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A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

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Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#131

Post by LiquidHelium »

mirekrusin wrote: post #9
sctb wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My general understanding is that "mind" is an objective concept; people have minds that cognize and think and learn and so on. Some minds are apparently more capable of those things than others. When speaking about intelligence, it makes sense to associate that with the mind. Consciousness, on the other hand, is (even) less well-defined and is usually considered to be subjective. Being subjective, it tends to resist…

I don't understand why people have problem with simply stating that it is emergent phenomenon and that's it. Similarly to how computer is computer and half sized computer is half of its bigger friend – you can keep halving it until there is no "computer" left in it. Or pencil – you have pencil that you call pencil; what about pencil half size of it? and so on until you hit single atom. You had pencil, now you don't,…

It depends on what you mean by consciousness, if we are talking about the intelligence or self awareness or thoughts then I don’t see any problem with it being emergent. But if we are talking about conscious experience/qualia (not something that thinks or interacts, but something that just experiences) then I think it’s incoherent for it to be emergent. That there is a consciousness that is experiencing something is the only thing we can know as 100% true, and the world itself is something we can never know is 100% true: we could be a brain in a vat, we could be dreaming, in the matrix, a demon making us hallucinate everything etc. It seems a bit silly to say the 100% true thing is an illusion or is dependent because something that we don’t know is true tells us it is.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#132

Post by skissane »

scotty79 wrote: post #119
skissane wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that what we now call “science” actually did start out as a branch of philosophy, and only gradually became separated from it; and there are figures who made substantial contributions to both disciplines (e.g. Henri Poincaré, who made significant contributions to both mathematical physics and philosophy of science) Al Gore’s relationship to the Internet can’t be compared

> The difference is that what we now call “science” actually did start out as a branch of philosophy, and only gradually became separated from it; It was hundreds of years ago, when philosophers of nature, aka people who thought about usefull stuff, left to become scientists. What remains in philosophy since then is all the useless stuff.

There are practising scientists who take philosophy of science much more seriously than you do.

To give a random example, I'm quite a fan of Lynn Waterhouse's Rethinking Autism: Variation and Complexity (Elsevier Academic Press, 2013) which seeks to provide a critical evaluation of the strength of the scientific evidence behind the theory of autism, in its various incarnations (from Kanner's early infantile autism and Asperger's autistic psychopathy through to DSM-5 ASD). And Waterhouse actually draws on philosophy of science in the process, as this quote demonstrates (p. 24):

> In fact, the orphaned and disconfirmed theories that have failed to explain variation in autism are, in large part, examples of theory underdetermination. Science philosopher Peter Lipton (2005) argued, “Theories go far beyond the data that support them; indeed, the theories would be of little interest if this were not so. However, this means a scientific theory is always ‘underdetermined’ by the available data concerning the phenomena” (p. 1261). The theory of underdetermination, called the Duhem–Quine principle, is a formal acceptance that theories make claims that data do not fully support. Theory succession, as from Hippocrates’ theory of pangenesis to Darwin’s gemmules, to DNA and transcriptomes, moves from one underdetermined theory to the next. However, Stanford (2001) pointed out that not all theory underdetermination is acceptable. It can be a Devil’s bargain: a serious threat to scientific discovery.

And another quote from the same book (p. 27):

> Equally problematic, autism brain research findings have not uncovered the underlying complexity of the phenomena. Bogen and Woodward (1988) argued that what can be measured is “rarely the result of a single phenomenon operating alone, but instead typically reflect the interaction of many different phenomena ….Nature is so complicated that … it is hard to imagine an instrument which could register any phenomenon of interest in isolation” (pp. 351–352).

And the citations referenced in those quotes:

> Lipton, P. (2005). The Medawar Lecture 2004: The truth about science. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B, 360, 1259–1269

> Stanford, P.K. (2001). Refusing the devil’s bargain: What kind of underdetermination should we take seriously? Philosophy of Science, 68, 3. Supplement: Proceedings of the 2000 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers, pp. S1–S12

> Bogen, J., & Woodward, J. (1988). Saving the phenomena. Philosophical Review, 97, 303–352.

The book only cites three philosophy of science papers, compared to dozens and dozens of papers from neuroscience, genetics, psychology, etc – as you'd expect for a scholarly book focused on the science of autism. Still, the fact it cites philosophy papers at all is an example of how many practising scientists are more positive about philosophy of science than you yourself are.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#133

Post by szvsw »

bloomingkales wrote: post #91
szvsw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define adaptation and learning? What about say, an autoscaler which is programmed to just track the the load for every hour over the last week, and use the average of the last 7 days at 8am to pre-emptively auto-scale? Is that learning and adapting? Alternatively, neural networks are also just doing explicitly what they are designed to do… sure there is a larger computational graph with lots of operations,…

What if we define adaptation and learning as the ability to concentrate. Our single cell ancestors would have to concentrate and deliberately store the first memory. Otherwise it would have just taken in the world with its sensors but never do anything with it. Adapting and learning means it chose to concentrate on packing the world into retrievable storage. When do we not adapt and learn? When we ignore our inputs a…

> When do we not adapt and learn? When we ignore our inputs and do nothing with it (don’t store it, don’t retrieve it).

In the example I mentioned, the program clearly is taking inputs (load), storing them, querying for previous values that satisfy certain conditions (the value at a certain timestamp for each of the last 7 days), running computation (computing a mean), and operationalizing the result (pre-emptively scaling) to achieve a goal (avoiding having insufficient capacity) that affects the world (whoever interacting with the system will have different experiences because of the actions taken by the system). That seems like it satisfies your criterion to me.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#134

Post by metalmangler »

protocolture wrote: post #65
skissane wrote: post #61

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinction…

I bailed 10 words in and came to the comments to see if the article was worth reading. Thanks for confirming its a skip.

I held out a bit longer, and then skimmed, but started to become offended by the whole ,thing, but couldnt be bothered to be that annoyed by so many different things. That said I am very much into bieng outside in the company of many animals, working with them, and just bieng in wild environments, but language fails, when it comes to describing how species interact, and in the end, we cant describe our own mental proceseses in a clear, intellible by all, way. There is yet to be a genius of the mind, where the definition of genius is,:an idea that once explained, everyone else goes "of course" My main issue is that these sort of philisophical projects, reek, of money and hidden agenda's, and shade very quickly into, policy decisions, and quasi religious beurocratic powers.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#135

Post by timewizard »

_1tem wrote: post #121

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Take any definition of consciousness or intelligence that is not based on biological components. For example "reacts to stimuli, exhibits anger". You can apply that definition to other entities like the United States. Does the United States react to stimuli (i.e. invasion) and exhibit anger? Yes (e.g. Pearl Harbor). Therefore the United States is conscious? If a person argues…

If I break a bone. It heals itself. Are my bones intelligent?

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#136

Post by timewizard »

giorgioz wrote: post #35

I've been thinking as well that from some perspective a human being isn't actually a single life but rather itself a multitude of separate tiny-life forms that cooperate to survive (the cells). The voice in our head is the emerging consciouness that act as a captain, it's useful for the captain to think of itself as one being. Now this said, I feel the article is jumping a bit too much on the Animism hippie bandwagon…

You perceive one voice and give it a position of authority.

What if it isn't?

What if it's many voices and they compete for control?

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#137

Post by LiquidHelium »

anon291 wrote: post #77
marcus_holmes wrote: post #73

I found it fascinating how this discussion dovetails with the discussion around free will. In both cases, defining the actual thing under discussion is hard. If you can accurately predict a decision in advance, is that "free will"? If an organism reacts to a stimulus in an appropriate manner, is that "intelligence"? In both cases, we're complex chemical organisms doing all of this with complex chemistry. If we rule o…

One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of. And this is where these arguments that seek to reduce intelligence to purely mechanistic processes breaks down. For sure, everything the article is saying is true, and indeed, the system could be classified as intelligent, but this is a wholly different question from 'agency' or 'free will'. Even exceptionally dumb people have free…

This is an argument for anecdote so feel free to ignore me but if you meditate for long enough or take certain substances you can experience that the conscious experience we are having doesn't actually control things in the way we think it does - you don't actually think your thoughts, you just observe them, like we don't control the sounds we hear - and same with everything else we do. The "only thing one can be assured of" is the experience, not the control of the experience.

This is completely contradicted by the fact I could talk about that experience, which does imply some control from the observer to the physical world. Which makes the whole thing paradoxical. The only way I can square it is with my religious beliefs.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#138

Post by gnz11 »

scotty79 wrote: post #120
perching_aix wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing the scientific method. Philosophy is not for "understanding the universe". Surely it cannot be blamed for not fulfilling a goal you only imagine it to have.

It can be blamed for being pretentious useless ramblings.

Nah, that is strictly the domain of political punditry.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#139

Post by IsTom »

teekert wrote: post #128
mcswell wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language." We have known since 1957 that there is a hierarchy of "grammars", with finite state "languages" being near the bottom, and transformational grammars at the top. Human languages are certainly at a minimum at the context free phrase structure grammar level. My point is that by using the word "langu…

As a scientist, articles like this also annoy me. Because it, right off the bat, assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness. Just because we don't experience those degrees, and animals can't convey what they feel through language, we assume it is "emergent", or "suddenly there". I think we are too caught up in believing that consciousness must be something really special or some magic discontinuity of spaceti…

> assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness

And I don't get why, it seems to me quite self evident that you yourself can experience reduced-consciousness states, be it being half-asleep or quite drunk.

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