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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

#3

Post by card_zero »

I read it all, for a certain value of "read". It's very long, and heavy on examples and fascinating facts, but skimps on getting to the point. I enjoyed the line about plant biologists suffering from brain envy. The article gets better from about halfway through as skeptical views begin to be introduced, but eventually it lets go of that and turns back into lot of hand-wavy awe about mycorrhizal networks, and I missed what the "new proposal" is. If it's only saying that intelligence is an emergent property of connections, and could therefore emerge in swarms or societies, we've had that idea since at least Hofstadter and his sentient ant nests.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#4

Post by sctb »

gregwebs wrote: post #2

I don't see the word "consciousness" in the article. I thought that was the thing to figure out to understand the emergence of the mind.

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 all of the usual objective approaches of description and analysis. Hard problem and all that.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#5

Post by kayo_20211030 »

The whole proposal can be distilled to Connections => Mind. We've been struggling with the causal effect, even the definition, of what the `=>` means in humans. Seems a long shot that the study of, and breathy coverage, of plant signals will illuminate much. Maybe it will, but I'm not holding my breath.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#6

Post by SubiculumCode »

card_zero wrote: post #3

I read it all, for a certain value of "read". It's very long, and heavy on examples and fascinating facts, but skimps on getting to the point. I enjoyed the line about plant biologists suffering from brain envy. The article gets better from about halfway through as skeptical views begin to be introduced, but eventually it lets go of that and turns back into lot of hand-wavy awe about mycorrhizal networks, and I misse…

'Get to the point' is my primary response to the article..

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#7

Post by Aardwolf »

sctb wrote: post #4
gregwebs wrote: post #2

I don't see the word "consciousness" in the article. I thought that was the thing to figure out to understand the emergence of the mind.

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…

The mind concept here then could apply to computers as well since after all those can also be configured to learn things and behave in certain intelligent ways

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#9

Post by mirekrusin »

sctb wrote: post #4
gregwebs wrote: post #2

I don't see the word "consciousness" in the article. I thought that was the thing to figure out to understand the emergence of the mind.

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, where on this line there was pencil and then there wasn't?

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