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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 4, 2018 - 07:22am PT
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Helaje:
I would say you are the one doing the misrepresenting. Worse, you are mischaracterizing the nature of the research. No one who considers themselves a scientist (and isn't cluelessly arrogant) has been trying to PROVE anything to date; what everyone has been doing is proposing models for various aspects of attention (awareness) and consciousness doing the experimental work an attempt to support those models. Anyone who can't imagine a how it could be possible is clearly not among those doing the work and as a result really have nothing more than opinions to offer. Those doing the work have lots of ideas and lots of models.
For starters, attention, awareness and consciousness are not the same things in terms of functionality. That's part of the reason that your thesis is always so muddled, IMO.
AWARENESS itself is just a baseline, given phenomenon of BEING aware, and unlike any other phenomenon you can mention, awareness itself CANNOT me described in circular fashion, by virtue of some other function or property or attribute that IT IS LIKE. If you believe otherwise, describe raw awareness accordingly.
ATTENTION, which is largely unconsciously directed, pertains to the subject or object of where awareness is directed, and the WAY it is directed.
We PAY attention to discrete objects or phenomenon in reality. The bank from which the payment is made, so to speak, is baseline awareness. The WAY which we pay attention pertains to how attention is focused. We focus wide or on infinity when viewing a panorama, or when casually listening to music. We focus narrowly when picking out a tree in the panorama, or the guitar playing in the music.
Consciousness is the generic word to describe the whole perceptual and subjective shebang.
Per "Those doing the work have lots of ideas and lots of models," list one that makes sense. None of them - and I've looked most all of them very closely - has any viable way of mechanistically explaining how objective processing creates subjectivity out of whole cloth (neurofunctioning). When pressed, they all are totally in the dark about the find points.
What most if not all of them have is an attempt to do what you are doing - and that's the blur the line between objectivity and subjectivity so thoroughly that we no longer have two sides of one coin, but rater a one-sided coin.
And fatal flaws? A meaningless pejorative in in terms of science. Again, there's lots of actual science being done to validate a lot of different models with varying success. And the models themselves are undergoing an rigorous evolution of their own. They don't get deemed fatally flawed but rather graded on how well the data supports the various assertions of the model.
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One can't help but notice the frequent mention of "science" in Healje's last rant. And that's the rub. Here's why:
All of the models you have mentioned are "build ups," that is, they begin with neural functioning, work up through various layers of complexity/organization and "emergence" (if so inclined), and eventually end up at the level of phenomenological consciousness. The fact that we are aware of anything; the "what-is-it-like" to have subjective experience; and all the other phenomenon found on that slippery slope. This is where the models totally fall apart - at phenomenological consciousness. I believe the problems are several fold.
First, few neuroscientists have any clear idea what is happening at the level of phenomenological consciousness itself. They have never studied it as they have objective functioning, and so are left to interpret the phenomenological by way of what they do know: Objective functioning, basically by way of behavior and function. What's more, they generally believe that there is nothing to be gained by looking at the phenomenological - even though in the end, that's what they are trying to describe and explain - because to do so they would have to move out of the 3rd person to the 1st person, and few feel that is worth it.
What's more, most are totally ignorant of all the vast work that has gone on by those LOOKING directly at the phenomenological, even in the western tradition. Edmund Husserl, Michel Henry, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, even Jean-Paul Sartre did yomens work on wrangling down the basics, but these folks are largely written off because those in the quantitative camp believe that new data (computer metaphor) somehow disqualifies anyone but themselves to work up models. The problem of course is that you get totally wonky takes on the phenomenon they are seeking to describe and explain. Evan a concept as simple as pre-reflective self-consciousness is largely lost on this group. And so you get awareness, for example, being described by way of "proto-selves," etc.
Where does this leave us. It often leaves us with the Type A physicalist, of which our own Ed is a poster boy.
The Physicalist claims that we are merely physical creatures with mental experiences, and that those mental experiences are nothing more than physical events. We might question whether or not it is even POSSIBLE to have mental experiences that are nothing over and above physical events. No physicalist has ever been able to say exactly what this means, if it means anything.
Consider looking at some subjects that we know FOR SURE are merely physical beings, and ask: Could THOSE things be conscious? The Physicalist says “Yes.” Others say “No.” The beings in question are robots.
In 1950, Alan Turing proposed that an artificial intelligence (AI) would be “just like us” mentally if it could pass a certain test. The test was to have a human being ask it a series of questions via something like text messages. If the human couldn’t tell whether or not the person she was texting was a human or a robot, then the AI passed the test—that is, we would judge that the robot was CONSCIOUS. And perhaps, if a robot’s mind can be just like ours, then the “mind” may be merely physical—after all, a robot is nothing more than some silicon and some wires, right? So, maybe the human mind is nothing more than some carbon and some synaptic connections.
Thus, the proposal of the physicalist is that consciousness amounts to nothing more than certain behaviors and functions (functionality), and, furthermore, it seems as if, in order for a thing to behave a certain way, this would not require anything more than physical stuff. Viola: behaviorism.
What gets left out, or explained away is exactly what is in question: The phenomenological aspect. It never seems to occur to these people that they are not even looking for it, and won't possibly find it using a methodology that that is "observer independent." Why would they ever find an observer, or observing?
Of course the models you (Healje) are referring to have long ago left Ed behind and ITT (Integrated Information theory) has as their starting point the credo that phenomenological experience is the one thing we can be certain about.
The problem is, IMO, they don't really understand conscious awareness at any meaningful depth, and are inductively trying to explain it as an incrementally emergent phenomenon whereby "unconscious awareness" becomes a phenomenon entirely different than what is is, becoming a functional phenomenon, a behavior having to do with information processing and supplying the appropriate behavioral output.
If people working on those models even understood a basic idea like "pre-reflective consciousness" (basically raw or empty awareness) they would know that awareness is at bottom is just awareness, BEFORE any discursive reflection occurs. However when awareness is used to try and describe unconscious processes, it is totally beholden to what task or function it is performing.
Need I say how absurd it is to believe that the brain has a pre-reflective experience of being a brain (pre-reflexion being the hallmark of awareness), experiences its brainess, and when called upon, reflects (is aware of) and responds with an output. Not only does this contradict the widely held notion that the brain is totally determined, but the whole notion of "unconscious awareness" is logically incoherent. The brain is a stimulus-response machine that is totally UNAWARE that it's a brain and has no awareness of what it is doing. If you believe the brain itself is aware, that's identity theory, and that's a dead end every time.
Take Healje's example of his brain trying to serve up fully realized words and phrases, except they are the wrong phrases. In what manner is the brain "aware" of doing so, or is aware of the conversation, or what needs to be said, or is aware in any way you can imagine. In normal, healthy people, engaged in conversation, the right words come tumbling spontaneously out of our mouths, not because the brain is aware of anything, but because the brain has learned from millions of inputs to instinctively (mechanically, no awareness needed) give a response to the stimulus of the other person's drift. In this regards the brain generated content is basically no different than the movement sensor in my back yard. It just responds with an output, but the process is vastly more involved and complicated inour brains. That is, the brain merely registers an input, processes, and spits out an output, never aware of what it is doing any more than this laptop knows and is aware of what it is doing. No awareness needed.
More later...
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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"What am I?"
a point...
Interesting, thought-provoking answer.
Another: the letter "e".
So this riddle, like other cognitive exercises, reminds us how answers can vary depending on framing (contextual framing, eg, or categorical framing).
Change your categorical framing (from lowest level causation, for e.g., to higher level systems) and not only can your description and language change (cf: "just word games") but your answers to inquiries or responses to claims too.
...
Just uploaded.
Some interesting exchanges here (On Topic) between Eric Weinstein (mathematics) and Ben Shapiro (jewish conservative) and Harris...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTWCl32j8jM
re: agency, free will, Laplacian determinism, shifting categorical frames
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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I am modest for good reason. I know a bit about neurophysiology. Sensory and motor systems are the best understood.
For me, the term neuroscience is too comprehensive. I know almost nothing about cognitive science. I think the field may have been invented after my time.
I apologize for being overly harsh regarding The Big Book of Concepts. I was trying to be brief, and it may have been missed that my main objection was to MikeL appearing to hold it up as a sort of neuroscience, or a body of knowledge that has direct relevance to neuroscience. I would call it psychology.
I have looked into The Big Book of Concepts and the few reviews that are found on-line, and the book itself is largely a critique of attempts to systematize aspects of psychology. Murphy finds that theories derived from one approach to the study of concepts and their formation and transmission do not hold up well when applied to observations made in other circumstances.
From a review by Paul Bloom in Nature.
If you skip to the end of the book looking for a clear resolution, you will be disappointed. Concepts, Murphy cheerfully concludes, are a mess. With the exception of the classical view ("a total flop"), each of the existing theories is the best explanation of a particular set of empirical findings.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Consider looking at some subjects that we know FOR SURE are merely physical beings
And some people happily pronounce on physics when they have shown no deep understanding of the subject.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Largo is sure that there is more to "conscious, mind, etc..." than the "mere" physical. He states, which I find hilariously, that we are unaware of all the work that has been done over the centuries contemplating what the "unphysical" might be, perhaps he does this to increase the contrast of the views. It seems sophomoric (and I mean high school), when I think I first read The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or whatever passed for such a thing back then) and had my mind blown by Ram Das' Be Here Now.
Of course I was too unsophisticated at that time to make much serious of it, and the explosion of academic studies in these areas was just happening. Now we have a tremendous breadth of research to look at, and the opportunity to study under any sort of master you might want to, not only of contemporary versions of ancient practices, but even the resurrections of those long ago extinct (at least what we have imagined them to be from what scanty information we have).
We live in a very privileged time for humans, this last 5,000 years.
Imagine sitting in meditation for hours in a hostile environment where you are considered prey, neglect your search for water, food and shelter, fail to protect you family.
If you are serious about the idea that "consciousness, mind, etc..." must be unphysical, then there are challenges presented to you in this thread to actually explain this, challenges you have yet to come back to, or have you have dismissed with your toss off "you have to do the work" phrase. OK, you have to do the work now, what does it mean: "unphysical"?
We are done, of course, if you punt again and say that is not meaningful. I do not deny your experience, I would say, however, that your experience really cannot inform my own experience.
I came across a Chalmers paper about "The Singularity," which is the point at which AI "explodes." It is an interesting read, though somewhat long, and I also found some of the assumptions too heavily based on our ideas of the recent "human intelligence explosion" (which I consider missing the point).
The article was referenced from a FiveThiryEight article on chess AI, chess machines are much better at chess than humans are, and algorithms incorporating learning have allowed these chess machines to rapidly explore all of the domain of human chess and expand it, without human intervention (except, of course, to turn the machine on after having written the code).
Machines do chess better than humans do chess, but even in the context I mentioned above, chess as an activity is possible only because we are privileged in that we do not have "anything better" to do with our time.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/chesss-new-best-player-is-a-fearless-swashbuckling-algorithm/
but for those who would "do the work" see:
Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm
Abstract
The game of chess is the most widely-studied domain in the history of artificial intelligence. The strongest programs are based on a combination of sophisticated search techniques, domain-specific adaptations, and handcrafted evaluation functions that have been refined by human experts over several decades. In contrast, the AlphaGo Zero program recently achieved superhuman performance in the game of Go, by tabula rasa reinforcement learning from games of self-play. In this paper, we generalise this approach into a single AlphaZero algorithm that can achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance in many challenging domains. Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.
........................
The interesting innovation here is that the algorithm does not rely on the "brute force" method of evaluating moves far into the future to derive its strength.
Back to the Chalmers paper, which careens through the idea that there will always be better AI, that AI drives AI+ drives AI++ etc, thus the explosion, thus the singularity, the singularity being that the best intelligence will be machine intelligence, which will far outperform humans, just as machines do in our "ancient" games of chess and Go.
The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis
"...Perhaps the most important remaining form of resistance is the claim that the brain is not a mechanical system at all, or at least that nonmechanical processes play a role in its functioning that cannot be emulated. This view is most naturally combined with a sort of Cartesian dualism holding that some aspects of mentality (such as consciousness) are nonphysical and nevertheless play a substantial role in affecting brain processes and behavior. If there are nonphysical processes like this, it might be that they could nevertheless be emulated or artificially created, but this is not obvious. If these processes cannot be emulated or artificially created, then it may be that human-level AI is impossible.
Although I am sympathetic with some forms of dualism about consciousness, I do not think that there is much evidence for the strong form of Cartesian dualism that this objection requires. The weight of evidence to date suggests that the brain is mechanical, and I think that even if consciousness plays a causal role in generating behavior, there is not much reason to think that its role is not emulable. But while we know as little as we do about the brain and about consciousness, I do not think the matter can be regarded as entirely settled. So this form of resistance should at least be registered..."
[emphasis added]
so I let Chalmers throw down the gauntlet to Largo, to wit: what is the evidence for "strong Cartesian dualism"? the dualism being the "physical" and the "nonphysical" when discussing "consciousness, mind, etc...".
Who knew that Largo was a Type A Strong Cartesian Dualist?
(or would that be dualismist?).
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zBrown
Ice climber
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... he is the ONLY one on this thread who is actually qualified to speak with authority on the neurosciences.
Why would that be true?
Spectre and Meltdown are massive security flaws that affect almost every PC on Earth. Here’s what you need to know.
The scramble to harden a broad array of devices comes after researchers found two significant vulnerabilities within modern computing hardware, one of which cannot be fully resolved as of yet. Experts say the disclosure of the critical flaws underscores the need to keep up with software updates and security patches and highlights the role independent research plays in prodding tech companies to minimize security weaknesses.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 4, 2018 - 02:15pm PT
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Largo is sure that there is more to "conscious, mind, etc..." than the "mere" physical. He states, which I find hilariously, that we are unaware of all the work that has been done over the centuries contemplating what the "unphysical" might be, perhaps he does this to increase the contrast of the views. It seems sophomoric (and I mean high school), when I think I first read The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or whatever passed for such a thing back then) and had my mind blown by Ram Das' Be Here Now.
Of course I was too unsophisticated at that time to make much serious of it, and the explosion of academic studies in these areas was just happening. Now we have a tremendous breadth of research to look at, and the opportunity to study under any sort of master you might want to, not only of contemporary versions of ancient practices, but even the resurrections of those long ago extinct (at least what we have imagined them to be from what scanty information we have).
We live in a very privileged time for humans, this last 5,000 years.
Imagine sitting in meditation for hours in a hostile environment where you are considered prey, neglect your search for water, food and shelter, fail to protect you family.
If you are serious about the idea that "consciousness, mind, etc..." must be unphysical, then there are challenges presented to you in this thread to actually explain this, challenges you have yet to come back to, or have you have dismissed with your toss off "you have to do the work" phrase. OK, you have to do the work now, what does it mean: "unphysical"?
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Actually Ed, for all your avuncular retorts, and sober sounding reasoning, you do a poor job of interpreting anyone's view but your own. Especially the word "unphysical." The implication being that you are too sophisticated now to be duped by what a bunch of yahoos (half of the current day meditators I am around ARE scientists BTW) with nothing to do but sit on their ass while the building burns down and the family starves. Does that actually describe me, according to anyone who knows me? Is this ludicrous charicature an actual nugget of scientific wisdom that any sane person would take seriously?
What I said was that the analogue and the discrete, for lack of better terms, are two sides of the same coin we call reality. And that aawareness is ungraspable. If you feel otherwise, if you can grasp what awareness is without grabbing your slide ruler, you tell me.
Of course, when you ask me to "explain," is not the only criteria you would accept physical proof for the "unphysical?" What would that question actually mean? What IS the unphysical? "IS" implies physicality. Logic has words and phrases for these kinds of logical howlers, which are only begging the answer you already have in your head.
The craziest thing of them all is the idea that you are onto something that is somehow lost on Mike and I and whoever is not a type A physicalist, as though physics is the royal road to understanding consciousness. Thing is, your take is an old one and it looks like this (from a lecture I kept): I posted this before but it's worth a quick review.
Is Consciousness Nothing More Than Input/Output?
Ed claims that we are merely physical creatures with mental experiences, and that those mental experiences are nothing more than physical events. Others might question whether or not it is even POSSIBLE to have mental experiences that are nothing over and above physical events. What does experience itself, as a physical event, even mean? That it's "unphysical?" What might that possibly mean?
Perhaps we can shed some light on the subject if we look to some beings that we know FOR SURE are merely physical beings, and ask:
Could THOSE things be conscious? The Physicalist says “Yes.” Others say, "How so?"
The beings in question are robots.
The Turing Test: In 1950, Alan Turing proposed that an artificial intelligence (AI) would be “just like us” mentally if it could pass a certain test. The test was to have a human being ask it a series of questions via something like text messages. If the human couldn’t tell whether or not the person she was texting was a human or a robot, then the AI passed the test—that is, we would judge that the robot was CONSCIOUS. And perhaps, if a robot’s mind can be just like
ours, then the “mind” may be merely physical—after all, a robot is nothing more than some silicon and some wires, right? So, maybe the human mind is nothing more than some carbon and some synaptic connections.
Thus, the proposal here is that consciousness amounts to nothing more than a certain kind of behavior—and, furthermore, it seems as if, in order for a thing to behave a certain way, this would not require anything more than physical stuff. (Call this proposal
‘behaviorism’).
It certainly seems that this is sum and substance of your game, Ed, and while you boast that you are cutting edge per the science, your methods of framing the inquiry are from 1950. Fact is, the bus passed you by long ago. How - let's look.
Healje mentioned a bunch of so-called main stream neuroscientists who have "scientifically" worked up a bunch of consciousness models, and I commented that all of them have fatal flaws that don't square with the simple facts of your perception. But that's not to say that they are not making progress. However, it is critical to look at first assumptions, and probably more importantly, a model’s starting point, is crucially important.
While I have issues with many of Integrated Information Theory's (ITT) postulates, I am confident they have two things right.
First, they state that the existence of phenomenological consciousness is certain. You, Ed, seem to be certain that the ITT people are mistaken in this regards. And anyone else who "believes" this.
Second, IIT STARTS with consciousness itself, working from phenomenology DOWN to mechanism. This avoids the countless snags and cul-de-sacs and ontological howlers of trying to work bottom-up. That is, the Lego Log approach to "explaining" consciousness.
Why do they do that? Because they want to have some understanding about what they are trying to explain.
Here, in my opinion, is where the argument is passing you by.
While consciousness itself is not something anyone can observe in the 3rd person, as we all know (feel into your daughter's awareness if you doubt it), and since you seem only to trust in 3rd person observations, this greatly compromises your options - again, first assumptions.
Your options appear to be these: Phenomenological experience is itself an illusion. All of it. Consciousness is merely physical behaviors determined by physical causes. Any sense we have of subjectivity is merely a thought, or an impression, which itself is actually a physical event in the mechanical brain.
Except the logic behind this is totally bunk.
First, even you couldn't say that you don't even have the impression or sense that you are experiencing reading these words, regardless if that impression is real (to you real = physical) or imagined. Second, unless you are a zombie, you also have a sense of being aware of that experience. I suspect you would say that both your sense of being aware and the experience of being aware are both illusions, are something the brain is making us believe through smoke and mirrors.
So I ask: how did you ever arrive at the "truth" of Type A physicalism if not by observing the data? Observing postulates awareness. Ergo you are using an illusory phenomenon (awareness) to vouchsafe what you insist is true - a logical incoherence.
The typical default, weak as it is, is that, unknown to "you," your brain is aware, but gives you the impression that "you" are aware and have an experience that is above and beyond brain function. When it's "really" just brain function all the way.
The most radical take on all of this is to say even the brain is not aware of what it is doing. It's just machine registration, not unlike my movement sensor in my back yard, just more robust and complicated, with the ability to update it's programming with no awareness of doing so.
What most who believe this are really angling towards is to disqualify a self or agency who HAS awareness or subjective experience, when these phenomenon really are the sole property of the brain itself, we just have the illusion of something more, of an "I" who is aware.
Now the ironic thing here, is that this is in part the very thing that Husserl, Henry, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and other phenomenologists arrived at with their notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness,
during which there is no self to be found. There is only awareness BEFORE discursive thought or self formation. You can check that out here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/
It's just that they weren't daft enough to believe that pre-reflective awareness was "really" just brain awareness of which they were ignorantly unaware.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Keep circling the wagons, JL.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Why would that be true?
It is one person's opinion, but it is an informed opinion.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Might I just make a stab at this one.
The most radical take on all of this is to say even the brain is not aware of what it is doing. It's just machine registration, not unlike my movement sensor in my back yard, just more robust and complicated, with the ability to update it's programming with no awareness of doing so.
Something Yuval Harari, an historian, made me aware of and that I have alluded to in some of my more recent posts is that biochemical algorithms, like feelings, seem to be associated with almost every memory we have. The memory itself, is mainly data, right? It's some kind of imprinting in the brain that is a representation of the experienced world. It can be retrieved on demand (except when it can't). When the memory gets imprinted, algorithms, which are basically code, are somehow associated with it. Some of those algorithms are feeling algorithms like happy, sad, humiliated. Others are those algorithms that give rise to other aspects of consciousness like self-reflective awareness.
We know that the entire order of mammals include feeling algorithms (a mother's "love" for her child). So, it's not the same as that movement sensor in your back yard. Let's say an organism has a movement sensor of some kind (come to think of it, they almost all do). That movement sensor would have evolved in a manner where there were feeling algorithms and such associated with the evolution of the functionality. So, it would never be this robotic purely functional thing.
That's just what I think at this point in time.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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not just me, you apparently didn't have time to read that link...
"...Later in the paper, I will advocate the view that if a system in our world duplicates not only our outputs but our internal computational structure, then it will duplicate the important internal aspects of mentality too. For present purposes, though, we can set aside these objections by stipulating that for the purposes of the argument, intelligence is to be measured wholly in terms of behavior and behavioral dispositions, where behavior is construed operationally in terms of the physical outputs that a system produces. The conclusion that there will be AI++ in this sense is still strong enough to be interesting. If there are systems that produce apparently superintelligent outputs, then whether or not these systems are truly conscious or intelligent, they will have a transformative impact on the rest of the world..."
which brings up a very interesting point. If we can build AI machines which are more intelligent than we are (and we have, at least for games like chess and Go), then perhaps that other stuff, the first person stuff, is entirely irrelevant to intelligence, and perhaps to the larger things our brains do that we are not conscious of...
this puts Chalmers a bit on his head (though he might not object).
We can debate whether or not AlphaZero sees the beauty of Kasparov's games (Kasparov certainly sees the beauty of AlphaZero's) but we cannot debate whether or not AlphaZero is a much better chess player than any human, and extrapolate that from now on, the best chess will be played by machines, not humans.
If chess is a measure of intelligence, as it once was thought to be, then machines are already more intelligent then the humans.
So what of all this silliness regarding "The Hard Problem"? what we find for chess, and for language, and even for viewing images, that machines are matching or doing better than humans in their mastery. And adaptive learning algorithms are making this all the better for machines.
The "Chinese Room" problem is equally rendered irrelevant, so what if the machine doesn't go through the same internal process a human does when reading Chinese (or any other language). And it has been demonstrated that machines can have some ability to "understand" the language (maybe not the way humans do), but in the end, if your earbud can listen to and translate any language in real-time, and maybe even provide you with context, history, interpretation, would you turn it off? is it cheating? do you really care that it can't tell you what qualia are, or what it's feeling?
Could it be that, aside from human preoccupation with humans, that the importance of "consciousness, mind, etc..." is a side issue to intelligence?
That would be something worse than calling it, our experience of the first person, an illusion.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Could it be that, aside from human preoccupation with humans, that the importance of "consciousness, mind, etc..." is a side issue to intelligence?
Duh! (I say with the utmost respect)
Ed, if you haven't read Homo Deus, by Yuval Harari -- do. I would love to know what you think.
Edit: Could it be that mathematics is the underlying reality and that intelligence is it's natural evolutionary end product? Nah -- probably not. Hope not, really. Because those will be robots or human/robot composites.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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HFCS, I went with my first response thought and came up with marriage. (But that's just my Interpreter, he's such a kidder).
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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John, first let me say that Lynds’ paper revolves about ideas that have been around for a while. For example, Lynds’ primary thrust, presented as novel, is that, regarding physical processes, there are no static points in time, only intervals of time. But Aristotle says, “Time is not composed of individual moments.”
The overlap with Bergson is broadly with regard to Bergson's notion of "duration" as opposed to individual instants. In Bergson, however, there is an overtone of intuition woven into the subject, so much so that at least one prominent critic has said Bergson's Time must be intuited and cannot be expressed in words.
Lynds does not seem aware of any of the complexities of the real number system by which we describe measurements of time. Nor does it appear he understands basic calculus (perhaps he does).
He offers no equations for criticisms. Only citing formulae from modern physics. I seriously doubt he understands the Schrodinger equation. (My own understanding is very naive in that under simple conditions it reflects the universal idea that the rate of change of a quantity is proportional to the amount of that quantity - I'm probably wrong).
I find his arguments not compelling, as in
“Another way to look at this is if a physical value were precisely determined at a precise instant in time, it could never change, as it would firstly have to proceed to another precise value.”
And the following statement, though big on conjecture, is small on proof:
“If there were a precise static instant underlying a dynamical physical process, everything, including clocks and watches would also be frozen static and discontinuous, and as such, intervals in time would not be possible either.”
The word underlying is open to interpretation. Is he speculating that were a dynamical physical process a succession of instants the world would freeze? And, to me, the following argument seems rather naïve in that he feels it necessary to use the absence of a reality beyond this "block":
“It might also be argued by analogy with the claim by some people that the so-called 'block universe modelí, i.e. a 4-dimensional model of physical reality, incorporating time as well as space, is static or unchanging. This claim however involves the common mistake of failing to recognize that unless there is another time dimension, it simply doesn't make sense to say that the block universe is static, for there is no 'external' time interval over which it remains the same.”
His conclusion that “imaginary time”- an interesting concept in modern physics - cannot exist because it cannot run at “right angles” to regular time is something a high school geometry student might say.
I know I must irritate you when I criticize your appropriation of concepts from physics and math in efforts to lend credibility to your views of the intangible world, and for this I apologize. Where I feel you may be confusing is when you take these metaphysical ideas of time and apply them to all of reality, such as reality is "continuous" and we somehow digitize it in consciousness:
"Worth noting is that for humans, though few realize it, the source is continuous, and as mentioned, consciousness can digitize the continuous into manageable parts or bits much as a video camera digitizes reality into 30 free frames a second."
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Why I am still an incompatibilist.
1. I don’t recall ever hearing a good reason for why there is a time delay between the actual decision and one’s consciousness of the decision, as has been demonstrated in various experiments. If we were truly autonomous, the responsibility for the decision (consciousness of it, at least) would be expected to be more coincident with the actual decision. On the other hand, the time delay would be expected if consciousness is dependent on subconscious processing (which takes time).
2. If, as Gazzaniga proposes, that our Interpreter is always reflecting on experience rather than directly experiencing, then, again, I have a hard time seeing how our “moral reasoning” is going to affect our decisions ahead of time. I find it far easier to believe that we do what we do (subconsciously make a decision before our Interpreter is even aware of the question) and then make up a story about it that fits in with the rest of our imagined self. In this regard, our sense of self is always after the fact.
3. I’ve always used (my understanding of) evolutionary biology as a litmus test for evaluating any hypothesis regarding consciousness or free will. We are only around 7 million years removed from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Clearly, one of the biggest differences between us and chimpanzees is our self-reflective awareness (some of us are also less hairy). I happen to think that the best evolutionary answer to this difference is that we developed an algorithmic engine (the Interpreter) since our split with chimpanzee that essentially manifests itself as our self-reflective awareness. To me, the engine itself is all that is needed to explain several things. To propose that somehow, we also developed an individual moral self that can be compared with other humans or with a set of adopted rules by this group seems implausible and unnecessary.
4. Our laws include provisions for people who are insane, for children, etc. But let’s face it, most properties and behaviors fall along a normal distribution curve. There are probably an infinite number of conditions that could affect behavior that could make it much easier or not to subscribe to the current moral consensus of a society of humans.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Actually Ed, for all your avuncular retorts, and sober sounding reasoning, you do a poor job of interpreting anyone's view but your own. Especially the word "unphysical." The implication being that you are too sophisticated now to be duped by what a bunch of yahoos (half of the current day meditators I am around ARE scientists BTW) with nothing to do but sit on their ass while the building burns down and the family starves. Does that actually describe me, according to anyone who knows me? Is this ludicrous charicature an actual nugget of scientific wisdom that any sane person would take seriously?
sorry you took that as an insult, I was actually pointing out that our ability to "meditate" or even do physics, is a privileged state achieved relatively recently.
The "intelligence" that allowed us to achieve this privileged state is not something we have direct access too, history being equally recent. But it is highly likely that the conversation we are having about the attributes of "consciousness, mind, etc..." focuses on this recent period, and may not have been a feature of early human society; that is, what we are familiar with in terms of "consciousness, mind, etc..." is not something familiar to humans, say 1 million years ago, humans who had a lot more on their minds then philosophizing, or meditating.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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some of us are also less hairy
neither you nor I can make that claim.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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^^^^ Those were the two that just popped into my consciousness.
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