What is "Mind?"

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WBraun

climber
Jul 30, 2017 - 08:10am PT
There is NO AC (alternating current) battery.

Only an inverter hooked to the DC battery produces AC.

You're being a disingenuous aszhat as usual.
jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Jul 30, 2017 - 03:18pm PT
The Wizard rescued by the Duck.
feralfae

Boulder climber
in the midst of a metaphysical mystery
Jul 31, 2017 - 05:58pm PT
Excuse me for interrupting. Thank you.
I think I have mentioned on prior occasions on this Taco Forum both David Bohm and DeBroglie. Bohm's "Causality and Chance in Modern Physics" has some interesting concepts. I have been reading on Bohm's focus and increasingly unifying theories and thought since 1979. All the time, also reaching into Anthropology, Archaeology, Psychology, and most recently, the unfortunate experiment in PTSD, from which I am obviously fairly well recovered, and thank you for your kindness since Doug escaped. :) I offer my deep gratitude for your forbearance and comfort as well. It has meant a lot to me, more than I can say.

Back to the fun stuff. . .
Now then: If one follows the development of another mind as a means of kicking up the level of one's own exploration, one gets to follow minds such as Bohm's. Before that, my Icon was Hypatia, of course. :) But I am in the process of perhaps shifting again fairly soon (in my thinking on some things).

I think we have a brain, which is the hardware, so to type, and the mind, which might be called the software, which, together as one unit, seems to have the capability to very swiftly ask and answer a high order of questions.

I have a few minutes, and wanted to share this: What is brain? What is Mind? Neither (usually) manifests without the other, but there are some interesting exceptions to this theory of unity about the thinking process. So:

Bohm (from wiki)
David Bohm viewed quantum theory and relativity as contradictory, which implied a more fundamental level in the universe.[8] He claimed both quantum theory and relativity pointed towards this deeper theory, which he formulated as a quantum field theory. This more fundamental level was proposed to represent an undivided wholeness and an implicate order, from which arises the explicate order of the universe as we experience it.

Bohm's proposed implicate order applies both to matter and consciousness. He suggested that it could explain the relationship between them. He saw mind and matter as projections into our explicate order from the underlying implicate order. Bohm claimed that when we look at matter, we see nothing that helps us to understand consciousness.

Bohm discussed the experience of listening to music. He believed the feeling of movement and change that make up our experience of music derive from holding the immediate past and the present in the brain together. The musical notes from the past are transformations rather than memories. The notes that were implicate in the immediate past become explicate in the present. Bohm viewed this as consciousness emerging from the implicate order.

Bohm saw the movement, change or flow, and the coherence of experiences, such as listening to music, as a manifestation of the implicate order. He claimed to derive evidence for this from Jean Piaget's[9] work on infants. He held these studies to show that young children learn about time and space because they have a "hard-wired" understanding of movement as part of the implicate order. He compared this "hard-wiring" to Chomsky's theory that grammar is "hard-wired" into human brains.

Bohm never proposed a specific means by which his proposal could be falsified, nor a neural mechanism through which his "implicate order" could emerge in a way relevant to consciousness.[8] Bohm later collaborated on Karl Pribram's holonomic brain theory as a model of quantum consciousness.[10]

According to philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen, Bohm's suggestion "leads naturally to the assumption that the physical correlate of the logical thinking process is at the classically describable level of the brain, while the basic thinking process is at the quantum-theoretically describable level."[11]

end of wiki

I thought you might enjoy this short statement, since nobody seems much interesting in reading Bohm and chasing along this trail, having splendid trails of your own to follow. What I refer to as Mind is that process we are now attempting to identify. It is a concept which has led to an interesting set of learning. (Thank you Ed, I may be checking in with you on your learning offer.)

Back to the project at hand. Actually, mostly just in the mind. :)
Thank you. Happy August.
feralfae
(I apologize in advance for any typos.)
WBraun

climber
Jul 31, 2017 - 07:49pm PT
I think we have a brain, which is the hardware, so to type, and the mind, which might be called the software, which, together as one unit,
seems to have the capability to very swiftly ask and answer a high order of questions.


Who really is asking the questions?

Software doesn't ask questions nor does hardware.

Software is ultimately inputted by a higher order of real intelligence.

Software doesn't ultimately write itself.

So, ..... Who really is the person asking the questions ........

Ed Hartouni

Trad climber
Livermore, CA
Jul 31, 2017 - 09:19pm PT
I think Bohm is held up with respect to this OP (and Largo has invoked him many times) because of his work in physics, and particularly in taking an idea due to de Broglie and developing it to show it agrees with quantum mechanics.

Certainly Bell was inspired by the idea which lead him to develop a quantitative test of the question: is the universe really deterministic and we don't know about it, so it looks quantum mechanical (probabilistic).

But this is a thread about "the mind" so we can jump to the end of Bohm's story where he considers the nature of knowing in physics, where his "implicate" and "explicate" order enter into things...

Albert writes (in his book Quantum Mechanics and Experience Harvard University Press 1992) when discussing the differences of Bohm's theory about mind and the "many minds" theory, which is a quantum mechanical superposition of "mind states" ["...this proposal is going to entail that what you might call the 'global' mental state of every sentient being is uniquely fixed by the state of the world...And there's something else about this kind of picture that's nice: this picture is local"].

He goes on:
"So suppose it were to turn out that what our empirical experience entails is that the dynamical equations of motion are always exactly right; and suppose it were also to turn out that there aren't any purely theoretical reasons why one or the other of these two theories is somehow manifestly out of the running. What that would mean is that questions about the structure of space and time, and questions whether or not the world is deterministic, are the kinds of questions which there can't ever be scientific answers to. Period."

I have no reason to doubt the seriousness of the philosophical issues in this discussion (and maybe if you haven't read the book it might be something you'd like). But the philosophical discussion is based on what is known, and so it is possible that additional scientific discovery renders the discussion moot.

For instance, there have been a series of every more complex experiments that test Bell's inequality. Along the way experimenters have proposed tests, and found that the universe is not deterministic in precisely the way quantum mechanics says.

Theorists find loop-holes in the experiments, so experiments continue to refine their experiments to close the loop holes, so far quantum mechanics is the answer. We have reached the point where there are no more loop-holes...

If this is so, then the very basis of Bohm's theories are incorrect. Bell was unhappy with the results of the first experiments, he preferred Bohm to quantum mechanics.

But it isn't about our like or dislike of a particular theory, physical theories have to describe the physical universe, and when shown they do not, they must be discarded, no matter how much you want them to be true.


People don't talk about Bohm because the prevailing view, backed by experimental evidence, is that his theory is incorrect.

Interestingly, Bell's contributions to trying to understand this have laid the foundations (along with other previously obscure work on quantum fluctuations) for modern quantum information theory.

It is marvelous, really, and quite unanticipated that this would have been so. But then science is a lot more subtle and sophisticated then many of the posters to this thread have any idea about (as evidenced by their rather ham handed objections).




Ed Hartouni

Trad climber
Livermore, CA
Jul 31, 2017 - 10:04pm PT
we call it "Greek science,"

Modern science's innovation (or realization) is that one's speculations are subject to test, and having failed the test are no longer material to understanding the outcome of the test.

In many ways, the test result can reveal something surprising about nature that was unanticipated by one's thought.

There is little of relevance to modern science in the particular results of Greek natural philosophy, and that is not because of some flaw in thinking, but because nature didn't turn out to be the way those philosophers thought it was.

But as an interesting challenge (that I certainly have failed) one might name some predictions of something entirely unexpected that was a prediction of philosophy, and happened to be verified. To my understanding, that's not at all how philosophy works.

jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Jul 31, 2017 - 10:25pm PT
One philosopher posting here claims there will never be sentient artificial intelligence. He is quite certain of this. However, science marches on and the appearance of the unpredictable may change the ways we think. But without such discoveries and the understanding of these discoveries the Socratic method and rhetoric are hobbled and unlikely to yield much of value.

Enter the analytic philosopher, working with scientists or following them knowledgeably,or being a scientist themselves, clarifying complicated structures for public awareness.

Edit: As is her custom, sycorax quickly deleted her post that led to Ed's reply and mine. So little patience, or so little confidence. One has to cut and paste quickly, for her contributions have remarkably short half-lives.
WBraun

climber
Aug 1, 2017 - 09:08am PT
jgill -- "One philosopher posting here claims there will never be sentient artificial intelligence."

The sentient being in the machine is already there ... as YOU.

Sentient artificial intelligence is just that "artificial".

What is it about you so called scientists and your failed logic and understanding of the word "artificial"?

Because every living sentient being has all the qualities of God but not the quantity they want to play God and create.

You'll create Frankenstein, due to your limited quantity.

We'll just give you a plastic apple for you to eat from now on and you'll be happy.

Life and consciousness

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19420889.2015.1085138?scroll=top&needAccess=true&
MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Aug 1, 2017 - 09:14am PT
At least her participles are detectable.

Going, going, gone.

What of the resonance participles?
Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Topic Author's Reply - Aug 1, 2017 - 11:15am PT
An interesting little tidbit from British neuroscientist, Raymond Tullis.

Physical science begins when we escape from our subjective, first-person experiences into objective measurement, and thereby start to aspire towards Thomas Nagel’s “view from nowhere.”

You think the table over there is large; I think it is small. We take a measurement and discover that it is two feet by two feet. We now characterize the table in a way that is less beholden to our own, or anyone else’s, personal experience. Or we terminate an argument about whether the table is light or dark brown by translating its color into a mixture of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. The table has lost contact with its phenomenal appearance to me, to you, or to anyone, as being characteristic of what it is.

As science progresses, measurement takes us further from actual experience, and the phenomena of subjective consciousness, to a realm in which things are described in abstract, general quantitative terms.

The most obvious symptom of this is the way physical science discards “secondary qualities” — such as color experiences, feelings of warmth and cold, and tastes. These are regarded as somehow unreal, or at least as falling short of describing what the furniture of the world is “in itself.”

For the physicist, light is not in itself bright or colorful; rather, it is a mixture of vibrations of different frequencies in an electromagnetic field. The material world, far from being the colorful, noisy, smelly place we experience, is purportedly instead composed only of colorless, silent, odorless atoms or quarks, or other basic particles and waves - some of questionable materiality - best described mathematically.

Physical science is thus about the marginalization, and ultimately the elimination, of phenomenal appearance. But consciousness is centrally about appearances because the basic stuff of consciousness are “secondary qualities.” We don't "see" radiation at 450nm (wavelength) and 630THz (frequency). We see blue. Such sensory qualities fill our every conscious moment.

As science advances, it retreats from appearances towards quantifying items that do not in themselves have the kinds of manifestation that constitute our experiences. A biophysical account of consciousness, which sees consciousness in terms of nerve impulses that are the passage of ions through semi-permeable membranes, must be a contradiction in terms. For such an account must ultimately be a physical account, and physical science neither seeks, nor can ever admit the existence of anything that would show why a physical object such as a brain should find, uncover, create, produce, result in, or cause the emergence of appearances and, in particular, secondary qualities in the world.

Any explanation of consciousness that admits the existence of appearances but is rooted in materialist science must always fail because, on its own account, matter and energy do not intrinsically have appearances, never mind those corresponding to secondary qualities.

We could, of course, by all means change our notion of matter; but if we do not, and the brain is a piece of matter, then it cannot explain the appearance and experience of things. Those who imagine that consciousness of material objects could arise from the effect of one material object on another material object, don’t seem to take the notion of matter seriously, or simply don't understand the indisputable inferences of their own descriptions.

Some neuroscientists might respond that science does not eliminate appearance; rather, it replaces one appearance with another — fickle immediate and conscious appearance are replaced with one that is more true to the reality of the objects it attends to. But this is not what science does — least of all physical science, which is supposed to give us the final report on what there is in the universe. For the materialist, matter (or mass-energy) is the ultimate reality, and equations linking quantities are the best way of revealing the inner essence of this reality. For, again, it is of the very nature of mass-energy, as it is envisaged in physics, not to have any kind of appearance in itself.
MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Aug 1, 2017 - 12:39pm PT
As science advances, it retreats from appearances towards quantifying items that do not in themselves have the kinds of manifestation that constitute our experiences.


As metaphysics advances?

Maybe it doesn't matter what it means as long as it sounds like something.

There must be something it is like....
Dingus McGee

Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
Aug 1, 2017 - 01:36pm PT
I have lost all my secondary qualities of anchors after reading the science based text of John Long's Climbing Anchors.


Any explanation of consciousness that admits the existence of appearances but is rooted in materialist science must always fail because, on its own account, matter and energy do not intrinsically have appearances, never mind those corresponding to secondary qualities.

Your cluelessness is obvious: Matter and Energy have many forms that we can both talk about and measure. And we can measure many ideas of quality.

Largo, try another argument. You have made no sense with this one, but just demonstrated your insufficient understanding of matter and energy. And this likely happens every time you make such proclamations.

Truth is you would make more sense to the rest of us if you would just admit you have no understanding of how such and such aspects of matter and energy could form the machinery that supports and produces experience/feelings. The rebuttal to your nonsense is simple: You simply do not understand all the ways the properties of matter and energy can manifest. Will you ever?


Awareness is just a feeling.



jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Aug 1, 2017 - 02:03pm PT
. . . and physical science neither seeks, nor can ever admit the existence of anything that would show why a physical object such as a brain should find, uncover, create, produce, result in, or cause the emergence of appearances and, in particular, secondary qualities in the world


Seems to me like an unwarranted assumption. It's true that science may shun metaphysical speculation, however. Nothing new or interesting here.


It's not Raymond Tullis, Wizard. Raymond Tallis.
Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Topic Author's Reply - Aug 1, 2017 - 03:09pm PT
To me and many others, the comments just offered arise from what some call "mechanitus." Note that the arguments offer no intelligent counter to what Tallus - himself a neuroscientist - actually said, but are tossed out there willy nilly in a kind of blind fealty to materialism. While we often hear about how little I know per the majesty of materialism, it is clear that most from this camp have little understanding of what is discussed OUTSIDE of that closed loop, even by noted scientists (who inevitably "misinterpreted their own data.").

However, when contrary evidence or arguments are shown, we hear such hare-brained replies that awareness is actually a "feeling," feelings being emotional data widely believed to be the output of our limbic systems. What makes this such a rookie error is that it tries to posit being aware of some article of content (memories, thoughts, feelings, sensations) as being selfsame with the content itself. Why, because when you look only at a mechanism, you will never find nor yet observe awareness. This leads to Tallus' points per the logically incoherent proposition that neural functioning and sentience are the same - a rudimentary error easy to refute, though few understand the reasoning behind the refutation.

What it seems to break down to is a woeful ignorance to our own sentient process. Only a person who had no understanding of their own process would ever claim that awareness itself is emotional content. Such a claim is almost otherworldly daffy - we can easily see why.

Much of the misunderstanding is owing to those claiming that neuroscience actually has a theoretical or even possible mechanistic explanation for sentience, and that only outlying scientists, given to woo, would think otherwise. The following was recently offered to counter that false claim:

"Steven A. Pinker, experimental psychologist at Harvard University, on how consciousness might arise from something physical, such as the brain, states, “Beats the heck out of me. I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else.” Donald D. Hoffman, cognitive scientist at University of California, Irvine: “The scientific study of consciousness is in the embarrassing position of having no scientific theory of consciousness.” Stuart A. Kauffman, theoretical biologist and complex-systems researcher: “Nobody has the faintest idea what consciousness is.... I don’t have any idea. Nor does anybody else, including the philosophers of mind.” Roger W. Sperry, Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologist: “Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature.” Eugene P. Wigner, Nobelist in physics: “We have at present not even the vaguest idea how to connect the physio-chemical processes with the state of mind.” Physicist Nick Herbert, an expert in nonlocality: “Science’s biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.” Physicist Freeman J. Dyson: “The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.” Philosopher Jerry A. Fodor, of Rutgers University: “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness.” Philosopher John R. Searle, of the University of California, Berkeley: “At the present state of the investigation of consciousness we don’t know how it works and we need to try all kinds of different ideas.” Mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: “My position [on consciousness] demands a major revolution in physics.... I’ve come to believe that there is something very fundamental missing from current science.... Our understanding at this time is not adequate and we’re going to have to move to new regions of science....” Niels Bohr, one the great patriarchs of quantum physics: “We can admittedly find nothing in physics or chemistry that has even a remote bearing on consciousness.... [Q]uite apart from the laws of physics and chemistry, as laid down in quantum theory, we must also consider laws of quite a different kind.” Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield: “It will always be quite impossible to explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain.... Although the content of consciousness depends in large measure on neuronal activity, awareness itself does not....To me, it seems more and more reasonable to suggest that the mind may be a distinct and different essence.” Sir John Maddox, the editor for years of the prestigious journal Nature: “What consciousness consists of ... is ... a puzzle. Despite the marvelous successes of neuroscience in the past century... we seem as far from understanding cognitive process as we were a century ago.”

And yet, there are still those who hang onto the rags of materialism, certain that the business of sentience will be solved once the numbers are in.

In the end, these arguments break down to two false premises: mechanistic complexity "creates" consciousness, and that awareness itself can be understood in terms of the data and brain processing of that with which we are aware.

What's lost on many here is that all of those scientists that were mentioned in that quote were perfectly aware of both the complexity and processing hypothesis, and recognized they were entirely false and bolstered by no data whatsover. As though all of those folks were totally clueless about what others are so clear about.

Claiming that awareness itself is emotional content - to pick out just one howler - is a glaring symptom of "mechanitus."

My guess is that few understand a word of what neuroscientist Tullis actually said, and have no idea about the thinking and reasoning that led him to his conclusions. Why? John recently said that a scientific paper was "too complicated" for "metaphysicians," even thought most modern thinkers tackling metaphysical questions are themselves scientists. Fact is, if you want a complicated challenge, observe your own conscious process, and its interface with content, then tell us what you find.

I say there is virtually no chance of anyone suffering from mechanitus to ever even start this adventure. And so we end up with such rookie errors as conflating emotional content with our awareness of same.



healyje

Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
Aug 1, 2017 - 03:10pm PT
Tallis:

"...takes us further from actual..."

"The most obvious symptom of..."

"...thus about the marginalization..."

"...it retreats from..."

"...nor can ever admit the existence of..."

"...this is not what science does..."

No stilted bias here - kind of a total fail of contextualization...

Crikey, I can do that too...!

healyje:

"...science grinds down and crushes all the beauty of life under the brutal, twisting heel of its method..." (for Paul)

"...withering scientific gaze strips..."

"...starts by repressing the most..."

"...nothing remains after...

Kauffman: Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious

And yet - stupefyingly - it can be.

Largo: And yet, there are still those who hang onto the rags of materialism, certain that the business of sentience will be solved once the numbers are in.

As ever, you equate not knowing how in the now or knowing how ever with something being impossible. We don't know how life starts, but that doesn't mean life can't exist. We don't know why the universe exists, but that doesn't mean it doesn't. Newton didn't know about special relativity, but that didn't mean it didn't exist.

Not knowing the how of things doesn't mean they don't exist or can't happen. And you're putting words into the mouths of most of those folks you quote when you suggest they support your panpsychic beliefs. They're not say that, they're just saying we're currently clueless as to how. Get a grip and ease up on that bone.
Dingus McGee

Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
Aug 1, 2017 - 04:13pm PT
Why capitalize after a colon?


Why worry about it Bitch: My colon is full for you.
Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Topic Author's Reply - Aug 1, 2017 - 04:20pm PT
Healje, it's time to call you out on what you've been doing all along - lobbing turds into the conversation sans ANY understanding of what the neuroscientist said, even briefly reviewing a single tenet of the argument, to demonstrate your understanding, then countering with specifics that would even remotely constitute a counter argument that is logically coherent.

Your one and only argument is based on the philosophical belief that physical mechanisms and processes can entirely explain, in causal terms, the existence of all reality, and that if we don't yet have a mechanistic explanation, that doesn't mean we won't soon enough.

My contention is that you don't understand the first thing about what Tallis is saying in regards to your mechanitus. You're just pot shotting without taking the time to grasp what is being said - because, I fear, you don't.

So let's nail this down and give you a chance to demonstrate your understanding, and counter Tallis with your own logically derived hypothesis - RELATIVE to what Tallis actually said.

First, what is your understanding, specifically, as to what Tallis actually said per "appearances?" Clue: It pertains to the age old issue of reality and appearances. What is your take on the issues that Tallis raised?

Second, what specific aspect of Tallis' argument are you attempting to refute, and what, specifically, is your refutation?

Here is your chance to grasp an argument, show your understanding, and respond, specifically, in kind.

jgill

Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
Aug 1, 2017 - 04:30pm PT
. . . no intelligent counter to what Tallus . . .


Tullis, Tallis, Tallus
Names of those who say
Above the fray and fuss
There's only our one way


(I know, crap)
Dingus McGee

Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
Aug 1, 2017 - 04:45pm PT
Largo,

get a clue! With a brain there would be no utterances from U

do tell us a favor.
Dingus McGee

Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
Aug 1, 2017 - 05:15pm PT
Healjye,

And you're putting words into the mouths of most of those folks you quote when you suggest they support your panpsychic beliefs.

Exactly

And is Largo's skill at doing this attributable to poor reading comprehension?

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