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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Jun 26, 2016 - 12:28pm PT
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Teachers today have a hard time fascilitating the learning process of their students:
[Click to View YouTube Video]
Do many American teachers believe in angels?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jun 26, 2016 - 12:41pm PT
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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...
I greatly admire the weather map as an abstraction but I realize it is not the weather as in Rene Magritte's This is Not a Pipe. To "represent" consciousness is not to be conscious. Hopefully you see the difference, maybe not.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 26, 2016 - 01:05pm PT
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To "represent" consciousness is not to be conscious. Hopefully you see the difference, maybe not
maybe, but my point all along is all that we have is a representation of consciousness, which is learned... it is how you get away with saying "gee, I don't know how to describe it, but I'm experiencing it"
the possibility exists that the "it" isn't, and that the collection of things you're experiencing you form into something coherent which does not exist, that coherence is provided by your representation.
"...What do you see when you turn out the light
I can't tell you but I know it's mine..."
with a little help from your friends.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 26, 2016 - 01:21pm PT
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Consciousness is not learned.
Consciousness is the living entity itself.
The living entity is either in material consciousness due to false identifying with the gross material and subtle material body as the self.
Or it is liberated in its consciousness as the spiritual self within the gross material body as the self (the driver of the body).
The material body minus consciousness is a dead body.
Learning means intelligence or learning how to be stoopid .....
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jun 26, 2016 - 03:18pm PT
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how do you know that, wbraun?
you been reading those books again?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jun 26, 2016 - 04:07pm PT
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the possibility exists that the "it" isn't, and that the collection of things you're experiencing you form into something coherent which does not exist, that coherence is provided by your representation.
Like I said before there are, as we look at a single tree, two trees: a science tree and a tree perceived through the senses.
If you're saying the senses only allow a representation of the reality available through science, I would disagree. The science tree is molecules and atoms and electrons and space and wavelengths of color and the perceived tree is all the things we are aware of through the senses: color, smell, texture.
Those perceptions are not representations of what science sees they are a reality that is the product of evolutionary processes for which deception in a predatory world is problematic. It is likely that the tree exists and my sensory data is correct.
The perception of nature to the senses is not re-present-ed it is simply presented.
The perception of nature through the senses is direct if not completely truthful, a representation is always indirect and a kind of falsehood. Any representation of consciousness is a kind of deceit. This is Not a Pipe. This is Not a Conscious Machine.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Jun 26, 2016 - 04:42pm PT
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This is not a pipe...
Douglas Hofstadter used that many times in his book Godel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid.
The book is really good, but takes a lot of time and care to grasp. A lot of it is about number theory and closed loops. Hofstadter was primarily an AI researcher.
He talked a lot about Bach, and specifically his canon's. You know a canon as Row, Row, Row Your Boat. The same voice then comes in at different points and it is fun.
Bach's canon's can be looked at mathematically. What he did with some of them was nigh miraculous. Voices that went backwards and forwards and a high number of them. Bach was a real genius.
Back to the story problem. You could program a machine to write a story. A lot of the language is just rote: Punctuation, vocabulary, etc.
It could be a simple story. Take the stories of 30 7 year olds and insert one written by a machine. None of us could tell the difference.
Look at fiction. You tell a story with no real basis other than what the writer injects. The characters are believable because they are relatable. The writer may tell of murders, yet most assuredly never experienced committing or even witnessing a murder.
Much of our "experience" is experience gained from others. Data, if you will. Not direct experience, but indirect. A machine can't taste vanilla, but a description of vanilla can be programmed.
If programmed to do so, some of the supercomputers could write stories. That is a simple function compared to doing what humans could never do: look at information on a vast scale, parse it and make it meaningful or useful. I do it all day long with my geophysics software. I could do the same thing with a pencil and paper, but it would take at least millions of time as long. The machine can even interpret. It isn't cheap. 10K a year, not counting the data licenses. I do all of this on a tower computer just like your notebooks. Consumer computers are now so powerful that I can search and find specific wells out of a 50,000 well dataset in seconds.
My machine doesn't learn, but it does remember. Machine computing could probably already pass the Turing test. It really isn't much of a test, and isn't that important anymore.
With sensors, a machine can sense, and it can do it in ways that our own senses cannot. Any wavelength of light. A sensitivity to sound much greater than our own ears. If it is physical, it is data. Data is merely information.
The thing you need to adjust to is that to our brains, this is data. Data. Even experience is, in a form, data. Information.
Writing a story, I would imagine, wouldn't pose much of a problem to programmers
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 26, 2016 - 05:12pm PT
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Ed: . . . my point all along is all that we have is a representation of consciousness, . . .
I’m sorry, but I missed that somewhere here.
I think what people might have is a representation of the behaviors that arise from consciousness (e.g., what the Turing test proposes), . . . not consciousness itself. If you or someone thinks that they have a representation of consciousness itself, then please point me to that. (Really, I’m interested.)
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 26, 2016 - 05:14pm PT
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One doesn't need to learn consciousness as the living entity is already consciousness.
Only sentient living entity can destroy a supercomputer .......
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 26, 2016 - 06:31pm PT
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Only sentient living entity can destroy a supercomputer .......
You are referring to God, right? Who would be behind the asteroid or volcano or human that appeared to destroy the supercomputer?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 26, 2016 - 06:31pm PT
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Cintune: 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.
You’re right. I overlooked your response. My apologies.
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WBraun
climber
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Jun 26, 2016 - 07:06pm PT
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Who would be behind the asteroid or volcano or human that appeared to destroy the supercomputer?
You actually think and asteroid or a volcano can destroy consciousness.
You must now meditate on what consciousness is for 108 life times and then you just might see yourself .......
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 26, 2016 - 07:38pm PT
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all that we have is a representation of consciousness
Are we aware of this representation of consciousness or is the representation our awareness? My take is that we have consciousness that may be culturally influenced, but "representation" seems like a bit of a stretch. Guess I'm not feeling very philosophical at the moment.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Jun 26, 2016 - 07:54pm PT
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rmuir
Social climber
From the Time Before the Rocks Cooled.
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Jun 26, 2016 - 08:47pm PT
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And, there's this…
http://qz.com/709969/2300-years-later-platos-theory-of-consciousness-is-being-backed-up-by-neuroscience/?utm_source=parVOX
In 2008, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Sleep and Consciousness put forward his “integrated information theory,” which is currently accepted as one of the most compelling explanations about what consciousness is.
One of the central claims of the theory is that, for consciousness to exist, it must have “cause-effect” power on itself.
Neurologist Melanie Boly, a resident at UW’s School of Medicine and Public Health who has worked with Tononi, explains that for anything to exist, it must be able to have an effect; it must be able to make some small difference to something else.
“Consciousness exists for itself and by itself,” says Boly. “Thus it should have cause and effect on itself.”
Boly is currently working with other researchers to develop a mathematical framework to test the predictions of integrated information theory.
But she points out that, long before the explanation of consciousness was put forward in such a scientifically rigorous form, the philosopher Plato expressed the idea that for something to exist, it must capable of having an effect. And so consciousness (or “being,” as Plato described it) is “simply power.”
In the dialog Sophist, written in 360 BC, Plato wrote:
“My notion would be, that anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to be affected by another, if only for a single moment, however trifling the cause and however slight the effect, has real existence; and I hold that the definition of being is simply power.”
Just as it’s impossible to definitively know what caused the world, we’ll never be able to completely prove a theory of consciousness. But Boly believes the current evidence suggests that the integrated information theory is correct—which would then scientifically validate Plato’s views from more than two millennia ago.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 26, 2016 - 09:09pm PT
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. . . integrated information theory” which is currently accepted as one of the most compelling explanations about what consciousness is.
Says who? An online website? (Let’s read a little closer and think for ourselves.)
So, . . . it’s Plato who says consciousness exists for itself and by itself? Would anyone mind, then, if I bring in a deity or an ancient master or two while we’re at it to get their take on the mechanism for the existence of consciousness?
Melanie Boly: “. . . it [consciousness] should have cause and effect on itself.”
Which cause and which effect? How far should we go back? The very first cause? The “cause” of a moment ago? The cause of my mother and father co-creating me?
I’m not too sure that neuroscience is getting anyone anywhere.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/the-seductive-allure-of-neuroscience-and-the-science-of-persuasion/
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 26, 2016 - 10:00pm PT
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neuroscientist Giulio Tononi . . .
I recall we talked about this guy many pages back. I don't recall the consensus being especially kind. Was it JL who was expounding Tononi's virtues?
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rmuir
Social climber
From the Time Before the Rocks Cooled.
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Jun 26, 2016 - 10:24pm PT
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I’m not too sure that neuroscience is getting anyone anywhere.
So a SciAm blog article settles the issue?
That's just what we need: more Pyrrhonists of the self-styled Supertopo voluminati… Because, I'm absolutely certain that this bloated discussion strand will get all of us everywhere! And settle everything… <g>
Color me skeptical.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jun 27, 2016 - 07:36am PT
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Me, too. I’m skeptical about what fMRI pictures portray or show us. The intricacies of filtering and the interpretation of meaning in colored images is fraught with possibilities for error and misinterpretation. Yet, it’s become almost the entire basis for what neuroscience has to offer.
fMRI measures brain activity based upon blood flow and neuron activity. It’s a mapping technology that assigns a color to indicate strength of activity. Not unlike CAT scans or even simple X-ray techniques, it is highly reliant upon an experienced technician to “interpret” meaning. That is, it is somewhat of an art form, rather than being strictly technical.
fMRI research has been criticized for using small samples, problematic statistical analyses (to ferret out high levels of noise in the data), and what’s been called “reverse inference.” Reverse inferences are big problems, in my view. They say: because a region of the brain lights up, then it is indicative of a particular cognitive function: “I can confirm that I found X because X is what showed up.” Petitio Principii.
The concerns about the efficacy of fMRI (for rigorous research purposes), have been brought up in other venues than Scientific American. The generic problem of saying what things are and how they work from mapping techniques have been discussed in medical research studies far earlier when X-rays and CT scans were first developed. Why? Because interpretation is such a big part of the procedures. It would be very helpful to the studies if there were triangulation with other scientific disciplines and measures. As well, the brain appears to be a multi-dimensional, holographic organ that does not rely strictly upon localization of functions. People can damage part of their brains and still recover functions and memories in time (although not with previous fidelity).
What’s made X-rays, CT scans,and fMRIs enticing is that they are not invasive. They are relatively benign to apply. But just because something is easy and convenient does not mean it is effective or insightful.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 27, 2016 - 08:52am PT
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I’m skeptical about what fMRI pictures portray or show us.
I'm more skeptical than you are about fMRI. It gets a lot of attention because it can be done on conscious humans but it does not have the timing or spatial resolution to follow millisecond-to-millisecond communication among individual neurons.
It is wrong, though, to condemn the rest of neuroscience on the basis of the deficiencies of fMRI.
By way of analogy, a novice meditator might declare meditation not worth the effort after a month or two, and without exploring various traditions.
Wilder Penfield used small electric currents to study the human brain in conscious patients undergoing surgery for epilepsy. His work showed connections within physics, anatomy, and mind.
When I was at University of Washington in Seattle, there was a neurosurgeon who used the same technique to study human speech. The results were quite interesting but you are unlikely to read about them in the newspaper.
Nowadays, Parkinson's disease and other brain-related loss of function may get treated with brain implants which allow the patient to control the stimulation. I know a climber who has one of these. He has a different perspective on his brain than you or I do.
Yesterday I was going down a trail, not having seen anyone for hours, and four women came running up. As they passed one was saying, "...the neural link is promising but it gets messed up by general anesthesia."
There is more to neuroscience than fMRI. I especially like the attempts to puzzle out the nervous system of a nematode. It may prove too hard for us to do. This particular project seems to have stalled in 2012, but work probably continues, somewhere. The question remains, though; is it worth the effort? What could we expect to learn that would be significantly different from what we already know?
http://www.artificialbrains.com/openworm
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