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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 26, 2011 - 12:18am PT
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it's all mind-brain mechanics.
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All right, Fruity. What, exactly, is experience? I am not asking from where you believe it came from (matter), or what "caused" it, or the atomic activity that runs alongside of it, nor yet the objective functioning from which many believe experience springs.
Mind-brain mechanics are . . . mind-brain mechanics. Nowhere in any mechanical breakdown are you talking about experience. And we already know that fatuous comments like "experience is what the brain does," or "experience lies in the atoms," are both rhetorical falacies, veiled and failed attempts to overcome a Law of Mind: that the map (brain mechanics) is NOT the territory (experience). Closely associated, surely. The very same - no cigar.
This is subtle stuff and it's fun to see people suddenly grasp the fact that - until one of us becomes omniscient - a person can never have a 3rd person experience. Funny thing is that some posts back, Ed was saying that all of us subjectively create our own worlds, each for ourselves - a classic example of "the one and the many" paradox running through all philosophy from way, way back there.
From the POV or our singular, subjective, 1st person experience, we embrace a multiplicity (the "many") of worlds.
JL
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Oct 26, 2011 - 12:48am PT
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i had an extremely close relationship with my first girl friend
one night following a long session of lovemaking, we swapped bodies
i got up half asleep to go to the bathroom
i walked down the hallway and was very surprised to notice myself wearing her green nightgown
a few moments later and wide awake; i was even much more surprised to discover i was wearing her body
after a little while i returned to the bedroom to find her awake and quite distraught to discover herself inhabiting my male body
we got back together in bed and kind-of sorted things out
for years after that we were like one person with two bodies; which led to various unusual side effects
our friends were always amazed at how we could coordinate information from a distance without talking to each other
our friends eventually got into the habit of addressing either or both of us with a merger of our two names
(short version that i rarely share of a long story )
kinda hard for me to accept mechanistic theories of mind after these experiences
i appreciate all the scientific analysis; but i have personal knowledge about certain aspects of all this
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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Oct 26, 2011 - 12:04pm PT
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What we live as experience is output of the brain circuitry. That is the paradox that Pinker and Harris, for example, suggest we might not be able to ever fully wrap our minds around. Look at this way: 10 billion neurons sporting 100 trillion interconnections aren't just making hay. If they're not making sentience or memory streams, what else would they be doing? Eh? As I said, my lifelong experience in electronics, neuroscience, etc. convinced me the mind-brain model is the most reasonable one for who I am. I remain convinced even as I've moved on from these fields. Notwithstanding Cochrane's shot above, this exquisite mind-brain model has worked pretty good for me over the years as I employ it in my own practice of living. It kept me out of drugs, it incentivizes me to wear a helmet when climbing, it motivates me and humbles all at the same time.
Again, what are those 100 trillion interconnections doing if not making up these super-sophisticated "positronic" circuits. I have a term for it: biomagic or biomagic miracle or biomagic wonder. All mechanistic. No brain, no experience. And that's okay, I'm fine with it. Long ago I came to terms with life as a one-shot deal. Bev Johnson: "I do not look to any further life, but this one was life enough..."
EDIT to ADD
Let's face it: If we lived 500 years ago (a) in the absence of modern scientific and analytical bio-engineering accounts of ourselves and how we work - all of us no doubt would accept the ghost-machine model as the most reasonable model to explain the mysteries of body control and the mysteries of our thoughts and feelings and to go forward with in our practice of living. So we've come a long way even though week to week or post to post it doesn't seem so.
Oh, almost forgot, (b) chances are we wouldn't be climbing in the Sierra. So it's all good. :)
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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA
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Oct 26, 2011 - 12:29pm PT
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Anyone can change their mind without changing any physical laws of the universe or system constraints.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 26, 2011 - 01:29pm PT
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Fruity has show one way to look at human life - from the purely mechanistic angle. He mentions a paradox, which implies that the opposite of the purely mechanistic POV is equally in play. That would be the 1st person subjectve. So if we were to approach this whole business of mind not from the POV of bottom up casality of the meat brain, but from the "output" of same, how might it all look?
JL
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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA
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Oct 26, 2011 - 01:54pm PT
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If experience is simply the rush of feeling or sensation, then there's nothing interesting about it. The interest lies in what do we make of experience? Meaning is not a question of science; it's a humanities question.
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wack-N-dangle
Gym climber
the ground up
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Oct 26, 2011 - 02:20pm PT
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"So if we were to approach this whole business of mind not from the POV of bottom up casality of the meat brain, but from the "output" of same, how might it all look?"
I think what he meant was something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX0XVEmwlfs
have you seen, have you felt, have you been, etc.
I still contend that it is all biochemical. How can it not be? Experience plays a role. Much like a computer than can run new software. It is still the same framework.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Oct 26, 2011 - 02:50pm PT
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Fantasy and reality are different things
congratulations on naming the heart of this discussion
and that is a very convenient way to look at it, so you don't have to think too much
if you are serious about this discussion; perhaps you should seriously reconsider that statement
it is easy to accept the idea that you know what reality is; bounded by the limits of your personally processed experience
it seems the prevailing reasoning method here is to claim that an unacceptable expression of reality need not be seriously considered; but simply labeled as someone else's fantasy
If you don't like it, you can flap your arms and fly away.
we haven't gotten quite that far yet; but working on it with paragliders, wingsuits, skyray, griffin, etc
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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA
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Oct 26, 2011 - 05:03pm PT
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Tom, I have to say that is the most amazing story I have read on Supertopo yet.
It's gutsy of you to post it.
Wow on both counts.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A community of hairless apes
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Oct 26, 2011 - 06:11pm PT
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Indeed, this is a fine example of where crucial decision making plays its fundamental role in the practice of living.
Also, it's at this point where naysayers will typically confuse "crucial decision-making" with close-mindedness. And then try to convince others to join them in this confusion.
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The maddening elusiveness of 1st person consciousness or sentience to 3rd person observation/detection makes one wonder...
what OTHER evolved "tricks" might be out there... happening even right now under our noses...
that evolution working through the media of matter-energy and natural laws (physics, chemistry...) has devised perhaps over a gazillion regenerations. Exciting matter (pun) to ponder.
Afterall, who says 1st person consciousness (or, first person sentience) has to be the only one? that is, the ONLY "maddening elusiveness" in situ?
Fun food for thought for interested hairless apes. :)
.....
No, on second thought, scratch that. Whatever "OTHER" would be, it would have to result from natural selection over many regenerations. As this would require living things, the "maddening elusiveness" of consciousness is probably the BIG ONE at least as far as complexity or complex mysteries go.
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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA
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Oct 26, 2011 - 07:32pm PT
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I'm slow. Explain that please.
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MH2
climber
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Oct 27, 2011 - 12:12am PT
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So it is not enough to merely explain experience as a product of nervous activity, we must then explain how meaning is created?
We aren't anywhere near the stage where such questions can be framed in a way that permits an answer. If you want to ask what experience is, you need to narrow your focus. I will narrow it down to asking why a chimp in a lab setting might suddenly get up and go over to check a box that food sometimes appears in. You can start synchronizing the appearance of the food to a light or a sound. You can monitor brain activity and see what happens and when. The skeptic may object that we haven't detected experience, just a response to a stimulus. We reply that somewhere between the stimulus and the response, experience must lie or branch off. We discuss our various conceptions and understandings and our findings and refine our approach and devise other tests to locate experience in the brain.
Or if you are willing to narrow the focus further, you may consider the "fear response" of the sea slug Aplysia. I have no trouble believing that a creature of several hundred neurons might experience fear and what is more is capable of attaching meaning to it: get the Hell out of here.
http://www.mendeley.com/research/associative-learning-aplysia-evidence-conditioned-fear-invertebrate/
We humans may think we have different problems but the fundamentals remain the same. Eat. Avoid getting eaten. Reproduce.
Asking what experience is is like asking, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" It has its place but trying to answer it misses the point.
A strange and wonderful story from Tom. No more strange and wonderful than other stories, though, for example this description of Quantum Field Theory in relation to brain:
from Symmetries in Science XI
Bruno Gruber, Giuseppe Marmo, Naotaka Yoshinaga
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MH2
climber
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Oct 27, 2011 - 12:26am PT
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I'll volunteer instead to research the question Tom raised.
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
I'm James Brown, Bi-atch!
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Oct 27, 2011 - 12:37am PT
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what is potato?
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Oct 27, 2011 - 12:39am PT
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Oct 26, 2011 - 02:03pm PT
Tom, I have to say that is the most amazing story I have read on Supertopo yet.
It's gutsy of you to post it.
Wow on both counts.
thank you, MikeL
that story is unusual, but not an isolated instance
it is amazing to me that a discussion within such a well educated and experienced group as on this thread can stick to such a myopic subset of the available material; including a wide scope of peer reviewed scientific papers
Largo is clearly knowledgeable and yet being very gentle with certain fragile concepts of reality
it is no accident that some of the majorly funded black programs have to do with paranormal phenomena and psych ops techniques; particularly electromagnetic thought control equipment
it is also no accident that the scientific community has been constrained to ridicule such studies, or at least represent them as discreditable
it is very dangerous to mention anything from these deep black programs
and you all know about my aversion for dangerous activities
so you are going to have to do some of your own homework
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Oct 27, 2011 - 12:46am PT
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Well, Tom . . . what can one say?
You've taken this thread on a very strange way
The swap you describe does boggle the wits
nevertheless, tell me how big were your tits??
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Oct 27, 2011 - 12:51am PT
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lol, Jogill, you have always had a talent for getting straight to the basics...
let me just say that i am not even the least bit gay or a cross dresser, and my girl friend was very cute
and they weren't mine; just a wrong turn in the mind meld...
and yes the experience did pretty much boggle my wits at the time
Edit: actually not so much boggle my wits as to bring me up against a reality that was quite different than what i had always early thought to be true
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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA
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Oct 27, 2011 - 12:53am PT
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I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, Toto.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Oct 27, 2011 - 12:57am PT
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have you heard me comment before that 'we have much to learn'?
i make no claims to know it all; just that a lot of commonly accepted 'knowledge' doesn't always hold up across the broader experience base of what we naively call 'reality'
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Santa Cruz Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Oct 27, 2011 - 01:00am PT
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FortMental,
yeah, just where was it on the gradient scale of awareness that we designated 'ridicule of new information'?
and congratulations on rapidly crafting five lines; each of which contains a lie
not sure what that might say about you...
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