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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jun 17, 2015 - 11:03am PT
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Oh boy.
First off, the statement? The post concerned the question the girl posed to Dawkins at 57:10. Did you listen to the question? Do we have to go back and retrieve it? Her question concerned what seems to be your issue: Accepting God even if God isn't real for consolation / comfort purposes. The post from which you drew your latest quote didn't concern Hitchens' "Religion poisons everything" at all.
Second... " Religion offers a consoling understanding, rituals that placate our grief..." Yeah, both offerings based on supernatural fantasy. Really, is that what you want? The world's changed. It's certainly not what millions of others living today want.
Third... "Let science prove the truth of our insignificance... to what end?" It goes with the process, it's part of the total package. Besides "the truth of our insignificance," science reveals, or points to, many other truths. Currently reading Faith vs Fact by Jerry Coyne. Here is one more in a long list, if more is needed, besides one's own everyday experience, that clearly illustrates the benefits that derive from knowing about these truths.
Here's the link, once again...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD1QHO_AVZA
57:10. It's a question (not a statement) by a girl posed to Dawkins, just as I said. It seemed to remind me of your position or sentiment, just as I said.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jun 17, 2015 - 11:16am PT
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Yes, a very refreshing, remindful post by Jan.
.....
re: AI and its dangers
John Lilly: "Silicon Valley techies are divided about whether to be fearful or dismissive of the idea of new super intelligent AI. The fearful say that AI sentience is inevitable & dangerous. The dismissive say we know so little about how we think ourselves that it’s crazy to say that sentience is inevitable, let alone dangerous. How would you approach this issue? How do you think about it?"
Steven Pinker: "Sentience is a red herring here -- stupid and simple creatures can be sentient, and super intelligent ones could be zombies; we have no way to tell. So let's concentrate on intelligence. I think it's a fallacy to conflate the ability to reason and solve problems with the desire to dominate and destroy, which sci-fi dystopias and robots-run-amok plots inevitably do. It's a projection of evolved alpha-male psychology onto the concept of intelligence. A huge proportion of the population--they're called women--exercise high intelligence without applying it to mass murder or world domination.
Of course an evil genius could use AI to design killer bots, but the number who do so is the product of two small numbers: the number of geniuses and the number of homicidal maniacs. The latter number is obviously greater than zero, but the fact that we don't have Tsarnaev-like attacks every hour in every American city, when the technology to carry them out is already available at any Walmart, shows that they're not hugely plentiful either. And if a genocidal technologist did arise, he'd have to overcome the countermeasures of the worldwide community of anti-genocidal technologists.
So I don't think that malevolent robotics is one of the world's pressing problems."
http://www.parlio.com/qa/pinker/
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 17, 2015 - 12:27pm PT
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Thanks Jan,
The Japanese truly live by the Golden Rule rather than a set of laws.
Sorry for being Inadequate I'm back to typing on my iPhone :(
Inside my description of Love and Laws, I didn't mean primarily written laws. And along with love I assume hate be credited. My impotent point was trying to establish that when a person interacts with society, and society interacts with a person there are conscious, and unconscious "rules" engrained to direct behavior. Be it written, ethic, moral, etc. these "laws" are presumably instilled for the "good" of the person, or the society.
My intent was to magnify the coherence with these [laws, rules, ethics, morals] and that of [love and hate].
The laws and rules in something like physics are virtually unbendable. Thus requiring no love or hate. (Gravity isn't hating you when your climbing up ElCap.)
But inside a living/dying organism such as the human who internalize's his external actions through rational free thinking. Love or hate are the predominate motivators for free-will.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jun 17, 2015 - 12:37pm PT
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Steven Pinker: "Sentience is a red herring here -- stupid and simple creatures can be sentient, and super intelligent ones could be zombies; we have no way to tell. So let's concentrate on intelligence."
Not an unwise way to preceed on this thread. Forget about sentience or let the meditators deal with it to their hearts' delight. This would also eliminate quantum woo.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 17, 2015 - 12:49pm PT
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Seems like just keep watching pinker vids and you'll be a zombie in no time ; )
and super intelligent ones could be zombies; we have no way to tell. So let's concentrate on intelligence."
Irony?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jun 17, 2015 - 12:57pm PT
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jgill, and yet you're the first to fire it up
when there's an absence of either no-thing woo or lgo.
a close second, BASE.
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jstan
climber
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Jun 17, 2015 - 01:36pm PT
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Woo can't compete with prancercise. You won't have me to kick around on this thread any more.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 17, 2015 - 01:38pm PT
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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines (RWE)
Hey, It's not my fault. I am but a product of mechanistic processes.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jun 17, 2015 - 02:26pm PT
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A mind with intelligence and without sentience is hardly a "mind" at all. Pure intelligence without self aware discretion regarding that intelligence leaves only a rote subservience to given algorithms, and though a machine might produce and even "learn" to produce information, said information can produce understanding only through sentient interpretation.
What is information worth without understanding?
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 17, 2015 - 02:49pm PT
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On come'on now Stannard. I thought you were really go'in somewhere with your "C" project!
Isn't refutal, skepticism, alternative views and humor a part of the scientific method?
Prancercise seems much better than this;
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Jun 17, 2015 - 02:53pm PT
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. . . said information can produce understanding only through sentient interpretation
No argument here. But you can banter with JL and MikeL about what sentience is as much as you wish, and keep us informed if you reach any conclusions. I've already stated my opinion about what JL needs to accomplish to gain any credibility outside woo circles.
But I hope he and his cohorts make a breakthrough in metaphysics.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Jun 17, 2015 - 03:05pm PT
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Oh boy.
First off, the statement? The post concerned the question the girl posed to Dawkins at 57:10. Did you listen to the question? Do we have to go back and retrieve it? Her question concerned what seems to be your issue: Accepting God even if God isn't real for consolation / comfort purposes. The post from which you drew your latest quote didn't concern Hitchens' "Religion poisons everything" at all.
Really? You don't think Dawkins was arguing that same position, favoring scientific truth, no matter what it presents, as opposed to the woo of theology?
I stand somewhere between the girl and Dawkins. I would say scientific truth is vital and important to human understanding, but so is religion. The problem is religion must keep up with the nature knowledge presented by science or it (religion) falls as it has into disrepute and silliness.
But if you read the symbols of religious thought as the psychological metaphors they are, they can easily conform to that nature knowledge revealed by science and a religious understanding is often very helpful to people.
The two (science and religion) are compatible and should be..
Problem is, you, in the same manner as a believing Christian, read these symbols as reality and you can declare that a burning bush must be consumed and snakes can't talk!
Bravo!
In doing so the wisdom of those stories is lost and the metaphor consumed by a myopic certainty based on an understanding of nature that ignores what is truly important in human understanding: the ability to live and live well in this strangeness where we find ourselves.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jun 17, 2015 - 03:38pm PT
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So I think we'll just have to conclude we perceive these things differently.
Have a good one, it's been fun.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jun 17, 2015 - 03:40pm PT
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Ed said: You have made many assertions based on your experience. However, isn't it a bit of a pickle to do that, to use your subjective, first-person experience to explain/understand/describe what consciousness is?
I still think you are referring to my experiences of mental content - which changes person to person and moment to moment - and NOT to the phenomenon of sentience, of consciously being present with our internal and external stimulus in time and space.
A crucial distinction to make is the difference between the phenomenon of "being consciously present with" content, and the people, places, things and phenomenon (content) of awareness. This distincting is made profound through the process of detachment, of separating "our" awareness from a given thing or object or feeling, say. We come to realize that what gives consciousness shape is the content. Otherwise awareness can be talked about and experienced as a borderless field that has no form or substance or objective quality whatsoever.
This field no more needs to "learn" to exist than the sun needs to learn to be luminous. It is what it is, inherently. We learn how to relate to being conscious, how to act from a sentience POV, and so forth. But all tasking and doing and behavior must for a moment be set aside to ever get a clear view of sentience otherwise consciousness will always be construed as a function, a cognitive doing, a task, an output.
So when I say, "Shut up and stop calculating," I am inviting you to delve for a moment into human being (as in being, sans tasking or doing or thinking or efforting or wanting this and not that, etc.), which is the direct experience of the open space of the sentient field in which our every thought and feeling and objective function arises. The fundamental nature of this field is "emptiness." It has NO inherent algegraic structure or edge or size nor yet any content. The challenge is our attention always fuses with and gloms onto content, so the field is to most humans what water is to a fish.
Of course this is not easy and totally twarts even seemingly bright folks: Steven Pinker: "Sentience is a red herring here -- stupid and simple creatures can be sentient, and super intelligent ones could be zombies; we have no way to tell. So let's concentrate on intelligence."
Of course he has no idea what he even means by the terms beyond stimulus response mechanisms. He never had the discipline or curiosity to "shut up and stop calculating," and so he harkens straight back to objective functioning and tasking, in this case, "intelligent" tasking. What we call "numberical woo." A man entirely fused with content. And putting virtue on same.
And we ask such a person: Who is calculating?
And John S,. what you wrote down about consciousness is more suitably framed by developmental psychology and the slow development of an independent "I" identity, the so-called individuation process, from fusion to the mother to altruism at the top of Maslov's pyramid. Developmental psychology is full of interesting material.
JL
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 17, 2015 - 06:11pm PT
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Otherwise awareness can be talked about and experienced as a borderless field that has no form or substance or objective quality whatsoever . . . . This field no more needs to "learn" to exist than the sun needs to learn to be luminous. It is what it is, inherently. . . . which is the direct experience of the open space of the sentient field in which our every thought and feeling and objective function arises. The fundamental nature of this field is "emptiness." It has NO inherent algebraic structure or edge or size nor yet any content (JL)
Once again you appropriate a concept from the physical or mathematical world and metaphorically shoehorn it into meditative experience. It all started some time ago with Hilbert spaces, then into (mathematical) virtual particles, to the present. But if this is your way to describe sentience, so be it. The question is Where does this take you? Is it anything more than simply a pleasing poetical digression, or does it amount to anything more than vacuous mind? If it is entirely empty and has no qualities whatsoever, how can you move beyond its simple non-existence? It is both alpha and omega.
Never mind. You and Ed can bounce this back and forth.
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Jun 17, 2015 - 07:07pm PT
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jun 17, 2015 - 08:17pm PT
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so the field is to most humans what water is to a fish.
Glad to see you admit to being a fish out of water. A red herring, at that.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Jun 17, 2015 - 08:32pm PT
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^^^dont be silly
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Jun 17, 2015 - 09:05pm PT
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The challenge is our attention always fuses with and gloms onto content, so the field is to most humans what water is to a fish (JL)
Water is the medium in which a fish lives. It supplies oxygen necessary for life. You are saying that the sentience field supplies the physical means for our lives even though it has no physical extent and is emptier than a vacuum? Not even a mathematical structure.
Strange.
Keep at it .. . a work in progress. Initial ideas may appear foolish in hindsight.
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