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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 10, 2011 - 11:36pm PT
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It was rather an unprecedented,subjective, imaginative, and almost artistic series of astounding epiphanies that led to that singular discovery of the nature of the universe.
you know this?
have you read the papers?
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Nov 11, 2011 - 03:33am PT
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Reformulation: If you hold on to the view that what you subjectively think and feel is a fact about nature is just as much a fact as what science has shown to be a fact about nature, then such a view has the implication that you one day may think an feel for creative design concluding that creative design is a fact, the next day you may think and feel for evolution as fact and so on. The thieves in the house of the man from Merv and Creative design are then just as much facts as the daughter of Largo and evolution. Such a conclusion is in my view nothing short of subjective nonsense.
Einstein's discoveries were primarily part of an incremental process where he built on the findings of other scientists. He had broad and deep knowledge about his subject matter and there was surely also an element of creativity and imagination that built on his knowledge base. But there is no way Einstein could have reached his conclusions without his deep and broad pre-knowledge.
To me his words "imagination is more important than knowledge" is just a smart formulation signifying nothing of great importance.
As is the case with Darwin and evolution - if Einstein had not found what he found the probability is very high that other scientists would have reached the same conclusions within a few years.
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d-know
Trad climber
electric lady land
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Nov 11, 2011 - 09:20am PT
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einstien - "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 11, 2011 - 08:33pm PT
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To me his words "imagination is more important than knowledge" is just a smart formulation signifying nothing of great importance.
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So you and Albert Einstein disagree on what is "important." Fair enough, Marlow.
Of course his definition was drawn directly from his own experience, in which his imagination was the germ for his ground breaking theories. If you are suggesting that Albert Einstein was mistaken about his own experience, and is beholden to you to set big Al, and us, straight, that in fact knowledge (measurements) provided the germ for his theories, then you are just being impudent again so it's back on with the pointy hat and into the corner once more.
And of course I'm just funning you here as always. And measure that, dood.
JL
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pa
climber
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Nov 11, 2011 - 09:07pm PT
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And,
"The intuitive mind is a precious gift. The rational mind is its faithful servant. We have created a society in which we honor the servant and have forgotten the gift."
Dr. Einstein...it's Einstein dammit, not Einstien...
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MH2
climber
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Nov 11, 2011 - 11:17pm PT
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Donald Thompson
When you say,
Science can neither validate or invalidate subjective states of mind.
it isn't clear to me what you mean. What do you mean by a subjective state of mind? When I look for an explanation of the difference between objective and subjective, I find that subjective information can be opinion, judgement, assumption, belief, rumor, or suspicion. When it is put that way, I don't think it would take science to detect a subjective state of mind and invalidate it if it was false.
I like the perspective of JL a few posts above:
the subjective and objective, the physical and experiential are inextricabl[y] intertwined
I agree with that. It may seem to us that we are looking out on the world, through a window of the mind as it were. However, we only get to that point after a lot of early brain development, when the world is in effect looking into our minds and molding them. At different times we may cooperate with or combat the molding influence of our experience, but mind and world are closely linked.
I don't think it is a simple job to characterize or talk about mental activity. The scientific approach of carefully framing questions and devising tests to answer them can be helpful.
JL seems to simplify the scientific approach to measurement. Numbers are just a tool. It is finding connections that is the goal. The Pythagorean theorem is a statement about relationships. It's validity doesn't depend on measurement.
Science despite its power is only one small part of human experience. The common theme in this thread is exploration, I hope. Reality could be pictured as a landscape in 3(more or less) dimensions with each of us climbing up a hill, descending into valley, or traversing a slope. However, a mist obscures faraway features. We may holler across the distance to each other about what we find, and what we see around us may differ from what someone else is seeing. We may feel exhilaration on reaching a summit, but it may only be a local high point, with higher peaks still hidden. And science is only one mode of exploration among many.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Nov 12, 2011 - 04:10am PT
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I will repeat the story about complicated thinkers: The man from Merv
A man in the city Merv, known for it's complicated thinkers, one night ran around in the streets of the city shouting: "Thief! Thief!"
People collected around him and asked: "Where is the thief?"
In my house, he answered.
Did you see him?
No.
Was anything stolen?
No.
How do you then know that there was a thief?
I lay in my bed and suddenly I realised that thieves break into houses in absolute silence and that they move extremely silently.
I was not able to hear anything, so I understood that there had to be a thief in the house.
Comments:
I am not suggesting that the thinking of the man from Merv did not appear real to the man himself. This was his subjective experience. To him the thieves were seen as a fact.
My point is that the probability that there were thieves in the house of the man from Merv is extremely low. My strong hypothesis is that there were no thieves, the thieves were not there. Another way to describe that is to say that it is probably a fact that there were no thieves in the house.
Regarding Einsten's imagination and knowledge I have already made my point quite clear and will not repeat it.
Donald
I have no problem disagreeing with you on this issue.
My main conclusion however is that you are a remarkable poet. I thought for a while that you cited other poets. If the poems you post are your own I think you are up there with the best of them. In my view you are outstanding.
Robinson Jeffers is common ground for us. I have his collected works in my library.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 12, 2011 - 10:49am PT
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People define and measure subjective experience all of the time. I mean constantly. If you didn't, you would go around running red lights and would be dead in a day.
If there weren't any value in discussing and pondering subjective experience, we would all be lost in insanity. We also wouldn't have art and literature and poetry and music.
There is no harm in exploring this. People explore it without even thinking about it all of the time.
So, yeah. The material and experiential are very much entertwined. I don't know where you would even draw the line separating the two unless it were in some arbitrary way.
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Nov 12, 2011 - 11:57am PT
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The Man from Merv is a story.
An argument by story attempts to generate resonance in sympathetic readers. But if readers do not perceive an analogy, then stories as arguments fail.
Shakespeare's works, for example, presents varied portrayals of the human condition that have resonated with readers for over 400 years. It can be said that his plays present a truth of a different kind than what science provides, a truth that is timeless and spaceless.
Few of us would be willing to use Shakespeare's works as proofs or arguments about what human beings are. It just wouldn't seem right to do so. What we might do is to use his plays as examples for arguments about things or issues that have facts about them: "Like Gloucester in Lear. . . my mother can see what needs to be seen with or without her eyes--with her heart." Here we at least know about my mother, a fact. But we probably would hesitate to use stories alone to make arguments about things for which we have no facts at all.
We can use stories to argue about other stories, but that seems more like literary criticism or the consistency of a canon of literature.
The Man from Merv is a parable. It has no facts; the claim about complicated thinkers has no facts either. There is no meaning to argue about empirically. Fiction writers do this all the time, and it makes sense imaginatively because one can run a mental simulation to check for consistency. Einstein and others have indeed used thought experiments to suggest ideas and run simulations, but they then proceeded to test their simulations about the physical world.
Perhaps a story approach is an indication of a non-complicated thinker. At the bottom, I guess what is being argued is that complicated thinkers are misguided or wrong.
I may, however, be misguided in this.
(BTW--some really great posts above.)
Be well.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 12, 2011 - 12:05pm PT
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People define and measure subjective experience all of the time. I mean constantly. If you didn't, you would go around running red lights and would be dead in a day.
I think this statement is an illustration of what could be wrong in our discussion of "mind." It is stated with absolute authority whose veracity is established by our common experience. However, there are many other things we have experienced that would indicate that the statement is not true, experiences that we've all had.
In those experiences, you act before the discursive mind gets around to "discussing" the situation. This has been studied, perhaps first by Deecke & Kornhuber and more famously by Libet, and has generated the field of study known as the "neuroscience of free will." Here, the physical measurement of brain response is correlated with the "conscious awareness" of the stimulus, the challenge that Largo put to the physicalists earlier in this thread.
The question it poses is certainly interesting, if not controversial, that is, if we act without "conscious" intent, what then of free will?
The issue at question here is the connection of our conscious experience to our actions. The causality is not established, though our "experience" might lead us to believe otherwise. There is evidence that the situation is considerably more complex than our simple interpretation of the experience.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Nov 12, 2011 - 01:14pm PT
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MikeL says:
"At the bottom, I guess what is being argued is that complicated thinkers are misguided or wrong."
Answer
Not so. But often conclusions based on introspection and mentalistic constructs and subjective reasoning is flat out wrong.
The story illustrates a simple point for complicated mentalistic thinkers. The story itself is not the point. I think my point is clear enough above and I will not repeat it.
Here are some of the distinctions I can make from my simple thinking:
1. That people have subjective experiences can be seen as a fact.
2. To a person himself/herself all of his/her subjective experiences about the outer world may be seen as facts about the outer world.
3. When we study the outer world by help of scientific method or just inquire seriously we may sometimes find that there is no reason to hold some of these subjective experiences for being facts about the outer world. History is filled with misconceptions about the outer world based on subjective experiences, subjective reasoning and subjective conclusions. And our body is part of that "outer world".
4. At times people come to the insight that some of the conclusions they came to based on their subjective experiences were only illusions.
5. The conclusions we reach about the outer world based on scientific method have a higher probability of being facts about the outer world than the conclusions we reach from subjective experiences and subjective reasoning alone.
6. Metacognition and metascience is necessary inside the scientific community to correct for the fragility of the human mind - an example: humans using scientific method have a tendency to use scientific method wrong and in such a way that they reach the conclusions they are attracted to
7. What science has shown us covers only a small small part of what we need to know to live our daily lives as human beings. In our daily life our subjective reasoning skills or intuitions are far more important to us than science.
8. The facts found by help of science are taken up as part of our subjective experiences of the outer and inner world over time.
9. Science is not and will never be enough to give meaning to a human life.
10. To some human beings, scientists, science is an important part of what gives meaning to their lives.
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MH2
climber
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Nov 12, 2011 - 08:48pm PT
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In those experiences, you act before the discursive mind gets around to "discussing" the situation.
Like when you touch something hot?
edit:
I see this comes from a clever use of the "readiness potential". The question of Free Will is a big load to rest on studies of finger movements.
You would want to test an action that makes the brain work harder. Present the subject with a choice of 2 different kinds of tooth paste. If there is movement before conscious intention in that case, I'd be impressed.
A good discussion:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK10796/
A source that considers Libet, Deecke, and Kornhuber:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Awareness_of_intention
from the Scholarpedia article:
According to Libet, conscious intention is not causally responsible for initiating movements.
There is just something wrong-sounding about that. I am sure that our brain makes low-level decisions without our awareness. It's probably faster that way, and speed can be life-or-death important. But it is a big stretch from that to no Free Will.
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maculated
Trad climber
San Luis Obispo, CA
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Nov 12, 2011 - 09:43pm PT
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I would think no, more like instinctual behaviors. People touch stuff for too long if it's hot, and maybe, just maybe, I might have chopped the tip of my finger off this year and didn't notice for a few minutes. Pain is entirely under mental controls depending on the situation.
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MikeL
climber
SANTA CLARA, CA
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Nov 12, 2011 - 11:00pm PT
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It's like deja vu all over again.
It is stated with absolute authority whose veracity is established by our common experience. However, there are many other things we have experienced that would indicate that the statement is not true, experiences that we've all had.
Now I think You're doing it Ed (over-generalizations). I don't get that impression from people who have been arguing for the incommensurability of subjectivity, Ed. Maybe I'm wrong. As someone up above said with equanimity, "we're closer than you think [on this thread]."
(Free will vs. determinism has been a controversial topic for a long time. I'm excited that empirical science can make contributions.)
I agree, Ed. Darned interesting data, and lots to think about. I like it. Cheers.
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Marlow:
Here are some disagreements with your 10 points.
1. That people have subjective experiences can be seen as a fact.
I wouldn't say that. That's not a factual statement; it's an inference. You're misusing the notion of fact as I understand it. You can't measure subjective experiences. But hey, if you think you can, please say what the constructs are and how you would measure them.
2. To a person himself or herself all of his or her subjective experiences about the outer world may be seen as facts about the outer world.
No. That's not what some of us have been saying at all. Is that YOUR claim?
3. When we study the outer world by help of scientific method or just inquire seriously we may sometimes find that there is no reason to hold some of these subjective experiences for being facts about the outer world. History is filled with misconceptions about the outer world based on subjective experiences, subjective reasoning and subjective conclusions. And our body is part of that "outer world".
(Pretty sly interjection of "seriously," friend.) Ok, sure. There will always be reasons for doubt, no matter what. I think we all agree with that for conversational purposes. I'd say that's a necessary consequence of incommensurability. I believe that is the subjectivists' complaint on this thread. At least it's mine.
4. At times people come to the insight that some of the conclusions they came to based on their subjective experiences were only illusions.
Most of us have been very sensitive to unconscious projections. Especially Jan. No one claimed infallibility. That's not the argument. The argument is about type and whether one type can stand in for another type.
5. The conclusions we reach about the outer world based on scientific method have a higher probability of being facts about the outer world than the conclusions we reach from subjective experiences and subjective reasoning alone.
Well, unfortunately, to my knowledge that has never been tested. I mean, my god, how would you conduct that research? Jeez, one would have to come up with measurements for subjective experiences first of all. Perhaps one could simply tabulate "conclusions" and come to a loose representative assessment, but there are so many intervening variable problems operationally. Maybe there are research studies that you can point me to? I'm all ears, brother.
6. Metacognition and metascience is necessary inside the scientific community to correct for the fragility of the human mind - an example: humans using scientific method have a tendency to use scientific method wrong and in such a way that they reach the conclusions they are attracted to
Again, you got research studies on this? The problem with metascience studies (trying to find common threads or findings across large groups of studies) is that it exposes regression to the mean and ignores contextual detail of the studies--which happen to be pretty darned important. In my field, we use them very infrequently. Maybe you do in your field.
7. What science has shown us covers only a small small part of what we need to know to live our daily lives as human beings. In our daily life our subjective reasoning skills or intuitions are far more important to us than science.
Speculation. Maybe. I can imagine a thought experiment regarding how long science has been around and how long Man has been around. But unfortunately, I can't show it for modern times only. Again, structuring the research would be daunting.
8. The facts found by help of science are taken up as part of our subjective experiences of the outer and inner world over time.
Whatever presents itself to a mind gets taken up as a subjective experience. QED. What is outer becomes inner, and what is inner becomes outer--that's how projections work.
9. Science is not and will never be enough to give meaning to a human life.
10. To some human beings, scientists, science is an important part of what gives meaning to their lives.
Yes of course. It's like saying that money is important to investment bankers. It's to be expected.
Ed points to data, to method, and to interpretations of the data.
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BASE104
climber
An Oil Field
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Nov 12, 2011 - 11:40pm PT
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Ed,
All I am saying is that I agree that subjective experience isn't "processed" in a quantitative way very often. Our senses are working every waking second, and nigh everything goes down without much thought. To even think objectively is, in my opinion, not how our brains evolved. It takes some effort to think objectively.
That said, we are immersed in our subjective experiences. We deal with them and make decisions every second.
Certainly we don't pull out a spectrometer at every traffic light to measure the light and confirm that it is red.
Maybe if we were invaded by a race of alien sociologists. They would be very interested in how we have traffic with so few collisions.
And hey. I work in a shop full of very bright scientists. Some had to learn how to distance themselves from any personal investment in science the hard way.
That said, I see no reason to flatly pull a Largo and say that the mind will never be understood.
We need a good neuroscientist in the conversation. It would help.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 13, 2011 - 12:36am PT
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The mind is by nature very restless, and one should not make friends with it.
Material life is not peaceful life.
At the time of death, the condition of your mind will transfer you with mind, intelligence, subtle body.
They are seeing that this gross body's finished, but they cannot see that there is another body which is made of mind, intelligence and ego.
That is called subtle body .
All the people on this whole thread can not even grasp their own minds ......
Unless he comes to the final cause, this research goes on.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Nov 13, 2011 - 04:53am PT
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1. That people have subjective experiences can be seen as a fact.
MikeL says: I wouldn't say that. That's not a factual statement; it's an inference. You're misusing the notion of fact as I understand it. You can't measure subjective experiences. But hey, if you think you can, please say what the constructs are and how you would measure them.
Answer: I cannot measure subjective experiences directly, but it is something I believe in although I cannot measure it directly. Indirectly I can ask people to tell me what they are experiencing. And there will surely be a measurement problem. I used the word can because I know the point can be challenged. You have every right to do that.
2. To a person himself or herself all of his or her subjective experiences about the outer world may be seen as facts about the outer world.
MikeL says: No. That's not what some of us have been saying at all. Is that YOUR claim?
Answer: No, I am not saying that that is what some of you have been saying all the time. That is not my claim.
3. When we study the outer world by help of scientific method or just inquire seriously we may sometimes find that there is no reason to hold some of these subjective experiences for being facts about the outer world. History is filled with misconceptions about the outer world based on subjective experiences, subjective reasoning and subjective conclusions. And our body is part of that "outer world".
MikeL says: (Pretty sly interjection of "seriously," friend.) Ok, sure. There will always be reasons for doubt, no matter what. I think we all agree with that for conversational purposes. I'd say that's a necessary consequence of incommensurability. I believe that is the subjectivists' complaint on this thread. At least it's mine.
Answer: Do you see me as generally sly MikeL or was it just this one time when I used the words "inquire seriously"?
4. At times people come to the insight that some of the conclusions they came to based on their subjective experiences were only illusions.
MikeL: Most of us have been very sensitive to unconscious projections. Especially Jan. No one claimed infallibility. That's not the argument. The argument is about type and whether one type can stand in for another type.
Answer: I do not understand exactly what you mean when you say "That's not the argument. The argument is about type and whether one type can stand in for another type."
5. The conclusions we reach about the outer world based on scientific method have a higher probability of being facts about the outer world than the conclusions we reach from subjective experiences and subjective reasoning alone.
MikeL says: Well, unfortunately, to my knowledge that has never been tested. I mean, my god, how would you conduct that research? Jeez, one would have to come up with measurements for subjective experiences first of all. Perhaps one could simply tabulate "conclusions" and come to a loose representative assessment, but there are so many intervening variable problems operationally. Maybe there are research studies that you can point me to? I'm all ears, brother.
Answer: My point is quite simple. Just look at history and the former subjective experience of the Universe, with the sun circling around the earth, with up to fifty crystal heavens and so on, and then take a look at our much more science- and evidence-based picture of the Universe today.
6. Metacognition and metascience is necessary inside the scientific community to correct for the fragility of the human mind - an example: humans using scientific method have a tendency to use scientific method wrong and in such a way that they reach the conclusions they are attracted to.
MikeL says: Again, you got research studies on this? The problem with metascience studies (trying to find common threads or findings across large groups of studies) is that it exposes regression to the mean and ignores contextual detail of the studies--which happen to be pretty darned important. In my field, we use them very infrequently. Maybe you do in your field.
Answer: Just search for Ioannidis at metaresearch on the net and you will find all the evidens you want.
"Ioannidis is what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem."
7. What science has shown us covers only a small small part of what we need to know to live our daily lives as human beings. In our daily life our subjective reasoning skills or intuitions are far more important to us than science.
MikeL says: Speculation. Maybe. I can imagine a thought experiment regarding how long science has been around and how long Man has been around. But unfortunately, I can't show it for modern times only. Again, structuring the research would be daunting.
Answer: Well, I believed we were quite close to the conclusion that we still do not know very much about the human brain (as example). I believe that if I should have the ambition of making all my moves, all my thoughts and feelings through the day evidence-based best praxis I would be completely lost, a complete fool even by the standards set by hero Don Quijote.
8. The facts found by help of science are taken up as part of our subjective experiences of the outer and inner world over time.
MikeL says: Whatever presents itself to a mind gets taken up as a subjective experience. QED. What is outer becomes inner, and what is inner becomes outer--that's how projections work.
Answer: At this level of abstraction it looks like we are agreeing.
9. Science is not and will never be enough to give meaning to a human life.
10. To some human beings, scientists, science is an important part of what gives meaning to their lives.
MikeL says: Yes of course. It's like saying that money is important to investment bankers. It's to be expected.
Answer: I agree.
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MH2
climber
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Nov 13, 2011 - 09:40am PT
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When I think about it for more than an instant, the gentle push to the direction of the conversation provided by Ed makes more and more sense. Acting before thinking could explain a lot about this thread.
Let's take a quick look at a nice parallel to how the brain(or mind if you prefer) may work. Say we have a large group of people with a job to do. A job that requires a bit of cooperation and division of labor. Let's say that job is an old expedition-style ascent of Everest.
We are fortunate that, somewhat like the thinking feeling machine imagined by Leibniz, we have an inside view of what such an expedition is like:
A series of perfectly sensible decisions led to the emphasis of a division that is always incipiently present in any large expedition. The A team represented the Overground Leadership, the B team the Underground Leadership.
On the positive side, the Underground can, once the expedition is strung out over a number of camps and communications are strained, influence the course of events by withholding information. In this way the Overground still makes all the decisions, but on the basis of grossly inadequate information, and this means that, skillfully handled, the Overground without realizing it simply okays the wishes of the Underground.
from Out With the Boys Again by Mike Thompson
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Nov 13, 2011 - 10:38am PT
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Dingus
See it this way: What you take is often what you are given. At times you are given something you haven't taken, it's a gift. That is something happening all the time in my life, I never stop wondering. At times what you thought you took or what you thought you were given was not what you got.
From the perspective of an enlightened thief at heart all meaning is hidden in the act of taking.
These words make no claim of being good science.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 13, 2011 - 01:01pm PT
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in my description above of the "discursive mind" separation from the other parts of mind not accessible to it, I do not mean to imply that those other parts of mind are "primitive," "uncivilized," "undisciplined," "unintelligent." My main hypothesis here is that the discursive mind tends to take all the credit for our mental abilities, since the other parts of the mind are not accessible to it for investigation.
One of the experiences I believe we all share is the one where we've been working on thinking through a hard problem... trying this and that internal argument, working through various aspects of it with hyper-concentration. Once exhausted, we go off and have a beer or whatever and just relax, do something else, "take our mind off the problem." It is not infrequent that the answer might just "pop into our heads" or the answer is "just sitting there" once we take up the problem again.
It seems odd to me that we ignore the possibility (as represented in the quoted phrases in the last paragraph) that there are parts of our mind that carry on the exercise of working the problem outside of the "view" of the discursive mind. I've experienced this in a number of ways, but most interesting is the more difficult physics or mathematics I've done, and the interplay between the conscious concentration on the problem, and the stuff that is going on unconsciously.
It is apparent that this happens in physical training too, where we work through many "reps" of a particular exercise and when we get into a "game situation" know what to do without the discursive mind blabbering instructions... "just do it" to quote a popularly shouted tip... and the talk of "muscle memory" (would that be truly "meat memory"?) makes a whole lot of sense in one way, but just very possibly, that sort of behavior is related to the parts of mind that we don't have access to in our discursive nature.
The idea that our "mind" is a patchwork of many behaviors, all working in concert, to produce our behavior is an attractive model since it seems to be plausible on evolutionary grounds, and suggests a number of possible phenomena similar to what we experience.
Here, our discursive mind takes the role of a blustery friend who loudly proclaims the answers, but doesn't understand what is going on behind the scenes... and often gets things badly wrong, though retains our affections. Our blustery friend has a role to play, and an important one, when the group needs a strong confident voice to forward its agenda to other groups, or to assure those other groups of our good intentions.
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