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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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my blue cones are tickling...
Yes they are. And what exactly are they tickling? Well, it's that mysterious "entity" that it is "you" and is the receptacle of all experience and is beyond sensory input as the arbiter of that information. It is the thing unavailable to those human constructions we know as machines. It is the thing that so far negates the possibility of AI.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Yes they are. And what exactly are they tickling? Well, it's that mysterious "entity" that it is "you" and is the receptacle of all experience and is beyond sensory input as the arbiter of that information. It is the thing unavailable to those human constructions we know as machines. It is the thing that so far negates the possibility of AI.
you aren't very good at following the little dotted lines, are you...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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you aren't very good at following the little dotted lines, are you...
No I'm not.
But if you think this mechanical explanation of the process of information gathering by the eye and the transference of that information to the brain explains the experience within the brain of seeing, you're out of touch with the issue. The explanation completely ignores the perceiving entity residing within the brain deciding whether an object is a particular color or not.
Information is not experience neither is it knowledge; it's really as simple as that.
Information without someone to receive it as knowledge in the epistemological sense is not knowledge at all.
Any rock is full of information regarding geology and the cosmology of the earth and the cosmos, but it requires sentient examination and explication in order for that information to become knowledge.
in the same way any eye can record information but that information is nothing if not sent to the entity that can turn it in to knowledge.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 5, 2015 - 10:08pm PT
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"How we see color" should read, "How color is fashioned by the brain and served up to awareness. Sans awareness, there ain't no "seeing." A machine can't see. It can only register a visual data stream.
Ed says everything reduces to noting does not come from physics, and he should know.
But depending on who you listen to, some insist that everything reduces to energy, which is not substance or matter, which itself has no universal definition. And if you go with the big bang, it's hard to avoid the idea that all things reduce to energy, or potential energy. And since the sum total energy in the universe is zero, what, exactly, does the world reduce to?
JL
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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...but it requires sentient examination and explication in order for that information to become knowledge.
and you know this how?
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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and you know this how?
It's simple logic. The earth and the cosmos are ripe with information. Everywhere you look is information. The closer you examine the more information there is... but it is nothing without comprehension. And that's what we're talking about:
What is the comprehending element within each of us that makes sense to the information input of the senses?
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WBraun
climber
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but it requires sentient examination and explication in order for that information to become knowledge.
Yes ... 100% correct.
Without the living entity originally there within the machine it would never animate.
Even the firmware of a modern machine which initializes the hardware is originally developed by a living entity.
The machine is not the living entity ever.
The living entity manipulates the material world according to its developed consciousness.
Life always comes from life ...... always
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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It's simple logic. The earth and the cosmos are ripe with information. Everywhere you look is information. The closer you examine the more information there is... but it is nothing without comprehension.
ok, so what is this "information" you are talking about?
where does it come from?
what makes it?
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Back from the east coast and working with my family and my dad who is recovering from his stroke. he was very lucky ; he can walk and talk and minor disfunction of right hand has some vision issues and some cognitive issues but he is very ready to restart his fight with multiple myeloma. It is beyond me to see how energetically he wants to fight he has a very strong will to live and needs to get into a dana farber clinical trial or else it will probably be hospice. He called me from rehab yesterday and said he wanted to arrange to go to boston the next day and I had to explain he wasn't scheduled for release until saturday.
I noticed that my 90 yr old mother never takes a deep breath. So I taught her how to take a few minutes to take 3 deep breaths.
My meditation practice really helped and was stripped to the basics with the high level of stressful activities. Just taking some time each day to stop and watch the breath and watch the thinking ; the thinking was rapid and varied , lots of different scenarios going by like a fast moving train. Slowly the breath would bring me back to the present moment and hence prepare me to be available to assist.
It is not metaphysical; it is just noticing that we get attached to constructed stories running through our heads and when we notice they are constructed we can step back and be more free to function in a more constructive/compassionate manner.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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What is this information?
What informs us is corporeal matter and its antecedents. In these, we believe, we might reveal the structure of what is. The real question is why is there anything at all?
Where does this information come from?
What makes it?
Oh, oh, mystical questions. Welcome aboard.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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"...simple logic..."
which it is not... as you push that logic you will end up where we are today, science concluding something that you are not ready to accept.
I do like your 19th century invocation of "corporeal matter and its antecedents," technology is a larger factor in driving our interest in "corporeal matter" than the resolution of philosophical issues. The technology of paint is not only interesting in its own right, but the accomplishments of the painters are known to us because of their success in mastering that technology... and allows us to wonder of their other "philosophical" musings displayed in their depictions, 40,000 years ago...
We can play the game Largo would have us play, "descending" to the "bottom" and, when coming up to the boarders of our knowledge, wave our hand over the unknown and proclaim that "no-thing" exits there. Technically, a correct proclamation, as it describes every boundary between known and unknown, but that boundary moves with time, often because we wish to understand something as simple as getting the right color to paint with...
Overarching pronouncements of profound philosophical principles are less likely to inform us regarding the nature of that unknown, and are just as rapidly discarded once we walk that territory.
HIC SVNT LEONES
oh, and there have been musings regarding what is at the bottom...
apparently there is room there, and no apparent evidence of the "no-thing"ness.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Here's a practical question for all of you.
I am trying to help revise an introductory social science course that covers six social sciences and scientific methodology in 8 weeks. The textbook we are using now on methodology is so deadly boring the students are turned off in the first week. Mainly it is memorizing definitions of various aspects of research and method.
Can any of you recommend an engaging book or chapter, video, interactive exercise etc. that illustrates the scientific method in an interesting and engaging way? It's for a social science course so it should be geared to logical thinking and analysis in general or the social sciences specifically. Many thanks!
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Carl Sagan wrote a great book on methodology called The Demon Haunted World. Everyone should read it.
It might be a too long for your purposes, and although he takes great care not to take on religion directly, he more or less skewers it throughout the book.
Mainly, the book is about junk science, weird claims, and superstition opposed to the scientific method.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Psychologists perform tests like this all of the time. So again. What color do you guys see?
Also, have any of you taken a biology class? Did you learn about rods and cones? Wiki has a terrific page on the topic of color perception, and some of you will be happy to read the summary, right at the top:
Color vision is the ability of an organism or machine to distinguish objects based on the wavelengths (or frequencies) of the light they reflect, emit, or transmit. Colors can be measured and quantified in various ways; indeed, a person's perception of colors is a subjective process whereby the brain responds to the stimuli that are produced when incoming light reacts with the several types of cone cells in the eye. In essence, different people see the same illuminated object or light source in different ways.
So yes. It is subjective. We've covered that ground. Our senses are hopelessly subjective.
As to the color, I would say blue. Perhaps a little on the light side.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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technology is a larger factor in driving our interest in "corporeal matter" than the resolution of philosophical issues.
The implication here is that technology is an end in itself... which it is not. Technology is a means, a tool developed for the same reason humanity developed science, philosophy and even religion: revelation.
My, my the 19th century is so old fashioned, in the same way, I suppose, as Socrates and his followers and any number of "philosophers" from Descartes to Emerson... no wisdom to be found there except to know they're all old and wrong.
No hubris in the world of science, no overarching statements of a philosophical nature except perhaps the statement that philosophical statements are overarching.
As to finding the right color, it's never simple. It may look simple but it's analogous to poetry: all the words are in the dictionary and all you have to do is put them in the right order.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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But depending on who you listen to,
no, depending on what you understand from what they say...
some insist that everything reduces to energy, which is not substance or matter,
a classical view point, pre 20th century, as DMT points out above, Einstein showed the "mass energy" equivalence. Also, Einstein thought up the idea of a "quantum" of light, making light into a "particle" with zero mass, but with a set of attributes defining it (in particular, it's intrinsic angular momentum).
which itself has no universal definition.
for his work in defining what energy is, Joule has the honor of having the unit of energy named after him... he worked in the 1800s as a physicist and a brewer...
And if you go with the big bang, it's hard to avoid the idea that all things reduce to energy, or potential energy.
which have mass equivalents, you don't have to go to the big bang, you can go to the LHC to watch energy transformed into mass
And since the sum total energy in the universe is zero, what, exactly, does the world reduce to?
the sum total of energy in the universe is very close to zero (in our current thinking on cosmology) but that doesn't reduce the world to nothing, of course, because of that freaky quantum mechanics, which allows for the idea that for a sufficiently short time we can have matter and antimatter emerge from the vacuum and then disappear again,
ΔEΔt ≥ ½ħ
if you estimate at the equality, you get an idea of how short a time the creation of the mass pair might be...
but note that the energy-time product must be larger than the quantum mechanical bound of ½ħ
if you produce a pair of inflatons in your quantum vacuum fluctuations then 15 billion years later you might be asking about it...
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Mark, it looks blue, somewhere in the spectrum of blue. If I printed it on paper it would look different. If I used another computer it might look different as well.
What is down there below Planck length? Since this is mysterious and elusive territory JL takes the opportunity to inject and advance his meditative/metaphysical beliefs. As a great story-teller he appropriates this environment and spins a speculative and entertaining tale. Kind of biblical.
;>)
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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"...simple logic..."
which it is not... as you push that logic you will end up where we are today, science concluding something that you are not ready to accept.
Really? I wonder what it is I'm not ready to accept? I'm certainly ready to accept logic and reason especially simple logic.
Blue is a fascinating color which in the palette theory moves from green to red. Its complement is orange and so its saturation is most efficiently affected by adding orange. It is common, for instance, for an artist to use a red blue for the sky and a green blue for the sea in a seascape and thereby create a complementry contrast of red and green within the structure of blue, and then use a subtle orange in the clouds for a more complex complementary nature. It is almost always used as a cool color in relation to contrasting warm colors. On a saturated or even desaturated orange any neutral grey realizes itself as blue to the viewer. Colors are like bullies in the school yard pushing each other around, affecting one another, changing one another.
Color relationships are really rather complicated.
The subtractive color wheel is very simple, but the use of color is very difficult/complicated as a form of communication from mind to sensation to mind or experience to sensation to experience.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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"How we see color" should read, "How color is fashioned by the brain and served up to awareness. Sans awareness, there ain't no "seeing." A machine can't see. It can only register a visual data stream.
This is not true. The brain has been evolutionarily fashioned by light de novo .The brain does not predate light, light predates living things. It is a delivery device for the energy that helped to create and sustains life. Human awareness of light in and of itself does not play a central role in the fundamental nature and function of light in the cosmos .The very act of seeing visible light , or the effect of invisible light on our biology is an autonomous automated process. The quote above has it bass ackwards.
Here neurosurgeon Dr. Jack Kruse explains:
The pupillary light reflex allows the eye to adjust the amount of light reaching the retina and protects the photoreceptors from bright lights. The iris contains two sets of smooth muscles that control the size of the pupil. These muscles are under autonomic control and they cannot be conditioned by behavior. They respond to characteristics of light. The interesting aspect of the retina surface is that it projects to the central grey matter where the PVN rules the sympathetic system and parasympathetic control of the cranial nerves are housed segmentally in the brainstem.
Normally the parasympathetic sphincter action dominates during the pupillary light reflex. The PVN increases the tone of the wrong side of the eye to create chaos in optical signaling. When it is chronically activated it stop working through fatigue due to chronic calcium efflux in this nucleus. This changes the oscillation it radiates to the central and peripheral nervous system. Since non native EMF and blue light increase ROS, this means pupillary change tells us about the output or fatigue of the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) from our environment. We’d be wise to pay attention to this. In our labs the answer is buried in adrenal stress indices with salivary melatonin levels.
And BTW some of you who are stuck in the old static notion that the perception and the myriad effects of visible light is only a matter of "rods and cones" need to get updated.
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