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rbord
Boulder climber
atlanta
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Feb 24, 2015 - 09:01am PT
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Agreed HFCS, and what percentage of snails will be able to do it, and how will that be determined?
We create an advantageous ecology of beliefs, and if the cognitive dissonance of adding one more true belief threatens to upset the apple cart of our advantageous balance of true and false beliefs, then maybe we choose not to believe it, and substitute an advantageous false belief instead, whether woo or Jesus or another. Or maybe those are the true ones and we lack the resources and information to ferret out the offending false belief that prevents us from believing them and developing an advantageous ecology of only true beliefs. Maybe we're evolving towards that, or maybe not, but in the meantime, we still all walk on our feet, and believe like humans. We all do, you, me, and those other arrogant self-righteous azzhats with the different beliefs (eg me to many :-). Sometimes that means believing something that's not true - I mean for other people that's what it means!
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Feb 24, 2015 - 09:37am PT
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What is the appropriate method for studying G,A and I ?
In the West most people go for psychology. In the East most follow a meditation school. Increasingly the two disciplines over lap and borrow from each other's methods and terminology. Which do you prefer - Spirituality or transpersonal psychology?
Some psychologists are still focused on rats in labs and some spiritualists on ancient rituals, but a new synthesis is developing as a sub specialty of both.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 24, 2015 - 09:53am PT
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"in the meantime, we still all walk on our feet, and believe like humans. We all do, you, me, and those other..." -rbord
Sonder: The Realization That Everyone Has A Story...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkoML0_FiV4
sonder: n. "the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk."
Thanks, bvb!
http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/
rbord, I hear you. And I bet like me you are grateful you don't live in a culture in which they believe it is a necessary thing every once in awhile to throw virgins into a volcano.
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PSP also PP
Trad climber
Berkeley
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Feb 24, 2015 - 09:55am PT
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Transpersonal psychology typically costs more than $100/hr; so how many people are truly using it; actually working on themselves with it as a tool to observe their own G,A and I ? It is not available to the masses.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Feb 24, 2015 - 10:13am PT
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You know, to replace the 'indefinable woo' in the consciousness equation. Something is causing it. What?
This is reductionism. But when we reduce down far enough, as we have seen, you get to that which has no physical extent. No-thing. That is what sources all the stuff. What you are locked into is the belief that the stuff (brain) "causes" the woo (no-thing). But this is a truncated reductionism. You stopped reducing at the last stratum of stuff.
JL
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 24, 2015 - 10:17am PT
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"This is reductionism."
I love reduction!
I love reductionism!
.....
reductionism: belief in reduction as a useful tool for figuring out stuff.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Feb 24, 2015 - 10:35am PT
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Transpersonal psychology typically costs more than $100/hr; so how many people are truly using it; actually working on themselves with it as a tool to observe their own G,A and I ? It is not available to the masses.
On the other hand, I have been to several ashrams where I was told that when they gave away their teachings for free, they were plagued by hippies hanging out for the free room and board and when they started charging even modest fees, they got people who were there to learn. Unfortunately money gives value in our society even when it comes to spirituality.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 24, 2015 - 10:36am PT
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That's what he said HFCS.
If you reduce far enough you will come to the answer.
Unfortunately for you ... you never went far enough.
Instead you had your usual passive reading comprehension tantrum triggered by your biases.
You don't even have full control of your own mind.
Thus you're still in the dark ....
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Feb 24, 2015 - 10:36am PT
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Paul: . . . there is something missing from any purely computational model of consciousness.
Yeah, a helluva lot. Perhaps the most important thing missing is an empirical description of consciousness. People use made-up definitions, but there is nothing that can be pinned down that can be agreed upon. It’s pretty obvious why. (Largo’s regaled us with articulations of that problem now for years.)
Scientifically, science is going to need a measurable construct of the dependent variable. If it doesn’t have that, talking about the independent variables will be fruitless and purely speculative (read, “imaginative”).
Many folks in cognitive science have given up on the mind-as-computer metaphor. AI has a vested interest in continuing with the metaphor, though. (What else can they do?) Those who are looking into grounded cognition or embodied cognition are getting closer to a notion of “experience” as the basis for cognition. (Note, the causality: they are not saying that cognition is the basis for experience.)
OH, wait-a-minute, . . . I screwed up! (I forgot; jeez.)
“Evolution” is the answer.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Feb 24, 2015 - 11:30am PT
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My tortured guess would be that the ultimate nature of human consciousness, and it's overall functioning, will prove to outwit both biologic/evolutionary determinism and all the various ad hoc formulations based upon semantics or confined to personal subjective experience.
The one pivotal thing that must be kept in mind about AI is that "Artificial Intelligence" does not mean "artificial human intelligence" since for all intents and purposes that phrase appears to be an oxymoron. AI ,broadly speaking ,is not a project to merely mimic or mechanistically reproduce human consciousness. Despite the fact that the only referential model for advanced "intelligence" in our world happens to be human---to confine the advances in computational prowess,for example,to the human categorical model would be a retrograde "advance to the rear".
Therefore there does not necessarily exist a crucial problem in the development of AI (again,broadly speaking) which represents a sort of Godelian statement beyond which no real advances can be made in its further development due to a theoretically inherent inability to foster an acceptable simulacrum of human consciousness.
Nevertheless, even if a fully functioning human-like android/robot were developed to strictly conform to the human model --- and this is a point I've repeatedly made--there would be no precise way to determine what sort of subjective life this creature actually does/doesn't lead; pertinent algorithms notwithstanding.
If you ran into this android at the supermarket you would a) not know it was a robot b) have no way to determine the content of its consciousness.
Sort of like meeting WBraun at Safeway.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 24, 2015 - 11:41am PT
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"Largo’s regaled us..."
Hey, that sounds loaded. (If not groupiesque.)
"Many folks in cognitive science have given up on the mind-as-computer metaphor."
I imagine that canard gets miles when it's trotted out over there on the humanities ala liberal arts side, eh?
OH, wait-a-minute, . . . I screwed up! (I forgot; jeez.)
“Evolution” is the answer.
Yep. (To 1,001 questions.)
Evolution is the basis of a new way of thinking.
Yep.
.....
Meanwhile (in the nonsupertopo universe) a step closer...
a bionic eye - the ‘Second Sight Argus II’ retinal prosthesis system...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2966700/Heart-warming-video-captures-moment-blind-man-sees-wife-time-ten-years-bionic-eye-implant.html
Recall tvash's insightful "consciousness-raising through our toys present and future" principle.
I (heart) reduction(ism)! As a learning tool!
It's so tangible! so real! so down-to-earth!
Especially as it delivers us miracles!!!!11
.....
"I created humanity so that most of it would believe in Me the wrong way and I could send them to hell." - God
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rbord
Boulder climber
atlanta
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Feb 24, 2015 - 07:38pm PT
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Grateful, yes! Also figure being a dinosaur probably seemed like a good idea at the time, just like all of our beliefs do, if they don't lead us on a path to extinction. Not to say that evolution has anything to do with who we are :-) I mean, its pretty obvious to see why, depending on which way your beliefs lean.
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Feb 24, 2015 - 09:06pm PT
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Also figure being a dinosaur probably seemed like a good idea at the time, just like all of our beliefs do
certainly a humungous ego to cause a body of that size!?
more than genetics, environment absolutely spawned them!
IMO, Christians need not be so temperamental over the age of the body or it's constitution. The bible aint. What is relevant in the bible is environment..
that's how i read it anyways
evolution's language is mysterious and queer
atleast the way people write about it anyways
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BLUEBLOCR
Social climber
joshua tree
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Feb 24, 2015 - 09:12pm PT
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depending on which way your beliefs lean.
what are beliefs without your action on the environment?
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Feb 24, 2015 - 09:42pm PT
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I missed this by Paul: "In essence: that there is something missing from any purely computational model of consciousness. That the function of mind takes us far beyond the limited construct of computation. That it is an error to perceive complexity within computer functions as a lead in to self awareness as such awareness may be entirely separate from such functions. That computation cannot evoke emotion. That science insists mind is to be understood solely in terms of computation and that there is something striking missing in that assessment."
It amazes me that computation is ever confused for or even related to consciousness - as if a number crunching machine will suddenly become self-aware in real time once it's mother board and the data crunched reaches a certain level of complexity. If people have any perceptual wherewithal when reading this thread, they will immediately realize that what is missing from a staunch computational model is not only their subjective experience but also their real time awareness of same. Trying to foist all of this into computational terms is what Healj was trying to do per positing consciousness as a behavior, or some action or function that we can observe that is in response to an internal or external stimulai. Further down the line, Ward said that even if an AI robot ever achieved a human kind of self awareness we would not be able to determine or prove as much through an objective analysis. This is telling information on Ward's behalf. First, (A), Ward knows - as most of us do - that human style self awareness and experience are unquestionably real phenomenon. Second, we assume that no current machine enjoys this phenomenon of consciousness, and if one eventually does, there is no way to prove it. Why, because there is no way to measure (A). What we can measure is computing, an objective thing.
Why all this harping about mind being no-thing. Because if you want to know about human sentience, and you can't measure the it, then you have to look at other methods to deal with it straight up.
That's where a discussion about consciousness generally leads, because all objectifying models of inquiry are in fact talking about computation, or are working the computational model, and consider all other models woo. But of course this is simply a kind of laziness of mind that can't stop doing what it has always done, like repeating the same rock climb over and over. The new route simply has no relish to some.
JL
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Feb 24, 2015 - 09:54pm PT
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Why could a computational device not have subjective experience and real-time awareness of same?
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Feb 24, 2015 - 09:59pm PT
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"Why could a computational device not have subjective experience..."
yes, esp taking into account the "computational device" in an organic is evolution-made, not man-made, therefore likely constructed by altogether different means many of which we probably can't even imagine.
We're constrained in our thinking about the solution to the Hard Problem to man-made designs and constructions - how Man would do it with his facts and figures, calipers and soldering iron - that's probably why, as much as anything else, it remains so elusive.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 24, 2015 - 11:05pm PT
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Yep, it took some four billion years to create consciousness from a few simple chemicals.
No such thing ever happened nor can you prove such nonsense.
You should seriously reread what you just said especially the words ....
(to create)
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 24, 2015 - 11:19pm PT
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Why all this harping about mind being no-thing. Because if you want to know about human sentience, and you can't measure the it, then you have to look at other methods to deal with it straight up.
Don't have time for a proper reply to the last couple posts other than to say in response to this gem: nonsense - and as if your "other methods" yield or offer up anything concrete to say about the nature of consciousness. If it did you'd have been 'reporting' back here instead of spouting an endless diatribe about what is to be gleaned beyond the consciousness event horizon if only some[else] is willing to journey there and report back. So what does dealing in those other methods yield? Out with it.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Feb 25, 2015 - 12:16am PT
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^^^^^^^^
I think you’re still grousing about self-consistency. If non-science has no leg to stand on, neither does science. Bloody hell . . . at least show some consistency. Take some stand and apply it equally in everything, otherwise we might think you fickle, simply self-interested, or or expeditious.
Ward:
You seem to be saying that there is no limit to human intelligence to figure this issue of consciousness out. In a manner of speaking, you must be right. (But check-out my notion of “what I am”).
Look, at the end of the day you’ll have to operationalize something. Until then, it’s a conversation, a theory, an imagination. I have many students that would be willing to give that a go.
“If ye be scientists, then create and operationalize! Until then, it’s the myth in thee that sings!”
MH2: Why could a computational device not have subjective experience and real-time awareness of same?
How could 4 not be 2? (You’ve lost some credibility points here.) Or kindly bring forth your theory.
There needs to be more time for recreation in our lives. However we can get it, we should come more in contact with ourselves. More opportunity for expression. Less orientation to goals and objectives. (Those are just markers in a moving stream.)
There is a flow that we are a part of, and we are being pulled willy nilly to our origin—One and All. This is what I am aware of. It is not the thought of it that I am aware of, but the feeling of it.
Any form of struggling is a waste of energy. There is only being. The rest is merely interesting.
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