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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jul 19, 2016 - 01:47pm PT
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Perfect if you happen to be an elephant.
Though dark, O God, thy course and track,
I think thou must at least have meant
That nought which lives should wholly lack
The things that are more excellent.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Jul 19, 2016 - 01:58pm PT
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“…it is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.”
"If we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage."
Rilke
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jul 19, 2016 - 08:28pm PT
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Yes, we are animals but we're the only ones that make paintings, why?
Probably because we have more mitochondria in our brains than any other animal.
Without the extraordinary number of these energy producers within our brains we'd all be creating the chimp finger paintings that sold surprisingly well many years ago.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1567724916300988
You can improve the functioning of the mitochondria throughout your body but you gotta know what you're doin.
And what not to do
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 19, 2016 - 10:55pm PT
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Probably because we have more mitochondria in our brains than any other animal.
Without the extraordinary number of these energy producers within our brains we'd all be creating the chimp finger paintings that sold surprisingly well many years ago.
Really, mitochondria? And what ultimately is the product/effect of mitochondria in the human brain. What is that experience that seems to take us beyond an animal state and allows a condition of understanding and awareness and exploration unique only to us?
The chimp finger painting is, of course, juried by a human judge: this one's good that one not so much. The story is a smug dismissal of nonobjective painting and a validation of a quotidian taste and understanding of, in this case, abstract expressionism. That critical eyes may have determined some of these works to be interesting simply confirms the ignorant suspicion that abstract, or in this case nonobjective, painting is nothing but foolishness. If we put ten chimps in a room with typewriters for a week i'm sure a few sentences would be produced that some moron could then use to claim chimps can write... it's all a matter of human intervention.
It's always very comforting to dismiss what you don't understand.
But animals don't make art, certainly not in the manner that humans do.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jul 20, 2016 - 06:22am PT
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It's always very comforting to dismiss what you don't understand.
You must admit that Paul is self-aware.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jul 20, 2016 - 01:03pm PT
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I can't trust, though I do not dismiss, what I don't understand.
From Jan's link:
For cross-subject registration of the cerebral cortex, we used a two-stage process
based on the multimodal surface matching (MSM) algorithm 14 (see Supplementary
Methods 2.1–2.5). An initial ‘gentle’ stage, constrained only by cortical folding
patterns (FreeSurfer’s ‘sulc’ measure), was used to obtain approximate geographic
alignment without overfitting the registration to folding patterns, which are not
strongly correlated with cortical areas in many regions.
The cortical areal classifier. We used a supervised machine learning classifier to
automatically delineate and identify each cortical area from its neighbours across
a large majority of individual subjects based on multi-modal information. Besides
validating the robustness of the parcellation, this provides useful information about
each individual subject’s parcellation, along with an approach to generalizing the
parcellation to other datasets.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jul 20, 2016 - 09:25pm PT
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Now, . . . if humans could only do that.
Leave it to Popular Science.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jul 20, 2016 - 09:27pm PT
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But can they paint?
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jul 20, 2016 - 09:57pm PT
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Can a cabbage relative experience empty awareness? Maybe that's all it can experience. Therefore it exists on a meta-level to which we can only aspire, being creatures so focused on number-crunching.
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jstan
climber
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Jul 20, 2016 - 09:57pm PT
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cintune:
As was stated in the link above one may easily imagine chemical signals that Lead to what is seen as
memory and response to signals. The link does not discuss the nature of the conduits postulated.
They obviously have additional data.
I would think as soon as they have identified the conduit an experiment might be done where the
conduit has been severed. Clearly the signals could be transported by both mechanisms acting in
parallel. Would be very interesting.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Jul 21, 2016 - 07:34pm PT
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Really, mitochondria? And what ultimately is the product/effect of mitochondria in the human brain. What is that experience that seems to take us beyond an animal state and allows a condition of understanding and awareness and exploration unique only to us?
Yes really , mitochondria. Without which you'd be unable to experience the profound differences encountered "beyond the animal state". Or beyond any state at all for that matter.
The "profound effect" of mitichondria in the human brain is the unprecedented amount of energy produced for the enjoyment and edification of artists and intellectuals who can employ large primate brains to develop concepts like "quotidian". ( If I don't nip this in the bud you'll be callin me " bourgeoisie" next)
If there are two things chiefly responsible for the uniqueness of the human brain and thus the extraordinary scope of its accomplishments a) it's cubic centimeter size b) the astounding number of mitochondria located there( once mitos were bacteria).
If you have at least two primary reasons, well, I' m all ears.
Edit: Strike that, make it just one possible reason.
And don't say "experience" . My dog has experiences and he can't sculpt like Michaelangelo.
Btw the product/effect of mitochondria is to turn the energy of electrons into Shakespearen soliloquy and the discovery of quantum effects, just for openers.
A pitcher of my dog who cannot sculpt at all because his brain is too small with a lot less mitichondria.
For the identical reason he cannot do advanced math, lucky for JGill .
Ol' Pitchers of dogs beat videos of Ted Talks any day .
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 21, 2016 - 09:50pm PT
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Btw the product/effect of mitochondria is to turn the energy of electrons into Shakespearen soliloquy and the discovery of quantum effects, just for openers.
And you see no term between Shakespeare and the energy produced by mitochondria? What then is a thought? And how do thoughts build and critique themselves? Are you saying thoughts are simply physical manifestations of mitochondria. If so, how do thoughts control and manipulate themselves? And what is doing the self reflective thinking that allows for Hamlet? Again, a mechanical explantation simply falls short of explaining both thought and its self reflective witness.
Like chimps, dogs aren't artists but neither are a great many human beings. Experience, I'm afraid, is the issue.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 21, 2016 - 10:29pm PT
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Hamlet in your hamlet.
Yes, and thanks for the heads up... looks like fun in the new venue.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jul 21, 2016 - 10:36pm PT
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Me too Ed (always had a love for maps). The map IS the terrain.
Yo, note the word "fire" here on the screen (map = the symbolic representation of a person, place, thing, or internal/external phenomenon). Touch it ("fire") and see if you burn your fingers.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jul 21, 2016 - 10:51pm PT
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why would you ever look at a map before going someplace?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jul 21, 2016 - 10:54pm PT
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Why would you ever think you've been someplace by looking at a map?
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