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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jan 30, 2018 - 01:50pm PT
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“The mind-body problem is about what experience IS, not how it is caused."
It is what it is. It defines itself. No problem there.
However, it depends upon a brain to exist.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jan 30, 2018 - 02:56pm PT
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However, it depends upon a brain to exist.
Exist it does and the implications of that existence are fascinating:
Mind and its intelligence seem to exist on a continuum and doesn't that imply an intelligence or mind far more complex or superior to humanity's?
The potential for life and mind is written in the physical laws of the universe, an order that might other wise prohibit the existence of mind or self-awareness assures it.
Humanity is driven by mind to know. Why?
Science is very good at describing means (the brain creates the mind) but rather poor at describing ends (what is a thought?).
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jan 30, 2018 - 03:52pm PT
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Mind and its intelligence seem to exist on a continuum and doesn't that imply an intelligence or mind far more complex or superior to humanity's?
I would say it supports speculation of a god-mind rather than logically implies it. But you have your interpretation.
;>)
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jan 30, 2018 - 03:56pm PT
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I would say it supports speculation of a god-mind rather than logically implies it. But you have your interpretation.
And I would say that's probably a better way of putting it.
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okay, whatever
climber
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Jan 30, 2018 - 04:40pm PT
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Not to change the subject, but rather to engage it a bit more, what is "life" (other than being some sort of semantic category)? And does "mind" only exist within some life-form, whatever that may be? And we all know there's plenty of controversy about what constitutes "life", not to mention "mind" (hence this thread!!). Obviously, some commenters here think that mind is NOT coupled to a biological life-form, made of proteins and calcium and so on. Others, and I am one, think that "mind" is just a piece of our biochemistry. But I don't KNOW that, I just THINK that, and I have no way of proving it.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 30, 2018 - 04:48pm PT
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I would say that the evidence overwhelmingly supports a bottom-up architecture that only appears as design. It's ultimately more elegant, IMO.
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okay, whatever
climber
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Jan 30, 2018 - 04:51pm PT
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I think that, too... not that intellectual elegance is the litmus test, in the end.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 30, 2018 - 05:23pm PT
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I wasn't suggesting that intelligence is elegant. I was suggesting that evolution is elegant. Intelligence is the kind of thing that results from evolution because of its elegance and simplicity. Evolution is basically a competition of replicators that compete for scarce resources in a changing environment. The genes of the survivors and sexually profligate are the overall winners.
Evolution provides the feedback mechanism that makes life work.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 30, 2018 - 05:48pm PT
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the belief persists that if a causal chain can ever be linked to awareness, said chain will be what awareness IS, all else being woo.
Whose belief? Where is this statement made? Can you back up your a*#ertion?
edit:
and please forgive my censorable language.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jan 30, 2018 - 08:43pm PT
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The belief persists in the imaginary realm of Dennett's Folly.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 30, 2018 - 09:32pm PT
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Evolution is basically a competition of replicators that compete for scarce resources in a changing environment.
it's not about individuals, however, but about the genetic information that is replicated as a population.
it's hard to define winners and losers as we would usually do because the process is largely indifferent to individuals, it's just playing the long odds in a game whose rules can change. today's winners could be tomorrow's losers.
it is better to think about it on a geological scale
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 31, 2018 - 08:12am PT
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by adopting a physical viewpoint there are many questions regarding mind that do not need to be answered because they are a part of an overall explanation of life on the planet.
a consequence of evolution is that we, humans, are not exceptional, but the result of evolution of life just as all other life is.
if your explanation of mind presumes that humans are special, outside of evolution, then there must be some reason why, at least if you are trying to come to some understanding of mind. this isn't anything new, the problem with the exceptions offered is that they lead to a whole raft of problematic questions usually requiring ever more unnatural answers.
while mind might be a daunting problem to provide a strictly biological answer to, it seems that we would not find the idea that roughly 40 trillion cells can organize into a human body, and for which the explanation of evolution makes complete sense. the behavior of that organization of cells is complex, but in our discussion of "mind" we seem to allow for a lot of "instinctual" behavior that is outside of that question, that is, we would admit that this collection of cells can have complex, coordinated behavior that is not a part of "mind."
viewed from that prospective, it is a small step in thinking to get to mind as the result of biology.
finally, we arrive at this point of view not from a set of philosophical considerations, but by the result of scientific observation and explanation, empirical observation, and theoretical picture of how this phenomenon, life, behaves.
it is somewhat perverse, to get to the point of biological explanation but stop short of considering "mind" as the result of biological process because the precise explanation has not yet been made, and various philosophical issues muddy the waters. philosophy cannot anticipate the result of the empirical process of understanding mind.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 31, 2018 - 08:29am PT
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it's not about individuals, however, but about the genetic information that is replicated as a population.
it's hard to define winners and losers as we would usually do because the process is largely indifferent to individuals, it's just playing the long odds in a game whose rules can change. today's winners could be tomorrow's losers.
You're right, Ed, it's not about the individuals, it's about the genes. From a genes-eye-view, it is the gene that is the winner or loser through time. At any point, a gene (or really, a group of genes) will have a greater or lesser proportion in the genome compared to other alleles) Genes that play well with others are one of the selection criteria, so the idea of a competition doesn't necessarily mean a struggle. The organism itself is a temporary vehicle for genes, but it is the thing that differentially survives and differentially passes on more or fewer progeny.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 31, 2018 - 09:10am PT
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but to turn it around, since we are idly (mental) speculators,
presuming that human intelligence, putatively the result of evolution, were able to "intelligent design" in genetics, what might the outcome be (aside from the trite Blade Runner dystopias)?
and more wildly, non-cell based life (though it might be difficult to achieve the power of genetic coding without the genetic code)?
while we are unintentionally altering the Earth, what might intentional alteration lead to?
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 31, 2018 - 09:19am PT
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I don't think winner / loser applies to evolutionary process at all. Genes come, genes go, just like the species they define. Of course genes aren't "trying" to do anything. But it is useful to think in terms of winners with respect to genes because that is how they proliferate -- from being better, on average, across a population than a rival gene. I am not anthropomorphizing at all with using the term winner.
Ed, we will be intentionally altering evolution soon enough. We already have started.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Jan 31, 2018 - 09:28am PT
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the idea of "winners" is a modern (American?) appropriation of the idea of genetic dominance, but as we all know, "wild type" genes are dominant.
and not only that, but "successful" populations have the greatest genetic variance (this is not a judgement statement, it is a statement from population genetics).
so the popular human idea of genetic "winners" is far from reality
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 31, 2018 - 09:32am PT
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Okay, maybe successful is a better word. Fact is some genes get out-competed and may eventually drop out from the genome. I'll have to look up how Dawkins' phrases it in The Selfish Gene. I'm pretty sure that he uses the term winner. There is a reason that he titled the book as he did.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 31, 2018 - 09:57am PT
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a consequence of evolution is that we, humans, are not exceptional, but the result of evolution of life just as all other life is.
if your explanation of mind presumes that humans are special, outside of evolution, then there must be some reason why, at least if you are trying to come to some understanding of mind.
--
Many look at this differently, especially in terms of "special."
Special in regards to mind does not, in my mind, make awareness better than anything else. It simply means what "special" means, in terms of being "singular and uncommon."
That is, awareness and consciousness are fundamentally unlike other "things" that physics and biology are designed to explain. When saying, "We seem a biological explanation for consciousness," what are the first assumptions?
A biological explanation will, perforce, be a causal explanation, ergo, our biological explanation will in some minds double for explaining what mind IS. The difficulty, as Nagle points out, is that conscious experience has an essentially subjective character—what it is like for its subject, from the inside—that purely physical processes do not share. So what you have by way of explanation (mechanistic) - if in fact one is forthcoming - is a description of a biological process that makes no mention of nor yet encompasses the subjective dimension, the axis around which our life revolves. This allows some to believe that we need not strive to discuss or examine subjectivity itself, which harks back many decades to now-junked behaviorialism. Or to daffy, logically incoherent beliefs such as, "We only think or believe we are conscious, when in fact consciousness is just a biological process."
If the later were true, then Nagel's claim that experience has aspects that purely physical processes do not share, would be counted with either - the physical processes ARE subjectivity, or else consciousness is only a subjective impression or illusion. Integrated Information Theory and other camps, as mentioned, have realized this is double talk and have taken as a starting point that consciousness is real - that is, music is real, so to speak, and it's more than a guitar process. This analogy assumes that ALL of consciousness is biological output, and that's something not likely to be solved anytime soon.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Jan 31, 2018 - 10:12am PT
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Ed wrote.
and not only that, but "successful" populations have the greatest genetic variance (this is not a judgement statement, it is a statement from population genetics). The problem with this statement IMO is it sounds like you are suggesting that the genome is the thing that is being selected for. It's not. Genes are. A successful genome is a happenstance, not the driver.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jan 31, 2018 - 10:46am PT
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And what is happenstance? In a universe with with the vastness of space and time found in our own and with a particular set of inviolable physical laws, how is mind the result of happenstance? Isn't mind an inevitable product of "what is" in the same way hydrogen is?
And at what point does evolution become irrelevant? When evolution produces a being to which evolution becomes "known" and as a result "controlled" by that being what is the continued efficacy of evolution anyway?
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