What is "Mind?"

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klk

Trad climber

cali

Aug 28, 2011 - 11:51pm PT

From my perspective consciousness is the chemical reaction between the neurons in the synaptic cleft. Nothing more, nothing less.

money

Jingy

climber

Somewhere out there

Aug 28, 2011 - 11:51pm PT

"at what level is the mind of a lower life form considered consciousness?"

- Good question. Extended further "At what level is the mind of a higher life form considered consciousness?

I have to say... there are a few on this board that fit the lower life form definition, and their consciousness is well in doubt.

Much like myself, there are no correct answers.

krahmes

Social climber

Stumptown

Aug 29, 2011 - 12:36am PT

Pattern recognition and language and I hope as Searle’s has hypothesized with a moment of quantum uncertainty as the kernel of the core.

murcy

Gym climber

sanfrancisco

Aug 29, 2011 - 12:38am PT

klk is not a historian. he is a polymath, and knows more about parts of my specialties than i do.

Patrick Oliver

Boulder climber

Fruita, Colorado

Aug 29, 2011 - 12:42am PT

I'm kind of simplistic, but consciousness to me is
tantamount to awareness. And all awareness is tied to
some or other sense of value. I mean, to look outward
at the night, one manner of mind might see only some flickering
light. Another higher consciousness sees something of
supreme value, something that signifies the vastness of
life and love, how infinitely we feel compared to what
we believe is possible to feel, and how infinitely
we don't know yet anticipate. The higher consciousness
looks deeper, in other words. Whether it be through the
tool of philosophy or of history or poetry or music, or
through plain reflection and response to the world around,
there is a level of feeling and appreciation, of
curiosity and search. We follow our own minds,
using the instruction of forest and air, carefully guided
until at moments we believe almost that we have followed
the right way into the only true living place. We know we are alive.
It is a mystery, all of it, and beauty is only diminished
by trying to pick it apart, to measure it in a scientific
way, or as Dylan once wrote, to "pluck apart the sound of
waves...." Simply, at times the moon is right. The smell
and feel of rock envelop a climber, on some otherwise
silent and empty-seeming tower of another day. We sometimes
must simply breathe, and we learn in ways we cannot speak. We
go on seeing something everywhere, where dreams flow together
in a new reality that appears always to be taking shape....
We are alert to whispers and gestures, attuned to powers,
as the poet W.S. Merwin would say. Children, we hope to be the heir
of every secret. Each hour we go farther into the dream, into
the clouds and rain, and along the distance a caravan of friends
we admire for their kindred sense of adventure through the days and nights.

klk

Trad climber

cali

Aug 29, 2011 - 12:48am PT

heh, murcy, yr just dodging--

start posting some real content in this thread and ill buy the heritage rye

im thinkin potrero green cask.

not like i can actually get my hands on any, but whatever.

klk

Trad climber

cali

Aug 29, 2011 - 12:49am PT

Each hour we go farther into the dream

nice, i like that

john hansen

climber

Aug 29, 2011 - 12:58am PT

I had a strange expereriance coming out of sedation from dental surgery..

My mind was fully aware, but the world was just a white void...

I was thinking while I slowly came to,,is this my new reality? I would exist in this reality forever...

Like suspended animation..

Slowly, after 10 or 12 min, I realized I was in the dentist office looking up at the florescent lights in the ceiling.
It was strange, my mind was completely aware but my body did not exist.

It was kind of fun....

Mungeclimber

Trad climber

sorry, just posting out loud.

Aug 29, 2011 - 01:10am PT

Will come back to this thread, but what is wrong with settling on the model that works? Nothing more nothing less.

Wayno

Big Wall climber

Seattle, WA

Aug 29, 2011 - 02:42am PT

Mind is an endowment. Ask Spock.

bergbryce

Mountain climber

South Lake Tahoe, CA

Aug 29, 2011 - 03:13am PT

It's one of my favorite Talking Heads songs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w1N6RTiTpw

TGT

Social climber

So Cal

Aug 29, 2011 - 09:04am PT

Newton had to create a new math to describe the world as it was.

Got your point, but Leibniz was coming up with the same mathematical ideas simultaneously and independently and Hooke had already come up with the law of gravitation.

The famous "I have stood on the shoulders of giants" was probably really an insult directed at Hooke. He was a short little dude with a crooked nose. Newton didn't want to share the credit.

Keynes was completely in error when it came to economic theory, but there's one quote of his I really like, (he owned the largest private collection of Newton's work)

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians,

The work of any philosopher needs to be examined in the context of their age.

http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html

Dingus McGee

Social climber

Laramie

Aug 29, 2011 - 09:31am PT

Sensing environment conditions and responding was the task of early neurological mechanisms. The tangle comes from when neurological mechanisms began sensing neurological states. The tingle comes because many neurological states send faint signals to the body parts which causes other states to arise. For some this experience is called "subjective". But our parallel processors do their looping and with words some make knowing thy self much more complicated than it is. Knowing how this happens is all about attention.

Tony Bird

climber

Northridge, CA

Aug 29, 2011 - 10:21am PT

in search of mind: essays in autobiography by jerome bruner--interesting memoir of a research psychologist.

survival

Big Wall climber

A Token of My Extreme

Aug 29, 2011 - 11:31am PT

Since a strict computational model can be summarily ruled out, and a “brain is consciousness” model is insisting that an apple is an orange, and religious explanations are equally unsatisfactory, one wonders what direction is needed to wrestle this one down.

There is no wrestling this one down. Some need it to be science, some need it to be God.

As a good friend said:
"Waaaay too many people thinking that we're more special or "entitled" than other life on Earth."

All minds will check out in their biological time.

One thing's for sure, your mind may get a little extension from healthy living or medical advances, but no mind gets to carry on permanently from being a high thinker.

We need to get over ourselves and start respecting the planet or there will come an end to all "mind".

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Aug 29, 2011 - 11:39am PT

Largo writes:
//Scientism ~ the belief that the methods of measuring, or the categories and things described through measuring, form the only real and legitimate elements in any philosophical or other inquiry, and that science alone describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective, with a concomitant elimination of the psychological dimensions of experience.
//

I don't know about scientism, I am a scientist, I know what troublesome issues arise when subjectivity is injected into scientific investigations.

It is no doubt troublesome when the scientific investigation is about "subjectivity" itself.

As for philosophy, I see it more like sport team affiliation, you route for the "home team" and perhaps have warm feelings for those "home teams" of your past... and you might jeer the evil "away team." The consequence of all this routing is rather nill in the whole of it, in my view.

I take the word scientism as a way of making science a "philosophy" and therefore open to the various bickerings of philosophers. But while science may be interpretable as a philosophy, it has a privileged position of other philosophies, and that is the primacy of empirical verification.

While this greatly limits the extent of philosophical questions which may be presented to "science" it is the absolute arbiter of scientific dispute. It doesn't matter how pretty or how logical or how mighty you proposed theory is if it fails empirical verification.

The role of theory is also important, for without it there would be nothing to verify. Ordering phenomena, organizing them and describing them and then predicting what will happen are all necessary in order to obtain scientific understanding. Theories with no ability to make predictions that can be subject to empirical verification are by and large useless to science. We might use various polite words for this, but "bullshit" hits the mark rather well. Many would posit that theories like "string theory" are "bullshit" because they are incapable of predicting something testable. You can read books on this...

My position regarding empirical verification has been met by Largo with a great deal of chiding and a healthy dose of intellectual bullying, perhaps because my view is at such variance with his, and we have both been at this for decades, "this" being our views on consciousness. He can't believe I believe that all there is to life is the dry stuff of equations and lab experiments. His experience tells him otherwise.

First and foremost, an education in science teaches us how to ask a scientific question. The point being that if you cannot frame a curiosity in a way which is accessible to the scientific method the chances you will obtain a scientific answer vanishes. My realization with discussing this subject with Largo is that he is not asking a scientific question. And so another thread would be more appropriate with the title "The Science of Mind" which would be quite different than Largo's "What Is Mind?" Though I hesitate to suggest such a thing... (although I guess I just did).

Now having violated Gill's aesthetic for short posts, I will end by bringing up an example experience from climbing; regarding what we experience.

I have hypothesized on other threads that we actually know what each other is thinking only through our ability to communicate. I can expand on this, but one objection to the scientific study of "mind" is that it does not consider the "subjective experience." Behaviorism as a biological discipline studies behavior (obviously) but is not privy to the "inner thoughts" of those individuals behaving.

As I sit on a ledge in the Valley, enjoying the beautiful views, I become aware of the distinct smell of formic acid, and my experience immediately tells me I've pissed off the local natives, the ants that live around the tree. They are attacking me, collectively, with the weapons that they have. I know if I don't do something, they'll start biting too, and this is all very unpleasant. I can go on and on about the science of this...

...but let me do a Largo and ask, "what are the ants thinking? how are they experiencing this? what is their subjective response?" and how would I know?

cliffhanger

Trad climber

California

Aug 29, 2011 - 11:48am PT

Tantra Yoga technique 75 to learn the true nature of consciousness:

"If you can carry this image of flame and light through the doors of sleep, you will never sleep again, only the body will rest. And while the body is sleeping, you will know it. Once this happens, you have become the fourth. Now the waking and the dreaming and the sleeping are parts of the mind. They are parts, and you have become the fourth -- one who goes through all of them and is none of them."

http://www.meditationiseasy.com/mCorner/techniques/Vigyan_bhairav_tantra/75.php

Technique 76 is excellent also.

Index:

http://www.meditationiseasy.com/mCorner/techniques/Vigyan_bhairav_tantra/Meditation_techniques_index.htm

rrrADAM

Trad climber

LBMF

Aug 29, 2011 - 12:11pm PT

What is "Mind?"

IMHO... It is our consciousness (direct and sub), our awareness. It is something that evolves and changes... Think of an infant, toddler, adult, or later, people with alzheimers, as all have different degrees of consciousness and/or awareness. Even physical trauma of the brain can have an effect on it, as does psychological trauma, or drugs.

Most, take it for granted, some, explore it and become well versed or even expert at different aspects of it (I.e., higher consciousness/awareness). Just like an dedicated and well trained athlete can do things far above that of normal people. No different.

We can all recognize different levels of awareness in other animals, if we look in our pets, as each is unique in its "personality", and this is even present in other animals (E.g., dolphin, elephant)

So, IMHO, it is a physical thing, that we don't fully understand, but that doesn't mean there is anything nonphysical about it... Just that we don't fully understand it.

survival

Big Wall climber

A Token of My Extreme

Aug 29, 2011 - 12:28pm PT

When the "hard issues" of consciousness don't square with our particular discipline, we end up with simplistic quips like "brain output," which neither addresses or perhaps doesn't even recognize that the computational model of consciousness is a bust for a dozen reasons.

Seems you do a fair amount of dismissing of ideas yourself Largo.