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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 12, 2019 - 09:26pm PT
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unfortunately that paper was more a criticism of the current scientific ideas and little discussion of the Vedāntic ideas... of the 72 cited papers, less than 5 referenced Vedāntic sources.
aside from an overview of those ideas, a link points to a web site, but no deep discussion supporting the view
The central tenet of Vedānta (also known as Vedānta-sūtra) is that everything is dependent upon an original sentient/conscious foundation or self-knowing absolute truth.
this is stating a principle.
The fact that life goes on generation after generation for thousands or millions of years is not something we would expect in chemical or physical material processes.
why would we expect this?
To provide a valid explanation to these observations, the soul (ātman) hypothesis certainly offers a good possibility, because according to BG, the soul (ātman) does have the property of consciousness.
But not the only one, and not a predictive one...
‘Laws of karma’ check the freewill of the soul (ātman) by providing new bodies and throwing into different suffering conditions.
depends on the "transmigration of the soul," one might expect some support for this idea, none is provided.
Life and its evolution cannot be understood by imposing simplistic Darwinian mechanistic reductionism on sentient biological systems.
Shouldn't the article really be about the Vedāntic view and not against other views?
Maybe to understand the Vedāntic view one would have to study, this paper doesn't help point the way to that.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 12, 2019 - 09:40pm PT
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Largo wrote: Lord. The guy on the cover of Time lacks "scope."
Lanza was on the cover for cloning and stem cell research. Last time I checked, being on the cover of Time doesn't necessarily give one wide purview beyond the scope of one's expertise. Hell, Jeff Sessions was on the cover as well - so what?
Who, in your opinion, has the scope required?
Someone more capable on the physics side of things. Bohm-Penrose-Hameroff took a stab at it which I find more credible than Lanza, but then they do essentially the same as Lanza in the reverse - grasping out of their depth into biology where they were then wildly guessing.
More importantly, why do you think Lanza and others have taken the path they have?
I clearly stated why I think Lanza has taken the path he has.
Do you believe that some of the science is "lost" on Lanza, that he too has "misinterpreted the data?"
What data?
What, specifically, do you disagree with per his ideas.
Well, pretty much the entire tract. These gems for a starter:
Lanza: Science’s assumption of a dumb random universe, in which life arose by chance, has had the effect of isolating us from the world. This, together with the growing abandonment of religion has led to a sense that, in a cosmos ruled by accidents rather than by plan and/or perfection...
He clearly declares his allegiance to Intelligent Design here, the only question beyond that are the particulars of his variant.
Lanza: ...that consciousness which was behind the youth I once was, was also behind the mind of every animal and person existing in space and time.
And here he veers into the whole fundamental/universal consciousness deal and I will hand it to him for that as, unlike you, he at least commits and owns it.
Otherwise, he basically swipes through physics with a reaching butterfly net for a grab bag of ideas - Plank's take on consciousness and all things quantum heavily among them - which he then ties together with similar swipes through anthropology, poetry, and philosophy knitting it all up into Biocentrism aka more quantum woo.
But the biggest problem with his theory is precedence - the early universe existed in a state which did not support life or consciousness.
Do you consider Bohm's Implicate Order to be another version of Creationism?
No, I simply consider it more reaching, more unwillingness to accept unanswered questions which is what I consider all the various attempts to position consciousness as a fundamental/universal aspect of the universe.
Do you realize that Creationism is just another version of physicalism (linear-causal)?
I don't consider it physicalism as the root causal agent in all these various creationist themes is never physical. I consider creationism/ID and all its myriad variants, such as Biocentrism, just another attempt by hook or crook to claim there has to be - must be - a fundamental/universal intelligence behind the universe. It's an inherent intellectual and emotional unwillingness to accept the possibility beauty might simply be the result of randomness.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 12, 2019 - 10:04pm PT
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eeyonkee wrote: I'm surprised that I'm not getting more traction from you on this, healyje. We both agree I think that our decisions are actually made subconsciously and that the subconscious is where nearly all of the action is. So, why the need for consciousness to be intelligent? And even more, why the need for mind to be intelligent?
My take is there is a two-way street of behavioral influence which goes like this: instinct <-> subconscious <-> consciousness
 Some organisms never exhibit anything but genetic-based instinctual behavior (algorithmic behavior) and that is shaped over the long haul by environmental/ecological pressures.
Some organisms evolve a subconscious behavior and can respond non-deterministically to environmental events in ways which are not algorithmic but develop no conscious agency (many insects). Still, over time those subconscious behaviors can influence changes in the instinctual genetics.
Some organisms evolve conscious agency and then it gets interesting with all three - algorithmic, subconscious and conscious behavior all influencing one another in determining the long-term behavioral future of the species.
Where we diverge is I don't consider algorithmic behavior, be it genetic or in silicon/software, to be intelligence but rather just that - programmed algorithmic behavior. To me, intelligence both implies and requires conscious agency.
Subconscious behavior is clearly a little problematic in that scheme as it's not purely algorithmic even when it's ranged and bounded algorithmically. I tend to consider consciousness a matter of a sort of high-order quorum of sufficient sub-agencies where all the various subagencies are functionally structured and bounded (even when their role is to aggregate and integrate other subagencies). My best take on it is such subagency is it's basically the wetware equivalent of machine/deep learning - i.e. a much more sophisticated version of what at root is still algorithmic behavior.
So while I don't have an entirely satisfactory answer to how to classify subconscious 'agency', for the moment I'll stick with the belief intelligence per se requires conscious agency as my principle take on the matter.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Feb 13, 2019 - 11:36am PT
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Good answer, healyje. I guess that our most fundamental difference is that I believe that it is all algorithmic. An embryo developing is playing out an algorithm. The predator going through its various options is playing out a very sophisticated and nuanced algorithm, but it is an algorithm all the same. Algorithms can use parts that appear to be things, but those things are themselves built from algorithms. It's very much like a computer program that uses existing objects.
Agency is a tough one, but I believe that agency can be reduced to a very complicated set of algorithms.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 13, 2019 - 01:14pm PT
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Someone more capable on the physics side of things. Bohm-Penrose-Hameroff took a stab at it which I find more credible than Lanza, but then they do essentially the same as Lanza in the reverse - grasping out of their depth into biology where they were then wildly guessing.
---
The "grasping out of their depths" is a common saw we see trotted out here. One wonders, seriously, how physics, which by design leaves out 1st person reality, or tries to - is now the gold standard in your eyes of being able to "explain" mind.
Your idea of conflating Christian Intelligent Design with Implicate Order, or fundamental qualities, is misguided in my opinion because at the root of ID is a God, a creator, an entity (however immaterial) that we can point to and say, "That's it!" Nowhere in any of Bohm, Penrose, Lanza et al is there any mention of a "God" as it is posited in ID.
The reason that ID is another version of linear-causal-classical thinking is that God is seen as the "cause," whereby if we are to believe Bell - at least how many view his theorem - there ARE no causes nor yet locations in the way we normally think about them, as time-bound sequences occurring in space. It would seem that the fact that space, time and location are shape shifters should tell you something other than the belief that these are classical "things" or phenomenon.
I'm not at all saying that Biocentricism is the answer to this riddle, but contrasting it to ID is off base. What I see or suspect when I see your comments is a person stuck in a linear causal kind of trance (we all are) on which you place virtue, believing that physicists can sort it out for you. Whenever I read, "There was a time," it's a giveaway that you are thinking classically. Then you run into mind, and all bets are off. You can parse consciousness down to an algorithm which covers processing of content to some degree, but the fact that we are conscious of same is the white elephant in the room. Physics can and has told us a lot about the observer's part in our take on "reality," but positing the observer as object, function, feeling or other is a non-starter to those who have made it a special study.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 13, 2019 - 02:15pm PT
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Modern people lost their minds a long time ago.
Now they specialize in theorizing and guessing about everything and then end up so confused they come to the insane conclusion that ...
NO ONE KNOWS
They even speculate and guess that they know everyone on this planet.
No wonder they are insane ......
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 13, 2019 - 05:31pm PT
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Lanza: Science’s assumption of a dumb random universe, in which life arose by chance, has had the effect of isolating us from the world. This, together with the growing abandonment of religion has led to a sense that, in a cosmos ruled by accidents rather than by plan and/or perfection...
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 13, 2019 - 08:32pm PT
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what at root is still algorithmic behavior
This phrase and other talk of algorithms made me look up some stuff. In the Wikipedia entry on algorithms, I see:
a precise list of precise steps
the order of computation is always crucial
Which reminds me of Largo's much-repeated "linear causal physicalism."
I wondered about algorithms that were written so that they could modify themselves. That has been done, but recent developments in so-called deep learning have increased the interest in what happens when programs modify themselves.
Someone here may have already brought up this article:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/
The machine-learning experts are curious about:
What is going on in the machine as it learns?
Can humans learn how the machine is getting its results?
Can humans explain in explicit precise terms how the machines function?
There is a question of explainability: If the machine does a job that you want done, like driving a car, do you need to know how it does the job?
edit: And even a question of whether you can know.
Human brains and deep-learning computers are vastly different, but both lead to questions which may not be answerable. Although I feel pretty sure that our brains are what provide both conscious and subconscious processing of present and past experience, I cannot be confident that we will ever explain everything about how our brains work.
second edit:
And to emphasize that human learning and deep-learning are different, and to show we can still laugh at the machine:
how different deep learning is from human perception, in that it might make something out of an artifact that we would know to ignore. Google researchers noted that when its algorithm generated images of a dumbbell, it also generated a human arm holding it. The machine had concluded that an arm was part of the thing.
from the Technology Review article
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 13, 2019 - 11:39pm PT
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"Knowing" how AI arrives at any given decision is a matter of tracing, logging, and auditing. The issue is any meaningful tracing, logging and auditing in this kind of program is almost as computationally expensive as working the problem itself. That and it would generate so much data you'd likely need another AI program to interpret it for you. It's a work in progress and now that we have more computational power at our disposal it will get resolved over time.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Feb 14, 2019 - 07:31am PT
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healyjje: . . . the cover of Time doesn't necessarily give one wide purview beyond the scope of one's expertise.
When I worked in the investment industry for a primary government securities dealer, it was common belief that anything that appeared on the cover of Time magazine was dead news, worthy of heavy discounting. Indeed, there are studies on it. “Buy the gossip, and sell the news.” What is new is always something that comes in vogue and sooner or later leaves.
One can consider what "newness" implies and our fascination with it. Is what reality *is* changing, or are the deck chairs simply being moved around?
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 14, 2019 - 07:56am PT
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Time magazine IS dead and garbage.
Nobody in their right mind read that horrible mag
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Trump
climber
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Feb 14, 2019 - 09:16am PT
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Yea. Science as a structured rational way of knowing stuff is cool. And talking to other people and coming to a consensus about what is true is also a fine way of knowing what’s true. And sitting in our heads or hearts and just thinking or experiencing for ourselves what is true is a fine method too.
It’s just that, regardless, the stuff that we end up believing that we know - the stuff we end up believing that we know is true - that stuff might not be true. When I look around,what I notice is that some of that stuff just isn’t true.
If something hurts and I’m sitting there thinking how much it hurts and stressing about how much it hurts, and then I start to ask myself does it really hurt as much as I’m telling myself it hurts?, and I start to think about how it doesn’t hurt as much as I’m telling myself it hurts, and I don’t have to be experiencing it hurting as much as I’m experiencing it hurting, sometimes it starts to not hurt as much as I used to believe it actually factually hurt.
The nuthatch when he dives into eight feet of snow at a 50 degree angle to retrieve the acorn he buried in the ground down there six months ago - sure maybe he has consciousness and he knows what’s true and he knows that he knows that acorn is right there where he left it and the angle that he’s digging at is gonna get him there.
Or maybe it’s something else.
The stuff about ourselves that we believe - that I can tell you exactly actually factually the reason why I wrote ‘the’ just then, as opposed to going fishing or something - sure, we can believe we know the reason, or we can believe that science has or will explain the reason, but me, I just don’t really believe it. Not yet any way. It’s probably kind of maladaptive, but it seems to me to be what is. And maybe it isn’t.
To me it seems like the basis of consciousness is that the stuff that we’re conscious of is actually factually true.
So if we’re not saying that the stuff that we’re conscious of is actually factually true - if we’re not saying that “we” (and we all seem to believe “I” more than “other people”) really do KNOW stuff - I don’t really understand what we’re talking about. (And I expect that’s often true.) We’re conscious of stuff that might not be true? That just seems to me to be making stuff up. And I wonder why we do that instead of digging in the dirt for acorns or taking out the trash. If the nuthatch believed stuff that wasn’t true, I think he’d starve, but after 4 billion years of evolution, it seem to be working pretty well for us.
You? Use it or believe in it or believe the results of it however you choose to. And reality just has a way of sorting it all out over time, regardless.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 14, 2019 - 09:22am PT
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from Daniel Dennett at the end of the MIT Technology Review article:
"If it [the machine] can’t do better than us at explaining what it’s doing,” he says, “then don’t trust it.”
If tracing, logging, and auditing are needed, the machine would surely be able to do those tasks. But knowing exactly what happened in every detail isn't what humans usually look for in the way of an explanation. We prefer to reduce the description to ideas, or a model, that preserves the focus of interest while ignoring many details.
The "Deep Dreaming" investigations in the article are intriguing.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 14, 2019 - 09:56am PT
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I had posted the link to the Google team's work on "debugging" the neural network code they were running. It is a long standing issue in neural networks, that of "understanding" what the algorithm is doing.
Highly non-linear, there isn't a simple "formula" that you can plug into to get the answer.
So the basic idea of the Google debugger is to do a local linearization around some particular point, a multidimensional perturbation, and get an idea of the solution space behavior.
This might not be sufficient to achieve the desired "understanding." But this sort of thing provides an important step towards that.
As I had opined up thread, the fact that these neural networks cannot "explain" how they do what they do is a feature shared with the biological examples.
One might speculate that this is a feature of that particular architecture rather than evidence that something "non-physical" is happening, since we know the neural networks we build are physical.
Just how do you come up with an explanation of how you solve the arithmetic question: "what is 1+1?"
You can't actually come up with an explanation, you do get the answer...
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 14, 2019 - 10:00am PT
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"what is 1+1?"
The material platform it is 2
On the absolute platform, it is always ONE
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 14, 2019 - 10:19am PT
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how do you come up with either answer, Werner?
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Trump
climber
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Feb 14, 2019 - 11:32am PT
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I think one of the foundational aspects of human thinking is that we always believe that we’re working on the absolute foundation, regardless of what foundation we’re working on. To try to believe that the stuff we believe isn’t true is just maladaptive. If you believe something you believe isn’t true, then you stop believing it. And the way we work is by believing stuff. We’re not that good at finding acorns under 8 feet of snow that we buried six months ago without forming some consciously constructed beliefs about it.
But with respect to consciousness, I don’t understand how we can talk about it without asserting that what we are saying or what we are believing - the stuff that tweaks our fancy as being consciousness - the stuff that we believe- the stuff that we believe is true - is absolutely foundationally true. We all do, regardless of whether it’s true or not.
But if it’s not true, how conscious are we, really?
When we’re conscious of pain, ok, some people feel pain more than others, you can change your experience of pain by changing the way you think about it. Pain I think is something we create in ourselves, for some probably good reason or other, the same way we create thirst, for some probably good reason or other.
I’d say the same with fear. I’m really good at creating fear, and I’m really good at being conscious of fear. Fear is real, it’s true, I feel it! Honnold on the other hand, he kind of sucks at it. He’s got some deficiencies with regards to creating and being conscious of fear. Still though somehow he gets admired for his creation and consciousness deficiencies :-)
Beauty though I think is something else. It’s an external characteristic (at least to me) that we may or may not be conscious of. Maybe it changes over time, and it now resides in thinner people than it used to when food was harder to come by.
But still though I think that thing that we admire in ourselves - our consciousness of beauty for example - it’s something that we make up. Maybe you’re conscious of pain or fear or beauty, and maybe you’re not. But is that stuff real - the stuff that you’re conscious of - is it true, or did you just make it up? It’s often hard for me to tell.
But that it’s not for most people seems like a pretty adaptive trait to me. A trait that we believe in and admire in ourselves for some probably good reason or other.
But if the stuff that your consciousness perceives as true turns out to not be true, how conscious were you, really? And did the fact that you were conscious of a truth that wasn’t true prevent you from admiring your consciousness in yourself? My sense is probably not, for some probably good reason or other.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 14, 2019 - 02:24pm PT
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Explain yourself, Werner.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 14, 2019 - 02:34pm PT
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No matter how much we add subtract divide nultiply etc. in the material world it still always is under the ultimate control of the God.
And that is ONE while simultaneously with difference
(acintya bheda-abheda-tattva)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achintya_Bheda_Abheda
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 14, 2019 - 02:58pm PT
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I appeal to a higher authority on achintya.
The Princess Bride
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