What is "Mind?"

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High Fructose Corn Spirit

Gym climber

Aug 14, 2014 - 03:13pm PT

If more evidence is needed animals have minds, here you go...

[Click to View YouTube Video]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWemgBG5llc

But hold on...

"Sorry to burst your bubble but.. the Dog isn't trying to save the fish. He think's he is burying it. He's using the water to bury it but doesn't realize that water is not dirt, and hence he cannot successfully do the job properly.... Canines are not intellectual enough to know that a fish needs water to "breathe" or survive."

Seems to have validity as well. Oh what an amazing mystery it is!

What is like to be... a dog? lol!!

Tvash

climber

Seattle

Aug 14, 2014 - 03:20pm PT

Grab it and staple the teacher's forehead.

No words.

No thing.

Pure sentience.

MikeL

Social climber

Seattle, WA

Aug 14, 2014 - 03:55pm PT

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/magazine/should-you-fear-the-pizzly-bear.html

At the time, scientists thought that because genetic diversity came from spontaneous mutations and because useful variants arose only after thousands of generations, evolution had to proceed slowly. But as the Grants watched the finches’ beaks change over a few generations, they realized that the process of hybridization could speed up evolution. The birds were exchanging genetic traits that had been, in effect, already field-tested.

. . . .

As Brendan Kelly, the chief scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, told me: “The dirty secret of biology is that the fundamental unit of science — i.e., species — in fact can’t be adequately defined.”

. . . . .

Fusion . . . [is a] realization [that] is more than one of scientific clarity; it goes to the heart of conservation efforts, offering new ways to think about what we’re trying to conserve.

. . . .

“Biodiversity has developed in a web of life rather than a tree of life,” Arnold told me. That interconnectedness lends strength. “It’s sort of cool that evolution is really messy.”
-----------------------------

All reality appears to be this way. Every time you think you finally really know something, something comes along and pulls the ground from underneath your feet. Reality is just too fluid, too infinite, ever-changing, too much of a mirage to sit still for categorizations of any kind.

Every peer-reviewed paper should start with something like, "Here's what we think is sort of happening . . . ."

MikeL

Social climber

Seattle, WA

Aug 14, 2014 - 04:00pm PT

HFCS: We just don't know the critical details of the underlying mechanisms to this so-called Hard Problem.

:-)

Then how do you think that you know anything? By the weight of the paper of the journals that have been published on the topic?

MikeL

Social climber

Seattle, WA

Aug 14, 2014 - 04:04pm PT

The walls of knowledge are constantly crumbling before our eyes. Like frantic bricklayers, people are constantly trying to erect new ones. But every one of them finally seems to crumble as well. Nothing lasts. Not one thing.

Energy?

Tvash

climber

Seattle

Aug 14, 2014 - 04:09pm PT

The dog video illustrates our propensity to assign human-like consciousness to the world around us.

As for what the dog's really up to? Maybe he just likes the smell of that water. Dog's love to rub stinky stuff all over themselves.

PSP also PP

Trad climber

Berkeley

Aug 14, 2014 - 04:10pm PT

Tvash said"Grab it and staple the teacher's forehead.

No words.

No thing.

Pure sentience. "

Exactly; the answer moves beyond the discursive box.

The lesson is to percieve clearly and then function correctly. (stapling the teachers head wouldn't necessarily be correct function but you got out of the discursive box)

So then ; What is mind?

Tvash

climber

Seattle

Aug 14, 2014 - 04:21pm PT

It's not like I'm going to take out extra insurance or anything, though.

BLUEBLOCR

Social climber

joshua tree

Aug 14, 2014 - 06:23pm PT

True that, MikeL!

Mind isn't matter.

It's matter + energy

Maybe, matter + energy + info?

Matter without energy has no form!

Energy without matter has no ability!?

Energy's formed the earth!

Energyless matter has no info!

Does energy harbor info?

Together do they expose info?

Maybe there's more to energy than we see? HeHe

Tvash

climber

Seattle

Aug 14, 2014 - 06:25pm PT

I'm a lot more Zen than you might think.

jgill

Boulder climber

Colorado

Aug 14, 2014 - 09:37pm PT

Senility comes quickly enough to us oldtimers: I would rather remember that stapler is called "stapler" than be forced to pick it up and staple something while in a vacuous mental state dwindling to emptiness. It's bad enough I've been assured that "I" is not real and I'd be better off without it! This is the result of two millennia of meditative exercises?

The phenomenon of "blind sight" probably tells us something about attention and awareness. The more we learn, the more it seems we are indeed biological machines.

MH2

climber

Aug 14, 2014 - 09:48pm PT

I'm a lot more Zen than you might think. (Tvash)

I'm a lot more Fly than I might think.

"It is astonishing how much of a fly's life is spent doing nothing."

To Know a Fly
Vincent Dethier

MikeL

Social climber

Seattle, WA

Aug 15, 2014 - 11:39am PT

Jgill: The more we learn, the more it seems we are indeed biological machines.

I just had my 67th birthday yesterday, and I would say that we just get tired as we get older, and we start to operate more and more on automatic pilot. Life wears us down. The awareness dulls, excitement is less available, energy seems to diminish (how can that really happen?), and physical and mental capabilities also seem to get dialed back. After 67 years of climbing, biking, running, weight lifting and reading far far too many journal articles (thousands, now) and books, I'm of the opinion that everything is always new and yet nothing is really different.

Buddhists might call this attitude a form of equanimity: nothing is more important, critical, useful, productive than anything else. I'd add: especially when seen in the rear view mirror. All the things that I thought were really important faded like the light in a twilight sky. Rather than trying to change the world, I just find myself weaving through it these days. What shows up was meant for me, and I try to harmonize with it. No pushing, no pulling, no arguing.

I guess I should say that I've learned that "I" am tiring.

DMT: the mind is your imagination.

In a way, I'd say this is true. But which word is the offending label or problem?

"The?" "Your?" "Is?" "Imagination?" "Mind?"

cintune

climber

The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen

Aug 15, 2014 - 12:19pm PT

[Click to View YouTube Video]

Lightbulbs are getting dim
My interests are starting to wane
I'm told it's everything a man could want
And I shouldn't complain

Conversations getting dull
There's a constant ringing in my ears
Sense of humor's void and numb
And I'm bored to tears

I'm bored to tears, yeah...
I'm bored to tears, yeah...

eeyonkee

Trad climber

Golden, CO

Aug 15, 2014 - 05:11pm PT

I'm with Cintune. Although just a part timer here, it's clear that this thread has run out of gas. For one thing, "mind" is pretty much a catch-all for several, if not dozens of subjects. I was thinking of starting another thread that focusses specifically on free will. That subject seemed to get some traction and it is one I'm struggling with. I've made one pass at Daniel Dennett's critique of Sam Harris's book on the subject and, must admit, am still reeling... "but Basil, what does it all MEAN?" On the other hand, I'm not a particularly good thread owner.

jgill

Boulder climber

Colorado

Aug 15, 2014 - 06:12pm PT

. . . it's clear that this thread has run out of gas (eye)

It's that darn blasted JL . . . he hasn't been around much lately for us to throw darts at! He has an endless supply of energy, being a mere youth.

;>(

BLUEBLOCR

Social climber

joshua tree

Aug 15, 2014 - 07:07pm PT

I was thinking of starting another thread that focusses specifically on free will.

Sorry you can't!

Your an evolutionist, you must be "Caused" to do something. Didn't you get that from Harris? Determinism!

i think it's a bit pretentious knowing what we do of fMRI's to say that the activity going on in the brain before we answer Cheeseburger! when asked what do you want for lunch, is "determinism". You may be seeing activity, but i don't think you'll see a pic of a cheeseburger, or even the word cheeseburger. Seeing this activity prior to making the decision of a cheeseburger over taco, certainly doesn't prove thats when the decision was made.

But that's just my GOD given Free-Will talk'in!

Edit: maybe since i said you couldn't, that will be the cause you need to do it?

eeyonkee

Trad climber

Golden, CO

Aug 15, 2014 - 07:13pm PT

I'll only do so if you promise not to post to it blue. There's clearly nothing to be learned from you. People I would look forward to hearing (more) from on the subject include Ed (duh!), jGill, MH2, cintune, HFCS, Tvash, healje, several others.

Edit: This is a passage from Daniel Dennett's critique of Sam Harris's book on free will. This is the kind of subject that I find interesting.

All this is laudable and right, and vividly presented, and Harris does a particularly good job getting readers to introspect on their own decision-making and notice that it just does not conform to the fantasies of this all too traditional understanding of how we think and act. But some of us have long recognized these points and gone on to adopt more reasonable, more empirically sound, models of decision and thought, and we think we can articulate and defend a more sophisticated model of free will that is not only consistent with neuroscience and introspection but also grounds a (modified, toned-down, non-Absolute) variety of responsibility that justifies both praise and blame, reward and punishment. We don’t think this variety of free will is an illusion at all, but rather a robust feature of our psychology and a reliable part of the foundations of morality, law and society. Harris, we think, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater

Now for a Graziano take.

How the brain attributes the property of awareness to itself is, by contrast, much easier. If nothing else, it would appear to be a more limited set of computations. In my laboratory at Princeton University, we are working on a specific theory of awareness and its basis in the brain. Our theory explains both the apparent awareness that we can attribute to Kevin and the direct, first-person perspective that we have on our own experience. And the easiest way to introduce it is to travel about half a billion years back in time.

Two smart people coming at this from different perspectives but from within the confines of a "scientific" worldview. This is what makes for interesting debate. I could no more believe in religion than I could in Santa Claus. What I don't know for sure...what I actually do believe I could entirely change my mind about, is free will.