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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 23, 2014 - 09:16am PT
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Uh oh!
"Let’s turn now to a final — alleged — myth. One of the long-standing questions about consciousness is whether it really does anything. Is it merely an epiphenomenon, floating uselessly in our heads like the heat that rises up from the circuitry of a computer? Most of us intuitively understand it to be an active thing: it helps us to decide what to do and when. And yet, at least some of the scientific work on consciousness has proposed the opposite, counter-intuitive view: that it doesn’t really do anything at all; that it is the brain’s after-the-fact story to explain itself. We act reflexively and then make up a rationalisation."
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 23, 2014 - 09:19am PT
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interestingly, Graziano's attention schema explains the appeal of panpsychism, that we so believe in our consciousness that we endow it to the universe.
Graziano's take is much more convincing to me... and along the lines of what I've been saying all along...
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 23, 2014 - 09:30am PT
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Don't know who's peddling what in your schema - the scourge of the reflexive contrarian I suppose, but this whole thing hits a huge speed bump when one considers the the Army Men in Toy Story - do they have even smaller Army Men schema-as-consciousness inside, or are they pretty much working with a 1:1 scale model?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 23, 2014 - 09:30am PT
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223025/
Cogn Neurosci. Jan 1, 2011; 2(2): 98–113.
Human consciousness and its relationship to social neuroscience: A novel hypothesis
Michael S. A. Graziano and Sabine Kastner
Abstract
A common modern view of consciousness is that it is an emergent property of the brain, perhaps caused by neuronal complexity, and perhaps with no adaptive value. Exactly what emerges, how it emerges, and from what specific neuronal process, is in debate. One possible explanation of consciousness, proposed here, is that it is a construct of the social perceptual machinery. Humans have specialized neuronal machinery that allows us to be socially intelligent. The primary role for this machinery is to construct models of other people’s minds thereby gaining some ability to predict the behavior of other individuals. In the present hypothesis, awareness is a perceptual reconstruction of attentional state; and the machinery that computes information about other people’s awareness is the same machinery that computes information about our own awareness. The present article brings together a variety of lines of evidence including experiments on the neural basis of social perception, on hemispatial neglect, on the out-of-body experience, on mirror neurons, and on the mechanisms of decision-making, to explore the possibility that awareness is a construct of the social machinery in the brain.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 23, 2014 - 09:31am PT
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Or the old joke
"I brought a map of the entire world with me tonight, folks. Scale 1 foot = 1 foot."
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MH2
climber
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Jul 23, 2014 - 09:35am PT
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Descartes, who incidentally was the first philosopher to have problems with mind and body.
I read parts of a book called Descartes' Dream by Philip J. Davis. I remember that it says Descartes was strongly affected by a dream he had. The dream as described made no sense to me.
Google did not get me where I wanted when I searched for Descartes' Dream, but this I find funny:
Of these three dreams, it is the third that best expresses the original thought and intention of Rene Descartes' rationalism. During the dream that William Temple aptly refers to as, "the most disastrous moment in the history of Europe," Descartes saw before him two books. One was a dictionary, which appeared to him to be of little interest and use. The other was a compendium of poetry entitled Corpus Poetarum in which there appeared to be a union of philosophy with wisdom.
Peter Chojnowski
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/cho/cho_14descartesdream.html
When I searched for 'what were Descartes' three dreams' I got what I wanted:
In the first dream he was revolved by a whirlwind and terrified by phantoms. He experienced a constant feeling of falling. He imagined he would be presented with a melon that came from a far-off land. The wind abated and he woke up. His second dream was one of thunderclaps and sparks flying around his room. In the third dream, all was quiet and contemplative. An anthology of poetry lay on the table. He opened it at random and read the verse of Ausonius, "Quod vitae sectabor iter" (What path shall I take in life?). A stranger appeared and quoted him the verse "Est et non" (Yes and no). Descartes wanted to show him where in the anthology it could be found, but the book disappeared and reappeared. He told the man he would show him a better verse beginning "Quod vitae sectabor iter." At this point the man, the book, and the whole dream dissolved.
Philip J. Davis
http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/descarte.htm
Maybe it was the melon.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 23, 2014 - 09:36am PT
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From Ed's last article: An obvious insight that I obviously haven't thought of before:
"Third, in the present hypothesis, the same machinery that computes socially relevant information of the type, “Bill is aware of X,” also computes information of the type, “I am aware of X.” When we introspect about our own awareness, or make decisions about the presence or absence of our own awareness of this or that item, we rely on the same circuitry whose expertise is to compute information about other people’s awareness."
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MH2
climber
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Jul 23, 2014 - 09:39am PT
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Yes, Ed. That sounds quite a lot like what you were proposing earlier in the talk about consciousness.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 23, 2014 - 09:47am PT
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How wise is it to argue with a guy named Graziano?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 23, 2014 - 09:51am PT
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a guy from Princeton, no problem...
a guy from Hoboken? fuggetaboutit
( even if from Stevens Institute of Technology)...
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 23, 2014 - 09:57am PT
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"I got yer Universal Consciousness Field right here, pal. POW!"
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 23, 2014 - 10:03am PT
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'Consider the process of decision-making. Philosophers and scientists of consciousness are used to asking, “What is consciousness?” A more precisely formulated question, relevant to the data that is given to us, would be, “How is it that, on introspection, we consistently decide that we are conscious?” All studies of consciousness, whether philosophical pondering, casual introspection, or formal experiment, depend on a signal-detection and decision-making paradigm. A person answers the question, “Is awareness of X present inside me?” Note that the question is not, “Is X present,” or, “Is information about X present,” but rather, “Is awareness present?”'
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 23, 2014 - 10:07am PT
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This helps clear up the problem of 'consciousness as after-the-fact movie' versus 'consciousness as player (hipster/d#@&%e definition)', which, given the substantial evidence for the evolutionary benefit of consciousness, is a real problem with the first notion.
I think vision is what throws us off, mostly. One can intuitively feel that one's own feelings and one's schema of the feelings of another aren't all that different - I can think I feel one way about something, but discover that, in fact, I feel differently. Kind of fuzzy and fluid - like our schema of what we believe other's feel.
Vision is far more concrete.
Ironically, vision is most likely one of the simplest experiences to 'port' to another's consciousness.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 23, 2014 - 10:11am PT
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This is arguably the most interesting climbing discussion I've ever had online
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 23, 2014 - 10:49am PT
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Different model and serial number, but, yes, probably. Dog's may not sport some of the brain gizmo's we do, but in this regard, they're pretty talented.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 23, 2014 - 11:03am PT
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Do they use this same machinery too?
the basic physical proposition is that we have the machinery to impart action, and we use that same machinery to help in our perception. it would be a powerful adaptation for learning "monkey see, monkey do"
and dogs also learn by being aware of what the other dogs are doing, probably in exactly the same way... it is a general principle and applies to all central nervous systems (to some degree).
Looking at it from an "engineering design" level (where is HFCS, off sulking somewhere? there's my "theory of mind" kicking in) the increasing complexity of learning and controlling motor skills are combined into one computation structure, reducing the need for increased "hardware" by using a "software" approach... if everything were hard wired then the brain would be very complex, big and require lots of energy...
it is a very familiar pathway in our computer design, that we provide very general purpose hardware that can be used in a variety of ways depending on the software. interesting to imagine an architecture that would be "learning" in a similar manner: "empathetic programming"
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 23, 2014 - 11:06am PT
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Same answer.
At the molecular level, everything alive on this rock uses the same machinery.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 23, 2014 - 11:06am PT
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we have a "theory-of-dog-mind" which is, no doubt, different from the dog's "theory-of-human-mind," yet each work perfectly well for their purpose, and yet work in the same way.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Jul 23, 2014 - 11:09am PT
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Dogs have a much more developed schema for keeping track of butts, is all.
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Port
Trad climber
San Diego
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Jul 23, 2014 - 11:09am PT
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If our minds were so simple that we could understand them, we would be so simple that we could not.
So go climbing. You're not going to solve this one on Super Topo.
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