What is "Mind?"

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MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Nov 23, 2016 - 06:06pm PT
there's the consciousness of waking up and OMG it's Monday again.



What is "Monday?"




And would the non-physical aspect of consciousness...[can't use words like continuous or discontinuous]?
MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Nov 23, 2016 - 07:22pm PT
Thank you.

It is said that if you don't use something for a year, you probably don't need it and could toss it and de-clutter your space. My mind appears to have adopted that program.
MikeL

Social climber
Southern Arizona
Nov 23, 2016 - 08:30pm PT
Jgill:

Ugh. You’re so one-dimensional.

Is there a continuum of consciousness, from unconscious to fully conscious, say from 0 to 1?


Of / on what dimension? There are an infinite number of them, and that’s a narrow description. What dimension can your mind or any other mind conceive?

You don’t know the unlimitedness of your own consciousness.

What do you see? There’s your limits. There is your personal myth.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Nov 23, 2016 - 09:08pm PT
MikeL: Excellent misinterpretation. You have confused the state of consciousness with the object of consciousness. 0=unconscious, 1=fully alert. Are you conscious when you meditate? If not, then you've fallen asleep. Circle those infinite dimensions if you wish, but if you are aware of doing so you are probably >.8

Don't fret about it. Tononi's Phi Function is very complicated and advanced, but it's no better than my Consciousness Function. Neither applies as you spin through those astral planes. That's another function involving imaginary numbers and infinities.
MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Nov 24, 2016 - 07:01am PT
No more Mondays for you eh?



Funny, though, about the bad cheeseburger, because Tuesday is the one day I must be able to identify, because that is garbage pick-up day in our neighborhood. Since the municipality handed out bins and started a separate collection for food waste, I estimate they have made a pile big enough that the slide could reach you down in California if the crust moves up here.
Bushman

climber
The state of quantum flux
Nov 24, 2016 - 07:24am PT
🎼
Feed the bears, tuppence a bin
Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bin
MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Nov 24, 2016 - 09:05am PT
I must be the only person in our neighborhood who has not seen the mother and three cubs. I have seen the photos people took on their phones of the bears in gardens, in front yards, and on the dog-walk trail. Lynn saw the bears coming toward her on the street as she was walking home, and she ran to the nearest house asking to be let in and watched through the hedge as the bears went by. We met a guy on the dog-walk who had seen the bears 10 minutes earlier.

The bears, like me, seem able to track one weekday. At my bus stop:



MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Nov 24, 2016 - 09:25am PT
Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;



So which is it?


i-b-goB

Social climber
Wise Acres
Nov 24, 2016 - 10:16am PT
BUMP!
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Nov 25, 2016 - 03:38pm PT
When JL talks about the absurdity of attempting to scientifically dissect the experiential I more or less agree. In my book, to do that is akin to analysis and quantification of poetry, which of course destroys its very essence. Recently, we got off on a tangent discussing metaphors - that all of us enjoy in literature - that led ultimately to that list Andy linked of a bewildering array of categorizations, as far from mainstream appreciation as mathematical Category Theory - about which I am relatively ignorant and plan to remain so.

But, too often I think we confuse "What is Mind" with "What is Consciousness", and as Jan has noted mind is much deeper than consciousness. And so I present another purely descriptive mathematical function having only the vaguest form, with values defined from 0 to 1, with 0 being essentially non-functioning or dead and 1 somewhere up in the advanced experiential realm idolized by JL and MikeL.

Before you offer helpful criticism ("Ugh. You are so one-dimensional") let me explain a bit more. This function, or one-to one mapping, maps states of the mind to numbers in the interval [0,1]. The range of this function (included in the interval between 0 and 1) has an uncountably infinite number of values, so there is more than enough room to assign weird mental states (like empty awareness). For instance,s=empty awareness, M(s)= √(.987). An interesting question is how does M(s) relate to C(s)?

Fascinating isn't it? Easily as riveting IME as thousands of pages by Dennet and others. I'm ready to take on Tononi and bury his Phi Function!
MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Nov 25, 2016 - 03:54pm PT
This function, or mapping, maps states of the mind to numbers in the interval [0,1].


Definitely more than enough room, there, but would it tell us anything about how one state changes to another?


To give an example, here is how the list of figures of speech came up.




http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/programs/northbynorthwest/saturday-november-12-1.3848489


The first few minutes are about the swans.


The next several minutes are a riff on figures of speech.


Then there is an interview with a man who had a stroke and he gives us a good look at how hard it is to know what your own mind "IS." A part of his brain died but he was not aware of some of what he was missing using just his own mind.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Nov 25, 2016 - 04:06pm PT
Forty years ago, one morning I decided to shave off my goatee, that I had had for years. The two kids at the breakfast table, girls ages 13 and 11, immediately noticed and I told them to keep mum when mom came downstairs to the table and sat down opposite me. Then one of them said, Mom, do you see any difference in dad? She looked up and said no. The other one asked the same question, persisting. Again, not really. Then they burst out laughing, which completely puzzled mom. Finally they told her and she said, Oh yes, I see! And was a tad embarrassed.

When we look at something very familiar what we "see" is a combination of what's there and an image from memory.

;>)
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Nov 25, 2016 - 07:25pm PT
I doubt it. The kids were typical agitated teens and my wife was very calm.
Ward Trotter

Trad climber
Nov 25, 2016 - 07:47pm PT
your mind is very quiet then you'll see things as they are and not from memory.

There is a certain element of truth to that assertion. The more disciplined the mind the less the irrelevancies from previous experience are allowed to intrude. This amounts to a highly specialized state of mind characterized by a linear relationship to prior associations. Ordinary consciousness is more non-linear, by design, to facilitate survival in an often dangerous world. The more non-linear = the more consciousness resembles a grab bag of possible responses.

However all bets are off when quick action is required.
MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Nov 25, 2016 - 08:36pm PT
If your mind is very quiet then you'll see things as they are and not from memory.


It may feel that way, and it is a good thing to quiet the mind, but memory runs much deeper. It isn't just about recognizing or naming objects. You may escape from conscious awareness of memory, but that doesn't mean you have reached a condition in which your memories play no role.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Nov 25, 2016 - 08:53pm PT
I seem to recall an incident in which a man under hypnosis was told he would not see his wife. When he snapped out she was standing right in front of him, but he did not see her. He could see normally everything else.

It's hard to imagine what he did see. What about objects behind her? Somehow the mind wall-papered over his perception without it seeming odd.

A similar fictitious scenario occurred last week on HBO's Westworld. Bernard - a cyborg of sorts - was told he would not see the woman he had murdered. Nor would he remember doing so.


The more disciplined the mind . . .

Would you say that is synonymous with the mind being very quiet? My mind is very quiet as I fall asleep. On the other hand when I look deeply into a math problem my mind is not very quiet, but it is very disciplined.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Nov 25, 2016 - 09:04pm PT
Doesn't this assume that recent memory is perfect? What of memory many years past, like meeting someone you haven't seen in twenty years? Will the mind be in sync? I have found this experience to be rattling at times, being difficult to reconcile memory with current reality.

I suspect you are talking about meditative calm as described by the woo-masters on this thread. When they say there is no distinction between objects my opinion is that they are in a peculiar mental state that is no more correct than it is mistaken.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Nov 25, 2016 - 09:32pm PT
And with that I shall retire and calm my mind.
paul roehl

Boulder climber
california
Nov 25, 2016 - 09:40pm PT
"Astronomer Carl Sagan put it this way: “We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star.” Stephen Hawking was even blunter: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.”
An objective look, however, at just two of the most dramatic discoveries of astronomy — big bang cosmology and planets around other stars (exoplanets) — suggests the opposite. We seem to be cosmically special, perhaps even unique — at least as far as we are likely to know for eons.
The first result — the anthropic principle — has been accepted by physicists for 43 years. The universe, far from being a collection of random accidents, appears to be stupendously perfect and fine-tuned for life. The strengths of the four forces that operate in the universe — gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear interactions (the latter two dominate only at the level of atoms) — for example, have values critically suited for life, and were they even a few percent different, we would not be here. The most extreme example is the big bang creation: Even an infinitesimal change to its explosive expansion value would preclude life. The frequent response from physicists offers a speculative solution: an infinite number of universes — we are just living in the one with the right value. But modern philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and pioneering quantum physicists such as John Wheeler have argued instead that intelligent beings must somehow be the directed goal of such a curiously fine-tuned cosmos. It seems likely that exoplanets could host extraterrestrial intelligence. But intelligence is not so easy to produce. Paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee summarize the many constraints in their book “Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe ” and show why it takes vastly more than liquid water and a pleasant environment to give birth even to simple (much less complex) life. At a minimum, it takes an environment stable for billions of years of evolution, plus all the right ingredients. Biologists from Jacques Monod to Stephen Jay Gould have emphasized the extraordinary circumstances that led to intelligence on Earth, while geneticists have found that DNA probably resulted from many accidents. So although the same processes operate everywhere, some sequences could be unlikely, even astronomically unlikely. The evolution of intelligence could certainly be such a sequence. There is, moreover, a well-known constraint: the finite speed of light, which ensures that even over thousands of years we will only be able to communicate with the comparatively few stars (tens of millions) in our cosmic neighborhood. If the combined astronomical, biological and evolutionary chances for life to form and evolve to intelligence are only 1 in 10 million, then we probably have no one to talk to.
The discovery of exoplanets was dramatic but not unexpected: Since the Greeks, we have imagined planets were common. Textbooks even taught that our solar system was typical. But the exotic diversity of exoplanets came as a surprise. Many have highly elliptical orbits around unstable stars, making evolution over billions of years difficult if not impossible; other systems contain giant planets that may have drifted inward, disrupting orbits; and there are many other unanticipated properties. These unexpected discoveries are helping scientists unravel Earth’s complex history.
The bottom line for extraterrestrial intelligence is that it is probably rarer than previously imagined, a conclusion called the misanthropic principle. For all intents and purposes, we could be alone in our cosmic neighborhood, and if we expand the volume of our search we will have to wait even longer to find out. Life might be common in the very distant universe — or it might not be — and we are unlikely to know. We are probably rare — and it seems likely we will be alone for eons. This is the second piece of new evidence that we are not ordinary."

MikeL

Social climber
Southern Arizona
Nov 25, 2016 - 09:47pm PT
Jgill: . . . The range of this function (included in the interval between 0 and 1) has an uncountably infinite number of values, . . .


But it’s still one dimension. even though infinitely bracketed.

Which function / myth *are* you working?

Sun: If your mind is very quiet then you'll see things as they are and not from memory.

He [Jgill] doesn’t get it. Won't get it. Doesn’t want to.

There seems to be a great many, apparent glitches in the matrix that we don't get. That's what limits us. We think there is / are problems--none of which really exists. It's a waste.

Happy Thanksgiving!

(I'm full.)
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