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zBrown
Ice climber
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I don't know jogill
Likely not a feeling
Just feeling
Don't we feel consciousness
As well as talk about it?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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eeyonkee: I just don't like being pigeon-holed as someone who just reads "popular" science and, is (consequently) not serious.
So many of us are like this. It could be a characteristic of modernity.
Being serious gets in the way of creativity, insights, and general understanding. When one is serious, one tends to be concretely literal (heavy, dense, grave, weighty). Seriousness and concreteness tend to run together.
One who is stalwart says, "but this is reality." Sometimes the two characteristics show up in social or moral conventions, e.g., an ethical code; other times they could show up as diet, energy, habits, or even stylistic codes of conduct (as in climbing).
Concretism and seriousness often show up as semiphilosophical beliefs as so-called "facts", history, evidence, logic, or personal feelings. Often they show up in personal relationships, as an idealized figure of truth and trust (Werner?). Most often, what's concrete and serious is simply money.
When a person is concrete and serious, he or she has invested their body in some way or another. It's not just an issue of words or wording. "This is an unavoidable necessity; it matters above all." Matter, matters, and "mattering" all look like projections to me.
Hang loose. Play. When an activity is no longer play, stop until it becomes play again. Look at kids on a playground: they make up their own rules at a moment's notice, they do "do-overs" when there are disagreements, they are silly with joy, and they are fully engaged without guile (most times).
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Lessons from HAL:
Don't lock your car with the keys inside.
Especially if you are in outer space.
When in outer space it is good to have redundancy including manual override.
Another lesson from movies:
Don't go into outer space anywhere near Sandra Bullock. George Clooney learned that one.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 5, 2019 - 12:33pm PT
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I don't know jogill
Likely not a feeling
Just feeling
Don't we feel consciousness
As well as talk about it?
-
Excellent questions. Why not explore?
In my experience, consciousness is not a quality or thing or article of content (thought, feeling, sensation, memory, etc.) but rather that which makes content concrete and known.
Its small wonder why consciousness gets conflated with processing/ content, because the later is some thing, some quality, that we can observe and talk about.
That much said, "What is Mind?" is itself a bit of a trick question because our discursive side assumes mind is some thing or phenomenon we can get hold of by way of objective qualifiers and qualities, as we do with aevery other thing out there. Lacking these, we balk at the lack of progress in attaining such data, believing we haven't "gotten any where."
Actually, in trying to dog down a non-thing like consciousness, the inquiry advances by eliminating what it is NOT. While we are right to contrast content generation with compute in connecting objective functioning with the creation of sentience, only in its apparent disappearance during sleep, etc.
It's a fun and instructive exercise to try and reason through staunch physicalism (what isn't physical?) and realize how quickly you run aground. It becomes totally unintelligible in almost no time. But maybe someone else has worked it out more better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj8MK2oG0R4
That's a fun one with a great attitude.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Sail on down the line
'Bout a half a mile or so
And don't really wanna know
Where you're going
Maybe once or twice you see
Time after time I tried to
To hold on to what we got
But now you're going
And I don't mind about the
Things you're gonna say, Lord
I gave all my money and my time
I know it's a shame
But I'm giving you back your name
Yeah, yeah
Sail On
Lionel Ritchie
Commodores
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Largo: . . . "What is Mind?" is itself a bit of a trick question . . . .
:-)
I was wondering when you were going to get around to that.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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I've explained before that I am always trying to come up with the smallest number of words to describe a system. Here's my latest.
* Genes replicate
* Genes build proteins
* Proteins regulate genes
* Proteins build bodies which house and propagate genes
* Proteins drive evolution at the behest of Mother Nature (environmental pressures)
You just need to bootstrap the system to get it going, and that seems to have happened about 3.8 billion years ago. How it happened is, obviously, open for discussion.
Seems to me that proteins are the most amazing thing in this story. I mean, they catalyze nearly every reaction in the cell and they can build all of the structural elements in a body -- cells and tissues and organs and stuff. Not to mention that ALL of these things are built from 20 different protein parts called amino acids.
That the most basic algorithm of life is gene => amino acid => protein still just amazes me every time I think of it. The fact that 20 different amino acids, based only on their relative sequencing gives rise to essentially all of life's structure is the thing that needs explaining as I see it. The fact there was a molecule that came along (DNA) that was so well-suited for replicating and preserving code seems almost secondarily improbable.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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eeyonkee, I think you're using "algorithm" where others, even majorities, in other misc scientific disciplines prefer "mechanism." Nothing wrong with it, I guess, just sayin.
e.g., the mechanism of action in clorination, the mechanism of action in gene replication, the mechanism of action in calcium ion channel functioning, the mechanism of action of nitrous oxide in some anesthetic setting...
One more thing: I wouldn't be so quick to discount the role of circuitry (vis a vis chemistry, biochemical algorithm) in consciousness, e.g., sentience or feeling. As I've said before, that's where I'd put my money. My science background has taught me about the enormous variety of circuitry types each with their own mind-blowing characteristics and functions.
Just peruse amazon books for so-called "cookbooks" in electronic circuitry (design and development) to get an idea when you have the time. My favorite bitd was The Art of Electronics - the "art" in the title points to the idea.
My view is that sentience (feeling) - the holy grail of "consciousness" to my lights - or subjectivity is an emergence of system complexity (circuitry a core element of that) and not any amorphous simplicity promoted mostly by naifs.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+art+of+electronics+by+paul+horowitz+and+winfield+hill&crid=2QE607WUUJLH0&sprefix=The+Art+of+Electronics%2Caps%2C217&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_5_22
This was my go-to source in the lab for 10 years. Nice to see that it's now in the 4th or 5th edition, that says something.
Another reason I wish I could live for 1,000 years: So I could return to those heady teen and 20-something years again - effectively feeding back - and then to work through all that basic math and basic chemistry and basic electronics again that I found so exciting - this time with the mature adult background for support that would surely give me a far broader perspective on things.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 7, 2019 - 05:15pm PT
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My view is that sentience (feeling) - the holy grail of "consciousness" to my lights - is an emergence of system complexity (circuitry a core element of that) and not any amorphous simplicity promoted mostly by naifs.
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Fruity, I assume you are aware of your feelings, at least the strong ones like elation, anger, bummer energy (depression) and so forth. That might indicate to you a quick rethink on sentience and "feeling" being remotely the same.
And "amorphous simplicity?" Come on, amigo, you're just pulling this stuff out of your ass. Seriously, though, the common use of "amorphous" usually means without clear shape of form. When you settle into your own sentience (or awareness, if that helps), moving neither toward or away from any feeling, thought, etc., what specific "shape" or form does your sentience take?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 7, 2019 - 05:29pm PT
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Definitions of sentience or consciousness etc are usually very poor and misleading because they are generally anchored in WHAT we are aware of, that bedeviling qualia, as opposed to simply being conscious.
For example, sentience is usually considered "the capacity to feel, perceive or experience subjectively." Here, as often happens, sentience is posited in terms of a task, of managing, registering, or uptaking content. The creative function of reifying content, or differentiating forms from void or potentiality is foreign to this physicalist model, wherby it is believed that the brain generates or "creates" not only content, but an awareness "algorithm" that gives it a conscious or epistemic "known" flavor some would call "self-awareness."
Such models have practical value because they allow people to work with the phenomenon much as math models allow us to work with objects and phenomenon, but IME, they are not accurate descriptors of the "terrain' itself. Rather useful maps that cohere to the linear/causal way our discursive minds parse out observable phenomenon, at least the way that it "seems." For example, time, as a thread in reality itself, is at best, relative; but I nevertheless glance at my phone about 50 times a day to see what time it is.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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eeyonkee, I think you're using "algorithm" where others, even majorities, in other misc scientific disciplines prefer "mechanism." Nothing wrong with it, I guess, just sayin. Fair enough, I suppose. On the other, I see clearly two different things. Mechanisms and their algorithmic underpinnings. The algorithms that I am talking about use the available "meat" (molecules and their rules) to optimize the mechanisms of life with respect to the environment.
Mechanisms are physical; algorithms are code that exploit the physical.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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My view is that sentience (feeling) - the holy grail of "consciousness" to my lights - or subjectivity is an emergence of system complexity (circuitry a core element of that) and not any amorphous simplicity promoted mostly by naifs. I like this description of what sentience is but don't agree with your pinning it to emergence. I think that emergence amounts to not understanding the power of algorithm. Emergence sounds like woo to me.
I mean, think about it, a snail has all of the neurological machinery to remember and learn. Why would it take "emergence" to evolve consciousness? Why not, instead, gradual evolution from that basic neurological machinery?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 7, 2019 - 06:30pm PT
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Why would it take "emergence" to evolve consciousness?
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What do you imagine consciousness was before it evolved? And what problem was "solved," per algorithms (and what set of rules).
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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What do you imagine consciousness was before it evolved? And what problem was "solved," per algorithms (and what set of rules). It used to be that life solved its immediate problems of surviving without being conscious of it. Algorithms help the individual body to survive. Why the need for consciousness is the question that nobody has a great answer for.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 7, 2019 - 07:01pm PT
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It used to be that life solved its immediate problems of surviving without being conscious of it.
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"It used to be" sounds like an attempt to recruit time as a fundamental, linear frame in which consciousness unfolded or emerged, but linear time has largely been junked in this regards.
See the problem?
Consider this:
Einstein once described his friend Michele Besso as “the best sounding board in Europe” for scientific ideas. They attended university together in Zurich; later they were colleagues at the patent office in Bern. When Besso died in the spring of 1955, Einstein — knowing that his own time was also running out — wrote a now-famous letter to Besso’s family. “Now he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me,” Einstein wrote of his friend’s passing. “That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Einstein’s statement was not merely an attempt at consolation. Many physicists argue that Einstein’s position is implied by the two pillars of modern physics: Einstein’s masterpiece, the general theory of relativity, and the Standard Model of particle physics. The laws that underlie these theories are time-symmetric — that is, the physics they describe is the same, regardless of whether the variable called “time” increases or decreases. Moreover, they say nothing at all about the point we call “now” — a special moment (or so it appears) for us, but seemingly undefined when we talk about the universe at large.
The resulting timeless cosmos is sometimes called a “block universe” — a static block of space-time in which any flow of time, or passage through it, must presumably be a mental construct or other illusion.
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