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WBraun
climber
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pansychism -- the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness.
This is true indirectly.
Unfortunately consciousness is absolutely never/not material ......
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 10, 2016 - 12:10am PT
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Jgill: Philosophical discussions that begin with poorly articulated or conceived definitions lead to hundreds of pages of inconclusive babbling. If you jump into the middle of a discourse without laying the groundwork it's probable that very little of anything worthwhile will emerge.
Well, how about this? How about we instead talk about our observations, our experiences?
(I’m with the Duck’s last post, btw.)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 10, 2016 - 12:54am PT
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Any way you shake it, behavior in this regards is considered the outcome of purely physical factors in much the same Xs and Os churn computational output on a computer.
Again, complete nonsense and, per usual, you have no alternative, cogent or otherwise, to present.
You sound so glib and make no sense, nor yet posit anything directly attending what I actually say. You drank the bong water again, Healje, and I warned you about hat.
Now let's look at what was actually said with a little more acuity.
First, "Any way you shake it, behavior in this regards is considered the outcome of purely physical factors..."
We all know that you hark back to the evolutionary card like a rat to a hole. Let's remember that I am commenting on a world view (materialism, not my own) that says all behaviors are the result of physical processes. If you disagree with this, kindly tell us where and how.
If you are saying that behaviors evolved, that's all good and fine by the materialist, but he will ask you by what means are said behaviors stored in the brain. In parts or in whole cloth, and adaptable relative to the external stimulai?
If an external stimulus triggers a behavior, a materialist will say the behavior is first initiated by a brain response that causually "creates" the behavior, and makes us robots respond. Even it the neocortex first interprets the stimulai and sends a signal down to the reptilian brain to unleash another process that gives rise to a given behavior / response, all of this can be explained, says the materialist, by firing neurons. There is no special box in the brain where evolved behaviors exist or are stored in any kind of meta form, and are summoned like songs in a jukebox. To the materialist, behaviors, evolved or otherwise, are first and foremost the outcome of neuro level processes. Understanding how the processes became part of the robots bag of responses is not the questions here. The issue is how a behavior arises spontaneously in real time
If you disagree that the materialist is wrong here, state your case.
Lastly, most materialists hold out hope for Dr. Frankenstein, that one of their brothers will soon "create' a conscious machine. Some form of a computational model is normally used as the theoretical basis for creating said machine. A machine isn't going to simply BE conscious by chance. It has to be built that way, programmed that way. If you are saying that this conscious AI machine can arrive at consciousness or behavior by way of other processes then those derived through mechanical output, that behavior would issue from the machine NOT computing in some manner the input as data, then responding according to extant stored data, kindly explain yourself to the other materialsts. And do it in a way that is totally mind-independent.
You can't, because that's the model you hold dear to your heart.
You have to think through your responses before you drink that bongwater...
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Jun 10, 2016 - 12:59am PT
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So your whole thesis over 10k pages is best summed up by "can't" and "doesn't" - do you have anything whatsoever to say about what consciousness is and how it is we have an association with it, however tenuous? Yes? No? Anything?
Gotta go, out of bong water, will regurgitate more of same later.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jun 10, 2016 - 10:16am PT
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Mike, I put that definition up there with the expectation that you or JohnL or someone else would put a little flesh on it. If you don't like definitions, then don't use words, or if you desire, attach a new definition to a word.
The only thing that I said was that the medium of this conversation is written words, and therefore the definitions are important. How is that batty?
If you have a different definition, and you share it, then I have accomplished my goal. This is a tough medium to converse in: only written words.
Same goes with my definitions of Mind. Wiki has an amazing amount of information on the different viewpoints of Mind, including yours. From personal experience in my own field, I know that Wiki can be shallow. After all, it is normally a page long, with embedded links leading to other topics.
If you Wiki "Mind," you will see what I am talking about. I wasted much of a day reading about the topic and the different schools of thought. If I found anything, it was that there is not a new idea being presented here, by anyone. This is well trodden ground. It just feels new because we are winging it.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 10, 2016 - 11:02am PT
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JL,
It isn't clear from your writing what you are claiming versus what you think materialists are claiming.
It seems likely that most materialists would be pragmatic when it comes to minds, brains, and machines. The main questions would be, "What can they do and how do they do it?"
Your confusing statements about what brains or machines cannot do are of little interest to the materialist. Gödel, Turing, and others have done better in that direction.
What audience are you talking to?
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 10, 2016 - 11:27am PT
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1.
consisting of many different and connected parts.
"a complex network of water channels"
synonyms: compound, composite, multiplex
"a complex structure"
Since the example I noted of the slime molds navigating through mazes was the primary basis for my use of the word " complex" and that this use is consistent with the above definition; I'm afraid I'll employ this same usage on future occasions should they ever arise.
A maze is a complex structure, especially to a slime mold. Any set of thousands of biochemical reactions which allows our slime mold to choose the correct path through "a complex structure " is therefore complex, structurally and dynamically. Specialized usages of that term notwithstanding. Additionally it is complex because a complex environment determines those reactions. This can be considered a linguistic maxim in biology, so to speak.
(Language in context)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 10, 2016 - 11:51am PT
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It seems likely that most materialists would be pragmatic when it comes to minds, brains, and machines. The main questions would be, "What can they do and how do they do it?"
Your confusing statements about what brains or machines cannot do are of little interest to the materialist. Gödel, Turing, and others have done better in that direction.
And per Healyjes rant, in many cases, especially here, you have to state what something IS NOT before you can move in a direction of discovering what something is. If you don't establish that clearly, people will simply drag their own belief systems into whatever material is presented. Materialists are stuck saying that unless you provide another mechanical explanation - basically another specie of materialism - then go away. in a sense, people are saying, if you have another explanation, prove it, materially. This is the closed loop I am chipping away at.
Per what MH2 is saying. What part of my materialist statement are confusing you? And Goedl and Turing never talked about consciousness per se, only objective functioning. Machine talk. The fact that you might think these are one and the same is not my issue.
Just be clear, what, then, is the rock bottom line on materialism and the mechanical output model in regards to human consciousness?
Never mind where we evolved from, when we look at a present day humanoid the materialsts say we are really looking at a machine that is TOTALLY determined by it individual parts. Because any mechanical part can in theory be measured, then it follows that the parts can be digitized in some form. This is the basic theory that drives AI. Once sufficient data is worked up on the brain, the data is digitized, is ran on whatever machine is most appropriate, and the output of that machine will be identical to the life of a human being. If it isn't identical, using the same parts, materialism and determinism falls apart.
One can argue that the brain works with large scale global patterns, not just neural level fireings, but those patterns are determined by the neurons because the materialist credo is that nothing is greater than the sum of its parts. Meta level phenomenon like economies and psychology are seemingly more than their parts, but only when theoretically pondered by a thinking brain. And since the brain is only a machine, and every machine is no more than a sum of its parts, we all understand. That fact that psychology is NOT applied physics is a topic that never gets addressed on this thread.
The question is: When people say, "Show me what the mind is if it is not a determined machine," what would ever be enough other than a mechanical show of physical parts, or stuff, or things, all of which are external objects? This is asking for proof according to a supposition that not everyone holds true.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 10, 2016 - 12:10pm PT
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This is asking for proof according to a supposition that not everyone holds true.
Well then provide a proof outside of that supposition. Proof of what ? Correct me if I err but your proof would be contained within an experience you had, and nowhere else?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 10, 2016 - 12:18pm PT
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^^^^
Alleged proof by experience and internal observation?
How about we instead talk about our observations, our experiences? (MikeL)
OK. I've talked at length about my art of dreaming experiences, and JL has talked at length about his internal experiential association with nothing. As long as flawed inductive reasoning is not equated with the deductive variety.
I am still curious how respondents to the MetaMind Project convey their results to the managers of the project. And what do they convey? JL teased my appetite with his vague intro to this thing, but nothing else has been forthcoming. My previous questions have gone unanswered.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jun 10, 2016 - 01:01pm PT
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Since any experience, including the absence of experience, or what could be called the experience of something other than objective objects, are all mediated by neuronal activity in human beings; Therefore I am proposing that the putative subjective experience of nothing is nothing more than neurons in the "off " position with a sort of hitherto undiscovered slime mold mental processing taking over in human beings at the precise moment the specific neurons involved in active awareness are switched off. This slime mold consciousness can be thought of as a type of background radiation of human mental functioning.( Note: I am not meaning the activity of actual slime molds in humans but rather activity very similar to the way slime mold intelligence operates)
This slime mold consciousness, being devoid of neurons, is incapable of transferring the correlational data of external objects in a directional manner to the executive brain. And yet , because of an on-going low level redox potential being expressed , there is a minimum of electron transport occurring. This energetic activity is so under the radar in humans that it can only be accessed by those with special powers deliberately cultivated over the course of a lifetime.
My slime- mold-consciousness-theory explains, at least partially, such enigmatic phenomena as intuition and certain aspects of nocturnal dreams, just for starters.
A future computer might be a lot slimier than the solid silicon devices we have today. In a study published in the journal Materials Today, European researchers reveal details of logic units built using living slime molds, which might act as the building blocks for computing devices and sensors.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140327100335.htm
And of interest to Canadians:
Dr. Akl (School of Computing) placed rolled oats on a map of Canada, covering the major urban areas. One urban area held the slime mold. The slime mold reached out for the food, creating thin tubes that eventually formed a network mirroring the Canadian highway system
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120326133635.htm
Think of the time and money the Canadian Dept. of Transportation ( or whatever it's called) could be saving were they to employ slime molds directly in highway design.
My theory accounts for this in the creative slime mold-like mental functioning of the current highway engineers.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jun 10, 2016 - 02:06pm PT
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What about morality and ethics?
What is the ethical basis for killing? Are morals absolute, or are they relative? History tends to show that it is the latter, but for the fighters themselves, it is very real. For instance, we regularly kill bad guys with drone strikes. I know enough about it to know that they keep these drones over them for days or weeks, establishing a pattern of life, planning a way to kill them without killing too many non-combatants, aka innocent people. They even made a hellfire missile with half of the explosive power, in order to not blow up the innocent neighbors in a drone strike. They are made to blow up only one house.
How many innocent people is the no-go situation? One? 15? It is all relative, depending on how bad we want this guy dead.
ISIS cuts off heads for video. They video the drowning of Kurdish prisoners. Right now, I can't imagine a less moral group of people than ISIS, but in their minds, they are following the Koran, and are perfectly moral. Deuteronomy has a passage hat people have interpreted as permission to kill people. Christians have used that passage in the past, just as these guys mine the Koran for permission to kill apostates. I've read most of the Koran, and it does say that apostates should be killed. Perhaps it is true that 99% of muslims are truly peaceful, concentrating on the good passages of the Koran, just as Quakers refuse to go to war, because the loving passages of the New Testament disallow it. There are as many schools of thought as you can imagine. This is old stuff, covered by the philosophers of yesteryear. It has been worked to death, but we ignore it.
This is a religious question of morality. Choices to do bad things, albeit permitted by their religion, if you interpret a passage in that way. Here lies a problem. Moral ambiguity. Practical necessity tends to trump morality in many cases. The drone pilots work out of Nevada, in trailers, and are immune from the smell, sights, sounds, or lives of the people they target. To them, it is like a video game.
Is it worse to show a nice black and white exploding house with innocent people inside or a person being beheaded? Either way it is murder on TV. Perhaps ISIS does it in a more graphic way, but don't fool yourselves, we kill many muslims, and they are hopping mad about it.
I use these examples, because it is an extreme situation of how religion can be guilty of causing bad things. We are tribal. Throughout history we have been killing our enemies. It seems like a curse on humanity, without any moral justification. Christ said to turn the other cheek, but that gets lost somewhere. As for the Koran, I was surprised at how violent it was. Not a pleasant read. Not like the book of Mormon, which is just weird.
John's concentration on no-thing is a concept we can grasp, if not quite understand. Does he find pleasure there? Peace? Obviously something, because he seems quite dedicated to it. However, it seems absolutely personal. There is no tome dedicated to it such as the Koran or the Bible.
At the other end of the spectrum is MikeL. Although he is a professor, he appears to be a nihilist. The only thing that irks me is that he tends to preach this nihilism. It isn't bad. He doesn't hurt anyone. But does he help others, or is this so personal that others don't enter the picture?
Are we pitiful materialists who refuse to acknowledge anything that cannot be measured, as John just said? Of course not. Even a materialist has to confront morality and practicality in their work. Certainly in their lives in the way that they teach others.Teller was a brilliant physicist who pushed the hydrogen bomb. The generals liked him no doubt. He was a militarist to the bone, and it affected his work as a physicist. Of course he is an extreme example.
There is also the old saw that if we don't do it first, our enemies will beat us to it and destroy us. This is a false narrative, meant to play on fear. Still, technology has great potential to do harm in many cases, just like religious fanatics. All you need to do is park your morality at the front door and then go build bigger and better bombs. I had friends, engineers, who went to work in the defense industry. I parted ways with them.
There was a line from the end of Apocalypse now, where Kurtz was saying on the radio: "We train young men to drop fire on people, but we won't let them write "F*#k" on their airplanes because it is obscene."
A lot of the hardcore right Christians hate moral relativism, as if morality is an absolute. Same with converted Jihadi terrorists. Morality is relative, and it applies to every situation. Where do scientist find this morality? Mainly from an overwhelmingly Christian country. They may not be Christians, but Christian morality has seeped into their lives. Our country is built around this.
I'll end this rant with the following:
We spend half of our discretionary budget on defense. The military-industrial complex is far larger than Eisenhower would have thought possible.
I say that this is wrong. Nobody is going to attack us at home, in any big way. All that can be done is wounds, like 9-11. Each of the new F-35 strike fighters is going to cost 304 million dollars each. The total cost?
$1.508 trillion (total with inflation), US$55.1B for RDT&E, $319.1B for procurement, $4.8B for MILCON, $1123.8B for operations & sustainment.
For a comparison, the source of a lot of scientific work is paid for by NSF grants. I know guys who get all of their research money from them.
Their budget? 6.9 Billion dollars. Congress wants to cut that, to rid themselves of Global Warming Alarmists.
Look at countries who don't spend much on defense.Germany. They have an array of social programs that greatly increase their quality of life. They have high taxes, but the average person lives a good life. And it is PAID for. Their national debt is vastly smaller than ours. We can afford free healthcare for all, but we want to spend a trillion dollars on a new fighter plane, and all the rest.
Check this out: Annual military spending by major counry:
Now I can get into an economic discussion of Keynes and the Chicago School of trickle down style Reagonomics. That is a thread of its own. Our country is messed up. Lobbyists force politicians to look strong on defense, and even if we stopped spending a dime tomorrow, it would totally disrupt our economy. We would need to do it slowly.
Clinton balanced the budget by cutting military spending. The Cold War had just ended. The military industrial complex is so powerful that Lockheed Martin has more political power and influence than the politicians themselves. They are helpless against Lockheed and Boeing.
We have one Hubble Space Telescope. In 1974, it lost all funding. It was still in the planning stage. It ended up costing 5.5 billion dollars. At the same time, the National Reconnaissance (who builds and operates our spy satellites) spends this type of money, although we don't really know, because it is a black budget.
In 1999 the NRO embarked on a $25 billion project with Boeing entitled Future Imagery Architecture to create a new generation of imaging satellites.
the National Space Symposium in April 2010 NRO director, General Bruce Carlson, USAF (Ret.) announced that till the end of 2011 NRO is embarking on "the most aggressive launch schedule that this organization has undertaken in the last twenty-five years. There are a number of very large and very critical reconnaissance satellites that will go into orbit in the next year to a year and a half."
They have dozens of spy satellites in orbit, most of which are as powerful and costly as the Hubble Space Telescope:
In 2012 the agency donated two space telescopes to NASA. Despite being stored unused, the instruments are superior to the Hubble Space Telescope. One journalist observed, "If telescopes of this caliber are languishing on shelves, imagine what they're actually using
The world we are living in is messed up. Exactly how much defense material do we actually need? Obviously need has gone by the wayside, as these defense contractors (and the NRO budget primarily goes to contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed), have carte blanche. Even most of congress doesn't know exactly what they do.
Mankind had bigger problems than an argument over mind that has been hashed and re-hashed by philosophers for thousands of years. I found one thing out. None of our ideas is new. They occurred to others long ago. Just do a little poking around, and you will realize this.
Hopefully it comes across that I am a pacifist.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 10, 2016 - 03:21pm PT
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None of our ideas is new
It's amazing what truth is in this statement. My late advisor told me this over 45 years ago. He worked in classical complex analysis, a subject that is not very popular these days since one can think he is doing something new, but sadly discover after much intellectual labor that Cauchy did the same thing 200 years ago. Scary.
Much of modern mathematics is based upon entirely new definitions and focusing on extending the classical results to more abstract spaces. Generalizing some of the old stuff. True also in classical complex analysis.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 10, 2016 - 03:56pm PT
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Dig that slime mold stuff, Ward Trotter. I'm thinking there might be a good business in it -- think ant farm.
When nobody else is there for you, at least you've got your slime mold.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jun 10, 2016 - 04:42pm PT
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Base has talked about the (seemingly) obvious continuum between human consciousness and animal consciousness (I also have several posts to that effect). Ward Trotter has pointed out that it extends all of the way to molds. I will posit that it extends more generally to groups of molecules -- after all, proteins are molecules, and genes code for proteins (Ward pretty much was pointing to this also). Genes are the atomic unit of life. Richard Dawkin's, The Selfish Gene, pretty much nailed it IMO. The gene has no consciousness, but genes working in concert are responsible for consciousness. All the gene "wants" to do is reproduce. Like a simple recursive, mathematical function that gives rise to the Carpet chaos pattern (as well as other, cool patterns), genes naturally surviving or not, (somehow) give rise to consciousness. I am a materialist and PROUD of it. A materialist is a naturalist. I don't believe in woo as Largo obviously does. There is no in-between.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 10, 2016 - 05:17pm PT
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Base:
As Ward has shown us above, people will use whatever definition they damned well please. Definitions be damned. What I said to Jgill most recently is what might be a good way to proceed: we could simply report our observations, our personal observations. (Of course, that subordinates the values of objectivity, and that will raise the ire of many here.)
What does consciousness look like to you? What is your observation of your own mind? What would you report awareness is for you? Let’s be scientists.
From the tone of your message, it seems that you think I’m after you. I’m not. I just don’t like the idea of definitions as a basis for discussion. I just don’t think that approach goes anywhere. Perhaps I’m wrong. I’m reading what is getting written here. What I see is a fair amount of conceptual speculation. I think we could do better. I think we have the horsepower, discipline, and confidence to look for ourselves.
Jgill: I've talked at length about my art of dreaming experiences, and JL has talked at length about his internal experiential association with nothing. As long as flawed inductive reasoning is not equated with the deductive variety.
I see this as a problem. It’s a problem because it makes assumptions about subjective reporting, and it says what is acceptable and what is not before the fact. There is something deeply wrong with inductive processes.
What might be wrong is that it relies upon reasoning. It’s like there is no other way of knowing anything important. I submit: (i) hot cognition / emotions; (ii) instinct / genetics; (iii) stories / narratives / episodic knowledge; (iv) procedural knowledge (the knowledge that comes through the body, from “doing” something); (v) tapping into the unconscious, the wellspring of creativity; (vi) social understanding (which is not necessarily rational) that comes from collaboration or networks; (vii) spiritual understanding the comes from an experience of the nondual; and yada yada yada.
If you give a hammer to a small child, you will see that everything they encounter will need pounding. (This is called, “The Law of the Small Instrument.”) If you believe that that only tool that is proper to apply to important issues is reason, then there is much you will not see.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 10, 2016 - 07:10pm PT
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the discussion of panpsychism has been kicking around this thread (and others) for a while.
Aside from humans putatively possessing consciousness, we have no evidence that the panpsychic hypothesis is necessary for explaining anything but human consciousness. Generally this is not a very sold basis for proposing a hypothesis, it tends to be circular. And even with human consciousness, which we haven't defined (actually there was something Base posted earlier this week), but we implicitly know.
As for tests of a physical (or none physical) mind, I had posted this set of assumptions from C. D. Broad that constitute a test:
1) Backward causation, the future affecting the past, is rejected by many philosophers, but would be shown to occur if, for example, people could predict the future.
2) One common argument against dualism, that is the belief that minds are non-physical, and bodies physical, is that physical and non-physical things cannot interact. However, this would be shown to be possible if people can move physical objects by thought (telekinesis).
3) Similarly, philosophers tend to be skeptical about claims that non-physical 'stuff' could interact with anything. This would also be challenged if minds are shown to be able to communicate with each other, as would be the case if mind-reading is possible.
4) Philosophers generally accept that we can only learn about the world through reason and perception. This belief would be challenged if people were able to psychically perceive events in other places.
5) Physicalist philosophers believe that there cannot be persons without bodies. If ghosts were shown to exist, this view would be challenged.
see THE RELEVANCE OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH TO PHILOSOPHY
I found this refreshing because we could argue whether or not any of these tests have been performed with a positive result, which would be inconsistent with the hypothesis that mind is physical, that is, e.g.:
1) people could predict the future
2) people can move physical objects by thought
3) mind-reading
4) psychically perceiving events in other places
5) ghosts exist
these have all been subject to skeptical enquiry, see for instance James Randi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi
who would argue that none of these have been observed (at least in controlled situations).
Perhaps there are more subtle tests of the five basic areas? that is:
1) backward causation
2) physical and non-physical things cannot interact
3) non-physical stuff can't interact with anything
4) we only know about the world through reason and perception
5) minds do not exist without bodies
whether or not we can yet identify what physical states of the brain are associated with mental states, we do know that brain activity is associated with mental activity, and we know that affecting brain activity can affect mental activity. and we have very good reason to believe, based on our understanding of biology, that mental activity is the result of brain activity.
that is, mind is physical.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 10, 2016 - 07:20pm PT
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that is, mind is physical.
It's not gross physical but subtle physical.
The exact definition is subtle material.
But consciousness itself is never material nor has it ever been material .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 10, 2016 - 07:45pm PT
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"Esotericism is therefore understood as comprising those world views which eschew a belief in instrumental causality and instead adopt a belief that all parts of the universe are interrelated without a need for causal chains."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_esotericism
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