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jogill
climber
Colorado
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The question remains as to the meaning of meditative or dreaming experiences. They seem so real at times, but are they simply shows put on by the brain? If they lie outside present science are they aspects of a deeper reality or merely curiosities? At this time, to assert they are aspects of reality requires belief beyond objective evidence.
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WBraun
climber
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At this time, to assert they are aspects of reality requires belief beyond objective evidence.
That's mental speculation and NOT science.
You should do the actual experiment like a real scientist.
Do the real actual meditative process, not just make useless statements like the mental speculators and fruitloops.
The process may actually take several lifetimes for certain individuals.
Some have done it in one second .......
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Werner:
My question points out that "a complex bucket of figurative bolts" can achieve equal or better performance than an entity who benefits from the comfy feeling they have some weird undefined advantage of being human.
When the bolts outperform the weird entity to which you feel such kinship, your question should instead be
How did evolution mess up? If you address that question we can have a useful discussion.
The way I understand it, what happened was those entities you refer to, that benefited from comfy feelings, learned how to construct algorithms that formalized they way they sometimes thought when they did mathematics. Interestingly enough, one of the principal motivations to formalize this, was to show that Hilbert was wrong about the nature of mathematics. It turned out that their idea was successful to show Hilbert was wrong, but after that modern technology developed by the entities created machines that were better at executing the algorithms than the entities themselves. Money, for the entities that developed the tech, was a big motivation.
Does this mean evolution messed up? I only ask because I would like to have a useful discussion.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 1, 2018 - 06:22pm PT
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The question remains as to the meaning of meditative or dreaming experiences. They seem so real at times, but are they simply shows put on by the brain? If they lie outside present science are they aspects of a deeper reality or merely curiosities? At this time, to assert they are aspects of reality requires belief beyond objective evidence.
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I have to wonder what you mean by the last sentence. You have on many occasions mentioned your dreaming experiences, lucid and otherwise, and I never got the feeling you questioned whether or not you "really" had those dreams. So I don't question that you really had the experiences you have described. If you are wondering if the dreams themselves were "real," what is the metric or criteria for "real?" Are the dreams themselves physical objects or phenomenon (seems doubtful), or perhaps part of a "deeper reality" in which the physical words is embedded?
I encourage others to take a crack at this one.
Per meditation and dreaming. In my experience, dreams are about the content of the dream, and the ontological nature of the subject who is aware (in some sense) of and remembers dreaming. Meditation also starts with content, but eventually ends up as a 1st person investigation into the nature of who is meditating, BEFORE identity and content and interpretation begin. What that is, or who we are at this depth is widely said to be ungraspable in the sense that we can get hold of an external object or phenomenon.
The only metaphor I can think of in this regards comes from a physics friend who says there is no "thing" that is a photon which has the qualities of luminosity/radiation, there is simply luminosity/ radiation. In meditation, there is no fixed, stand-alone "I" which IS aware, there is just awareness, and it has no qualities without reference to content.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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If you are wondering if the dreams themselves were "real," what is the metric or criteria for "real?"
No wondering on my part. The "dreams" were fabrications of the brain without external stimuli. Is "empty awareness" this kind of fabrication of the brain as well, before the assemblage of the "I"? Can you have awareness without any brain activity?
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jstan
climber
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If you address that question we can have a useful discussion.
What makes a discussion "useful". I suggest this proposition. It is pretty well understood that humans are less than error free. That's why the scientific process requires experiments be repeated and by different people. We discuss our thinking with others as a form of error checking. The discussion is successful when questions are framed in new ways or new data is presented leading participants to have changed ways of looking at questions. Frankly, expecting the truth to be established is a standard so high it is rarely reached and so is seldom worth attempting.
When I asked if evolution had not messed up was an attempt simply to reframe the question. It worked in that Werner subsequently revealed the assumptions he was following that forced his position to be as he stated. That made the device I used, "successful". Now one can say with some basis, we and nature use the same method to develop new things.
It is called trying. Every R&D project on which I have worked tried several different approaches to solve problems. In my case I did this for perhaps a few years. Nature took billions of years to develop us. Nature used a property all processes share. Variability. It has the time to do it this way.
I had hoped Werner would retreat to the obvious to challenge me. Our computers are not even in a league to compete with our neural system. How so? The speed with which we can play chess was not even a design criteria for our development. Very high in the list of performance specification for the brain was the requirement that it could consume only milliwatts of energy and it must be attached to a transporter that could, on a second's notice, move at fifteen miles per hour over a distance of a few hundred meters. Long enough to get to a tree. I still wonder whether the loss of our prominent canine teeth was really a good idea.
Asking questions in new ways is key.
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WBraun
climber
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The computer must ultimately be turned ON which can be done by any complete simpleton.
It was consciousness itself that ultimately designed the machine and consciousness itself that turns it on and off ultimately and consciousness itself that programmed the firmware.
A forklift can lift what no mortal human can but the mortal human is still needed to operate the machine which is only an extension of one's arms to lift an object.
The creation of any material machine is still under the jurisdiction of the superior antimaterial consciousness which is never material and never dies nor is it ever destroyed.
Consciousness manipulates the material elements & energies to mold them into whatever one desires.
But human is never ultimately the owner of anything material.
The individual self (you) is none other than consciousness (soul, atma) and survives beyond the dissolution of the material body.
Modern mankind has not solved the four defects of birth, death, disease and old age with all their machines and science.
Thus all their machines are all ultimately useless ......
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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One of my old roommates, from my graduate school days, wrote a nice expository article about the mathematics behind the way neural nets learn how to recognize patterns. It's a bit technical and assumes a certain mathematical sophistication, but it's clear and relatively simple, considering the rigor. Anyways, it's not meant to weigh in on the "What is "Mind?"" debate, but I post it here in case anyone is interested. One thing that makes the machine learning process sound oddly human has to do with something Dave said at the end: "Of course, a net is only as good as the data that we use to train it. Any biases that appear in the training data will be built into the net and influence any decisions that the net makes."
http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2018-03
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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actually from the stand point of using neural nets (dating back to the 1980s) I've always found that this criticism:
"The gradient descent algorithm finds nearly optimal weights and biases without human intervention. This means that we lose the ability to describe with any certainty the role of any particular neuron in the net."
was the more difficult one. Bias can be measured and quantified using a number of well developed techniques, explaining precision requires a quantitative analysis of how your optimization works, and we have yet (after now 30 years) to describe the neural net optimization process.
But I believe it is possible to provide an explanation.
As for the qualifier: 'Anyways, it's not meant to weigh in on the "What is "Mind?" debate...' I think this is being disingenuous. Neural net architectures are natural abstractions from biological systems, and the very systems we associate with brain, and thus provide a possible physical process for Mind. That is a long suppositional chain, but starting with the understanding of the "mathematical" process of neural networks provides a path to understanding more and more complex organizations of neural networks.
The lack of quantitative understanding describing "the ability to describe with any certainty the role of any particular neuron in the net" is a part of story. Many statistical mechanics ideas have been applied to understanding networks, and these ideas may yet provide a comprehensive explanation of their function.
see for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_theory
follow that to where ever you like, but pertinent to this post:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_neural_network
where the neural network architecture was known as early as the late 1800s, and the computational capability of neural networks known since the late 1950s.
The abstraction of biological neural networks to the "artificial" (ANN) variety is the subject of this article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network
for which the criticism is also voiced:
A central claim of ANNs is therefore that it embodies some new and powerful general principle for processing information. Unfortunately, these general principles are ill-defined. It is often claimed that they are emergent from the network itself. This allows simple statistical association (the basic function of artificial neural networks) to be described as learning or recognition.
(I added the emphasis) interestingly, our propensity to believe the results may come from our own "theory of mind" from which we "recognize" the ANN as going through the same mental process that we do ourselves. We are convinced through analogy.
Mathematicians were cured of falling into this trap by the insistence of Hilbert that rigorous proof was the only basis of proof, and that analogies with physical systems were insufficient to provide proof.
Hopefully the mathematicians will save us.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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I think this is being disingenuous
The extent to which the mathematics in that article can characterize human thinking is not obvious to me at all. It's an extrapolation based on a very simple model for brain functioning. You can use it to build a machine that's "better" than previous ones at pattern recognition. To conclude much more than that, in my opinion, would be disingenuous.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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You can use it to build a machine that's "better" than previous ones at pattern recognition. To conclude much more than that, in my opinion, would be disingenuous.
Or would it be induction?
It is nice to see two humans putting their best foot forward while implying that each may be disingenuous. Or so suggests my neural net.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Man,
Are you guys still at it? This thread took hours every day just to read and understand. I'm worried that you are all getting pale and Vitamin D deficient.
I am off to Florida for cross country thermal flying training in a couple of days. I'll be flying for a month straight. They have unreal conditions, but you have to tow to get airborne.
I went to a terrific spot west of Mexico City in December. There were a zillion wings in the sky. Maybe two hang gliders. Paragliders are now so good that they have really killed hang gliding. Many of them have switched. We can fly at a slower speed, which allows us to core the center of a thermal, where you get screaming lift. You don't need a truck to haul your wing around, either. It backs up into your harness like a backpack. It is pretty wild, but peaceful as well. The air can get really rowdy in thermic air, tossing you around. Learning pitch and roll control takes a while to learn.
Here is a short video of a flight I did just after getting my rating. You guys can log off, get in touch with me, and I'll spill the beta on how to learn to do this. There is a LOT to it. Skydiving didn't help much, other than being comfortable in the air.
This thread will still be here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdEE-B-ABJs
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Lennox
climber
in the land of the blind
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Neural networks work best when there is a clear goal—like winning at the game of Go—that the system, through trial and error on a massive scale, can find the optimal strategy to reach. Chitchat has no goal.
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-amazon-alexa-prize/
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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just got back from Cochise last week, so it's not all studying to post to this thread
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I think you might have a different opinion about ANNs after playing with them and seeing them perform. Quite startling behavior in some cases... that's my experience with them at least.
As for whether or not such things pertain to "Mind" it is at least an interesting starting point. Introspection leads you down the rabbit hole (in my opinion) and you come up with silly analogies like kissing your own lips and such. The sort of things that amused us when we were in high school puzzling out the same questions.
The BNNs are "real time" architectures which are much more complex to understand, though accessible through many of the network analysis techniques. Mathematics (but maybe I really mean physics, if you mathematicians don't feel up to or aren't that interested in the challenge) will describe these systems, it hasn't happened yet, but when it does we can see how to extend them both to make better "artificial" networks as well as understanding the "natural" ones.
Just my opinion, of course.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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This thread took hours every day just to read and understand.
You long ago achieved emeritus status, BASE104. Enjoy retirement from the "What is 'Mind'?" Diversity.
Looking pale is a relative thing.
The cabin was built by a pilot. The guy who took the snap had just been in Patagonia. I felt a bit pale after hearing his stories.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Nice flying, Mark!
Hopefully the mathematicians will save us
Mathematics (but maybe I really mean physics, if you mathematicians don't feel up to or aren't that interested in the challenge) will describe these systems
Another possibility is bypassing all this with non-numerical Wizardly woo.
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WBraun
climber
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Dry speculative knowledge is all what gross materialists ever achieve ......
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