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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 11, 2018 - 08:40pm PT
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Since the study of mind must rely heavily upon studies of the brain, the analysis of data relating thereto is of prime importance. In general, in science a huge amount of data is accumulating, in some cases awaiting analysis that has yet to be perfected.
I've been reading about the world's most successful mathematician - in monetary terms. Jim Simons, who is 79, received his PhD from Berkeley at the age of 23, and over the years has made significant contributions in his specialties. But in the 1960s he began investing and later created a hedge fund (Renaissance Technologies) that utilized algorithms he has devised to great advantage. Today, he is worth 18.5 billion dollars.
He endows the Flatiron institute in NYC, devoted entirely to computational science - the development and applications of algorithms to analyze enormous caches of scientific data. Scientists that produce this data are generally not professional programmers, and some even give their grad students this assignment. Even if, by chance, the student is an effective programmer, they leave and frequently leave behind piles of figures for other hapless students to deal with.
It's unfortunate that sometimes a brilliant experiment produces significant heaps of data that are inadequately interpreted. Simon's group aims to help top researchers by supplying programmed algorithms that can detect the faintest patterns - those hitherto unrecognizable. This might benefit research into the paranormal, although those studies might be a very low priority.
Simon was surprised to learn that astronomers cannot confirm the accuracy of their most complex models. The many-fold calculations that are required all arise in programmed algorithms that make simplifications. Solutions to fundamental equations never occur, only approximations made by different algorithms, with results that could vary significantly. This reminded me of a standard mathematical ploy: approximating non-linear math by linear math.
Simons funds these efforts to the tune of 75-80 million dollars each year - chicken feed for this mathematical tycoon. He comments that more and more private donations and foundations fund research, whereas in the past research, particularly basic research, was mostly supported by federal grants. This can be a sword having two edges.
Regarding neuronal processes, one of the promising programs, MountainSort, improves the parsing of brain-electrode recordings, in part by automating the interpretation of data. The program can tell, before a rat moves, whether it is thinking of turning left or right.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 11, 2018 - 11:05pm PT
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Interesting thing about EEG and qEEG research is that you start with elecrterochemical brain artifact, but what you capture in the machine is a digitized extraction of what is not digital - the brain. Then the signal is organized into bandwidths, amplitudes and so forth, none of which are inherently IN the brain. Just a metric to quantify what IS going on, and it allows us to work with it in surprisingly effective ways.
I've always wondered what a really good programmer could do in wrangling the data in ways that would possibly disclose some embedded harmonic in the matrix. Harmonics are vibrating energy, like hammered strings in a piano. Currently we have phase and coherence and some other patterns but these I suspect are just scratching the surface. Both have been around for decades.
Another thing is that normal EEGs only record few channels derived from specific spots on the cortex. A qEEG derives from a global activation pattern, derived from (top end) high-density 256-channel EEG sensor arrays, but 35 channels (electrodes) are probably sufficient to map the patterns.
My sense of it is this is overkill with the focus on capture as opposed to seeking other ways to interpret the data from a 35 channel rig. So instead of pasting on even more electrodes, I think future breakthroughs will come by way of advances in interpretation, which breaks down to creative organizing though novel programs. Again, I'm convinced that there are many possible patterns at play here, but the tricky part is you don't know what you are looking for.
Bottom line is what you are doing is trying to extract meaningful patterns from the ongoing tumult of electrical activity in the brain. This global electrical activity is built from the firing of individual neurons. A single neuron responds to a stimulus in an all or nothing manner—if the stimulus reaches a certain threshold, the neuron “fires” an electrical signal. Groups of neurons firing in a coordinated way create a local electrical field that is in itself a signal that can vary in pattern. These local field potentials (LFPs) have been a target of research, but that research has largely been limited to detecting coherence patterns.
I say look for other patterns. They must be there.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 12, 2018 - 09:50pm PT
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What do you see? What is it you desire? Ask the Djinn.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 12, 2018 - 10:17pm PT
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A single neuron responds to a stimulus in an all or nothing manner—if the stimulus reaches a certain threshold, the neuron “fires” an electrical signal.
actually there is a period, initiated by the neuron having "fired", when the neuron will not fire
this is an important attribute which makes the "medium" of the neural net non-linear. interestingly, the identical properties work e.g. in your heart to propagate a wave of contraction from the pace maker point.
the period of "repose" organizes the network behavior in time.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 13, 2018 - 09:01am PT
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Per what Ed just said, artificial neuron work also wrangles with the non-linear aspects just mentioned. From a recent article:
Sigmoid Function
Well, this looks smooth and “step function like.” What are the benefits of this? First, it is nonlinear in nature. Combinations of this function are also nonlinear. Now we can stack layers. What about non binary activations? Yes, that too. It will give an analog activation unlike step function. It has a smooth gradient as well."
But this is just fiddling around with activation patterns. The interesting work, for me, is in watching the interface and mutual feed-back activity between brain and subjectivity/mind.
One of the most interesting thing is to discover for yourself that brain states and mind states are not identical. This is most obvious during neurofeedback protocols involving "entrainment," where the brain, by way of reward signals (usually sound), carefully programmed micro LED lights ("light stim"), mag stimulation, and some other procedures too complicated to explain, wheedle the brain into activation patterns, usually either increasing activity or coherence in certain band widths, or inhibiting activation by either flattening out neural spiking or supressing activation across all bandwidths, essentially dialing off all the white noise in consciousness.
Early on people thought, Hey, let's entrain a person's brain into the same patterns of the Zen master, except people's brains were not accustomed to that much Delta (slow wave) activity and some seizured. Attempts to treat ADD patients by increasing Beta were less successful than supressing the flood of Theta waves common to this disorder. Increasing Alpha usually increases expansiveness but someone not accustomed to this tends to space out, rather than maintain a relaxed focus.
What's more, suppressing activation usually brought better results than trying to boost a particular bandwidth.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 13, 2018 - 02:32pm PT
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Sigmoid function: Well, this looks smooth and “step function like.” What are the benefits of this? First, it is nonlinear in nature. Combinations of this function are also nonlinear
Seems a little curious, but what do I know? "Step function like" is not generally smooth, having jumps. Nonlinear is good? Usually linear is easier to deal with, but the particulars here are missing, so I'm probably wrong. The Sigmoid function is simply a non-linear S-shaped function of a real variable, and it is smooth by definition.
I tend to think in terms of well-defined linear functions and functionals, and not in less specialized notions of linear and non-linear processes.
Pay no attention. Just rambling.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 13, 2018 - 07:46pm PT
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nonlinear is required for memory...
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chainsaw
Trad climber
CA
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Feb 13, 2018 - 07:59pm PT
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Approaching 20,000 replies and counting! Cheers to you John! Bump this thread.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 19, 2018 - 03:49pm PT
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^^^ Is there an ongoing discussion on the site about this? Can't seem to find it. Maybe it's necessary to log in to get one started.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 19, 2018 - 05:47pm PT
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I think that site is just a way to get the pros and cons of some seminal issues in mind studies.
Carl Weinberg, who runs the site, got my attention with the following ideas from a 2017 paper:
In my view, to ask how the brain creates consciousness is like asking how an abacus creates math. The brain has its own context which has little to do with us. We use the brain, and our awareness is limited and shaped by its function, but there is no scientific reason to suppose that any part of the brain even knows that we exist.
Consciousness is not like other things. To study it we must 'break the fourth wall' so that our own direct experience is featured in that experience's model of itself. It turns out that this is a trick that not everyone can do, or wants to do. This has led to the remarkable idea that you don't need to do so at all.
And this:
As others have mentioned, the idea of consciousness being an ‘illusion’ is a non-starter. The question that we should ask is why some people are not able to see what should be a shockingly obvious problem with this hypothesis:
Illusions can only be a comparison between conscious experiences in which one experience is judged to seem falsely similar to another experience. A non-experience cannot seem similar to an experience. Non-experiences can’t ‘seem’ in the first place.
The notion that mind-blindness is rampant in the scientific community should not be surprising, since those who are successful in scientific fields would naturally tend to be systemizing, tough-minded thinkers with ‘thick boundaries’. What has not been appreciated fully is how this demographic skew translates into a feedback loop of unintended ideological contamination.
That’s not all though. The really interesting part is how closely the divide between tough minded functionalists and tender minded mystics parallels the explanatory gap itself: The distance between physical forms and their logical functions and aesthetic qualities such as color, flavor, and feeling.
In my understanding, the reason that many highly intelligent thinkers fail so completely at apprehending consciousness is the same reason why matter in general, or a brain in particular fails completely at supporting a plausible origin of consciousness. The reason boils down to Occam’s Razor. Brains and bodies could logically do everything that they do without any sort of ‘signals’ or ‘impressions’ at all. A computer does not need a monitor to see the internet, nor does it need graphics or geometry. In a computer the microelectronic states themselves are all that are required to complete a mindless circuit of mechanical inputs and outputs.
In our hyper-masculine, Western-analytical tradition, we have lost the necessary empathy to appreciate the significance of aesthetic qualities. We take them for granted, giving them names like ‘emergent properties’ and seeing them as temporarily unexpected gifts of ‘complexity’. This is not the case. Those of us who are not focused on the rigid end of the spectrum of consciousness can see that complexity need not lead to anything remotely like a feeling or flavor. To presume that it could is truly magical thinking. What the Western materialist sees is the reflection of his own blind spot - an anti-religious religiosity which has forgotten that all notions of objectivity ultimately emerge from a consensus of subjective thoughts. When that consensus feeds back on itself, the pretense of objectivity becomes its own greatest obstacle.
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There's some jive in this writing (IMO) but also some interesting ideas. Like most of this stuff, I take what I like and leave the rest.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 19, 2018 - 08:47pm PT
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Ford motor company created the ford motor car.
The driver of the ford car is Not the car!
The driver of the human body is also not the body, nor the mind, nor the brain. Etc
Yet the fool scientists still guess the driver of the material body is the body itself.
The foolish gross materialists think they are their material body.
That is the same as saying the driver of the car is the car.
The gross materialists are always insane ........
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 20, 2018 - 09:19am PT
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From that site/paper previously quoted, these bits seem, on review, most interesting:
Physical phenomena include 'formations' but there is nothing physical which could or should transform them 'in' to anything other than different formations.
Alfred Korzybski famously said "the map is not the territory". To the extent that this is true, it should be understood to reveal that "information is not physics". If there is a mapping function, there is no reason to consider it part of physics, and in fact that convention comes from an assumption of physicalism rather than a discovery of physical maps. There is no valid hypothesis of a physical mechanism for one elemental phenomenon or event to begin to signify another map.
The principle of causal closure in physics, would, if true, prevent any sort of ‘input’ or receptivity. Physical activity reduces to chains of causality which are defined by spatiotemporal succession. A physical effect differs from a physical cause only in that the cause precedes the effect. Physical causality therefore is a succession of effects or outputs acting on each other, so that any sense of inputs or effect on physics would be an anthropomorphic projection.
In Bateson’s paper, he says “In fact, what we mean by information—the elementary unit of information—is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We may even say that the question is already implicit in them.” In my view this ‘readiness’ is a projection of non-physical properties of sense and sense making onto physical structures and functions. If there are implicit ‘questions’ on the neural level, I suggest that they cannot be ‘in them’ physically, and the ‘interiority’ of the nervous system or other information processors is figurative rather than literal.
The brain has its own context which has little to do with us. We use the brain, and our awareness is limited and shaped by its function, but there is no scientific reason to suppose that any part of the brain even knows that we exist.
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My (JL) sense of the above is, when he mentions the defense of physicalism, he is basically saying that from a physicalist or functionalists POV, the issue is not the relationship between brain and mind, but rather a causal exercise to demonstrate how mind is an extension, an output, or product OF brain, whereby brain is fundamental or a priori to mind. The problem is not only that said “output” is not observable, but in the conjuring of the physical process we tend to ascribe attributes of mind to physical processes which are not there in any scientific (physical) sense. There is, according to this angle, no scientific reason to believe that the brain has any “knowledge” of mind (or “us”), or of its own processes, any more than a computer does. In making these attributions we are anthropomorphizing physical processes in a way – as Planc said ages ago – in which consciousness is already “postulated.” Strangely, this very POV leads to some being "mind blind," whereas, while mind is postulated in actual brain function, it is absent (in their descriptions) as a "real" phenomenon, the all and everything being physical processes alone.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 20, 2018 - 07:23pm PT
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I take what I like and leave the rest.
The Hunter and Gatherer lie deep inside us.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 20, 2018 - 09:40pm PT
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In my understanding, the reason that many highly intelligent thinkers fail so completely at apprehending consciousness is the same reason why matter in general, or a brain in particular fails completely at supporting a plausible origin of consciousness
To date, that is. So confident is he that all eternity bends to his belief.
The counterpart of scientism: believing that consciousness will never be shown to have a physical explanation.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 21, 2018 - 10:23am PT
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The counterpart of scientism: believing that consciousness will never be shown to have a physical explanation.
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I think that Searls point is that "physical explanations" are all that is ever needed to "understand" external objects and phenomenon, which have no experiential dimension, something that science has no history of ever having to account for. The notion is, I believe, that no matter how accurate a causal explanation can go, we will still be left with nothing more than physical (objective) parts which themselves - in part or collectively - will be "mind blind," that is, the subjective dimension will not be there. As the man said: “Physical phenomena include 'formations' but there is nothing physical which could or should transform them 'in' to anything other than different formations.”
This angle of thought is not a knock on science, but rather a serious look at what “physical explanation” actually means in terms of the brain “creating” mind out of whole cloth. It is an attempt to make sense of the common refrain that “there is no reason to believe that the brain cannot cause consciousness.”
Implicit in that claim is the idea that there IS a reason why this is possible, and the most common ones are complexity, etc. But if we look closely at any of the common “reasons,” we find no “reason” why physical structures, no matter how complex, fast, robust, etc. “could or should” beget anything other than complex, fast, robust physical formations. Seeing this, some have concluded that consciousness is an illusion - and we can hardly blame them for believing so.
The folks who really buckle down on this point go even deeper, trying to figure out what a “reason” actually means in this regards. We might say that mind emerges from brain, though there is no precedent in science, nor yet any conceivable process by which this might happen. The man quoted previously pointed out that attempts to do so already have consciousness postulated somewhere in the imagined process whereby matter becomes conscious - but this is metaphorical rather than literal. If you stand pat on a literal explanation, then you are squared off with the Hard problem, which I consider a trick question because it assumes that a strictly mechanical explanation IS possible.
My sense of this is that the sticking point here is our slavery to physical causation as the end all means of explaining all of reality. Alternatives simply swap out efficient physical causes for woo causes – but this is still being slave to causation.
Someday someone might come along who looks at the mind body challenge in different terms.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Feb 21, 2018 - 11:23am PT
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Someday someone might come along who looks at the mind body challenge in different terms
Yes. My guess is that this will come from the neuroscience side, but maybe not.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 21, 2018 - 03:08pm PT
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John, my guess is it will be someone steeped in all sides of the investigation. One thing seems certain: Understanding the relationship between brain/mind is a monumental and slippery task, and we have to wonder why, beyond the problems with complexity etc. Carl Weinberg was pivotal to me in pointing out part of the challenge. To consolidate my ramblings so far on this…
First, we have the fantastic advances in neuroscience and psychology which have gone far in describing and explaining the physical processes per the content of mind. That is hardly debatable.
What gets advanced here, a point that Weinberg is quick to question – is the belief that studying how our visual system works, say, or aspects of memory, is at the same time telling us something about being conscious, or in any way goes any distance is explaining how or why we have subjective experience, a personal point of view, and so forth.
What Weinberg points out is that there is no objective reason, nothing inherent in objective stirrings, that provides a reason or conceivable causal link to awareness and experience.
That is, objectively speaking, there is nothing inherent in either objective structures or complex objective systems that explains or denotes anything MORE than objective structures or complex objective systems themselves. What would it possibly be? “Emergence” is not an explanation and it denotes no causal efficacy whatsoever for objective processes to ever become anything else. In fact an “objective explanation” of any thing or phenomenon always seeks to avoid contamination from the subjective it now proposes to “explain.” So in this sense Weinberg is probably right to wonder what, exactly, is meant by an “objective explanation of subjectivity.”
Put differently, if a mode of inquiry is designed to eliminate subjectivity, it follows that any scientific explanation about brain processes is in fact a description of objective processes alone. If that description dove tailed into subjectivity, it would, by definition, no longer be objective. One could argue that no matter what we say here, that process (the objective becoming or birthing/causing the subjective) nevertheless happens, so Weinberg takes up that belief, looking to root out the incoherencies and blarney.
Two things Weinberg is good on making clear is A), his idea that objective descriptions are “mind blind,” insofar as subjectivity is nowhere to be found in objective physical processes. There’s only the physical . Second (B), he points out that in trying to work up the ladder of physical complexity, some are prone to anthropomorphize strictly physical functions by attributing subjective qualities such as knowing, understanding, and awareness to said functions, attributions which are figurative rather than literal (objective).
For example, returning to the light sensor in my back yard – it is easy to attribute the qualities of subjective awareness and “understanding” to a machine that is capable of responding to an input with an “intelligent” output or action. In this way, a Mars probe is said to be intelligent and to understand when it completes a given task, this despite the fact that it is subjectively dead inside, had no understanding or awareness about itself, about Mars, or about the sentient beings who designed it and who are monitoring it back on Earth.
What happens involves two things. First, subjectivity tends to be “explained” as a kind of step process, a phenomenon that is accrued through small, incremental objective steps that eventually “cause” full blown human subjectivity. Weinberg says, “Bollocks.” At any step along the way of objective functioning, all there is IS objective functioning. We merely project our own subjectivity onto a physical process devoid of subjectivity.
The second thing that happens, what Weinberg calls “mind blind,” is that some agree with the purely objective take and insist that this is all there is, that we “only imagine” or are given the impression that we have an actual subjective realm or awareness and experience when all of that is nothing more than objective functioning. This last belief is the easiest to debunk because it is so inherently ludicrous. Weinberg put it this way:
Illusions are not objective things, rather experiences. As such they can only be a comparison between conscious experiences in which one experience is judged to seem falsely similar to another experience. A non-experience cannot seem similar to an experience. Non-experiences can’t ‘seem’ in the first place.
On other words, consciousness is postulated in the mere presence of an illusion.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 21, 2018 - 06:13pm PT
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On other words, consciousness is postulated in the mere presence of an illusion.
Oh, the joys of rarefied discussion!
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No God
Mountain climber
MT
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Feb 22, 2018 - 01:47pm PT
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The original premise of this thread is where is goes off the rails in my mind. Mind, by definition, is awareness of the world and experience. that's it. processing information and a brain developed enough to understand a sense of place in the world. Largo is looking for something beyond the material mind, but that does not exist. You are looking for god in the brain and you will not find him. just neurons and thoughts arising from them.
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