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| pico |
 Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2007 1:39 pm |
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"Curt Welch" <curt@kcwc.com> wrote in message
news:20070911143133.056$EW@newsreader.com...
Quote: "pico" <pico.pico.pico> wrote:
Brain scanners show only gross electrical activity. Watching your brain
to learn your mind is like watching your feet to learn how you walk.
Which is why I said "high resolution real time brain scanner". If you
could sit at a computer terminal and watch in real time (down to a 1/10 of
a second or so) what individual neurons in your brain were doing, the
experience would be very different than what you can get today by watching
something like a fMRI. Even the best current technology is still very low
resolution.
We need more than a dim map of the terrain. Show how your method tells us
where an idea comes from. |
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| JGCASEY |
| Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2007 5:07 pm |
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On Sep 12, 1:58 am, "pico" <pico.pico.pico> wrote:
Curt Welch wrote:
Quote: If you want to kill the myth of a non-physical mind,
just figure out how to develop a noninvasive high
resolution real time brain scanner which any Joe
from the street can experiment with and see the
physical activity of his brain
Brain scanners show only gross electrical activity.
Watching your brain to learn your mind is like
watching your feet to learn how you walk.
I think the suggestion was to "kill the myth of a
non-physical mind". People suffering physical damage
to their brains or the effects of chemicals on the
brain I believe make the link between the contents
of our experiences and brain activity very clear.
Those who need a soul will never be convinced for
psychological reasons.
--
JC |
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| Curt Welch |
| Posted: Tue Sep 11, 2007 5:21 pm |
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D H <wings4us@budweiser.com> wrote:
Quote: Curt Welch wrote:
If you want to kill the myth of a non-physical mind, just figure out
how to develop a noninvasive high resolution real time brain scanner
which any Joe from the street can experiment with and see the physical
activity of his brain which correlates with the mental events he is
experiencing in his mind. Anyone that spends enough time playing with
such a machine will no longer be able to see his mental events as
anything other than physical brain events and the mind body problem
will be solved for that person.
Weren't there some crude proto-types of that invented several millenia
ago? Like getting bonked on the head and becoming unconscious, or
ingesting mind or behavior altering substances of one sort or another?
Yes. And today, we have countless experiments that show the correlations
between mental activity and the physical world (sticking probes in our
brain and seeing the mental sensations they create). That's why so many of
us our materialists. But yet, we all still have private mental events
happening which don't correlate to other mental events in the domain we
learn to label as the physical world. We just never get the opportunity to
experience the correlation first hand, because the only physical events for
these types of mental events we call private thoughts only exist inside our
head.
If our brain was built different so that all brain activity was directly
correlated to external physical events, then we wouldn't have the power to
have private thoughts. Private thoughts are just the result of the neural
activity which is not directly correlated with external physical events.
For example, if the only time we could think about a dog, was when we were
seeing a dog, then there would be no confusion about the mind. It's the
simple fact that we can have thoughts about dogs, when there is no dog in
the environment, that creates the illusion of a non-physical mind. It's
the simple fact that we can see a dog foot-print and then have thoughts
about the dog that created it (a large black dog with floppy ears pops into
our thoughts) which creates the notion of a mind.
If we had a brain that could not create private thoughts, the entire
mind-body confusion never would have happened. We wouldn't be wasting any
time talking about the mind vs the brain because everyone would simply see
themselves as a physical body interacting with a physical environment and
nothing else. This stuff people like to call "conscious experience"
wouldn't exist because there would be no confusion over the "I" in "I am
having a conscious experience".
When people talk about the fact that they are having a conscious
experience, and that this is something odd which needs to be explained
(John posted some of his normal talk like that in this thread), it's
because they are confused about what the "I" is that is having the
experience. It doesn't feel to John that it's his physical body which is
having the experience. It feels to him (and to most people) as if it's
something separate from the body which having the experience. That's
because, when we say to ourselves, in our own private thought, "Gee, I
wonder what type of dog left those foot prints", we don't associate our
mental perception of our own words with our own physical body. Those words
seemed to have come out of no where. There is nothing physical in our
environment that we are able to correlate with the production of those
words. Science has uncovered the fact that it's brain behavior creating
those thoughts, but just because that's what it says in a book doesn't mean
most of us have any first hand experience of the physical correlates of
those private thoughts. As a result, all these private thoughts we have in
our "mind" seem to exist separate from the body.
It's easy to understand that there's a link between the mind and the
physical world since the mind is responding to things that happen in the
physical world and that events in the mind later effect the physical world
(Out of my mind comes the words: "I think I'll raise my hand" and then my
hand moves). But seeing there is a link, doesn't allow us to see that it's
the same thing. I can control a car, but I am not a car just because I can
control the car. And likewise, just because the mind can interact with the
physical world is no proof that the mind and the brain are the same thing.
People love to argue (and it's already happened in this thread) that the
mind is "created by" the brain. They pull the magic word emergence out of
their ass to justify this argument. Why do they feel the need to make such
an argument if the mind is not in fact created by the brain, but is in
fact, _the brain_.
When we move our hand, do we feel the need to make the argument that the
motion has emerged from the hand, and that motion is not the hand, but
instead, something created by the hand through the magic of emergence? Of
course not. It's just the hand moving. We don't have any illusion that
something which wasn't there before the hand moved has now been created by
emergence.
But if materialism is correct, then all this activity we sense happening in
our brain which we call private thoughts, is nothing more than the motion
of the physical parts of the brain. So why, when the brain moves, do we
feel the need to talk as if something new has been created in the world
which is something other than just the brain? Why, is the entire concept
of the mind body problem, and the concept of consciousness, still such a
mystery to all these people like John and Alpha, who are otherwise strict
materialists who have spent a lot of their free time exploring these
concepts?
Why does John keep saying, things like (I'm quoting from his message in
this same thread): "You dismiss what might be an interesting question, what
is the physical basis of a conscious experience."
John "knows" he is having this thing he calls "a conscious experience" but
he can't for the life of him figure out how a physical brain could create
such an experience despite the fact I've given him a perfectly workable
explanation a good 20 times here in c.a.p.
He doesn't see his own "conscious experience" as nothing more than the
motion of his brain. He believes something else has been created by the
brain. He calls the "something else", "conscious experience", but he can't
for the life of him, figure out what it is, or how it got there. He just
knows it's there.
But if materialism is correct, there is nothing else there other than the
motion of the brain. It's as if every time I moved my hand, he jumped up
and said:
Look, there it is, your conscious hand experience just showed up again.
Where did it come from? What is it? How is it possible that a hand
could create such a think?
And when I stop moving my hand, he says:
Look, your hand is unconscious. The conscious experience is gone. why
did it go away?
Then, when I tell him it's nothing more than my hand moving and there's
nothing else that needs to be explained, he reacts with:
You dismiss what might be an interesting question, what is
the physical basis of a conscious hand experience?
I dismiss nothing. I explained it. It's nothing more than the movement of
the hand.
John doesn't have any problem understanding that a hand in motion isn't
creating something new and mysterious. It's just a hand in motion. But he
can't accept the fact that his private thoughts are just brain motion, and
nothing more, even though he will try to make the argument that he's a
materialist, which is the believe that there is nothing else in this
universe except the motion of physical matter.
All this confusion, which we can see first hand right here in this thread
by reading the posts of John and Alpha, has to come from somewhere.
Neither of them are stupid, both of them are interested in ideas of AI and
the mysteries of the human brain and mind. But yet, both of them believe
there is something happening here, which hasn't been explained. And they
are not alone - they are right in sync with the majority of scientists
working in these areas.
Why do they all see hand motion, as something we all understand and nothing
special, but yet they see brain motion, as something so special we have to
give it special names like conscious experience, or mind, and talk about
the fact that no one has been able to explain why it exists?
It's because of what I wrote in the first post. It's because of how the
brain works at the most fundamental level to classify the sensory world
into separate objects. It uses temporal correlation of sensory events to
classify them and build it's internal models. When different sensory
events are temporally correlated, they get modeled by the brain as sharing
the same cause, and the end result is that we sense them as being one
object instead of two objects.
When I hear a car drive by and turn to see the car, I don't think of it as
two different objects (one which made the sound and one which I saw). I
sense it naturally as one object. But when I hear the siren of a police
car, and turn to see a bicycle pass by, my mind doesn't join the vision of
the bicycle with the sound as if it were the same object. From past
experience of hearing police cars and seeing bicycles, we don't have a
history of the two sensory patterns being correlated. They are not
predictive of each other. As such, the brain has modeled them as separate
objects in our universe. When we hear a siren, and see a bicycle at the
same time, our perception is that there are two objects currently in our
environment, the bicycle, and the think making the sound, which we know is
near by, but we can't currently see.
The brain builds its models of the world based on the temporal correlation
of sensory patterns. How different sensory patterns correlates is how it
is able to correctly parse sensory data into objects. And more important,
anything that correlates, becomes one object to us, and anything which
doesn't correlate, is parsed as two different objects.
At the highest level of the brain's classification network, it has created
for each of us the concept of "physical world" and "mental world". All the
sensory patterns which correlate to events outside the head (aka they are
caused by external physical objects, like dogs, and trees) get loosely
associated together as part of the physical domain. They are seen as
similar to one another based on their expected temporal correlations. But,
as the brain does it's mechanical job of building models of the environment
based on sensory data temporal correlations, it's never come across any
strong temporal correlations between all those objects it's modeled in the
physical world, and all those objects it's modeled in what we call the
mental world. As such, the brain builds for us, a classification we see as
the physical world, which is associated with all the sensory patterns that
can happen in what we all understand to be the physical world, and another
classification of the mental world, which are all the sensory patterns
which have little correlation to the physical world patterns.
We see the mental world as being a different thing, or a different object,
from the physical world, simply because that's the model our brain has
built for us. And it builds that model for us, because there are few
temporal correlations in all the mental world sensory patterns, and the
physical world sensory patterns.
When John sees my hand, or my hand moving, his brain classifies it as the
same thing either way because the two different sensory patterns are
temporally associated. He just doesn't see a still hand and a moving had
as being different things.
But when he sees a physical brain, (even if he could see his own physical
brain with the help of some surgery and a mirror) he would see no sensory
pattern correlations between that vision, and the thoughts he was having.
He might detect a little motion caused by the heart pumping and sense a
correlation between his heart pounding in his chest, and a slight pulsation
of the brain tissue. But there's nothing in that sensory data of a vision
of his own brain, to correlate with his mental thoughts.
As a result, there is no physical activity he can directly sense, to
correlate with his private thoughts, and as such, the brain parses the
sensory data as being two things, instead of one things.
So, because his brain has build sensory data classification networks which
classify all the events from the physical world as being not temporally
correlated with the sensory events from the internal mental world, John (as
well as just about everyone in the world), believes there are two things
that need to be explained, instead of one. There is not just a brain, there
is the brain, and there is the mind. So this is why he things there is
something else here (a different object, or different thing) that needs to
be explained. It's not just the brain, it's the brain, and this other
things created by the brain called conscious experience, which he things I
ignore, and which he things we should find an answer for. He wants to know
where this second thing that he calls conscious experience, comes from, and
how the operation of the brain creates it.
And though I've put forth this theory that the brain uses temporal
correlations in sensory data to build its sensory data parsing networks and
that the form of these networks explains how the data binding problem is
solved by the brain, and explains the basis for how the world is
objectified for us, and why everyone sees the mind as something separate
from the brain, he still things I've explained nothing. I've written at
least 20 long messages like this, addressing all his points, over and over
again, and still, he tells me he doesn't understand why he sees his own
conscious experience as being something different from his brain.
My theory about all this makes a nice little prediction. It predicts that
since these data parsing networks built by the brain are constantly being
re-trained based on experience, that if you simply exposure the brain to
sensory data which has temporal correlation between sensory events in our
physical domain, and sensory events in our mental domain, the brain will
re-wire itself to adjust for these correlations. It would stop classifying
them as unrelated, and start to build associations showing they are
correlated. After enough exposure to the output of a brain scanner, which
was injecting sensory data into your eyes, and ears, and even your touch,
in response to mental brain activity, the brain would build associations
linking them.
For example, lets say that playing with this new neuron level brain
scanner, you find a small groups of neurons somewhere in your brain (the
scanner would display a map you could zoom in and out of) so you would know
exactly where in your brain it was located), that showed a direct
correlation with the thought of "dog". Those neurons became active only
when you were thinking "dog", and every time you thought "dog" those
neurons became active. We then build a nice little 3D sculpture of that
neuron which is 6" in diameter, and we put lights in it and make it flash,
and little motor to make it vibrate and buzz each time it became active.
Then we wire this little device to the brain computer so that every time it
sensed your neuron activating, it made this thing light up, and and
vibrate, and buzz. We could make the intensity of the light, and the
strength of the vibration relative to the activity level of the small group
of neurons. Then, the subject gets to sit in from this thing, and see it
flash, and feel it vibrate, and hear it buzz. Any time he started to think
about dogs, it would activate. He could have fun flipping through a deck
of cards with pictures on them, and only when the dog showed up did it
activate - or, if for a second, he left his mind drift to the thoughts of
dogs, it would activate. It would be fun to play with. And the guy would
know it's not his actual neuron, but only this physical toy which is being
activated by the behavior of his neuron.
But, in the future, after that experience, every time he feels the thought
of dogs slip into his consciousness, he would also be thinking of that
vibrating and flashing and buzzing neuron model, and in turn, he would be
thinking of the fact that the cluster of neurons were firing in his head.
And from the map, he knows exactly where in his head that neuron cluster is
located, and he can even take his finger and roughly point it. With
training like that, the thought of "dogs" would in time, no longer seem
like some conscious experience which was separate from the brain. It would
be seen as the same thing, as the activity of that little neuron cluster in
his brain. The brain would no longer classify them as two unrelated
things, it would associated them as being the same thing. With enough
training like that, anyone's brain would adjust its model of sensory
reality to show that the brain, and the mind, were not two different
things, but were instead one thing. We would see each different conscious
experience we have, as different parts of the brain in motion. We should
stop talking about, and understanding, the mind as something different, and
we would just think of as the brain. The end result, the mind body problem
is solved, and the mystery of consciousness, is no longer a mystery.
Some of us, already understand this based on our power to reason about the
way it must all work. I'm so convinced that this idea is valid, that I've
already been able to condition myself to see myself not as a mind existing
in a body, but simply as body. I've eliminated the mind/body split from my
own self image of myself. It took a few years to really condition myself
to see myself that way, but now the split is gone. I'm just a body
interacting with the environment, and my mental activity is just the
movement of microscopic and atomic brain parts.
Most people however are unable to be convinced by logic alone. They sense
their own mind is separate from their own brain, and being told it's
separate because of a lack of temporal correlation in the sensory data just
doesn't do anything for them. When they sense that a cookie is separate
from the table it's sitting on they don't see that as the result of some
type of processing happening in the brain, they sense that it's separate
because they believe that's the way it is in the real world and they are
just seeing the world for what it is. They however, have never tried to
program a computer to analyze video data and correctly parse it into
objects, and they don't understand how hard it is to correctly parse a
visual scene into objects like our brain does for us without us having to
think about how it hap panes. So not understanding anything of this
problem the brain solves for us, they don't appreciate the idea that the
brain does, at times, parse things incorrectly, simply because it hasn't
been exposed to all the data it needs to see the truth. It's the fact that
under normal conditions, we can't sense the inner working of our own brain
with our external physical sensors, that causes the brain to make this
mistake.
But, if we had this sort of high resolution real time scanner that people
could play with to explore the inner working of their own brain in real
time, then this illusion of a mind/brain split, would vanish for them.
Anyone that was told the illusion would vanish for them if they played with
the device, and then experienced first hand, how the illusion vanished,
would then be able to understand the argument I've made in these posts.
Some people like John and Alpha seem to fail to understand my point, and
somehow think my ideas have explained nothing, and that I'm just pretending
that conscious is not real. They couldn't have failed to understand my
point any more. Conscious is real, but it's just an illusion created by
the brain building an invalid model of the universe for us. It's the
illusion that our mind is separate from the brain, that causes everyone to
work so hard to find some magic, like emergence, to explain how the mind is
created as as separate object in the universe from the brain. Their error
is believing that that just because they perceive the mind as separate from
the brain, it must actually be separate. They fail to even grasp the
possibility that it's just an illusion, and that in the physical world,
there is no split. The mind and brain are one and the same thing, so there
is nothing to explain about how the mind "emerges" from the brain. There
are not two things there to explain, there is only one. Emergence happens
in the brains percpetion of things, not in the physical world.
When we take a pile of toothpicks, and arrange them to spell out a word,
like DOG, we say that the word DOG just emerged from the toothpicks. But it
didn't actuall emerge from the toothpicks. The concept of DOG doesn't
exist in the toothpicks. If someone who doesn't read English was watching
the toothpicks they wouldn't see the concept of a four legged pet emerge
from the toothpicks. It exists in our brain's perception of the
toothpicks. It exists because the DOG neurons in our brain, which were
inactive at one moment, suddenly became active once the toothpicks were
moved into the right configuration. What emerged, was again, the movement
of parts of the brain - brain behavior, not toothpick pile behavior.
When mind seems to emerge from brain, it's not because something is
happening in the world to make a "mind" emerge. It's because the way the
brain represents its own self image, is naturally a dualistic model of a
physical body (and brain) along side a mental self we call the mind (and
used to call things like soul before we rejected the soul and tried to
pretend we didn't believe in dualism when we still actually did).
Quote: No matter what the correlation, Average Joe still seems to stubbornly
interpret the assertion that "All those thoughts, emotions, images,
sounds, odors, and etc that you're experiencing are really brain
tissue" as somewhat equivalent to saying that "this 1000-page written
description of Paris is the Paris you visited on vacation".
Yes, that's true. But I think it's because the more you are guided by a
"show me" mentality and the less you are a rationalist guided by the
rational logic you can create with language, the less likely you are to
accept the rational argument as truth. Rational arguments only sound
valid, if they confirm what you see with your own eyes. The majority of
people in the world today don't seem to accept the simple rational argument
of materialism. Or they only accept it to a point, and are then left with
the need for someone to explain to them why conscious experience exists in
the universe. The answer is that it doesn't exist in the universe, it
exists in their own brain's faulty model of the universe. But before they
can accept that it's just an illusion created by their own brain, I think
we have to show them first hand how it works by making their own brain,
change it's model. And the simple way to do that, is to allow them to
experience fist hand, in real time, to a high resolution, the operation of
their own brain. John can't accept (or it seems, even understand) the
rational argument, becuase it doesn't fit with what he "sees" with his own
"eyes".
I've tried to explain the rational logical argument to John for a few years
now, in many long posts like this (for those of you not reading from
c.a.p). But after all my writing, he still doesn't have a clue what I'm
talking about. Either I'm just a very bad writer (probably some truth to
that), or he's just never going to accept the rational view of the argument
and will never understand it until I can show him what happens to his own
view of reality, after being exposed to an experiment that allows him to
experience first hand, the internal operation of his own brain (aka mind).
Enough exposure to that would force his own mental model of reality to flip
making a light bulb go off as it happened, and at some point, he will look
back and wonder just what it was he was having such a hard time
understanding. But without the ability to show people this effect first
hand, they will keep thinking that conscious experience is a mystery in the
universe which no one has been able to explain.
How many Schizophrenic people accept a rational argument that their
illusions are not real? My understanding is the very few are able to
understand that what they experience is just an illusion created by a
faulty brain - even when everyone they trust is telling them it's an
illusion. Understanding the illusion of the main/brain split is exactly
the same problem, except with this illusion, the majority of people in the
world - even some of the most educated - argue it's not an illusion. How
do you fix a world full of people that are suffering from
schizophrenic-like illusions about the mind being something created by the
brain, instead of understanding it IS the brain they are talking about? A
real time interactive high resolution brain scanner is just the tool I
think we need for the job.
--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@kcwc.com http://NewsReader.Com/ |
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| JGCASEY |
| Posted: Wed Sep 12, 2007 1:08 am |
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On Sep 12, 8:21 am, c...@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:
[selective reponse]
...
Curt:
Quote: When people talk about the fact that they are having
conscious experience, and that this is something odd
which needs to be explained (John posted some of his
normal talk like that in this thread), it's because
they are confused about what the "I" is that is
having the experience. It doesn't feel to John that
it's his physical body which is having the experience.
It feels to him (and to most people) as if it's
something separate from the body which having the
experience.
JC:
If I chop off your leg "you" will no longer experience
the leg. You may argue that the leg is still having
experiences but that aside "you" will not be having
those experiences and I can prove it by asking "you"
what is your leg experiencing.
"You" are of course some kind of brain activity and
that is separate from most of the body except the parts
of the brain involved in the creation of "you".
In Conway's Game of Life the rules create gliders and
pulsers, when water molecules flow down the plug hole
they create a whirlpool, when neurons are connected in
a certain way and fire in certain patterns they create
a "self" or a "conscious experience" and NO it is not
a separate thing from the brain!!!
...
Curt:
Quote: People love to argue (and it's already happened in
this thread) that the mind is "created by" the brain.
JC:
It is created in the brain by the brain just as gliders
and pulsars are created in the computer by the computer
when it runs Conway's game of life.
Curt:
Quote: They pull the magic word emergence out of their ass
to justify this argument. Why do they feel the need
to make such an argument if the mind is not in fact.
created by the brain, but is in fact, _the brain_.
JC:
The mind is not the brain, it is something the brain
does and is in fact created by the brain the same way
gliders and pulsars are created by a computer running
Conway's game of life. And, no, minds are not separate
from the brain anymore than gliders are separate from
the computer.
Emergence is not a magic word it means the description
of the whole cannot be found in the description of the
parts, it does not mean that the description of the
whole is not a result of the interaction of the parts
and their topological and physical relationships.
The description (rules) of Conway's Game of Life do not
contain a description of the gliders, pulsers and so on
that may result although it is the rules that ultimately
determine what can "emerge".
We want an explanation of the phenomenon. A sensible
explanation requires precise ideas about how parts and
wholes may be related.
If you take graphite and diamond you can say they are
"nothing but" carbon atoms. True. But an explanation
of the differences requires a higher level description
than that.
You are using the word "emerge" differently to the way
I have been using it and it is thus another strawman.
An emergent phenomenon refers to something that is
hidden and is revealed. You open the doors and something
emerges from inside. It is not magic. The gliders and
pulsers are hidden in Conway's rules and reveal themselves
as a consequence of those rules and a particular starting
pattern.
...
Curt:
Quote: Why does John keep saying, things like (I'm quoting
from his message in this same thread): "You dismiss
what might be an interesting question, what is the
physical basis of a conscious experience."
John "knows" he is having this thing he calls "a
conscious experience" but he can't for the life of
him figure out how a physical brain could create
such an experience despite the fact I've given him
a perfectly workable explanation a good 20 times
here in c.a.p.
He doesn't see his own "conscious experience" as
nothing more than the motion of his brain.
The problem I have here is the paucity of your "explanation"
as "nothing more than". It is clear that my "conscious
experience" directly correlates with brain activity and
in that sense it is "nothing more than" brain activity.
However, whatever activity that is, it doesn't exist as
far as I can observe, *when there isn't this activity*,
regardless of what you might believe as an act of faith.
I am saying that an active brain can involve conscious
experiences and an inactive brain cannot, or at least not
to the same degree.
A "conscious experience" refers to something real and
physical and something, like heat or velocity that varies
in degrees.
Curt:
Quote: He believes something else has been created by the brain.
JC:
What do you mean by "something else"? The old strawman
soul again? I believe that "patterns" form in the brain,
as they can form in Conway's Game of Life, and some of
these active patterns produce an activity that involve
a "conscious experience".
Curt:
Quote: He calls the "something else", "conscious experience",
but he can't for the life of him, figure out what it is,
or how it got there. He just knows it's there.
JC:
Again you are implying that I am suggesting it is something
other than brain activity which is not the case. And yes,
I know it is there just as I know anything. Indeed that is
all it is, the fact I can be aware of and know things in
a particular way we call "being conscious of". It seems to
be an important part in the brains ability to learn new
skills by directing an activity until it becomes automatic.
Curt:
Quote: But if materialism is correct, there is nothing else
there other than the motion of the brain.
JC:
And I have never denied there is nothing but "motion
of the brain". However the explanation as to what kind
of brain activity involves a "conscious experience" is
not revealed in the statement: "there is nothing but
motion in the brain" anymore than the difference between
graphite and diamond are explained as "there is nothing
but carbon atoms". Functionally there is a difference
and it needs to be explained. The difference between
having and not having a "conscious experience" needs
to be explained.
So I say again in different words, you dismiss what
might be an interesting question, what is the neural
activity of a conscious experience.
...
Curt:
Quote: I dismiss nothing. I explained it. It's nothing more
than the movement of the hand.
JC:
What is the difference between an X, T and L?
I agree they are nothing but two lines but they are
not the same.
Where I think we disagree is your notion that everything
is conscious because consciousness is nothing but the
"movement of the hand". Whereas I see a difference in
the types of "movements", it may only be a difference
in viewpoint, but that is a difference.
...
Curt:
Quote: We see the mental world as being a different thing,
or a different object, from the physical world, simply
because that's the model our brain has built for us.
But when we learn that the mental world is a result of
a physical brain the question becomes one of what kind
of self observation is occurring when it involves a
'conscious experience'?
When we learn the sun is not being pushed across the
sky by angels we don't then claim there is nothing to
be explained it is all "just motion".
...
Curt:
Quote: I've written at least 20 long messages like this,
addressing all his points, over and over again, and
still, he tells me he doesn't understand why he sees
his own conscious experience as being something
different from his brain.
JC:
You have spent 20 long messages answering what you
imagine to be the question. I have never taken my
"conscious experience" as not involving the brain or
as being "something else" apart from brain activity.
We differ only in there being something to explain
or not. You see "consciousness" as a property of all
things in motion which is silly in my opinion. People
have no trouble separating conscious motion from that
which is not conscious just as they can separate an
X from an L even if they are nothing but two lines.
...
Curt:
Quote: Some people like John and Alpha seem to fail to
understand my point, and somehow think my ideas have
explained nothing, and that I'm just pretending that
conscious is not real. They couldn't have failed to
understand my point any more. Conscious is real, but
it's just an illusion created by the brain building
an invalid model of the universe for us.
JC:
Conscious is real *and* it is an illusion? An illusion is
something falsely believe to exist, something that is
not real. Make up your mind, oops you don't have one,
it's an illusion!
It may be an illusion that it is separate from brain
activity but otherwise what you say doesn't make sense.
A mirage is an illusion but it has a physical explanation
so illusion or not you haven't explained mind either way.
...
Curt:
Quote: John can't accept (or it seems, even understand) the
rational argument, because it doesn't fit with what he
"sees" with his own "eyes".
JC:
If someone explains how the "water" on the road ahead
is just light being bent by the heat from the sky and
is just an illusion I have no trouble believing the
truth in that even though I can see "water" with my
own eyes.
The nature of a system observing its own activities
however can be very different from one that does not
make such observations even though they are both
"nothing but motion" and you will never work that
out because you don't see differences resulting from
how things are put together, everything is nothing
but the parts for you.
A new property can arise (emerge) as a result of
the way the parts are put together. |
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| Curt Welch |
| Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 3:11 am |
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JGCASEY <jgkjcasey@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
Quote: On Sep 12, 8:21 am, c...@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:
JC:
And I have never denied there is nothing but "motion
of the brain". However the explanation as to what kind
of brain activity involves a "conscious experience" is
not revealed in the statement: "there is nothing but
motion in the brain" anymore than the difference between
graphite and diamond are explained as "there is nothing
but carbon atoms". Functionally there is a difference
and it needs to be explained. The difference between
having and not having a "conscious experience" needs
to be explained.
Ok, I wrote a few thousand words to your other comments, but I just deleted
them all, because this one paragraph of yours is where I have all the
problem with your thought process and your logic.
Let me try this. Lets pretend that an alien from outer space showed up,
and programmed one of our computers with their AI software, and our
computer started to act like a human. This computer also happens to have a
robot body which arms and legs and eyes and he's talking to us just like
humans talk to us.
And the computer says to us, I wonder why I'm conscious? And we ask, what
do you mean by conscious? He says, you know, I'm conscious. I'm aware
that I'm speaking to you, and I'm aware that I exist, and I'm aware of what
I did yesterday. When you turn me off, I'm not conscious, and I have no
awareness. But what I don't understand is why I'm conscious? So we tell
him that he is aware because he's a computer which is processing and
responding to sensory data. He's aware because the computer has power and
it's running the software which makes him respond to his environment. When
we turn him off, he can no longer respond to sensory data, and the computer
can no longer store information about past sensory data in it's memory.
Then he says, ok, I know all that. But that doesn't explain this feeling
of conscious experience I'm having. Why am I conscious, but the computer
over there running Windows is not conscious? I mean, just look at it, it's
sitting there and it doesn't care at all if I smash it with a hammer, it's
got no awareness of the fact that you and I are talking about. He doesn't
love anything or feel anything. I love watching R2D2 in Starwars. The
Windows machine doesn't love anything (except maybe to blue-screen on us
after we have spent three hours typing a Usenet message). So why am I
conscious but the windows machine is not, because we are made of the same
hardware? There must be something really special about my hardware that we
don't understand.
So we tell him that the only thing special about him is that he has
software that makes him act like a human, and the windows box has software
that makes him act like a windows box and the Linux box has software that
makes him act like a Linux box.
The computer still doesn't buy our argument that the difference is just
software, because he knows this awareness he has is something other than
just his behavior.
So the computer starts to talk about qualia. He says, but I have qualia.
That chair over there is red. It looks red to me. Where does this
sensation of red come from? It's not in the chair because the chair is
just reflecting a given frequency of light. So the redness is not in the
chair any more than the blueness is in that blue book. Why does one look
red to me, and the other look blue? I've seen inside my computer box, and
there's nothing red in there. All the transistors are the same color, and
there's no redness anywhere in there. So where does redness come from? It
just seems to magically emerge from the behavior of the box.
We explain to the computer that it can see red because it's got a camera
which is able to detect the frequency of light and it produces different
signals for different light frequencies. And we explain to the the
computer that the software is then written so that it triggers different
behaviors based on the sensory signals that come into it. Different
sequences of sensory signals in, creates different strings of behavior out.
We explain that red looks different from blue because they are represented
by different internal signals in the computer. We explain that that is all
there is. When he "sees blue" all that is happening, is that the computer
is reacting to the blue sensory signal.
But the computer fails to accept this. He says, but I see blue, and there
is now blue in my circuits. What you say makes no sense to me.
So we give the computer a demo. We wire a button to it's blue sensory
input so that when he pushes the button it activates his input, and we tell
him he will see blue. He tries it out, and he sees a flash a blue even
though there is no blue in the room. He says, yeah, it works, I see it.
But why do I see it as blue instead of red? Red is the same signal as the
blue signal but I only see blue when I hit the button. We explain that red
is the other wire and we switch the button to activate the red wire. He
hits it, he tells us he sees red. But still, he wants us to explain how we
do this trick because the wire is not red. We tell him, that's all there
is. There is that signal, and that signal triggers all your behavior of
you talking to us about seeing red. There's nothing else to explain.
He tells us that we are just ignoring the interesting question. He says we
haven't explained where the red comes from. He says the red somehow
emerges from behavior of the computer, but that elections moving in the
wire are not the redness - the redness must be something else - and we
haven't explained how the electrons moving in the wire create his conscious
experience of redness.
We explain to him, AGAIN, that his conscious experience of redness IS the
movement of the electrons in the wire, and nothing else. What he calls
"seeing red" IS the movement of electrons in the wire. It's not something
CREATED BY, the movement of the electrons.
He doesn't buy it. He knows there is something else here to explain and
thinks we are just ignoring the interesting question of where the redness
comes from by pretending there is no redness (but the computer is sure as
he is a live that he sees redness and that he is having a conscious
experience of everything he is aware of). The best he can come up with to
explain it, is that it must be an emergent property of his computer brain.
So the computer switches subjects again.
He says, ok, you still haven't explained why I'm having a conscious
experience and the MS Windows machine over there is not.
So we point out to the computer that the Windows box has the same camera he
has, and that the Windows box can "see red" for the same reason the
computer is able to see red - simply because he's got a camera which is
sensitive to red light and sends signals to the computer which are
different from red light than for blue light. And the windows computer
responds in different ways depending on what it "sees". But our friendly
computer responds...
But, the Windows box is not conscious. It doesn't see red like I do. It's
just a computer with no conscious awareness of what's going on around it.
It can't talk or do anything I do.
We point out that the only difference is that the Windows computer is
programmed to produce different reactions to "red" than he does, but other
than that, there's no real difference. We pint out that how the Windows
box reacts to the environment defines what we understand it to be, and how
our talking computer reacts to its environment, defines what it is to us.
The windows computer do all the things we expect a windows computer to do,
when we press it's keys and wiggle it's mouse.
And the talking computer, likewise, does all the things it's been doing
when we press its keys, and wiggle its mouse. It's been producing a long
string of words about its conscious experience and it's awareness of it's
environment and of how its conscious and the windows box is not producing a
similar list of words.
We try to explain to the computer that he is nothing but a CPU box, and
wires, and transistors, and that the only thing going on in there is the
movement of elections in the wires and that there is nothing else there for
us to explain to him. But again, he doesn't buy it.
So we ask the talking computer, what exactly do you think you are talking
about when you use the words "conscious experience"? You are nothing but
wires and transistors which produce a constant stream of nonsense about
"your conscious experience".
The computer says, but I'm not just a computer saying these things. I'm
"aware" that I'm live, and that I'm saying these things, that's what makes
me conscious and the Windows box not conscious?
So we ask, so you mean since you can spit out English words, and the
windows box doesn't, that's what is special about you? No, he says, we can
program the dumb computer to spit out these words - but that won't make him
aware of what he is saying.
So we suggest we need to make the computer parse and respond to English
words as well. And the computer says, no that's not it. If you do that, he
will just respond to way you programmed it to respond. It won't have any
free will. It won't be aware of anything, it will just be an unconscious
machine spitting out English words.
So we explain to the computer that it's "awareness" of what it has said, is
nothing more than changes to it's internal state in response to past
sensory inputs (such as our words and it's words), and that those changes
are what is making it say the next thing it says.
Again, the computer doesn't buy it. He goes back to his old mantra, "but
you still haven't explained where my conscious awareness comes from".
We go off and talk to other people about the fun we have been having
playing with this talking computer who thinks that he's got something in
him (conscious awareness, and this red qualia) which is something other
than his wires and transistors and the movement of the elections in the
wires and transistors. We explain he is stuck in a dualist view of reality
where instead of understanding and accepting he is just an electronic
computer programmed to react to his sensory environment, he believes that
he's an electronic computer which because of it's configuration, has caused
conscious experience to emerge when the Windows box doesn't have conscious
experience.
But hearing us talk about him, he jumps in and starts to argue:
I have never denied there is nothing but "motion of electrons in the CPU"
However the explanation as to what kind of CPU activity involves a
"conscious experience" is not revealed in the statement: "there is nothing
but motion of electrons in the CPU" anymore than the difference between
graphite and diamond are explained as "there is nothing but carbon atoms".
Functionally there is a difference and it needs to be explained. The
difference between having and not having a "conscious experience" needs to
be explained.
So we explain it to him again. The Windows box is programmed to pop up
windows when we type on the keyboard, and you are programmed to look for
patterns in the sensory data, and produce different behaviors for different
sensory patterns. But the guy that created you didn't decide how you would
respond to each sensory pattern like the programmers at Microsoft selected
how that box would respond to each different input pattern. Instead, he
built in you a learning algorithm which makes you learn, through a constant
process of reinforcement learning, which behaviors are the best response to
which classes of sensory patterns. But other than that, there is nothing
else in you. You are just a reaction machine where your behaviors are
being selected, and adjusted, by reinforcement learning, where as the
Windows box is a reaction machine where the programmers at Microsoft
hand-picked, and hard-coded each reaction it makes.
We explain to the talking computer that if it wants to call "reacting to
the environment" a "conscious experience", then we have to say that the
Windows box is conscious as well, because it too is using the same type of
hardware to react to the its environment and that the only difference is
between the two is the output they produce in reaction to their
environment.
But talking computer throws in, "but I'm aware of the past, and the Windows
box is not". So we agree that one thing the talking computer is programmed
to do, is change as a result of past experience so that it can act
different in the future based on what happened days ago. The windows box
doesn't have any sort of state memory of the events that happened
yesterday, so the way it acts today, is pretty much the same as the way it
acted yesterday. SO that is an important difference in the two. So we ask
the computer if it wants to call a memory function in the hardware,
"consciousness awareness of yesterday's events"? He says, well, not really
- it's far more than that, but don't ask me to explain what more, because I
don't know - that's what we need to figure out and the thing you are
ignoring.
At this point, the computer gives up. He says, fine, I'm a complex machine
which is programmed to react to my environment by a learning algorithm.
But that doesn't explain why red things look red to me, or why I have a
conscious experience.
We give up for the night because we don't think the talking computer is
ever going to understand that he's nothing but a signal processing machine
reacting to his environment and that there's nothing else we can explain to
him other than the exact details of every class of sensory conditions he is
currently configured to react to and the exact details of how his learning
system changes those sensory reaction classes over time (neither of which
would make the talking computer happy even if we could do a core dump and
show him his exact programing byte for byte).
So John, tomorrow, you get to explain to the talking computer why he has
conscious awareness. It's just a computer which is programmed with an
advanced learning system which is constantly shaping how it reacts to long
temporal streams of sensory data. What can you say to it, to help it
understand what it is and help it understand what it is talking about, when
it keeps talking about "my conscious experience"?
--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@kcwc.com http://NewsReader.Com/ |
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| D H |
| Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 12:53 pm |
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Curt Welch wrote:
Quote: JGCASEY <jgkjcasey@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
On Sep 12, 8:21 am, c...@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:
JC:
And I have never denied there is nothing but "motion
of the brain". However the explanation as to what kind
of brain activity involves a "conscious experience" is
not revealed in the statement: "there is nothing but
motion in the brain" anymore than the difference between
graphite and diamond are explained as "there is nothing
but carbon atoms". Functionally there is a difference
and it needs to be explained. The difference between
having and not having a "conscious experience" needs
to be explained.
Ok, I wrote a few thousand words to your other comments, but I just deleted
them all, because this one paragraph of yours is where I have all the
problem with your thought process and your logic.
Simply to toss in my nickel on the sub-topic (or my possible mis-
apprehension of it?), I'll borrow your choice of paragraphs above as a
diving board.
For me, being "conscious" is a judgemental process of categorizing
phenomenal-content under linguistic concepts and emotional values
(which in turn are probably just acquired and innate memory-
templates). Thus, when a brain is classifying or is attempting to
classify information that has been organized into qualitative
experiences, I deem that "consciousness" is taking place. I emphasize
the latter as a necessary aspect of "consciousness"--because as the
clinical condition of "blindsight" indicates, there are neural regions
that can make judgements about information before it is converted into
phenomenal representations (and this seems labeled as an "unconscious"
form of knowing or cognition by some scientists and philosophers).
So, getting the matter of "consciousness" out of the way, one of the
supposed enigmas we are left with is the origin of that phenomenal-
content that the intentional process examines. How can neural,
electrochemical activity be qualia or etc, when such only appears that
way internally, not externally when scanning another's neural
operations or theorizing about such in general?
In a closed system like nature, there should be no explanations of
basic regularities and properties other than their eventually circular
relationships with each other: A causes B causes C causes A (or
replace "causes" with "affects" should that be more the case). So it's
a waste of time expecting deeper or more satisfactory explanations for
primaries. Yet this doesn't quite work for "qualitative experiences";
if they're produced in the late history of the universe by brains, how
can they be fundamental?
One could say: I don't care anything about philosophy, only science.
The "hard-problem" is grounded in an ontological mess that science
cannot or need not concern itself with, since science deals in
methodological naturalism, not metaphysical naturalism. But individual
scientists who dabble in personal metaphysical beliefs and their
resulting quandaries also occasionally scratch their heads like the
philosophers in David Chalmers camp. So.....
In a subset of metaphysical realism like materialism (which at times
appropriates the entities of physics as its "stuff"), the puzzle could
be seen to arise from being too dogmatic about that doctrine. This
could go like: "I know with certainty that 'material stuff' has
nothing in common with 'mental stuff', and therefore it cannot be a
precursor to the latter." As Ed Brandon summed this up in a review:
"Since human experiences are signally absent from what physics and the
rest account for, such physicalists are then confronted with an
apparently insoluble problem of fitting experience within the physical
world so understood: the well-known mind-body problem. [Galen]
Strawson suggests that one reason for this stance is that most card-
carrying physicalists think they know quite a lot about the nature of
physical reality; but they don't. All we have are mathematical
structures; we have no idea what the intrinsic nature of physical
stuff is like. The only case where we do have some sort of access to
the intrinsic nature of something is our own being, and voila, that is
conscious."
I'd disagree in calling either raw information or its later
organizational enhancement to phenomenal-content "conscious", but
otherwise it's a way of defusing the problem in the sense that "if it
was possible to know what 'material stuff' is in itself rather than
how it is described or comprehended from the POV of a cognitive system
(human), then it would be obvious how electrochemical activity could
constitute qualia or phenomenal properties or whatever". |
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| rscan@nycap.rr.com |
| Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 7:39 pm |
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On Sep 13, 1:53 pm, D H <wings...@budweiser.com> wrote:
"Let the reader be warned, accordingly, that whenever he hears a
philosopher proclaim any metaphysical opinion with great confidence,
or hears him assert that something in metaphysics is obvious, or that
some metaphysical problem turns only on confusions of concepts or upon
the meanings of words, then he can be quiet sure that this man is
still infinitely far from philosophical understanding. His views
appear to him devoid of difficulties only because he stoutly refuses
to see difficulties."
--Richard Taylor--
Now this will do for the great mass of men, but what are we to do with
those troublesome few that find imaginary difficulties in the plain
truths we have enunciated. They are the really pig-headed ones.
The soul/body problem has a long and distinguished history. It has
lately been renamed.
"In more recent metaphysics less has been heard of the soul and more
of the mind; the old problem of the relationship of soul and body is
now that of the relationship of mind and body"
--The Britannica--
Many are of the opinion that the soul had best be called something
else...Soul: spirit, essence, psyche, mind, consciousness, awareness,
intelligence, intellect, mentality, self, individuality, persona,
personality, conscious mental field, self awareness, sentience,
executive function. There should be something here for everyone. I
like "executive function", or perhaps "conscious mental field".
However, in deference to historical usage, I will stick with "soul".
Now many feel that the soul (spirit, mind, whatever) is intimately
involved with any discussion of the nervous system. What are we to do?
McGinn has given it as his considered opinion that man lacks the
intellectual muscle to understand the relationship between the soul
and the body. I say we must put the soul (spirit, mind, whatever)
completely to one side, and discuss the nervous system wholly as if
there were no soul (spirit, mind, whatever) involved.
Let us talk of neurons, and the neural structures constructed by the
genome. How do they work and think. Is that not enough for a simple
soul?
If you are interested in the nervous system, you might look at:
http://home.nycap.rr.com/rscanlon/brain/brain.htm
For a conjecture on how the nervous system might work.
Ray |
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| JGCASEY |
| Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 11:11 pm |
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On Sep 13, 6:11 pm, c...@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:
Curt:
Quote: So John, tomorrow, you get to explain to the talking
computer why he has conscious awareness.
John:
The problem is Curt, tomorrow, I don't get to explain
to the "talking computer" why it has conscious awareness
because no one knows why and saying that is not saying
it must be something magical anymore than someone saying
I don't know how this machine plays chess.
Curt:
Quote: It's just a computer which is programmed with an advanced
learning system which is constantly shaping how it reacts
to long temporal streams of sensory data.
John:
Which doesn't explain why the machine is acting "this way".
There are many problems you will never solve because you
have this notion you have solved them with your nothing
but motion of electrons etc as a sufficient explanation.
I went to some lengths to point out why this is not a
sufficient or even useful explanation.
If you want to explain why a computer program does a
particular thing like ask "why red things look red to me
and yet there is no red in my circuits" you need to go
deeper into the details of how the program works.
Your "explanation" above is as useless as me explaining
to someone how a modern digital television works compared
with the older analog models by saying it is just electrons
flowing through wires and if you dare suggest there is
more to it than that you are a silly person who believes
something magical must have happened. No they don't believe
there is something magical, they just wanted a non-magical
explanation with enough detail to make the difference clear.
Curt:
Quote: What can you say to it, to help it understand what it
is and help it understand what it is talking about, when
it keeps talking about "my conscious experience"?
John:
What you can say is: "it is indeed a mystery to be worked
out by understanding how the parts work together to produce
this phenomenon."
Just as you need to explain why chlorine atoms which
manifest as a noxious green gas and sodium atoms which
manifest as a soft silvery substance turn into crystals
of salt when combined. You don't brush it away with it
is "just atoms interacting".
I wasn't writing about the "hard" problem only the
paucity of explanations which, with regards to the actual
question (whence comes the salt), you pretend you have
answered with "it is nothing but moving atoms" or
something to that effect. And I am saying it is an
interesting question that needs more thought than
that throw away "explanation" and if you don't agree
with that then you will never solve it.
Glen Sizemore can hide behind the "complexity of it all"
when any attempt is made to implement something like
operant conditioning in an actual program to see if it
does what he claims it will do whereas you *seemed* to
be keen on actually trying to implement it in a program.
But when I make suggestions you are silent. When I say
your "explanations" are insufficient or trivial to the
extreme you write long replies about how I must have
been conditioned to believe in some magical something
or other if I think that way. |
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| Alpha |
| Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2007 10:19 am |
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Guest
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"JGCASEY" <jgkjcasey@yahoo.com.au> wrote in message
news:1189743110.066980.327350@57g2000hsv.googlegroups.com...
Quote: On Sep 13, 6:11 pm, c...@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:
But when I make suggestions you are silent. When I say
your "explanations" are insufficient or trivial to the
extreme you write long replies about how I must have
been conditioned to believe in some magical something
or other if I think that way.
Curt's astoundingly naive, simplistic "explanations" are the refuge of a
person whose mental cloud of unknowing is now approaching the size of the
entire *expanding* Universe!
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com |
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| Curt Welch |
| Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2007 4:35 pm |
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JGCASEY <jgkjcasey@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
Quote: On Sep 13, 6:11 pm, c...@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:
Curt:
So John, tomorrow, you get to explain to the talking
computer why he has conscious awareness.
John:
The problem is Curt, tomorrow, I don't get to explain
to the "talking computer" why it has conscious awareness
because no one knows why and saying that is not saying
it must be something magical anymore than someone saying
I don't know how this machine plays chess.
Curt:
It's just a computer which is programmed with an advanced
learning system which is constantly shaping how it reacts
to long temporal streams of sensory data.
John:
Which doesn't explain why the machine is acting "this way".
There are many problems you will never solve because you
have this notion you have solved them with your nothing
but motion of electrons etc as a sufficient explanation.
I went to some lengths to point out why this is not a
sufficient or even useful explanation.
If you want to explain why a computer program does a
particular thing like ask "why red things look red to me
and yet there is no red in my circuits" you need to go
deeper into the details of how the program works.
I've gone deep enough that you should be able to understand at this point
even though I've not given you working code of a machine that says these
things. We already know why they say these things.
Quote: John:
What you can say is: "it is indeed a mystery to be worked
out by understanding how the parts work together to produce
this phenomenon."
The root problem here John, is that you and I agree on everything, until
you reach the point of saying that you are conscious and that it's a
mystery no one understands.
My problem with you saying that, is that you are talking about a ghost in
the machine as if it were something real. I can't give you more details
about your ghost because it's not real. There's nothing there for me to
give you details about. I can only try to show you it's not real, and try
to show you why you have made the mistake of believing in a ghost. By
asking me to give you a deeper explanation about why consciousness exists,
you are asking me to prove the truth of something that doesn't even exist.
This thread started with my theory about why I think this particular ghost
is so prevalent in our society. But instead of trying to take a rational
stand against my theory, you go right back to you pre-conceived notion that
the ghost is not a ghost, and that you and everyone else knows it real, so
it must be real, and then, I'm left as the person who will "never solve the
problem" because I close my eyes and pretend it's not there.
I've tried to make you understand that by chasing consciousness, and its
cause, you are chasing a ghost. The evidence of what I'm saying is all
around you. Multiple people smarter than me have written books about this
subject. You only have to wake up from your dream long enough to see it.
But no matter how many different ways I try to slap you out of your
delusion, I can't get you to budge.
You are EXACTLY like someone who believes in God, who can't understand how
other people don't believe in God. They know he's real, because they see
his work. All you have to do is look around you, and see all the trees,
and rocks, and sky, and animals, to know that God is real because he's the
guy that created all this. Once you get sucked into that delusion, it's
damn hard to escape it because everything you see supports your delusion.
You start to see God in everything. And it sure doesn't help if everyone
in your family and all your closest friends share the same mass delusion.
All the materialists I know think they have rejected the idea of a soul,
and they our proud to believe they are taking the scientific stance when
they believe in evolution as the cause of the complexity around us and not
some god, but they fail to understand that they are still sucked into a
delusion as strong and as misguided as a belief in God when they talk about
consciousness as something that emerges from a biological brain.
The only reason the idea of God has been rejected by so many, is because we
have something to substitute for it - evolution. If we didn't have
evolution, the majority of the world would still believe in God because
it's the best answer they have available for the question of where did all
this stuff around us come from.
The problem with consciousness, and the mind, is that since we don't have
one of these talking robots and we don't have a theory as strong and as
obvious as evolution to explain what magic humans have in us to allow us to
do all these things, people are left using the best placeholder they have -
consciousness.
God is the name we gave to the cause of the things around us until we were
able to understand the real nature of the cause of the things around us.
The word "mind" and the word "consciousness" are the names we gave to the
root cause of our thoughts since we didn't understand what they were.
We shouldn't believe in God just because we don't know why there are trees
and animals around us, and we shouldn't believe in the mind and
consciousness just because we don't know where are thoughts come from. We
should just accept the fact that we have thoughts and work towards
understanding how those thoughts happen.
Quote: Just as you need to explain why chlorine atoms which
manifest as a noxious green gas and sodium atoms which
manifest as a soft silvery substance turn into crystals
of salt when combined. You don't brush it away with it
is "just atoms interacting".
Fine, but you have totally failed to grasp what I was brushing away.
I'm not brushing away something real, like salt crystals. I'm trying to
get you to realize that this stuff you keep talking about when you use the
words "conscious experience" is a ghost. It's not real. What's real, is
that your brain is a signal processing machine reacting to sensory stimulus
signals and producing output signals. That's all there is. You keep
asking me to how these signal processing devices produce your conscious
awareness ghost, and I can't, because they don't produce anything like
that. All they produce, is output signals to make your arms move. There's
nothing else there. No salt crystals which I need to explain the cause of.
What I'm brushing way, is your ghost.
If you think there is something in you, other than neurons firing, where is
your evidence to support that belief? Where is the proof that this God of
yours is real and not just a figment of your imagination?
You see a property of light called red. We all do. But where is your
evidence to support your belief that what you call redness, is not neural
activity?
The point here, is that none of this _seems_ to be neural activity to any
of us. But, when you analyze the facts, it becomes obvious that it is in
fact, just neural activity.
The people like you who think consciousness is something real, are trying
to argue the position that redness is not neural activity, but it's
actually something CREATED BY neural activity.
Stop for a second and think very serisoly about what I'm saying here.
For you to suggest that you have both the sensation of redness in your
mind, and neural activity in your brain, is to suggest that these two
things are different fundamental objects of the universe.
It's very natural for all of us to see these things as separate fundamental
objects, or properties of the universe. We see them as separate because of
what I explained in my first posts to this thread.
But, when you accept the idea that they are separate, and explore all the
natural ramifications of what that means, you get a universe full of
contradictions which can't be explained.
But, when you explore the possibility that they are an identity, we find
all the contradictions vanish. Everything becomes easy to explain, and to
understand. All you have to do, is get past your innate belief that they
are not an identity.
I understand why this is hard for some people to grasp. It's like trying
to understand that your left hand is not actually different from your right
hand. If someone was to tell me that I really only have one hand, and the
belief that I had too was just an illusion, I would have a very hard time
grasping what they were talking about, because no matter how much I
listened them, I would still know that I have two hands, and he must just
be saying odd things to help me understand why I have two hands by using
some mystical mumbo jumbo to talk as if I only had one.
Maybe that's what's happening with you. You are so positive that your
conscious experience is separate from your physical brain that you can't,
even for a millisecond, grasp the possibility that it's not. Currently, of
the thousands and thousands of words I've written, not a single reply you
have ever made gave me even the slightest hint that you grasped what I've
been talking about all this time.
Quote: I wasn't writing about the "hard" problem only the
paucity of explanations which, with regards to the actual
question (whence comes the salt), you pretend you have
answered with "it is nothing but moving atoms" or
something to that effect.
The correct answer, is that it's nothing but the brain receiving signals
from the sensors and sending signals to your muscles. There is nothing
else there to explain, to talk about, or to duplicate in our AI machines.
Once we understand the signal processing features of all the parts, and the
signal processing features of the network as a whole, we will understand
all there is to understand about the brain. At no point, is anyone, ever
going to stop and figure out how "conscious is created" because YOUR
concept of consciousness is a ghost you believe in and which isn't actually
there. The only thing that is there, is neurons firing.
All we can do, is figure out why so many people believe in this ghost. But
that to, I have done, as explained in the first posts.
This is because the stuff you talk about as "seeing red" is just neurons
firing but you haven't' yet been able to understand this. The stuff you
talk about as "being aware of things" is just neurons firing. The stuff
people talk about such as "feeling sad", is just neurons firing.
The only hard problem here, is trying to get people who believe in ghosts,
to understand that they are not talking about a ghost created by the brain,
they are talking about the brain itself. There are not two things here.
There is not a brain, and a mind. There is only one. There is a brain. If
you think there are two, you believe in a non-material ghost which you
choose to call the mind, or consciousness, or conscious experience, or
qualia, or whatever name you want to use for it today.
You keep telling me I'm putting up strawmen to debate because I tell you
that you believe in the soul. You keep telling me it's a strawman because
you don't believe in the soul, then you turn around and talk about your
little ghost by calling it qualia, or conscious experience, or an effect
created by the physical behavior of the brain. The fact that you think you
only believe in things that are real just doesn't connect with all the talk
you keep generating about your ghost.
But never, ever, not even once, have you written a single word, that makes
me think you grasp what I'm saying. You haven't even put up a counter
argument that makes me believe you understand the nature of what I'm saying
and just choose to believe in some other alternative. You simply show no
signs of grasping what I'm talking about.
Everything you write makes me believe that you think your ghost is real,
and that you are are so sure it's real, you can't even grasp what I'm
saying because even the notion it's not real, is something that can't enter
your mind, even for a second.
It's real alright, but it's only real in your brain which has built a
network of neurons which create a model of the universe which is your
understanding of the universe you live in. In your universe, which exists
only in your brain, consciousness is very real. But in the real universe,
it doesn't exist. It's a myth your brain created which you believe so
strongly in, you can't escape from it.
The reason you can't escape from it is the same reason I believe so
strongly in my brain models and the same reason we have so many crack-pots
in the field creating brain models each of them know is correct.
It's because brain models are self supporting. We see in our mind,
whatever we choose to believe is in our mind. The fact that what happens
in the mind is out of reach of objective experimentation is what makes this
work. Whatever we subjectively choose to believe is there, is what we are
simply forced to accept is there. There's no other source of evidence to
verify what we think we see. None of our friends can say to us, "I'm
looking at your mind, and I'm not seeing the same thing you say you are
seeing".
So no matter how many times I tell you about what I see in my mind, (just
brain activity), you don't care, because you know what you see in your own
mind, and nothing I say is going to change your opinion of what you see in
your own mind. And when you look at your own mind, you see conscious
experience. You don't understand what it is, or why it's there, but you
simply accept this as interesting stuff to figure out like all the other
interesting stuff we have used science to figure out.
But sad for you, science already figured out what it is. It's action
potentials created by neurons in your brain. But since the stuff you see
in your own brain (this stuff you made up since you didn't have a real
answer) doesn't look anything like neuron action potentials, you are left
having to believe it's something else. So you choose to believe it's a
magic substance of some type created by the brain. Some new aspect of the
universe which physics has not yet discovered and explained.
But that's just not the case. Physics has moved far beyond the brain and
is looking at far more interesting questions. Chemistry has figured out
what's happening in the brain, and there simply is no magic stuff there
called consciousness or qualia. Many of us in AI have moved beyond the
question and realized there is no magic stuff there called consciousness.
All there is, is a single processing network which makes is react to our
environment in interesting ways. And once we make computers react to their
environment in the same sorts of ways, we will have figured out all there
is to figure out about AI. And never once, would any of us had to spend
one more second looking for an answer to "consciousness" because we figured
out what that is. It's just a signal processing system. It's not something
created by a single processing system, it's just the normal behavior of a
single processing systems as it processes signals.
Quote: And I am saying it is an
interesting question that needs more thought than
that throw away "explanation" and if you don't agree
with that then you will never solve it.
You are telling me I will never explain why you see a ghost. I'm beyond
you by 3 steps because first, I realize it's a ghost, when you don't.
Second, I not only understand it's a ghost, but I understand enough about
what the brain is doing to be able to explain why everyone is seeing this
particular ghost. That's what I explained in the first posts of this
thread. And Third, I understand the basic structure and form of the signal
processing network at work in the human brain. It's a reinforcement
trained real time temporal pattern matching network.
So where I'm trying to get other people up to speed so they can help finish
the work on the final details of building the signal processing network
which will give us human level robots, you are still stuck, three steps
back, believing in a ghost.
You haven't even grasped the idea that it could be a ghost as far as I can
see, so you still think it's something real that needs to be explained and
you know I will never explain it because I don't even think it's real.
Quote: But when I make suggestions you are silent. When I say
your "explanations" are insufficient or trivial to the
extreme you write long replies about how I must have
been conditioned to believe in some magical something
or other if I think that way.
You don't grasp that you are seeing a ghost. I've tried very hard for a
few years to get you past that because other than that one big flaw of
yours, you kinda grasp everything else. Anyone that still fails to
understand that the mind, and conscious, is just a ghost in the machine
created by the very brain we are trying to understand, for very simple
reasons, will never be able to make any real progress on real AI, because
they will constantly be distracted by wondering how this ghost is created.
You might work on RL algorithms for the fun of it, but as long as you still
believe in the ghost, you will never understand the fact that building a
better RL algorithm is the solution to AI. You will always think that
something more has to be figured out because an RL algorithm isn't enough
to explain your ghost.
And unfortunately, you are exactly in the same boat as probably 90% of the
scientific community who is trying to figure out the brain, and trying to
figure out AI. They all believe in this ghost in one form or another and
they keep thinking they aren't even close to solving AI or solving the
basic mysteries of the brain because they are looking for the mystery of
where the ghost comes form, instead of realizing that Skinner found the key
50 years ago when he advanced the concepts of operant conditioning and that
there are no other foundational concepts needed to fully solve AI and fully
solve all the mysteries of conscious experience and the mind (or whatever
other name you want to put on the ghost). We aer a a parallel, operant
conditioned, reaction network and that's all we are. Building more
powerful operant conditioned parallel, real time, learning networks, is the
one and only problem left to solve in AI before we get conscious human
level machines walking around with us.
But yet, how much research money is going into building that type of
technology? Not enough (though Darpa for example has some projects that
are funding that type of research). But they aren't doing it because they
understand that's the path to conscious robot solders with minds of their
own. They are doing it just to try and get very simple robots to work
better on very simple tasks - like navigating across unknown land.
If you pick up a book which is a general overview of the field of AI, how
much is dedicated to RL algorithms? Two pages out of 600 if you are lucky.
But yet, this is the technology which is the key that's going to solve AI
for us.
The reason I get frustrated with you, and write these long posts, is
because you are a prime example of the failings of AI. You don't
understand what you need to be looking for, even though we have all the
answers about what is needed right in front of us.
How many people reject behaviorism because they think it fails to answer
some important fundamental aspect of human behavior? Almost everyone has.
Even a huge percentage of the posters to this group (c.a.p.) left and went
over to a moderated yahoo email list just to escape the concepts of
behaviorism and the personalities that were pushing it. But what is the
thing they thought behaviorism was ignoring? The mind. The founding
principle of the field of cognitive since was to bring the mind back as a
subject of research.
But they were making, the same mistake you are making. They were
ultimately motivated to explain the ghost in the machine when there was no
ghost to explain. There is only the belief there there is a ghost which
needs to explained. Other than that, it's just a problem of understanding
behavior, both externally, an internally.
The only question we have to answer for AI, is how do you make a machine
act like a human, and the only answer you need to understand about that, to
be working in the right direction, is the fact that all our interesting
behavior is shaped by past experience through reinforcement learning. We
do the things we do, and think the thoughts we think, because we are a
large high power reinforcement learning machine.
Any second I spend trying to figure out where this ghost in the machine
comes from, will be another second I'm making zero progress on AI, because
it will be another second I've wasted not working on better RL algorithms.
But I write these long posts, because I know that if I can get other people
to understand what they need to work on, we can make far more progress,
than if I do all the work by myself while everyone else is off chasing
ghosts.
I don't like working alone all that much, and one of the reasons I started
to post to c.a.p. a few years ago was to see if I could find some other
people to work with. So far, what I have mostly found, is people chasing
ghosts, or people working on the wrong problems, because they believe that
this ghost is real and the belief in this ghost of the mind cause people to
speculate and research in a thousand directions that have almost nothing to
do with the real work we need to produce. If I can't get people like you
to see you are chasing a ghost, then I'm not going to have anyone to work
with, and the odds of AI being solved any time soon, goes down. I don't
like seeing that happen, so that's why I keep trying to fight hat
possibility by writing these long posts.
--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@kcwc.com http://NewsReader.Com/ |
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| JGCASEY |
| Posted: Fri Sep 14, 2007 9:28 pm |
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On Sep 15, 7:35 am, c...@kcwc.com (Curt Welch) wrote:
....
Quote: My problem with you saying that, is that you are talking
about a ghost in the machine as if it were something real.
I am not talking about a ghost in the machine. That is your
strawman to claim that and then knock it down.
Quote: This thread started with my theory about why I think this
particular ghost is so prevalent in our society.
I was not attempting to take any stand one way or the other
with regards to your theory about why people see a ghost in
the machine. It was about the paucity of your "explanations"
of higher level behaviors as devoid of any useful content I
was making a point of.
I have never thought of "conscious" behaviors as a ghost in
the machine for that has no testable explanatory value.
Quote: But instead of trying to take a rational stand against my
theory, you go right back to you pre-conceived notion that
the ghost is not a ghost, and that you and everyone else
knows it real, so it must be real, and then,
???? I wasn't taking any stand against your theory. It was
about your "explanations". You agreed that we are all
"conscious" but I never took that as anything more than
a way of behaving. Or to the extent I may have suggested
you didn't have a theory I meant a testable scientific
theory.
Quote: ... and then I'm left as the person who will "never solve
the problem" because I close my eyes and pretend it's not
there.
No I wasn't suggesting you couldn't solve an unsolvable
"ghost in the machine" I was suggesting your "explanations"
as to particular behaviors as "nothing but motions" isn't
useful in explaining any behavior, conscious or otherwise.
Quote: I've tried to make you understand that by chasing
consciousness, and its cause, you are chasing a ghost.
The evidence of what I'm saying is all around you.
Multiple people smarter than me have written books
about this subject.
And I have read the most popular books on the subject.
Subjective experiences are not ghosts, they are all you,
the speaker, have. The true nature of these experiences
is not to be found in ghosts or any of the other
unverifiable ideas but in the way the neural circuits
work.
Quote: You are EXACTLY like someone who believes in God, who
can't understand how other people don't believe in God.
It is as if you aren't seeing what I write. I fully
understand you don't believe in a non-physical mind
and I have not been suggesting such a mind.
Quote: All the materialists I know think they have rejected
the idea of a soul, and they our proud to believe they
are taking the scientific stance when they believe in
evolution as the cause of the complexity around us and
not some god, but they fail to understand that they
are still sucked into a delusion as strong and as
misguided as a belief in God when they talk about
consciousness as something that emerges from a
biological brain.
There is no relationship. No one says God emerges from
an evolutionary process whereas they might say conscious
behavior is an emergent (hidden property) of a neural
network. But as I have been at great pains to point out
emergent behavior does not imply magic or ghosts.
Quote: The only reason the idea of God has been rejected by so
many, is because we have something to substitute for it
- evolution. If we didn't have evolution, the majority
of the world would still believe in God because it's the
best answer they have available for the question of where
did all this stuff around us come from.
Actually most people do still believe in God as the
explanation but it has never been a scientific explanation
for it lacks the requirement of testability.
Quote: God is the name we gave to the cause of the things around
us until we were able to understand the real nature of the
cause of the things around us.
We still don't know the real nature of the things around us.
We have a better description of how the real things around
us work but where they come from or why they are the way
they are is an unexplained given.
Quote: The word "mind" and the word "consciousness" are the names
we gave to the root cause of our thoughts since we didn't
understand what they were.
I certainly don't see "mind" or "consciousness" as causes.
They are names we give to certain kinds of behaviors that
result from the neural networks interactions with the
environment.
Quote: We shouldn't believe in God just because we don't know
why there are trees and animals around us, and we shouldn't
believe in the mind and consciousness just because we don't
know where are thoughts come from. We should just accept
the fact that we have thoughts and work towards
understanding how those thoughts happen.
Agreed. What is not agreed is "it is nothing but motions"
as an useful explanation.
...
Quote: I'm not brushing away something real, like salt crystals.
I'm trying to get you to realize that this stuff you keep
talking about when you use the words "conscious experience"
is a ghost. It's not real. What's real, is that your brain
is a signal processing machine reacting to sensory stimulus
signals and producing output signals. That's all there is.
You keep asking me to how these signal processing devices
produce your conscious awareness ghost, and I can't,
because they don't produce anything like that. All they
produce, is output signals to make your arms move. There's
nothing else there. No salt crystals which I need to
explain the cause of. What I'm brushing way, is your ghost.
Yes I know that is what you are doing but it is a strawman
ghost. Conscious behaviors are real like salt crystals. Not
all machines will wonder why they see red and green when
there is no red or green in their circuits. You have to
explain the illusion as you call it and I am not suggesting
it has a ghost as an explanation.
If a machine with visual input saw virtual edges you would
have to explain why this happens and not simply accuse it
of seeing ghosts.
Quote: If you think there is something in you, other than neurons
firing, where is your evidence to support that belief?
Where is the proof that this God of yours is real and not
just a figment of your imagination?
But I have never said there is anything more to it than the
firing of neurons. That is your strawman. I have been saying
that your explanations are insufficient to separate what
we observe as conscious vs. unconscious behavior. Yes an L
and a V are made up of nothing but two lines but the
difference is in their spatial arrangements. The problem
of the consciousness illusion hasn't been so easy to explain
but it doesn't follow that it must be supernatural.
Quote: You see a property of light called red. We all do. But
where is your evidence to support your belief that what
you call redness, is not neural activity?
Your "conscious" rock was again based on the idea of
consciousness as something a system has not on a way
of behaving.
Clearly it is a neural activity but not just any neural
activity just as V and L are clearly made up of two lines
but not just any spatial arrangement of two lines.
Quote: The point here, is that none of this _seems_ to be
neural activity to any of us. But, when you analyze
the facts, it | | |