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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 30, 2011 - 11:04pm PT
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I went riding all day.
Jan is right: most of what I talk about is VERY standard Zen stuff.
Somebody else is right that I only riff here and don't make much effort to present a systematic ideas.
The Libniz experiment has nothing to do with being old or new. I use it simply to show that a representation, or a meant brain, or an equation, or a measurement, or (fill in the blank) is NOT experience itself - any more than the opposite is true.
The irony is that we are all fully embedded in 1st person subjective experience but overidentified with discursive thinking, so the compulsion to quantify follows.
Our discussion has broached the two sides of the "mind" coin: 1st and 3rd person, objective and subjective, material and experiential. Since we can't objectify the 1st person subjective with the same techniques/results we can per regular "things," some of us simply evaluate the meat brain we believe "causes" experience in the same causal sequencing that occurs when a bee makes honey or Detroit makes another Ford - that is, an unbroken, bottom-up sequence of material stirrings, spiraling upwards in ever more complex matrixes, till the meat brain "outputs" 1st person subjective experience.
This leads to two "hard questions."
1. There's no trace of anything but processing going on in the meat brain, and certainly no hint of experience. Moreover, while the data is still being collected that might "fully explain" experience, there is absolutely NO empirical evidence, in any of the causal sequencing that we DO know, that explains where or how material processing suddenly jumps to sentient experience. Bottom up causation, if nothing else, is a forward unfolding temporal sequence, so by definition it is promised that at some point in time and in the sequence, sentience arises from matter. We have no evidence that this is true in whole or in part. Nothing. All simulations and AI stuff is per 3rd person objectifying and processing, not experience.
2. The second hard question: Fiddle with the meat brain, and experience is immediately effected.
Ed says that my basic thesis is that "mind" can never be explained. Not so. I simply say that measurements of the meat brain and evaluations of objective functioning will never "explain" experience since said measurements and evaluation are not even focused on experience, but rather the meat brain.
This brings up to the Rule of Mind that is the sticking point to all those who scream at me: That the Map is NOT the territory, that the Meant Brain is NOT experience, that representations, evaluations, figures, big bangs, and so fort are not, qualitatively, the same thing as your 1st person experience.
But the real doosy is raw awareness itself.
JL
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MikeL
Trad climber
SANTA CLARA
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Oct 30, 2011 - 11:37pm PT
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Ed,
You're mocking me . . . and that's fine, too. It's a good thing for my ego.
I thought we were talking about consciousness (e.g., subjectivity), what it is, and how it can be accounted for.
Here's what I can make out from your post: length of the life of a species / number of members of a species / weight of a species / the degree to which a species causes aggravation of another species = [what?] consciousness? success? some kind of measurement of an environment (in that an environment "selects" a species)?
Earlier I talked about (i) the history and philosophy of science and (ii) various complaints and concerns if science were ungrounded, with no values from community, history, or culture. Your comment here is an example of what science can imply without a grounding of values.
Ok, perhaps we should be just like ants. Nah, we're not ants. We're human. But we could sorta be like ants. We could let human behavior run full force and see what survives. We should follow the law of survival of the fittest. Enough with all this silly humanism.
Then, "let slip the dogs of war," and of power--in whatever form it can be mustered. Name your bogeyman or political nightmare. (Hello, Mr. Spencer--a little eugenics, perhaps?)
Is that what you want and believe as a scientist? As a human being?
If ants had consciousness as we know it, I don't think they'd be very happy with their lives. I think being an animal would be a terrifying existence. (Except for my cat.)
Yeah, :-) I do think that consciousness is something special. If you've got one, then I think you're something special, too.
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MH2
climber
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Oct 31, 2011 - 12:38am PT
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JL says:
There's no trace of anything but processing going on in the meat brain, and certainly no hint of experience.
So there is no hint of experience in the brain? Then where does experience take place?
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
I'm James Brown, Bi-atch!
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Oct 31, 2011 - 12:54am PT
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when i grow up, i wanna be an operating thetan
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 31, 2011 - 02:55pm PT
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JL says:
There's no trace of anything but processing going on in the meat brain, and certainly no hint of experience.
So there is no hint of experience in the brain? Then where does experience take place?
-------
This is subtle but also not so subtle.
First, our primary reality is incontrovertibly 1st person subjective and experiential. That, simply put, is our personal reality.
Second, materialists insist that our experience is "output" or produced by our meat brain. (the 2nd hard question suggests that this is so since when we fiddle with said meant brain, experience goes south).
Third, so far as I can tell, the "output" model is based on normal real-world stuff. For instance, a radio station telecasts a signal, a radio intakes that signal and "outputs" a sound. Every place along the sequence we have a material "thing," even if it's merely a radio signal, but in each of the causal steps, the next "thing," caused by the previous "thing," (radio station ~ transmission ~ radio ~ music) is not only distinct from the previous causal link (i.e., the transmission is NOT the radio station, the radio is NOT the transmission, and the music is NOT the radio, et al), but each has its own material form.
But in the meat brain "transmission" model, we have the causal logic borrowed from the radio transmission model, but the output (experience), even though it is the most profound thing in everyone's lives, now and forever, has no individual material existence above and beyond the meat brain itself.
So while, as mentioned, we don't call the radio station the transmission, or the radio "music," in the case of the meat brain, and in the absence of any material "thing" found that IS experience, we default out of the material causal model and say the meant brain IS experience.
I suspect that experience cannot be considered a thing, in a similar way that it makes no little sense to consider gravity as a material thing, when it seems to be merely an effect of mass, velocity and so forth, having no corporeal existence itself. We know it's existence merely by effects - perhaps material acts this way because gravity is an inherent quality or tendency of matter. Who knows? I sure don't.
I've heard it said - correct or not I'm not sure - that gravity, though barely measurable, is overall the most decisive "force" in the universe.
So does the meat brain "act" experientially because it is inherently sentient?
Fun stuff to ponder...
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Oct 31, 2011 - 03:13pm PT
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as much as I look at those grooves cut in the vinyl record, I just can't find Miles Davis there... this leads me to conclude that Miles is somehow miraculously conjured up everytime I put that record on the turntable and land the stylus on those grooves...
I know I don't have Miles in the room with me, but my experience is that he's there blowing that sweet horn of his...
...and after all, it is my experience that is the primary thing... all those bumps and wiggles aren't Miles...
seems we're still miles apart on this.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 31, 2011 - 06:22pm PT
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as much as I look at those grooves cut in the vinyl record, I just can't find Miles Davis there... this leads me to conclude that Miles is somehow miraculously conjured up everytime I put that record on the turntable and land the stylus on those grooves...
I know I don't have Miles in the room with me, but my experience is that he's there blowing that sweet horn of his...
...and after all, it is my experience that is the primary thing... all those bumps and wiggles aren't Miles...
seems we're still miles apart on this.
You're missing the crux of this, Ed.
Let me make it crazy simple.
The sticking point here is that materialists are using a standard causal model to "explain" experience. One of the few things we ALL agree on is that we do have experience, and that our 1st person subjective experience is our fundamental reality. So far so good.
Standard causation says that in the case of your record, you might not find Miles Davis in the grooves, but if you put that disk on a turntable (a thing), and drop the needle (a thing), a sound wave will be generated by the amp (a thing), and will issue out a speaker (a thing), and will be heard by your timphanic membrane (a thing), processed by your meant brain (a thing), undergo a bunch of other process for which the crafty AI folks have models for and viola, we have experience - but no "thing" or evidence of this, our fundamental reality, even existing.
We hear the argument that experience is surely "implied" by the 2nd hard questing, but we do not use this explanation in other cases.
Before we had microscopes the ancient Greeks guessed the existence of atoms, and that the atoms were real, material things. And with Brother Miles Davis, we can reverse engineer our way back from the sound in the room through a series of real things - sound waves, speakers, amps, and so forth, back to the recording studio and a real flesh and blood dood (Miles) blowing said fluglehorn. But we cannot reverse engineer the non-thing of experience back to matter in the same way we can do so with Kind of Blue, and to say we can imply same, is to pull a fast one on our material causal model - which has a material thing at every link - equal to saying experience and matter (meat brain are the same thing).
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Oct 31, 2011 - 06:40pm PT
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but John, were I blind folded, and were the sound system good enough, how would I actually know that it wasn't Miles?
...my experience might lead me to believe that it was.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Oct 31, 2011 - 06:47pm PT
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Largo
Marlow wrote:
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.
Largo answered:
IMO, this is half right and half completely crazy. The second half is the plain and simple fact of it: a quantitative description "will not be the same thing" as subjective experience. A Rule of Mind issues from this simple, empirical fact: The map (measurements) is NOT the territory (experience). No exceptions. But the first sentence tries to smuggle the idea in sideways - that is, measurements will eventually get closer and closer to "knowing what happens during experiencing." What makes this crazy is that measurements are about measurements and descriptions and atoms and motions, they are NOT about experience. That's the paradox. The Rule of Mind states clearly that the measurements are NOT experience. Even Marlow - and avowed reductionist - says so. Measurements are just data about matter, not about experience. And we already know that loopy statements like "matter IS conscious" are simply daft and meaningless swindles.
Marlow answering by using an example that illustrates the point Largo calls completely crazy simple daft and meaningless swindles according to his "Rule of Mind":
Think that I had instruments that measured your brain activity. At the same time you told me what you experienced when I measured the activity. After doing this for a long time we turned it all around. I measured your brain activity and told you what you experienced and you told me when I was right and when I was wrong. And the result was that I was 99% right and 1% wrong - would you then accept that experience could be measured?
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MH2
climber
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Oct 31, 2011 - 11:19pm PT
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JL
Thanks for the careful reply.
There are of course differences between brain and mind, and between nerve activity and experience. It may be that no two people agree exactly on any of this stuff. That's why science comes in handy as a way to test ideas. Ideas we can't test, we can at least talk about.
Here is how I like to look at brain versus experience:
When we experience, with rare exception, we experience something. There must also be something with which to do the experiencing. Suppose that the thing being experienced is the wind. Suppose that the agent of experience is the surface of the ocean (to leave the human side out). The wind creates waves on the surface of the ocean. Let's get poetic and say those waves are the ocean experiencing the wind. Although they were caused by the wind, they aren't the wind, they don't behave like the wind, and they can persist after the wind and travel miles from where they were formed. So in this analogy the brain is water, an agent which can experience the wind. The waves are not the experience, they are its vehicle, if you will. We can't recreate the wind from measuring the waves (at least not uniquely).
Marlow,
We've had a visit to the Empirical Epistemologist already in this thread. He actually provides some support for Largo's view that analyzing first person experience is a tricky business.
http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/epistemologicalNightmare.html
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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MH2
Yes, it is a tricky business, and possibliy impossible even in the long run.
Still the question stands on it's own.
Largo
Think that I had instruments that measured your brain activity. At the same time you told me what you experienced when I measured the activity. After doing this for a long time we turned it all around. I measured your brain activity and told you what you experienced and you told me when I was right and when I was wrong. And the result was that I was 99% right and 1% wrong - would you then accept that experience could be measured?
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Ed, as soon as you said "blindfolded" you put yourself straight into Platos's allegory of the cave. Which I keep telling everyone here to read, but nobody does. It is short and illustrates a very important thing.
How do we know that we know?
JL is all hung up on the duality of mind and body. This was very much a Descartes hangup. That we are vessels of the mind, or that the mind and body are two separate things.
That question is: does brain = mind?
I want to back all the way up to the OP and question the very essence. What is mind? Is it all in the brain, or is the brain insufficient in explaining consciousness and self awareness?
There is also the very cool question of the map being a simulacra of the territory. Baudrillard wrote a whole book about this that is a fun read. His point was, that after a while, the map actually replaces the territory in importance. I see it all of the time now. People don't even bother learning the territory in favor of using a GPS device when traveling.
One of the real problems that AI people have is that computers are already far better at crunching objective data than the human brain is, but remain utterly stupid when it comes to pattern recognition. The human brain is incredible at that. The meat brain, if you want to call it a computer, is a very different type of computer than the digital one sitting in front of you.
From a hard quantitative standpoint, it is hard for science to put a lot of capital into subjective experience, but you will never understand how the human brain works without doing so. We operate on subjective data far more than we do objective data. Perhaps because our senses are constantly flooded with subjective information.
I have never seen any reason to suppose that the mind resides anywhere other than the brain. That is pretty obvious from an intuitive standpoint.
It can even be tested. Easily. Do things to the body and then see how the mind reacts. Go to war and see all your buds get blown up one by one while you miraculously survive? PTSD.
Have your eyes destroyed in an accident and you go blind, losing our main sense of the world.
A brain injury can cause complete loss of memory, including the ability of memory to function at all after the injury. The injury broke the brain's hard drive, so to speak.
From where I stand, it seems pretty obvious that the mind resides in the brain. I don't know why JL is all hung up on that.
Now, the questions, "What is consciousness?" and "What is self awareness?" are very cool questions. I see no reason to jump ship from the brain at this point.
You have to remember how the mind functions, though. It is far more intuitive and qualitative than a digital computer. It is also far more prone to errors than a digital computer as well as being far slower. Electromagnetics is far faster than electrochemical. Why go the electrochemical route? Is it that our brains evolved in the absence of electrical outlets?
Our brains are also notoriously imperfect when processing incoming subjective or even objective data. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously wrong. Show five people the same subjective or objective data, and there is a high probability that all five will not agree on a later account of the same experience.
The mind is very subjective. Woefully subjective. Why is this? Is the ability to be objective and quantitative something that had less of an evolutionary advantage than the ability to be highly intuitive and subjective?
I don't know. I do know that we have to build perfectly objective machines to do a lot of our dirty work now. Computers are a crutch for that inability to be objective and quantitative on any reliable basis.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Marlow,
I think that we have all seen enough FMRI and other brain imaging data to know that experience causes activity to change in certain parts of the brain.
Modern neuroscience is stuffed full of data like this.
That said, you would have to be dumb as a box of rocks to say that the brain does not operate on subjective experience. AI researchers aren't stupid. I live next door to the guy who wrote the first computer program that evolved. Won a big prize. Monster mind.
He has a very strong position that where most science abhors subjective data, you will never get anywhere in a discussion of intelligence if you ignore subjective data. Intelligence in a human type brain requires that you consider it constantly. The human mind is not all that objective.
It is interesting to turn the microscope around and look at how we have adapted this massive subjective mind to operate objectively at all.
Look at math and physics. Arguably the most basic of any sciences. Both math and physics rely on a vast array of symbology and extremely strict definition. Ever watched a physicist or mathematician work? It is pages of symbols.
I put forward the notion that those fields use intense symbology for the precise reason that our minds function quite differently from computers. We are very subjective by nature. Language is too imprecise to efficiently and correctly convey ideas in the very deep objective sciences. Our brains didn't evolve for that.
The story may be apocryphal, but I have heard many times that Einstein came up with the idea of relativity from a thought experiment. Thought experiments are probably most common and useful in philosophy. Worked, though.
To understand the biological mind, you have to immediately realize that you are dealing with a machine that operates almost exclusively from subjective experience. It is a great evolutionary advantage to have a human brain, but it does have its drawbacks. It is very difficult to operate objectively.
Hell, everything I have written this morning is intuitive. Intuition is a fantastic tool. By its nature it has to be double checked objectively at some point, though. It isn't very reliable.
We just don't have enough time to go around objectively checking everything. It is too slow. That can of worms opens up a whole bunch of other things like content and context. You wouldn't get out of bed if you had to objectively consider each decision you made in the morning. It would be closing time by the time you tied your shoes.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Base,
I am in no way denying that experience is subjective. To reformulate my formulations to make it absolutely clear:
Largo
Think that I into the future had very advanced instruments that measured your brain activity. At the same time you told me what you subjectively experienced during the time I measured your brain activity. After doing this for a long time we turned it all around. I measured your brain activity and told you what you subjectively experienced and you told me when I was right and when I was wrong. And the result was that I was 99% right and 1% wrong - would you then accept that subjective experience could be measured?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Ed, as soon as you said "blindfolded" you put yourself straight into Platos's allegory of the cave.
not exactly, I just wanted to isolate the senses, audio verisimilitude is a more common experience among those who would be posting on this thread... visual is good enough in many cases...
but my point is, we might not be able to tell the difference between Miles in person and Miles as a recording... which gets to your point of the finiteness of our sensory input and the stories we make up about the gaps in that input.
In Largo's example, taken to extreme, and just to be crazy simple, Miles isn't even the sound coming from his horn or his visual presence, Miles is some construct that lives in my first person experience..
different from Plato's cave because the shadows on Plato's walls originate from some "real world" which we cannot know (in that allegory).
What Largo is saying is that real or not, it is irrelevant, as all that matters is our first person experience, devoid of any actual stuff...
The Science section in the NYTimes has an article about such stuff today...
Decoding the Brain’s Cacophony
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MH2
climber
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After taking Fortmental's critique to heart and then being confused by Base104's use of "objective" and "subjective", I had to go check the definitions of those terms.
To make it quick:
Objective statements are based on fact.
Subjective statements are based on something other than fact.
Obviously then, if JL considers experience to be subjective, it has loose connection to fact.
It was more enlightening to read the NYT piece that Ed referred to. Mostly for the way in which people interpret things according to their personalities. From his split brain studies, Michael Gazzaniga finds the left hemisphere to be a narrator, to such a degree that it will fill in missing details to make a complete story. As the journalist puts it, "The storyteller found the storyteller."
It may be no coincidence that this seems to make a good story for the journalist, too.
Another way to look at it, though, is that the brain has predictive power. It is very useful to have an idea about what is going to happen next. This is true for animals as well as us. Our brains are looking for patterns that may have significance for us and trying to make decisions in advance of prey escaping us, us getting taken down, or a thunderstorm catching us, for examples. In the niche we evolved in, I am sure we were pretty good at looking ahead and filling in any gaps with reasonably good guesses. In today's world, this predisposition extends to language and there is less selective pressure on coming up with the right narrative.
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Well, I have at least met someone who has read Plato's allegory. I understand what you are saying.
I dunno. I see sitting here and arguing experience, which I see as no more than sensory data being subjectively assembled, being based on nothing real, as kind of as#@&%e talking. William S. Burroughs like.
The hard problem is to make correct decisions. This often involves objective analysis. For the human mind, which has a knack for the subjective, I assume because of speed, great care must be taken to define and be aware of what is subjective data.
Objective thinking is possible, but great care must be taken in interpreting the data and communicating the results. It has to be rigorous. The brain is not good at that compared to a computer's ability to process an incredible amount of quantitative data.
I will say that intuitive thinking is a strong point of the brain. The ability to see connections between data or experiences that on the surface may seem to be unrelated is a fantastic tool that I use fairly regularly.
Many great ideas come from intuitive thinking. It still has to be rigourously checked from an objective standpoint to verify, though.
What we think of as mind is simply our perception of what is going on in the brain. Kill the brain and not much happens. Kill the senses and it is much harder for the brain to operate.
If you look up the definitions for words like "qualia" or "discursive", you will find them heavily derived from psychology.
Psychology is a tough topic. It is hard to quantify something and arrive at a pat answer. Its use is without doubt valuable. How do you talk 100 million poor rednecks into believing that some dipshit should be president probably involves a whole crew of skilled psychologists. Look at how we are manipulated by the TV. It works very well.
One thing is certain. The human mind, if not carefully trained, is easy prey to all sorts of disinformation.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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I bet the stroke was in the brain and not the mind, huh?
I think it is foolish to dismiss the human brain as a lump of meat, and replace it with what I can only describe as a unicorn.
This doesn't mean that the human brain is not fascinating on many levels. Buddhists are very good at controlling the human brain's autonomic functions. A damn cool fact. Buddhism is not a religion to me. It is a very cool way of thinking.
The first sentence in my favorite buddhist text is the first one. "Siddhartha was just a man like any other." No reason to believe in ghosts in buddhism. It stands up to very harsh quantitative study.
And it seems to be good for you. And it makes a load of sense on that intuitive level. It is also useful. Everything you need.
I took one of those easy personality tests and scored out as being highly intuitive but very judgemental. It has served me quite well. At any time there are at least a dozen other geologists looking at the same area that you are. Breakthroughs for me come intuitively by staring at the clouds or late night traffic and then Bam! There it comes. Then I have to rip it apart and see if it holds up. Doesn't always work, but I would wager any thinker of new ideas needing an intuitive side.
The Feynman story of watching the spinning plate is a pretty good example of an intuitive breakthrough. Again, an idea is not good enough. It is just the start. The first thing any critical thinker must be able to do is to be willing to rip their own ideas to shreds. If you don't, someone else will do it for you.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Largo
Think that I into the future had very advanced instruments that measured your brain activity. At the same time you told me what you subjectively experienced during the time I measured your brain activity. After doing this for a long time we turned it all around. I measured your brain activity and told you what you subjectively experienced and you told me when I was right and when I was wrong. And the result was that I was 99% right and 1% wrong - would you then accept that subjective experience could be measured?
The reason why I ask this question is to get to know if you are absolutely dogmatic about your "law" or if there are circumstances under which you would be willing to reconsider it or consider it falsified. My hypothesis at present is that you are dogmatic about the "law".
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