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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Yowza!
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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Maybe he could put these in an e-book along with the formulas?
This one I think should be blue as I see two fish in it, one Nemo-like in the upper left corner and a bigger Grouper in the bottom center. There's a floating sea cucumber to the left of the grouper and some smaller ones to the upper right. Probably a layer of kelp floating between Nemo and the grouper.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Most of the interesting imagery, accompanied by functions, appear in elementary math notes I have posted on researchgate.net during the last few years. So, in a sense, they constitute an e-book.
I don't have the urge to be artistic. I just enjoy these unexpected results.
Weak emergence is the name of the game.
Thanks
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
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I appreciate them for their artistry and psychological symbolism. For me the math is just an added curiosity. I did have the impression though as I looked through the referenced Wiki article, that you had saved the most interesting and aesthetic ones for Supertopo. Those could be a separate ebook.
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WBraun
climber
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Back on track ..... consciousness, NOT matter, is the foundation of everything that is.
The Supreme consciousness is God, not matter, or brain, mind, etc.
The living entities are part parcel of that Supreme consciousness with all qualities but not the quantities.
God is NOT impersonal but personal.
The gross materialist scientists are always in very poor fund of knowledge and that is why they have no real clue to ...
What Is Mind
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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I opened up this thread for the first time in a while and immediately was captivated by jogill's last post. I think that the interesting and beautiful image really underscores the relationship between algorithm and concrete manifestations of (running) the algorithm. John just supplies different rules and inputs to a recursive algorithm -- and it seemingly magically paints these beautiful images.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 4, 2018 - 07:14pm PT
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For the tenth time over almost as many years: What's the source of the visual perception we get when in a pitch black room at night we stimulate the corner rods of our retina (e.g., from wiggling a finger in the corner of our eye)?
Your point blank answer?
Sorry I couldn't get to this before now. I was working in Colorado and just got back.
My point blank answer is that you assume there is one source or cause of the visual content, and that is the brain. But as mentioned earlier, IMO, any model of mind that is based on WHAT we perceive is bound to founder since what we perceive is only a mind model of a "reality" that is not "there" in the way mind tells us it is there. My mind tells me that my girlfriend is solid, but in fact by the best estimates, she's 99.999999999999% empty space, and what is "there" glitches in and out and its levitating on an electrostatic field.
The question is not what we are aware of, but rather the nature of being aware in the first place. At lest that's the way I see it.
You are, of course, begging for a classical linear causal take on mind and are asking question that beg for an answer supporting this. And calling qEEG readings BS is basically calling the quantitative output of a scientific measuring device BS. Not a credible guess coming from a purported "science type."
But your main sticking point here, imo, is the inability to separate out awareness from content. That's why Turing tests are useless as models for consciousness - the Turning machine does not know it is a machine and it is not having a conscious experience of same. What separates humans from computers is not what the brain processes, rather the fact that we are aware of and experience it, and through that awareness feedback loops arise whereas consciousness performs as a unified whole, however conflicted.
What surprises me is that science has shown that the ways the world works can be very counterintuitive, and yet here we have people insisting that consciousness arises from a machine (the brain) according to a "folk" or classical linear/causal take on reality.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Duck: . . . consciousness, NOT matter, is the foundation of everything that is.
This is not easy to see for most folks because they are so involved in the images that appear to consciousness. The key psychological principle learned by 3 years old, “object permanence,” implies “object existence.” Who here can see outside of that principle?
jogill: I don't have the urge to be artistic. I just enjoy these unexpected results.
You mean inasmuch as the unexpected results are math. But outside of that domain, you seem sure of most everything else, enough anyway to deride that which cannot be empirically and verified materially. The images you exhibit here can provide evidence that consciousness can show up as anything at all. There appears to be nothing at all that cannot show up as consciousness. When it does, it gets interpreted as “this” or “that,” and that diminishes what consciousness is. It’s a reduction. Your explanations of how you generated the images are reductions. As you can read, others see much more than a math equation in the images.
One cannot say what your images are. If one can live with that—without explanations—one can see consciousness more fully. The wont to interpret and define things (as eeyonkee seems to do, imo) is what reduces consciousness down to a mere biological level.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mike,
We all live without explanations. In well-defined instances we have what we may freely call explanations, but outside of those carefully restricted regions you can point to many things that are not explained.
At least not to your satisfaction. But that does not bar us from thinking about the brain and the mind and studying what they do and how they do it. Perhaps call it an exploration or a pastime if calling it an explanation seems wrong to you.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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And let us take heart:
“Being wrong isn’t a bad thing like they teach you in school. It is an opportunity to learn something.” – Richard Feynman
Our Original Poster is an exemplar. We keep hearing things like:
a "folk" or classical linear/causal take on reality.
the Turning machine does not know it is a machine
and stuff about math, physics, and neurobiology.
It is not bad to be wrong. It is not bad to try and improve one's understanding.
I like the way this thread keeps going thanks to people finding fault with what other people say. It gets to be like a family around a table.
The Turing machine does not know it is a machine? If you are a biological machine, couldn't it be possible that you would not know that you are?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 5, 2018 - 09:44am PT
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The problem, MH2, is that IMO, you are trying to have it both ways.
You can obviously have a provisional "explanation" that can posit things in linear/causal terms. Without these, we have no technology.
On the other hand, you cling to a bio-machine model of mind and wonder if another view of mind could likely be "wrong," meaning in your heart of hearts, the bio-machine is our best and possibly the "right" take on mind.
Compounding this junk show is the obvious fact that much of our lives are led in auto-pilot mode, so there is a automatic or mechanical mode in which our minds generally operate, to an extent lost on most.
The mistake, I believe, is in holding the mechanical model as the "real" and underlying truth, and that "we only think we are conscious."
This approach allows many to conflate consciousness with a mechanical model of mind, whereby we need only study the brain to "explain" mind.
It's my understanding that this mindset has less to do with reality, however you define it, than with a predisposition toward a certain psychological way of organizing our experience. This was first pointed out to me in a course I had in grad school about the philosophy of science, taught by a physicist, who used as his model the various ways people sought to "explain" or at any rate consider QM.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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QT What is "mind"?
ANS In addition to information processing machine, body controlling machine, it is also a forgetting machine.
So far this morning I've been reminded twice. (1) I forgot the difference between Steven Novella (neurologist) and Peter Boghossian (philosopher), confusing the two; (2) I forgot what partial fractions are, what use they are.
Rather discouraging. Wonder what I'll discover I have forgotten by late afternoon. I am not 60yo yet.
...
Steven Novella
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-brain-is-not-a-receiver/
Peter Boghossian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSgA74k5Vnk
...
One wonders...
What is the more valuable tool for mind-brain studies: introspection or mindfulness meditation.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 5, 2018 - 11:48am PT
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What is the more valuable tool for mind-brain studies: introspection or mindfulness meditation.
------
You ask seemingly easy questions but they're not, IMO, because terms like introspection and mindfulness meditation mean different things/techniques to different people. A round breakdown of mindfullness might look like this:
Today the meaning of mindfulness meditation has shifted away from its religious connections. While some still practice it within the context of religion, mindfulness meditation has been adopted by psychologists, healthcare professionals and other secular organizations as an effective way to deal with the stresses and illnesses of the modern world.
Though many unique styles and techniques have been developed, all mindfulness meditations have the following in common:
Awareness Is Key
All mindfulness meditations focus on developing awareness. Sometimes this awareness is of the body or breath, while other times it may focus on the outside world or internal thoughts.
Non-Judgement Is Essential
Mindfulness meditations all focus on experiencing awareness without judgement. In other words, mindfulness is about witnessing an experience or sensation without attachment or criticism.
It Cultivates Peace
Witnessing something without attaching meaning or value creates an important detachment that results in a calm and peaceful mind. Though your feelings are valuable and important, mindfulness teaches you how to find serenity despite them.
That much said, in my experience, mindfulness is a great vehicle to train your attention from wandering, and once you get there you can venture onto trickier ground, having less to do with serenity, and more to do with - what the hell is this life I am experiencing right this second? That's when the counterintuitive stuff starts to bubble up, once you get past, MY brain is "causing" all of this.
Just unpacking that statement gives you liftoff.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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One introspection I contemplated a couple times this week in conjunction with Dr. Ford's testimony before Senate subcommittee:
I remember attending a high school graduation party some 40 years ago now in somebody's backyard in my county; of course I remember my new crush Marie attending and I remember my good feeling associated with that; but I do not remember how I got there or how I got home or who all made up my group of companions save one (all males); and I do not remember where or at what house in this suburb this party took place.
I cannot remember but I'd be surprised to learn that I got there by horse or helicopter rather than a car or truck. I cannot remember but I'd be surprised to learn I got into a fight that night or that I ended up making out with Judy or Tina.
Oh the memories.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 5, 2018 - 03:22pm PT
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Oh the memories.
Who, exactly, is remembering?
How about the experience some have when they are woken from REM sleep all of a sudden and for a moment, can't remember why "they" are. The link to memory is momentarily not on line, so to speak.
When you start hoisting the curtain on Oz, all bets are off.
But as Fruity pointed out, old memories shimmer in their own light.
I remember one time I went to visit my parents grave. They were buried together - not in the same coffin, of course, but side by side.
A strange moment got stranger when I went to try and find a younger brother I never saw because he was stillborn, my folks NEVER talked about him, but I knew he was buried at the same cemetery. The office was closed but I found the child's area and walked up and down the isles, reading the names and feeling increasingly strange till I found it.
I knew nobody had visited that grave since the day "Tommy" was buried, 50 some years before, and it felt like a resurrection, the older brother (me) stopping by to pay tribute. An intersection of worlds.
Walking back to my car I took a direct route and keeping my head down and eyes open, I came across the grave of my grandmother, two uncles, and someone else in the family, strictly by chance in a 200 acre spread. It felt like I was guided by unseen hands.
Never believed in ghosts or woo or supernatural stuff but the probability of a random route finding all those dead relatives had to be remote. But the how of it was dwarfed by the penumbra of those memories Fruity hinted at, stretching across time.
Perhaps this is a magic world after all...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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What mechanical model are you talking about, Largo? Do you think that a network of neurons will give the same output each time it gets the same input?
I think you do not understand how nervous systems work and are not a good authority on what they can't do. They are not "linear/causal" in their behavior. Consider how you may be projecting your own heart-of-hearts; a feeling that there must be more to your interior experience than neurons connected to each other and to the outside world.
This approach allows many to conflate consciousness with a mechanical model of mind,
Scientists who study nervous systems would not be among 'the many.' Those who have looked into the details of how simple systems operate, like the stomatogastric ganglion of the lobster, or the decision-making of the nematode c. elegans, would not take the leap you imply from the stuff we now know to consciousness. But there is also no reason to be sure that progress can't be made.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Largo,
Nice writing on mindfulness.
Wittgenstein and others said that once you’ve climbed up, you can kick away the ladder. Everything we seem to learn, if we continue investigating / looking, we turn upside down. What we first learn often becomes naive, over-simplified, and wrong at the next level of understanding—and there appears to be no end to that process. What we thought we needed to learn as an adolescent becomes quite different than what we next need to learn as a young adult. Mindfulness is just such a notion. All notions in mind investigations / training seem to work that way, imo. At first mindfulness seemed to be about focus, concentration, and will. However, now it seems to be opposite for me: now mindfulness is a sense of wide-open awareness, awareness like space itself. It’s easy to see how folks and groups are using mindfulness as a technique to make living modern life more productive. Sooner or later, everything sacred and profane becomes trivialized, explained, and categorized.
MH2,
I have been conditioned by my experiences. From as early as I can remember, I looked to deep-structured understanding about me, about life, about careers, about marriage, about friendship, about love, about society or community, about conflict, about learning, about what things really were. Every little foray (some lengthy) ended up in disillusion. I never found any principle, theory, explanation, or process that told me what the thing was that I was looking at. What I came to slowly (and painfully) understand is that life is nothing but illusion no matter where or how one looks. There is nothing at the bottom of anything. (I feel the Duck is about to make a contribution here.)
This is not a complaint. I could certainly be wrong in this expression, but the implication is that one best takes things lightly.
In Dzogchen, there are four notions that one might come to see: (i) absence—there’s nothing substantial as one believes; (ii) openness—every “thing” is wide-open; (iii) unity—there’s really just one thing; (iv) spontaneity is what everything is; every “thing” is free-form. That which one looks to find is that which is Itself seeing. There’s no possible explanation (imo).
Be well.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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But as mentioned earlier, IMO, any model of mind that is based on WHAT we perceive is bound to founder since what we perceive is only a mind model of a "reality" that is not "there" in the way mind tells us it is there.
this idea, while intended as a criticism of a particular way to think about "mind" is quite general and one of the difficulties of the subjective/objective dichotomy which seems to be prevalent in this thread. Dichotomies are appealing structures for arguing, they often do not survive careful explanations of the phenomena they attempt to characterize.
Ultimately, we only perceive... but we know that. Time to move on, at least I have.
But for some interesting speculation, from last week's Physical Review Letters,
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.138102
Criticality Distinguishes the Ensemble of Biological Regulatory Networks
Bryan C. Daniels, Hyunju Kim, Douglas Moore, Siyu Zhou, Harrison B. Smith, Bradley Karas, Stuart A. Kauffman, and Sara I. Walker
ABSTRACT
The hypothesis that many living systems should exhibit near-critical behavior is well motivated theoretically, and an increasing number of cases have been demonstrated empirically. However, a systematic analysis across biological networks, which would enable identification of the network properties that drive criticality, has not yet been realized. Here, we provide a first comprehensive survey of criticality across a diverse sample of biological networks, leveraging a publicly available database of 67 Boolean models of regulatory circuits. We find all 67 networks to be near critical. By comparing to ensembles of random networks with similar topological and logical properties, we show that criticality in biological networks is not predictable solely from macroscale properties such as mean degree ⟨K⟩ and mean bias in the logic functions ⟨p⟩, as previously emphasized in theories of random Boolean networks. Instead, the ensemble of real biological circuits is jointly constrained by the local causal structure and logic of each node. In this way, biological regulatory networks are more distinguished from random networks by their criticality than by other macroscale network properties such as degree distribution, edge density, or fraction of activating conditions.
A key and oft-debated concept in the physics of life is the criticality of living matter [1–6]. Criticality, or tuning to a point of marginal stability, is hypothesized to drive both the robustness and evolvability of living processes [7,8]. Systems far from their critical point are expected to be less adaptive than critical systems, being either too stable to be responsive in the ordered phase or too unstable to maintain memory in the chaotic phase. Many examples of living systems are now known to be poised at the boundary between these two regimes, with proximity to criticality reported across a variety of biosystems with very different functions, such as neural firing, animal motion and social behavior, and gene regulation [2,9–14]. Yet, despite these many examples of critical behavior in biology, the true pervasiveness of criticality across living systems remains to be illuminated.
...Isolating the properties that uniquely distinguish the ensemble of biological networks is a necessary step toward statistical approaches to characterizing living matter and therefore toward developing a bona fide physics of life. Our results indicate that an average sensitivity close to critical is sufficient to distinguish biological regulatory networks from random networks with similar global topological structure and logic. This suggests that the most distinguishing features of biological networks are not their macroscale connectivity patterns, such as degree distribution or edge density, or even the average bias of their logic operations. Instead, criticality in biological regulatory networks is better explained by the relationship between local causal and logical structure...While critical sensitivity is a collective property of the interactions of many components, suggests that evolution optimizes the macroscale behavior of regulatory networks, as quantified by their criticality, by jointly tuning the microscale causal structure and logic of individual components.
...Our results also confirm that neither network structure nor logic alone can predict the behavior of biological networks: Knowing both is necessary to characterize their behavior...In this sense, criticality in regulatory networks, which captures something of their collective properties, can be considered as an emergent property of their logical and causal structure together. This has implications for our understanding of the physics of living processes, where the connection between information processing (aggregate logic) and causation (aggregate connectivity) has yet to be fully explicated [52–54].
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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understand is that life is nothing but illusion no matter where or how one looks. There is nothing at the bottom of anything.
Hey MikeL, before this somber conclusion you seem to have furnished us with a type of conclusive rationality sitting squarely on a foundation of life experiences.
An odd place to encounter "...illusion" as the overarching theme, don't you think?
"...nothing at the bottom of anything." And yet you have found meaning, beyond nothing?
Meaning every bit the equivalent of illusion, I'll wager?
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