What is "Mind?"

Largo wrote: Expecting matter to simply become alive, or conscious, by randomness, non-linear processes, chaos factors, or a hell of a long time, with meta level stuff building on itself, cha cha cha, is as woo as Dr. Frankenstein or a greater God throwing lightning bolts.

Let's not go down the road of genetic poaching.

Well, hey, what about learning? Here’s what a grant recipient on learning from Berkeley says:

“The conditions for inputs to learning are clear, but the process is incomplete without making sense of what outputs constitute learning has taken place. At the core, learning is a process that results in a change in knowledge or behavior as a result of experience.”

Did you note that the researcher reports the process is unclear?

It becomes interesting to ask what the minimal physical system is that can act as an agent. In Investigations, I sought to answer this, by proposing that a minimal molecular agent is a system which can reproduce itself and carry out at least one work cycle in the thermodynamic sense. I will not go into the ramifications of this, which are puzzling and I hope important. On this account, a bacterium, swimming up a glucose gradient, and performing work cycles, is an agent, and glucose has value and meaning for the bacterium, without assuming consciousness

Of course it is natural selection that has achieved this coupling. But teleological language has to start somewhere, and I am willing to place it at the start of life. Either here, or later in the evolutionary pathways, meaning and value arise in the biosphere. They too are ontologically emergent. We have a natural place for value in a world of fact, for the world is not just fact: agents act on the world and actions are not just facts, for the action itself is a subset of the causal consequences of what occurs during an act, and that relevant subset cannot be deduced from physics.

3) We are, in fact, conscious. That is, we have experiences of the world. The philosophers call these "qualia". For years, philosophers of mind have tried to argue that such experiences are "ghosts in the machine". This is just false.

We are, in fact, conscious. Whatever explains consciousness, it is clearly ontologically emergent. There are three radically different views on the cause of consciousness, none known to be true.

The first in the West, is that mind derives from direct connection to the mind of God — St. Augustines view, and to my astonishment, not far from that of Schrodinger, one of the inventors of quantum mechanics. In Tibetan Buddhism, consciousness is continuous, and thus underwrites reincarnation. The second, predominant view among cognitive scientists is that consciousness arises when enough computational elements are networked together. In this view, a mind is a machine, and a complex set of buckets of water pouring water into one another would become conscious. I just cannot believe this. I cannot however disprove it, but I can offer arguments against it.

On this view, the mind is algorithmic. With Penrose, in The Emperor's New Mind, I believe that the mind is not algorithmic, although it can act algorithmically. If it is not algorithmic, then the mind is not a machine and consciousness may not arise in a classical — as opposed to possibly to a quantum — system. Penrose bases his argument on the claim that in seeking a proof a mathematician does not follow an algorithm himself. I think he is right, but the example is not felicitous, for the proof itself is patently an algorithm, and how do we know that the mathematician did not subconsciously follow that algorithm in finding the proof.

My arguments start from humbler conditions. Years ago my computer sat on my front table, plugged into a floor socket. I feared my family would bump into the cord and pull the computer off the table, breaking it. I now describe the table: 3 x 5 feet, three wooden boards on top, legs with certain carvings, chipped paint with the wood surface showing through with indefinitely many distances between points on the chipped flecks, two cracks, one crack seven feet from the fireplace, eleven feet from the kitchen, 238,000 miles from the moon, a broken leaf on the mid board of the top…..You get the idea that there is no finite description of the table — assuming for example continuous spacetime.

So I invented a solution. I jammed the cord into one of the cracks and pulled it tight so that my family would not be able to pull the computer off the table. Now it seems to me that there is no way to turn this Herculian mental performance into an algorithm. How would one bound the features of the situation finitely? How would one even list the features of the table in a denumerably infinite list? One cannot. Thus it seems to me that no algorithm was performed. As a broader case, we are all familiar with struggling to formulate a problem. Do you remotely think that your struggle is an effective "mechanical" or algorithmic procedure? I do not. I also do not know how to prove that a given performance is not algorithmic. What would count as such a proof? So I must leave my conviction with you, unproven, but powerful I think. If true, then the mind is not a machine.

The third view of mind and consciousness, which I tentatively favor, is that it is related to quantum behavior. The standard physicist's answer is that quantum effects cannot occur at body temperature. Indeed, Schrodinger says this, then says of consciousness, "I am become God". However, recent theorems in quantum computing, and facts about cells cast doubt on this conclusion. The theorems show that, if measurements are made and work is done on a quantum computer, its qubits can remain "quantum coherent" when they should "decohere" towards classical behavior. Thus, if work is done on a system, parts of it may remain quantum coherent at body temperature in principle.

Schrodinger says this, then says of consciousness, "I am become God"

You, with a post-materialist context of thinking, must appreciate the fact that this obtuseness has a very simple reason behind it. Materialist scientists do not have any unambiguous experience of the subject-pole of their experience. The fact is this: the subject pole of the ordinary ego experience is so overwhelmed by previous memory that it is almost implicit in the form of what materialists do acknowledge and call the “qualia” of an experience. However, in this implicit form, consciousness seems a manageable concept, manageable within the philosophy of the world conceived as material objects. They call it the “hard” problem.

There are three radically different views on the cause of consciousness, none known to be true.

Amazingly, the ancient wisdom traditions somehow intuited all this. In wisdom traditions, they always theorize that the Oneness, which is called the causal domain of reality, comes down to the material level (called the gross level) via an intermediary—called the subtle level. The subtle consists of not only the vital but also the mental with which we think (meaning) and the supra-mental with which we intuit (archetypal contexts of elevated thinking and feeling such as truth, love, beauty, goodness, and wholeness).

eeyonkee, channeling Kauffman: a bacterium, swimming up a glucose gradient, and performing work cycles, is an agent, and glucose has value and meaning for the bacterium, without assuming consciousness

emptiness or non duality is the final goal

All you goy high thinkers are completely oblivious of our Hebrew friends’ approach:
“When do we eat?”