What is "Mind?"

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Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - Sep 11, 2011 - 04:25pm PT

However our minds think up all sorts of crazy stuff, stuff that is not physical. As long as it stays that way, as thoughts, we're good to go with the separation of the physical universe and the unphysical universe.

Here is the heart and soul of the physicalist belief system, clearly stated by Ed.

Basically, we have "reality," which is based on matter or sense data. Then we have the "crazy stuff" which is non-matter but harmless enough since it/they are "only" mental apparitions, lacking the heft and authenticity of physical matter-of-fact shite.

The "hard question" introduced from the whole qualia gig is that the "real" shite is only known through direct 1st person experience, a process that to us humans is more "real" and authentic than the sense data/physical shite that we hold as the High Lama or Golden Fleece of reality. This first person experiencing is not a physical "thing" in the normal sense of the word, it is rather a subjective process by which we come to know ourselves, the world and the world of "crazy stuff," all qual that is processed alike by "mind."

Of course giving an inch to the simple experiential fact that 1st person subjective experience is NOT, in and of itself, a physical thing, is a non-starter to a physicalist, hence we see all the scrambling around that qualia is all good and fine but "it" (the lives they actually experience) is after all "produced" by an evolved meat brain and that qualia, or 1st person experience is simply "what the evolved meat brain does." Then you brace yourself for all the AI, digital modeling and tri-processing concepts that "explain" consciousness at a mechanical function that had we the facts, we could reengineer back to atomic level processes from which your conscious life directly emerges. I referred to this as the "broadcast" model of consciousness, whereby the evolved meat brain broadcasts both the 1st person, subjective flow we all identify as out real lives, and also the "watcher" or self-referential agency which is just a snazzy digital mirroring device. If you doubt this model, just pour some whisky into the works, or bang the meat brain with a hammer and notice the quality of the broadcast changes immediatly. Ergo the "mind" is in some way an emergent quality of matter. That's the story.

The "hard problem" with this story is that the broadcast model builds on purely physical observations and occurrences that we see all around us and everyday, where one physical thing leads to another physical thing. We don't see a physical thing producing a non-physical thing, though we see physical things creating effects like gravity and so forth, but nowhere do we see physical things "producing" someone remotely like qualia. This doesn't mean we have to consider our lives and 1st person experience as "special," but the fact remains that mechanistic models can describe processing and info crunching capacities, and can even postulate ideas about cellular underpinnings to "mind," but these 3rd person objectifications are not qualia, and to this we can can only fail to see the "hard problem" if we fail to experience the 1st person subjective bubble we live in and always will, and so much physical stuff "caused" by preceding physical processes.

In other words, a strictly mechanical causal description will always overlook or attempt to explain away (mater IS mind) the 1st person experiential subjective process you experience as you read this, as itself being a "thing" or a mechanical broadcast.

Fact is, by the physicalists definition, qualia, or the lives we actually experience and live are so much "crazy stuff" while the mechanical shenanigans some believe entirely create said craziness are held to be "real."

Funny stuff . . .

JL

healyje

Trad climber

Portland, Oregon

Sep 11, 2011 - 05:05pm PT

Largo: ....but nowhere do we see physical things "producing" someone remotely like qualia

If you bothered to read the link from pages back you'd see that fMRI studies can detect your current qualia by monitoring physical processes - i.e. qualia aren't 'things', but rather processes. If qualia were as spooky as you posit, there would be no way to detect / infer them from the output of an fMRI.

And so where is the salamander's consciousness stored while frozen...? Maybe, just maybe, consciousness only 'exists' as active neural processes - 'emergent' from your perspective; simply what that neural processing 'is' and designed to 'produce' to me and others (i.e. the salamander for one). And, if consciousness only exists simultaneously and concurrent to neural processing, then the distinction of what qualia and 1st person subjective experience 'is' hardly seems worth the electrons to quibble over.

Marlow

Sport climber

OSLO

Sep 11, 2011 - 05:13pm PT

Largo.

You say
"In other words, a strictly mechanical causal description will always overlook or attempt to explain away (mater IS mind) the 1st person experiential subjective process you experience as you read this, as itself being a "thing" or a mechanical broadcast."

I think you are now trying to expaining away the high probability physical explanation of the 1st person experiental process you experience as you read this. Why?

I am not talking simple cause and effect. It may end up with other models at some level, maybe complexity models or models including waves will be part of the explanation, but simple serial causation along one chain of cause and effect it will surely not be. There is no reason to hold a simple stereotypical view of the physical world. The weather is a good example.

And now please exemplify by showing us the 10 sec.

WBraun

climber

Sep 11, 2011 - 05:37pm PT

How is it that modern science can't even figure a simple thing like "mind".

Ya all have one don't ya?

Or maybe modern science doesn't have one .......

healyje

Trad climber

Portland, Oregon

Sep 11, 2011 - 05:43pm PT

WBraun: Or maybe modern science doesn't have one .......

....... sure it does, science just doesn't have the upgrade that keeps it working after its meat stops.

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Sep 11, 2011 - 10:32pm PT

hey, Largo's back even though he was "done" with this thread...
he wrote:
"The 'hard question' introduced from the whole qualia gig is that the 'real' shite is only known through direct 1st person experience..."

which is not correct, if it is a 'hard question,' it is because we all agree that there is something to it, that is distinctly a consensus view.

While we do have first person experiences, we are totally convinced that other individuals have them too, and we get together and talk about it, and share those experiences and see what is common. I could not prove that Largo is conscious, has a mind or even first person experiences. The only way I know that he does is that he looks human, and he communicates those experiences to me in a way that I understand.

My conclusion is that he has consciousness, he has a mind, he has a sense of what a "first person experience" is... my conclusion is most likely correct.

Now this comparison is an interesting thing... not all experience is shared, and not all of what we experience actually is true... if I'm drinking at a bar, and I go to drive my friends home, they may have a different opinion about my capability to do that then I do... "hey, I'm fine, nothing to it" and perhaps I'd make the bad judgement to do it... but my experience at the moment, first person and all, tells me that it's no problem...

In science, while Isaac Newton had a whole lot of ideas on a range of intellectual, religious, spiritual, technological topics, I don't really know what his experiences were, with the exception of what he wrote down regarding science. Because of the description of the experiments he performed, the quantitative description, I can reproduce what he did exactly, or certainly I can quantify just how exactly... I even can know how well he could have done. We can agree across centuries on this...

...not so his religious ideas, which are rooted in the culture he knew and grew up in... while I can read what he wrote, I cannot determine with any measure how close I come to understanding that writing, I can read a lot of other period pieces, sort of try to get an overall idea, but my cultural experiences, my "first person" stuff, get in the way of really getting what he's got to say. Certainly not like reproducing his experiments...

My point in all this is we don't just have "first person experience," we have a consensus experience. We all understand that our "first person experience" can dominate our views, but we also do not take that to such an extreme as to say everyone else is a zombie... because they don't have my particular first person experience...

jogill

climber

Colorado

Sep 11, 2011 - 10:40pm PT

I thought I was dead
but it seems I am not.
My dad’s final word
gave birth to new thought!

I feel I’m alive,
reborn in a way
Perhaps I may strive
to frolic and play!

The riddle’s new test:
Sly soul or mere meat?
No . . . where did I rest?
And where is delete?

Norwegian

Trad climber

Placerville, California

Sep 11, 2011 - 10:58pm PT

f*#k them ind,
im studying my feet.

TGT

Social climber

So Cal

Sep 11, 2011 - 11:09pm PT

Didn't Kurt Godel have something to say about this? (indirectly)

Is there an inherent intractable problem with something defining itself? (mind)

MH2

climber

Sep 11, 2011 - 11:15pm PT

It's been said that it can be hard to see what is in front of your face. Is it so hard to see what's behind your face?

The mind is a bundle of solutions to the problems of movement. Movement toward food and away from predators.

Life which moves has a nervous system, life which is rooted doesn't.

The tunicate is an example of the ancestral vertebrate. The larvae are free-swimming and have sensory organs and a notochord. The larvae soon attach to a substrate and become sessile. As they mature into the adult form they digest what passes for their brain. It's only use now is meat.

Evolution has coughed up a weird one in the human case, but all our mental faculties are basically there for figuring out where to go and what to do.

Only we live in such leaden times that we need only go to the refrigerator and capture whatever doesn't get out of the way fast enough. Our formidable mental processing power is idling.

Climbing helps set us aright.

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber

Livermore, CA

Sep 11, 2011 - 11:48pm PT

TGT, it was about axiomatic systems...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorems

to quote:
Gödel's second incompleteness theorem can be stated as follows:
For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent."

not so arcane, e.g.: "This sentence is false."

Wayno

Big Wall climber

Seattle, WA

Sep 12, 2011 - 12:00am PT

Does mind exist beyond the scope of our purely human observations?

Wayno

Big Wall climber

Seattle, WA

Sep 12, 2011 - 12:05am PT

Quick... Why is there something and not nothing? :^)

Captain...or Skully

climber

or some such

Sep 12, 2011 - 12:18am PT

Is there something? We could ALL be a dream.

Wayno

Big Wall climber

Seattle, WA

Sep 12, 2011 - 12:24am PT

A dream is something, ain't it?

Captain...or Skully

climber

or some such

Sep 12, 2011 - 12:26am PT

Sometimes, it's everything.

Captain...or Skully

climber

or some such

Sep 12, 2011 - 12:40am PT

There are also those we just wish someone had dreamed. Those poor bastards.
Shutup & get some pants, joxie.
You obviously don't get it.

Largo

Sport climber

The Big Wide Open Face

Topic Author's Reply - Sep 12, 2011 - 12:55am PT

Now you guys aren't tackling the hard question at all, you're simply skirting it by repeating ad nauseum how matter IS mind or that mind is what this particular matter "does." Saying that digital models are essentially the same thing as experience is pitiful.

Ed says this:
My point in all this is we don't just have "first person experience," we have a consensus experience. We all understand that our "first person experience" can dominate our views, but we also do not take that to such an extreme as to say everyone else is a zombie... because they don't have my particular first person experience...

Now where has Ed lost touch with reality here - and I DO NOT say this meaning harm or disrespect. But there is a fundamental dislocate and thought distortion here that has taken many, many posts for me to finally rout out. And IMO, it is just this:

Now Ed says two things: A) We don't just have "first person experience." "Don't" here can only denote that we have some else beyond or before our 1st person, subjective experience, but in fact we never do. We don't have 2nd or 3rd person subjective experiences of ourselves, and when our left brain objectifies something making, for instance, our own minds objects of study, the thoughts and notions generated are merely qual or articles that pass through our field of awareness. We can never escape our 1st person subjective bubble while we are breathing, ergo "consensus experience" is information, and any and all information is to us humans, made real and is known only through or subjective bubble. There is no stuff or objective matter of fact granitic ju ju out there that is ever know or experienced as anything BUT qual, or articles of our experience. We get this "library" kind of mind set imagining that the "real" stuff is exactly that vast catalogue of quantifiable material that flows through our experience, but that experience is not the stuff itself. I am not suggesting that there is no reality, material or otherwise, beyond our
experience, but the only way we ever know as much is when said stuff become items of our experience.

Lastly, when Ed says that "first person experience" can dominate our views," this implies that we, as breathing human beings, have, encounter or somehow experience a "view" that is other than 1st person, when in fact first person experience IS our one and only view. Where I believe Ed looses his way here is in falsely equating 1st person subjective as having something to do with sensations or beliefs or feelings and such, when in fact these things are merely more qual, along with thoughts about digital processing, the idea that the meat brain DOES mind and so forth - all qual. 1st person subjective means that human experience occurs to a subject, us, and that experiential flow is known directly, 1st person, meaning we are the first and only beings who experience our lives.

I've tried to quit this thread five times already.

JL