Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Jul 29, 2015 - 07:41pm PT
|
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.
Cintune, "going over" a topic and saying soemthing intelligent about it are quite different things. What's more, leading scientists at CERN might have a laugh at your expense in implying they were engaged in pop-wooplicious endeavoers. Articles like these (http://phys.org/news/2013-07-quantum-physics-macroscopic.html); abound in the literatre, and addressing quantum decoherence at the macro level has become a special study by legions of pop-woo-licious scientists. What the hell does pop-woo-licious mean, anyhow? Something other than jughead stanuch phyicalism, where all of rality operates with Newtonian simplicity? Sound like duffer thinking to me. Can't change his mind no how.
The larger issues are A), the quantum/macro issue introduces another "threshold" that people talk a big game about but have never come close to cracking - the Big Bang threshold, from nothing (?) to everything; from goo to DNA, from inanimate stuff to biological systems, from biological systems to sentience (how matter of any kind "becomes" conscious), and so forth. And B), if there is a true threshold between the macro and QM levels, then reductionism as an absolute throry is immediately shelved, since you can only reduce to the quantum level, then all bets are off, meaning reductionism has limited scope in the real world.
So Cintune, you old clodhopper (the "Jed Clampett" of science, maybe?), your work is cut out for you if you intend to dismiss the quantum/marco threshold with silly woo jargon as opposed to evaluating the issues involved.
JL
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Jul 29, 2015 - 08:02pm PT
|
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)
Please explain what "altogether different" means in this context.
I wrote an initial reply, but retracted it, having decided I'm not sure what you are saying.
I looked at Hoffman's paper again and got a little further along in the mathematics before concluding that it was too distant from what I do or used to do to be easily assimilated. However, he speaks of finite matrices and it seems to me that at every instance of a perception followed by a decision, then an action, one must consider something beyond even an infinite matrix - which would imply a countable set of probabilities. If one subscribes to a multiple universe model I would think uncountability might prevail.
Just musings. Probably wrong.
But Ed is correct. This paper seems to move in the direction (Hilbert spaces, etc.) in which JL had a strong interest. If math is to be employed it's not going to be elementary (like some of the classical "hard analysis" I do), but more advanced "soft analysis."
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
|
|
|
Jul 29, 2015 - 09:03pm PT
|
Today I returned to SAM (Seattle Art Museum) to see once more its exhibition of “Masks and Disguise.”
Masks in drama training and in ancient rituals are used to trigger or put people into different states of consciousness. People can throw off their self images of who they think they are and connect to archetypes and the unconscious in the same way we do in dreams. What is mind?
I took some pictures at the exhibit today, and when I got home, reviewing them encouraged me to re-review what mind is or can be. It’s more than conceptualizations.
A mask in ancient cultures and in drama is a device to drive the personality out of the body to allow spirit to take possession of it. In original cultures, nothing had more power than the mask, whereas the church saw masks as pagan. Our culture today appears to be hostile to trance states and masks because we tend to distrust spontaneity, and we have replaced that with reason. (Is education an anti-trance activity?)
Each of us individually holds a characteristic expression as a way of maintaining our personality and face (our masks). Adults lose the idea that face becomes the person over time. But once students take a mask class in improvisation classes, they are amazed by the passers-by they see on the street. Of course faces get fixed with age as muscles shorten, but if one looks they can see that even young people make decisions to appear tough, stupid, or defiant. Their face reflects who and what they think they are.
In mask classes, students are encouraged to let go and allow themselves to become possessed by masks. Teachers have students don masks, hold a mirror in front of them, and then ask the students to be what they see. The masks propel them into unusual states of being.
In Voodoo mythology, gods are supposed to possess a person against his or her will. Conflicts in life become dramatically enacted with great symbolic force—not unlike contemporary psychodrama or group therapy sessions (therapy groups, AA, Vietnam Outreach) where repressed urges and desires or socially conditioned desires are allowed public reign.
When students see how masks can compel certain kinds of behavior, they begin to feel the presence of spirits. They are told: “don’t think about being another creature; experience being another creature.” Masks work on students, not the other way around. Mindless listening, being quiet and still, is like attending to a mask. (Great Noh actors would look at their masks for hours before a play.)
Here are some of the masks at the SAM exhibit right now (until Oct 3rd or so). In the last pictures, the masks were attached to a mirrored wall so that a person could imagine what it would be like to wear one. I’m the one who took the pictures.
Looking at masks and imagining wearing them in a any drama might encourage one to drop their personal face, their persona, their character and see what then shows up. What would that be? Simply being, no doer, no manager, not even an observer.
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Jul 29, 2015 - 09:08pm PT
|
I think Jim Carrey's best movie was The Mask. Putting it on certainly changed his personality, as it did his faithful dog's near the end.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Jul 29, 2015 - 09:25pm PT
|
John, I don't have a burning interest in that paper because it was grounded in a tasking model, and IME the subtle aspects of mind are most clearly disclosed when one detaches from evaluation - decision - action mode, and you settle with awareness - and come what may. Whatever math is proposed in that paper -- all of it WAY over my head - I suspect is only relevant to objective functioning, not sentience per se. They posit observing as a kind of scanning device - with the accent on device (task, thing, computation). This scanning model of the observer is freighted with problems.
An example of how things changed once we started looking at them closely, is the case of a seemingly solid object, like a leg bone, being comprised mostly of empty space, and deeper still, that the matter it contains is apparently so ephemeral that we don't even have a universal description of what "it" is. Or that fundamental particles such as quarks and leptons (thought to be the building blocks of matter) are considered "point particles" with NO effective size or volume. Or the wave-particle duality of matter (whatever it is).
And that's just the seemingly physical stuff. Once you get into "mind" it's a looking glass all the way.
JL
|
|
cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
|
|
|
Jul 30, 2015 - 04:16am PT
|
Articles like these ( http://phys.org/news/2013-07-quantum-physics-macroscopic.html);; abound in the literatre, and addressing quantum decoherence at the macro level has become a special study by legions of pop-woo-licious scientists.
"The entanglement at the macroscopic level is one of the main research areas in the field, and we hope to entangle increasingly large objects in the years to come."
We can only wait for them to "report back" on how that works out. Right now, though, two fiber optic cables populated by 500 photons doesn't substantiate your wild, yet carefully unstated, implications.
What the hell does pop-woo-licious mean, anyhow? Something other than jughead stanuch phyicalism, where all of rality operates with Newtonian simplicity?
Yep, it's definitely something other than that.
The larger issues are A), the quantum/macro issue introduces another "threshold" that people talk a big game about but have never come close to cracking - the Big Bang threshold, from nothing (?) to everything; from goo to DNA, from inanimate stuff to biological systems, from biological systems to sentience (how matter of any kind "becomes" conscious), and so forth. And B), if there is a true threshold between the macro and QM levels, then reductionism as an absolute throry is immediately shelved, since you can only reduce to the quantum level, then all bets are off, meaning reductionism has limited scope in the real world.
Review the concept of decoherence - it's right in the article you posted - and watch without judging as your conflation bubble bursts.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
|
|
|
Jul 30, 2015 - 10:11am PT
|
Cintune: Yep, it's definitely something other than that.
Don't think so, . . . not the “definitely” part, anyway. It’s another theory. Hardly definitive.
We can’t seem to find anything definite. When looked at closely, every thing looks to be open (there is always more about a “thing” than can be said), undefinable (empty of substance), spontaneous (forever impermanent, unfolding), and un-bracket’able (One) other than by artificial means. All four of these characteristics seem to point to essentially the very same thing.
BB:
That video was sad and perverse to me. What do you think the point in making it was? What was Your Point? MY point in talking about masks was not what actors can portray by putting on a mask, but rather that masks can create (other) being. (If they can, then what is mind?)
There are different views of acting. Method acting is one of them (ala Strasberg, the ideas initially coming from Stanislavsky), and in that approach, an actor finds a way put themselves into a state of consciousness whereby they actually become the character (rather than “acting” a character). Cultural psychologists and military and police profilers have noted that certain facial expressions (micro muscle actions) are not available to conscious control. To show real sorrow facially (all 150+muscles), one must be in a state of sorrow. Most human beings immediately recognize when a person is faking such emotional “responses.”
For the actor in the video you posted, there would seem to be much more needed to take on the mind of the elephant man than putting on a prosthetic mask, hampering muscles, and reading a poem. The persona only gets in the way of great life and living.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Jul 30, 2015 - 12:58pm PT
|
Cintune sez: Right now, though, two fiber optic cables populated by 500 photons doesn't substantiate your wild, yet carefully unstated, implications.
--
Screwy thing about this thread is that I can cite scientists at CERN and their work, and if it doesn't square with staunch physicalism, it suddenly is "my" wild, yet carefully unstated, implications.
It sometimes feels like we are surrounded by drowing people grabbing for the last shards of "stuff" out there hoping not to be swept away by - nothing. Even screwer is that while people cling desperately to the stuff model, their actual lived existence, which is entirely a subjective experince, is considered by many as smoke in the air as compared to the real objects "out there."
Has to go back to that object constancey idea that gets layered in so early.
JL
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Jul 30, 2015 - 02:23pm PT
|
"Screwy thing about this thread is that I can cite scientists at CERN and their work,..."
actually, the screwy thing is you don't understand the papers and work you are citing... by your own admission... now if your car pool is providing you the citations, and you properly attributed your citation as "the Largo car pool said that this paper..." that would be a lot clearer.
Of course, you'd be arguing by appeal to the authority of your "car pool" who we all are sure are totally legitimate practitioners of the "correct" science (even if you have no idea what they have published themselves). We have it on good authority, after all.
|
|
jogill
climber
Colorado
|
|
|
Jul 30, 2015 - 02:59pm PT
|
I don't have a burning interest in that paper because it was grounded in a tasking model, and IME the subtle aspects of mind are most clearly disclosed when one detaches from evaluation - decision - action mode, and you settle with awareness - and come what may (JL)
That's a reasonable statement. Both the science-types and the meditators need to be cautious then about moving into one another's territory. To imply that meditative emptiness is somehow associated with quantum mechanics, particle physics, etc. is an unwarranted assumption - unless proof can be shown, as are statements about the neuroscience of meditation - unless experimental data supports them.
The two approaches might move in parallel until it can be definitively shown that one affects the other.
Peace and harmony . . . . . . boring, huh?
;>)
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Jul 30, 2015 - 04:35pm PT
|
It all leads to emotional catharsis in the viewer (sycorax)
Well, this certainly seems connected to the mind. Care to elucidate?
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
|
|
|
Jul 30, 2015 - 04:40pm PT
|
Uh, I suppose you’ve heard about the theory of the holographic mind and / or holographic universe?
I know Pribram’s work (from studies in organizational theory) better than I know Bohm’s. But if you’re into speculating, here’s a possible bridge from consciousness to quantum mechanics, if you’re looking for one.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
Be well.
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Jul 30, 2015 - 06:28pm PT
|
I wasn't being sarcastic, but was curious about this catharsis. Thought you might explain from a humanist's point of view. It certainly does have a great deal to do with the mind.
Not all scientists/engineers/mathematicians, etc. are your enemies.
I suppose you’ve heard about the theory of the holographic mind and , or holographic universe? (MikeL)
As I wrote, when some sort of data or proof appears from either camp I'll be interested. Bohm's ideas, as much as I can recall, are metaphysical.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Jul 30, 2015 - 07:25pm PT
|
"Screwy thing about this thread is that I can cite scientists at CERN and their work,..."
actually, the screwy thing is you don't understand the papers and work you are citing... by your own admission... now if your car pool is providing you the citations, and you properly attributed your citation as "the Largo car pool said that this paper..." that would be a lot clearer.
Of course, you'd be arguing by appeal to the authority of your "car pool" who we all are sure are totally legitimate practitioners of the "correct" science (even if you have no idea what they have published themselves). We have it on good authority, after all.
Ed, you know perfectly well that what you are saying that I "don't know" concerns the quantifications, and that the basic concepts can be reasonably stated by any expert so most any reasonably intelligent person can understand. Per the paper I cited, and the issues involved, how would an exhaustive understanding of the numbers change the basic idea or concept that serious dudes are now investigating how certain quantum phenomenon might be functional on the macro level of things and forms. There wasn't anything more to my point than that - that people are once again looking into what the Cintune's of the world swear is impossible.
Another thing is the disingenuous way you keep telling me how I am misinterpreting you, while rarely answering a direct question. You once asked, "What is not physical?" I asked, "Is you experience of blue, the subjective experience itself, a physical object?" You insist that sentience cannot be proven from a third person source, which I totally agree with, but you never say what this means to you or how it bolsters your personal view. And if sentience COULD be proven by way of a Turing test (as opposed to objective functioning/data processing), what would THAT mean to you? What's more, what is the difference to you between physical and matter, seemingly that the latter doesn't even have a universal definition (a "point particle" with no mass or volume cha cha cha).
So many questions, and it's not for lack of trying to understand your position, rather I haven't been able to tell what it really is.
JL
|
|
BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
|
|
|
Jul 30, 2015 - 07:30pm PT
|
MikeL, I was just exaggerating on your mask post which I really liked. It got me thinking about how we as humans can change our clothes, or other more extreme outward appearances inorder to feel better on the inside.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Jul 30, 2015 - 07:34pm PT
|
what is a superfluid?
a macroscopic quantum system...
what is a superconductor?
a macroscopic quantum system...
what are the CERN/LHC magnets made of?
superconductors...
it would seem that macroscopic quantum systems aren't that rare...
did you know that?
probably not, though any reasonably intelligent person could have. And any reasonably intelligent person might be able to understand how those macroscopic systems manage to remain quantum mechanical... and upon understanding that, perhaps understand the challenges of making other macroscopic quantum mechanical systems.
You are a reasonably intelligent person. And I've actually mentioned the issues upthread, but you like to think I'm just being difficult.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Jul 31, 2015 - 09:59am PT
|
Another thing is the disingenuous way you keep telling me how I am misinterpreting you, while rarely answering a direct question.
it isn't a disingenuous claim if it happens to reflect reality... even if I didn't answer you directly, that is not grounds for making up an answer you thought I might provide, and claiming that I provided it ("...what Ed is really saying..."). While I do not possess the same literary prowess of Largo, I think I usually say what I mean in an understandable way, reasonable intelligence isn't a reader requirement.
But I know you're chomping at the bit to have your OP thesis that what some claim as "science" in the study of mind, consciousness, sentience and all that, is actually just "scientism" (a relatively recent concept that equates the "belief" in science with any other "belief"). When you ask me what I "believe" I say, plainly, nothing. A more nuanced response would be an out-of-context reference to a former president, "trust, but verify," except I find it hard to trust.
Those familiar with working scientists (at least of those who specialize in experimental sciences) will find the discipline of distrust somewhat frustrating. There is an old saw that provides a guideline for telling which type of scientist is giving a talk. If the only person at the seminar who doesn't believe the talk is the speaker, the speaker is an experimentalist. If the only person at the seminar who believes the talk is the speaker, then the speaker is a theorist. (With all due respect for my theoretical colleagues).
Experimental physicists spend the majority of their time tracking down the imperfections of the instruments with which they are making measurements. While these may seem like mere "mechanisms," the "theory" with which they are designed, assembled, commissioned, and analyzed embody a huge set of assumptions which are often exhibited in the results. The experimentalist has to try to establish what results are due to the effect of the instrument, and what to the observed physical system.
Of course, we see these instruments are extensions of our own human sensory capabilities. And they are under the supervision of human intent. It is not a stretch, however, to pull back the same skepticism of the validity of the "instrument" to include the human body itself, and it's demonstrated finite sensory capabilities, as well as to question the "theory" of the interaction of the sensory information with the results that we call perception.
One questions then the "reality" of any human perception, or "non-perception."
I had been involved in producing a "data-driven real time" processing engine for an experiment. The idea was to analyze the data as it came in to provide a more sophisticated "trigger" to obtain the particular reactions we were interested in studying. The trick is to look at huge numbers of reactions and cull these down to a sample which included a high fraction of the interesting reactions.
The device we created had huge bandwidth, and was assembled out of various component operators. It turned out that debugging the thing was a very difficult and interesting process. I won't bore you with details you are uninterested in except to relate an interesting observation.
We had been working on the debugging by controlling the synchronous clock through the system, "single stepping" the clock and looking at the state of the computation device. Of course we'd set the state up with a problem we had in mind and then watch that problem cascade through. But what I was startled to realize was that the device was processing "noise" all the time... if you turned it on and cycled it, there was a transformation of whatever happened to be in the machine at the time through all the steps, in a very deliberate manner.
From our interpretation, the data had no meaning, but the machine didn't "know" and was happily transforming the noise per it's configuration. And while this seems to be only of limited interest, it turns out that it has a tremendous advantage in debugging, since the problems we fed the machine were of interest to us, but limited in the domain of machine performance, where as the random noise spanned the entire possible input, and the machine should correctly deal with that random input, thus testing a much wider domain, and outside of our own limited view of what constituted a test.
This is relevant here in two ways: 1) that our preconception of what constitutes a "test" of what mind, consciousness, sentience and all that certainly can seriously inhibit our understanding (we all consider ourselves "experts" in this because we all sense it) and 2) the empirical nature of "discovery" is not a priori bound by our initial philosophical/theoretical predisposition of what we are studying (those initial predispositions may be wrong).
If science is anything, it is about "problem solving" where we take the vernacular (at least by scientist) meaning of "problem" to be something we don't understand. These problems are usually "small" problems, but they grow by generalization. So it isn't at all odd that the various "mind" projects you so like to lambast are garnering huge support. That is because the generalization of their hypothesis: that "mind" is an emergent property of a highly networked set of operators, is of general, practical interest. The "World Wide Web" is one such instance, and the properties of how it works is of great interest commercially. The implications of its commercial importance drive a large number of other interests, security being one.
Can we say that "mind" is not an emergent property of the nervous system? I am unaware of any philosophical or theoretical argument that convincingly states such a thing. When I look at the work of some very careful and insightful researchers (e.g. the above discussion attributed to Gödel who did not believe that free will was compatible with a physical description of mind) they are stymied by the possibility that there could be some empirical path leading to a solution. That possibility cannot be eliminated.
So while I have not a whole lot to offer as to a comprehensive, physical description of mind, I do not discount it as a possibility. Interestingly, the Hoffman paper MikeL linked is a very provocative work, which is worth understanding the details (many of which I disagree with), and is totally in line with the activity of "problem solving." It does answer the question "where is the observer" and it does not reject the notion of a "physical reality," it merely states that evolution need not result in perceptual systems that provide a physically real perception. There is a lot going on in that article. The apparently astounding piece to you and MikeL is the assault on what an "object" is... but I am surprised at your naive idea that science is so bound to those common perceptions, you point out that quantum mechanics, now more than 100 years old, has dealt with this issue. Maybe you're late to the party.
The primary reason that physicists have not been more interested in what quantum mechanics "means" is also interesting from a historic point of view. But largely it is due to the success of applying quantum mechanics without the need to understand it at a fundamental level. As Hoffman stated in that paper, the authors consider themselves to be "instrumentalists" on the matter of whether or not their theory was "real."
In fact, the work of John Bell, which famously flew under the radar of physical research for decades, can be a bit of a resolution to this issue... the experimental confirmation of Bell's theorem, coming down in favor of quantum mechanics, leaves physics with a true dilemma as to which resolution to choose. I have no doubt that the process of choosing will create much interesting physics. You can peruse the upper part of the thread for references I've made to this in the past, apparently not interesting enough to you to follow up on, or perhaps you didn't appreciate the significance because it sounded so much like "small ball" and you were looking for a fast ball, belt high and over the middle to yard into the bleachers...
But Bell's work, interestingly, is the foundational work on quantum mechanical entanglement, which turns out to have potentially huge technical applications, some of which Feynman fleshed out when thinking about computing (his son worked for a now defunct company named "Thinking Machines," the corporate motto? "we want to build a machine that would be proud of us"). The manipulation of the "quantum domain" has many many practical applications.
And as we puzzle out these practical "problems" we learn about the world, we understand it, not because we have a philosophical foundation based on "truth," but because we can predict the outcome of experiments, we can tell you what the territory is going to be, given our map.
That predictive ability allows us to build machines that have the experience, and tell us about it, a la New Horizons. The machine is having the experience, we are not, we are sitting at home listening to it relate those experiences. That is how we build the machine.
My questions along this line were aimed, not at demonstrating that humans didn't have sentience, but what we lack is any good description of what our agreement was as to sentience. When we start to define it, we have to include a number of instances that our bias tells us are not sentience. I am perfectly ok with the idea that New Horizons has sentience... it has mind... it has consciousness. And that those are indistinguishable from the human behaviors.
I don't know why this is such an apparently controversial statement.
Similarly, sitting in meditation, when I get to the state that I am not "thinking" but "just being" my perception of that state is very much like my watching that device we built so many years ago, processing "noise" with the same impeccable manner as it would with "signal" the distinction we make between "noise" and "signal" being irrelevant to its activities.
"Nothing" and "thing" are a dualism, one requiring the other... and this dualism is a perceptual device, perceptions are not fundamental and subject to all sorts of effects, and may result in a very useful, but "untrue" picture of "what's really going on."
Why try to simplify it?
Well we do that in order to break it down to "problems" we might be able to actually understand.
And we do that in many different ways.
Since we don't yet understand it, why would one way be superior to another? we don't know yet. Science has been addressing the problem for a relatively short time, people have been meditating for a relatively long time, neither have yet converged on understanding.
You know what you know, I know what I know, there are aspects that are the same, and those that are different.
I meditate, and I do science... I don't see these as being exclusive. I don't seem to draw the same conclusions as you do based on my meditative practice.
This post might not be perceived by you as a direct answer to your questions. But it is my attempt to be direct.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!