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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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Oct 28, 2011 - 01:57pm PT
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Just want to jump in and say any proposed answers or speculations that seperate humans from the rest of the natural world is kind of sad to me. I do think humans hold a special place, but I don't think we should deny our evolution and connection to earlier and co-existing life forms and the connection to the universe as a whole. Love has been around for longer than humans and other beings enjoy it too. Is there a better use of mind than love?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 28, 2011 - 02:14pm PT
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Ed wrote:
Of course, this is the point that Largo has been lambasting us about for a while, the idea of causality, which he rejects as being an unprovable assertion. Taking Largo's philosophical point that there is no reason for this to be true, it is amply tested empirically, and the very means of knowing whether or not it is a least an excellent approximation to reality are contained in that very same empirical method.
WHERE ED LOSES HIS WAY HERE, IMO, IS IN BELIEVING THAT ALL PHENOMENON IN THE UNIVERSE IS QUALATATIVELY THE SAME, THAT 1ST PERSON SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE, THAT THE VERY EXPERIENCE OF BEING ED OUT THERE ON THOSE GRISLY OFF-WIDTH CRACKS, IS THE EXACT SAME THING AS A JUMAR AND A PEAR TREE, AND CAN BE CONSIDERED, MEASURED, WEIGHTED, AND QUALTIFIED IN THE VERY SAME WAY AS WELL.
WHAT EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE IS THIS BASED ON SAVE FOR THE "SECOND HARD QUESTION?" TO ME IT FEELS LIKE SOMEONE YELLING AT LIEBINZ'S MACHINE THAT IT (THE MECHANISM) IS REALLY AND TRULY THE SUBJECTIVE FACT OF ED CLIMBING THOSE HORRIBLE OFF WIDTH CRACKS. SAME THING. THAT SEEMS TO ME SUCH A LUDICROUS ASSERTION I HAVE TO LAUGH.
Not to distract the arguments so far, this gets back to Largo's frustration with "knowing what the real explanation is!" In a scientific approach where we refine an approximation of reality, we collect the observations and formulate a physical model or a theory of the phenomena, which has the feature that the observables are evident, and maybe even the finer points of the model have some inner logic.
NOW THE ABOVE STATES THE CHALLENGE IN A NUTSHELL. "WE COLLECT THE OBSERVATIONS." SO WITH 1ST PERSON EXPERIENCE, WE COLLECT A BUNCH OF SUBJECTIVE INFORMATION, AND FROM WITHIN THE SUBJECTIVE BUBBLE, WE DETACH AND OBJECTIFY OUR EXPERIENCE TO VARYING DEGREES AND GET MORE DATA, MORE INFO. NOW DOES IT FOLLOW THAT "FORMULATING A PHYSICAL MODEL" IS THE NEXT STEP, OR ARE WE DOING THIS SIMPLY BECAUSE THAT'S THE WAY WE HAVE ALWAYS DONE IT WITH STANDARD MATERIAL "THINGS," AND WE DO IT HERE SECRETLY HOPING THAT WE CAN WRITE OFF EXPERIENCE AS BEING QUALITATIVELY DIFFERENT THAN THAT PEAR TREE AND AVOID HAVING TO WORK UP ANOTHER APPROACH.
AS MENTIONED, THE TRICKY PART HERE IS THAT IN "FORMULATING A PHYSICAL MODEL," WE INVARIABLY END UP WITH LIBNIZ'S MACHINE, NOT EXPERIENCE. AND THAT LEADS US TO VIOLATE THE 2ND RULE OF MIND: THE MAP (PHYSICAL MODEL) IS NOT THE TERRITORY (EXPERIENCE).
Questions worth asking are:
From a 1st person subjective POV, what is the empirical qualitative difference between your experience and a can of beans?
From a 3rd person objective POV, what is the empirical qualitative difference between experience and a can of beans?
JL
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go-B
climber
Sozo
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Oct 28, 2011 - 02:32pm PT
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He who smelt it or dealt it?
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Oct 28, 2011 - 02:48pm PT
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The problem as stated involves perfect communication.
Otherwise there is no third person objective experience. You take someone's word for it. Kind of like religion. Or sex with your buddy's hot girlfriend.
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MH2
climber
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Oct 28, 2011 - 02:49pm PT
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Imagine a state of mind in which there is no thought, no sense of self, no sense of non-self. Imagine that this mind has an eye and that the eye regards a screen of uniform blue. Then a square appears within the field of blue. It could be any color but call it red. The image of the square travels via the optics and sensory transduction of the eye into the mind.
Does the mind react to the square? Does it experience the square? How does it react? How does it experience?
The mind that was used to ask these questions had about a billion neurons and a trillion synapses. It was built to simulate visual cortex and some of its major connections to the thalamus and reticular nucleus.
It isn't easy to summarize the activity of such a simulation, but all of it can be examined, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse, if desired.
A couple quotes from David Chalmers:
"We have seen that there are systematic reasons why the usual methods of cognitive science and neuroscience fail to account for conscious experience. These are simply the wrong sort of methods: nothing that they give to us can yield an explanation."
"After all, almost everyone allows that experience arises one way or another from brain processes, and it makes sense to identify the sort of process from which it arises."
Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness
David J. Chalmers
[Published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3):200-219, 1995]
http://consc.net/papers/facing.html
From the cortical simulation:
The cat is out of the bag: cortical simulations with 10^9 neurons, 10^13 synapses
Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, Steven K. Esser, Horst D. Simon, Dharmendra S. Modha
Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Computing Networking, Storage and Analysis
ACM New York, NY 2009
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Oct 28, 2011 - 03:16pm PT
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Yep. That 3 pound hunk of flesh is a damn amazing thing. Too bad that you can't take it apart, tinker with it, and put it back together again.
Lots of work to be done in neuroscience. Each new tool seems to give new insights, though.
Mike L's post above was nice. This thread is way fun to follow.
I do see a problem with adequately communicating. It would be much better to spend a month by the fire in J Tree inviting "experts."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 28, 2011 - 03:18pm PT
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MH2, you've just described Libniz's machine, but with more detail.
If we had all the details, all the 3rd person info per objective functioning, what do you feel this might tell us about experience? This gets back to my earlier question: What is the empirical, qualitative difference between 1st person subjective experience, and 3rd person data on objective functioning, such as you just provided.
JL
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Oct 28, 2011 - 03:22pm PT
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Maybe it is a typo, but I thought you said:
First person subjective "qualitative"
and
3rd person objective "quantitative"
Conveying experience or info or wah wah wah wha is very touchy stuff. There is an entire symbology developed in most areas of interest to avoid problems in communication. Numbers or whatever.
It depends on what is is. After laying off of this place for a while, I re-read this and it seems that adequately communicating these ideas falls a little flat now and then.
Do not lose heart.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Oct 28, 2011 - 03:37pm PT
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The pre-WWII meaning of the noun "computer" was a person employed for the purpose of doing a computation. At Los Alamos, Feynman had a group which performed computations, each individual computer (a person) used the inputs from other computers (persons) and passed the result along to the next... a macroscopic program organized in steps. This was not atypical of those times when large computations needed to be performed.
The model that the brain, and its functioning, is physical (be it mechanical, electromagnetic, chemical, etc) is compelling, though the simple models are shown to be inadequate to explain all of the phenomena regarding brain function and behavior (thought, consciousness, sentience, etc are all behaviors). The models are more and more complex, and explain more and more...
The question regarding where sensation of "experience" comes from is probably much more complicated than some simple philosophical answer... it does, after all, require the description of a time-dependent, near real-time, computation (in this physical model) of a number of sensory inputs to be transformed into a set of responses... anyone who's done this sort of thing "in the real world" knows how daunting that description is for much much simpler systems.
I still don't know where to find the "laws of consciousness" that Largo is referring to, I tend to discount such statements asserting "laws" that do not rise up to a level of explanation that is at least available to be read... violating such "laws" incurs no penalty in arguments that do so, as such "laws" have no basis.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Oct 28, 2011 - 03:38pm PT
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If we had all the details, all the 3rd person info per objective functioning, what do you feel this might tell us about experience? This gets back to my earlier question: What is the empirical, qualitative difference between 1st person subjective experience, and 3rd person data on objective functioning, such as you just provided.
OK. I see a very tough problem with "the details." Sharing emipirical information depends on the quality of the communication between two parties.
Subjective, Objective, Qualitative, Quantitative.
Geez. Let me try to describe what I did this morning. To get it all right would be longer than War and Peace. Lots of stuff. Took a breath there. Blinked here. Scratched my nads there.
I see a very real problem with communication between individuals. True total communication is far deeper than I could imagine.
"Everything tastes like chicken."
Think about it. The experience is there, whether real or imagined. The definition of what is objective and subjective gets really wormy when sharing experiences with others. What would chicken really taste like if you were to borrow someone else's body?
That is the reason that in math and physics, there is rich symbology to avoid errors in communication. If only art were so easy.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 28, 2011 - 05:05pm PT
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Ed wrote:
"The model that the brain, and its functioning, is physical (be it mechanical, electromagnetic, chemical, etc) is compelling."
It's not only compelling, it is a simple fact since the brain is a thing and "functioning" can never be less than 3rd person objective data. Hence the 2nd Hard Question of Mind.
But a "brain" mechanically described is exactly Libniz's machine - tell us otherwise - and the "functioning" is exactly the "figures and motions" the great mathematician described in the late 1700s.
Simple question, Ed: What do you see as the qualitative difference between 3rd person data on material functioning, and subjective experience?
Incidentally, the "penalty" for breaking a Law of Mind is usually confusion for you, in that you will invariably confuse 1st and 3rd person realities, or lump them together as qualitative equals.
JL
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Oct 28, 2011 - 05:58pm PT
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"And so, to sum it all up, I perceive everything I say as absolutely true, and deficient in nothing whatever, and paint it all in my mind exactly as I want it to be."
"And the good gentleman was so far gone in his fantasy that neither the touch, the smell, nor anything else about the good damsel -- which would have made anyone but a muledriver vomit -- disillusioned him in the slightest."
Don Quijote
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Klimmer
Mountain climber
San Diego
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Oct 28, 2011 - 06:09pm PT
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I just wanted to say I'm gonna miss HFCS.
C'mon. Really. I'm gonna miss him.
My eyes are getting misty as I type.
Oops. Mybad? That was the onion I was just cutting for my late lunch/early dinner.
HFCS, When you do return, come back nicer. Advice for another day.
Take care.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 28, 2011 - 07:53pm PT
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Okay, Marlow, now that you're out of that corner (hide the liquor and children), I answered your questions. Now honestly answer mine.
1. What do you see as the qualitative difference between 3rd person data on material functioning, and subjective experience? IOWs, how is your experience of listening to music qualitatively different than, say, a can of worms?
2. The Libniz thought experiment (below) was meant to show the paradox that while life simultaneously thrusts us between 1st and 3rd person, subjective and objective, and material and experiential realities, the 3rd person objective POV can never pierce the veil of the subjective, nor is any actual subjective substance ever found within Libniz's "machine" (matter). Do you find that Libniz has sufficiently show that the above is true, and if not, why?
It is interesting to note the havoc caused by the 1st person subjective. Even though, without exception, it is our only POV to the world, and our principal reality, because experiential is not itself a material thing, people go for the next best option and claim it is an "effect" of matter, ergo it IS matter, ergo we are not 1st person humans at all, we are now 3rd person Gods. Yet even God can't find experience inside Libniz's machine.
JL
In 1698, Gottfried Leibniz wrote:
It must be confessed that experience and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds - that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have experience, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain an experience.
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MH2
climber
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Oct 28, 2011 - 10:04pm PT
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In 1698, Gottfried Leibniz wrote:
It must be confessed that experience and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds - that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have experience, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain an experience.
It would be helpful to have more context. He has already supposed that the machine has experience, so it is really his inability to find it that is unexplained, not the existence of and implementation of the experience.
Can you provide a reference?
Yes, he has envisioned a simulation of thinking, feeling, and experience. Why does he not accept the implication that these properties, or functions, could be implemented in mechanical form?
To turn the binoculars around, if we shrunk you down small enough to look inside a human brain, would you find anything "by which to explain experience?"
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Oct 29, 2011 - 12:07am PT
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Simple question, Ed: What do you see as the qualitative difference between 3rd person data on material functioning, and subjective experience?
I'm not sure what, precisely, the "subjective experience" is, though I am entirely familiar with it... certainly there are things that go on in my body, including my brain, that happen quite outside the realm of my "subjective experience."
If you ask me to conjecture, my feeling is that experience is some property of the interaction of all the bits of behavior that make up our "mental" states. A physical analog would be something like "temperature."
Temperature is not a property of anything. We certainly experience it, we have both subjective and objective descriptions of it, yet no atom posses it. It is something that describes the collection of things, atoms, molecules, etc...
But temperature also is a quantity that we use, along with pressure and volume, and density to derive a quantitative understanding of the behavior of matter, that is usually called collectively "thermodynamics." One doesn't have to worry about averaging over all types of particles to make a sensible prediction of how a system is going to behave under changes of thermodynamic quantities.
It is quite possible that our experience of this mental activity is akin to this sort of collective physical phenomena. Thermodynamics originates in 1650, but it is not until the first half of the 20th century that we could say we understand where it comes from, how to derive the quantities from the underlying theory.
If asked, how do you suppose a computer would describe the experience of running a program? This presupposes a way of communicate its state in a way that we would understand, yet the problem is the same for a person, where a common language is used to convey the process of "experience" or "thought." The generalization of the Turing Test is not so hard to imagine, that is, how do we know that other people have experiences and thoughts "just like us"?
We infer that they do because 1) they are like us and 2) they can describe the experience in a way that we recognize is similar to our own experience.
On the internet, nobody knows your a dog...
...what that means is that we actually don't know if the avatars we are communicating with satisfy 1) above. But we all believe that we can use 2) to decide if the avatar is real or not...
...our experience is that it is entirely possible to be fooled, to a degree, about what those avatars are telling us... quite apart from knowing how the avatar comes by it's communication skills, one could be fooled into believing something far from the truth.
Given that all we know about our first person experience is that experience itself, we use the description of what others are experience, which is decidedly third person to confirm our inference that they are likely experiencing what we are. Without that third person confirmation, our conclusion would have to be that we are the only ones having experience.
Even this is doubtful, in my mind, as the development of mind, consciousness, etc, are a part of the evolution of our behavior, and an important part of that evolution is the creation of a means with which to communicate our "inner state" to others. So the whole of your argument of qualia is tied up in this development. qualia has no individual meaning, without the need to communicate those qualia there would be none... without out the need to describe our "inner experience," there would be none. We do not have anywhere near a proof that even our state of intelligence would require such experience, and many indications that intelligent thought takes place quite outside of our conscious experience... we say it emerges from the "subconscious" as if by magic... only because that behavior is not a part of the internal state which had become part of the evolved behavior of explaining our motives, a behavior which allowed us to adapt to living in larger groups.
As far as a machine is concerned, it seems entirely possible that such a thing could be built and behave in such a way that you could not conclude it was a machine... your question is, does it really have an internal experience? My answer is that it does for the same reason that we do. Our experience is not something innate, but it is a learned behavior, something that comes to us over our early life, and which we learn from our social group. We learn to talk, we learn to communicate, we are socialized and enculturated. The result of this is our ability to communicate our "first person experience" to others. In that sense, having "taught" our machine the same things, it could also be said to have "consciousness" and certainly, you wouldn't be able to tell.
In my opinion, this discussion is backwards, it is not about the impossibility of a machine having a "consciousness" but it should be about how it is impossible for us to have the "consciousness" you assume we have... my assertion is that we do not.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Oct 29, 2011 - 12:11am PT
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did your minds figure out what your minds are? have fun working on that
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wack-N-dangle
Gym climber
the ground up
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Oct 29, 2011 - 12:35am PT
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In my opinion, this discussion is backwards, it is not about the impossibility of a machine having a "consciousness" but it should be about how it is impossible for us to have the "consciousness" you assume we have... my assertion is that we do not.
Just a play on words. Maybe an answer to the above question is that it is not impossible, in Largo's reality. Largo's "consciousness" is his own, and seems immovable. His understanding of "mind" is much the same. It will only change when he changes his mind. From his 1pse, his reality, his concept of the "mind" is his truth. Maybe ironically, anyone else can only provide him a 3rd person explanation (their perspective).
A question that interests me, is why do humans hold onto their culture, beliefs, religion, etc. so strongly? Maybe it has something to do with the innate nature of consciousness. Maybe it was some kind of survival mechanism. It is tough giving up on your identity. If you ever experience an abrupt alteration of your consciousness, it can be shocking, but also liberating. It could almost seem like your body is living a lie.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Oct 29, 2011 - 04:31am PT
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Largo,
I will. Here is the Marlow perspective.
My experience of listening to music is different from only seeing the instruments and musicians when not playing. When I hear G n'R play Child of Mine my experience is different from when I hear children playing it on air guitar. My experience when hearing Clara Haskil play is different from hearing the sound of a F1 car accelerating.
And there is a clear difference between my brain studied under a microscope and my daily experiences.
But where we differ, is that I think science will get closer and closer to knowing what happens during experiencing, but obviously even the perfect scientific description of what happens in my body and brain when I experience will not be the same thing as my subjective experience.
And I am not one of those who believe that we one time will be able to make a human being without using cells from human beings or by copulation.
And there is a long long way to go before a perfect description of experiencing is possible. I even doubt that it will ever be possible perfectly to describe experiencing after seeing the argumentation of some great science-oriented minds in this thread. But we will get closer and I appreciate that some scientists are trying to disclose or uncover what is happening when we are experiencing.
By the way - the word objective is not a good one when describing how science operates. The point is approximations to what is true and intersubjectivity in the scientific community. And your stereotypical causality-view hits far off target time and time again. Your causality-thinking is also Monthy Python worthy stuff.
Largo: Is it important to you to deny that science will get closer and closer to describing what happens during subjective experience?
PS:
No one has ever seen a radiowave or light as wave and particles, but I would never deny that the models are useful. And I would add: even stimulating to the way I subjectively experience the world.
I am very glad I live in a world where the behavior of and the subjective experience of authority is very much changed the last hundred years. Thank you Nietzsche.
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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA
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Oct 29, 2011 - 10:35am PT
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DMT's suspicions have models to support them. I imagine they are still being used.
Neurons fired again and again and again make dendrites turn from whispy, snotty-based material to hardened material. If you will, the software of neural nets become hard-wired. That's why it's so difficult to change habits. Habits seem to change only when replaced by another habit.
I also remember neural net and semantic net modelling that had firing thresholds stipulated between 1 and 0. When a neuron gets fired more often, it's threshhold declines. I remember some big shifts in a patterns when complex patterns would shift ever so slightly (50-100 neurons or semantic nodes), which we came to interpret as the basis for subtle shifts and even radical shifts in meanings in cognitive science.
Largo's and Ed's problems revolve around transductions of meaning from sensory data to higher order representations to cognitive modelling (the computer metaphor of the mind). Unfortunately, no one's come up with those. It's a big problem for those who love the computer model of the brain. That's why, I think, many people have begun to shift to a new (old) model of cognition reliant upon the body and its inputs. The computer model is dis-embodied, as there is no need for a body.
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