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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jul 28, 2015 - 12:51pm PT
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What I think we all can agree on... whatever IT is that's tapped into, the brain plays a starring role in the process.
Whether mind is (a) an interactive product of the brain or (b) a machine simulation or (c) a reflection and/or interface to a universal consciousness (ala Hoffman or Tipler or Chalmers) it is ordered - bristling with causation (cause n effect) and mechanistic goings-on.
Grateful I am to have a human brain instead of a bonobo brain or pig brain or jewell beetle brain.
What a difference the kind of brain makes.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jul 28, 2015 - 02:03pm PT
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I had the opportunity yesterday of refuting Hoffman's fitness hypothesis. I had stopped at an intersection and looked both directions before pulling out and turning left. As soon as my car entered the intersection I saw a white vehicle approaching me from the left. Fortunately neither of us was in any real danger, but I would have thought the fitness probability for me would have been .9 and that I would then have seen the car and waited for it to pass.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 28, 2015 - 02:07pm PT
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What I think we all can agree on... whatever IT is that's tapped into, the brain plays a starring role in the process.
Whether mind is (a) an interactive product of the brain or (b) a machine simulation or (c) a reflection and/or interface to a universal consciousness (ala Hoffman or Tipler or Chalmers) it is ordered - bristling with causation (cause n effect) and mechanistic goings-on.
I'm with you on that one.
I also suspect that objective functioning/tasking as described by Chalmers is largbely if not entirely brain sourced.
Awareness, on the other hand, because it is not necessarly fused with tasking or functioning, or in DOING something other than being aware of content, is exceedingly hard to pin down and might be impossible to objectify in the normal ways, as something "out there" that we can run through a Turing test. Sure, we can test whether someone is awake or not, but quantifying what "awake" actually IS remains a challenge.
I think one of the reasons that this thread periodically dries up is that, as Ed said a while ago, he has set himself out on a path to see how far purely physical reasons and properties can go in explaining reality. When we delve into areas like that covered in the paper Mike cited, where physicality itself is not paramont, it is not so much a matter of Ed and other materialists disagreeing, as it is veerig onto an avenue which is not their stated path - a dimension where their normal tool kits can't even get hold of the chingadera, so to speak.
Quite naturally, people balk at what is not familiar. Ironically, what is more familiar than our first-person experience? It is truly all we have, and we can never escape our subjective bubble. But trying to mentally clone it and see it "out there," as an object, eludes us.
JL
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jul 28, 2015 - 02:25pm PT
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Some time back in this thread awareness was distinguished from consciousness and shown by experimentation to be, for example, tasked as a kind of subconscious warning device. So when you "observe" raw awareness how do you know you are observing an "empty" form of the brain's awareness and not some other mental manifestation? The fact that you can focus on an object doesn't necessarily mean you are dealing with the same phenomenon, moving continuously from emptiness to objective awareness.
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Jul 28, 2015 - 03:00pm PT
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http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116
The paper is titled “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?”, and it seems to contradict pretty much everything we think we know about neurobiology.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 28, 2015 - 03:49pm PT
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Some time back in this thread awareness was distinguished from consciousness and shown by experimentation to be, for example, tasked as a kind of subconscious warning device.
I missed that citation but would be glad to see it and read what kind of "experimentation" was devised. I would mention that in the above, awareness is posited as a "device" that is anchored and fused to a practical (survival) task (warning device for some content "out there"). What happens when you deatch from the impulse to take warning?
So when you "observe" raw awareness how do you know you are observing an "empty" form of the brain's awareness and not some other mental manifestation?
A subject cannot "observe" raw awareness. To do so would imply that a subject could move outside of itself and it's own subjective experience and as a remote viewer, observe its own process as an object "out there."
We can see the futility of ever doing so. Even out of body experiences don't involve observing the observer, but rather the observer is experienced as obseving the body "out there."
Some people might be able to escape the body in some fashion - or the illusion of doing so - but we cannot escape BEING the observer in the process, seeing awareness as a thing separate from ourselves, or dividing awarenss into bits, and shove one part into the distance so we can objectify and evaluate "it."
In no-mind meditation, one strives toward letting go of the ""I" and being present with awareness which yields an experience of emptiness, not as an object "out there," but as one's fundamental nature or state of being (as in human being).
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The fact that you can focus on an object doesn't necessarily mean you are dealing with the same phenomenon, moving continuously from emptiness to objective awareness.
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Kindly tell me what you mean by the "you" in the above.
JL
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jul 28, 2015 - 03:52pm PT
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"The point, though, is that under the right conditions, brain damage may paradoxically result in brain enhancement. Small-world, scale-free networking— focused, intensified, overclocked— might turbocharge a fragment of a brain into acting like the whole thing" (cintune's article)
Kindly tell me what you mean by the "you" in the above
Generic "you", nothing personal.
What happens when one shifts from the "experience of emptiness" to focused attention? Are the two states seamlessly connected? When "I" returns after its temporary absence is the transition abrupt or seamless? I'm looking at the fine details here in a (crazy) effort to connect with discrete math or continuous math. If the transition is abrupt there might be a tenuous relationship with catastrophe theory, etc.
Just curious.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jul 28, 2015 - 04:48pm PT
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Let me recommend Cintune's reference.
28, 2015 - 03:00pm PT
http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116
If you think we know anything about the brain or mind, just look at these photos of people who have water where the brain normally is yet are functional even so. One even had an IQ of 126.
This gives a whole new perspective to "What is Mind?"
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 28, 2015 - 05:08pm PT
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What happens when one shifts from the "experience of emptiness" to focused attention.
That, in my opinion, is a world-class question.
The "experience of emptiness" is simply the experience one has and the growing awarenees that comes from holding an open focus - aka, "being" present with our awareness.
Discursive evaluating (or parsing reality into discrete things or objects) is not possible in open focus, and only begins when our focus narrows and our attention gloms onto a person, place, thing or phenomenon, like a thought or sensation or impulse.
If you can find the seam between the two, between when "one shifts from the "experience of emptiness" to focused attention," you are more perceptive than I am.
JL
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WBraun
climber
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Jul 28, 2015 - 05:49pm PT
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HFCS -- "Grateful I am to have a human brain instead of a bonobo brain or pig brain or Jewell beetle brain."
HFCS is still far deep down in the caveman trench and still posing as a learned man.
It's NOT the brain.
Even an animal whose consciousness is in the right place is in a superior position than a gross materialist.
It's consciousness and not the brain.
A machine never operates without an operator ultimately.
A brain never operates without an operator either ultimately.
The HFCS's in this world all are just plain guessing and posing as a learned scholar ......
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jul 28, 2015 - 08:56pm PT
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This gives a whole new perspective to "What is Mind?"
JL's on the right track. It seems it truly is emptiness !
;>|
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jul 28, 2015 - 09:25pm PT
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^^^ HahHah
Jan, that is interesting! Seems as though we don't need all those trillions of pieces of mass to remember truths!?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 28, 2015 - 09:30pm PT
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I think one of the reasons that this thread periodically dries up is that, as Ed said a while ago, he has set himself out on a path to see how far purely physical reasons and properties can go in explaining reality. When we delve into areas like that covered in the paper Mike cited, where physicality itself is not paramont, it is not so much a matter of Ed and other materialists disagreeing, as it is veerig onto an avenue which is not their stated path - a dimension where their normal tool kits can't even get hold of the chingadera, so to speak.
no, that isn't the reason why I am not participating in this discussion... however, it is an example why I find it uninteresting, that is, that Largo likes to explain what I'm talking about and what I "really mean." My participation is not necessary for an interesting thread to continue.
I would find the discussion a lot more interesting if Largo tried a little harder to actually understand what it is that I had tried to discuss... rather than concocting some story of his own writing that he feels reflects "the truth" about my "real ideas."
Since that is not going to happen, it seems rather pointless, after nearly 5 years, to continue. Anyway, as the quote above shows, Largo doesn't actually need me to post in order to continue to have me in the thread, he can just make up a narrative and attribute it to me.
Oh, and having read the paper MikeL posted, my first reaction was how you could even make such a statement. You obviously didn't understand the paper... as it actually addresses your OP question, and is firmly in the camp that science has a role to play in explaining consciousness (perhaps you missed that in the paper). The paper has many fascinating implications which would be futile to discuss here... maybe jgill would be up for a discussion of σ-algebras, but not too many others. And famously, Largo's car pool could lob in their anonymous opinions, after all, it is reported that they are cutting edge physicists who are not gray haired and hidebound.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Jul 29, 2015 - 09:02am PT
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Ummm, as for Hoffman’s paper, I have a thought about it as my unconsciousness considered his ideas. I can’t talk much about the operationalization of Hoffman’s ideas as perhaps Ed and Jgill could, but I don't see that it is necessary to create what appears to be an independent observer for Hoffman's and Prakash's model. Hoffman and Prakash make a considerable effort to construct the concept of an observer to begin with so that they can show how objectification is a hack.
If there is an objectivization, then there must be someone or something objectifying. Correct? (Not necessarily.)
Perhaps Werner will complain, but it’s increasingly evident that there is no “I” that I can find, pin down, or concretely define. The “little self” (Ok, Werner?) is a fiction. It doesn’t really exist. It, too, is an objectivization, a label, a thought, a concept pointing to the experience of experiences.
There is no thought that can think. There is just thinking. There is no manager and no free will, volition. Consciousness is happening, happening to itself. Experience is “on” . . . “running.” There is no doer. There is just being. Everything that appears to happen, happens within that. Everything IS that.
Take away the independent observer, and Hoffman’s clever conceptualization and operationalization become irrelevant. The research actually shows nothing. It’s at best an interesting answer to the wrong question. It fosters another form of dualism.
To do what Hoffman wants to do, it would seem to me that he first needs to prove there is an observer that can be observed.
Can anyone observe an observer that he or she could call his or herself? (Look! Try and see that!)
Fun, huh?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 29, 2015 - 12:14pm PT
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Mike said: Can anyone observe an observer that he or she could call his or herself? (Look! Try and see that!)
Of course not. Nor can you directly observe observation itself (sentience) in a third-party because observing is a 1st person subjective experience not a 3rd person, objective/external thing. In a real turn of genius, people will reject their own qualia/experience as false or imaginary, since it cannot be quantified (ergo is not "real") - never realizing that the idea, "My experience is not real" is itself a subjective experience. According to the wonky logic of this position, the subjective idea that "qualia is not real" is, in fact, "true," though the only means of knowing as much, for any human being ever born, is by virtue of the idea observed through 1st person experience.
The fact that we cannot observe our observer is fairly obvious to anyone who has done even a tige of self-observation ("you cannot kiss your own lips"), but staunch physicalists will point to instruments that can register external stimulus and call THAT observation. How can you "prove" it is not? And so we see folks cook up all kinds of faux, sentient observers which are in reality are merely mechanical data collectors responding via their programming.
While we can neither escape our own sentient observing - which is our portal to knowing the world - or move it (or ANY observer) outside the subjective bubble for 3rd-person observation, we continually see people holding onto the hope that we will one day achieve this - once the data is all in, and our understanding of objective functioning, which sources sentience, is adaquate.
What's more, ascribing value to observing as primary to reality is also, to physicalists, a kind of crime. Note how many serious science types dismiss out of hand Copenhagan Model takes on QM, or on the observer having anything to do with "objective" reality, the goal being to shunt off the subjective - our only personal reality - to the sidelines so the "real" truth (objects, functions, computations) can rightfully take center stage.
If nothing else, the article Mike cited shows that this obsession with things issues not from "reality" but directly from early developmental psychology (Piaget), and is known as object constancy - that "real" objects exist "out there."
Nothing could be more obvious.
And yet what long seemed obvious turned out to be altogether different once people started taking a closer look at both sentience and "objects."
JL
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dhayan
climber
los angeles, ca
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Jul 29, 2015 - 06:35pm PT
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i haven't been following but was just checking in - have you guys figured it out yet?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jul 29, 2015 - 06:40pm PT
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So we've succeeded in taking the essential first steps: We've identified the basic models. There are two or three (depending on how one counts) under consideration / competition. It's a powerful start. :)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jul 29, 2015 - 06:42pm PT
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Fun, huh?
This question may best be answered by answering this question:
Is this still the What is "Mind?" thread?
This thread and other bits of what you perceive as reality are part of a magic 'shroom experience had by Denise McCann following her meeting Jimi Hendrix before he went onstage at the Monterey Pop Festival. When he was still unsure of his divinity. Denise McCann's trip is part of the superposition of probabilistic states of a quantum computer orbiting HD 129357, which in turn is a part, and only a small part, of a bit of indigestion Werner Braun once had,
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Jul 29, 2015 - 06:43pm PT
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^^^^ XD XD XD
Note how many serious science types dismiss out of hand Copenhagan Model takes on QM....
No "serious science types" dismiss this as long as it's constrained to the quantum realm. What does get absolutely rejected is the pop-woo-licious extrapolation of said model to the macro arena. We've been over this so many times before, but man, sometimes you just seem to have certain ideas fixed in your head like a welded stopper.
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