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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 26, 2017 - 06:55pm PT
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eeyonkee, ignore the noise. I got what you meant.
...
Here's Gazzaniga...
reminding us the idea's been around for awhile.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Dec 26, 2017 - 07:50pm PT
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Has anyone seen a group of machines sitting around in the lab discussing whether it would be possible to develop some algorithms for a machine to win at some bored [sic] game or other?
Where?
Haven't come a long way baby (in 40 or 50 years).
Hahahaha
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Dec 26, 2017 - 08:24pm PT
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Gazzaniga
Pfffft
Displayed little consciousness of humanity in "studying his patients"
At least in playing little artificial games with computers you're not phukking with somebody's life.
You're in the wrong place my friend
You better leave
Corpuscallously yours
-Thomas Szasz
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Dec 27, 2017 - 04:40am PT
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Moose, I must say, I'm not 100% there. The compatibilist position still requires a little bit of understanding the term free will in a different way from the "hard" determinist position. Because I also pretty much believe that you got about everything right in your little summary in the last post.
And MikeL, why shouldn't I be frigging swayed one way or another after watching a lecture? This is a subject that I have read about for years and am primed to understand the various positions and discover something new. I might still change my position on this again. I've gotta say, for the most part, this is an entirely intellectual exercise for me. Believing that we actually have free will or not does not really change my view of myself in the world. It seems clear that we have to go on more or less acting as if we have free will, in any case. On the other hand, knowing that people largely can't help themselves in their decisions, can help one be more empathetic, and less judgmental.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 27, 2017 - 04:47am PT
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Dingbat, you say that "ungraspable" is water. That's not what Mike and I are driving at, which is not some state or non-state you can grasp and label with a tag like H2O, a chemical substance you can measure.
Ungraspable here cannot be contrasted to other things with qualities, including water. And trying to contrast me, yourself, or anyone else according to the progressive 3-steps Mike laid out is a common blunder with beginners ... like the noob bragging about the hard sport climb he just frigged up, all the while stepping on your rope.
Good luck in the well. Don't drown.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Dec 27, 2017 - 06:10am PT
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Topic Author's Reply - Dec 27, 2017 - 04:47am PT
Dingbat, you say that "ungraspable" is water. That's not what Mike and I are driving at, which is not some state or non-state you can grasp and label with a tag like H2O, a chemical substance you can measure.
The understanding is in the metaphor, not in your pose making of water's likeness to you. You again want to cast the metaphor with your interpretation and then have me explain. Doodler work. I see more Jackass work here from you. Explain your creation? No thanks. Mu, Mu.
What is ungraspable with water?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 27, 2017 - 07:34am PT
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"We make our choices, for which we shouldn’t blame or praise ourselves or others." -moose
"I think that there is something worth preserving in the... deterministic view of free will. It's the empathy. -eeyonkee
I think we're all largely in agreement.
I watched Gazzaniga's E1 yesterday. Will try to watch E2 today and looking forward to see E3 and E4. Gazzaniga alludes to Robert Sapolsky in E1 re his "hard" deterministic view. Thinking about it, Sapolsky is probably even more interesting and insightful (and confirming, btw) re this specific subject matter (the mechanistic systems functioning of the mind-brain) than Metzinger. So if you have only limited time, I'd "choose" to watch Sapolsky on Waking Up over Metzinger.
We're all at base automata. Even supposing there might be some wiggle room - or wrinkle - in the last 1-3% of system metabolism - just as Gazzaniga takes pains to point out in E1 - the modern understanding is changing our views nonetheless re praise and blame in the context of conduct. How could it not? But the modern understanding takes time to seep across the group / society, to sink in, and it takes time to work out its consequences (eg, in sentiment, habits and law).
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8AD2B712B1A0578F
"When you monkey around with consciousness, it grabs you, it's disturbing." -Gazzaniga
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 27, 2017 - 07:50am PT
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Here's Sapolsky giving an awesome lecture in which he describes the benefits (of the skill) of moving in and out of different "buckets" (categories and frames) to give a fuller understanding of a subject.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL150326949691B199
He's one of Stanford's most popular professors.
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re: "compatibilist"
eeyonkee, food for thought...
you are reconciling (or at least attempting to reconcile) the different povs (or buckets or frames) and different ways of talking about "free will" and "determinism" and "praise and blame" right? as part of these changing times? So you might just kick around the term "reconcilist" for awhile to see if it's not a better fit (vis "compatibilist") and if it doesn't end up growing on you as a better identifier.
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Here's an audience shot, start of e2...
I want to know why there aren't more young people here - it looks like an atheist gathering! :)
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 27, 2017 - 08:29am PT
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But the modern understanding takes time to seep across the group / society
Gazzaniga is a complete mental speculator ultimately as he does not ultimately know at all and is just guessing.
His whole thing is based on "I suggest".
The actual truth is not based on "modern" or "ancient" or "I suggest".
Truth is always true and transcends all material consciousness.
//Modern understanding takes time to seep across the group/society // = brainwashing one's mental speculation to be accepted as truth holding on to the original fantasy that there is no God who is ultimately the real controller.
The bottom line is YOU have no ultimate real clue and are ultimately purely guessing and projecting those mental speculating "ideas" as science
to support your own internal biases using another mental speculator Michael Gazzaniga or anyone that will fit your so-called "theories".
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 27, 2017 - 09:09am PT
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Dingbat, I'm giving you every chance to make sense, to explain what you mean in a way some living human being can comprehend. But statements like, "The understanding is in the metaphor, not in your pose making of water's likeness to you," are somewhat lacking in substance.
I welcome you to go with whatever metaphor you want. It's your "well." But it's worth clarifying that whatever you are saying has little to no relevance to what Mike and I are saying about emptiness, for one simple reason.
A metaphor, or any figurative language, whether it's about water or shooting stars or a partridge in a pear tree or an enchanted well on the ramparts of the Wind Rivers, is not the emptiness we speak of because emptiness is not LIKE anything else. In fact it is not LIKE any thing (digital/discrete) at all. Ergo it is EMPTY of likeness, water, wells, etc.
PPSP warned of "trying to invent your own practice." Apparently you cribbd a few breathing exercises form a book and good on you for applying them to your life. That's a start.
But I would encourage you to look closely at the common tendency to "cowboy" the work (I did the same thing) and think you are avoiding the rather glaring pratefalls that are easily sorted out by seeking proper instruction, and especially, peer review of your process. Ultimately you have to cowboy the bulk of the work anyhow - nobody can linger in the Big Silence for you - but most find it helpful to source something beyond an Alan Watts book or some 3rd hand opinions cribbed from the web.
The reason I bother with this is not to seek some meaningless argument, rather to underscore the fact that the work is slippery, and there's no end of folks stumbling into meditation centers ready to set the staff straight on the fine points. As a lay fellow I don't have to wrangle that common challenge, but I've plenty of decades-old friends running Zen centers and so forth and there's no end to the time wasted in this regards. If you'd have left it to that, we could just chuckle to ourselves. But when you label Mike a phony (you can call me whatever you want), enchanted by a phony narrative, the integrity of the work is worth defending for the same reason that Ed called out Fruity for posing as the only true defender of real science and actual truth, all others being fakes and pretenders who do not inhabit your particular "well."
The biggest hurdle to students learning is the delusion that they have nothing to learn from (fill in the blank). Fact is we are all students.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 27, 2017 - 09:44am PT
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there's no end to the time wasted in this regards.
I believe that JL and Dingus McGee are in agreement.
We all got holes to fill
And them holes are all that's real
The choice is yours to make
The time is yours to take
from To Live is to Fly
Townes Van Zandt
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 27, 2017 - 09:58am PT
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I want to know why there aren't more young people here - it looks like an atheist gathering!
very typical of academic settings that the older members sit in the front with the younger differing to the back... there might be some practical origins to this practice (I think it is nearly universal), eyesight and hearing starts to fail as you get older, the ability to maneuver the upper rows of a lecture hall, and the likely familiarity of the older members to the speaker...
...we caused a bit of a ruckus one colloquium at Columbia U. as young graduate students by occupying the first and second rows of the lecture hall causing some confusion once the faculty arrived to hear the talk.
Being young, we were indifferent to, or more likely ignorant of the vicissitudes of age, thinking the older faculty our equals, at least in demanding respect. Time has a way of sweeping these perceived differences away.
The history of academe, at least Euro-centric history, attributes the emergence of the university as a consequence of the medieval guild framework, in this case guilds of students. As such, they would be among the only surviving guilds from the previous millennium; and is often the case, instead of being radicals our graduate student action could be seen as staunchly conservative, reminding the faculty that it is a student guild that they serve, as they had since around year 1100.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 27, 2017 - 11:10am PT
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Eyeonkee, good on you for putting in the time to wrestle this down for yourself.
Here are a few things to consider per Gazzaniga’s work.
Much to his credit he started with objective functioning (split brain stuff) and over many years of DEDLUCTIVE (starting with observable facts and deducing other facts) analysis, shifted to INDUCTIVE reasoning to try and generalize his findings into a probable or logical model of consciousness involving a “translator,” emergence and downward causation.
Of key importance here – at least to me – is the fact that he realized both deductive and inductive logic are required to build a coherent model of consciousness.
In a truly bold step, he attributed the causal drivers of his model to emergence and downward causation. This moves him out of the physicalists camp because emergence (described 1,000 different ways) implies that this function EMERGED from that function, and that the functions are not selfsame. That is, WHAT emerged is greater than the processing from which it emerged. And this is off limits to strict physicalists who maintain there is nothing greater than a sum of its parts. There is no “over and beyond.” The parts DO all the work. And top down causation is also a sticking point to those clinging to classical concepts of causation.
Future challenges in refining this model will have to dig into emergence right to the bedrock, since emergence is not a mechanistic explanation, but a descriptor of how higher levels of organization can emerge from lower levels.
Another challenge would be to demonstrate how human memories and ALL memory and memory retrieval are algorithmic and are the “equivalent” of the computer articles.
My sense of this is that human consciousness is both digital and analogue, both discrete and continuous. In terms of information processing, largely an unconscious affair, our brains work as syntactic engines and one need go no further than the digital model to understand most of it. My sense of it is that this does not explain the ENTIRE story. This merely explains what Ed is driving at with his intelligent machines.
Another thing is that awareness is postulated to The Interpreter in a way that could imply that it is just another digital component, while awareness itself smacks of the continuous.
But IMO you did hit on a crucial thing: The recursive nature of consciousness across time, and how it continuously updates consciousness as events unfold around and inside of us. The relationship between this recursive quality with awareness is especially relevant when we are doing original or novel work, when the digital system is faced with brand new material and choices. Here is where both analogue and digital processes are at work.
It would seem that Gazziniga posits the whole shebang in a way that only describes a zombie or a Turning machine. Understanding transcends digital functioning. Searle has shown this clearly, that the machine is not aware of existing nor is aware of what it is doing, and why. Nor does The Interpreter, as described, understand anything. It simply seems to furnish a narrative for what it is unconscious of: determined machine function. And it believes it.
It is the recursive one. It is the one that is always changing -- growing second to second, not to mention year to year.
Unlike computer memory, biochemical memories have a attachments to feelings and other biochemical algorithms, so it is even more complicated than the computer equivalent.
But the basic idea is this; not only do you generate long-term memories all of the time -- they become immediately available for the next thoughts. That's the recursive element. We all develop this ever-growing repository of long-term memories within the context of living in a society of human beings. They are after the fact but we all have similar structures and they all come to play in a greater interaction of humans with one another.other
Gazzaniga uses two terms to describe how it might work; Emergence and Downward Causation.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 27, 2017 - 11:34am PT
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"... will have to dig into emergence right to the bedrock, since emergence is not a mechanistic explanation, but a descriptor of how higher levels of organization can emerge from lower levels."
This is ultimately incorrect, of course, if you are making a physical explanation, as the thing that is "emerging" is emerging from something, that is, the "mechanistic" underpinnings.
What emergence is, if it is anything, is the consequence of those underpinnings. Why the properties described by emergent phenomena appear not to be deduced from the "simple" application of physical law is because of the large number of possibilities for those deduction, our inability to see the "answer."
One can think of super-conductivity as an emergent property of materials, and it took some time to realize that the electrons are "paired" together to make effective bosons, which then can settle into collective states, condensates if you will, that create infinite electron conductivity. To build that up from the building blocks of electrons didn't work for decades.
But in the end, it is the electrons and the ions in the material from which superconductivity emerges.
There is no magic in "emergence" except that feeling of finally understanding something that, in the end, seems so obvious.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Dec 27, 2017 - 12:18pm PT
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You know Ed, you hit the nail on the head
as to why I am still sitting on the fence with respect to free will. Of all of Gazzaniga's arguments, the idea that emergence somehow frees you from the underlying causation (he doesn't actually say that, but it is more or less inferred), is the one that still does not sit well with my overall understanding.
What's interesting about Gazzaniga is that his experimental work provides some of the most compelling evidence against our common notions of free will. On the other hand, he brings in all of the right ancillary evidence, IMO, for making the case that we are, on some social level, free agents who should be held responsible, to some extent, for our decisions. I hope that I hedged that last sentence, appropriately:)
By the way, thanks for that thoughtful reply, Largo. I'm mulling over it. I particularly like this.
But IMO you did hit on a crucial thing: The recursive nature of consciousness across time, and how it continuously updates consciousness as events unfold around and inside of us. The relationship between this recursive quality with awareness is especially relevant when we are doing original or novel work, when the digital system is faced with brand new material and choices. Here is where both analogue and digital processes are at work.
And WB, you can be a mental speculator or a zombie it seems to me. I take that back; you can be a true believer like you, as a third option.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Dec 27, 2017 - 01:48pm PT
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Hold the presses! I've got a new position. It's this. That the emergent "thing" belongs to the society and not to the individual. The individual is still basically at the mercy of events immediately preceding and does what he or she gots to do. The emergent thing is the rule -- within a society of humans. It's the rule that propagates downward causation. Damn, sorry to be like a ping-pong ball, but I think that I may be back in the incompatibilist camp but with an asterisk or something. Good thing that we don't have jerseys.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 27, 2017 - 02:00pm PT
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sitting on the fence...
sorry to be like a ping-pong ball...
Bad news: you've got a divided brain.
Good news: Gazzaniga wants to see you asap!
lol
...
It's a shame that old thread - the pre-largo, pre-ionlyski thread -was nuked, it had a lot of material pertaining to this subject that could've been fun to revisit. If not by an intentional search then sometimes by accident - that's always fun.
re either-or vs both
It's both in many of these cases and not either-or. A favorite example: Driving to the crag, of course. In this case you are BOTH the driver (as the control system) and the drivee (that which is being controlled). Driving to the crag, you not just the driver or just the drivee. You are both driver and drivee.
In Q/A, end of E2, Gazzaniga was asked by a questioner: "Based on everything you said, do we make our thoughts or do our thoughts make us?" Gazzaniga answered: Both. :)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 27, 2017 - 02:55pm PT
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Driving to the crag, of course. In this case you are BOTH the driver (as the control system) and the drivee (that which is being controlled). Driving to the crag, you not just the driver or just the drivee. You are both driver and drivee.
HFCS=Largo=WBraun
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Dec 27, 2017 - 02:57pm PT
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So, bear with me, HFCS, because I value your understanding of my position. I've been thinking a lot about the whole long-term memory through time aspect of mind that I mentioned up-thread and that Largo responded about. For some time now it has seemed to me to be that of the major components of the decision-making process, this is the one that is recursive. I mean, think about the other major components in a decision.
 Your sensors to the outside world (sight, touch, sound, etc.)
Your working memory
Your distinctive genes
I may be missing something. These are interesting and important but are more or less static. It's your long-term memory and associated algorithms that seem most likely to be the major contributor to who you are in a moral sense. And as I pointed out, it's the one that is, not only changing, but getting bigger through time. And it's getting bigger in this environment of a bunch of other individuals (whom we are aware of as independent agents) whose memories are also growing through time. And all in a society of communicating individuals making decisions subconsciously and at a particular point in time.
It just seems to me that the society will obviously have it's own properties, independent from each constituent individual. So, it's not that society has conferred some magical properties to the individual to be independent decision-makers. Rather, the collection of humans has determined an optimal algorithm (justice, etc.).
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 27, 2017 - 03:48pm PT
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Every single living entity has individuality.
Individuality is NOT a product of evolution like moosedrool thinks.
Varigateness has also been there from the very start and before and also is NOT how moosedrool thinks.
Varigateness and individuality have always been there since before and after the beginning of the whole cosmic manifestation ......
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