What is "Mind?"

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paul roehl

Boulder climber
california
Dec 17, 2017 - 11:16am PT
Always enjoyed this pondering of "the problem" by Joyce.


“INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.


Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.

Won't you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”

― James Joyce, Ulysses
eeyonkee

Trad climber
Golden, CO
Dec 17, 2017 - 12:08pm PT
Hmmm, I thought the Gazzaniga infusion would generate more interest in this crowd. It turns the free will debate on it's head, IMO. Of my recent posts, the Islam tenets thing was the biggest throwaway. Oh well. Something I learned just by describing my understanding of Gazzaniga is the idea of separating the decision engine from the story-telling/meaning engine. It makes everything so much clearer to me. We share with all? animals, particularly our mammalian cousins, an evolved decision engine. Like all of the other animals, it is basically automatic and subconscious. Ours is just much more sophisticated, largely because we are a social species. In an earlier post, I reasoned why ours seems so much evolved from our African apes cousins' (because the intermediates have gone extinct). What humans and maybe some other species have added is a story-telling/meaning engine that has access to our short and long-term memories and is completely separate from the decision engine. In fact, it depends on the decision as one of its main inputs. It's certainly not clear to me why this arose, but it did. The separation of these two functions is the big insight for me.
Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Topic Author's Reply - Dec 17, 2017 - 12:47pm PT
Moose, the ERR model is IMO as good as any in working toward the process of content generation. But it doesn't answer the the 1,000,000 dollar question of why we are AWARE of said content.

Chalmer's Hard Problem was posited in terms of content - namely that consciousness experience has a qualitative feel or sense or subjective aspect that is not "explained" nor yet present, so far as we can see, in objective brain function, local and global. I consider the Hard Question to be trick question because it's first assumption is that consciousness is brain artifact, then challenges anyone to provide and explain the physical/causal link between objective and subjective.

Neuroscientists not only has no idea what that might be - in strictly physical terms - but as one recently wrote, they can't even imagine what a model would look like, and that the problem, as such, is not a matter of gathering more data. That's probably why many progressive thinkers in this regards are introducing possible emergent properties like proto selves and experiential containers and so forth.

Problem is that this is just kicking the can down the road, insofar as you still have to demonstrate how matter sourced a proto self, or whatever, and as many have pointed out, emergence is not an explanation.

That much said, IMO, all of these models and metaphors can only paint a picture of a complex Turing Machine that is not actually aware, and who's "experience" leaves out the fact that we are aware of same.

jogill

climber
Colorado
Dec 17, 2017 - 03:51pm PT
Good post, Moose. Makes a lot of sense. Don't worry about $1,000K Hard Problem. It's a diversion for meditators.
yanqui

climber
Balcarce, Argentina
Dec 17, 2017 - 05:02pm PT
I looked at it a little eeyonkee, but I'm slow to understand. I won't have time to say much for a few days: I'm winding up at work to get ready for a 7 week break (much roped climbing in Córdoba is planned). Some things looked worth commenting on, but maybe I can say something after the 20th!
Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Topic Author's Reply - Dec 17, 2017 - 07:57pm PT
Moose. Nice link. I've seen some of these articles before but not nearly all. At over 1,000 pages, this is a big study.

Sever pull quotes are worth a brief note. On 1107 (Kotch). "The scholars represented in section X take the problem of consciousness, the first-person perspective, as given and assume that brain activity is both necessary and sufficient for biological creatures to experience something."

That's their first assumption ("assume"), though few go there with any conviction or horsepower.

The hard core neuro science is the real deal but many of us might find effort to long jump to phenomenal consciousness rather lacking if not logically incoherent.

Like this one:

"... we have unconscious thoughts—for example, subliminal representations of red—and those unconscious thoughts are, unconsciously, about things. According to the HOT theory, if a subject has an unconscious representation of red, and then forms an unconscious thought about the representation of red, the representation of red automatically is conscious."

Hard to imagine that this would be considered satisfactory once you dig into it. Especially the "automatically" claim.

But Ned Block's chapter starting on 1111 is worth close study IMO.

Said Block:

The higher order and global workspace accounts link
consciousness to the ability to report it more tightly than
does the biological view. On the higher-order-thought view,
reporting is just expressing the higher order thought that
makes the state conscious, so the underlying basis of the
ability to report comes with consciousness itself. On the
global workspace account, what makes a representational
content conscious is that it is in the workspace, and that just
is what underlies reporting. On the biological account, by
comparison, the biological machinery of consciousness has
no necessary relation to the biological machinery underlying
reporting, and hence there is a real empirical difference
among the views that each side seems to think favors its own
view (Block, 2007b; Naccache & Dehaene, 2007; Prinz,
2007; Sergent & Rees, 2007).

In other words, for most all theories from the Genesis Camp (brain produces consciousness) sentience is postulated in the processes said to "produce" it.

MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Dec 17, 2017 - 08:07pm PT
All these experiential and emotional data are recorded in association with one another.



It’s one thing to come up with ideas about how things work.


It is quite another thing to make a cute marketable robot that appears to have emotional reactions and can learn.


Warning: advertisement




[Click to View YouTube Video]
healyje

Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
Dec 18, 2017 - 01:46am PT
I still find it somewhat amusing the subconscious is accounted for almost nowhere in this long conversation and likewise neither is time.
yanqui

climber
Balcarce, Argentina
Dec 18, 2017 - 03:17am PT
Actually, this makes Cozmo thingie looks more interesting than I originally thought:

[Click to View YouTube Video]

Seems a little less "human" from this perspective:

[Click to View YouTube Video]
eeyonkee

Trad climber
Golden, CO
Dec 18, 2017 - 04:49am PT
healyje wrote.
I still find it somewhat amusing the subconscious is accounted for almost nowhere in this long conversation and likewise neither is time.

You must not have read my last coupla posts, I'm arguing that it's practically all subconscious. Even your decisions (all of them) are subconscious. The conscious part happens after the decision. Time is an important element in this model because the timing goes;
1. event
2. subconscious decision-making and responding
3. After-the-fact interpretation (Gazzaniga's Interpreter) which is conscious

Time, of course plays a big part in a different part of the problem, how did consciousness arise evolutionarily? So, you must not be talking about me:>

Edit: yanqui wrote.
I looked at it a little eeyonkee, but I'm slow to understand.
Yeah, aren't we all when it comes to this subject. I just find Gazzaniga's central hypothesis far easier to understand than, say something that involves degrees of freedom that can somehow operate in a deterministic world.

Moose wrote
The logic of compatibilism escapes me, btw. If the evolution of the universe was determined from the start, than no matter how you twist it, there is no room for chance or free will. No?
Yeah, I still can't wrap my head around it unless you change the meaning of the term from my way of understanding it.

WBraun

climber
Dec 18, 2017 - 07:15am PT
Consciousness was already there in complete whole BEFORE the start of the material creation.

There was absolutely zero chance involved.

When you created a jail for criminals did you do it by chance?

No, the jail was created and run by intelligence.

Consciousness and Time are eternal ....
MikeL

Social climber
Southern Arizona
Dec 18, 2017 - 07:22am PT
Moose’s quote: "A conscious being is constantly recording information about its perceptions of the external world, and most importantly for ERR, it is simultaneously recording its feelings." 

When the sentence starts with “A conscious being . . . ” it has smuggled in the conclusion. What is mind? What is consciousness? Start there and answer those questions. Then one might be motivated to say how consciousness or mind occurs. In my view, if one simply pays attention to attention (or notice noticing), then answers as to how become irrelevant and impossible. Anyone can generate theories.

healyje: I still find it somewhat amusing the subconscious is accounted for almost nowhere . . . .

Is it something you have experience of, or is it a concept?
Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Topic Author's Reply - Dec 18, 2017 - 08:23am PT
Eeyonke brings up crucial aspects of the process. The challenge is that this process works on a continuum from flow (little conscious intentionality) to measured, where there is a high level of intentionality. That's why I suggested to people that they carefully observe their own creative or "operative" process, especially when encountering or wrangling new or comparatively unfamiliar material.

But let's review Eeyonke's quote:

I'm arguing that it's practically all subconscious. Even your decisions (all of them) are subconscious. The conscious part happens after the decision. Time is an important element in this model because the timing goes;
1. event
2. subconscious decision-making and responding
3. After-the-fact interpretation (Gazzaniga's Interpreter) which is conscious

Time, of course plays a big part in a different part of the problem, how did consciousness arise evolutionarily?

---


The way Eeyonkee has it, we go from event straight to automatic reaction - basically from input to output. We take it for granted that brain processing transpires in between the two but as is, awareness plays no meaningful role, and memory (or stored information so to speak) is positioned as rendering a data stream as fixed as the Os and Xs in a hard drive. It also assumes that the data steam is not influenced by emotional, sensate and other influences.

What makes this tricky to unpack is that we concurrently have both unconscious and conscious processing going on, the majority which IS unconsciousness. But look at both ends of the spectrum.

The local climbing gym is only a few miles away, but to get there I have to drive through a residential area and make about 50 turns and take a dozen different roads. I had hand written directions the first time I drove there and because I didn't know the particular neighborhood very well, I had to PAY ATTENTION to not only the written description but to where I was driving. After consciously driving the route a few times and the route was embedded in memory, my mind could wander and I could get there mostly on auto-pilot (unconsciously). A driverless car could get there as well, but only if it had all the coordinates already in the system. It would have no chance of getting there if the destination was not established from the beginning. And neither would I, but the way we accomplished the drive and got jiggy with the route is different.

And what about a joy ride, like I often take out at Joshua Tree, when I have no fixed destination and just motor around looking at things, going this way and that according to how I feel or the comparative interest in the surrounding terrain. There is still unconscious decisions going on, but those decisions are not just vectored off coordinates that I don't have, rather they are based on the quality of my subjective experience. And I might also change my mind, heading down this dirt road, which turns out to be of no interest. And "non interest" in this regards is not contingent on coordinates, rather the quality of my conscious experience. The place looks boring or uninteresting or whatever. So my brain makes another unconscious decision or turn here or there and I see how that squares with my experience.

On the other hand, look at so-called flow experience, where we are seemingly "at one" with a task and the brain almost or entirely just executes my movements with seemingly no conscious on intentional effort. I used to get that feeling climbing sometimes but on close inspection this is anything but unconscious machine functioning.

For starters, I never had a high flow experience when I was first starting to climb because everything was so new and foreign. My brain simply didn't have any stored data and experience per what I was encountering, or any fixed techniques to bust out. I had to really pay attention and be aware and let myself (my brain) figure out how to execute. The decisions to place this foot there and grab this or that hold were unconscious, were made for me by my brain, but they were often the wrong decisions (grabbed he wrong hold) and only when I consciously knew as much and consciously experienced an awkward body position or whatever could I think, "try another hold."

Only after I had climbed literally thousands of feet of rock could I drop into true flow, and by that time I had such a catalog of moves embedded in memory that virtually no move was totally "new." But the interesting thing is that such flow experiences are anything but the physical movements of an automaton.

What's earmarks flow is the intense inner experience of presence, which in this regards is another term for being hyper aware in the present moment. There is a marked absence of the "I" directing any decisions per movement. I am simply climbing and experiencing with "no effort," or no intentionality. Here we have a magical blend of fully conscious and fully (or largely) unconscious.

That is, I am highly conscious of BEING THERE in space and time (which gives flow it's experiential luster), and largely unconscious of any intentional actions to move my body this way or that - it is "effortless," that is, almost entirely devoid of intentional or directed action.

We can argue this way and that per what "causes" flow, either our intense awareness or the rapture of the our biological machinery doing it's task so effortlessly, but one thing is for sure, if my attention is wandering as it often does when I'm driving to the climbing gym and all my driving decisions are unconscious, the flow experience evaporates because the rapturous effects of full immersion, high awareness and presence has gone missing.

It's challenging to try and understand the role of awareness when conscious and totally unconscious (the vast majority) phenomenon are present in the process. We tend to look at them as separate, autonomous phenomenon. And we can do so. But we miss the charmed medley of the mechanical and the conscious that makes us human and not merely machines, which we can all generally agree have no subjective life whatsoever.
MH2

Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
Dec 18, 2017 - 10:22am PT
Yep. Exactly what I’ve been saying from the beginning of this thread.



Or put another way: the human has an almost inescapable tendency to create a story (or narrative if you prefer) out of experience, after-the-fact.


How the 'experience' is generated isn't fully understood but neurophysiology shows us that there is a lot of activity going on in the brain that does not directly show up in conscious awareness. There is a lot of pre-processing that occurs before you become aware of a sensory input or a recalled memory.


Once we are consciously aware of anything, the story-making usually takes over.




eeyonkee

Trad climber
Golden, CO
Dec 18, 2017 - 10:36am PT
I agree with all of that, MH2. I guess my point is it's bearing on the free will problem. I would say that, to the extent that free will is defined as an agent's ability to "decide" in some kind of supra-deterministic way, it is clearly an illusion. What happens instead is consciousness, along with the decision to do this or that, just bubbles up without our awareness. We then ascribe meaning to the event as if indeed, our consciousness "authored" the decision.

I have to sit with your last post a little longer, Largo.
Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Topic Author's Reply - Dec 18, 2017 - 10:52am PT
Once we are consciously aware of anything, the story-making usually takes over.



That's when we start evaluating. But it's also possible to experience without evaluating, labeling, and laying on the narratives. That (evaluating) is when we are not so much experiencing reality, but rather we are experiencing our stories and conceptions and constructs (from words to equations) and believing THOSE are reality, as though reality was derived from our constructs, rather than the other way around. This leads to the "appearance versus reality" conversation, which initially sub-divides into subjective (how things appear) and what they "really" (physically/objectively) are.

For example, "red" is subjectively an experience. Objectively, red is the color at the end of visible spectrum of light, next to orange and opposite violet, with a dominant wavelength of approximately 625–740 nanometers. Then we look closer at "visible light" and realize it is not "there" in the normal, classically reckoned way we might have supposed. It gets more interesting from there...

Another interesting thing to ponder is the "consciously aware" notion. And the notion that we can be unconsciously aware, as in machine registration. Not the same phenomenon - in my opinion.
WBraun

climber
Dec 18, 2017 - 11:59am PT
Unconsciousness just means the living entity loses consciousness of its gross physical and subtle (mind) material body.

The living entity itself never ever loses consciousness as it is NOT material and is eternal.

Consciousness itself is the proof of living entity.

Dead stone has zero consciousness .........
eeyonkee

Trad climber
Golden, CO
Dec 18, 2017 - 12:12pm PT
Dead stone has zero consciousness .........
Totally with you, WB!
jogill

climber
Colorado
Dec 18, 2017 - 12:17pm PT
What's earmarks flow is the intense inner experience of presence, which in this regards is another term for being hyper aware in the present moment


I think there may be subtle distinctions between the flow one experiences in climbing and the flow in a highly rehearsed activity like gymnastics. True, wiring a climb or problem does induce flow, and the more one practices the problem the more the flow resembles that in a gymnastic, skating, or dancing routine.

..........

I have brought up time on several occasions, but the subject doesn't gain traction. The most recent attempts have centered on distorted or cmplex time, but that's too mathematical. We have briefly discussed the parts of the brain apparently responsible for our experiences of the passage of time.

This could be easily tied to Bergson's notion of time duration by our resident philosophy experts, but it hasn't. The notion of a time-space block is intriguing but is highly speculative. As is the question of whether time is continuous or discrete. That takes one headlong into physics. In math both concepts are at play, and one chooses which to employ. The areas of real and complex analysis are dependent upon infinities (and eternities) and infinitesimals (and instants) - which go back to Newton and Leibnitz.

Does consciousness process time? A person in a deep coma awakens a month later but has no experience of time passage - it's one instant to the next. Is time merely change, increasing disorder (or order)? If the universe were static (no physical change) would there be time?

How does our experience of time's passage intersect with physical change?

I'll bet this post goes nowhere.
eeyonkee

Trad climber
Golden, CO
Dec 18, 2017 - 01:04pm PT
^^^ Consciousness is easy... Time is hard.
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