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MH2
climber
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May 18, 2014 - 09:04pm PT
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I like the point made by Ed. It seems he is saying the answer to the question, "What is Mind?" must either assume that the mind emerges from physical interactions, or "goes right down to the roots of the world."
From his Panpsychism link:
Crudely put, someone who believes that amoebas have experiences, but that quarks and electrons, which ultimately constitute amoebas, do not is no panpsychist.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
Because if mind is not present on all scales, then it emerges from other things.
Putting the question this way frees those of us who are mere biologists from worrying about the issue. I cannot think of any way to approach the question through study of nervous systems. However, I would not rule out the possibility that study of nervous systems could settle the issue one day. We may be in the position of the Greeks and Romans who wondered whether the Universe was finite or infinite. They could ask the question but could not answer it.
We need to be patient.
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WBraun
climber
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May 18, 2014 - 09:10pm PT
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Now the "mind" is an engine for producing "ideas"
I like that description because .......,
The mind is the center of all the activities of the senses, and thus the mind is the reservoir of all ideas.
And yes the mind is physical .....
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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May 18, 2014 - 09:22pm PT
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Nope. Mind is a verb.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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May 18, 2014 - 10:37pm PT
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If an idea is a thing (it is), then failed ideas, Newtonian or otherwise, are things.
Ed:
"Arguing that it (the mind (sic)) is an "intrinsic property" of biology doesn't help, the "drive" to live seems a very silly and naive argument to make, and probably one that an uneducated physicist might make regarding what is known about modern biology. What is the physical origin of that "drive"? I think you shot your feet off with that one."
I'm really not sure what you're on about here, Ed. Not the 'drive to live' - 'life management' systems. All critters have them. If they didn't - they wouldn't survive. Optimizing (per the critter's limitations) food processing, waste management, repair, threat avoidance - these are 'life management' processes all creatures engage in.
When an evolutionary biologist examines why an organism is the way it is, such 'life management' systems are a primary consideration.
That they can and do enhance the chances of the organism's procreation doesn't seem a terribly difficult concept to me, but YMMV.
Whether the mind is an intrinsic property or not is another matter entirely - one that is unrelated to any discussion of 'life management'.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 18, 2014 - 10:42pm PT
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an idea is a thing because everything is a thing... that's your story and you're sticking to it...
but you have no explanation as to how an idea can be a thing, nor do you feel you need one, it is sufficient to just assert it
if you make it so from a "construction" then you're doing exactly as any religion would, you haven't explained it, you've defined it.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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May 18, 2014 - 10:47pm PT
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You say potato.
I'd wager we'll both live.
You can stop, now.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 18, 2014 - 10:49pm PT
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you've got nothing...
too bad...
I'll post something later, we're not saying the same thing.
But when you punt you should admit it.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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May 18, 2014 - 10:56pm PT
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If you want the innernut win that bad Ed, you got it buddy!
I'm all about increasing human happiness.
Plus, my eyes are well glazed over already.
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bixquite
Social climber
humboldt nation
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May 18, 2014 - 10:57pm PT
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perhaps the universe began when it became conscious of self, and the mind mimics this genesis
with thoughts and ideas?
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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May 19, 2014 - 01:14am PT
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in fact the western classical dialectic would be "things" and "ideas" so ideas would be outside of the domain of the physical, not being things and not needing to be placed under that domain.
The definition of" idea "used here is then apparently that specific category of idea which is not primary and representational ( or an idea derived strictly from the mere image of an object.) In other words , an "idea" in the quote above operates in the brain as an abstraction which is seen to bare no direct relationship to objects. An innate idea .
One view on the nature of ideas is that there exist some ideas (called innate ideas) which are so general and abstract, that they could not have arisen as a representation of any object of our perception, but rather were, in some sense, always in the mind before we could learn them. These are distinguished from adventitious ideas which are images or concepts which are accompanied by the judgment that they are caused or occasioned by some object outside of the mind.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea
There exists this crucial distinction in understanding what an idea might be. One is perceptual and the other is abstract.
Is this distinction only semantical?
Can ideas be the direct representation of objects?
If ideas were , by and large, not the identical representations of external objects, of things accessible to the brain and senses --then the evolutionary biologic success of humans as a species would not have taken place.
We know that the mechanisms of evolution would have selected out an organism like humans if the essential formation of adventitious ideas did not directly, for all intents and purposes, correspond to external objects, external conditions.
If ideas contained de novo qualities which were, and are, diametrically antithetical to the nature of external objects we would then have consequently misjudged and misperceived the external world of objects ; their nature, their operations, their relationships.
Now you might scoff at the that and say that ideas are things, but not so fast. First off, you have to describe how an idea is something physical.
At this point I can only point to the evolutionary history of human beings and the proof which an interpretation of this history provides.
Certainly a worm does not need ideas to correspond to an external reality , but highly complex triune-brained organisms like humans do need an instant ,relatively utilitarian set of mental calibrations and associations to insure a modicum of survival outcomes.
A set of mental representations to that end, namely ideas, must be something physical --simply because they arose as a requirement to survival in a physical context, not a non-physical one. The provenance of ideas are physical and their ultimate proving ground is in the physical world of objects and things.
If ideas are non-physical it must be shown precisely how these non-physical elements corresponded to the physical environment .What justifies their function as non-physical entities.? If ideas are non-physical why do we have them? Why were they evolutionarily developed in the context of an otherwise physical world of tooth and claw and corporeal objects?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 19, 2014 - 01:39am PT
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win what?
tvash, you got anything or are you folding?
really, you were just bluffing?
ok, I don't want to pull a Largo and not get back to the discussion once I said I'd get back to the discussion.
start first with Gödel's realization that logical propositions can be represented by natural numbers
I would turn it around then and ask where do logical propositions come from?
we know that we can describe propositional calculus in terms of algebras, there is Boolean algebra which generates Boolean logic. There is also an algebra which generates quantum logic (which differs from Boolean logic)
very deep connections exist between various logical systems and the algebras that describe them.
So here's the leap, the physical universe is defined by its symmetries. As I had described above for the intrinsic angular momentum of fundamental particles, it is the symmetries of nature that determine the properties of fermions and bosons (for instance). These symmetries are responsible for the stability of matter, they are why all these particles don't collapse down from the void.
A conjecture regarding the propositional calculus might be that they are generated from the symmetries of the universe, so that mathematics is a consequence. These same symmetries generate all the physicalness of the universe, too, so it is no surprise that mathematics is effective in describing natural sciences.
We would conclude that mathematics is not an intrinsic property, but the consequence of what makes the universe what it is.
A similar idea might generate dimension also, space and time, which has long been suspected as not being "intrinsic" either, but maybe that would be too much here... after all, space and time is the stage on which "things" do their thing, one could ask the physicalist to demonstrate that space and time are also physical. While it has not been done yet, there are many interesting ideas that have attempted it. My guess is that we'll have very good ideas soon.
But back to ideas, which we can essentially make equivalent to propositional statements. These statements have an existence, and depending on our logical system, values such as "true," "false," "undecidable" etc. The statements exist independent of their values.
What I have conjectured here is that the propositional calculus is generated from algebras which are the consequence of symmetries, just as chemistry depends on the interaction of electrons, which have interact through algebras which are the result of symmetries.
Spin is "real," it is "physical" and we can measure the physical consequences. In this sense, "statements" could be real things also, physical in nature, a consequence of symmetry.
It's a wild speculation, but hey, why not... that's what I got in this hand as a physicalist... though I've thrown my mathematician friends "under the bus" as it were, and denied them the possibility that what they study is something other than physical. Sorry about that.
Once propositional calculus is physical, then we have a means of describing ideas as physical also, and those things that generate the ideas are physical.
Now Largo can complain that an object with no physical extent cannot spin, so the analogy with the electron doesn't mean anything because we know the "real" electron can't have these properties.
And it is true that we haven't resolved all the issues regarding just what an electron is... but our physical ideas are quite powerful and have a wide range of validity even though they are not the "complete truth." We have empirical evidence of that over a broad range of phenomena and a theory able to compute predictions which are very accurate.
I'm just speculating here, but the idea the ideas are physical doesn't have to be stated as a definition, it can be explored from a physical standpoint.
What I have suggested above is very unlikely to be the correct physical theory of ideas, and there may be very simple demonstrations that the consequence of the conjecture is inconsistent with our observations of the universe. But it makes definitions, provides a logical framework from which to make predictions and, in principle, can make predictions that can be tested.
That's a start, along with the willingness to be wrong, and the understanding of what we know and what we don't know.
We can state that ideas are physical, but if we can't explain how they are physical then we can't claim to know.
I showed you my hand...
...we can deal another. I suspect you don't want to play anymore, especially if your bluff is going to be called.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 19, 2014 - 01:41am PT
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Ward Trotter, I think you need to learn more about evolution.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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May 19, 2014 - 01:48am PT
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Ward Trotter, I think you need to learn more about evolution.
Okay. How so?
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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May 19, 2014 - 02:57am PT
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Ravens do make art. Ever seen one do complex aerobatics? That's every bit as artistic as our dance.
How would you know if a raven was a performance artist or an actor?
You wouldn't know.
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Jim Clipper
climber
from: forests to tree farms
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May 19, 2014 - 10:27am PT
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Apologies in advance if these quotes are interpreted out of the context of the general idea.
We would conclude that mathematics is not an intrinsic property, but the consequence of what makes the universe what it is.
Seems like a paradox. Could you also say: Math is intrisic and the consequence of what the universe is? :)
Don't traditions speak to this: mandalas, patterns in islamic architecture, greek and roman temples, hindu art, in a way, Chaco Canyon?
Math, a human invention or interpretation, naturally?
Maybe Largo's point: If all this is a consequence, what came before the universe? Further, what do we make of consequence.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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May 19, 2014 - 11:03am PT
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the statements you make can be boiled down to propositions with values...
is it such a reach to think that the propositional calculus, the structure of the operations, are the result of the character of the universe?
oddly, the description of what "nothing" would be, the vacuum, places restrictions on the symmetries that would exist for "nothing"
the domain of knowledge is probably not bound (in a practical sense) and our ability to probe it exhaustively is certainly bound (having to do with the amount of energy required for the inquiry) setting practical bounds on the estimates of how much we could know.
evolution will have to wait for later, but as much as the ideas of "complexity," "force of life," and "directed evolution" may seem apparent and so much common sense, they aren't really a part of the theory. One might also contemplate what is happening in a nonjudgmental manner, the metric for "success" etc are probably ill formed. Finally, very interesting work on the protein creation networks in cells determined by the genome information suggest that these chemical reactions persist without "a life force" or "will to live" and can be considered every bit just little chemical machines...
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