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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 13, 2018 - 08:24am PT
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Like most of the challenges in nailing down mind,
An ambitious project when you can't tell where the nails are.
You will need to do some observation and measurement, form some hypotheses, and test them.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 13, 2018 - 09:18am PT
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My understanding of this, Ed, and what my friends were arguing over, in essence, was that when photons spontaneously emerge out of nothing, whatever equations are used do not refer to nothing, but rather to potentialities and the boiling in the quantum soup (which the equations equate with something). So the equations don't actually show photos spontaneously out of nothing, but out of something. But perhaps you have a much better way of phrasing this, though it's it seems unlikely that you should side with the nothing take of "where" the photos emerged. But I'm just guessing.
This is sort of a reverse take on the so-called "explanatory gap" between physical brain function and consciousness. If you were to take your advice and "shut up and calculate," said explanation would be limited to descriptions, by way of calculations of observable, physical processes. So no matter how diligent or complex the calculations, they will be limited to ... physical processes themselves.
Since subjectivity is not observable, there is "nothing" there to directly measure. We can attribute properties to what we cannot observe, and assign numerical values to said properties, but we are no longer directly measuring any physical thing or phenomenon, so our calculations are no longer based on physical properties themselves, or to the effects that the phenomenon of consciousness has on observable physical processes.
And bridging the "gap" is not a matter of collecting new data - we can easily see why. If we say that this gap is imaginary, and that mind is itself a physical process, then physical processes and mind have to be identical - that is, exactly the same. For this to be true, mind itself would have to be observable ... and so we see that the contention of "identity theory" (the subjective and objective are selfsame) is logically incoherent - as has been pointed out many times by many people.
The most progressive theories of mind coming from the science camp, from Information Theory to emergence (variously described) only occurred when people stopped calculating and started talking, or speculating. And all of these speculations derived from a phenomenon from which they could not directly pull a measurement. Assigning numerical values to that phenomenon (mind) neither makes mind itself observable or physical.
That's why, to me, the "explanatory gap" is a trick/bogus question because it assumes some future science will be able to pull a measurement directly off a phenomenon that is neither itself physical or observable. And when we insist that mind itself IS physical, we are left looking at the brain and not consciousness itself. This is almost certainly why physical models of consciousness don't "find" awareness and all the rest because it is simply "not there." "There" being something physical we can see and measure, or at any rate, we measure the physical by products or gravitational effects of what we cannot directly observe.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 13, 2018 - 09:31am PT
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jogill: Paul can clarify if an art work created by a painter need necessarily reflect a clear mental image at the outset, but might, at least initially, arise spontaneously from the subconscious. I admit, not being an artist I don't know what I am talking about!
Nobody does. It’s doubtful to me that Paul could clarify it. There are theories. (Look up “creativity” on Wiki; it’s a kind of joke.)
Your choice of the word “image” would seem to have some power behind it. Hillman (a contemporary devotee of Jung) says that everything psychological is based in some kind of image—it’s all imagery.
IMO, the search for “meaning” seems to be at the core of all art and creativity. Yet none of it can be articulated definitively. (Many artists I’m acquainted with loath historians’ and critics’ articulations of “artistic meaning.”)
Viktor Frankl (a neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor and the author of “Man’s Search for Meaning”) said: “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
The pursuit of happiness, according to Frankl, is not related to pleasure but to the discovery of what a person finds personally meaningful. Just what THAT is, is what all the conversations appear to be about here and elsewhere. People appear to need meaning in their lives. That’s what I see in art and in creative acts—a search for meaning through expression.
Closely observing reality, however, I’d suggest one cannot find long-lasting, personal meaning. No matter how we look, we see innumerable corridors of meaning that appear to go on forever.
Or, maybe they are simply images.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 13, 2018 - 09:36am PT
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our best physical theories side step the requirement that they have a one-to-one correspondence to nature.
Looking at Feynman's way of doing the calculation, which is highly graphical, and "intuitive" we have a tendency to ascribe those graphs to actual physical steps. It is important to keep in mind that they only represent a particular way of describing the calculation.
This way was so different from Schwinger's that when they got together they couldn't communicate. Others, like Tomonaga and Dyson were able to show how the two methods were equivalent.
Feynman's method was adopted because he was a charismatic speaker, and the graphs made it easy to discuss what was going on, at least apparently. One always came away from a talk by Feynman thinking they understood everything, only to run up on the shoals of ignorance attempting to apply that understanding after the fact.
Schwinger was not such a good story teller. Reading his papers (or listening to his talks) you would cruise along understanding everything, and realize that you didn't understand the particular "last step" bridging what he was talking about now in the logical sequence from what as just presented.
Working through Schwinger's papers could be very frustrating since filling in that gap could produce a lot of work, somehow Schwinger could make the jump.
This wasn't a problem with Feynman, he didn't write papers.
The confusion with what the Feynman diagram "means" is similar to what you are discussing regarding "mind," you want a story, and you correctly (in my opinion) assert that science can't give such a story. That is very different from the assertion that science cannot be used to "understand mind."
Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) is one of our most precise scientific theories, even though a carload of geeks can get riled up about creation and destruction operators and the "true" meaning of the vacuum.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Apr 13, 2018 - 11:06am PT
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...subjectivity is not observable...
...Mind is physical...
The first is a thin veil to hide behind.
As for the second, yes, subjective experience isn't physical, but that doesn't mean it isn't emergent from physical processes and only manifest locally, in real-time with said processes, i.e. no meat, no mind. Is there an explanatory gap in how brains manifest mind via physical processes? Sure, and that's ok, but to me that dependent, local emergence theory is way more likely than various panpsychic propositions or any other proposition that seeks to uncouple brains and minds.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 13, 2018 - 11:10am PT
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You might be interested in comparing my latest image with the previous gold-colored image. They are both over the same region of the complex plane, and both arise from the same rather complicated process using the same functions - with the second image due to a slight change of an internal parameter. That parameter is "1" in the gold image and "1/2" in the latest purple one. Interesting how that leads to a significant difference in the images.
Changing one's perspective by internally altering a thought slightly could produce significant effects in observed reality. Or not.
I always liked Feynman's little arrow vectors - I use them in an elementary setting all the time. Then I tell my computer: calculate!
(JL, don't get carried away with the notion of particles birthing from no-thing. That way lies madness.)
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 13, 2018 - 12:40pm PT
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Ed, I think science is essential in understanding mind, but I am within reason and logic to point out that scientific language is equations derived from measuring physical phenomenon, and in that sense, science rests on descriptions, not explanations. For physical reality, descriptions are, essentially, explanations because there is nothing else involved, nothing that beyond observable (or the physical effects thereof) physical phenomenon that needs to be accounted for. Ergo those descriptions (equations) can by definition never get past the physical brain. How could they? At some point you'd have to leave of measuring global activation patterns in the brain, say, and start providing measurements/equations of what you can't observe and of which there is no apparent physical effect thereof. Anyway you shake it, bridging the explanatory gap cannot be done by way of equations of what you cannot observer or measure. No one has the slightest idea how equations can get us there, so any bridging of the gap would, perforce, not be rendered in scientific language. If you believe otherwise, give us some idea how that could be so using standard scientific methods.
This is not to mystify mind in any way. It is only a mystification if your first assumption is that reality, to be real, must meet the criteria of numerical representation derived from observing physical phenomenon.
A common dodge here is to demand to know "what" mind actually is so we can direct our measuring to that end. But this is logically incoherent because the language is misleading.
Asking "what" implies some thing or phenomenon that we can observe or at any rate detect in space and time. Barring such a "thing," we end up with Dennett's Folly - since we cannot observe and directly measure mind itself, "we only think we are conscious." Of course this is a logical howler for reasons previously stated.
Emergence is, of course, not an explanation or description in the scientific sense of the word, because whatever emerges is not directly observable or open to physical measurements.
When you say that science can "understand" mind, my take on this is that scientific understanding boils down to either a physical theory or equations derived from measuring a physical phenomenon. That rules out emergence, Information Theory, etc. No one I've ever heard or read has the slightest idea how measurements are supposed to relate to mind in the same way they relate to quarks or white stars of gravity or (fill in the blank).
This problem is dealt with in interesting and practical ways in the subjective adventures, which generally leave off trying to explain consciousness - which is said to be "ungraspable" as a thing or object - and sticks with descriptions. This inevitably leads to observation and understanding of impermanence, that no thing or object has an independent existence apart from the rest of reality. No thing or phenomenon exists apart from anything objective OR subjective. The end game of this is that reality is ephemera, and that the stuff we sense is solid is only provisionally so, and the source which the car full of geeks argues about is itself nothing at all.
The real question might be about overcoming a dualistic view of reality. Perhaps it is all right there to be sorted out. From the Big Bang, in which current "reality" spontaneously emerged from nothing, to photons spontaneously "popping into existence from the void," to material takes on the same phenomenon, where the Big Bang emerged from an acorn of primordial condensed matter, to photons emerging from the boiling quantum field, to living to dying, to being here and not being here, nothing and something seem inextricably conjoined in one unborn dance. And neither nothing or something is so in any absolute, unchanging sense. To say that something is more fundamental than nothing is to revert to a dualistic perspective. It also lets us work with something in remarkable ways.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 13, 2018 - 12:58pm PT
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A common dodge here is to demand to know "what" mind actually is so we can direct our measuring to that end
That dodgy end being the title of this thread.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 13, 2018 - 01:51pm PT
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About 3 pounds.
edit:
or 1250 cc for adult male
and 1130 cc for female
Males need the extra help.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 13, 2018 - 02:49pm PT
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Just how big is this mind anyway?
Depends on whether it's open, but bounded. If it's closed, it's finite.
Whoops, drifted into topology there!
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Apr 13, 2018 - 04:17pm PT
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This inevitably leads to observation and understanding of impermanence, that no thing or object has an independent existence apart from the rest of reality. No thing or phenomenon exists apart from anything objective OR subjective. The end game of this is that reality is ephemera, and that the stuff we sense is solid is only provisionally so, and the source which the car full of geeks argues about is itself nothing at all.
You were doing ok until here and then you drove off the road which you generally do whenever you try to bring computer science and physics into the discussion.
The real question might be about overcoming a dualistic view of reality. Perhaps it is all right there to be sorted out. From the Big Bang, in which current "reality" spontaneously emerged from nothing, to photons spontaneously "popping into existence from the void," to material takes on the same phenomenon, where the Big Bang emerged from an acorn of primordial condensed matter, to photons emerging from the boiling quantum field, to living to dying, to being here and not being here, nothing and something seem inextricably conjoined in one unborn dance. And neither nothing or something is so in any absolute, unchanging sense. To say that something is more fundamental than nothing is to revert to a dualistic perspective. It also lets us work with something in remarkable ways.
And here, between something and nothing, you go completely off the rails again.
And as far as being able to do science of the mind, what happens when we can reliably pin brain states to subjective experiences - i.e. a brain state for red, or middle C? What should be said about such couplings?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 13, 2018 - 07:49pm PT
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Ed: One always came away from a talk by Feynman thinking they understood everything, only to run up on the shoals of ignorance attempting to apply that understanding after the fact.
I love this.
Healyje: what happens when we can reliably pin brain states to subjective experiences
You first must say what “states” are . . . you know, with constructs that can be measured.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 13, 2018 - 08:30pm PT
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The real question might be about overcoming a dualistic view of reality . . . nothing and something seem inextricably conjoined in one unborn dance
You might be happier taking that position at an ashram in India.
. . . to photons spontaneously "popping into existence from the void," to material takes on the same phenomenon, where the Big Bang emerged from an acorn of primordial condensed matter, to photons emerging from the boiling quantum field, to living to dying, to being here and not being here, nothing and something . . .
You project an unprecedented level of confusion. Get help.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 13, 2018 - 08:55pm PT
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When you say that science can "understand" mind, my take on this is that scientific understanding boils down to either a physical theory or equations derived from measuring a physical phenomenon. That rules out emergence, Information Theory, etc. No one I've ever heard or read has the slightest idea how measurements are supposed to relate to mind in the same way they relate to quarks or white stars of gravity or (fill in the blank).
I said that science could be used to understand mind, I readily admit to the possibility that it will fail, though I wouldn't bet on it failing.
The way of treating emergence in the few physical systems that have been so treated does not rule out the usual ways of doing science. All successful treatments of emergence are scientific examples, philosophers can't agree on what it is, and though they have an opinion, I think they'll weigh in after the physicists have their day with it.
As for measurements related to mind in the same way that we do it everywhere else, there are plenty of measurements, and observations and even experiments.
Certainly this is a rich area to not only speculate, but to attempt to make and test hypotheses...
Decoding mental states from brain activity in humans
John-Dylan Haynes and Geraint Rees
Abstract | Recent advances in human neuroimaging have shown that it is possible to accurately decode a person’s conscious experience based only on non-invasive measurements of their brain activity. Such ‘brain reading’ has mostly been studied in the domain of visual perception, where it helps reveal the way in which individual experiences are encoded in the human brain. The same approach can also be extended to other types of mental state, such as covert attitudes and lie detection. Such applications raise important ethical issues concerning the privacy of personal thought.
this paper has almost 1500 citations, with lots of interesting ideas regarding these measurements that Largo asserts have never been proposed, or perhaps he makes the stronger assertion that they cannot be.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 13, 2018 - 09:08pm PT
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No one has the slightest idea how equations can get us there, so any bridging of the gap would, perforce, not be rendered in scientific language. If you believe otherwise, give us some idea how that could be so using standard scientific methods.
Maybe the various examples of physicists working out physics and not "understanding" the equations they are using to perform exquisite measurements that verify those equations which , only after decades, they grudgingly concede that maybe the "understanding" was different then they had originally believed?
I use Millikan because he is an example. Obviously there was a gap in his understanding of the "equations" of Einstein and his experience of reality.
He engaged in the "adventure" of expanding his experience and, eventually, closed that gap (for himself) between the "equations" and "reality."
I used the same story to describe my coming to understand quantum mechanics, which MikeL felt was a incorrectly stated, but I did have a sensory experience of quantum mechanics, as real that way as if I could see with my own eyes what was going on, I did "see." The gap closed.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 13, 2018 - 11:17pm PT
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Ed: The gap closed.
Not with a resounding ‘thud,’ I’d wager.
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 14, 2018 - 08:17am PT
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"Seeing" only the gross and subtle material manifestations means the gap has not even begun to close.
And thus remains wider than ever .......
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 14, 2018 - 06:15pm PT
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No one has the slightest idea how equations can get us there, so any bridging of the gap would, perforce, not be rendered in scientific language
At the present time that may be true. You seem to imply scientific progress is done, finished, so let's shut down our intellectual faculties and spiral down to emptiness. Oh, boy . . .
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 14, 2018 - 08:26pm PT
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Largo: Since subjectivity is not observable,
I see subjectivity in your posts.
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