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zBrown
Ice climber
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Sep 27, 2018 - 08:11pm PT
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How many cranial nerves in a maternally bonding gorilla and her puppy?
Excluding the red nucleus I'm gonna venture 24 and I didn't look it up
Doncha wish she wouldn't do dat with her mouth?
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Sep 27, 2018 - 09:01pm PT
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"It is my contention that conflating what we are aware of with awareness itself is one of the biggest sticking points in all of this."
In a sense you are absolutely correct. If we "stick" with empty awareness we get nowhere. It's all naval-gazing. Only by studying what the mind can do will we make any progress in understanding what the mind is.
Philosophical rambling doesn't help.
(89 is not that old. I'm rootin' for him.)
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Sep 27, 2018 - 09:19pm PT
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I guess we lost him.
Maybe he's off somewhere in pitch black darkness trippin' on light flashes?
I mean, it can be quite a trip - taking into account no photons are present - and yet to experience subjective flashes of light. Whence they come?!
Anyways, learning the cranial nerves, together with their brain nuclei, the afferent and efferent pathways, and all their functions, is an important first step in the overall learning of the nervous system's anatomy and physiology. The more one knows the latter, a process that takes months to years to decades, the harder it is to dismiss its role in mind-brain control of the body, including its associated functionalities like memory, cognition and subjective experience.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Sep 27, 2018 - 10:02pm PT
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Speaking of pitch darkness we ventured down into the sensory deprivation room in Tolman Hall once.
It was interesting to enjoy consciousness with almost no sensory input (briefly)
Now that the ST has brought me up to speed, it might be interesting to give it another try.
How do eight hours in the chamber and eight hours on the ST compare?
Well, there’s fistfights in the kitchen
They’re enough to make me cry
The mailman comes in
Even he’s gotta take a side
Even the butler
He’s got something to prove
Then you ask why I don’t live here
Honey, how come you don’t move?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Sep 28, 2018 - 08:58am PT
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Don't the science types here remind you of partisan politicians - refusing to consider any context other than their own? refusing to answer point blank questions they can't answer or else weaken their claims? refusing to consider any frame of reference other than the one that supports their agenda or ideology? Oh the parallelism!
On the other hand, maybe they can't consider any context other than their own. I mean if they haven't had a many years of looking at their own minds, how could they? You can't squeeze blood from a turnip.
So if this is the case, you wonder (a) where they get this continuing "confidence" day after day to keep discussing these subjectively intensive topics in the absence of the requisite background; (b) if they were so interested in these topics then why do they not go study them directly instead of engaging in deeply scientific posts (if not rants) here.
It sure seems to me their posts reveal next to zero experience in looking at their own experiences as experience, a lab of the mind. It's a curious fact because I draw on all the past experience in these discussions - that amounts to millennia worth of mind training- and couldn't imagine doing so without it. Because... you can't squeeze blood from a turnip.
My post from several years ago suggested that neuroscience or posting credentials in neuroscience was not very rigorous, as other critics from other disciplines questioned neuroscience’s arrogant and irrelevant to the conversation, lol. (See, for example, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25442936); Some have argued (other than me) that neuroscience is pretty baseless. Now in hindsight, though, I totally get it, the Why behind it.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Sep 28, 2018 - 09:13am PT
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HFCS: How many cranial nerves in the human nervous system. What's the highest level chemistry? the highest level biology? the highest level math class you've had? In high school or college?
This reminds me of the calls for more useful education in university. “What’s important is that people get educated for a job / career, and that means they need to know stuff / content.” That call ran headlong into classical notions of what the purpose of higher education was supposed to be all about: breaking people out of their provincialism, out of their family biases, out of nationalistic views, to see their own cultures for what they were, to think and feel for themselves rather than assuming what the dominant social faction wanted them to think and feel. The classicists were oriented to critical thinking skills, while the more recent lament and call for more useful knowledge (content) seemed to be bourgeois.
The bourgeois view is in keeping with the other part of the complaint that HFCS articulates: that the measure of wisdom (about the world, about life, about how to live) is a degree in a field of study. Got a degree? You must know what you’re talking about. These are generally people who exhibit difficulties making themselves clear or who clarify complex issues clearly—but instead point to a URL to explain what they supposedly think to others.
What people generally claim to know are theories and narratives. Knowing who and what they are . . . ppffftttttt. If science were to make real claim, it would be helping to engender better human beings. I’d say science has nothing to do with that.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Sep 28, 2018 - 11:24am PT
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MikeL, very creative. :)
We're just going to have to agree to disagree, I think, and accept the idea that I'm a science type and that you are a non-science type. Not the end of the world, eh?
...
Claire Lehmann on gender differences, dangerous ideas, free speech, postmodernist overshoot, her publishing platform for scientists...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afmxd42UNZA
I could listen to her all day.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 28, 2018 - 01:27pm PT
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First person experience
UH, death?
Is there a firsthand account of what it feels like to die? From someone who actually did? The real thing, not a near miss.
A personal story of what it feels like to be born would be interesting, too.
We would need a little to go on before we could tell whether brain stimulation could evoke such feelings.
In the meantime I will take this as an approximation:
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 28, 2018 - 01:49pm PT
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These are generally people who exhibit difficulties making themselves clear or who clarify complex issues clearly—but instead,
point to a URL to explain what they supposedly think to others.
That's fruitloops (HFCS) for sure.
He actually knows very little.
He believes his tiny limited brainwashed so-called academia is all the knowledge there is .....
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Sep 28, 2018 - 03:52pm PT
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Is there a firsthand account of what it feels like to die?
Well, if there isn't, it's gonna be pretty hard to validate if it CAN be faithfully ({re})produced by brain electrical stimulation.
Some ways back, folks were trying to simulate birth circumstances to induce "reliving" one's birth. This would have been back in the days when Art Janov and Primal Therapy were in vogue.
Wouldn't it be disconcerting if the setup was off a bit and you ended up reliving someone else's?
How would you know if you got the right "channel" so to speak.
Keep picking at the scab, it ain't gonna heal.
When does the subjective experience of death commence and terminate?
Some might say it doesn't terminate, just that the electricity gets turned off.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 28, 2018 - 08:47pm PT
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When does the subjective experience of death commence and terminate?
The easy answer: It begins when you are born and ends when you die.
Next up: translating Macbeth into scent so dogs can appreciate it.
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Sep 28, 2018 - 09:23pm PT
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I paid my electric bill (technically gas and electric along with a kicker for San Onofre Nuke phase out) so I'm feeling so alive and trying to stay on topic.
"knowing" this may make the Macbethian task easier than at first it seems
Dawgs possess up to 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to about six million in us. And the part of a dog's brain that is devoted to analyzing smells is, proportionally speaking, 40 times greater than ours. Dogs' noses also function quite differently than our own.
How you ask?
We cover that in the form vs function chapter
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Sep 29, 2018 - 07:04am PT
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HFCS: We're just going to have to agree to disagree, I think, and accept the idea that I'm a science type and that you are a non-science type. Not the end of the world, eh?
Right.
Well, I’m a bit of both, I suppose. I appreciate a clever analysis if it has some data to support it. However, we all seem to have access to the same data. It’s the interpretations that expose our creativity and biases. It’s all good or God.
If you must put me into a camp, I’d prefer the one of didactic, general doubters. I suppose this means that I’m going no where in particular. I guess that makes me a fool or a clown. I’m trying to be wise in that.
The only thing that I find somewhat substantive and semi-serious these days is the process of making art.
Be well.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 29, 2018 - 09:15am PT
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The only thing that I find somewhat substantive and semi-serious these days is the process of making art.
A very good thing to find semi-serious and substantive.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Sep 29, 2018 - 10:58am PT
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"The only thing that I find somewhat substantive and semi-serious these days is the process of making art."
Post some pictures, Mike.
;>)
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sep 30, 2018 - 05:58pm PT
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Yes, Jim. It seems a good way to get past minor disagreements about what is mind.
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 30, 2018 - 06:07pm PT
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You guys haven't even begun what is mind yet.
You've only begun "What you THINK is mind" .......
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Sep 30, 2018 - 06:16pm PT
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Don't the science types here remind you of partisan politicians - refusing to consider any context other than their own?
...the pot calling the kettle black...
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Speaking of the "Academic World", mathematics has always been a bit captivated by a sort of "rock star" mentality, idolizing the young, outstanding participants. The "Fields Medal" personifies that infatuation.
Getting back to "What is "Mind?", one of the latest winners is Peter Scholze. In a recent interview, Scholze said "his work thus far has felt less like research than an attempt to learn what other mathematicians have done and reformulate it in his own words".
Nothing like a functional description for trying to build a theorem proving machine, but never-the-less an interesting characterization of what a young math researcher does:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/peter-scholze-becomes-one-of-the-youngest-fields-medalists-ever-20180801/
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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About Scholze: very interesting thoughts on how to gain understanding and what it means to understand.
This much I get:
“I understood nothing, but it was really fascinating,” he said.
(about trying to understand the Fermat's Theorem proof)
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