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jstan
climber
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Sep 28, 2011 - 03:45pm PT
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Great links Joe. So elder memory loss may just be due to a competition between several memories
trying to reach the conscious level. Either because of degradation in the lock-out mechanism
or just because our lives have been so memorable.
In my case the lock-out mechanism is clearly at fault.
Got to stay trinary.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Sep 28, 2011 - 04:43pm PT
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I hear you John! Have to figure this aspect of 'place' organization is one of the first victims of dementia. I also suspect the rapid context searching / matching is also probably responsible for the occasional sense of déjà vu.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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A thought experiment proposed by Kathryn Schulz in her book Being Wrong:
"...imagine that you step outside not in Chicago or Houston, but in someplace truly dark like the Himalayas, say, or Patagonia, or the north rim of the Grand Canyon. If you look up in such a place, you will observe that the sky above you is vast and vaulted, its darkness pulled taut from horizon to horizon and perforated by innumerable stars. Stand there long enough and you'll see this whole vault turning overhead, like the slowest of tumblers in the most mysterious of locks. Stand there even longer and it will dawn on you that your position in this spectacle is curiously central. The apex of the heavens is directly above you. And the land you are standing on--land that unlike the firmament is quite flat, and unlike the stars quite stationary---stretches out in all directions from a midpoint that is you.
...this is the view that we as a species have been looking at for 73 million nighttimes."
So our experience in this case is overwhelming, we are at the center of it all.
It is codified in the Bible, e.g.:
1 Chronicles 16:30: "Tremble before him, all the earth! The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved."
Psalms 93:1: "The LORD reigns, he is robed in majesty; the LORD is robed in majesty and armed with strength; indeed, the world is established, firm and secure."
Psalms 96:10: "Say among the nations, 'The LORD reigns.' The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity."
Psalms 104:5: "He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved."
Ecclesiastes 1:5: "The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises."
These passages are the most obvious evidence from the Bible for the geocentric view that our experience agrees with, and the basis for the inquisition's heresy case against Galileo.
Cardinal Bellarmine:
"If there were a real proof that the Sun is in the center of the universe, that the Earth is in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and we should rather have to say that we did not understand them than declare an opinion false which has been proved to be true. But I do not think there is any such proof since none has been shown to me."
It was not just the Catholic church, here from Martin Luther:
"There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must . . . invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth."
And it is not just an ancient idea... as recently as 1999 a Gallop poll found that 18% of Americans believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth. (see http://www.gallup.com/poll/3742/new-poll-gauges-americans-general-knowledge-levels.aspx and also http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2007/06/06/eppure-si-muoveor-does-it/);. The later study also found that the belief was strongly correlated with the lack of formal education... which is to say perhaps, a stronger dependence on "personal experience" as a guide to the world.
For this discussion of "mind" it begs the question: "to what extent should our experience of reality be used to explain reality." Obviously (I think) we see the limitations of such arguments in an idea which coined the term "revolution."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 1, 2011 - 01:55pm PT
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For this discussion of "mind" it begs the question: "to what extent should our experience of reality be used to explain reality."
I haven't had time to write about this lately but I've been reading like crazy and have some things to say per this stuff.
The above question boils down to recognizing and differentiating. Chalmers sees a science of consciousness as relating third-person data - about brain processes, behavior, environmental interaction, and the like - to first-person data about conscious experience. Others have other ideas.
A fundamental Law of Consciousness is that third-person data cannot totally explain first person experience, and vica versa. Chalmers (originaly a mathematician), Nagle and others posit arguments that the process described about is not ultimately reductive, which is interesting.
I don't agree with Chalmers about several key points, especially this:
"The job of a science of consciousness, then, is to connect the first-person data to third-person data: perhaps to explain the former in terms of the latter."
This is basically backing into reductionism, but more on that later.
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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we can look at our first person experience and draw conclusions from those experiences...
we can construct a "third person" POV and infer "first person" POV experience and compare...
don't the differences tell us something about mind?
this is a reductionist process, I agree...
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 1, 2011 - 04:54pm PT
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we can construct a "third person" POV and infer "first person" POV experience and compare...
--
Putting all bombast and cocking around aside, I have looked at this and other conundrums with the whole "science of mind" thing and have been unimpressed with their conclusions, mainly because there is no common terminology, and because the differences between first/third person, subjective/objective, mechanistic/experiential are not fully understood and or even imagined and so the genres get muddled and lost are all hopes for a meaningful confluence of ideas. Much of the problem lies in methodologies.
For instance, while systems theory are required/helpful to explore meta-functions, bottom-up, reductive explanations are fundamental for functional analysis. When it comes to first-person data, however, this model breaks down quickly because the data of subjective experience is not about objective functioning. That is, in and of itself, experience, as a dynamic subjective process, is not a mechanism. Put differently - (this is an inviolate Law of Consciousness) as data, first-person data is irreducible to third-person data.
Much as some folks would like it, third-person will never be the whole or even the partial story about human experience. People insist this is not so, that third-person date IS experience, that experience IS what the evolved meat brain does, that in essence, third person data totally explains experience - en toto. This last idea also violates another Law of Consciousness: The Map is not the Territory. Of course, we have real world, empirical experience to clear the air on the last point.
Take Hal and Petunia. They venture onto the South Face of the Column, but forget the water. It is mid August and Valley temps are upwards of 100 degress on most days. For reasons not described here, Hal and Petunia cannot reverse course and so they have to top out, in the most wasted state, after bashing and gasping their way up the collum in 105 temps, for three days, sans water. They make it back to Camp 4 on last legs, more dead than alive.
Several days later, when the memory is still very much alive in his head, a friend of Hal's presents him with a 25,000 page which breaks down every statistical fact about his three days on the Column without water. He and Petunia were wired with probes and gizmos and so forth and the tome has all the scientific info, all the dehyradation markers, pH levels on down to the thirsty quarks. There is no more to learn about being thirsty on the South Face for three longs days beyond what's in the tome. The tome, his friend insists, is the WHOLE STORY, and "explains" his experience right down to the atom.
Of course Hal begs to differ since the statistics, accurate as they are, tell nothing about the subjective qualia of being so damn thirsty. And no matter how hard he tries, Hal will never be convinced that the figures in the tome "is the whole story" about his epic with Petunia. In fact, the statistics don't tell any of the story, because numbers are not the selfsame thing as dying of thirst on the column.
So long as we insist that they are, that our experience is not real, or is entirely reductive, the science of mind can do nothing but circle and go nowhere. We are standing fast on principals which do not stand up to direct empirical evidence.
More later.
JL
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Still back to processing and content as simply expressions of the same thing - not unlike waves and particles in physics.
I also go back to an opinion that evolutionary contributions to the development of consciousness of an arms race of predation were significant; where being able to construct anticipatory first and third person points-of-view have high intrinsic value to both predator and prey.
[ Edit: If your matter is getting a little grey around the edges you might want to check out http://www.lumosity.com/ for exercising what matters. ]
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Oct 2, 2011 - 12:32am PT
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Still back to processing and content as simply expressions of the same thing.
---
Nope. You're failing to discriminate the real world differences between first/third person, subjective/objective, mechanistic/experiential, ergo, you fail to actully see the difference between (in the example provided) the experience of dying of thirst and a statistical breakdown of being thirsty.
"Expressions of the same thing" is in yet another effort to back up into "the map IS the territory," and this violates a Law of Consciousness (First Person experience is NOT reducive to third person data).
There are some other very common myths per the science of mind that are worth looking at - and which keep the inquiry on a treadmill - and I'll type up a few words tomorrow if I get a chance. Chalmers has done a wonderful job of listing most of the false approaches to the study.
JL
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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The statistics of being thirsty are irrelevant - "dying of thirst" (the [first person / subjective] experience) is the 'content' / programing of nerve cells firing (processing) - i.e. first person, subjective experience is both.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Thanks to Ed and Largo for finally defining the issue in terms that are easy to understand and free of specialized professional vocabulary. First person and third person data and how they interact? That is a simply stated and comprehensible question.
To use some other examples:
No one would argue that when a person goes to a concert of beautiful, emotionally uplifting music, that the only reason they have that response is solely the provenance of the physical properties of the musical instruments. No one would argue that the composer was immaterial to the total experience, yet that seems to me to be the material reductionsist stance.
On the other hand, it seems inaccurate to state that first person experience can never be translated to third person data. While it's true that we will never know exactly the experience of a composer like Bach, Mozart, Handel, or Beethoven, we are able to understand huge amounts of their skill, their innovativeness, and their emotions nevertheless. And of course music critics and mathematicians can analyze it even more minutely in terms of the mechanics of the composition.
Yet another aspect for consideration, is that statistically speaking, all but 1 or 2 % of those who have listened to this great music have appreciated it for its emotional evocation, not it's acoustical balance or rhythmic symmetry and their mathamatical descriptions. Between first person subjectivism and third person reductionism, there is also a social and emotional consciousness that communicates between the two.
Consciousness bedevils us because it is multi-layered and not reduceable to either subjective or objective reductionism. A quadraplegic who has been rendered mute and is unable to even press a stick against a computer screen but is still conscious, is having a subjective experience while the people who measure physical and mental responses can reduce that consciousness to brain waves on a graph. What's lacking in this case is not first or third person, but the ability to communicate between the two of them.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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No one would argue that when a person goes to a concert of beautiful, emotionally uplifting music, that the only reason they have that response is solely the provenance of the physical properties of the musical instruments
And that "response" is nerve cells firing - anyone who thinks first-person experience happens in the absence of nerve cells firing is serious kidding themselves.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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No one on this thread has ever said that first person experience occurs without the firing of nerves?!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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A fundamental Law of Consciousness is that third-person data cannot totally explain first person experience, and vica versa.
where does this come from? empirical?
or is there a proof?
your "Hal and Petunia" story isn't relevant because it isn't something that we are proposing as "third person" though a reconstruction of the 3 days could possibly be built out of the data so collected.
In computer immersive environments where "reality" is simulated, there is a true invocation of first-person experience as if the person were actually involved in the simulation, as if it were real, though we know it is not.
The ability to invoke the experience is a "third person" act... the way in which the invocation is designed is through "first person" experience... is sounds like a violation of your fundamental law.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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No they haven't, they just tend to ignore they are firing and discount the possibly that firing 'is' consciousness.
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dogtown
Trad climber
JackAssVille, Wyoming
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That good Acid is going around again. Right? Well if not, I wish it was so I could keep up with what you just wrote!
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Didn't you hear? Acid couldn't possibly taint experience - it would be too 'reductionist' a concept.
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dogtown
Trad climber
JackAssVille, Wyoming
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Right, How foolish of me.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Acid doesn't taint experience, it enhances it,
and helps one to understand that there are multiple levels of consciousness
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Spider Savage
Mountain climber
SoCal
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Don't buy this one folks. Acid sucks. It is straight up poisoning and total fogging of the mind.
Hallucinations include sensations that approximate epiphany but in the end the conclusion is gibberish.
I've been down that road and a wish I hadn't a gone.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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chemical alteration of our minds, be it modern or ancient, be it ingesting something or just stressing ourselves to the limit... all of these are ways of understanding how our perceptions and experience are shaped by biology, by factors "external" to the conscious experience, but "internal" to our bodies.
all of these activities, taken together, are a strong indication that the source of the conscious experience, the first person yada yada, have their origin within the body, and the site of the effect, the brain, an overwhelming clue that that is where the experience originates.
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