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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 25, 2016 - 06:56pm PT
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experience it is not
If you are curious about what experience is, how are you going to find out? You could come to the conclusion that you already have experiences and that therefore you know what it is. Your curiosity may not go beyond that.
Beyond that, though, is there any way in which the processes that underlie experience could be discovered?
Can experience be influenced in an experimental setting and the results interpreted to advance our understanding of how the human mind works?
You and Largo can have your own ideas about what experience IS, but what implication if any do those ideas have for people doing research in the area?
Those books are meant to be fun to read, right?
Whether meant to or not, they are, and the one I referred to addresses issues we debate, here.
Another good Smullyan book is, The Tao is Silent.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 25, 2016 - 08:34pm PT
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Cintinue:
The article in Science presents an after-research abstract of neuroimaging structural comparisons between insects and more advanced beings, and then presents a large number of conclusions about the development and functioning of experiences. I'd argue that structure answers little. Looking at structure is the easiest thing to do in an investigation. Structural comparison is basically a call for an analogy. Analogies always leave important things out. Analogies are good for suggestions and pointers. A solar system is not an atom, although structurally both arguably share some structural similarities.
Do you actually read those articles and consider the arguments and their bases?
As for arguing that an insect’s consciousness is indicative of human-like consciousness, I’ll echo what we would call for in research presentations at UIUC: “show me the data.”
MH2: Another good Smullyan book is, The Tao is Silent.
The author might have followed that lead. Instead, he writes an entire book of words trying to express a cleverness of what he thinks the Tao is about philosophically. The Tao has nothing to do with philosophy.
Ward:
Do you know what idealism refers to and what realism refers to? Could you tell me what constitutes evidence?
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 25, 2016 - 08:43pm PT
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As for arguing that an insect’s consciousness is indicative of human-like consciousness, I’ll echo what we would call for in research presentations at UIUC: “show me the data.”
The general symptoms are that the insect eats, you eat; the insect sleeps, you sleep; the insect mates, you mate; the insect defends, and you defend.
Where is the difference? :-)
The only difference in humans, their consciousness is developed much greater with the capacity to transcend the material limitations .......
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 25, 2016 - 08:43pm PT
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"The present essay highlights the uniqueness of biological systems that offers a considerable challenge to the mainstream materialism in biology and proposes the Vedāntic philosophical view as a viable alternative for development of a biological theory worthy of life"
Interesting reference, Duck. Just as Georg Cantor's ideas about infinities drew the cruelest of ridicule from the mathematical leaders of the time, but decades later became the accepted foundations of the subject, investigations like these may bear fruit eventually.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jun 25, 2016 - 09:56pm PT
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Beyond that, though, is there any way in which the processes that underlie experience could be discovered?
The problem is that the processes and the chemistry and the flesh are not the experience. Discover all the neurons and chemistry you like and there is still a mysterious leap into the realm of individual awareness and experience. Presenting an image is so much different than comprehending that image. The chemistry of the taste of chocolate is so much different than the comprehension of its taste.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Jun 25, 2016 - 10:28pm PT
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Werner, thanks for the reference. What strikes me about yours and mine from MIT is how appropo of the topics we discuss here. We may not have any answers, but we're asking all the same questions as the best people in the field.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 25, 2016 - 10:36pm PT
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but we're asking all the same questions as the best people in the field.
their merely the best questions in the field, that is all.
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jstan
climber
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Jun 25, 2016 - 10:42pm PT
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Jan:
First of all for the classicists, but especially jstan.
Athens in the Age of Pericles
I seem to be unable to unzip the lecture notes. I'll have to update my software to a version dating after 400 BC. As I understand it Pericles came a-cropper when he ran into Donald Trump's grandfather. Something about Greek debt being out of control.
So much for the Acropolis imperative.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 26, 2016 - 07:04am PT
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Duck: Where is the difference? :-)
Hey, Werner.
I think the difference might be the capacity for self-reflection. I’m obviously biased, but it is from that capacity that all sorts of humanistic expressions show up—even science. Knowing as the crudest of forms could well be explained by mechanistic stimulus-response reactivity. But knowing that you know, . . . well that seems to be what development or unfoldment (e.g., evolution) so far has been largely about. It’s then that Man falls out of the Garden of Eden, because with self-reflexivity comes doubt . . . and wonder, mystery, and the awe in “seeing.”
“Behead yourself! . . . . Dissolve your whole body into Vision: become seeing, seeing, seeing.” (Rumi)
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cintune
climber
Colorado School of Mimes
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Jun 26, 2016 - 07:53am PT
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Do you actually read those articles and consider the arguments and their bases?
What kind of question is that? I'm just sharing pertinent stuff here, your analysis is always welcome. They obviously don't dig down to the "what is" part of the question here, but baby steps are better than no steps. Unless no-steps is actually the better thing, of course.
As for arguing that an insect’s consciousness is indicative of human-like consciousness, I’ll echo what we would call for in research presentations at UIUC: “show me the data.”
Guess we'l have to wait for them to publish that. And then see how many times it's cited. (Because that means everything)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 26, 2016 - 08:13am PT
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Presenting an image is so much different than comprehending that image. The chemistry of the taste of chocolate is so much different than the comprehension of its taste.
Yes, but both can be studied.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Jun 26, 2016 - 08:31am PT
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I hope someone is checking to see that this is not turning into an endless loop.
On a lighter note ... er ... film
If you want to get rid of the pop-ups, click on the little flower like wheel and turn annotations off.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
Actually I did and was going to comment to the effect, did you see him at 1:16 "using only head and feet", but I did not want to wander too far afield.
↓ ↓ ↓
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 26, 2016 - 08:40am PT
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^^^ way cool! did you see that no-hands, omg
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jun 26, 2016 - 10:20am PT
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I don't know any of you. For all I know, I'm talking to machines. I'm certainly hitting keystrokes in a machine to talk to you.
While a machine can't experience like we can, some of the supercomputers, like IBM's Watson, can easily handle human language.
If you put every piece of literature into a machine's memory, and carefully wrote the code for it to access that data and from it tell stories, I wouldn't know, and I doubt JL could sniff them out.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jun 26, 2016 - 10:54am PT
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While a machine can't experience like we can, some of the supercomputers, like IBM's Watson, can easily handle human language.
But what is meant by handle? The machine is by definition a human construction and it's programed by humans to imitate human language. Handling isn't conscious awareness. Handling here is thougt-less reaction. The machine model born out of a materialistic mind set doesn't adequately represent individual conscious experience. The weather map on your computer screen isn't the rain.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Jun 26, 2016 - 11:16am PT
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While a machine can't experience like we can, some of the supercomputers, like IBM's Watson, can easily handle human language.
Consciousness questions aside, admittedly, I haven't checked lately, but I'm very skeptical that any machine currently available can carry on a conversation over multiple topics (multiple domains below) as can a human.
IBM WATSON NATURAL LANGUAGE CLASSIFIR
How it works
The service enables developers without a background in machine learning or statistical algorithms to create natural language interfaces for their applications. The service interprets the intent behind text and returns a corresponding classification with associated confidence levels. The return value can then be used to trigger a corresponding action, such as redirecting the request or answering a question.
Intended Use
The Natural Language Classifier is tuned and tailored to short text (1000 characters or less) and can be trained to function in any domain or application.
Tackle common questions from your users that are typically handled by a live agent.
Classify SMS texts as personal, work, or promotional
Classify tweets into a set of classes, such as events, news, or opinions.
Based on the response from the service, an application can control the outcome to the user. For example, you can start another application, respond with an answer, begin a dialog, or any number of other possible outcomes.
YOU INPUT:
Text to a pre-trained model
SERVICE OUTPUT:
Classes ordered by confidence
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Jun 26, 2016 - 11:47am PT
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How about:
The machine model born out of a materialistic mind set doesn't adequately represent [my] individual conscious experience
though it might adequately represent someone else's since I have no way of knowing someone elses.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 26, 2016 - 11:49am PT
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The machine is by definition a human construction and it's programed by humans to imitate human language. Handling isn't conscious awareness. Handling here is thougt-less reaction. The machine model born out of a materialistic mind set doesn't adequately represent individual conscious experience. The weather map on your computer screen isn't the rain.
of course the weather map is an abstraction, apparently Paul has problems with abstractions, how odd given his admiration of objects hircine, some of which he defended as the essence of human expression. Would he now argue that, such abstractions doesn't "adequately represent" the "individual conscious experience"? I doubt it...
What isn't a human construction? humans are taught human languages... this is not a mystery, though it seems that parts of our ability to learn language are "wired" into us. We are taught to "handle" language.
In fact, the teaching of language, as with the teaching of other skills, is done from very specific points of views, and, as we know, freighted with the cultural biases of both the teacher and to a lesser extent the pupils. What we strive for in teaching is that the lessons are assimilated and to some extent generalized to expand their domain. Successful teaching, at least as a deeply cultural trope, is to provide skills that are useful, "teach a man to fish..."
So it becomes very interesting to see the results of "machine learning" which I will assure the skeptics is not about "just programming a computer to handle" something, but to actually learn something new that was not programmed. It isn't that much a stretch from human behavior, since we are also programmed to some extent, by our genetics (which determines our individual physical qualities) and learn to do things quite beyond the specifics of that programming. Many will take issue with this...
but back to teaching machines. While machines could be viewed as "unbiased" (an easy assumption to make since, according to Largo and Paul, they lack the necessary human essentials to display bias) and one wonders at the generalizations the machines make based on the lessons they learn from... of course, these lessons are initially provided by their teachers, but later, based on this early learning, the lessons are gleaned from their every increasing experience.
It should not be surprising (though it appears to be very surprising) that machines learn to be biased, and on topics that they arguably have no experience with, at least not the same experience as we presume humans have. While Largo disdains "data" as some dusty dry set of "facts" futzed around with by nerdy technicians, these have real consequences in our modern culture.
In an opinion article in today's NYTimes, Kate Crawford writes about the interesting issues with what machines are learning and how this has real-life consequences.
Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem
I expect this to elicit a groaning "dah" except that this is a bit more complicated, the computers aren't programmed to be biased, they are programmed to learn, they learn to be biased based on the experiences that they given by their teachers and their environments.
Two other articles seemed related, one by Maia Szalavitz, Can You Get Over an Addiction? argues that understanding the physical causes of addictions profoundly change our approach to "getting over" them... not only the physical aspects of brain chemistry, but also related to the way we learn. The author proffers the idea that addiction is a learning disorder, a problem with the way we are 'wired,' and that it is developmental, a problem with the order in which we learn. The argument is, essentially, that a physical understanding of the brain, and brain behavior, is important in understanding and treating addiction. I think I argued this upthread.
The other article has to do with gender bias in granting university tenure, with a very odd twist. It turns out the "family-friendly" policies, e.g. maternity/paternity leave policies are greatly advantageous to men, who take the time to publish, while women are otherwise predisposed, with having the baby. Not too surprising, this process is inherently gender specific... men don't have babies, and don't have all the physical challenges that that entails.
A Family-Friendly Policy That’s Friendliest to Male Professors
which cites the paper Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies? by Antecol, Bedard and Stearns, which shows a 19% increase in tenure for males, and a 22% decrease for women when compared to rates prior to the policies being deployed.
Why I connected this to the other articles has to do with learning, here it is "teaching" that matters. We as students are guided by our teachers, who not only help us interpret what we are learning, but serve us the lessons as well. If our teachers are all the same, all white males, what are we learning? We are not independent of these experiences, they are formative, and deeply a part of our physical composition. Providing the ability for machines to learn reenforces the profound role that teachers play, the machines are not human, but the learn human biases, first through lessons, then through experience tempered by those lessons.
maybe even better than a real goat
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