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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 15, 2018 - 06:48pm PT
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If you don't like Werner then you probably don't know Werner. The same could be said for any of us.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 17, 2018 - 09:26am PT
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I'm not so sure that humans need to create some kind of "objectivity." We can probably agree that there are objects with what we call mass and length. Problems arise with attempts to get increasing precision in the measurements. For me, 3 significant places are usually enough. But I'm not trying to measure the gravitational constant.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 17, 2018 - 10:00am PT
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We can probably agree that there are objects with what we call mass and length.
If you look at the Hoffman video, "mass and length," as well as space/time are not qualities that are "out there" as an "objective" reality, rather constructs that our mind cook up to organize the foam of quantum energy (or however you choose to phrase it) into objects and qualities (like "blue") that we can manage on the meta level. But behind the curtain, says Hoffman, there are no objects, no space/time, etc.
This is probably the most counterintuitive thesis I've ever heard from a neuro psych, MIT geek, but what's most interesting to me is his model that the "reality" we see and measure is only a cognitive interface, like a desktop display, and the icons are the objects, etc. This is a super inaccurate and dumbed down version of what he said but I'm going riding now and will clarify it later - so far as I can. To say the least, Hoffman has his critics, though most of his main points are widely accepted.
Watch the vid and give your own take on it.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 17, 2018 - 10:40am PT
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Hoffman seems a popularizer of this sort of thinking, but what is most striking to me is that Largo would post it...
...why would you think, Largo, that engaging in the type of research that Hoffman does would lead to any better idea about "mind" then your own exhortations to subjective introspection?
After all this time, my conclusion is that you just like to troll... rolling out various arguments for the purpose of "deflating" what you'd consider to be pompous experts (on anything).
And while that might be a useful project, once you've let all the air out of the party, how would you move forward? Of course, that is not part of your program... critics can be important, but in the end critics are opining on the work of others.
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yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
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Nov 17, 2018 - 11:34am PT
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I'm not so sure that humans need to create some kind of "objectivity." We can probably agree that there are objects with what we call mass and length
Once again, I'm not sure what you mean, MH2. Are you saying people didn't "need" to develop a "standard" of measurement? How can two people know the weight they report in two observations "agree"? What are they "agreeing on", if they don't have a precise definition? Where did that definition come from (historically) and how did it develop? What is it now? "Objectivity" means that two labs doing a water test, where contamination from chromium is on the order of a few micrograms per liter, mean the same thing when they report the result. What the article is about is what people did, developed, produced, worked on and made precise in order for that "objectivity" to exist. You are welcome to use any of those (more or less synonymous for the practical purposes of this discussion, IMO) words if the word "create" gets your panties in a wad.
Watch the vid and give your own take on it.
I did. Not having any prior knowledge of "Hoffman" I'll give you a "first impression". The talk kind of starts out interesting and the guy makes a couple of relevant points, but then he goes way off the deep end. Nothing he says, in the end, follows from any of the earlier points he makes. I suppose it's logically possible that the brain and neurons are a "hack" of evolution, but there is absolutely nothing in the talk that would lead me to believe that's true. In the end, my impression of Hoffman is that the guy wants to be a guru more than a scientist or a philosopher. On the other hand, he's certainly not alone in that category.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 17, 2018 - 04:38pm PT
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I'm not sure what you mean, MH2.
The problem lies with me.
I don't have much need for a standard meter or kilo, but a language through which two people could communicate with less misunderstanding would be useful. You are right: it was the "creating 'objectivity'" that felt too close to what Largo and Hoffman and others say about there being no objects "behind the curtain."
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 17, 2018 - 05:08pm PT
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but a language through which two people could communicate with less misunderstanding would be useful.
Sanskrit
Modern people can't do it because they are brainwashed trained up addicted to guessing ....
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 17, 2018 - 07:10pm PT
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Hoffman seems a popularizer of this sort of thinking, but what is most striking to me is that Largo would post it...
...why would you think, Largo, that engaging in the type of research that Hoffman does would lead to any better idea about "mind" then your own exhortations to subjective introspection?
After all this time, my conclusion is that you just like to troll... rolling out various arguments for the purpose of "deflating" what you'd consider to be pompous experts (on anything)
That's quite a whopper, Ed, and full of the avuncular bong water you so cherish. As though my exploration of mind starts and finishes with meditation. "Exhortation" is a charged word flubbing you into the corner with Dingus with his "preaching." Now a if a number cruncher strikes a high dungeon tone, it's never "preaching," rather simply laying out the "facts." Mercy, the hogwash that goes on here, but it's high theater in a way ...
Tthe "troll" thing is totally bogus. As if anyone had a purely physical theory about mind. Neuroscience has only the First Assumption that sentience is sourced, mechanistically, in a linear/causal manner. There is no working theory at all. Whose "work" are you purporting that I am trolling by posting Donald Hoffman's work. Had you bothered with even a cursory view of his ideas (they are not mine) you'd know Hoffman is not a popularizer of someone else's model.
But getting serious for a second (Ed's blue wind was anything but serious), Hoffman dovetails nicely into a slew of links and commentary about the fact that our minds source the qualities and stuff of consciousness, and that stuff - the subject of blue was taken up a while back, and that light in a certain wavelength contains no "blue") - in little to no way corresponds with what our mind's show and tell us about what is "out there." No one can mount any objection to this basic fact, which is why it is universally taken as so. The eyeball doesn't see/register "blue." That most believe happens in the brain and consciousness, which some - it is true they are few, but out there nonetheless - conflate as the same thing (Identity Theory).
But Hoffman goes WAY beyond this, and it's fascinating to look closely at what he is saying. The computer lab where he works at MIT is full of bright folks who work at a high level so what they are up to is worth a look. The fact that this work runs cross-grained to Type A Physicalism doesn't make Hoffman, his computer lab, or the folks who work in it
(nor yet MIT) "trolls" of a remotely workable model furnished by "experts" doing "work." And my posting of same is another brick taken from the wall which got kickstarted with examples of why the world we experience is not some mirror image or accurate representation of an objective world.
I'm too tired from riding to summarize Hoffman now, but I'll try maybe tomorrow. Hell, the link is like a 15 minute TED talk. Not much and you can get the drift.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 17, 2018 - 09:39pm PT
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I think we've reviewed Hoffman here up thread.
Some of what he's working on is of real interest to me.
Oddly, you seem to accept his dichotomy, that there is what we experience, and that there is a "reality out there."
He comes to this conclusion by the same ideas and techniques and methods that scientists use, he is a scientist. From my point of view, his model may not capture everything that's going on, for instance, how you define the "fitness landscape" in which his agents evolve might not quite be what's happening.
But then, what is a "fitness landscape"? and what does it have to do with reality?
My guess is that your interest in his ideas have more to do with their apparent unorthodoxy (in your eyes) then with any agreement you might have on the details.
You're not a "details" sort of a thinker.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 18, 2018 - 08:19pm PT
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more details...
BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding
Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova
We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT representations can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications.
BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE benchmark to 80.4% (7.6% absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7 (5.6% absolute improvement) and the SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5% absolute improvement), outperforming human performance by 2.0%.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/technology/artificial-intelligence-language.html
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 18, 2018 - 08:32pm PT
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Still working on Hoffman. In the meantime...
Neil Theise is Professor of Pathology and of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a leader in the fields of liver diseases, liver stem cells, and adult stem cell plasticity.
This is an interesting one from Neil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaGuSZz-Fzw
And a complimentary one from Peter Wilson that is a gem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g04RHQ1ysb4
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 19, 2018 - 11:40am PT
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My guess is that your interest in his ideas have more to do with their apparent unorthodoxy (in your eyes) then with any agreement you might have on the details.
You're not a "details" sort of a thinker.
Actually, I don't agree with all of what any of the Naturalists camp has to say. What I DO agree with is the carefully reasoned approach they have taken to the subject, and the rigorous scientific approach both Hoffman and Wilson have stuck with. Neither are afraid to be wrong, and neither have been fooled into believing that there is some credible or even actual theory - or even a conceivable model - of how the physical "creates" experience by way of a linear-causal mechanism (however you want to define this). And it's not for lack of trying to make that work, or from working off any "spiritual" first assumptions.
But to Ed's point about "orthodoxy," both men are clear that THERE IS NO ORTHODOX theory (physical/linear/causal/mechanistic process occurring in space-time) against which they are pushing off. There certainly are orthodox first assumptions and beliefs, but but none of these has produced anything remotely associated with a physical process by which matter "becomes" conscious, starting from non-sentient stuff.
Ed's point that Hoffman proposes he believes there is some fundamental "real" stuff or phenomenon "behind" or before energy self organizes into complex patterns - Hoffman needs (IMO) to clarify his language in this regards. Since Hoffman ditched the notion of linear time (as merely a mental construct for utility sake), no thing comes before any other thing. But enough for now. Let's look at a few Hoffman quotes, to get some flavor of what he is saying:
What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences. We don't just have no theories about it, we don't have any good ideas.
If our senses evolved, and were shaped by natural selections, the probability that we see reality as it is, is zero. The probability that space and time and matter are the right concept to describe objective reality, is precisely zero.
What exists in reality is not space/time and physical objects.
Space/time is not a fundamental reality; it's a data structure. We're living in the matrix of our data structure.
The key idea of 3rd person science is that you can look at this physical object, and I can look the same physical object and both make measurements on it, then compare. This is false. All science is 1st person science.
Deeply held preconceptions are going to have to be let go because the current preconceptions are not working. Here's the challenges for science. Most of us believe that space-time and objects exist even if they're not perceived. That's a fundamental assumption of most. We also believe that space, time and matter are the right and "real" concepts to describe objective reality. I want to propose that that's false. Those are the wrong concepts.
(Per accuracies) The fact that we can put rovers on Mars, tells us nothing about the nature of reality as it is except to put a lower bound on its complexity.
We assume that we see reality as it is. We're interacting with some reality, but that reality is arbitrarily different from what we experience.
It might be that when we look inside our heads and see neurons and brains we are interacting with a reality that's objective, and would exist whether or not we were looking, but - it's nothing like neurons and brains, and therefore the belief that neurons and brains "cause" consciousness is plain false. How can we address this question is a scientific manner?
Most of us believe our perceptions are "true." How could they be useful if they're NOT true? The analogy I like is the analogy of a desktop user interface. Suppose you're editing a file, and that file has an icon on the desktop that's blue, rectangular, and is located on the lower right had corner of your monitor. Does that mean that the file itself, in the computer, is blue, rectangular, and in the lower right hand corner of the computer? Clearly not. Anyone who thought that misunderstands the purpose of the desktop interface. It's not there to show you the reality of the computer. In fact, quite the opposite. It's there to hide that.
You don't need to know about the diodes and hardware and megabytes of software ... if you had to know all that, good luck editing your file. The point of the interface is first, to hide the truth. You don't need to know it. In fact it gets in the way. And second, it's there to give you eye candy. That lets you get done what you need to get done. So the idea is that evolution has shaped us with an interface that hides reality, and that's the purpose, in part.
Three-D space as you perceive in this room right now, is just your desktop, for the species homo sapient. And physical objects - right down to particles - are just icons on that desktop. They're there not to show you the truth. They're there to guide adaptive behaviors. So that's the key idea here: We've evolved an interface that's specie specific - different species will have different interfaces. They won't see reality as we do. They'll see it through their own interface.
The obvious objection is, Hoffman, if you think that train coming down the track is just an icon on your interface, why don't you step in front of it? And after you're gone, and your stupid theory with you, we'll know there was more to the train then just being an icon. Well, you'll be happy to know I wouldn't step in front of the train for the same reason I wouldn't drag that icon into the trashcan carelessly. Bad things can happen if I did that. Like lose a year of work. So I don't take the icon literally - the file's not blue and rectangular - but I do take it seriously.
So the idea is that evolution has shaped us with an interface such that when you do see a tomato, as your experience, you are interacting with some reality, but it's not like a tomato at all. And the same thing with the brain. When I look inside of the skull, and I have a conscious experience I describe as the brain, and neurons, I'm interacting with an objective reality, but that reality is NOT brains or neurons. It's something utterly different. The best I can do as a humble member of the human race is to describe it as brains and neurons. Brains and neurons do not exist unperceived. They have no causal power and that's why we've never been able to boot up consciousness from neural activity. Neurons are just useful fictions of our desktop interface.
I might be wrong about this, but the only way to go is to go down trying to mathematically demonstrate how the theory is right.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Nov 19, 2018 - 11:57am PT
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Many months have gone since the Mind thread emptied the concept of mind of all content. Mind is now emptied and everybody should be satisfied...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 19, 2018 - 01:14pm PT
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the idea is that evolution has shaped us with an interface such that when you do see a tomato, as your experience, you are interacting with some reality, but it's not like a tomato at all.
Good Zen.
edit:
We could move on to, "What Is 'Tomato?'"
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 19, 2018 - 01:59pm PT
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Not Zen, MH2 - at least in the sense that Zen in this case is purporting a woo take on what is "really" out there. That's a misconception, IMO, that assumes something that neuroscience tells us is ENTIRELY false: That there IS a tomato can, just as we experience and "see" it, existing, objectively, "out there."
If nothing else, Hoffman did to death the idea that, while our intuition tells us the soup can exists as a soup can if we are perceiving it nor not, such a folk understanding is certainly NOT the orthodox view of the neurophysics camp (Hoffman's circle).
So it might be Zen, but it is also an accepted view of science. That is, what we "see" and measure and study is NOT what is "out there."
The larger question, as Ed noted, and Kant rambled on for 1,000s of pages about, concerns the intuitive belief that there is something "real" upon which our perceptions are built.
"Real," as in an independent objective stuff that stands tall and is just so regardless of what is swirling around it and who perceives it. And that "real" stuff "creates" all worlds.
Some believe that the deeper and closer we look, the more objective and "real" the stuff is. Hoffman says, Not so fast. Whatever we perceive - no matter how big a pair of spectacles we wear, so to speak - the quarks and vibrating energy out there, as well as our brains, are merely icons on our desktop (using his analogy).
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Nov 19, 2018 - 04:49pm PT
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Sigh, my ST interface is weeping...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 19, 2018 - 05:24pm PT
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Zen in the sense that a tomato is not a tomato. Not woo: confrontation with contradiction.
It can be fruitful or not.
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Jim Clipper
climber
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Nov 19, 2018 - 07:25pm PT
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Oops. I'm gonna leaf it
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