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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Objective experience is of material objects that persist regardless of our perceiving them, and are subject to causal laws.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Here, Ed has conflated an objective cognitive take (agreement) of experience, and has gone on to attribute that objectivity to subjective experience itself.
where do you draw the line?
I expect your standard vacuous retort : "well there's the real biscuit" or some such.
My contention isn't a conflation, it is that you only know what you experience because you learned what you know. And it is entirely possible that what you learned may not be what is happening. It works fine for most purposes, but not when you are trying to understand it using it itself.
Preacher was talking there's a sermon he gave
He said every man's conscience is vile and depraved
You cannot depend on it to be your guide
When it's you who must keep it satisfied
It ain't easy to swallow it sticks in the throat
She gave her heart to the man in the long black coat
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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suppose we all reach an agreement as to what mind is.
Or imagine that machines attain high intelligence, including "natural language understanding."
They might wonder why we humans would call our language understanding "natural." They would see that we often use the same word for different meanings. They would not be surprised that we have difficulty finding agreement among ourselves.
From their perspective, our language understanding could be unnatural.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Well, like the mathematician once said:
a
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Weird how that post upstream got hosed up
Could it be hard carriage returns embedded somehow?
Do they have those in natujral language?
Well, like the mathematician once said:
a <= b
So I guess we could call ‘a’ very many thingsa was and no machine would be the wiser, eh?
As I recall the "natural" in natural language usage in A.I. was to distinguish it from machine languages, which were for the most part invented by humans. Except of course, for Bell Labs L6, which was in fact invented apparently by Bell Labs
Natural language in contrast has, I would bet, has no well established inventors and evolved [naturally enough], naturally
Any takers on this bet? Well, like the mathematician once said:
[Click to View YouTube Video]
or ...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Natural language in contrast has, I would bet, has no well established inventors and evolved [naturally enough], naturally.
Humans have poor memory.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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With a little help from their friends, everybody is trying to make it better.
My old buddy Gary Lynch and his friends Conor Cox and Christine Gall:
Front Syst Neurosci. 2014; 8: 90.
The possibility of expanding memory or cognitive capabilities above the levels in high functioning individuals is a topic of intense discussion among scientists and in society at large. The majority of animal studies use behavioral endpoint measures; this has produced valuable information but limited predictability for human outcomes. Accordingly, several groups are pursuing a complementary strategy with treatments targeting synaptic events associated with memory encoding or forebrain network operations. Transcription and translation figure prominently in substrate work directed at enhancement. Notably, the question of why new proteins would be needed for a now-forming memory given that learning-driven synthesis presumably occurred throughout the immediate past has been largely ignored. Despite this conceptual problem, and some controversy, recent studies have reinvigorated the idea that selective gene manipulation is a plausible route to enhancement. Efforts to improve memory by facilitating synaptic encoding of information have also progressed, in part due of breakthroughs on mechanisms that stabilize learning-related, long-term potentiation (LTP). These advances point to a reductionistic hypothesis for a diversity of experimental results on enhancement, and identify under-explored possibilities. Cognitive enhancement remains an elusive goal, in part due to the difficulty of defining the target. The popular view of cognition as a collection of definable computations seems to miss the fluid, integrative process experienced by high functioning individuals. The neurobiological approach obviates these psychological issues to directly test the consequences of improving throughput in networks underlying higher order behaviors. The few relevant studies testing drugs that selectively promote excitatory transmission indicate that it is possible to expand cortical networks engaged by complex tasks and that this is accompanied by capabilities not found in normal animals.
Conference in April
http://learnmem2018.org/
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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zBrown, as Ed explained to me some time ago, using those symbols causes your editing to vanish below the first symbol. Save a copy.
;>)
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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I'm intrigued with getting into zBrown's recent posts, but I've been thinking about this and wanting to ask it of Largo for a long time now. My question is; how is awareness so different than feelings that we have like love, anger, hate, and humiliation? It seems to me that you can feel these things independently of awareness. And yet, they are all subjective. Why is awareness so different?
Nice link upthread by the way, yanqui.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Thankz Herr Gill
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jstan
climber
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People keep saying things I mentioned years ago, each time with no third person comment, This place is like our Congress. Nothing changes. For no particular reason I will say what I did not say before.
Since every organ in each of us was constructed to serve the Prime Directive, SURVIVAL, we are ignorant if we fail to start at that directive when questioning why we are built as we are.
Time is at the core of Awareness. You have only to listen to hear your own internal clock clicking approximately once per second. And every factor affecting survival has a beginning and an end in this stream of time.
Consciousness is just the fact we actually have a role to play in determining what happens in this stream of time. It is the Prime Directive, the bottom line, after all.
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WBraun
climber
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every organ in each of us was constructed to serve the Prime Directive, SURVIVAL,
Then you've all failed miserably since you haven't survived ......
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Then you've all failed miserably since you haven't survived ......
You failed to read what jstan did not say.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 9, 2018 - 12:52pm PT
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eyonkee asked: I've been thinking about this and wanting to ask it of Largo for a long time now. My question is; how is awareness so different than feelings that we have like love, anger, hate, and humiliation? It seems to me that you can feel these things independently of awareness. And yet, they are all subjective. Why is awareness so different?
Excellent question.
Whenever I ask myself questions or wonder about the dichotomy between awareness and content (feelings, in this case), I usually refer to introspection because anyone can do it and see for themselves. The trap or possible misstep in doing so is that "knowing" about any of this depends on definitions, whereby a simple question about the difference between awareness and feeling can devolve into an epistemic argument about content.
But for the moment, to try and clearly answer EEEEYONKE's question, consider the case of a psychologist working with a trauma victim whose unconscious is working overtime to keep the trauma buried beneath awareness. Problem is, big trauma causes hyperactivation in our sympathetic nervous system (called hyper arousal), and that spiking energy tends to get frozen (deer in the headlights) via the freeze response (the other two responses being fight or flight) and that energy can cause all kinds of havoc in wonky behaviors, weird dreams, dissociation and so forth, till the frozen event is tickled out and made conscious.
What's happening here is that unconscious content is intentionally brought up to awareness, where it can be dealt with without repressing it and causing all the funky symptoms. So in a sense you do FEEL something without being aware of what the cause is, but what makes the symptoms so grevious is that you are keenly AWARE of them.
Often times people go to a therapist because they do not know or understand WHAT they are feeling, and a skilled psychotherapist (very rare, IMO) will use and direct a clients awareness to get at and make known what the content is.
In meditation - which at the early stages involves simply watching content such as thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, planing, etc. - it is quickly made clear that observing, and WHAT you observe, are not selfsame. That is, awareness of content is a different phenomenon than the feelings, thoughts, etc. that ENTER awareness.
One the breakthroughs for many therapy clients is learning that they are NOT their content (feelings, etc.), that content is simply what transpires within awareness, and the experiencer is who they really are. Once people can learn to disidentify with content, they often experience a vast freedom. So long as the two are fused, you're at the mercy of your unconscious - even more than we normally are.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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I dunno, awareness as its own thing, independent of evolution just seems so unnecessary and messy. We have all of this complicated brain machinery that we know evolved. We know that if you knock out certain parts of the brain that strange and reproducible behaviors occur in the individual -- and many of these are conscious behaviors. And they happen exactly the same way based on which part of the brain that you knock out. I'm inclined to believe that feelings and awareness fall under the same umbrella.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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More CAPS, eeyonkee.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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So, you're saying that I should use more capital letters? I try to limit them to just the beginning of sentences.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Follow the fellow who follows a dream, Greg.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 9, 2018 - 05:09pm PT
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I dunno, awareness as its own thing, independent of evolution just seems so unnecessary and messy.
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Who mentioned a "thing" regarding awareness. Observe your own awareness and try and find an edge, a beginning, a quality, a figurative take on awareness itself.
Perhaps look at it this way. The closer science looks at "reality," the more counterintitive things become. For example:
In 1915, Einstein published GR, and it was made know to Allied scientists through the Dutch (neutral) scientist Wilhelm de Sitter. GR was taken up by Eddington, who organized a what would now be called a 'media campaign' in anticipation of measurements to be taken at a solar eclipse in 1919. It was still pretty obscure to the public, but at least those who followed the scientific news had a general idea that some crazy theory was going to be tested at an upcoming solar eclipse.
In a newspaper article about the event of the eclipse proving light bends in gravity, the Title was "More of Einstein's Humbugery" There was no respect. All the way until the eclipse was recorded, filmed, and photographed, he was disrespected in physics, and by major scientists of his day, like Tesla. But once Everyone saw that star, in the wrong place, according to official maps, he was genius material. But Tesla still disrespected him. Many of his opposition had agendas of their own beliefs. He was regarded well even more after his equation held true from The Trinity Drop of the first atomic bomb. He lost respect by denying that Edwin Hubble proved, with the red shift, that it is not a static universe, galaxies are moving unlike what he predicted. He never unified the field in his own mind but it was found later his theories hold true beyond the time gravity multiverse and range into the solidity of matter, the speed of the universes collapse, and the time dilation of all forces.
I mention this not to bolster some woo theory of mind by way of science, but rather to show that we humans are geared to want a classical description of everything, all else being "messy and unnecessary."
The idea that the most unique facet of reality - that we are aware and have subjective experience - would perfectly square with classical causation, given that nothing else does, seems no more likely than QM being a classical phenomenon.
That much said, it seems entirely reasonable to believe that all aspects of mind are brain artifact, and t look at awareness as a kind of light that switches on and off according to brain states believed to "create" same.
But how many people hold this view who have devoted serious study to looking at awareness itself - not what we are aware of, nor yet the brain that logic says creates it, or the thought (content) saying that "you only think awareness is this, when in fact it is (fill in the blank).
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Being aware of the awareness you use to perceive your awareness seems a bit circular. But I agree that feelings and awareness might lie in separate categories.
I stated one definition of objective experience. Do you have another?
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