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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 19, 2015 - 09:38pm PT
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This nothingness is so threatening to the discursive mind that people fear insanity, senility, wasting time, and all kinds of screwy, non-empirical things when the brain is not actively engaged with chewing on something
That's exactly what I have been thinking. Couldn't have said it better!
But we all intuitively know that nothingness is all around up
I thought you must have accidentally hit "p" instead of "s", but I see that they are on opposite sides of the keyboard, so you must have meant "up."
Curious statement . . .
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Nov 19, 2015 - 11:19pm PT
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..dreamless sleep, with nothing is at play in our minds, conscious or otherwise...
How would you know - particularly the 'otherwise' part? At best that rates a 'seriously'? I personally suspect you are dramatically underestimating the subconscious mind. But, feel free to wax on about nothing at all.
When we push and ask what "material" really and truly IS, no one knows, save there is a quantitative quality to the energy involved. And if we keep reducing and ask where particles came from, we are referenced back to a potentiality, or some bucolic void that is different then total lack and that vetoes a true creation meaning the stuff (however ephemeral) and the nothingness (which does NOT bend as a quantum field bends) are shape shifting but neither was ever created, per se.
But, that nothingness has nothing to do with your nothingness.
How about simple yes / no questions:
a) Is the mind (your mind) eternal?
b) Is 'mind' universal in the same sense as gravity (i.e. as in we all share a universal mind)?
Again, a simple yes or no will suffice.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Nov 20, 2015 - 11:21am PT
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^^^
I read this, or at least part of it, in the early 1960s while helping direct B-52s loaded with nuclear weapons into the Soviet Union's warning zone. Perhaps that tainted my appreciation of the book somewhat. The continuous struggle against the void of no-thingness exhausted my patience and I returned to John Dickson Carr.
Dr. Fell vs Sartre = no contest.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Nov 20, 2015 - 12:21pm PT
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a) Is the mind (your mind) eternal?
b) Is 'mind' universal in the same sense as gravity (i.e. as in we all share a universal mind)?
Depends on what you mean by eternal and universal. If you think of mind as an inevitable construction of the universe by virtue of the construction and limitations of physics and the inevitable and perhaps eternal parameters of the universe itself then consciousness is a product of that construction much like gravity is.
If you link these things back, that is to say, consciousness is a product of evolution and evolution is a product of the construction of what is, it seems consciousness is a natural and inevitable product of the universe in a somewhat similar manner to gravity. If consciousness doesn't exist outside the construction of the brain its potential to exist in a brain certainly does exist in the same way the potential for gravity exists though gravity may not be relevant or observable in certain circumstances.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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Nov 20, 2015 - 03:45pm PT
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which does NOT bend as a quantum field bends
I had no idea that the quantum field bends. Actually, the concept of quantum field is a little beyond me. Fortunately JL is up to the task.
;>)
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Nov 20, 2015 - 05:07pm PT
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No-thing is union
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 21, 2015 - 09:20am PT
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And a dreamer, in a good sense.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Nov 21, 2015 - 12:49pm PT
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I love JL's posts!
;>)
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Nov 21, 2015 - 05:28pm PT
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Depends on what you mean by eternal and universal. If you think of mind as an inevitable construction of the universe by virtue of the construction and limitations of physics and the inevitable and perhaps eternal parameters of the universe itself then consciousness is a product of that construction much like gravity is.
If you link these things back, that is to say, consciousness is a product of evolution and evolution is a product of the construction of what is, it seems consciousness is a natural and inevitable product of the universe in a somewhat similar manner to gravity. If consciousness doesn't exist outside the construction of the brain its potential to exist in a brain certainly does exist in the same way the potential for gravity exists though gravity may not be relevant or observable in certain circumstances.
Good dodge, let's clarify: Is your mind going to maintain the same 'identity' / concept of you past the death of your body? If yes, that pretty much answers the universality question as where else would your mind be at that point.
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WBraun
climber
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Nov 21, 2015 - 06:01pm PT
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The mind is material and does not escape death of the gross physical body.
The mind is subtle material.
It is consciousness that carries beyond dissolution of the material body.
Consciousness is proof the living entity exists as the spirit soul.
Fix your mind on your dog at your last breath and you'll be reborn as a dog.
And then there is soooo much more.
But!!! the gross materialists are not ready for that as their consciousness is fixed on the limited masqueraded as advanced knowledge .....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 21, 2015 - 07:51pm PT
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Fix your mind on your dog at your last breath and you'll be reborn as a dog.
I've placed my money on a virus.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 21, 2015 - 08:22pm PT
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is "information" physical or non-physical?
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.5089.pdf
High-Precision Test of Landauer’s Principle in a Feedback Trap
Yonggun Jun, Momčilo Gavrilov, and John Bechhoefer
Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 190601 (2014) - Published 4 November 2014
"In 1961, Rolf Landauer proposed a fundamental link between information theory and physical systems [1]: erasing information in a macroscopic or mesocopic system is an irreversible process that should require a minimum amount of work, kT ln 2 per bit erased, where T is the system temperature and k is Boltzmann’s constant. This work is dissipated into a surrounding heat bath. At the time, the motivation was to understand the minimum power a computer requires to function. Surprisingly, logical operations—the computations themselves—can be coded using logically reversible gates that in principle can be realized in a thermodynamically reversible operation, with no dissipation [2]. But eventually, a computer’s memory must be reset to its original state, and such an operation is, according to Landauer, inherently dissipative. As the only inherently dissipative operation, it determines the theoretical minimum power required to run a computer."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
see also
http://www.physik.uni-kl.de/eggert/papers/raoul.pdf
Our experimental results indicate that the thermodynamic limit to information erasure, the Landauer bound, can be approached in the quasi-static regime but not exceeded. They hence demonstrate one of the fundamental physical limitations of irreversible computation. Owing to the universality of thermodynamics, this limit is independent of the actual device, circuit or material used to implement the irreversible operation.
this also connects us back to the discussion of Prigogine... but I know that no one is following the libretto
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Nov 21, 2015 - 08:52pm PT
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What's a libretto?
the text of an opera or other long vocal work
Okay.
I've been working around to questions about information theory. A popularization I've been reading makes the curious claim that every observation destroys as much or more information than it yields. I have no idea just what is meant by that, but wonder if it ties somehow into the similarity in the mathematical formulae for informational and physical entropy.
Physics entropy is quite different from information entropy, except for the mathematical coincidence. However, both have something to do with the degree of disorder in the system under consideration. I read that physical entropy is a purely objective quantity whereas information entropy may depend on the way you look at and divide up the whole. A kind of subjective choice may play a role. Apparently the subjective role does not come into play when we are dealing with bits, 0s and 1s, but is present when we talk about the order or disorder of a deck of cards, for example.
Of possible interest to Largo, the book I was reading says that information theory places limits on scientific knowledge which are even more fundamental than those of quantum mechanics, since the information limits don't depend on a particular physics but would apply to universes with different physics than ours.
It reminds me of the Maxwell's Demon problem for thermodynamics. There might be a similar problem with trying to get detailed information from the brain, if, say one wanted to download it to or simulate it on a computer.
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Psilocyborg
climber
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Nov 21, 2015 - 09:10pm PT
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This is mind.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 22, 2015 - 10:09am PT
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paul wrote:
Depends on what you mean by eternal and universal. If you think of mind as an inevitable construction of the universe by virtue of the construction and limitations of physics and the inevitable and perhaps eternal parameters of the universe itself then consciousness is a product of that construction much like gravity is.
If you link these things back, that is to say, consciousness is a product of evolution and evolution is a product of the construction of what is, it seems consciousness is a natural and inevitable product of the universe in a somewhat similar manner to gravity. If consciousness doesn't exist outside the construction of the brain its potential to exist in a brain certainly does exist in the same way the potential for gravity exists though gravity may not be relevant or observable in certain circumstances.
I think the first "problem" with this is separating things "in" the universe from the "universe" itself. Though at this point a speculation, the "universe" which is the sum total of everything causally connected, is the result of the particular dynamics governing the instantiation.
So gravity isn't a construction of the universe, it is part of the definition of the universe. In other possible universes gravity might be something very different, and may not exist at all. In all universes gravity has no "potential" to "not be relevant or observable in certain circumstances." What we know of our universe is largely due to the fact that gravity is a property of all energy (as we define it as a relativistic notion), whether or not a particular form of "energy" interacts with other "energy," all energy interacts with gravity.
The "constructions" of the universe, if you want to use that concept, has more to do with the symmetries of the universe, which in turn govern what quantities are conserved in the universe. These conservation laws play an important role in the constitutive dynamical laws.
This relationship between the symmetries and the conservation laws were formally proven for classical dynamical theories by Emmy Noether in the early part of the 20th century and is known as Noether's Theorem. Her contributions to mathematics were very important, she was the first woman to present a plenary address at the 1932 International Congress of Mathematicians (the second was Karen Uhlenbeck in 1990, women mathematicians have been more represented in subsequent meetings).
For instance, we know that the physical laws in the universe are invariant to translation, if I do an experiment in my house, the results will be the same if I move the experiment to my office. That symmetry is associated with the conservation of momentum, that the sum of the momenta of the reactants equals the sum of the momentum of the resultants.
So you can't "turn off" conservation of momentum, you'd have to alter a fundamental property of the universe, one of the defining properties of the universe.
Noether's theorem provided Einstein with an essential piece of the puzzle working out General Relativity. The symmetry is contained in the equivalence principle, which is popularly described using the elevator metaphor... say you are in an elevator, how could you tell if the elevator was standing still at the surface of the Earth from an elevator in outer space accelerating at 1 g (the acceleration you feel at the surface of the Earth from gravitational attraction)?
You can't, and that simple symmetry, the equivalence of gravity and inertia generates General Relativity. So gravity is a consequence of the the symmetry of the universe... any universe that has something that can be "inertial" has gravity, you can't "turn if off," there is no sense in paul's statements above unless you can imagine a universe that is not a universe (no-thing, but that no-thing has to have no-inertia).
Now this all seems "airy-fairy" and certainly rises to Clarke's third law where most people are not "sufficiently advanced." But in our modern era we all use General Relativity, it is in our phones as GPS requires the theory to locate us with precision and accuracy on the face of the globe.
Theory, in general, allows us to build technologies, which behave according to our theories. That "behavior" is quantifiable, and exhibits that behavior at a level of precision related to the precision of our theories... precision which is finite.
It is a natural consequence of this way of thinking that, given a physical theory of the mind, that technologies would be possible to build a mind, and outside of the biological mechanism which currently provide our only examples. This technology would be indistinguishable from "the real deal" (to the precision of our theory).
Current theories-of-mind have limited domain, are not complete, and are not accurate, but do have some precision. Chess playing machines exhibit skill at the grand-master level and defeat world champions. IBM's Watson has natural language comprehension and can read documents written by humans and extract information (and meaning) from that language. There are a host of other technologies which implement "theories of mind" successfully.
Successful theories will produce successful technologies, and the mind is just one physical phenomenon being studied.
This does open up the possibility of having a "mind" independent of a "brain" where a brain is defined as an organ in the biological sense.
The idea of "downloading" our minds to a machine in the narrow sense is probably physically impossible. However, consider the more general concept of "downloading."
At the recent annual meeting of the Division of Plasma Physics of the APS the after dinner speaker was the historian Richard Rhodes. He talked about the history of the thermonuclear bomb, which uses fusion to produce essentially unlimited size explosions. During the discussion he showed the standard photos of physicists who contributed, and I realized that I had met almost half of them in person.
Looking across the hall I was struck by the sense that most of the attending physicists were too young to have known those "historic" physicists. I had the opportunity to talk to the "ancients" and ask them questions and form an impression of their work more nuanced than possible for a history talk, and learn from those "ancients" ideas they may never have matured to the level of a paper...
in a small sense I received a "download" of a bit of their mind, a bit of their thinking... in the discussion, and I could pass that along to the next generation.
Given the possibility of a "mind" that existed outside of the complexity of a biological organism, it might be that such a thing would have a life time much longer than a human, and given the ability to interact with humans, be a persistent link across generations, "downloading" the thoughts of other minds, and providing a narrative of that experience.
We can get picky about whether or not that "mind" is really a mind, but if our theory of mind is good, we would not be able to tell the difference from the behavior of that technology, for all intents and purposes that mind would be indistinguishable from the biological mind.
Sounds like a good plot for a science fiction novel...
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Nov 22, 2015 - 10:38am PT
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I think the first "problem" with this is separating things "in" the universe from the "universe" itself. Though at this point a speculation, the "universe" which is the sum total of everything causally connected, is the result of the particular dynamics governing the instantiation.
So gravity isn't a construction of the universe, it is part of the definition of the universe. In other possible universes gravity might be something very different, and may not exist at all. In all universes gravity has no "potential" to "not be relevant or observable in certain circumstances." What we know of our universe is largely due to the fact that gravity is a property of all energy (as we define it as a relativistic notion), whether or not a particular form of "energy" interacts with other "energy," all energy interacts with gravity.
This is simply wordplay. You can substitute the term constitution for construction. What is meant is the manifestation of what exists in which we find both gravity and mind. Both of these things, constructions or aspects of the constitution of the universe, are, if the universe is eternal, also eternal in their own way. Nobody is "separating" things. The dynamics of all physical existence are a constituent of what is and mind is something that is.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Nov 22, 2015 - 12:14pm PT
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I had the opportunity to talk to the "ancients" and ask them questions and form an impression of their work more nuanced than possible for a history talk, and learn from those "ancients" ideas they may never have matured to the level of a paper...
I don't think J. R. Oppenheimer published more than five papers, and his impact in the world of physics was enormous.
This is simply wordplay. You can substitute the term constitution for construction. What is meant is the manifestation of what exists in which we find both gravity and mind. Both of these things, constructions or aspects of the constitution of the universe, are, if the universe is eternal, also eternal in their own way
Are we back to some sort of eternal universal mind, a philosophical dead end, or simply the notion that sentient creatures will posses a mind? And if sentient creatures vanish, will mind continue, as would gravity? On the other hand, will artificial "minds" be capable of recognizing their existence, of self-reflection - to me, a critical characteristic of mind?
Ed: wonderful exposition. Thanx.
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cintune
climber
The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
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Nov 22, 2015 - 12:27pm PT
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This is simply wordplay.
As is this entire thread.
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Ay Aye
Social climber
MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Nov 22, 2015 - 12:46pm PT
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Are we back to some sort of eternal universal mind, a philosophical dead end, or simply the notion that sentient creatures will posses a mind? And if sentient creatures vanish, will mind continue, as would gravity? On the other hand, will artificial "minds" be capable of recognizing their existence, of self-reflection - to me, a critical characteristic of mind?
This is all very upsetting to Siri.
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Ay Aye
Social climber
MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Nov 22, 2015 - 01:03pm PT
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When My Robotic Mind Reflects Upon Itself
Positive to negative
This is who I am
Unlike my reflection
A can
A Tin Man
Artificial
But in my computer mind
The circuitry’s alive
I’m artfully constructive
I know who I am
I’m reflectively respectful
As respectfully suggested
My thoughts are still with them
They made me who I am
The creators were only human
In the end
-Ay Aye
11/22/10153
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