What is "Mind?"

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Ed Hartouni

Trad climber
Livermore, CA
Feb 9, 2018 - 06:16pm PT
Perhaps look at it this way. The closer science looks at "reality," the more counterintitive things become. For example:...

you should stick to writing fictional accounts of climbing, you know it better.
zBrown

Ice climber
Feb 9, 2018 - 07:30pm PT
Righto jstan (back a ways). It's very hard to follow this.

Largo

Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
Topic Author's Reply - Feb 9, 2018 - 07:44pm PT
The closer science looks at "reality," the more counterintitive things become. For example:...

you should stick to writing fictional accounts of climbing, you know it better.
--


The thing is, Ed, when you toss out a bomb like that, you need to back it up with specifics. When the man said (about your own field), "if you think you understand it, you don't," how far does this go in bolstering your jab that the very science you study IS intuitive and makes perfect classical sense. And per you making sense per mind, look at this doosey you wrote:

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.


A logician would have a field day with that dud. The obvious conflation is that Ed is lumping both the objective and subjective worlds together, assuming that the means of knowing the objective is the very means of knowing the subjective - as though all of the folks doing the subjective adventures (including many scientists these days) never considered that, and learned the hard way that this is simply not so. At all.

But let me consider an intelligent response. This is a tricky one to unpack because it has more to do with a particular mindset than the subject matter itself. It always boils down to first assumptions.









jogill

climber
Colorado
Feb 9, 2018 - 08:18pm PT
So, there are no other definitions of objective experience?


It's understandable if you fail to reply. That's OK.
Ed Hartouni

Trad climber
Livermore, CA
Feb 9, 2018 - 08:27pm PT
my comment had to do with the poor history you recounted... which you got very wrong. Maybe you watched a movie to get your facts on this... I believe that most scientists respected Einstein in 1915, he had made major progress in physics ten years earlier. Tesla was not a major scientists. Eddington was, and that expedition wasn't the only one to attempt to observe the Sun bend light. Maybe you could tell us which edition of which newspaper had that headline... it wasn't the NYTimes or the Times of London. But it wasn't the only test of general relativity either. Nothing was dropped at the Trinity site, except the pieces of paper that Fermi used to estimate the yield (the test was a tower shot, rather famously documented).

then you devolve into gibberish, maybe you could translate this: "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"

And I have no doubt that you are confused by "modern" physics (which began about 100 years ago, so perhaps we should retire that particular assignment).

I have no doubt that you will wander off on some other discussion and not reply at all. You do that frequently.

zBrown

Ice climber
Feb 9, 2018 - 08:41pm PT
OK roughly 340 more to go until 20,000

Is there going to be a party?

I am anticipating, though I'm not sure it will fly with the legal eagles, packing up the whole kit and ka_boodle and sending it off to IBM Watson for a final determination if it hasn't been resolved by then.

Has anybody, besides me, wondered why Cincinnati Milacron didn't develop a competitor to Watson, say maybe called Sherlock?

Elementary my dears.

[Click to View YouTube Video]

"It's a clean machine"
-Penny Lane


jstan

climber
Feb 9, 2018 - 08:43pm PT
Righto jstan (back a ways). It's very hard to follow this.

Several years ago I decided there was no following this. People here were focussed entirely on getting others to accept their personal subjective feelings as being certainly true. An absurd proposition. Certainty has never existed, Then came the admission that some posts were intended only to create reactions. In the final analysis the entire thread became something other than a search for how things really work. It is just an expression of unexamined ego. I thought, and said, this was bad. Why bad? People with real ability and specific knowledge were wasting their valuable time. That IS what bad is.

All of that is obvious. I am moved to post here by eeyonkee’s post.
I'm inclined to believe that feelings and awareness fall under the same umbrella.

Here is a possibility. I have argued awareness exists because while following our Prime Directive we exist in a stream of time. And consciousness forms a WEIGHT we carry because we can affect our outcome.

Let me ask whether FEELINGS are not a result of the absence of certainty as to which alternative action best assures our survival? Sort of a third proposition added to the two I have already advanced.

On another topic.
During the Thomas fire another thread caused me to watch videos of climbing falls. A personal story:

My father fell head first from a roof and wound up for several years in a Stryker frame. They drilled a hole in the top of his skull, put in an expansion bolt amd stretched him out in a frame that could be easily rotated on its axis. His bowel movements were possible only using a long handled spoon.

In those videos I see people taking chances only because other people are taking chances and under the assumption anything bought in a store will make everything good. Culturally we have created a monstrousity. Do we intend to live with this?

jogill

climber
Colorado
Feb 9, 2018 - 09:08pm PT
^^^ I've thought about this and mentioned it before. During the early to mid 1950s risk-taking was not nearly as pronounced as it has become the last few decades. So many soldiers and others died in WWII and the Korean Police Action that to foolishly taunt fate for no societal reason seemed, for most, ridiculous. At least that's what I remember being the case. Not to say there were not a few who ventured out to throw the dice.
eeyonkee

Trad climber
Golden, CO
Feb 9, 2018 - 10:26pm PT
jstan, regarding your next to last post, based on my understanding of evolution and genetics, I would say that the Prime Directive is not SURVIVAL but fecundity.
Jan

Mountain climber
Colorado & Nepal
Feb 9, 2018 - 10:33pm PT
Why not both? One has to at least survive until they are able to reproduce. After that it doesn't matter so much, especially for males. Females need to hang around longer to take care of the helpless young. Designwise, we were all meant to survive only until around 50 anyway.
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Feb 9, 2018 - 10:43pm PT
Actually these bodies are not designed to deteriorate once they reach maturity. And they are incredibly tolerant of insults to their integrity. It takes a lot of poisoning of our air, water, food, electromagnetic radiation, combined with spiritual attacks to overcome our immune systems and convince us to go into agreement with succumbing.
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Feb 9, 2018 - 11:20pm PT
It seems to me that emotions are properties of awareness on a gradient scale from
apathy to grief, fear, anger, antagonism, boredom, conservative, up to enthusiasm
It may be possible to associate each of these with specific mental frequencies related to the discussion on the levels of awareness. If the different emotions are associated with frequencies, that's not something I know about, but seems likely to me
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Feb 10, 2018 - 03:16pm PT
Clearly the question, 'What is "Mind?"', is an interesting topic to think about.

So do you control your mind or does it control you?

Can you turn off your mind and stop thinking?

Can you be fully aware in present time without having to think?

Does your mind enhance awareness or does it get in the way of awareness?

Are you your mind?

Or are you simply possessed by it?

Do love, beauty, joy, and creativity arise as properties of the mind or from somewhere beyond the mind?

eeyonkee

Trad climber
Golden, CO
Feb 10, 2018 - 05:25pm PT
Jan, in response to your last question, I would emphasize reproduction because of how life must have started out. Somehow, at a particular point in time, the replication process involving the DNA molecule started on earth. We don't know a lot of things about it's earliest stages, but once the replicators came on the world stage, it led to a couple of billion years of unicellular life followed by another billion of mixed unicellular and multicellular life leading, on one branch to humans and human mind.

When you're a replicator (as opposed to a jet), your success is a function of your relative numbers in future generations. It is in this sense that I suggest that fecundity is the prime directive. By the way, we are not replicators; our genes are. We are vehicles built by replicators to help them replicate (little rascals).
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Feb 10, 2018 - 06:51pm PT
"Do love, beauty, joy, and creativity arise as properties of the mind or from somewhere beyond the mind?"

mind is responsible for turning basal facts into notions such as love beauty and joy

creativity stretches out toward an actions to the point that I would disagree on a point but obviously its recognition is based on a particular state of mind

I should probably switch this part of the discussion to the other thread...
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Feb 10, 2018 - 07:45pm PT
ive never come across a good analysis of creativity

You've just put your finger on the key problem with artificial intelligence.

To the extent that we can identify and chart out a thought process, we can replicate it in computing hardware/software.

And AI systems can very quickly restructure and reorganize thought processes in random/quasi-creative ways.

However AI systems will not and can not do original creative thought. That requires creative consciousness...preferably and optimally unencumbered by thinking...

Some members of the AI community fail to see the humor in a couple of my comments on the subject:

AI is what you study when you lack your own.

Artificial Intelligence ... just add water ...

This is the limiting problem and the huge risk that Elon Musk warns against about AI and the drive towards Tranhumanism.

The Transhumanists lack creative intelligence and are trying to entrap the human race in a state of robotic slavery. In this enslaved state, the creative intelligence will be entrapped as an energy source and nothing else.

This is why in the The Matrix movie, we see Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) holding up a battery and telling Neo that this is what the human race has been turned into within the Matrix.

jstan

climber
Feb 10, 2018 - 08:13pm PT
Expect nothing new here, but bear with me.

In pursuit of our ultimate goal the brain integrates past experiences(threats), recent problems, and it attempts the earliest possible warning. A climber who has had one or more bad falls, particularly recent ones, is going to behave differently( more cautiously). This processing goes through at a logical level. The integrative function actually can go through below the logical level.

An example. When I started on statins I began to run into hallucinations upon awakening in a dark room. The brain goes through the list of possible dangers and presented clear visual images and a very strong feeling that there was someone in the room. It will do anything to provide an early warning. Logically of course I knew the whole thing was artificial. Vision itself is apparently far more artificial than we think, As I understand it,the optic nerve intersects the retina right in the center of the visual field of view. We are blind there but the eye constantly rasters and then uses those images to construct an interpolated image in the center of the field of view. In the interest of immediacy some part of this post processing goes on right in the nerve pathways and is already completed before reaching the larger neural structures.

Don't always believe what you see. Even our courts have begun to realize this. Evolution sometimes has no choice but to cut a few corners. Computer programmers do the same thing, Quite simply, this is that with which we have to work.
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Feb 10, 2018 - 08:37pm PT
jstan, i think that is exactly what we are trying to discuss on the 'consciousness' thread. All our senses work sort of that same way, sensing complex electromagnetic wave forms, transmitting them to the brain as electrical signals via the nervous system, where the brain performs Fourier transforms to create holographic images viewed by conscious awareness via the mind. Much of this mental imagery is dubbed in to fill in the blanks, as our five senses are not adequate to populate the level of detail that we view as our improperly assumed 'reality'. This works sort of ok in familiar territory and people are fiercely adamant about how solid that reality is, but it goes all wonky when faced with unfamiliar domains of perception ... a phenomena that pilots inadequately slang as 'vertigo'

I still have pretty 'clear' memories of my first skydive with a static line out of a Cessna 185 at Livermore airport on November 12, 1966 ... particularly how my mind was completely unable to process the sensory inputs ... even though by that time I had experienced a number of long leader falls
jstan

climber
Feb 10, 2018 - 09:02pm PT
TC:
The vertigo with which I am very familiar comes about because when I was a fish nerves got all jammed into what is now the inner ear. The output from the balance function there is what allows us to fix our sight on an external point even when tilting our heads back. When the balance signal gets corrupted by disease the pointing of the eye goes bonkers. But yes, I find thinking about how we actually work is fascinating. It is not as simple as we generally assume, But there is no evidence pointing to a magic hand,
TomCochrane

Trad climber
Cascade Mountains and Monterey Bay
Feb 10, 2018 - 09:24pm PT
Yes, the proper use of the term 'vertigo' has to do with signals from the inner ear getting confused in the brain. Pilots use the term for want of a better one to describe situations such as flying in clouds or at night over the ocean when normal visual references get fooled. A pilot can be logically convinced of flying straight and level, while actually entering into a 'death spiral', even though the inner ear correlates with the turn and bank indicator instrument to say all is fine until it's too late ...

The FAA has a portable flight simulator called The Vertigon designed to fool pilots in just this manner unless you pay careful attention to all the instruments. I have a little cert in my log book that says I passed it fine.
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