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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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healyje:
5" gun? Would that be naval? I shot 155s there, and that's a little over 6", and a 105 would be 4".
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Apparently Fritz Capra has written a new book about some of the things being discussed in this thread. a talk by him was aired in KPFA's morning show this morning.
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jgill
Boulder climber
Colorado
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How about, How to Solve It? Or How to Solve Problems, by Wicklegren? (formal problems) (MH2)
I would look at material like this from time to time, but my approach to problem-solving had been established by high school graduation. If I had taught at a prestigious research university I might have wished I had paid more attention to such literature, but the basic patterns of thought I developed early on were adequate. (By the way, my Erdos Number could not be calculated since I never collaborated on a paper, preferring to solo over modest terrain.)
Like Feynman (what a hoot to say that!) I needed to work things out with pencil & paper as if I were discovering them rather than follow a presentation. And not having the innate ability to comprehend very abstract ideas from basic descriptions I required examples . . . I still do. Once I can see the abstract notion in play it all makes sense and I can use the idea.
And, like Bruce, a lot of the material on neuroscience discussed on this thread is over my head. HFCS criticized me for asking for credentials rather than refuting his posts, but without the basic knowledge with which to do that I am left with the most reasonable alternative: credentials. If Ed or jstan talks about physics, you talk about neuroscience, Mike talks about management theory or meditation, Largo talks about writing, psychology or meditation, PSP talks about Zen, Jan talks about anthropology, etc. I pay attention. Otherwise I'm a little more skeptical.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 7, 2014 - 02:04pm PT
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I think that this thread illustrates that "explaining" usually means, "say things in a language I know and trust." For instance, Fruitecake only knows and trusts engineering and what not, and anything else he ridicules. After I tried to describe sentience in plain language, he lost his mind insisting that I was talking about things in ways unheard of in all the literature he had scanned (what he trusted as correct). But my point was, nothing he was reading was even dealing with sentence, the Elephant in the Room of all brain studies. When my friends looking to program sentience found nothing worthwhile in the literature, the point was driven home to me.
So in some sense much of what is discussed on this thread, including people's reports of their direct experience, falls outside the loop of typical neuro-speak, so for some, the explanations will be a "waste of time" because they don't involve quantifications or don't fit neatly into know categories.
Another challenge is the way the information is arrived at. People trust evaluations that have been worked up from the molecular or atomic level because the thing in question is observable and usually measurable in some way. But with meta level phenomenon or "emergent" qualities, and sentience may be one of those, a bottom up approach either misses things entirely or is not empirical. The often results in brilliant people like Daniel Kahneman concocting things like different selves who experience different aspects of time. However when the business of selves is taken up on the meta level by competent psychologists like the Stones and others, who tested literally 1000s of people over many decades in over 50 countries, the picture of our selves or subpersonailties is very clear, comprehensive, and most of all, entirely empirical.
The main challenge is that when meta level phenomenon like sentience is investigated on the meta level, the material that is found does not always fit neatly into standard materialist language or terms. And in many cases it CANNOT be swindled into these terms no matter who is doing the explaining. We need to be careful not to blame the material itself, or nor yet the messenger, just because we cannot get our discursive minds around something in the normal way. New approaches and modes of understanding are often required, lest we are essentially getting mad that French is not English, so to speak, and faulting French in the bargain. The solution might be to learn French, seeing that English is not the indicated language. The problem, of course, is that many insist that English and only English is valid, all other being a "waste of time."
JL
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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Healyje:
Ugh. Was it noisy in the gun house, inclosed like that? How much of the sound got into the gun house?
Jgill:
You make very good points.
BTW, I hardly consider myself a meditation maven. As for management, ha! . . . that term may be a gross over-statement or a misinterpretation of what actually occurs. You should perhaps consider me either a failed or disenchanted scientist.
Bruce:
One more thing. Decision making, such as the kind that K&T turned their bright lights on to, is reliant upon the application of statistical probability. There are many assumptions that need to be applied when doing so. For example, projecting past data points onto uncertain future scenarios can be problematical when causes and conditions shift about constantly. Witness financial and economic markets, to name a couple.
I think you might be interested in something more dynamic--like game theory.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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MikeL,
It was a grisly level of noise and you couldn't wear ear protection as you needed (ironically) to hear to coordinate loading sequences, particularly during 20-100 round rapid-fire salvos which were common depending on the engagement. Basically your ears could occasionally bleed in the mount proper and your hearing was equally f*#ked almost immediately even if you only worked the shell deck ('upper handling room' in the diagram). There were no comms in the mount other than the turret chief/mate's headset as the guns were made in the late 30's.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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MH2: ... In your case the 'speech processing' may work fine on the noisy signal from the ear but memory gives a wrong match. Not a bad hypothesis, but 40 years of it has left me feeling pretty confident it isn't a memory issue - if anything the memory retrieval can be inappropriately good out the other way. Pretty sure some aspect of the severe tinnitus introduces a scrambling/masking signal which my brain successfully compensates for 99.9% of the time in general, but just can't manage it 100% of the time.
I can also [loosely] associate occurrences with rapid swings in barometric pressure, repeated deep yawning, periods of high stress, and what I assume are spikes in blood pressure like from standing up too quickly resulting in getting a little 'purple haze'. All have the capability of transforming my tinnitus from something I'm not [functionally] aware of to an incredibly loud air-raid siren in a heartbeat (happens around once a month and takes anywhere from a couple of hours to several days to recede into the background when it does).
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MH2
climber
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Maybe a better comparison would be a person with normal hearing in a noisy place like a bar or a cocktail party. It is amazing how people can attend to one conversation among many going on at the same or greater volume.
Thanks, jgill, for talking about how you approach mathematical questions. I looked at the books on problem-solving in hopes of finding a general method which could be automated. What I saw was a lot of very different methods which might be useful in particular cases for some people. It is a useful reminder to those interested in artificial intelligence that people have different styles of thinking which can succeed on the same problem.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Something about Capras new book. I like the part about relationships. Is "Mind" a relationship and perspective dictates the relationship?
PP
"It will of course also be of interest to researchers, practitioners and enquiring readers who are interested in discovering more about the profound shift in the scientific conception of living systems, the primary insight of which is the move from the machine metaphor of life to one where life is perceived as a network of inseparable relationships.
This primary insight looks quite innocuous in the written word, and it may be that people, in our highly-networked world, may wonder what the fuss is about. The shift becomes more pronounced when understood in terms of autopoiesis, one of the major foundations of the systems view of life, developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the 1970s.
In this view, living systems continually recreate themselves by transforming or replacing their components. They go through structural changes while preserving their web-like pattern of organisation. Hence there is both stability and change – a key characteristic of life. Instead of thinking of “mind” we change to a conception of the process of cognition. This has developed into a rich field known as cognitive science which transcends the traditional frameworks of biology, neuroscience, psychology, epistemology etc."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 8, 2014 - 11:07am PT
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This has developed into a rich field known as cognitive science which transcends the traditional frameworks of biology, neuroscience, psychology, epistemology etc."
--
While this is accepted as fact across the board by many disciplines, there are still those who insist that "mind" does NOT transcend the Newtonian material they believe "creates" it (though no such staunch material exists in any absolute sense), or else mind is a separete stand-alone non-thing composed of fairy dust and "God." As mentioned many times by many people, anything purported to transcend Newtonian matter, that stuff we can grab and call "real," is so much woo = "I don't understand this at all."
Per Capra's new book - a truly fascinating read IMO:
"These necessary overviews of human affairs on Earth are threatening to traditional academic institutions and single-discipline science - usually incurring hostile reviews. Thomas Kuhn described the evolution of the scientific method in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and over my dinner table in Princeton summarized his famous shift of paradigms as "progressing one funeral at a time."
Capra and Luisi trace these paradigm shifts through the ages in biology, medicine, genetics and physics to the emergence of systems thinking, quantum mechanics and cybernetics. They emphasize networks at all levels from cells to ecosystems and the flow of energy, matter and information through networks as fundamental to living processes (p. 68).
They summarize this paradigm shift in perception from material objects and structures to the non-material processes and patterns of organization. This emphasis on networks, relationships, qualities and processes does not mean that objects, quantities and structures are no longer important. Rather, there is a shift of focus: from parts to wholes; from objects to relationships; from measuring to mapping; from quantities to qualities; from structures to processes; from objective to epistemic science; from Cartesian certainty to approximate knowledge - all inherently multi-disciplinary."
IME, the shift "from quantities to qualities" is where the sh#t really comes down and where all bets are off. The new thinking and new approaches are very evident in Capra's work. Will be interesting to see where it goes.
JL
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 8, 2014 - 12:54pm PT
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Forty, we've been patient with you and have told you in plain language NOT to drink the bong water before posting. These were simple instructioins but verily, you can't even follow those. We can hardly be expectd to trust you with slippery concepts when that bong water has a hold on you like this. Now be hondest and tell us what you don't understand per Capra, or whatever. I trust someone on this thread can help you out.
JL
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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Healyje:
"Sounds" terrible. I'd almost suggest an application for a combat related benefit. I got 20% years ago. If it affects your life substantively, you could do that--but for the sorry state that the VA is in these days. My sympathies. War. Can't say enough about how I feel about it. Such a bitter sweet experience for me. Got me on this road of self-realization ("what this life all about?"), while seeing men at their most base and primitive. Experience. Thanks for sharing.
DMT: "Transcends"... that's one of those woo words.
It must be. Rene Thom and later other with similar theories (chaos, for example) showed just how that could be when moving from linear systems to non-linear systems. http://www.gaianxaos.com/pdf/dynamics/zeeman-catastrophe_theory.pdf as an example, among a few.
Transcendence happens in so many ways in so many places. When a person shifts repertoires from infancy to adolescence to early adulthood to adulthood and beyond that to seniority, those are all transcendences. When one shifts from basic arithmetic to algebra to calculus, those are transcendences. When one starts to shift from being an emotional being reacting to stimuli to a reasoned being with self-reflectsion, that's a transcendence.
But, hey. . . . it's easy to catcall from the bleachers--especially when you don't know anything about, or haven't done any close work in, a subject. (You're not even dilettantes . . . you and Fruity.)
Largo and PP:
I don't see how anyone can not see the web of life in reality, or in the world. How can anything exist concretely on its own, independently, and without change? How could either be possible? It does more than stretch the mind's imagination. It's just not logical. Everything is connected to everything. What 3rd-grader does not understand that? We beat insight and intuition out of young people institutionally, when they sense very well reality and the universe.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 8, 2014 - 02:05pm PT
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Wow, Germany is handing Brazil an old-fashioned ass-whooping.
Anyhow, the idea that there is no transcendence is itself the biggest troll, or frank admission of blindness, this thread has ever seen. If we look no further than the classic "threshoild" issues such as how something transcended nothing, how life transcended non-organic matter, or sentience transcended biology, we can easily see that transcendence is alive and well.
The curious thing is, why would otherwise intelligent people be entirely stumped by such an obvious and facile truth? My sense is that any existence or experience (meta) beyond the strictly physical level is interpreted as some thing that lives separated from reality, physical and otherwise. But as Mike has been saying, the experiential disciplines have conclusively show this is no the case. Nevertheless, if the "solid" aspect of matter is not clasped as the Golden Fleece, the real and basic deal, then some seem to believe that the sky will fall on us all.
JL
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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They emphasize networks at all levels from cells to ecosystems and the flow of energy, matter and information through networks as fundamental to living processes (p. 68).
Sounds good! But i couldn't find this Capra. Only Frank.
Darwin called one Cell lifeforms, "Simple Cell Lifeforms". With his microscope, he could see down at the cells membrane sack (an independent "bag of water", is what i call it.), and distinguish each cell by its independent movement from each other, and independent from the Organism. An Organism with only 1 cell, he termed "Simple Cell".
Today we can look down inside that little "Bag of Water", and see it ain't so simple! As a matter of fact float'in around in there is not only water, matter, and energy, but also Information. Prescribed information inherited through DNA, that keeps memory of the past that guarantees the present, then predicts the future. Doesn't this sound like a Brain? The Acorn will become an Oak Tree. Each cell in that acorn knows it will become a tree. That acorn relies on every single cells' ability to remember and reconstruct into a mighty oak. This big oak is an individual bag of water, separating itself within its membrane skin from its environment. It makes decisions imputed by environmental conditions based on the welfare of the "whole" tree, not just as each cell. Each of the billions of cells inside an Oak has DNA written in matter. And each cell knows to become a tree, but they all must become conjoined to uni-formally act as One. One thinker for The Whole?
Pretend each Cell is a Brain and we throw a billion inside that "bag of water" we call an Oak Tree. Could we maybe call that combined communicated consensus between the individual cells that make up that one tree;
The Mind?
Jus think'in out loud
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