were the problems areas.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I don't think that "Shannon-Weaver" means the same thing in the different fields that claim to use it.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Behaviorism
"Each of us knows..." the obvious objection to this argument is that familiarity is not fact.
Computationalism
"...the program is defined purely syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation, whereas mental processes have actual content..." presumes a rather limited view of the concept of "mental processing," it is not stated what this view is, and as such, can hardly claim to "disprove" it.
"You might give the right answers, but, all the same, you do not understand Chinese..." he needn't have used Chinese, English would suffice, along with MikeL's criticisms of actually communicating. We "understand" English as some level, and we can give answers to questions asked, we don't always understand what is being communicated.
Epiphenomenalism
"We have literally thousands of years of experiences of human and animal consciousness causing behavior." This is misleading and essentially false from the stand point of human knowledge. When people with no means of communicating met in the past, there was the question of whether or not the others were "human." The idea that animals may possess consciousness is very modern, essentially less than 50 years old.
"Part of our difficulty in understanding this point is that we are stuck with the traditional vocabulary that contains the traditional mistakes, the vocabulary of the mind and body, and dualism and materialism." Misappropriation of the mistake, our vocabulary is one of human cause and effect, where we view the world as objects which are manipulated in the same manner as our own manipulation of the world.
Readiness Potential
"I believe the history of the readiness potential is an unfortunate chapter in recent scientific history and it raises the question: Why were people so eager to believe these implausible conclusions? The answer I think is that they wanted to discredit consciousness. " This is an absurd conclusion, the answer is that they wish to find empirical evidence one way or the other concerning how we react, in particular, whether or not our conscious awareness happens before or after the action. Science is full of "implausible conclusions" that happen to be correct. It is entirely possible that the experiments were flawed, wanting to believe that this was intentional is a very strange statement coming from someone who claims to think deeply about such activities.
Objective/Subjective Argument
"This argument is an obvious fallacy of ambiguity over the two senses of objective and subjective that I have explained. Science is indeed epistemically objective. However, there is nothing in epistemic objectivity that prevents the investigation of a domain that is ontologically subjective." Begs the question: how does one undertake an investigation of a domain that is necessarily unsharable? what does it even mean?
Materialism
'Of course, ultimate reality is as described by the natural sciences and thus is “material.” There is nothing in this concept of the material that prevents subjective, qualitative consciousness from being as much a biological phenomenon as digestion, mitosis, or photosynthesis.'
Digestion, mitosis, photosynthesis are not "subjective" or "qualitative" though perhaps prior to scientific innovation, they were less than "quantitative." "A biological phenomenon" each of these examples are, and were subsequently investigated by objective and quantitative methods, there is nothing that prevents consciousness being studied in the same manner, and perhaps be explained as the others have been, in terms of an objective, quantitative scientific theory.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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JL: "Sometimes the stuff on this thread goes no distance in supporting a thinking cap is used as instructed."
JL: " By the way, MH, one can accurately know what something thinks by what they say they think per SPECIFIC issues."
I know I'm being nit-picky, but we need to be more careful in what we type. It's only through common language that we convey our thoughts.
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WBraun
climber
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Of course, ultimate reality is as described by the natural sciences and thus is “material
No such thing exists except in a gross materialists runaway mental speculating mind ......
The only common ground the gross materialists have is mental speculating .....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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we need to be more careful in what we type.
Probably that would help, but this way we get a bit of practice trying to guess what people meant to type.
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