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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 7, 2011 - 12:59am PT
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And I guess JL would be skeptical of the possibility of artificial intelligence.
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When a machine starts chiming in on this thread we will all believe in sentient AI. Till then we'll let sci fi be just that, and accept that AI is a processing/computation tract, not a 1st person, subjective-experiential tract.
People get confused and deluded when they start breaking one of the Laws of Mind and believe that third person data about objective functioning is the same thing as 1st person data about experience, meaning, in this case, that if only we got the right functional data locked and loaded in the right gizmo, sentient experience would geyser out said gizmo in no time. But as mentioned, the map (AI - 3rd person functional computation) is not the territory - no exceptions in this universe.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Largo writes: "...start breaking one of the Laws of Mind and believe that third person data about objective functioning is the same thing as 1st person data about experience, meaning, in this case, that if only we got the right functional data locked and loaded in the right gizmo, sentient experience would geyser out said gizmo in no time."
but we all depend on our own "Theory of Mind" to infer that everyone else has one, too...
Largo, how do you know I'm not a machine?
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jan: 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.
I couldn't possibly disagree more with. Scientists are scientists exactly because of the mysteries and the questions they provoke - the answers, in some respects, are almost entirely secondary to worshiping the questions and the homage to the mystery of what we don't know. That is entirely the opposite of the religious who cannot tolerate unanswered questions and so attempt to fill every void with one storyline after another.
Jan: Those who love mystery and hope that we never will know the answers to everything are the poets and philosophers of this world.
Now, after this thread, I do believe this comment about philosophers - at least those with an inherently phenomenological bent. I can clearly see language, logic, and argument to carefully construct and support a position / perspective that, in the end, can only be discussed philosophically. Those elegantly crafted 'laws', 'rules', and their use in defense and dismissal are quite gifted, but seem ultimately bankrupt when the bottom line always comes down to what in the end are phenomenological apologies.
Acknowledging the mysteries of what we don't know is one thing - carefully constructing arguments to assert something is unknowable - at least in the case of consciousness - seems highly premature at best and somewhat grasping at worst.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 7, 2011 - 12:11pm PT
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Largo, how do you know I'm not a machine?
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Unless a person does a lot of work on their own proclivities and personality traps, we ARE machines in so far that our choices are almost entirely determined by unconscious factors. That's what enneagram and suffi stuff is all about, breaking free from conditioning and genetic predisposition ("snares of the world") into conscious action.
The question Ed asks cannot, IMO, be answered through third-person analyses of objective data. But it can be answered. An ancient Zen poem talks about the path to answering the question:
I climb the route to Cold Mountain,
The route to Cold Mountain that never ends.
The Valley is long and strewn with stones;
The stream is broad and filled with thick grass.
The slabs are slippery though no rain has fallen;
Piņons sigh but it isn't the wind.
Who can break from the snares of the world
And stand with me among the white clouds?
Lastly, Healy said:
Those elegantly crafted 'laws', 'rules', and their use in defense and dismissal are quite gifted, but seem ultimately bankrupt when the bottom line always comes down to what in the end are phenomenological apologies.
The real question about the "laws" of mind concern their verity. They are all based on empirical evidence. For instance, if you can provide an empirical example of where third person objective data tells the entire story about 1st person subjective experience, then we can invalidate the Law that experience is not entirely reductive to third person data. Of course you cannot do so because at best, third person data is about the mechanisms related to experience, not to experience itself.
In fact the bottom line will always be our direct, first person human experience. It is inescapable so long as we are alive. That is our fundamental reality. Our thoughts or feelings about your objective functioning all occur within the orbit of our awareness which is part of our direct experience.
What makes this challenging for some is the simple and incontrovertible fact that this experience is not entirely reducible to third person data because first person, experiential data is not about objective functioning.
Chalmers and others made this clear in the 1990s. That's old news. If we can never move outside obsessing on objective functioning, everything will be seen in that light. Like they say, if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is why the science of mind must combine both subjecive and objective, first and third person elements present the whole picture on mind.
JL
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WBraun
climber
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Hell, ... even Ed knows he's not a machine .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Largo, you either misunderstood the question of decided not to answer it...
my question is:
how do you know I'm not a machine?
This isn't about how I know it, as you say, that is first person
rather, how does someone else know it?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 7, 2011 - 10:57pm PT
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Largo, you either misunderstood the question of decided not to answer it...
my question is:
how do you know I'm not a machine?
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Ed has asked a question that an entire branch of philosophy (epistemology) has struggled with for centuries: how do we, as individuals, know anything.
Per Ed not being a machine, I must have a working assumption or supposition that takes that as a starting point, based on my own experiences of working with my mechanical tendencies (genetics, personality, conditioning, etc.). "Not a machine" would in this instance hold that Ed has some modicum of free will between what girls he likes, beer he drinks, food he eats, routes he climbs and so on. A machine has no choice.
Working with assumptions makes it all possible. Chalmers uses the example of a physicist using perception to gather measurements about the external world, whereby they rely on the assumption that the external world exists, and that perception reflects the state of the external world. They cannot directly test this assumption, just as I cannot directly prove that Ed is not a machine.
Instead, in both cases these assumptions serve as a kind of background assumption for the whole field(s). It seems a reasonable assumption to make, and it makes science, and the study of mind, possible. Of course this goes for our assumptions about the conscious, 1st person subjective experiences and verbal reports of others. These seem to be reasonable assumptions to make, and they make the science of mind possible.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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These seem to be reasonable assumptions to make, and they make the science of mind possible
but they are just assumptions, and this falls far short of the sort of evidence you seem to be requiring of the very idea that physicalists might be onto something. The fact is, your theory of mind is a "third person" reductionist notion, that is, I seem to do the things you'd think I'd do if I had a mind like yours...
...but you wouldn't actually know if I weren't just some sort of sophisticated machine given that theory of mind, you cannot verify that I have first person experiences. At least no verification that you could do that would not be consistent with my being a machine.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 8, 2011 - 01:18am PT
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These seem to be reasonable assumptions to make, and they make the science of mind possible
but they are just assumptions, and this falls far short of the sort of evidence you seem to be requiring of the very idea that physicalists might be onto something. The fact is, your theory of mind is a "third person" reductionist notion, that is, I seem to do the things you'd think I'd do if I had a mind like yours...
...but you wouldn't actually know if I weren't just some sort of sophisticated machine given that theory of mind, you cannot verify that I have first person experiences. At least no verification that you could do that would not be consistent with my being a machine.
This seems like a lot of double talk, but perhaps I am still misunderstanding. I certainly don't have ONLY a 3rd person reductionist view of mind, because that excludes experience, which is our fundamental reality. A Science of mind must have both the objective AND experiential without violating the 3rd Law of Mind, that qualitatively speaking, the map IS the territory.
This is why Craig's statement that "mind" is only a biological machine is so profoundly false. If "mind" includes 1st person subjective experience, our fundamental human reality, then for Craig's notion to be true, he'd have to provide empirical evidence that subjective experience is itself, inherently, a mechanism. NOT that the evolved meat brain in directly correlated to mind, or that effects in the meat brain effect mind, or any of that, all of which is true. But none of the mechanistic workings that might or do underscore consciousness mean that said mechanisms are themselves experiential. This is of course transparently absurd. My experience of listening to Michael Petrucciani vids on Youtube is not the same thing as the locomotive I rode in yesterday, and my experience of eating the banana bread on the train is not the same thing as my wrist watch. That's because experience and mechanisms are not selfsame.
Logan tells of an interesting thought experiment for those who can't get their meat brains around the 3rd law of mind and glitch on the differences. Logan feels it is a fixation on "hard," billiard ball causation, where one thing "causes" the next thing and by dint of the direct causal link, their mind can justify saying the first and the second things (mechanism and consciousness) are the same.
The thought experiment says that we have a trombone player who is just great, and he plays on the trombone and "creates" a tune. Since the trombone and the tune share a direct causal link, that makes them the same things. Whats more, a woman hears the tune and cries. Owing to the causal link between the tune and the crying, which was "created" by the tune, the tune and the crying lady are the same things. The crying lady is angry that she is crying so she kicks her dog. Since all are created by the previous thing (b way of "hard causation") the dog is a trombone.
Of course this is meant to be preposterous, but it makes clear the falacy that a hard causal relation eliminates qualitative differences in things, by which two totally different things like machines and human experiences can be posited as selfsame by virtue of one supposedly following the other.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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how do you know I have a "mind"?
it seems a simple enough question to answer. Perhaps you don't like that answer.
The point is, you do not, unless you build a theory of mind which allows you to test you assumption. Your theory of mind is actually just a "third person" explanation (of my mind, it has to be) which is empirical, uses data (your experience), judgement and some idea of what the origin of mind is... and it is testable, which you do (as we all) by interaction and communication.
So even if you don't intend to, you are being a scientists, a reductionist... and your working idea of mind is based on squaring up your "first person experience" with "third person" data... that is, the observation of others. In fact, you cannot do it any other way since that is how we're "wired." It's how the machine works...
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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How do you know that you know anything? The only way is to be extremely skeptical, and even that is always subject to revision. Hell, maybe we all live in The Matrix.
Don't pull that Descartes stuff on me. He started with cogito ergo sum and ended up proving the existence of god.
Go read Simulacra and Simulation. Beaudrillard will twist your head. I also always recommend Plato's Allegory Of The Cave, but nobody reads it. You can find it online and it is really short. Hell, you can read a summary on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave
The entire notion of what is real is a very interesting topic.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 8, 2011 - 08:39pm PT
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Your theory of mind is actually just a "third person" explanation (of my mind, it has to be) which is empirical, uses data (your experience), judgement and some idea of what the origin of mind is... and it is testable, which you do (as we all) by interaction and communication.
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Not so. My bad here is that I haven't taken the time to present what I am driving at in any systematic way. Chalmers has done a lot of the work, unwinding the falacies that Dennett and others posited in the early 90s. But no, Ed, my theory of mind is not based on 3rd person data alone. 3rd person data is by nature about objectifying, usually focuses on behavior and brain funcion, and in any case is not first person data about subjective experience. When a third person perspective is used to evaluate someone else's first person experience, it is always a little sketchy, though a spouse might know from experience what the other is thinking and feeling. But a science of mind must incluse third-person data about behavior and brain function and first-person data about subjective experience. A satisfactory science of consciousness must admit both sorts of data.
Now directly to Ed's question, the information gathering techniques for 1st person subjective experience are not the same as for 3rd person measuring. We are in fact wired to operate in ways you might not be aware of in gathering said data. The reductive model is mainly about "how" because it focuses on ever more discrete bits of information believing that the smaller creates the bigger via bottom up causation. Working with 1st person subjective experience starts with the "all" (aka awareness or presence) and looks not so much at "why" as to "what" is there and what is happening. Paradoxically, we detach from our subjective experience and assume a 3rd person observer POV toward our own experiential process. What's stranger still is that a whole new kind of data starts emerging once the "observer" dissolves and we are no longer fused with memory.
More later.
JL
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WBraun
climber
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Base 104 -- "The entire notion of what is real is a very interesting topic."
Yes absolutely!!!
It's the only real subject matter worth living for.
All else is a worthless waste ......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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the idea of what we know is another topic.... I'm interested in how you know someone else is conscious...
it is really an induction from your own experience, and that induction is guided by your observations interacting with other people... however, you don't know for sure...
I'll await Largo's explanation, but it is he that is using inflated terms... he should simplify quite a bit. I suspect I'll be waiting for a long time.
The point is, from your induction you could be mislead into believing that something had a mind that didn't... or that something did not have a mind but did... a mind that perhaps you wouldn't recognize as such, it being at great variance with your own experience. The above sufferers of Anton-Babinski syndrome have a mind which is so at variance with our own belief in mind that we categorize them as being ill. Autistic people also have a mind quite unlike what most of us understand to be mind... it is possible that autism precludes the development of theory of mind.
It works both ways, certainly, our induction of what mind is, from our own experience, forms our theory of mind. Such a definition does not have the power to exclude other possible forms of mind.
How do you know I have a mind?
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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I'm imagining that we'll now have a discussion of solipsism. For figments of my imagination, you guys have the most interesting discussions. Really.
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Hilt
Social climber
Utah
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Self awareness, consciousness is "mind." Being aware, "minding a child, etc."
My ability to feel and analyze my responses is "mind."
Now what is soul??? It's something instinctual, knowledge without experience, awareness without thought. Now that is movement of the soul.
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Jingy
climber
Somewhere out there
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What do I do?
I feel as though I have risen above the concept of ascension... Therefore climbing has become irrelevant.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 9, 2011 - 12:25am PT
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It took me a little while thinking about what Ed was saying to understand what he meant but was not saying - or what I believe he means. True to form, Ed is focusing on objective functioning and uses various pathological models to show that "mind," in terms of said functioning, can vary extravagantly person to person. Perhaps Ed believes that owing to these variations, Laws of mind are rendered moot. But of course they wouldn't be "Laws" if they weren't based on empirical evidence and were more fundamental than the real differences we all have, person to person, including all our various pathologies.
Of course arriving at the Laws of mind involves induction, insofar that we "evaluate propositions that are abstractions of observations," but you need deductive reasoning to formulate laws.
Can't simplify it much more than that. But in fact just as you delve into increasingly difficult material the deeper you go into a study of objective functioning - be it an atom or a climbing anchor - delving into subjective experience is certain to leave people behind, just as some sciences leave folk behind who can't handle the math. Keep in mind that when someone can't hack the math, the complexity and difficulty of the math is not blamed for for people's inability to keep up. Of course no body expects to handle the math without practice, or by simply using their discursive mind, perhaps honed in some other discipline. Same will prove true for investigating subjective experience (as opposed to objective functioning), which involves a different mode of inquiry - we could hardly expect it to be otherwise. A great deal of practice and learning has to take place before even the basics become clear. The Laws are meant to provide a framework to avoid common traps, dead ends and mental circling.
But most of all this all has to be presented in a direct and systematic way .
JL
JL
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