What is "Mind?"

Vacuum has been a frequent topic of philosophical debate since ancient Greek times, but was not studied empirically until the 17th century.

Ed: Maybe "Truth" is the myth? Feferman has a better idea, that the knowledge might be "open-ended" and therefore, there is no "truth"

DMT: Interesting how you always find what you're looking for.

Randisi: I suppose the question regarding Mike is that if everything is perfect, why does he do anything at all.

Tvash: perfection in nature is hooey. Nature is one big junk pile . . . .

MH2: . . . your use of the comprehensive word anything. If there is nothing that you feel is worth getting really serious or concrete about, okay for you, but are you saying that people who feel otherwise are always making a mistake?

On the other hand your (well-written) commentaries are never dull!

Yes, he does suffer from pronouncements ex cathedra.

Largo: The problem with Hewaljy is that while sounding avuncular and reliable, his information is not remotely accurate. I said I was not guessing at this material, and here this guy keeps bumbling along insisting that I am butchering the data.

First, Healyj’s wonky claim that AI and other associated fields have given up on sentience since around 1980, this is not remotely so. And while it is true that some of the big brain projects are not trying to directly program sentience, or consciousness, they are very much trying to achieve and produce it as an ”emergent” function.

The most vocal, well-funded (1 billion Euros) of these Dr. Frankensein’s includes “Professor” Henry Markram, “a doctor-turned-computer engineer, who announced that his team would create the world's first artificial conscious and intelligent mind by 2018. And that is exactly what he is doing. On the shore of Lake Geneva, this brilliant, eccentric scientist is building an artificial mind. A Swiss - it could only be Swiss - precision- engineered mind, made of silicon, gold and copper.

Markram: A meticulous virtual copy of the human brain would enable basic research on brain cells and circuits or computer-based drug trials.

Markram: We cannot experimentally map out the brain. It's just too big. In a piece of the brain the size of a pinhead there are 3,000 pathways like a city with 3,000 streets.

Markram points out that, using conventional approaches, it takes 20,000 experiments to map a neural circuit. Yet, in all, the brain contains 86 billion neurons. On top of that, to fully understand the operation of every synapse and how they interact with neurons in other parts of the neo-cortex, scientists would need to trace all of the 100 trillion connections between them – something that is impossible to do experimentally.

Furber: "The thing that I admire about Henry is that he is a great believer that when problem reaches a certain point the only way to make progress is to industrialise the research process," says Furber, before adding that: "Whether the project will yield the big goal of giving us a clear conception of how the brain works is bound to be speculative because we have no way of knowing if we're capturing enough data or not, but it will almost certainly tell us a lot about the biology of the brain and advance computational neuroscience."

Largo: Mind you, this is not some isolated, crank “Professon,” but a leading neuroscientist who actually believes that a computer will be generating feelings (sans a limbic system LOL) in a few short years.

Now obviously my friends at Caltech don’t have a few billion greenbacks to simulate a human brain and hope sentience jumps off it like music out of a jutebox. So they are left to try and imagine what is involved, what is the process, what is the mechanical A-B-Cs that “creates” sentience. And where might they start to program such a “function.”

I would be interested in hearing why Haelyj believes that people “gave up” on building machine sentience, and how he might define what it is (self consciousness) that they collectively gave up on (they didn’t).

In his new book, Connectome , Seung argues that technology has now reached a point where it is conceivable to start mapping at least portions of the connectome. It’s a daunting task, he says, but without it, neuroscience will be stuck.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mit-neuroscientist-discusses-quest-reserve-engineer-human-brain

Seung: Indeed, mapping an entire human connectome is one of the greatest technological challenges of all time. Just imaging all of a human brain with electron microscopes would be difficult enough. This would yield about one zettabyte of data, which roughly equals the world's current volume of digital content. Then analyzing the images to extract the connectome would be even more demanding.

My connectome, myself - Neuroscientist Sebastian Seung is on a quest to map brain connections that reveal how our memories and personalities take root.

Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
February 7, 2012

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to many others. Neuroscientists believe these connections hold the key to our memories, personality and even mental disorders such as schizophrenia. By unraveling them, we may be able to learn more about how we become our unique selves, and possibly even how to alter those selves.

Mapping all those connections may sound like a daunting task, but MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung believes it can be done — one cubic millimeter of brain tissue at a time.