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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Largo
You say: "Marlow wants me to comment about his super machine (3rd person data collection) but because said machine cannot actually have 1st person subjective experience, it will basically be autistic and tell us facts and figures ABOUT experience but the fact remains that experience is not simply an info stream, it is also a dymanic, experiential process of being and becomming that is related to but not limited by the attending physical markers. Marlow believes that experience is entirely contained in these physical markers, and apparently has never read about wholism."
Answer:
You continue pushing your machine-point and you push it rigidly on me. I do not see the brain as a machine. It is something I have never said and never thought. It is only your own cheap polemical point. The brain is a brain. To use other words that are better suited than your stereotypical machine or meat - the brain is "organic", it is "flesh", it is "of nature", but the probability of the brain being either a machine or an experiencing non-physical "ghost" is very very low probability.
I see that you once more do not answer my question, just talk around it. I therefore get nearer and nearer to the conclusion that you are ideologically oriented and have certain dogmatic thought patterns you are not willing to change no matter what science should in the future show us to be an approximation to truth. You still have the chance to prove me wrong.
And to tell you what I believe about the future: the brain is so dynamic, so complex and so complicated that there will be a wide wide gap in our knowledge where the "ghost" can be put for a long long time and maybe for all time after our bones have become dust. There is being and becoming for sure. As long as space and time lasts.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Ed says
There are basically two trains of thought on this thread (Eds perspective/stance):
train 1: what we experience cannot be reduced to a physical explanation
train 2: what we experience is the result of physical phenomena
I like these to perspectives and will add nothing at present, just formulate my own stance related to the two trains:
Train 1: we can get closer to a physical explanation of what we experience.
Train 2: what we experience is the result of natural phenomena
I will not talk about the ego of any contributor.
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WBraun
climber
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Once you "root" consciousness then you will be able to replicate the first person subjective experience.
Since you all are not in the "root" consciousness, that is your defect and modern science's defect.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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The reason you can't replicate the first person subjective experience is because the meat-brain software/instruction-set are continually changing at every moment and no two are alike.
It would be like a computer that changed its circuitry in a continuous, never ending process, but instead of relatively simple dicreet circuitry you're dealing with multivariate chemical reactions and there is never a static state where you can attempt to replicate it. It's an exercise in nailing jello to the wall
I am in El Cap in the Butt's corner. The brain is a machine, but it is incredibly flexible and malleable. There is already neurological evidence that experience actually molds how the brain operates on a structural level. I will have to go dig that up, though. Our brains have the ability to adjust the wiring despite physical injury, for example. The brain is damn amazing.
Experience is just a time and place and senses. Data. Our brains are not good at quantitative thinking, so most experience is subjective first person. To think and communicate on a quantitative basis requires effort. Hence the need for symbols like F=ma.
Jan, I get what you are saying. I am not saying that illiterate people are handicapped. I am just saying that written language is a far more error free form of communicating with a large number of individuals. It doesn't make you smarter or anything, it just makes it possible to now communicate extremely powerful ideas quite reliably and easily. Hence Force equals Mass times Acceleration. F=MA. You learn that one in high school physics.
It would be difficult to share that simple law of newtonian physics without the symbology. F is force. M is mass. A is acceleration. They also have to be dimensionally consistent, which just means that each value has to be given in consistent units of measurement. Like the metric system, but a little more goofy.
First person experience. OK. It happens. We must all accept that or go play with legos or something. Third person experience is shared by communication. I could say that I was kidnapped by aliens who played with my wee wee. True or false. Even if I totally believe it, would you?
I feel that it is subjective and prone to error. The mind is not a good quantitative device. Just to think quantitatively requires a lot of effort that does not come easily. It is strong at processing a ton of interpretations of experience and then drawing intuitive conclusions from them. Some of these intuitive conclusions are our greatest achievements.
An interesting exception are the idiot savants. We have all seen things about them. Some are able to do incredible mathematical calculations error free that are in some sense super human compared to the normal folk. They almost invariably suffer from some sort of crippling brain problem, whether it be extreme autism or whatever. They may have to have someone tie their shoes for them, but their brains can operate in some specific way, music, mathematics, whatever, that is far beyond the norm.
Experience, as it is happening, is entirely quantitative. How we perceive it, including the context or construct in which we place the experiencial data is smack in the brain and very subjective.
What Largo hasn't even mentioned is that it goes far beyond experience. We can take multiple experiences and intuitively draw abstract conclusions from them that do not actually reside in the experience itself.
Like ElCapin yo ass says though, the brain is super malleable and is constantly changing as more experience is accumulated. I believe the brain is a computer, but unlike any nuts, bolts, and wires computer that we are used to. It is something truly fascinating. I can only pose informed guesses as to how it processes data (experience).
No. There is no reason to think that the brain is not a physical thing that operates on (mostly) subjective input.
From the personal standpoint, the map IS the terrain. We pull in data and make the maps intuitively by processing the data in the brain.
I dunno why JL is so utterly dogmatic about there being a mind/body dualism. It is easy to manipulate the mind, whether it be by feeding the brain "fake" experiences or feeding somebody a psychotropic drug, or whatever. Hell, go feed your meat body a fifth of whiskey and see how it affects the mind. I see no reason whatsoever to doubt that tinkering with the brain also directly tinkers with the mind.
Lets say I blow my brains out. Hell, no worries. I have only killed the meat brain. This will no doubt draw criticisms from the religious crowd.
I always want to put the word "mind" in as a poor substitute for the word consciousness.
Mind resides in the brain. Kill the brain and the mind either dies or goes off into some religious never never land that I have never seen. Even Werner must acknowledge that I would be a fool to believe in religion that I have not seen. I am open to the idea, I just haven't seen it yet.
JL did succeed in really making me admit that quantitative and objective processes operate within the realm of our senses constantly. However the brain is error prone and much of experience is entirely subjective. If you don't admit to subjective experience, you will never understand the brain.
It is all about subjective experience. To get quantitative is not natural beyond a certain point. That is why we need computers and that scientific method straight jacket.
There has been a total revolution in quantitave understanding, but we need rulers or machines to do the repetitive quantitative work for us.
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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UPDATE SUMMARY
Computers seem to be the only metaphor used in this thread, although Elcap brought in some non-binary chemical reactions, which I thought allow for more ambiguity and uncertainty.
Ed switched from being an empiricist to a "mental speculator" to (maybe) a emotional speculator (reading visual cues from Bev for her mental states). This last approach allows for even more levels of interpretations between reality and subjectivity.
Jan and Werner give us reality checks, albeit from different realities. Jan told us that illiterate Nepalese do just fine without quantitative tools (such as science might provide). Werner, on the other hand, gives us ultimate reality checks (while everyone else talks about conventional reality).
Ed introduced delusion and illusion into the conversation: what the mind experiences could indeed be "false" or not representative of the physical world. (See neuroanatomist's Jill Bolte Taylor's dual descriptions of her stroke. Which perception was "real" and which was not real? How could both be real?)
Marlow wants a definitive answer (to his liking) from Largo.
I'm kibbutzing while grading midterm exams (sigh) and not adding any value at all.
The slope seems to be getting more slippery as we go along. Physical reality seems to be getting further away. I think Largo is wearing everyone down.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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MikeL
I can see how you can reach such a conclusion regarding Marlow. I want Largo to realise that he has painted himself into a corner from which he has a chance to escape, though I am not sure he will.
What amuses me now is that both Ed and MikeL is applying an eagel or maybe even an upperdog perspective aspiring to place every other contributor but themselves in one or the other corner. And it is very well done... My compliments messieurs...
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Broken
climber
Texas
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I posted this in Hank's thread, but I thought I'd cross post it here (as I figured there was a decent chance that a contributor to this thread is familiar with the book mentioned below)...
I haven't had time to really delve into the Mind thread. Just a few bits here and there...
But, I was thinking about it when I recently listened to an episode of Radiolab about "Emergence."
http://www.radiolab.org/2007/aug/14/
The whole episode is worthwhile (the collective "intelligence" of ants, the wisdom of the crowd, etc) - but the portion that caused me to think of the What Is Mind Thread is the 16-minute segment called "The Unconscious Toscanini of the Brain" (which you can listen to separately if you don't have an hour to listen to the whole thing). That segment deals with how thought arises from our collection of neurons...
Francis Crick was apparently doing some work in this area in the last portion of his life...
EDIT: In that 16-minute segment, they interview Christof Koch, a neuroscientist who worked with Crick and wrote a book titled "The Quest for Consciousness: a Neurobiological Approach"
Has anyone here read that book?
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MH2
climber
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MikeL,
I watched Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk. What does it mean to you? Did you also check the NYT piece that Ed referred to about a scientist who studied people whose brain hemispheres had been surgically separated?
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allapah
climber
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one by one they wade in to the ring, and the no-nonsense hardman mentality embodied in Largo throws them out of the ring, at the impassable philosophical threshold between 1st person subjective experience and 3rd person objective reality… are we wearing Largo down yet?
Ed summarized on the hilarious "other thread":
train 1: what we experience cannot be reduced to a physical explanation
train 2: what we experience is the result of physical phenomena
I am waiting for a third train: it seems to have been labelled here with the term, "woo-woo."
Are we all cajoling Largo to accept "WOO-WOO" ("spiritual, paranormal, etc"-- god, i'm afraid to even attach the appropriate monikers lest I be attacked as drug-addled fruitcake, which I am anyway, being bedridden on Percocet after inguinal hernia surgery), or is it Largo who is holding out for WOO-WOO, and the rest are trying to strip him of it?
Why can't WOO-WOO ever be allowed in on Supertopo? Climbing literature is so permeated with mention of the consciousness of mountains. I thought this was all driving towards that end?
Is not Largo missing a crucial epistemological move regarding TIME as he pounds a hole in the dirt on this boulder problem?
ian
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micronut
Trad climber
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I'd like to get in on the action in this thread because the human mind amazes and confuses me. I'm not gonna jump in until I read the 900 and sumpthin' posts above. I'll join in later.....
For now I ask you this...
What is "Heart"?
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Yeah, moosedrool, I think we are in the same ballpark. The savant ability probably exists in all of us. For some evolutionary reason the brain evolved more towards dealing with the qualitative end.
But yeah, the quantitative is there. I just don't think it is that good.
JL will never change his tune. He is very well read on this topic and was twenty steps ahead when he trolled us all on the first post. He only opens up a tad when someone really kicks him in the nuts.
Fun topic, though. I'm not upset about it.
Look where we were 500 years ago. A blink in time. Galileo lived the last years of his life locked up because he discovered something that threatened the powers.
We were scientific dullards. A lot has happened in the last two generations. Hard to keep up.
The brain will be a hard nut to crack. Too bad that we don't have a neuroscientist here to bitch slap us and make us snap to.
JL: Haven't you been studying psychology for the past odd years? A mutual bud mentioned something along those lines once, but I don't remember any details.
It would explain the flurry of the word "discursive." Go wiki that one. Discursive psychology is quite the rage right now. Same with "qualia."
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Marlow: Ha-Ha. Funny.
My corner: mind is subjective and beyond consciousness. The unconscious seems infinitely rich and deep. Together the unconscious and conscious make up mind, but mind is layered, and there is more. I described the obvious levels earlier above. At the base of it all is the Base of Awareness: it has many names--Bodhichitta, the nature of mind, the great perfection, the universal base, the primordial base, the universal grandmother, yada yada. The Base not a thing or substance; it cannot be conceptualized in words (just as some people try to paint a picture or conceptualize "emptiness," "void," or "God"). Dzogchen, Chan, and Tantra practices approach discovery of this Base and mind through direct immediate experience rather than philosophical analysis. (It would be fruitless to say more, I suspect.)
Do I think subjectivity can be empirically explained? Mmmmm, maybe, but I don't think it matters. Can mind be explained? Not with science. (Good for now?)
MH2: I did read the NYT's story that Ed pointed us to. I read about an author / researcher who, at the end of the day, said that mind was an amazing mystery to him. Subjectivity would probably remain elusive, he thought. Kudos. Good reading.
What I make of Bolte-Taylor's talk? Freeking remarkable. I got chills up my spine. Analytically, if Ed ever gets his wish for an empirical explanation of subjectivity, I think the explanation will support both the experiences and realities that Bolte-Taylor so vividly presented. Both descriptions are very familiar, depending upon which community you run with. I run with both.
Base 101: Symbols and signs. Symbols reference meaning from different (evolutionary) structures of consciousness. Signs translate or reference from one topic area to another topic area within the same structure of consciousness. A symbol--anthropologically, socially, religiously, subjectively, etc.--hides meaning that can only be accessed from the structure of consciousness which generated it.
Perhaps you think you understand crosses in front of churches; you probably don't understand them profoundly as some religious folks do. You don't and can't readily understand what a stone-carved idol from Mesopotamia really means to the people that carved it because you live in today's rational, mental, abstracted, scientific structure of consciousness.
A sign like a mathematical equation variable is almost purely abstract. It has almost no real meaning to it. (Again, the philosophers from The Enlightenment were concerned how science would devoid living of value and meaning.)
Here are some signs that are still loaded with meaning and are not pure abstractions: mother, birth, death, country, God, climbing, your favorite color, sex, etc. Those signs (words signalling more than connotation) are emotionally, instinctually, and mythically laden with meaning for you and the rest of us. You are probably not very "reasoned" and rational when it comes to dealing with them in your day-to-day life. If you do, then we think there is something wrong with you. There are many things in our world that we do not deal with rationally, and I say "thank goodness" for it.
Base, it's very difficult to get out of your own (evolutionary) structure of consciousness (mental, rational, scientific, abstracted, etc.), because it's all you see. But that doesn't mean that is all there is (or should be) to mind.
With all due respect, the mind you point to seems pretty small to me.
(I apologize for not keeping up with the thread. My classes are swamping me. I should quit kibbutzing.)
Be well.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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A sign like a mathematical equation variable is almost purely abstract. It has almost no real meaning to it
An equation named “F=ma”, am I,
Once thought myself full and complete
But now I yearn only to die
My life a sham and deceit . . .
My presence, meaningless, pale
A scribble upon a few pages . . .
Oh Newton, you cannot prevail,
Casting me as your gift to the ages !
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Good luck to anyone introducing woo woo to this crowd! I gave up on that quite some time ago and decided to just increase my knowledge of the physical brain since there's plenty to learn still and lots of people on this thread who are more knowledgeable than I.
Meanwhile I think it is a very interesting point that we have no idea what the real capabilities of the brain are since it does have the ability to turn large portions of itself off and on, or simply override one with the other, depending on the needs of the moment.
The idiot savant who can calculate and the illiterates with their phenomenal memories do give us hints now and then to skills we have lost. Living in a non western village with no electricity or outside media and seeing how well illiterate people can entertain themselves with their own brains and those of fellow villagers, is another insight into verbal and social skills modern humanity has lost. Then envision the intuitive survival skills based on knowledge of nature that we all have lost compared to our hunter gatherer forbears.
Nor do we yet know the effects of current technology on the functioning of our brains. Most anthropologists would say that the computer and internet are the biggest advance in this realm since the invention of literacy. As for being handicapped by illiteracy, I would say that of course as soon as villagers interact with the outside world, they are at an enormous disadvantage. They realize this, and that's why the fasted growing urban areas are all in the developing world. Illiterate peasants realize their world has changed and they want their children to be fully functional in it. For that they need an education which is available only in the cities. Meanwhile many of these children leap from the 15th century to the 21st with seeming ease.
There have been interesting experiments in India by the way, where illiterate village children were given computers to play with but no instructions on how to use them, and within half an hour they were playing video games on them rather skillfully. Interesting to contemplate whether this shows us that the computer is just an extension of our own computer brains and therefore easy to comrehend, or that our minds are so superior, they can quickly figure out even the computer?
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Jan,
I think I didn't state myself clearly when I described the great advantage that came from written language.
I was talking in terms of very dense information. Newton's Principia for example.
That one would be hard to pass by word of mouth.
I don't know how special the human brain really is compared to some other obviously sentient animals. Whales and dolphins seem pretty bright, have rich language, etc. They don't have opposable thumbs. That doesn't necessarily make us smarter than they are though.
Written language has made it possible to pass on the lifetime works of many people. Shoot. Wiki is pretty darn amazing. Came out of nowhere.
Literacy does not equal intelligence. It just makes it easier to pass things between individuals with a far lower chance of error.
And people aren't shy about woo woo if you just read the last ten posts and pick them out. Share your ideas. Sure there is argument. That is the way it is when discussing something as nebulous as JL has been pushing.
Nebulous to me. Obviously not to him.
There aren't any firing squads, I promise.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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everything you ever say is an error because it is an interpretation
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Wrong. Sure, many things. No, not everything.
F=MA is not up to interpretation.
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
I'm James Brown, Bi-atch!
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who here wants to learn about the Reactive Mind?
does anybody need free auditing?
engrams?
secondaries?
no problem.
bad credit?
no problem.
earlier similar incidents?
no problem.
L3rd repair list after coffee shop emeter goes on the fritz due to bad ni-cads?
no problem.
past life experiences?
no problem,
dead grandmother on your chest with a bowie knife late night?
no problem,
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Literacy does not equal intelligence. It just makes it easier to pass things between individuals with a far lower chance of error.
We are agreed.
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WBraun
climber
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How do you know when your model is wrong?
You measure it against the absolute standard.
Even the materialists do this.
NIST, ...... although NIST is a perverted reflection of the absolute .....
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