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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 28, 2015 - 11:40am PT
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From Ed's link
Likewise, there is no reason to think that brains are exempt from the laws of computation. If the heart is a biological pump, and the nose is a biological filter, the brain is a biological computer, a machine for processing information in lawful, systematic ways.
If emotions were computationable, seems like we could predict their outcome more predictably.. Has any man here figured out a woman yet ;) seems like the Placebo effect shows our emotions ability to override the logical computation of the brain. The power of positive feeling alone can heal a body's ailment. And on the flip side a lineage of negative feelings can bring disease and even death to the body.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 28, 2015 - 11:59am PT
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Just decided to get back into Supertopo and see what's going on. All I can say is "Bless you , Ed Hartouni". I love to happen (with no effort of my own) upon ideas that seem obviously true to me that I had not really considered previously. This happens a lot when I read Ed's posts.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 28, 2015 - 12:36pm PT
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Thanks MikeL, for your thoughts on trance and consciousness. That was the clearest and most succinct explanation from the Buddhist point of view I've ever read.
Like Ed, I found your description of driving without thinking to be curious, particularly given the rest of your views. I regularly drive in that condition in places with which I'm familiar, and have never thought of it as dangerous. Rather, I find it demonstrates there are whole intelligent areas of mind we are not normally aware of. I also find, that discursive thinking while driving often gets me into trouble.
I have discovered for example, that I can not think about Japan for at least 20 minutes before getting in the car, or I will start off down the left hand side of the street every time. Likewise while driving, if my thoughts drift to Japan, I find I am suddenly in hyper alert mode, attributing the most illogical and dangerous motives to the by and large innocent, logical and law abiding American drivers. One of them pulls up to an intersection slowly, and I suddenly swerve to avoid them pulling out in front of me without looking as they would have in Japan.
Lately I have started thinking that my unconscious mind must have at least two layers/compartments for driving as does my conscious mind regarding different road rules. How they get crossed through discursive thinking is another wonder.
As for the brain being like a computer, I would note that historically, our metaphors reflect our physical surroundings. Think about the terms we use for sex for example. Most of them have originated with the industrial age starting with the word to screw someone and linguists would predict that in a generation or two, we shall have a whole new set of them reflecting the computer age or whatever comes next. Has sex changed in the process? I doubt it. Will there be a marvelous new invention after computers - probably. And will our language then reflect that the mind has a new metaphor. Most likely.
As for understanding women and using computer metaphors, the answer blue, is that men's programming is just not sophisticated or complex enough yet.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jun 28, 2015 - 01:26pm PT
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Criticism doesn't do much good without providing the correction.
As for metaphors, I could be missing something but it doesn't seem all that clear. See especially the last line of these quotes excerpted from Wiki.
Wiki:
"A metaphor is a figure of speech that identifies something as being the same as some unrelated thing for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the similarities between the two. While a simile compares two items, a metaphor directly equates them, and so does not necessarily apply any distancing words of comparison, such as "like" or "as".
One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature is the
"All the world's a stage" monologue from As You Like It:
My Edit: or perhaps "The mind/brain is a computer" ?
Wiki:
Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another (the target), or a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process.
In cognitive linguistics, the notion of conceptual metaphor may be equivalent to that of analogy."
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 28, 2015 - 02:02pm PT
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Face It, Your Brain Is a Computer
A computer ultimately has an operator that's NOT a computer that turns it on and programs it.
To make the comparison of brain equals computer is very very poor fund of knowledge that comes from materialistic body only consciousness.
"I" is the body is completely wrong and the real source of modern science's defective understanding ....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 28, 2015 - 05:27pm PT
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To make the comparison of brain equals computer is very very poor fund of knowledge that comes from materialistic body only consciousness.
Not so if there is an Operator.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jun 28, 2015 - 07:51pm PT
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The question is what or who is the operator of the mind? The observing entity within the mind that finds satisfaction in its knowing, that revels in a sure sense of epistemological certainty.
I believe that entity is the soul. I call it the soul for lack of a better term.
I don’t know if that individual soul is eternal, but the structure of soul, in the general sense, does share a kind of eternity with the very structure of the universe, its arche, its physical limits, the strange structure of consciousness itself and structures forming inevitably within a context of what may very well be the eternal nature of the universe.
The argument that a brain is a computer or at least some “kind of computer” a machine, fails to deal with this very strange conscious element of self-realization as arbitrator of information and action within all humanity. All existing computers are slaves to that arbitrating, deciding human element and they (machines/computers) are nothing without it. Without humanity all a computer can produce is information unrealized.
To define the mind/brain as a machine or as machine produced diminishes it. Structures as products of human thought remain remarkably distinct from structures that exist by nature. Robert Smithson made a career out of demonstrating this idea.
A watch discovered on the beach has a structure that tells us immediately it's a product of human action and we might marvel at its complexity. The rock that happens to be next to it seems infinitely less sophisticated and far cruder until examined more closely when the structure of that rocks crystalline formations and macrocosmic complexity make the watch’s complexity seem reductive and primitive by comparison.
Humans create machinations/machines as imitations of what they find around themselves but are distanced by something more than complexity from replicating creation/nature, except as metaphor.
Declaring mind a product of evolution based on the proclivities of survival denies what the human mind desires:
What are the things that we find make life worth living? Aren’t they the profound experiences of the human mind. Where is evolution when one is willing to forbear procreation for the sake of personal experience or for the sake of personal fulfillment? What is that deep-seated need for fulfillment within the soul that defies the dictates of nature. Is this nature gone awry or the noble rebellion of humanity with regard to the real purpose of life?
The soul begs to be fulfilled, to realize that which is its potential and in that is a kind of nobility. The search for a moral life, right thinking, reason, decency… in all its errors and fallibilities, in a very general sense, the human mind seeks these things.
As Matthew Arnold said, “ Regarding this hairy quadruped, arboreal in nature, there must have been something that compelled him to Greek!
Mind is more than simply the product of a machine.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jun 28, 2015 - 08:15pm PT
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"To define the mind/brain as a machine or as machine produced diminishes it." -Paul R
"The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it." Neil deGrasse Tyson
Maybe another Matthew Arnold quote applies to you?
"Caught between two worlds, one dead and the other powerless to be born." -M Arnold
Maybe?
.....
The rock that happens to be next to it seems infinitely less sophisticated and far cruder until examined more closely when the structure of that rocks crystalline formations and macrocosmic complexity make the watch’s complexity seem reductive and primitive by comparison.
Now compare your "rock's crystalline formations" to the mind-brain's neural formations. 100 trillion interconnections, participating in thousands of circuit functions.
Another Tyson quote...
"It's important to have your mind blown everyday."
:)
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Jun 28, 2015 - 08:23pm PT
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PR said"The soul begs to be fulfilled, to realize that which is its potential and in that is a kind of nobility. The search for a moral life, right thinking, reason, decency… in all its errors and fallibilities, in a very general sense, the human mind seeks these things."
This sounds more like Ego, "I", to me.
My experience has been when the begging for fulfillment drops away , every thing is as it is. Buddhist's call this "enough mind" it is an observational mind that listens by doesn't criticize or judge. There is no stress because you have no need to make things different because you are just listening an paying attention to what ever is going on.
This isn't to say that you may not take action if necessary; it is a fully awake experience and there is also no fear so taking action is unhindered.
Thanks for sharing PR maybe we are trying to say the same thing.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jun 28, 2015 - 08:39pm PT
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Neither nature investigation nor science nor mind-brain mechanics need be nearly as alienating as you seem to make them...
Whether it is the demotion of pluto as a planet or the human mind as brain process and body control system or our insignificance against the backdrop of billions of galaxies and billions of years... Tyson's mantra / challenge works...
"Get over it."
It worked for millions. It continues to work for millions. Just read his followers comments on twitter for proof, for eg. (Many thousands of them are millenials, btw.)
How ironic that such a sense of "alienating" to the extent it exists is itself a perception, a product of mind brain.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 28, 2015 - 09:20pm PT
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Leo Szilard's imitation of Werner Braun's STForum avatar? pretty good, especially because it anticipated the STForum by something like 70 years...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 28, 2015 - 09:42pm PT
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Today I saw an ant colony dispersing. Hundreds of winged females and smaller winged males were emerging from the ground, climbing to higher places, and taking to the air. Their movements looked haphazard and clumsy. On the ground they zig-zagged randomly, when climbing they often changed direction, on high places they spent a lot of time shuffling around and checking out each other, and when taking off they often went down instead of up.
You would place low odds on any individual ant contributing to the start of a new colony.
However, almost no animals or plants stay in one place generation after generation. It seems that for a species to be successful in the long run it must always be looking for new habitable niches, no matter how suitable the territory it occupies at the moment is.
Humans feel the urge to move, too. First we travelled out of Africa, then to the New World, and today there are people willing to go to Mars just to be there briefly and then die there.
Now that humans have taken geographical dispersal about as far as they can, the same ancient urge to look over the next hill may be finding expression in the mental landscape. New ways of looking at the world emerge, They may appear haphazard and clumsy. The odds of any particular new idea being around years from now may be low.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 28, 2015 - 09:43pm PT
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the sentiments expressed in paul roehl's response above regarding the mind as a product of a machine certainly harken back to European traditions. The idea that there is something more to life, not just human life, is an ancient surmise. That surmise leads to many subsequent traditional themes, the soul, the meaning of life, the nobility to seek a place beyond the cruelties and harshness of life in the wild.
Of course, all of these the construction of our mind, and communicated by our language, probably first as stories and later as written text. Stretching back 5000 to 10000 years.
Without the insight of modern science one has no idea of what a biological molecular machine is, or a biologically realized organism which functions with many machine like parts. When we think of these things, particularly without knowing the details of the biology, we imagine them in the only way we have to understanding machines, first, that machines are built by "someone."
One has to realize, at some point, that our bias in this comes primarily by our human experience. As far as most of us know, machines are built by "someone." We couldn't imagine a machine being built by evolution, for instance, let alone a "computer" being built and programmed by evolution. Yet we stand at a time, in the rather brief history of science, on the threshold of such a description.
It is more wonderful, more awesome, that we are "merely" the product of this natural process, and that we are "just" the result of a material process of evolution. That seems so incredibly unlikely in some ways, and that it is not unlikely (as it has happened) is just a wonder.
As for the meaning of life, why look for anything more profound than the serendipity of our existence, and that we have a life ever so briefly that we should never loss that "thrill of living." Why not use it fully, what more meaning do you need than the fact that we live.
I don't think anything is diminished by the fact that we are a part of nature, governed by all the same processes as everything else. Nothing less, nothing more.
We are just stardust. That's all you need (well, maybe a little help from the dark matter too).
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 28, 2015 - 09:49pm PT
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Atma (soul) is NOT a construction of the mind.
It is the life force itself ......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 28, 2015 - 09:55pm PT
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Atma (soul) is NOT a construction of the mind.
Atma is a construction of the mind to provide an explanation of life... a very old explanation lacking any understanding of biology.
There are other constructions that provide explanations that use our modern understanding of biology.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 28, 2015 - 09:56pm PT
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PR maybe we are trying to say the same thing.
i hope not. Paul's sounded like a beckoning to a wide open universe with the opportunity for boundless experiences perpechuated by our hunger and desire for our ever growing and maturing emotional states of Joy at one extreme, and at the other extreme hate. To be as a child full of awe and naive of fear ready to experience each opportunity full of love with bridleless emotion. To celebrate Life with a pursuit for an even more joyus day tomorrow, then that of today. All of this done outwardly, towards the infinite universe.
Please don't think i'm being hateful, only observent. But your descriptions of the zen way. To sit still,eyes closed with a grin being filled with bliss just seems to be harkening only to your "I". All inwardly. Nonsharing of YOUR blissfulness or love. On top of that youve described an abandonment of some emotions like pain, grief, anger, etc. the ones your "I" has deemed unuseful or negative to your bliss. Have you never felt or heard of great demonstrations of grief or anger directed maturely to bring about even greater feelings of joy or love to the experiencer, and more than often also to those witnessing around him?
Please don't hold it against me if i'm wrong in my a*#esement. i'm jus trying to figure out why some people seem afraid of their feelings..
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jun 28, 2015 - 10:03pm PT
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BRAINS AS COMPUTERS
Gary Marcus in the NYT’s is entitled to his opinion that brains are computers.
More and more, research in cognition has increasing doubts for many reasons. Computer-as-brain implies there is no need for bodies, that all cognition is what happens in heads, and that the meaning of symbols can be derived from other symbols. The metaphor is “mindless.”
Almost a century of research in thinking, emotion, concrete and abstract concepts has used a theory of arbitrary symbols operating in rule-based systems. This widely held theory requires transductions of stimuli into higher representational languages which are inherently non-perceptual. It uses a system of arbitrary symbols, computation, predicate calculus, and semantic nets. Hence, cognition is independent of body.
Increasingly converging recognitions across many fields suggests that perceptual and cognitive systems share common neural systems and functions. That is, they are grounded or embodied.
The grounding problem: how do abstract symbols possess meaning of referents? (Remember the triangle diagram I posted above from Ogden and Richards?) How are symbols mapped to and from the real world?
Symbols in a computer are manipulated based on shape not on intrinsic meaning (just like the symbols on this screen have no meaning in themselves). Computational outputs (in response to inputs) rely on mindless, non-mental applications of algorithms that determine new sets of tokens or token strings. But where do the meanings come in? Using a computer metaphor, the meaning of one symbol can only be derived from its relations with other symbols, which themselves have no meaning and so must be understood in terms of other abstract meaningless symbols *ad infinitum.* Where does that rest?
Embodied cognition argues that thought, emotion, and abstract concepts arise through the senses, through bodily movement and through introspections about physical perceptions. Knowledge corresponds to the perceptual states that produce them (ala, direct experience). You need a body to have consciousness.
Let’s say we need to understand directions in a foreign language (say, Chinese). But all we have is a Chinese-Chinese dictionary. How will we ever understand anything when the dictionary simply relates one abstract symbol to another—and that to another, and that to another? Ungrounded, symbols cannot be connected to their referents. No mind, and no meaning.
Amodal theories (ala, computer metaphors) may have Turing machine power because they can express any pattern. It’s argued they can explain everything—and hence nothing. While no result can disconfirm the computer model, the model only provides an *after the fact* description, rather *a priori.* It is not predictive, and it is not parsimonious.
If philosophy were a concern, the computer metaphor fails to overcome the dualism it tries to refute. The computer metaphor retains a conceit that the sense of self resides somewhere in the brain. But 'representation' and 'retrieval' maintain a dualistic perspective. To whom are the symbols being represented? Where are the memories being retrieved to? Science here is not representing cognition as a dynamic system that includes brain, body, and environment. Cognition is disembodied and unworldly.
If you’re interested in a model of cognition, it is a poor one. Try grounded or embodied cognition, instead. For my views here on this thread (and others’), it requires direct experience. Thought alone won’t do.
METAPHORS
Metaphors (in cognition and linguistics) are generally seen as structural mappings based upon not meaning or usage but the similarities in structures (e.g., atoms are like solar systems). But expertise or domain-specific experience is needed (like Largo and others continue to say) to properly understand and apply them. Without direct experience in a domain of question, metaphors are ungrounded, and they are unlikely to refer to or represent reality well enough for proper understanding. People must have direct experience in both base and target domains. Naïve subjects may say someone is a gorilla when he or she is a bullying lunk; yet gorillas are shy and not particularly aggressive. Naïve subjects may call something a “quantum leap” intending to mean it is very large, yet quanta are tiny; they have in common only that they are sudden rather than gradual.
Most scientific views are structurally-oriented. (They are biased in that way.)
MY DANGEROUS DRIVING
I’m a little surprised that folks would have picked on a choice of words (“dangerous”) to describe concerns about driving while being mentally “somewhere else.” When I learned how to drive, I was told I should be “defensive.” Accidents on three motorcycles and a few significant automobile accidents has reinforced that guidance in my lifetime. (Perhaps I’m just a poor operator.)
If a scientific principle is required, instead, for understanding my views on “being here and now behind the wheel,” then I’ll say that neuroscientists in this area argue that one should find ways to be relaxed but vigilant—living in “hot cognition” but ready to call on cold cognition should one get into trouble. I find driving automobiles inherently dangerous in my little world.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 28, 2015 - 10:04pm PT
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Atma is a construction of the mind to provide an explanation of life.
No it is not.
Atma is a non material sound vibration.
The mind is material but can sync to either the material or spiritual consciousness ......
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 28, 2015 - 10:09pm PT
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what more meaning do you need than the fact that we live.
I don't think you may have gotten the full jist of his post? maybe you did.
But your's seems like a copout for an exploring scientist. You've already given up on the "hard question"?
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Jun 28, 2015 - 10:14pm PT
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Atma is a construction of the mind to provide an explanation of life... a very old explanation lacking any understanding of biology.
Then again, those old Vedic and Kundalini dudes did seem to have more than a glimmer of a clue about the functionality of the nervous and endocrine systems. Without modern technology or methodology they were still way ahead of their contemporaries in those areas.
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