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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 2, 2011 - 03:45pm PT
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no, what I am getting at is our "first person experience" isn't complete, that it is full of holes and in actual recollection, and in real time, many things are "missed" by our perception. We "fill in" the details based on similar experience learned both by first person and by third person recollection.
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That's real progress here. I agree with this, though what Ed mentioned about would fall under what Chalmers calls "content" and is not relevant to the bottom line or raw awareness, which has no content at all.
The point is, both first person and third person, subjective and objective, experiential and functional modes of inquiry and representation are by themselves "not the whole story" about consciousness. As stated earlier, neither third or the first person data is entirely reductive to the other. I disagree with Chalmers on many points, but I am convinced he is correct in saying both the first and third person perspectives - including the significant differences between the two - are required to have a comprehensive "science of mind."
But the starting point is what I hope to get back to soon as I get a chance.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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perhaps...
let's take on something like Anton-Babinski syndrome as an example. People who suffer it have brain damage. They are blind, but they claim they are not. Their "first person experience" is that they are seeing, but they bump into walls, they describe the presence of things that are not there, etc... yet they insist that they can see.
How would you square this, where the brain damage is quite localized in the occipital lobe, and perhaps even more specific, with the idea that our "first person experience" has anything to do, directly, with the experience?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Articles variously attribute LSD’s action as being upon either serotonin or dopamine receptors.
LSD is peculiar amongst drugs in that it produces emotions and sensations which bend the realm of ordinary human conceptions of consciousness and defy chemical and scientific description at our current level of scientific advancement
These two quotes from jstan's interesting articles stand out a an excellent summary of how little we truly know about the mind/brain. While we've made good progress on in recent years with measuring blood flow and electrical activity, we still know very little about the chemistry of the brain. In part, this is the result of psychedelics being made illegal even for research purposes.
Any substance can be abused if taken too frequently and in too high a dose. I would venture that more people permanently damage brain cells every year from sniffing glue than ever did from psychedelics. Of course glue is too useful to be outlawed. The discoverer of LSD by the way, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who took it over 100 times himself, lived to be 102 and was quite lucid right to the end.
Meanwhile, research on psychedelics is resuming overseas as described in this Scientific American article of October 2009.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=return-of-a-problem-child
Here's the first paragraph.
Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, lambasted the countercultural movement for marginalizing a chemical that he asserted had potential benefits as an invaluable supplement to psychotherapy and spiritual practices such as meditation. “This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s,” Hofmann groused in his 1979 memoir LSD: My Problem Child.
For just that reason, Hofmann was jubilant in the months before his death last year, at the age of 102, when he learned that the first scientific research on LSD in decades was just beginning in his native Switzerland. “He was very happy that, as he said, ‘a long wish finally became true,’ ” remarks Peter Gasser, the physician leading the clinical trial. “He said that the substance must be in the hands of medical doctors again.”
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MH2
climber
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a friend of Hal's presents him with a 25,000 page which breaks down every statistical fact about his three days on the Column without water. He and Petunia were wired with probes and gizmos and so forth and the tome has all the scientific info, all the dehyradation markers, pH levels on down to the thirsty quarks. There is no more to learn about being thirsty on the South Face for three longs days beyond what's in the tome. The tome, his friend insists, is the WHOLE STORY, and "explains" his experience right down to the atom.
You might want to revise your estimate of 25,000 pages upwards a little, depending on how many bits of information per page. (see * below)
More importantly, haven't you, JL, in other posts, acknowledged that we have no way of knowing if we are dreaming, or brains-in-a-vat, or part of a computer simulation? Given such possibilities, is a distinction between map and territory meaningful? If we are software being run on a cosmic computer, we are both map and territory. Aren't you contradicting yourself in claiming that the only reality we know is our first-person experience, yet it is not possible to map that territory? Is an algorithm a map or territory?
If we are not simulations but actual atoms hooked up in complicated ways, we still perceive and map parts of our territory, but trying to produce a map that completely describes the territory would be an inane exercise even if it were possible.
"Explaining how birds fly simply does not require specifying how atoms bond in feathers."
"The primary aim of the cognitive sciences is to provide explanations of important mental
functions, including perception, memory, language, inference, and learning."
quotes from
http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/quantum.pdf
Largo seems to be talking philosophy, not science. Science likes to break big questions into smaller ones. Can this be done with qualia?
Isn't it better to start by trying to explain perception, memory, language, inference, and learning before going on to try to understand "first-person experience?"
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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It's better only if you're a science type. I've concluded from all these discussions that there are two major ways of looking at the world - those who love answers and those who love mysteries.
Those who want answers to everything are either religionists or scientists. Those who love mystery and hope that we never will know the answers to everything are the poets and philosophers of this world.
Most people probably lean more toward mystery than science, though almost everyone has elements of both.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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everyone has elements of both
I get your post, Jan, as what you describe are two of my "inner childs" and because they fight each other constantly, I get little inner peace and quiet. Oh well, it just means things are always bustling, never dull.
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
 Steven Jobs
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I've grown convinced. Great sums of knowledge can be at once empowering and disempowering. So you just have to hope -keep your fingers crossed - the circumstances you are in whatever they are jive with the empowering part.
"Life's a crapshoot."
Mom's cardiologist
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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So we do occasionally find ourselves in complete agreement on something!
And Steve Jobs was a genius in my eyes at least, because he was one of the
few masters of both science/technology and art.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 6, 2011 - 12:52am PT
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Notice how the term "mystery" gets inverted in this type of thinking into "false Beliefs" in order to caption a straw man with the intention of representing the poster's opinion to be identical with "science"and "truth."
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The quips the above talk about are not tolerated on mature handlings of this material and really amount to thinly-veiled rants. As mentioned, "scientism" comes from the same psychological space as religious fundamentalism, where by it's all or nothing. What's more, there is a "master race" or "favored nation" kind of skew insisting that measuring has an exclusive on true and sober investigation. Of course third person, objective data gathering is the mainstay of technology, but nobody but a fanatic or zealot expects measuring to answer all the questions that are worth raising.
JL
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MH2
climber
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It's better only if you're a science type.
Let us resist the urge to simplify.
My understanding and experience of science is that mysteries are much preferred to answers. The goal is to discover.
But you have to look at where you are and what you have to work with.
There are many questions outside the scope of science.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 6, 2011 - 03:30pm PT
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More importantly, haven't you, JL, in other posts, acknowledged that we have no way of knowing if we are dreaming, or brains-in-a-vat, or part of a computer simulation? Given such possibilities, is a distinction between map and territory meaningful?
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The first question is: In blurring map (objective data on functioning) and territory (experience), where lies the advantage. People who have long argued all of this know that this view is held exclusively by clinging to a hard mechanistic view, and simply dismiss whatever is not open to standard measuring. The insurmountable problem here is that you must chuck human experience to do so, and human experience is our fundamental reality, NOT objective data.
The distinctions are essential because as Chalmers and others have pointed out, if we aspire toward a comprehensive "Science of Mind," a term I do not like, we must include both objective data and experience. To be territory, or experience, it must be subjective (qualia experienced by a conscious subject) and it must be 1st person. Lacking those attributes, it's ain't territory.
And no, Fruity, I won't answer those "questions" because they're not honest questions. An honest question is a true inquiry about something you do not know in which you don't have a "right" answer in your head. I will bet you a buck that you are totally convinced that you have the right answer to your questions ergo you're questions are in fact set-ups for an argument we already know: "hard" materialism, AKA physicalism.
That much said: Do I believe in evolution? Of course. What would we otherwise do with the fossil record? Do I believe natural selection TOTALLY explains mind, or that mind is entirely reductive to third person data? Absolutely not.
JL
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Meatbird
Social climber
Lindsay, OK
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For the most part Ive enjoyed this thread especially after it became more focused and less personal. It drifts sometimes but overall I think the serious thinkers have done a good job at clearly defining the issues especially considering this is a climbing forum. My impression is that it is stalled at the same place that metaphysicians and empiricists have been stuck at for a long time. This is not to say that there hasn't been progress. I think our knowledge of the brain and technology has opened up a much richer and detailed understanding of what is happening. However, like in the past we are still stuck at the point of how conscious beings interact with the world they experience. Im not sure we will ever know. My sense is that at some point we may start asking different questions, not because we answered the old ones, but because they are no longer useful. This has already happened to many other questions that our ancestors use to ask.
Earlier, Jan, mentioned how different cultures don't ask the same questions, at least, in the same ways. I think our culture is so intertwined with spiritual vs materialistic dynamics that it is very difficult for us to think in any other way. The day may come when that is no longer a useful way of living.
Im not trying to say that this is a wasted effort but only that in struggling with the problems, at some point, if they remain intractable, we may find a more holistic language (one less drenched in dualism) in which to frame the entire experience.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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re: "honest question" versus "legitimate question"
An honest question is a true inquiry about something you do not know in which you don't have a "right" answer in your head.
Note how you "frame" it. Insofar as this is a philosophical thread of inquiry it is legitimate to pose such questions.
Asking you if you believe our biochemical systems evolved through stages over countless generations is a legitimate question. Asking you if you believe feelings like sexual drive evolved or if attractions like an attraction for eating meat over grass evolved is a legitimate question.
One reason they're completely legit is because your stances on these subjects (all of them on the side of modern science, btw) might shed some light on some of the other non-science-supported stances you've taken in these posts.
Anyways thanks for the reply.
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Meatbird, thoughtful post.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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All day I've been reading about how crucial decision making is critical in business to business success... ala Steven Jobs.
We could say pretty much the same for just about any activity or field in the human condition including rockclimbing: Crucial decision making is critical to success.
I've tried to make this point before: It should be no different either (a) for beliefs which determine behavior or (b) beliefs which determine the nature of one's practice of living - however you want to think of it. This principle regarding crucial decision-making - for which Steven Jobs is currently being lauded - applies equally to the practice of living or to the beliefs or the thinking behind it.
This is why the issues or subjects of these threads matter in a wider context, why some people care, even if they can't always express it clearly. And it's why decision making and asking legitimate questions concerning how the world works and how life works - and striving to get it right - matters too.
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"Don't be trapped by dogma..."
Steven Jobs, secular lifeguidance counselor
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 6, 2011 - 07:26pm PT
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Do I believe natural selection TOTALLY explains mind, or that mind is entirely reductive to third person data? Absolutely not.
Largo
Then where did it come from??
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This assumes an answer will be provided by a mechanical, bottom-up, causal model. Or that consciousness has to have been created or made, and if it cannot be demonstrated that experience is reductive to third person data - and it cannot - then we must attribute mind to "God."
Measuring only can lead us to this conclusion. So does common sense. After all, the fossil record proves that our brainpans increased in size over eons, ergo the meat brain increased and evolved, and if you shoot a person in the head - goody bye mind. So it's an evolved bio-machine, correct?
And yet . . .
JL
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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When everything in the mindbrain machine works right, you take it for granted.
What is "mind?"
When memories fail in severe retrograde amnesiacs, the answer to the question, What is mind? is - Your memories. "You are your memories."
Memories, neuroscience has revealed, are brain-based. Noteworthy is the fact that this is much more understandable by the layperson nowadays because of flash drives and Steven Jobs than it ever was 100 years ago let alone 1000 years ago. I mean, that silicon chips or neurons could store smells, sights and sounds by the thousands or millions - who woulda thunk it 100 years ago, who could've?!
No brain, no memories. No memories, no mind. That is the crucial decision-making (though deniers will call it closed-mindedness) that should inform one's beliefs in this area and more broadly one's belief discipline practice.
This very day's Dr. Phil episode had a severe retrograde amnesiac for a guest. What was clear to this person and his family is that he presented as Personality A before his accident and presented as Personality B after the accident. "You are your memories."
This amnesiac and his family have written a book about this life-changing, mind-changing mindbrain (machine) injury experience and how they have adapted, gone forward. It is, A Life, Deleted.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Interesting Yahoo article today on Steve Jobs titled:
"Steve Job's Mantra Rooted in Buddhism: Focus and Simplicity".
Among other things it states:
"Jobs admitted to experimenting with the hallucinogenic drug LSD, which he said was "one of the two or three most important things" in his life.
Might this not be the reformulating of old questions that Meatbird suggests?
And an example of a better practice of living that Fructose speaks of?
And perhaps the wave of the future whereby the real thinkers of this world transcend the empiracal/ metaphysical dualism and go on to produce what has not been thought of before?
Picking and choosing from the best of the world's wisdom traditions but not enslaved to them?
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Michelle
Social climber
SH60091
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so, I'm just wondering what people are doing? Are you all living in service of your values?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Maybe what we need is a World Religions Bible in imitation of the Jefferson Bible wherein all the supernatural elements had been removed along with all the threats of dire consequences, and only the original message of the original teacher was left? I have books with the quotes of Buddha and Jesus side by side, why not add others?
This might help focus on the application of their teachings to living life, instead of speculations about the after world. Or to quote Confucius, "if men live in a proper manner, they have nothing to fear from the gods".
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MH2
climber
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from DMT's link:
Only later did some scientists go back to some of their own inexplicable findings and realize they had seen quasicrystals without understanding what were looking at
A nice instance of how the unexpected result should be examined more carefully than the results you understand. It is mystery that drives basic science.
from JL:
To be territory, or experience, it must be subjective (qualia experienced by a conscious subject) and it must be 1st person. Lacking those attributes, it's ain't territory.
Does that rule out the possibility that you, or I, or any of us are software in a supercomputer?
Sometimes I get the feeling I could generate a thread like this without any super help.
And I guess JL would be skeptical of the possibility of artificial intelligence.
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