Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Oct 31, 2017 - 08:04pm PT
|
Neat!
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Oct 31, 2017 - 08:41pm PT
|
Anguish
(from coupled DEs in complex time)
Post your 'art', people.
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Oct 31, 2017 - 09:33pm PT
|
“I think, rather, it was inspired by the May night, by the springing grass, by the unfolding leaves, by the apple bloom, by the passion of love and joy that thrills through nature…”
John Burroughs
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
A horse by Butterfield’s rendering: spirit, grace, and strength.
It seems that everything in our experience / mind are characterizations of sorts. What has Butterfield captured? “The horse” or her mind? Which is more truthful? The thing that she sees, or the mind that sees? Is there any real difference between what Ed does in his work and the expressions of Burroughs, Blossfeldt, Fitzgerald, or Gill?
If we try being accurate in our reporting, what isn’t mind?
Cheers.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
Is there any real difference between what Ed does in his work...
this is an interesting question especially since I'm not aware that I've ever expressed in any detail just what I do in "my work." Though the end product of much of that work is available to view.
I returned last weekend from the annual meeting of the most recent division of the American Physical Society I've been active in (over my career this includes 4 divisions and one "interest group")... after presenting some of my work in a 10 minute talk (with 2 minutes for questions). In spite of a couple of weeks attempting to make the basic idea clear by stripping out as much of the irrelevant detail as possible, I succumbed in including 2 view graphs that I now see were somewhat irrelevant, and worse, distracting to the audience. This was fatal to my attempts at communicating a difficult analysis with a surprising result.
However some people I talked to actually understood the basic idea (which isn't all that complex once you think about it for a year or two). The most productive result from this entire exercise was that I simplified the line of reasoning for myself thus making future avenues of work clear. It also introduced me to a set of new collaborators, as well as renewed interest in current collaborators.
Alas, there was no deeply revelatory physics here, just the seemingly endless peeling of layers of complexity, the end result a hope, really, that it isn't just layers all the way down.
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
I knew a person who said that everything was an interpretation.
I noticed that they had a pair of shoes and always wore the left shoe on the left foot, and right shoe on right foot.
I saw the person once having trouble putting on one of the shoes. The left shoe was resistant to being interpreted as a right shoe. Or maybe the foot was at fault?
If you understand what it says about its mind when a crab that has just moulted picks up a grain of sand and places it in its otolith, you will have a good grasp of, "What is Mind?" The distance between human and crustacean is not great compared to the distance from crab to ameba.
I'm not sure what to make of gastropods. I've had to re-consider after learning that there are snails that hunt other snails. Our poster healyje has made a point about the influence of predation on the evolution of mind.
Since it's hard to imagine a wolf snail running down an elk snail, maybe they catch prey by hypnosis.
|
|
Ward Trotter
Trad climber
|
|
Don't know, never once been consumed by either question,
This report is a condensed version of what originally prompted me to declare BS. But still, if miraculously true, congratulations, you may belong to that sliver of humanity apparently immune to any sensation of mystery and wonder as regards the possibility of a universe containing something beyond the mere product of your steadfast determinism-- something very important that may have escaped a drafted inclusion in the formula.
And scaling up all the way back up to humans I personally find no more relevancy in those questions for myself than for virii or bacteria.
I find myself reacting to this assertion in perhaps a dozen differing (even conflicting) ways.
So, the foremost detectable separation between man and microorganism is one merely of scale in the matter of an experience of purpose and meaning?
Again, life just is. I'm on it and in need of no further purpose or meaning.
There is no urge to grasp for those items? Whatsoever? Has purpose and meaning become a mere cluster of synonyms for the irrational, or better yet, the non-rational ?
I personally consider life a breathtaking empty canvas. Nihilistic? Sure, but without the morality and value nonsense.
I thought so. You are the Nietzschean ubermensch. ( A little humor there, Healye).
I'm tempted to ask, to consider what governs your core relations to your fellow humans-- at least that portion otherwise subsumed by the dreaded bit we like to call morality and values.
Hmm, again with my background I'm disinclined to make the leap from parasympathetic responses and biological imperatives to something more 'meaningful'.
I would say that if your eyesight is inflexibly riveted to nervous systems responses exclusively you will see exactly what you want to see. If then something unexplainably falls outside this paradigm then it can generally be disqualified by the provisional invocation of some sort of imperative-- at least and until a solid connection between flight or fight, digestion, or defecation can be established.
Existential and metaphysical preoccupations aside, I think we possess great imaginations and creativity which work for us in hope and against us in fear.
Agreed.
( BTW I had a course in Micro with Lab. The fun part of the lab was being assigned a mystery organism which one had to identify and report on-- you know, gram staining, motility ,etc.. Unfortunately I cannot remember my organism's species. Over the years try as I might no name is forthcoming. After all that work!. It is a quest every bit as pitiful and daunting as the proverbial forgetting an old girlfriend's name. Still, I may have had it better than my lab partner who years later developed a lazy preoccupation with the tobacco mosaic virus)
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
such manifold directives seem to strictly reside in the genetic machinery of life.
Ward,
How strictly do you mean? Are you saying that we are machines? Or that the directives we obey are all in our genes?
I would say that if your eyesight is inflexibly riveted to nervous systems responses exclusively you will see exactly what you want to see.
Or in our eyes?
Riveted?
Inflexibly?
Exclusively?
Exactly?
Good thing you prefaced that volley with 'if.'
|
|
Ward Trotter
Trad climber
|
|
How strictly do you mean? Are you saying that we are machines? Or that the directives we obey are all in our genes?
Seemingly strictly.
Remember, James Brown was a love machine.
I'll answer that question more seriously later. I'm in a hurry.see ya.
Riveted?
Inflexibly?
Exclusively
Lol. Sometimes I like to needlessly fatten up my non-fiction in order to play with the big boys and girls here on the mind thread.
Actually I tend to blame it on the overcrowded breakfast time conditions here at Denny's . Do they have Denny's in Canada?
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
All is good, Ward.
I don't mean to suggest you misunderstand our current picture of what genes do.
And don't take any advice from me on your writing style. You know better.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
Ed: . . . some people I talked to actually understood the basic idea (which isn't all that complex once you think about it for a year or two).
Geez’us, Ed, . . . I just about spit out my cabernet. That is one of the funniest things I’ve read here. No disrespect, though. I have a deep appreciation for what you wrote.
An ex-student wants me to give them a recommendation to a doctoral program, and I spent about 40 minutes on the phone trying to tell him what he was getting himself committed to (which goes way beyond a doctoral program). He said, “gosh, . . . I need to think about this.”
I think it’s great, . . . and you, too. I’d be interested to hear what you think you’re doing in your work. I like the metaphor of peeling an onion. (Although I’m not sure about that hope-thing.)
|
|
Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
|
|
It would be interesting to know what everyone here is working on, including the retirees.
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
Every Tuesday I must take down the recycling (paper, plastic, and metal), the compost (kitchen waste) and old-fashioned garbage (on alternate weeks only). It is a major responsibility. After the occasional Long Weekend the pick-up is delayed by one day. As a retired person I am never sure when it is a weekend, let alone a long one. I don't need to remember because I can see on my computer what day of the week it is, and I can refer to a garbage pick-up schedule on-line to see what will be picked up and when.
When our daughter needs me to, I take care of her dog. I walk it once in the morning and again toward evening.
Most of the rest of my time is spent doing as little as I can get away with.
|
|
Ward Trotter
Trad climber
|
|
How strictly do you mean? Are you saying that we are machines? Or that the directives we obey are all in our genes?
No I am not saying that we are machines. I distrust machine analogies in general, even when I myself use them.
The directives we obey are in our genes and the directives our genes obey are in our intentions, whether enlightened or not, or many times accidental.
For instance, if I intentionally decide to pursue sun exposure to obtain the salubrious benefits of Vitamin.D. UVB strikes my skin and after being produced proceeds to influence upwards of 200 genes. There are nearly 3000 receptor sites for Vitamin D on the human genome. Perhaps even more yet to be discovered.
But before I can get outside to greet the sun a large,implacable dark cloud effectively blocks the UV light, or perhaps on the way out I stub my toe and get distracted. Maybe I don't get any sun that day. No genes are influenced. Those particular class of directives do not occur on that day.
Thanks for your interest in my post, Andy.
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
Those particular class of directives do not occur on that day.
Or maybe I should offer a bit of direction on writing.
But aside from nit-picking, I agree. It is a good point that we can choose among ways to affect our genes.
Genes can hold only so much information. During embryonic development they can specify, say, what sort of cells should be in your liver and roughly where and how big the liver should be.
When it comes to how to behave/move in the world, genes are thought to build a nervous system, much as they would a liver, but with the difference that the liver can be more or less be directed by the genes as to what it should do, while the nervous system must adapt to circumstances and "learn on the job" to a much greater degree than the liver.
Our behavior can affect our genes and our genes can affect our behavior. There is no simple cause-and-effect when THE BIG PICTURE is the object of interest.
Science gains a lot of its power from focusing narrowly on parts of the picture.
To me, it is marvelously instructive that a crab can pick up grains of sand and place them in small holes in its carapace, which it must do after moulting in order to know which way is up. You can be pretty sure that the crab's genes did not specify all the distances, angles, and forces needed to perform that act. The crab would have had to learn a lot about itself before it could do such a thing. To me that suggests a high degree of learned self-awareness. That is what I would call "mind." It is very different from most of our experience with what we call machines, but the machines may be gaining on us.
|
|
paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
|
|
Also, I believe the deepest searches for answers for most folks are driven by fear of the unknown for which we desperately want answers and will generally believe and accept almost any answer if it's presented in the right social context. Certainly our religions throughout history bear that observation out.
What strikes me is the universal nature of humanity’s search for meaning in all aspects of life.
I don’t imagine the desire to find meaning in the experience of love has much to do with a fear of the unknown, neither does the desire to make those “grave and constant” experiences of human existence into something profound and reconciling.
The desire to make something profound out of the experience of death has more to do with loss and grief than fear of our own mortality, and that profundity and a resultant exploration for meaning and through meaning reconciliation seems to be the exclusive pursuit and realization of human beings.
The idea that ritual and belief can reconcile us to and make comprehensible both joy and tragedy through a sense of meaning begs the question what is meaning anyway?
Why do we as human beings think so earnestly there should be meaning in the experience of being? Why are there so many verities of religious belief all seeking to reveal a higher purpose and potential even a justification for existence all through a discovery of meaning? What are the evolutionary benefits of this search? Where does this need come from? Fear alone? Don’t think so. A product of evolutionary processes? How so?
We can’t just live our lives, we are compelled to examine them as well. In the awesome place we find ourselves, saddled with our own peculiar consciousness, there simply must be an understanding.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
those ants have been farming for tens of millions of years, humans only the past 10,000...
I guess we're a quick study.
Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1852/20170095
Dry habitats were crucibles of domestication in the evolution of agriculture in ants
Michael G. Branstetter, Ana Ješovnik, Jeffrey Sosa-Calvo, Michael W. Lloyd, Brant C. Faircloth, Seán G. Brady, Ted R. Schultz
Abstract
The evolution of ant agriculture, as practised by the fungus-farming ‘attine’ ants, is thought to have arisen in the wet rainforests of South America about 55–65 Ma. Most subsequent attine agricultural evolution, including the domestication event that produced the ancestor of higher attine cultivars, is likewise hypothesized to have occurred in South American rainforests. The ‘out-of-the-rainforest’ hypothesis, while generally accepted, has never been tested in a phylogenetic context. It also presents a problem for explaining how fungal domestication might have occurred, given that isolation from free-living populations is required. Here, we use phylogenomic data from ultra-conserved element (UCE) loci to reconstruct the evolutionary history of fungus-farming ants, reduce topological uncertainty, and identify the closest non-fungus-growing ant relative. Using the phylogeny we infer the history of attine agricultural systems, habitat preference and biogeography. Our results show that the out-of-the-rainforest hypothesis is correct with regard to the origin of attine ant agriculture; however, contrary to expectation, we find that the transition from lower to higher agriculture is very likely to have occurred in a seasonally dry habitat, inhospitable to the growth of free-living populations of attine fungal cultivars. We suggest that dry habitats favoured the isolation of attine cultivars over the evolutionary time spans necessary for domestication to occur.
|
|
paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
|
|
Yeah, I wonder what it's like to be an ant. Particularly an ant agricultural specialist. In comparing human accomplishment to those our Formic friends let me know when ants develop farm subsidies and I might be impressed.
Again with the effort to diminish human accomplishment as no more than an equivalent aspect of the rest of nature. Dolphins, ants, nest decorating birds, whales and dogs, they're all smart, but good grief they ain't human! I hope at least some in the scientific world understand this.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
"...diminish human accomplishment..."
why does recognizing ant accomplishment diminish human accomplishment?
in particular, ants have been around a lot longer than humans, and there are many more species of ants than there are of humans (only one extant at the present)... the similarities are interesting, in particular, the effectiveness of social behavior.
|
|
paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
|
|
Again with the wholesale slaughter of our biosphere, such noble beasts are we!
Let's say ants, in fact, were destroying the biosphere. If so, they not only wouldn't do anything about it, they wouldn't even know it. We humans do terrible things but we also do remarkable, wonderful things and many of us realize our affect on the biosphere and are trying to do something about it. Human potential is something to be honored as in it is our nobility and our salvation. Refer to your own species as ignoble for long enough and it will no doubt be true.
Last year there were something like twelve cases of polio in the entire world. I consider that a good thing, a wonderful thing, a great human achievement. What humanity has to learn is when it is appropriate to meddle with nature and when it is important to back off. We can do that through a science that informs and a philosophy that mediates that information into proper action.
Instead of just complaining about our incivility toward nature and our own brutish nature we should consider carefully a potential that might very well be "the crown of creation."
those ants have been farming for tens of millions of years, humans only the past 10,000...
I guess we're a quick study.
Well, that's how it sounded to me.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!