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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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I hear Apple's releasing a 3-D printer this year to do this very thing. Apps for human companions - everything from ST:TNG's Data to Taylor Swift - we're told are expected to sell like hot cakes. Stay tuned.
Molecule by molecule build-up. Can't wait!
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I wonder if MikeL or jgill could cite another general philosophy popularizer as popular as Sam Harris (excluding Sagan and Tyson of course for their parts) since Bertrand Russell? I bet not.
Considering popular/influential 21st century science and belief philosophizers... I wonder who will make the century-end's short list? I suspect Sam Harris, Steven Pinker and Neil degrasse Tyson will make the list. What's that say, I wonder.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Then we run into the problem, at least last time I checked, with defining Life in biology.
Yes this is fundamental.
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WBraun
climber
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Fundamental ....
One must first define what "life" actually is.
Not present hypothesis, theories, or mental speculations ......
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Hey guys ,here's a representation of the EMF created by the human heart:
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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I wonder if MikeL or jgill could cite another general philosophy popularizer as popular as Sam Harris (excluding Sagan and Tyson of course for their parts) since Bertrand Russell? I bet not
For me, that would be correct; I don't pay much attention to philosophers these days. MikeL probably can cite a few.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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I, for one, am a Sam Harris fan. But my number one go-to guy is Richard Dawkins. I've probably read 10-12 books by him, some a few times. Now, I'm sure that MikeL will look at that with disdain. He doesn't need facts and knowledgeable, engaging writers (or knowledge, in general, apparently) to settle on his version of what is true or what he should believe. He is like Largo and Werner. They somehow just know -- they're special.
Edit:
Well, if your grasp is so fundamentally sound at this time then it should simply be a matter of creating life from scratch.
Sorry. I don't buy this. It is entirely possible -- probable in my opinion, that we will be able to create life from scratch -- not entirely digitally, of course, but with some starting material of say stem cells or something. It will involve no new fundamental principles. It's right around the corner.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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HFCS, have you been keeping up with the genomic editing capability of the CRIPSR/cas9 technology? Man, engineering people is now going to be a fairly simple task.
We will probably control our own evolution from this period forward. We now have the ability. They are doing it with rats and mice right and left.
Also, I've been reading about Free Will.
Could you describe your reasons for denying the existence of Free Will for us? One school is the Determinists. They say that every physical event, however minor, was a result of a prior physical process. In principal, after the big bang, the entire future is simply a cascading series of fully causal events. When you chose chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream is actually due to physics.
I don't buy into that theory, or at least all of it, but I'm reading up on it right now.
The more I learn, the less I think of Sam Harris. He is a talking head with an education in science, but he never really was a scientist. By that I mean that he didn't do any research beyond his doctorate, nor did he publish, other than pop books. I've watched youtube videos of him discussing free will, and he sort of draws on that deterministic notion. The topic is far more complex and nuanced than that. I'll report back after I've finished reading what I crammed into my Kindle last month.
If you read his wiki page, you will note that he spent years in the far east, studying mainly Buddhism. He is a big proponent of meditation. That is neither here nor there as far as free will goes. I just bring it up because we have our group of meditators here. I don't feel comfortable calling them Buddhists, because they rarely if ever touch on the teachings of Buddha. They are just zoned in on meditation. Sorry if I'm mistaken on that. It just appears that way. Jan, for example, seems to be very much into Buddhism. That is about it, though.
I look at Harris as a pop science author. At least Dawkins was a practicing scientist for most of his life. An accomplished one.
I bring this up, because getting a degree in Geology did not prepare me for Petroleum Geology very much. I learned most of it by doing it, and even after 3 decades, there is a lot that I don't know first hand. So much of it is proprietary, that it is an odd science. I could publish all of the time, but I would be giving away my ideas for free. Economics are involved. So most of the really good stuff is kept secret.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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ML said "If a person is truly interested, he or she can look for his or herself."
EEonkee said "What does this mean, exactly? So, the fact that we evolved from a common ancestor with the apes is not germane to the subject of what is mind? That's absurd. So, you just throw out all of the scientific knowledge that we have acquired over the past few centuries and just figure it out on your own? C'mon, get real! "
Probably the most common thing I have noticed about this thread is the Straw man argument is constantly coming up. Then add some ad hominem's on top (HFCS) and it goes completely off topic for a while.
Why not say I don't understand how you could do that? Please explain.
The classic straw man presented is the meditators are anti-science or don't understand science. Most hardcore meditators I know are highly educated and are skeptics and curious.
Regarding looking for yourself; it refers to witnessing how your own mind operates. How it reacts to certain things, situations, conditions. If you witness very closely you can gain insight about why you act the way you do. If you witness yourself doing negative damaging acts (ie speaking badly of other people) or(thinking negatively of other people) or (believing negative stories we come up with for our selves ).
First you have to see it before you can do anything about it. the fascinating thing is you find out how habitual most of our actions are and how it takes effort to do things differently.
And this is just scratching the surface of the witnessing your own mind process; as you get more present you and you recognize that "I" is a concept that you constructed and hence it can be deconstructed. As the you become less attached to this concept of "I" you become less distracted and realize how distracted you are when attached to the concept of "I".
To really experience this you have to look with in and stop acting out. from this point of view the books are just more concepts entertainment.
That is what Mike L means by looking for yourself. It is a very well developed process that is 1000's of years old that most americans are not aware that it exists. It is quite a wonderful secret and it is available to everyone for free.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 8, 2016 - 03:55pm PT
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I think much confusion arises on this thread from a basic approach that assumes two things: first, that nothing is more than an accumulation of parts, and second, that consciousness is essentially no different than any other external object in physical reality, so a physicalist/reductionistic approach will fully "explain" consciousness itself.
And once you have wrangled down a physical explanation per causes, there is no more to know since consciousness is no more than the parts believed to "cause" it in the first instance. There is no more to it, though we might imagine or hallucinate that consciousness itself, at the level of experience, IS more - when in fact it is selfsame with firing neurons blah blah blah. "More" in this regards would be more "objects" we can tie to causation ... the thinking goes.
Funny thing is that even in the sciences this approach is neither believed nor followed. We all know that psychology, for example, is not merely applied physics, nor yet biology. At various meta levels there arise phenomenon that is not disclosed from an examination of atomic parts, which in this regards do NOT tell the whole story. And that's with merely physical objects.
It's a little like saying that since actual physical money (or gold, etc.) creates an economy, or that a trumpet creates music, we need only study a stack of C-notes or a brass horn to know EVERYTHING there is to know about economics or music. And those who do not believe as much simply don't have a professional grasp of the physical properties and objective functioning of loot and horns. There is no more to know than the objective functioning of these things. And those doing the really heavy lifting per economies and music are studying gold and brass horns.
Brother, please ...
In real life, we know that to fully understand anything we need to investigate it at the level at which it appears to consciousness, and then work our way down to objective functioning should we be interested in looking into the basement, so to speak, knowing that even the closest study down there will not divulge what is happening a few, or many, stories above. There is, in fact, much more to know and learn, the higher up the causal ladder we go. And that is assuming that the mechanical/causal ladder is the benchmark for any investigation, including consciousness.
Fact is, only a conscious agent could ever even suspect consciousness in another agent. A machine could never suspect what it does not itself have. Studying objective functioning will not disclose "mind" because it is not simply neurons. Saying that experience itself IS gray matter is like saying that Vermeer's "View of Delft" is simply paint, and if you understand the chemistry of paint there is nothing more to know about both Vermeer AND painting. Surely folks realize the absurdity of such a dunderheaded approach. It simply keeps the investigating mired at the level of parts, while the band plays on at far remove. Believing that the whole shebang can be reverse engineered back to said parts is not a belief that come from any cogent examination at the meta level. This is a lego-log approach, which works well for external things, but fails miserably in "explaining" mind in any nuanced way.
Ward brings up a good point - creating life from scratch might involve more than simply combining the various components that we find in the objective functioning of living things. This might be as far-fetched as looking to "God" as another "cause" who creates life.
The entire model of mechanical creation might be the sticking point.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Base asked:
Could you describe your reasons for denying the existence of Free Will for us? Might I make a stab at this question HFCS? For some reason I've been on the bandwagon lately. Can't explain it myself, but it may be related to a hard problem at work that I've had no luck with lately.
1. There are certain things in our experiential world that are for all practical purposes unpredictable - chaotic. Turbulence, weather, stock market prices
Edit:
Damn! I somehow lost points 2 through 6 and my epilogue! Sheesh, computers!
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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^^^^
That sounds good. #6 is a bit of a stretch to imagine, but I do believe that physical causation processes lead ultimately to decisions and actions.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Saying that experience itself IS gray matter is like saying that Vermeer's "View of Delft" is simply paint, and if you understand the chemistry of paint there is nothing more to know about both Vermeer AND painting.
This is an absurd and dunderheaded characterization of the neuroscience view of how the brain works.
...
Oh, I see. In the next sentence your gray matter kicks in.
Surely folks realize the absurdity of such a dunderheaded approach.
Yes. Try to think before you write.
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WBraun
climber
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Brain ain't that important to begin with.
It's how to use it intelligently is.
Without good intelligence to begin with the brain is useless gray matter.
Thus the living entity should understand the science of the soul (the driver and user of the brain) ......
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Brain ain't that important to begin with.
True in a sense. Many people don't make much use of it.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Interesting . . . .
Occasionally there are these periods of randomness in the thread when it seems that it is re-adjusting into a new direction. I think Jgill has mentioned this before. It’s as though we’ve hit a brick wall in the dialogue, and we are searching for a new thread to develop. In some sense, the conversation seems to have a life of its own beyond its participants.
Thanks PSP for the assist. I was getting tired there.
Ward, you’ve said some insightful things here recently, IMO. (Of course, others will demur.)
Mighty Hiker:
Such questions (and we’ve had many of these types here recently) tend to present false dilemmas. Why are there only two options?
Welcome back, John.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 9, 2016 - 05:14am PT
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MH2, you seem to be a fan of the-parts-make-the-whole-and-no more camp. That mind IS matter. And because experience has an associated physical component, this de facto makes experience itself a physical object. Ergo your experience of reading this can be framed as a physical external object.
Through this tortured logic people can lump experience and matter into the same can, whereby the gold of consciousness is viewed as the lead of matter, a kind of reverse alchemy. Takes a strange mind to every even try to do so, IMO.
This all begs the questions: what does "experience" and "mind' mean to you in terms of phenomenon. Why not simply use one word - brain - to reference the whole shebang?
The two words, brain and experience, apparently refer to two distinct phenomenon. If you were to focus on the experiential, without defaulting back to brain, what do you see that is more than neurons? Or do you actually see and experience neurons in your experience?
To me this feels like a wonky effort to posit mind itself as mind-independent. Is this the sage neuroscience you have been harping on, insisting that we have a poor grasp of the nuances of same?
JL
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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I asked this question before, but it seems appropriate here.
Imagine a scientist living and working their entire life in an achromatic environment while studying color. This environment is nothing but shades of grey.
This scientist is the world expert on color, wavelengths of colors and how they interact and so forth but has never seen a color.
Suddenly said scientist goes outside and is exposed to a rich flower garden with all its variety of color.
At that point what is it the scientist would have learned beyond how wavelengths affect the senses? Anything?
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Ergo your experience of reading this can be framed as a physical external object.
My reading that has a physical basis. I do not see any need for a non-physical realm in which experience takes place.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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That question has many answers:
Yes it does. But it does, as do the answers, demonstrate the problem of experience over materialism. It's a very complex tap dance to say that there's no knowledge in experience. Ah, and then to define experience: big, hard problem.
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