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Lennox
climber
in the land of the blind
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Dec 29, 2017 - 06:04pm PT
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I don’t know if it is peer reviewed; I found it useful.
I was an English major who took some classes in statistics and probabilities & permutations in the 80’s. Then I took more bio science related classes in 2006-2010 for my RN. But I have always been trying to educate myself on the concepts that underlie some of these kind of topics that I’m interested in.
It’s funny that you have difficulty with the wordy stuff John Gill; the formulas and algorithms slooow me waaay down. I end up having to study 10 more pages of words for every line of mathematical notation.
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Lennox
climber
in the land of the blind
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Dec 29, 2017 - 06:26pm PT
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Sometimes the “narrative” is improved by smoothing out the noise.
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Tom Patterson
Trad climber
Seattle
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Dec 29, 2017 - 06:37pm PT
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So...What Is "Mind?"
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Lennox
climber
in the land of the blind
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Dec 29, 2017 - 06:47pm PT
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The whats’ of Mind are multitudinous.
“How” is the real question
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 29, 2017 - 07:12pm PT
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So...What Is "Mind?
We have 19,090 posts to help you.
Have you learned anything?
Do you really want to know?
I am happy with smoothed-out thinking, as long as it is others who are doing it.
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Lennox
climber
in the land of the blind
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Dec 29, 2017 - 07:31pm PT
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Largo’s thousands of posts have not moved the needle on the what or how or why of mind at all. Meditation may be helpful, ameliorative, or seemingly meaningful, and it might make you a better person, and as Jan has posited it may help reduce inter-societal and inter-cultural conflict—which would be great—but beyond that it is a dead end as far as really understanding how the mind does all it can do, including meditate.
Just as the studies of the whats of particle physics and the whats of astrophysics inform each other and will more likely converge on some better answers as to how one emerges from the other better than astrology could, so too neuroscience and modern psychology (once it gets its act together since the implosion of Freudianism) will lead the way to a better understanding of how the mind emerges from the brain.
All analogies eventually fall apart, and of course this one does because mind is like nothing else because it is the everything of our experience. But thousands of Largo one-hand clapping posts have not provided anything really explanatory. The scientific method does and will continue to do so.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Dec 29, 2017 - 08:44pm PT
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Lennox: This might be a nice review for you
DOA
It’s funny that you have difficulty with the wordy stuff John Gill
It's not difficulty, it's an absence of conciseness, as if the authors are pulling a fast one, drowning the reader in words.
I'd rather spend time puzzling at a challenging equation, trying to decipher its meaning. Just me.
;>)
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Lennox
climber
in the land of the blind
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Dec 29, 2017 - 09:46pm PT
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Ha.
Nappy time.
 - - - - - - - - - - - - -
No offense intended jogill.
I love words and language. I never came to love numbers and math. And it is difficult for me.
There are many scientific articles that I read whose experiments I can’t recreate or whose proofs are beyond me, and I either accept or doubt their probability based on other criteria. But I prefer to force myself to try to understand what underpins the claims in the abstracts—it does give me a headache though.
I love the kind of things Sycorax posts, but not how she’s been posting it lately. I could bore you for hour on end explicating Big Two-Hearted River or comparing and contrasting The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Hunger Artist, but I will refrain.
Actually I can’t refrain.
Just one note on your critique of an author’s lack of conciseness and a sense of them pulling a fast one. Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River is an example of his “Iceberg” technique. The language is stripped down, and the meaning is “below the surface.” I don’t think he is putting one over on anyone anymore than an impressionist painter.
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Dec 29, 2017 - 11:44pm PT
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I am lovingly astounded how some of the smartest people I know can chat on and on within this thread for over 7 years and 19,000 posts and still insist on looking at it backwards.
A mind does not arise as a property of a physical brain. There is no physical brain from which a mind could arise. The brain as well as the rest of the physical universe is an immaterial illusion manifested from vibrational energy with no solid substance.
The physical sciences have been rendered embarrassingly obsolescent by the proofs of quantum physics, which show that 99.999999999% of 'ordinary matter' is empty space. And so called empty space is permeated by immense energy that we can't perceive.
Modern humans have been so thoroughly schooled in this self-delusion of an entrapping material universe. The material universe is not solid at all. The appearance of solidity is really electromagnetic resistance between energetic fields of different frequencies.
The brain is not a material solid, it is a field of vibrational energy...... manifested for localized information processing by a viewpoint of the universal conscious awareness.
Humans limited to five senses only detect a minuscule percentage of the electromagnetic spectrum, and yet speak as knowledgeable masters of the universe....while very nearly 100% of the universe remains unknown to earthbound humans using only their tiny window of five senses and limited technological sensors.
What we call a mind is simply a viewpoint within the universal creative consciousness. Within it arises the creative vibrational energy patterns manifesting the immaterial hologram that we perceive as a universe....
We are awareness...a state of being aware. Everything else is creative illusion, no more real than images on a TV screen. We create it, feed it energy, and control it....
The Matrix is not just science fiction....and it is not necessary to remain entrapped within it. I would have expected a lot of climbers to have discovered this on their own from personal experience.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Dec 30, 2017 - 02:44am PT
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Chalk another one up in the panpsychism column...
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unlocked gait
Gym climber
the range
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Dec 30, 2017 - 04:10am PT
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my mind is a bullseye,
my face, it's frame.
it is at once, the
predator and the prey.
as a mild-to-major case of injury-induced
depression seeps throughout my
being, i feel like i'm on
a hunting mission and
i see my head as game.
i've got the pistol in hand;
my eyes are squinted and keen:
where is that mind?
come out, come out, leetle cerebrum,
i know your hiding in there.
but that mind has been dodging
death and capturing futures for
milleniums. its a survivor mind.
it don't come peeking around
no tree just 'cause i entice
it with soothing voice.
no it says f*#k you, ya hoor,
put that gun away and go push
around on your skateboard.
lob your hope high as you can
and let the stars do the rest.
sarah's shirt stay on.
at least in my company.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Dec 30, 2017 - 06:17am PT
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Particle filter? Kalman filters are used for guidance systems & robotic arm control and processed on digital microprocessors. Our brain hardware is Biological Neural Nets (BNN) and in a similar fashion they do the likes of processing data from sensors and drive actuators. In fact, very well for some people -- gymnastics. Both methods of control do have embedded transfer functions. Any embedded transfer functions in BNN may be thought of as what is mind? Of course along with the BNN's.
In the name of cognitive science, these authors speculate that the brain in decision making the acts as a Bayesian particle filter in most respects [these were words posted by Lennox]. Such speculation is far from doing science in that similar black box output does not imply the use of a similar/specific transfer function when it controls a similar process. And even in some sense to say it does the likes of such & such is a distortion of what goes on within another process.
Such forms of reasoning & speculation along with analogies likely lead to some very unsupported interpretations -- guessing. The biggest repeated speculation on this thread is that the brain must be using some form of QM because those mechanics allow such & such rather than ask what is the brains transfer function in doing that task. QM is the catch-all escape from Maxwell's demon.
Ed's 2 posts on "proofs" of determinism and free will are interesting. Either way, if both are true simultaneously or one of them is false, we do not know the necessary axioms of ultimate reality to resolve these idaes as to how we think the world is.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Dec 30, 2017 - 06:35am PT
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Lennox: Not an anomaly. Everything is a probability, based on an approximation. In decision making the brain acts as a Bayesian particle filter in most respects.
MH2: My close and careful observation does not agree with this. Neither does plain English. A further sign that meditation smooths the cortex.
If an anomaly is that which is not normally expected, then one could give some thought to what is expected, and how those expectations arise. Anomalies arise because they cannot be easily classified.
The essence of classification or categorization has never been definitively established in the field of cognition. It’s not for a lack of trying. There are at least 25 years of empirical and theoretical work in cognitive science and cognitive psychology, as well as supplemental research studies in sociology and linguistics. We neither know what things *actually* are, nor how the mind classifies those “things” (so-called Bayesian statistics notwithstanding). Are the bases of classifications family resemblances, exemplars, or conceptual prototypes? We don’t know. (See, “The Big Book of Concepts” by Murphy for a review of the literature’s findings.)
What “things” are is always the result of a social phenomena. We can ignore for the sake of clarity statistical bases for anomalies, as they are invariably based upon samples, never entire populations (as if anyone could definitively say what constitutes any population of anything). Hence, it is arguable that all “things” are unique unto themselves. What looks similar is based upon the grossest of similarities—when they can be found pervasively. Genus, species, dictionary definitions are all expedients so that we can loosely communicate with each other. The differences between a tree and a bush, a table and a chair, etc. are often defined by more practical usefulness in the world of experience than any hard-and-fast set of logical or empirical characteristics that do not overlap with any other so-called set of “things”. Wittgenstein made it clear that there are many “things” that apparently evade the ability to classify them at all. What we know, we know loosely.
Yet, the ability and wont to classify is what holds people’s worlds together. What appears subjectively to an undisciplined mind appears objectively intuitive and obvious.
Without classifications, people would have to look at everything very closely and resist the desire to speculate grandly with theories and meta-narratives.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Dec 30, 2017 - 07:53am PT
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The differences between a tree and a bush, a table and a chair, etc. are often defined by more practical usefulness in the world of experience than any hard-and-fast set of logical or empirical characteristics
Sure.
We do have good ideas and evidence about how the mind classifies things, and it has little to do with hard-and-fast logic. Simple lateral inhibition in a network of neurons is enough to organize sensory inputs into different types, or categories.
Way back in 1980 Teuvo Kohonen developed a simulated neural network that learned to sort human speech into phonemes.
The principles underlying his work have broad application.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166223698013423
If you don't start from practical usefulness in the world of experience, what are you starting from?
Our brains come from a long line of nervous system evolution. Until lately, the selective driving force that evolution was practical usefulness in the world of experience.
"... our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness or to answer any question we are capable of asking."
Steven Pinker
How the Mind Works
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 30, 2017 - 08:35am PT
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A mind does not arise as a property of a physical brain... The physical sciences have been rendered embarrassingly obsolescent...
I am lovingly astounded how a fellow engineer could post up in such a confusing (or confused) manner and sign his name to it. :)
The manner? Yes. Half right, half wrong... half right, half wrong... Right down the line through those many nicely-grammared paragraphs.
These types of descriptions, again and again, indicate to me how easy it is for H. sapiens to misconstrue science.
Whether accidentally or on purpose.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 30, 2017 - 08:36am PT
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"... our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness or to answer any question we are capable of asking."
Steven Pinker
How the Mind Works
Yes, this is a favorite. :)
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WBraun
climber
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Dec 30, 2017 - 08:38am PT
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Pinker is nothing but another sterile robot .......
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Dec 30, 2017 - 09:20am PT
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This thread should more appropriately be named:
What is `The Matrix?'
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Dec 30, 2017 - 09:31am PT
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Tom, I've got a book for you, it's right up your alley...
Celestine Prophecy.
Enjoy!
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TomCochrane
Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
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Dec 30, 2017 - 09:39am PT
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Celestine Prophesy provides a tiny glimpse behind the curtain.....
Nicola Tesla pointed out that when science begins studying non-material phenomena, more progress will be made in a decade than all its previous history
Tesla also stated that if you want to understand the universe, study vibration and frequency
Academic sciences are still a hundred years behind Tesla and have embarrassingly not been able to assimilate the revelations of quantum physics, as it blows apart the physical universe Matrix upon which the controllers depend for enslaving human minds
It is incredible to me how a bunch of expert rock climbers can still buy into The Matrix
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