Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

[dmanister]

Hi dmanister, we've discussed Radin's work on the C&P threads a bit and you might also search other threads for discussion, to see what has been said on the forum ... I think he is very interesting. I've read Entangled Minds and one other book by him and would love to discuss his ideas.

I like his work on how scientific paradigms change ... regardless of how one feels about his work, I think he provides one of the clearest explanations of how consensus changes ... it's in a chapter of maybe Entangled Minds, not sure ... I'll see if I can find the reference.

You will also find some discussion on the C&P thread around his evidence page:

http://deanradin.com/evidence/evidence.htm

I went through a number of the studies on that page and especially the work by Jessica Utts
JESSICA UTTS' HOME PAGE

You might also be interested in Robert Jahn's work - Princeton Engineering Anomalies research ... and then I think he went on and did additional research - I have read one of his books.

You might also enjoy Dean Radin's interview with Jeff Kripal (#2 at the link below)

http://www.jonescinemaarts.com/impossible-talk/

I look forward to your comments!

I'm familiar with Dr Radin's website but I'll have a look at the Utt's article. Thanks!

I think I've heard every interview he's given. The best one in my opinion is the one with Greg Bishop on Radio Misterioso:

http://radiomisterioso.com/2012/12/13/dean-radin-entangled-minds/

 

[Soupie]

@smcder @ufology

What do you two (and anyone else) make of this:

1) Consciousness (subjectivity) is neither objective nor physical. It cannot be measured/observed in the 3rd person.

Furthermore, it is unclear how subjective processes (subjectivity) could arise/emerge from objective processes. (The Hard Problem.)

Thus, it is proposed that consciousness/subjectivity is a fundamental feature of what-is, not unlike space, time, and energy/matter.

Alternatively, 2) so far as we know, consciousness is only associated with human/animal brain processes. (Technically, one can only be sure that they are conscious, and not other people.) Consciousness, so far as we know, is only associated with brains/neurons.

Thus, it is proposed that consciousness/subjectivity arises/emerges from objective brain/neural processes.

 

[smcder]

@smcder @ufology

What do you two (and anyone else) make of this:

1) Consciousness (subjectivity) is neither objective nor physical. It cannot be measured/observed in the 3rd person.

Furthermore, it is unclear how subjective processes (subjectivity) could arise/emerge from objective processes. (The Hard Problem.)

Thus, it is proposed that consciousness/subjectivity is a fundamental feature of what-is, not unlike space, time, and energy/matter.

2) On the other hand, so far as we know, consciousness is only associated with human/animal brain processes. (Technically, one can only be sure that they are conscious, and not other people.) Consciousness, so far as we know, is only associated with brains/neurons.

Thus, it is proposed that consciousness/subjectivity arises/emerges from objective brain/neural processes.

did you read the interview by Nova Spivack above?

 

[Soupie]

did you read the interview by Nova Spivack above?

I didn't read the interview but I read the other piece. There were several statements/thoughts of his that I don't necessarily agree with.

 

[smcder]

@smcder @ufology

What do you two (and anyone else) make of this:

1) Consciousness (subjectivity) is neither objective nor physical. It cannot be measured/observed in the 3rd person.

Furthermore, it is unclear how subjective processes (subjectivity) could arise/emerge from objective processes. (The Hard Problem.)

Thus, it is proposed that consciousness/subjectivity is a fundamental feature of what-is, not unlike space, time, and energy/matter.

2) On the other hand, so far as we know, consciousness is only associated with human/animal brain processes. (Technically, one can only be sure that they are conscious, and not other people.) Consciousness, so far as we know, is only associated with brains/neurons.

Thus, it is proposed that consciousness/subjectivity arises/emerges from objective brain/neural processes.

The way I read this, you are saying that consciousness/subjectivity is a fundamental feature of reality but that it emerges from the brain ... that sounds like a contradiction, the way I read it.

you also use a lot of "/" which is confusing ... ;-)

The interview transcript I linked addresses this and the talks about the problem of a lack of language in the Western tradition to discuss it accurately, that's why I asked if you had read it.

 

[Constance]

@smcder @ufology

1) Consciousness (subjectivity) is neither objective nor physical. It cannot be measured/observed in the 3rd person. Furthermore, it is unclear how subjective processes (subjectivity) could arise/emerge from objective processes. (The Hard Problem.) Thus, it is proposed that consciousness/subjectivity is a fundamental feature of what-is, not unlike space, time, and energy/matter.

So you’re seeing consciousness as an ontological primitive, but no longer in terms of panpsychism?

2) On the other hand, so far as we know, consciousness is only associated with human/animal brain processes. (Technically, one can only be sure that they are conscious, and not other people.) Consciousness, so far as we know, is only associated with brains/neurons.

Thus, it is proposed that consciousness/subjectivity arises/emerges from objective brain/neural processes.

I can buy the first sentence, but not the succeeding claims and the proposition you end up with. In the first place, consciousness cannot be equated with subjectivity. {See the link Steve provided today to a paper at wakingtimes.com} Subjectivity begins with affectivity as Panksepp shows, and is the ground out of which levels and aspects of consciousness evolve.
So we need to explore the evolution of consciousness in living organisms, an enormous task just now being undertaken. Here are links to several relevant philosophy papers we’ve read here already that recognize this, followed by a link to the SEP article on ‘Animal Consciousness’ and links to three further groups of papers linked to that discussion.

·

• Velmans, M. (2013). The evolution of consciousness. Contemporary Social Science, 7(2), 117–138.
• Gallagher, S. (2008). Direct perception in the intersubjective context.Consciousness and Cognition, 2, 535–543.
  
• Zahavi, D. (2011). Empathy and direct social perception. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2(3), 541–558.
• 
  
• SEP, ‘ANIMAL CONSCIOUSNESS, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/#Bib

· Psyche, Special Symposium on Animal Subjectivity: Target article by Peter Carruthers (1998a) with author's abstract, peer commentary, and author's response. {numerous papers here}

· Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mindentry onPhilosophy of Cognitive Ethologyby Colin Allen, with accompanyingAnnotated Bibliography.

· The Animal Consciousness section of PhilPapers (Chalmers & Bourget).

 

[Soupie]

The way I read this, you are saying that consciousness/subjectivity is a fundamental feature of reality but that it emerges from the brain ... that sounds like a contradiction, the way I read it.

No, I was saying 1) and 2 ) are two (main) positions; and I was trying to make them as concise as possible.

you also use a lot of "/" which is confusing ... ;-)

I know. My aim to promote understanding though, because people assign vastly different meanings to various words, eg, consciousness.

@Constance how would you distinguish consciousness from subjectivity?

The interview transcript I linked addresses this and the talks about the problem of a lack of language in the Western tradition to discuss it accurately, that's why I asked if you had read it.

Yes, here is the section I struggle with, as you know.

"Nova Spivack:I've been speaking about this already in this discussion today a little bit. So the global brain touches on a lot of these deep issues, and it's really just an idea at this point. Just like the notion of self is an idea, we kind of walk around without really thinking about that very much, but we have this convenient notion of self, or identity: "who I am", or "my personality". We can even say things like "this is my body, this is my head; this is my thought". Well who is saying that? That is the question. Who is the one who owns or thinks that it owns this body? We kind of naively assume that there really is somebody there, the owner. And we think that's me, or us, whoever we think we are. That's an assumption most people don't question. When you question it, that's the beginning of the spiritual path. It's also I think, an interesting question for the Internet and the Web: we can look at this question for an individual as well as for the global brain as a whole.
When we talk about the global brain, an analogous thing might arise: if there ever is a global brain, will it have a self? Will it have one self, or many? Will it be an actual real thing that we can point to, or will it just be some data somewhere, that's just a bunch of labels but not really an actual self? So what is self? Same question, just a different level of scale.
The brain, if you actually open it up and look inside it, is just a collection of different parts, billions of structures. But there is no one thing you can point to that's a self. And with the global brain, it's the same thing. If you look at the global brain, you see lots of people, lots of computers, lots of software, lots of data, lots of infrastructure. All of these are separate parts; nowhere can you find "the brain", or even "the self". So this question applies equally at both levels of scale.
It's also interesting that if there was something we can call "self", that was kind of a special thing, that could only be created by God, then that would mean that it will be unlikely, or who knows, whether or not that will happen for the global brain because we wouldn't know how to create that special thing. But, the good news is in a way, from all the evidence that we've seen, we cannot find anything that's an actual self. Self is basically some kind of concept, or an illusion that we maintain, because it helps us think, but it's not really there. Because of that in fact, it means that it's possible that there could be a self for the global brain, that it could emerge, that it could be constructed, because it is just a construct. So the bad news is that we can't find the self. The good news is that it means that we can create self at other levels of scale.
It means you can have an artificial intelligence that had a concept of self. Someday maybe you could have a disembodied concept of self, or structure that functions like a self for the global brain. It's certainly possible. Now, whether it will happen? Who knows. A lot of things will need to take place and maybe it's unlikely, but it's possible. So this concept of a human, and what it means to be alive, what it means to be a being, as we explore the frontiers of both neuroscience and computer science is shifting. And in a way, this is kind of similar to what happened to our understanding of matter, as we developed the frontiers of physics, biology, and chemistry in the previous centuries. It's analogous.
So we're effectively doing for a new frontier – the frontier of mind – what we’ve already done to the frontier of matter. And what it is we will discover, is just like we eventually found out how matter decomposes infinitely down to the quantum stuff we’re going to find the same thing is true with the mind: you never find an end, you get down to the quantum stuff. And interestingly, quantum mechanics itself has already established that there is some strange relationship between matter and consciousness. We don't really understand it, but we can show that observation does affect the outcome of an experiment. In fact it's so strange that there are some experiments that actually prove that it even travels through time so it actually can influence things backwards or forward in time. It's very strange, nobody really understands that today. But we know from numerous different directions of inquiry, that there's a relationship between what we call mind and matter.
And if we jump over to the other side, to the spiritual way of looking at things, all the great spiritual traditions have already discovered that a long time ago. From their perspective, it's all one thing. Mind and matter are dualistic concepts. They're artificial distinctions. There's really not any separation between all these different phenomena that we've observed. They're all a manifestation of something deeper. So I think technology and spirituality are kind of engaged in this sort of dance. This has been going on for centuries: the church and religion have been deeply involved in science. Many great scientists have been deeply religious, because when you ask these big questions, you inevitably start to experience this kind of wondering on mystery, and you even start to realize that there are things that we'll never understand, or they can't be understood, because that's what they are. They're not understandable.
So I think when we talk about the question how matter becomes imagination, or how matter becomes consciousness there's a lot of thinking going on about this right now, trying to find the source of consciousness. The approach taken in the book you're referring to is still a very mechanistic, materialistic approach, trying to find some physical thing in the brain that corresponds to the consciousness – whether it's a process, or pattern, or a particular way neurons fire are the certain conditions that's the source of consciousness. I don't think that will succeed. I think those approaches may find some analogues, some things correlated in the brain with certain experiences that we have. So when we see something that we recognize, there's a neural signature, and you can detect that. That's the basis of next generation lie detectors, which can actually detect whether you've seen or remember something by looking at the neural fingerprint of that experience in your brain.
So we'll be able to see some correlations between sensory experiences and mental experiences and the brain. But that doesn't actually locate the source of consciousness. That locates perhaps, the source of conception, where the concept is and how they [neurons] are firing at it. When we talk about consciousness, there's a very specific distinction that we have to make, and that is what do we really mean by consciousness? Do we mean an entire landscape of thought, or do we mean something more precise? That is the entity that's actually aware, or witnessing of what is taking place. These are two very different phenomena, and in the West when we talk about consciousness, we don't make that distinction; we're very messy when we talk about this. In Eastern philosophy, they're very precise about this. In Buddhism for example, there are very, very precise distinctions for all the different phenomena taking place within the field of consciousness. When you experience something, there are many different things going on in that experience, and there are labels and names and technical descriptions in all of these. That's still very lacking in the Western cognitive science and neuroscience. We have a very simple, primitive language we barely understand when we talk about what's going on in consciousness.
In the East, in Eastern philosophical traditions, they're much more sophisticated. They've had thousands of years of dialectical debate and research, and they've developed very sophisticated logic and very precise analytical method and language for explaining what's going on in consciousness. So, the conclusion is, we may find some physical analogues for thought, for experiences, but we won't be able to define the thing that's knowing. That's different. That's something else, and it doesn't have a neural signature. We won't be able to find it, and that's the statement that I'm confident making, because there are logical arguments as well as experiments that you can do in your own meditation for example, where you can see that and establish that, and you know it's true. And it's not a matter of belief; it's more like existence truth a mathematical truth. It's something you can find, it's something you can show and other people can repeat it and it's not even debatable once you actually see that.
Of course, that's something that scientists would probably scoff at and say, "Oh please, that's just another statement by a spiritual person who is not a scientist". Well, I happen to be both. I'm spiritual, but I also happen to be a scientist. And I can say having looked at both sides of a coin, that there really is something special taking place when it comes to awareness, to the source of knowing. Phenomenon that we know what appears to us, the senses are not as important or interesting. They're special too, but the really interesting question is, "What is knowing those things?" What is that? Actual awareness is the very root of the question. So I think through science we will never be able to answer that question."

We've been here many, many times and always seem to fail to find a middle ground.

I have recently used the Sculptor and Clay analogy, and the rest of you have seemed to follow it. So I'll use it to discuss the above concept.

In the SAC analogy, the sculptor is the physical brain and the clay is raw, undifferentiated consciousness. The sculptor (brain) forms the clay (consciousness) into various objects (mental contents).

According to the concept above in the quoted material, a 3rd element enters the picture. The knower/observer.

In my view, the knower/observer is a mental content/process. (It is what I have referred to as meta-awareness.) That is, I think the sense of self is a mental content—not something more fundamental.

In my SAC analogy, it would be akin to mental contents becoming aware of mental contents. (This is why I have an affinity for HOT theories.)

Nova seems to assert however that the knower/observer is distinct from the brain (sculptor) and mental contents/qualia (the formed clay).

Thus, we have a new mystery: not only do we not know the origin of consciousness; we now do not know the origin of the knower/observer of consciousness.

Does that make sense?

 

[smcder]

On the idea of "individual units", it's well known that the brain is made up of several regions with specialized primary functions. Those regions e.g. the visual cortex, might be interpreted as individual units within a larger whole. It's also obvious that "each brain" as a whole can be considered to be an "individual unit", even if it works together with other "individual units". So I'm not sure what the point of pointing that out is, other than, perhaps, the author's need to attain an arbitrary word count.

Again, I don't see the relevance. We can say the same thing about a CPU, or even an individual transistor. We could say that computation in computers happens at the level of electrons as they pass through the gates.

Maybe it's relevant. Maybe not. It may be the case that the chemical reactions going on at the molecular level of microtubules don't have anything to do with computations that affect the mind, but instead are geared toward cellular maintenance or some other function that has no correlation to thinking. Would we still call that function "computation"? It's a trickier question than it first seems. We normally think of computation as a process that requires an intellectual problem to solve and a mechanism to solve it rather than something operating on natural physical laws of arbitrary cause and consequence.

But at the same time, is it necessary for all problems to have originated within the frame work of intellect? Why shouldn't the problems and solutions arising out of nature not count? Is the brain itself not a product of nature that evolved out of problems presented by nature? A bit of a paradox there perhaps.

At any rate, if we assume that computation takes place at the level of molecules, it seems to me that in order to avoid confusion, we'd have to invoke a set of hierarchies that distinguish autonomic functions like cellular maintenance, from the large scale operations taking place in billions of cells that correlate to thought.

I suppose it depends on your philosophical belief. The subjective idealist will have an entirely different perspective on that question than the materialist. One might argue that there seems to be a little wiggle room in Dualism to squeeze in both ideas, but to remain coherent, that ultimately distills down to Physicalism ( even though that may make physicalists uncomfortable ).

that's pretty funny about the word count ... since it's a transcript ... ;-)

Remember, the argument began with a discussion about getting the computing power of the brain for $1, so the relevance is in determining how much computing power the brain has:

But let's forget about the question of how long it takes for a minute. Will it ever happen? If we had an infinite amount of time, will it ever happen? That's an interesting question. Could we ever do as much computation as the human brain does? That's a pretty deep question because we don't really know today whether the human brain is actually separate from the rest of the universe. It gets to that question where are we really isolated, or are we all part of the whole? If in fact the computation of human brain does, at such a deep quantum level, somehow connects to the very fabric of reality then it would be very difficult to separate that from computations about space and time, computations of the universe itself. On some level, technology is going to take us back to the same set of questions that Taoism and Buddhism (and Hinduism) have taken us as well. At the end of the day, the questions are: "Who am I?" and "How am I connected to the universe?", "What is all this?", "How does it work?", "What's the connection between self and other?"
So if for the brain to do what it does the whole universe is required, then there would be some contradictions in trying to replicate the computing power of the brain.

 

[smcder]

No, I was saying 1) and 2 ) are two (main) positions; and I was trying to make them as concise as possible.


I know. My aim to promote understanding though, because people assign vastly different meanings to various words, eg, consciousness.

@Constance how would you distinguish consciousness from subjectivity?

Yes, here is the section I struggle with, as you know.

"Nova Spivack:I've been speaking about this already in this discussion today a little bit. So the global brain touches on a lot of these deep issues, and it's really just an idea at this point. Just like the notion of self is an idea, we kind of walk around without really thinking about that very much, but we have this convenient notion of self, or identity: "who I am", or "my personality". We can even say things like "this is my body, this is my head; this is my thought". Well who is saying that? That is the question. Who is the one who owns or thinks that it owns this body? We kind of naively assume that there really is somebody there, the owner. And we think that's me, or us, whoever we think we are. That's an assumption most people don't question. When you question it, that's the beginning of the spiritual path. It's also I think, an interesting question for the Internet and the Web: we can look at this question for an individual as well as for the global brain as a whole.
When we talk about the global brain, an analogous thing might arise: if there ever is a global brain, will it have a self? Will it have one self, or many? Will it be an actual real thing that we can point to, or will it just be some data somewhere, that's just a bunch of labels but not really an actual self? So what is self? Same question, just a different level of scale.
The brain, if you actually open it up and look inside it, is just a collection of different parts, billions of structures. But there is no one thing you can point to that's a self. And with the global brain, it's the same thing. If you look at the global brain, you see lots of people, lots of computers, lots of software, lots of data, lots of infrastructure. All of these are separate parts; nowhere can you find "the brain", or even "the self". So this question applies equally at both levels of scale.
It's also interesting that if there was something we can call "self", that was kind of a special thing, that could only be created by God, then that would mean that it will be unlikely, or who knows, whether or not that will happen for the global brain because we wouldn't know how to create that special thing. But, the good news is in a way, from all the evidence that we've seen, we cannot find anything that's an actual self. Self is basically some kind of concept, or an illusion that we maintain, because it helps us think, but it's not really there. Because of that in fact, it means that it's possible that there could be a self for the global brain, that it could emerge, that it could be constructed, because it is just a construct. So the bad news is that we can't find the self. The good news is that it means that we can create self at other levels of scale.
It means you can have an artificial intelligence that had a concept of self. Someday maybe you could have a disembodied concept of self, or structure that functions like a self for the global brain. It's certainly possible. Now, whether it will happen? Who knows. A lot of things will need to take place and maybe it's unlikely, but it's possible. So this concept of a human, and what it means to be alive, what it means to be a being, as we explore the frontiers of both neuroscience and computer science is shifting. And in a way, this is kind of similar to what happened to our understanding of matter, as we developed the frontiers of physics, biology, and chemistry in the previous centuries. It's analogous.
So we're effectively doing for a new frontier – the frontier of mind – what we’ve already done to the frontier of matter. And what it is we will discover, is just like we eventually found out how matter decomposes infinitely down to the quantum stuff we’re going to find the same thing is true with the mind: you never find an end, you get down to the quantum stuff. And interestingly, quantum mechanics itself has already established that there is some strange relationship between matter and consciousness. We don't really understand it, but we can show that observation does affect the outcome of an experiment. In fact it's so strange that there are some experiments that actually prove that it even travels through time so it actually can influence things backwards or forward in time. It's very strange, nobody really understands that today. But we know from numerous different directions of inquiry, that there's a relationship between what we call mind and matter.
And if we jump over to the other side, to the spiritual way of looking at things, all the great spiritual traditions have already discovered that a long time ago. From their perspective, it's all one thing. Mind and matter are dualistic concepts. They're artificial distinctions. There's really not any separation between all these different phenomena that we've observed. They're all a manifestation of something deeper. So I think technology and spirituality are kind of engaged in this sort of dance. This has been going on for centuries: the church and religion have been deeply involved in science. Many great scientists have been deeply religious, because when you ask these big questions, you inevitably start to experience this kind of wondering on mystery, and you even start to realize that there are things that we'll never understand, or they can't be understood, because that's what they are. They're not understandable.
So I think when we talk about the question how matter becomes imagination, or how matter becomes consciousness there's a lot of thinking going on about this right now, trying to find the source of consciousness. The approach taken in the book you're referring to is still a very mechanistic, materialistic approach, trying to find some physical thing in the brain that corresponds to the consciousness – whether it's a process, or pattern, or a particular way neurons fire are the certain conditions that's the source of consciousness. I don't think that will succeed. I think those approaches may find some analogues, some things correlated in the brain with certain experiences that we have. So when we see something that we recognize, there's a neural signature, and you can detect that. That's the basis of next generation lie detectors, which can actually detect whether you've seen or remember something by looking at the neural fingerprint of that experience in your brain.
So we'll be able to see some correlations between sensory experiences and mental experiences and the brain. But that doesn't actually locate the source of consciousness. That locates perhaps, the source of conception, where the concept is and how they [neurons] are firing at it. When we talk about consciousness, there's a very specific distinction that we have to make, and that is what do we really mean by consciousness? Do we mean an entire landscape of thought, or do we mean something more precise? That is the entity that's actually aware, or witnessing of what is taking place. These are two very different phenomena, and in the West when we talk about consciousness, we don't make that distinction; we're very messy when we talk about this. In Eastern philosophy, they're very precise about this. In Buddhism for example, there are very, very precise distinctions for all the different phenomena taking place within the field of consciousness. When you experience something, there are many different things going on in that experience, and there are labels and names and technical descriptions in all of these. That's still very lacking in the Western cognitive science and neuroscience. We have a very simple, primitive language we barely understand when we talk about what's going on in consciousness.
In the East, in Eastern philosophical traditions, they're much more sophisticated. They've had thousands of years of dialectical debate and research, and they've developed very sophisticated logic and very precise analytical method and language for explaining what's going on in consciousness. So, the conclusion is, we may find some physical analogues for thought, for experiences, but we won't be able to define the thing that's knowing. That's different. That's something else, and it doesn't have a neural signature. We won't be able to find it, and that's the statement that I'm confident making, because there are logical arguments as well as experiments that you can do in your own meditation for example, where you can see that and establish that, and you know it's true. And it's not a matter of belief; it's more like existence truth a mathematical truth. It's something you can find, it's something you can show and other people can repeat it and it's not even debatable once you actually see that.
Of course, that's something that scientists would probably scoff at and say, "Oh please, that's just another statement by a spiritual person who is not a scientist". Well, I happen to be both. I'm spiritual, but I also happen to be a scientist. And I can say having looked at both sides of a coin, that there really is something special taking place when it comes to awareness, to the source of knowing. Phenomenon that we know what appears to us, the senses are not as important or interesting. They're special too, but the really interesting question is, "What is knowing those things?" What is that? Actual awareness is the very root of the question. So I think through science we will never be able to answer that question."

We've been here many, many times and always seem to fail to find a middle ground.

I have recently used the Sculptor and Clay analogy, and the rest of you have seemed to follow it. So I'll use it to discuss the above concept.

In the SAC analogy, the sculptor is the physical brain and the clay is raw, undifferentiated consciousness. The sculptor (brain) forms the clay (consciousness) into various objects (mental contents).

According to the concept above in the quoted material, a 3rd element enters the picture. The knower/observer.

In my view, the knower/observer is a mental content/process. (It is what I have referred to as meta-awareness.) That is, I think the sense of self is a mental content—not something more fundamental.

In my SAC analogy, it would be akin to mental contents becoming aware of mental contents. (This is why I have an affinity for HOT theories.)

Nova seems to assert however that the knower/observer is distinct from the brain (sculptor) and mental contents/qualia (the formed clay).

Thus, we have a new mystery: not only do we not know the origin of consciousness; we now do not know the origin of the knower/observer of consciousness.

Does that make sense?

@ufology will very likely sort it out for you this evening ... ;-)

 

[smcder]

@ufology ... a bit more on chess ...

Just the other evening ... around midnight, it was a dreary night as I remember ... perhaps that was only my imagination though as I was weak and weary from a long day's labors ... and I got to pondering (I have many quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore) and then I heard a tapping, a gentle rapping upon my chamber door ... but it turned out to just be Bob, my talking Raven.

Anyway, I started the Murders in the Rue Morgue and the opening paragraphs discuss chess, draaughts (checkers) and whist ... he makes a lively comparison of the three I found very interesting. Go is not mentioned. Apparently Poe had quite an interest in puzzles and mental challenges.

The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.
The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract—Let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherché movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometime indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.
Whist has long been noted for its influence upon what is termed the calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt there is nothing of a similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of analysis. The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind. When I say proficiency, I mean that perfection in the game which includes a comprehension of all the sources whence legitimate advantage may be derived. These are not only manifold but multiform, and lie frequently among recesses of thought altogether inaccessible to the ordinary understanding. To observe attentively is to remember distinctly; and, so far, the concentrative chess-player will do very well at whist; while the rules of Hoyle (themselves based upon the mere mechanism of the game) are sufficiently and generally comprehensible. Thus to have a retentive memory, and to proceed by "the book," are points commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. Our player confines himself not at all; nor, because the game is the object, does he reject deductions from things external to the game. He examines the countenance of his partner, comparing it carefully with that of each of his opponents. He considers the mode of assorting the cards in each hand; often counting trump by trump, and honor by honor, through the glances bestowed by their holders upon each. He notes every variation of face as the play progresses, gathering a fund of thought from the differences in the expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or of chagrin. From the manner of gathering up a trick he judges whether the person taking it can make another in the suit. He recognises what is played through feint, by the air with which it is thrown upon the table. A casual or inadvertent word; the accidental dropping or turning of a card, with the accompanying anxiety or carelessness in regard to its concealment; the counting of the tricks, with the order of their arrangement; embarrassment, hesitation, eagerness or trepidation—all afford, to his apparently intuitive perception, indications of the true state of affairs. The first two or three rounds having been played, he is in full possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the rest of the party had turned outward the faces of their own.
The analytical power should not be confounded with ample ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man is often remarkably incapable of analysis. The constructive or combining power, by which ingenuity is usually manifested, and to which the phrenologists (I believe erroneously) have assigned a separate organ, supposing it a primitive faculty, has been so frequently seen in those whose intellect bordered otherwise upon idiocy, as to have attracted general observation among writers on morals. Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.
The narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of a commentary upon the propositions just advanced.

 

[smcder]

Does anyone remember the level 4 and 5 problems we discussed by Lee Smolin? I think in part two. On AI ... I found the links and I'm going to read that again ... basically about the difficulties of AI ...

 

[smcder]

Found it:

I see that you are interested in exploring the 'should we' question, but I want to insert here Lee Smolin's second response to Lanier's Edge presentation which responds to the 'can we' question concerning both 1) the ThX project of constructing a human-like artificial intelligence in a machine substrate with which to replace humans, and 2) the ThX project of re-engineering our species.

Lee Smolin
Date: September 27, 2000

Jaron is raising some very important points that deserve closer examination and discussion. Among them is his challenge to the idea that the optimization of present day computers could produce anything with the capabilities of living, intelligent animals, cats let alone people. I think Jaron is right to point out that the arguments for this thesis rest on incorrect assumptions. I believe that Jaron's argument can be strengthened and I would like to explain how. The following is just a sketch, but I hope it suffices to stimulate the debate.

The problems to be addressed are 1) what kinds of problems can computers solve and whether they differ in kind from the kinds of problems humans solve. 2) What kind of problem is it to design a computer and whether it differs in kind from the problem of designing a human, or a creature with equal capabilities.

To approach these questions it helps to begin with the idea that some design problems involve searching a space of possible design parameters. We know that in these cases there are simple optimization algorithms that will find the local extrema in whatever basin of attraction one happens to be in. However, optimization is a small part of design because it can be used reliably to solve only a small subset of possible design problems. To talk about this we may distinguish five classes of design problems.

CLASS 1: Local optimization problems problems which can be solved with standard hill-climbing techniques.

CLASS 2: Locate a pretty good, but not necessarily global extremum in a configuration space with many local extrema and many basins of attraction.

CLASS 3: Locate the global extremum in a configuration space with many local extrema and many basins of attraction.

CLASS 4: Find local extrema in a landscape which changes unpredictably on the same time scale it takes to find local optima.

CLASS 5: find local extrema in cases in which the computation time required to construct the configuration space and/or calculate the fitness function is either infinite or much longer than the time available. These are the class of problems which have to be invented or discovered before they can be solved, as there is no algorithm that can lead to their formulation or complete specification.

Let us first discuss the first question. At least so far, computers are very good at solving CLASS 1 problems, and there are decent algorithms for simple CLASS 2 problems. But we do not have good methods for finding global extrema and hence solving CLASS 3 problems. To my knowledge computers can do decently at some simple CLASS 4 problems, but can easily fail when they become more complex. By definition computers have problems solving CLASS 5 problems, as the computation time to set up the extremization problem is prohibitive. However humans can often solve CLASS 3 problems and are also quite good at CLASS 4 problems. This should be no surprise, this is part of our biological specialization. This is what is required to flourish in a new environment, domesticate a new species, become farmers, populate almost all the ecological zones on the planet and so forth.

But humans can do even better than that, we can both invent and solve CLASS 5 problems. This is what poetry, art, music and science, are about. We invent the forms and traditions and then we master them. We can thrive in a domain in which we create optimal versions of things that did not even exist a short time before. We are not extremizing in a landscape, we are building the landscape on the same time scale that we master it.

One correspondent suggested that anyone who thinks people are different from machines are naive romantics. This is not true, we are different because we have vastly different capabilities. It is irrelevant to talk of the universality of Turing machines, for Turing machines are entities that run programs that must be written by an external entity. So far at least the only entities we know of who can function as those external programmers are humans. Humans are intelligent creatures that do not need to be programmed by any external agency. Turing machines are designed, we are the result of natural selection. We need then to examine the second question, whether designing or programming a computer is in the same CLASS of problems as the problems natural selection solved in the course of evolution.

Of course inventing the idea of a digital computer was a CLASS 5 problem. But once we had the idea, the optimization of digital computers is mainly a CLASS 1 problems. This is what Moore's law is about, it tells us how quickly local optimization can work when ample resources are available. One of the points Jaron is making is that the design of software required to do justice to the exponentially increasing capabilities of our machines are not CLASS 1 problems. Moore's law tells us that the fitness landscape for software is changing on a time scale comparable to the time required to write and debug software. Thus writing software involves problems of at least CLASS 4. This is of course just a different way of making one of Jaron's arguments.

For there to be a danger of robots taking over, or even being able to do a decent job entertaining us, replacing songwriters and singers, artists, scientists and comedians, one of two things have to happen. Either we will be able to design a machine that could replace us, which means a machine that can solve problems of CLASS 5, or we will be able to design a machine that could in turn design a machine that could solve CLASS 5 problems.

But while we can solve problems up to CLASS 5, so far we have only been able to design machines that can solve CLASS 2 problems reliably. And so far machines are not able to design other machines to solve even CLASS 1 problems. When one puts it this way it is clear that it is not just a matter of Moore's law, designing one of us is a very different kind of problem then optimizing a programmable digital computer.

What kind of problem is it to design an entity that can solve CLASS 5 problems? We know we were created by natural selection, acting on not only us but the whole collection of living species. This is at least a CLASS 4 problem, but it is very likely at least a CLASS 5 problem. The interactions among many species as they evolve under the rules of natural selection is a CLASS 4 problem, as is shown by models of Bak and Sneppen, Kauffman, Sola and others. But there are good arguments, summarized in Stuart Kauffman's forthcoming book, that natural selection and cultural evolution are really CLASS 5 problems. He argues that they are problems in which the construction of the fitness landscape itself is so computationally intensive that it is not correct to separate the specification of the fitness landscape from its optimization. Instead, both take place together. This means really that the metaphor of optimization has broken down completely. Whatever evolution is doing cannot, he argues, be conceptualized as extremization on a pre-existing fitness landscape.

Thus, the problem of designing an entity that can solve CLASS 5 problems is at least a CLASS 4 problem, and very likely is a CLASS 5 problem. But is it only this hard, or harder still? Human's can solve some CLASS 4 and 5 problems, but it is not at all obvious that the problems of these kinds that we can solve are comparable to the problems that natural selection has solved in designing us. At the very least, it is likely that the time required to solve the problem of designing us may take a great deal longer than the tine it takes to solve the CLASS 4 and 5 problems we have so far dealt with. It took natural selection 4 billion years to design us. Let us assume that we could do it much faster. How much faster? Let us assume that we could use genetic engineering to engineer an artificial speciation in an animal. Speciation is a process that takes on the order of 100,000 years. Given very optimistic assumptions it is possible to imagine that some years from now this is something we will be able to accomplish in on the order of 100 years. It could certainly not be less than that as we cannot do it faster than the time it takes for several generations to grow to maturity. (Because the interaction of an animal and its environment is a CLASS 5 problem, we are not likely to be able to simulate it reliably enough to replace the phase where we grow the animal and observe what happens.) This would mean that we had the tools to speed up natural selection by a factor of 1,000. Even with this fantastic increase of speed it would still take us a million years to invent something like ourselves, starting from scratch. (Note that this is true even if we skip the pre-cambrian stages of evolution, which begins with creatures whose cell biology and biochemistry is far advanced of what we have so far designed. Note also that many biologists working in parallel won't help as natural selection also works in parallel.)

This is on the order of the lifetime of a species. A problem like this, whose minimum time for solution is on the order of the lifetime of a whole species of creatures that can solve CLASS 5 problems deserves a separate class. So we may call this a CLASS 6 problem.

Is it possible that there is a way to do it much faster, by taking a route that natural selection could not have? One cannot say this is impossible, but all this means is that so little is known about the problem that it is in a class of problems we have no idea how to solve.

To summarize: the claim that optimization of present computer designs could produce something that is "as powerful" as humans requires that there is only one kind of intelligent entity, and they all live in a fixed landscape with a single local extremum. But we are not only not in the same basin of attraction as present day computers, it is not even obvious that the problem of constructing us has anything in common with problems we have so far solved. This is not to deny that someday humans may learn how to solve the problem of designing creatures that can themselves solve CLASS 5 problems. The point is only that there is no rational basis for predicting when or even whether this may happen, as the solution to this problem is not closely related to the kind of optimization problems that human designers have so far learned to solve.

Let us first discuss the first question. At least so far, computers are very good at solving CLASS 1 problems, and there are decent algorithms for simple CLASS 2 problems. But we do not have good methods for finding global extrema and hence solving CLASS 3 problems. To my knowledge computers can do decently at some simple CLASS 4 problems, but can easily fail when they become more complex. By definition computers have problems solving CLASS 5 problems, as the computation time to set up the extremization problem is prohibitive. However humans can often solve CLASS 3 problems and are also quite good at CLASS 4 problems. This should be no surprise, this is part of our biological specialization. This is what is required to flourish in a new environment, domesticate a new species, become farmers, populate almost all the ecological zones on the planet and so forth.

But humans can do even better than that, we can both invent and solve CLASS 5 problems. This is what poetry, art, music and science, are about. We invent the forms and traditions and then we master them. We can thrive in a domain in which we create optimal versions of things that did not even exist a short time before. We are not extremizing in a landscape, we are building the landscape on the same time scale that we master it.

One correspondent suggested that anyone who thinks people are different from machines are naive romantics. This is not true, we are different because we have vastly different capabilities. It is irrelevant to talk of the universality of Turing machines, for Turing machines are entities that run programs that must be written by an external entity. So far at least the only entities we know of who can function as those external programmers are humans. Humans are intelligent creatures that do not need to be programmed by any external agency. Turing machines are designed, we are the result of natural selection. We need then to examine the second question, whether designing or programming a computer is in the same CLASS of problems as the problems natural selection solved in the course of evolution.

 

[Constance]

Steve wrote to Soupie: "you also use a lot of "/" which is confusing ... ;-)"

Soupie responded: "I know. My aim to promote understanding though, because people assign vastly different meanings to various words, eg, consciousness."

That's exactly the problem. We can't define consciousness until we can describe all that it does and all that it is, and also how it has evolved in nature to produce an additional ontological primitive. So offering readers an assortment of terms implied to represent the same thing will never "promote understanding."

@Constance how would you distinguish consciousness from subjectivity?

Subjectivity develops from the primordial awareness of a distinction* {and mutual impingement} between an organism and its environment. Panksepp identifies the earliest sign of this awareness in terms of demonstrable "affectivity" in primitive organisms and has proposed that affectivity is the ground out of which consciousness evolves in species of life. Think of consciousness in human experience as the farthest end of a spectrum of capabilities that begin with affectivity. You will not find an account of 'subjectivity' in objectivist/physicalist science or neuroscience, though there are some neuroscientists (and I have linked them over the last three parts of this thread) who are beginning to recognize that it is subjectivity that must be understood in order to grasp what consciousness is..

*This is a sensed distinction that makes a profound difference in the experiences of evolving organisms and their increasingly complex responses to the conditions of their existence.

 

[smcder]

No, I was saying 1) and 2 ) are two (main) positions; and I was trying to make them as concise as possible.


I know. My aim to promote understanding though, because people assign vastly different meanings to various words, eg, consciousness.

@Constance how would you distinguish consciousness from subjectivity?

Yes, here is the section I struggle with, as you know.

"Nova Spivack:I've been speaking about this already in this discussion today a little bit. So the global brain touches on a lot of these deep issues, and it's really just an idea at this point. Just like the notion of self is an idea, we kind of walk around without really thinking about that very much, but we have this convenient notion of self, or identity: "who I am", or "my personality". We can even say things like "this is my body, this is my head; this is my thought". Well who is saying that? That is the question. Who is the one who owns or thinks that it owns this body? We kind of naively assume that there really is somebody there, the owner. And we think that's me, or us, whoever we think we are. That's an assumption most people don't question. When you question it, that's the beginning of the spiritual path. It's also I think, an interesting question for the Internet and the Web: we can look at this question for an individual as well as for the global brain as a whole.
When we talk about the global brain, an analogous thing might arise: if there ever is a global brain, will it have a self? Will it have one self, or many? Will it be an actual real thing that we can point to, or will it just be some data somewhere, that's just a bunch of labels but not really an actual self? So what is self? Same question, just a different level of scale.
The brain, if you actually open it up and look inside it, is just a collection of different parts, billions of structures. But there is no one thing you can point to that's a self. And with the global brain, it's the same thing. If you look at the global brain, you see lots of people, lots of computers, lots of software, lots of data, lots of infrastructure. All of these are separate parts; nowhere can you find "the brain", or even "the self". So this question applies equally at both levels of scale.
It's also interesting that if there was something we can call "self", that was kind of a special thing, that could only be created by God, then that would mean that it will be unlikely, or who knows, whether or not that will happen for the global brain because we wouldn't know how to create that special thing. But, the good news is in a way, from all the evidence that we've seen, we cannot find anything that's an actual self. Self is basically some kind of concept, or an illusion that we maintain, because it helps us think, but it's not really there. Because of that in fact, it means that it's possible that there could be a self for the global brain, that it could emerge, that it could be constructed, because it is just a construct. So the bad news is that we can't find the self. The good news is that it means that we can create self at other levels of scale.
It means you can have an artificial intelligence that had a concept of self. Someday maybe you could have a disembodied concept of self, or structure that functions like a self for the global brain. It's certainly possible. Now, whether it will happen? Who knows. A lot of things will need to take place and maybe it's unlikely, but it's possible. So this concept of a human, and what it means to be alive, what it means to be a being, as we explore the frontiers of both neuroscience and computer science is shifting. And in a way, this is kind of similar to what happened to our understanding of matter, as we developed the frontiers of physics, biology, and chemistry in the previous centuries. It's analogous.
So we're effectively doing for a new frontier – the frontier of mind – what we’ve already done to the frontier of matter. And what it is we will discover, is just like we eventually found out how matter decomposes infinitely down to the quantum stuff we’re going to find the same thing is true with the mind: you never find an end, you get down to the quantum stuff. And interestingly, quantum mechanics itself has already established that there is some strange relationship between matter and consciousness. We don't really understand it, but we can show that observation does affect the outcome of an experiment. In fact it's so strange that there are some experiments that actually prove that it even travels through time so it actually can influence things backwards or forward in time. It's very strange, nobody really understands that today. But we know from numerous different directions of inquiry, that there's a relationship between what we call mind and matter.
And if we jump over to the other side, to the spiritual way of looking at things, all the great spiritual traditions have already discovered that a long time ago. From their perspective, it's all one thing. Mind and matter are dualistic concepts. They're artificial distinctions. There's really not any separation between all these different phenomena that we've observed. They're all a manifestation of something deeper. So I think technology and spirituality are kind of engaged in this sort of dance. This has been going on for centuries: the church and religion have been deeply involved in science. Many great scientists have been deeply religious, because when you ask these big questions, you inevitably start to experience this kind of wondering on mystery, and you even start to realize that there are things that we'll never understand, or they can't be understood, because that's what they are. They're not understandable.
So I think when we talk about the question how matter becomes imagination, or how matter becomes consciousness there's a lot of thinking going on about this right now, trying to find the source of consciousness. The approach taken in the book you're referring to is still a very mechanistic, materialistic approach, trying to find some physical thing in the brain that corresponds to the consciousness – whether it's a process, or pattern, or a particular way neurons fire are the certain conditions that's the source of consciousness. I don't think that will succeed. I think those approaches may find some analogues, some things correlated in the brain with certain experiences that we have. So when we see something that we recognize, there's a neural signature, and you can detect that. That's the basis of next generation lie detectors, which can actually detect whether you've seen or remember something by looking at the neural fingerprint of that experience in your brain.
So we'll be able to see some correlations between sensory experiences and mental experiences and the brain. But that doesn't actually locate the source of consciousness. That locates perhaps, the source of conception, where the concept is and how they [neurons] are firing at it. When we talk about consciousness, there's a very specific distinction that we have to make, and that is what do we really mean by consciousness? Do we mean an entire landscape of thought, or do we mean something more precise? That is the entity that's actually aware, or witnessing of what is taking place. These are two very different phenomena, and in the West when we talk about consciousness, we don't make that distinction; we're very messy when we talk about this. In Eastern philosophy, they're very precise about this. In Buddhism for example, there are very, very precise distinctions for all the different phenomena taking place within the field of consciousness. When you experience something, there are many different things going on in that experience, and there are labels and names and technical descriptions in all of these. That's still very lacking in the Western cognitive science and neuroscience. We have a very simple, primitive language we barely understand when we talk about what's going on in consciousness.
In the East, in Eastern philosophical traditions, they're much more sophisticated. They've had thousands of years of dialectical debate and research, and they've developed very sophisticated logic and very precise analytical method and language for explaining what's going on in consciousness. So, the conclusion is, we may find some physical analogues for thought, for experiences, but we won't be able to define the thing that's knowing. That's different. That's something else, and it doesn't have a neural signature. We won't be able to find it, and that's the statement that I'm confident making, because there are logical arguments as well as experiments that you can do in your own meditation for example, where you can see that and establish that, and you know it's true. And it's not a matter of belief; it's more like existence truth a mathematical truth. It's something you can find, it's something you can show and other people can repeat it and it's not even debatable once you actually see that.
Of course, that's something that scientists would probably scoff at and say, "Oh please, that's just another statement by a spiritual person who is not a scientist". Well, I happen to be both. I'm spiritual, but I also happen to be a scientist. And I can say having looked at both sides of a coin, that there really is something special taking place when it comes to awareness, to the source of knowing. Phenomenon that we know what appears to us, the senses are not as important or interesting. They're special too, but the really interesting question is, "What is knowing those things?" What is that? Actual awareness is the very root of the question. So I think through science we will never be able to answer that question."

We've been here many, many times and always seem to fail to find a middle ground.

I have recently used the Sculptor and Clay analogy, and the rest of you have seemed to follow it. So I'll use it to discuss the above concept.

In the SAC analogy, the sculptor is the physical brain and the clay is raw, undifferentiated consciousness. The sculptor (brain) forms the clay (consciousness) into various objects (mental contents).

According to the concept above in the quoted material, a 3rd element enters the picture. The knower/observer.

In my view, the knower/observer is a mental content/process. (It is what I have referred to as meta-awareness.) That is, I think the sense of self is a mental content—not something more fundamental.

In my SAC analogy, it would be akin to mental contents becoming aware of mental contents. (This is why I have an affinity for HOT theories.)

Nova seems to assert however that the knower/observer is distinct from the brain (sculptor) and mental contents/qualia (the formed clay).

Thus, we have a new mystery: not only do we not know the origin of consciousness; we now do not know the origin of the knower/observer of consciousness.

Does that make sense?

You may want to read some Eastern philosophy, Spivack may have some recommended readings on his site.

It may also have to do with your relationship to what you think of as "mystery". For Spivack, some revolution came from experience that he claims is available in meditation and can be shown and repeated. For him, this ends the debate (and that aspect of mystery):

For Spivack, the
We won't be able to find it, and that's the statement that I'm confident making, because there are logical arguments as well as experiments that you can do in your own meditation for example, where you can see that and establish that, and you know it's true. And it's not a matter of belief; it's more like existence truth a mathematical truth. It's something you can find, it's something you can show and other people can repeat it and it's not even debatable once you actually see that.

Of course, that's something that scientists would probably scoff at and say, "Oh please, that's just another statement by a spiritual person who is not a scientist". Well, I happen to be both. I'm spiritual, but I also happen to be a scientist. And I can say having looked at both sides of a coin, that there really is something special taking place when it comes to awareness, to the source of knowing. Phenomenon that we know what appears to us, the senses are not as important or interesting. They're special too, but the really interesting question is, "What is knowing those things?" What is that? Actual awareness is the very root of the question. So I think through science we will never be able to answer that question."

His discussion of the language (and logic) that he says is not available to us in the east may shed some light on why we have the particular mysteries we do. That doesn't mean the answer will come in the form we are comfortable, I don't think, but instead calls on us to shift our thinking as to what an answer is.

The Buddha discusses this in terms of "papanac" in terms of "discursive thinking" and he can be very frustrating on this ... you can search for "questions the Buddha refused to answer" and you can search for the term "tetralemma".

All very inscrutable for this unworthy Western mind:

 

[smcder]

@Soupie

Did you see his answer to this question?

History always replays: about one hundred years ago modern physics owed its achievements to a combination of Chinese and Western ideas. Now as Internet stories happened, I see an integration of Chinese and Western ideas again evolving further. What are your thoughts on this?

 

[Constance]

Cutting to the chase . . .

Materialist/objectivist science and philosophy have avoided the subject of consciousness and mind for the last two centuries, only confronting these realities since the eruption of the interdisciplinary field of Consciousness Studies. That means that materialist science and philosophy have also avoided the issue of subjectivity in order to sustain a purely 'objective' description of reality. Phenomenological philosophy challenged the reductive materialist paradigm in philosophy and presently challenges standard neuroscience in Thompson et al's neurophenomenological research.

Phenomenology has made progress in confronting and resolving the perennial mind-body and subject-object problems in philosophy. There is no short-cut to understanding these sea changes in philosophy and neuroscience. Understanding them requires reading a complement of texts, which I have linked ad infinitum in these threads.

 

[Constance]

This paper develops a critical example of how presuppositional thinking limits that which can be learned in the study of cognition in non-human animals.

Chimpanzee minds: suspiciously human?
Daniel J. Povinelli and Jennifer Vonk
Cognitive Evolution Group
University of Louisiana at Lafayette

ABSTRACT: Chimpanzees undoubtedly form concepts related to the statistical regularities in behavior. But do they also construe such abstractions in terms of mental states – that is, do they possess a ‘theory of mind’? Although both anecdotal and experimental data have been marshaled to support this idea, we show that no explanatory power or economy of expression is gained by such an assumption. We suggest that additional experiments will be unhelpful as long as they continue to rely upon determining whether subjects interpret behavioral invariances in terms of mental states. We propose a paradigm shift to overcome this limitation.

Extract from the conclusion:

"Although, first and foremost, we advocate this new experimental program, there is another, more subtle change that is needed for further progress: the idea that theory of mind is the ‘holy grail’ of comparative cognition needs to be abandoned. Neither chimpanzees nor evolutionary theory will be insulted if the very idea of ‘mental states’ turns out to be an oddity of our species’ way of understanding the social world."

http://ulecology.com/uploads/Povinelli_Vonk_2003.pdf

 

[Randall]

Remember, the argument began with a discussion about getting the computing power of the brain for $1, so the relevance is in determining how much computing power the brain has ...

By the time computers have evolved equivalent processing power to the human brain, Earth will be part of the Federation of Planets, and society will have done away with money. So the idea it would only cost a dollar will no longer have any relevance. But for the sake of discussion, assuming that equivalent "computing power" includes equivalent intelligence ( after all, computers are already more powerful at computing things like numbers ), would that not be the same as saying human intelligence is only worth a buck apiece? Say bye bye to eggheads with comfy desk jobs. They'll become drones just like the rest of us, whose purpose is to maintain and service the machines.

 

[smcder]

By the time computers have evolved equivalent processing power to the human brain, Earth will be part of the Federation of Planets, and society will have done away with money. So the idea it would only cost a dollar will no longer have any relevance. But for the sake of discussion, assuming that equivalent "computing power" includes equivalent intelligence ( after all, computers are already more powerful at computing things like numbers ), would that not be the same as saying human intelligence is only worth a buck apiece? Say bye bye to eggheads with comfy desk jobs. They'll become drones just like the rest of us, whose purpose is to maintain and service the machines.

Is that your current occupation?

I was a tech for about a dozen years - it was an interesting line of work for the people I got to be around and the processes I saw. Human processes.

I'm afraid the machines didn't fare very well under my ministrations ... one former IBM big wig who settled down with our small(er) company went so far as to say "you don't fix computers worth a sh- but you sure are fun to talk to!"

Anyway, some might think yours a depressive appraisal, but it's more optimistic than many - in that it gives a purpose to humans ... some figure that would be an inefficient use of carbon!

 

[Constance]

". . . Neither chimpanzees nor evolutionary theory will be insulted if the very idea of ‘mental states’ turns out to be an oddity of our species’ way of understanding the social world."

ps to Steve: It might be that getting free of some of the presuppositions in analytic philosophy of mind would inspire McGinn to further his own investigation of consciousness. Perhaps that's what he's doing in his forthcoming book
Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity. Indeed, it looks like this is the case. The amazon page for the book now has a fuller book description and several reviewer comments, quoted below. I've just pre-ordered a copy.

Book Description

This book is a hymn to the hand. In Prehension, Colin McGinn links questions from science to philosophical concerns to consider something that we take for granted: the importance of the hand in everything we do. Drawing on evolutionary biology, anatomy, archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, among other disciplines, McGinn examines the role of the hand in shaping human evolution. He finds that the development of our capacity to grasp, to grip, to take hold (also known asprehension) is crucial in the emergence of Homo sapiens.

The human species possesses language, rational thought, culture, and a specific affective capacity; but there was a time when our ancestors had none of these. How did we become what we so distinctively are, given our early origins? McGinn, following Darwin and others, calls the hand the source of our biological success. When our remote ancestors descended from trees, they adopted a bipedal gait that left the hands free for other work; they began to make tools, which led to social cooperation and increased brain capacity. But McGinn goes further than others in arguing for the importance of the hand; he speculates that the hand played a major role in the development of language, and presents a theory of primitive reference as an outgrowth of prehension.

McGinn sings the praises of the hand, and evolution, in a philosophical key. He mixes biology, anthropology, analytical philosophy, existential philosophy, sheer speculation, and utter amazement to celebrate humans' achievement of humanity.

Review comments:

In the beginning was the hand. So argues Colin McGinn in this gripping, inventive, and wide-ranging tale of evolution and human nature. How did we ever get to be what we are: smart, social, linguistic, dexterous, and prone to anxiety? It is not our brains but our hands that explain our contours. Drawing on his life in philosophy, and his engagement with cognitive science and the theory of evolution, McGinn proposes that we are handlers by nature: we take hold, reach and grasp, seize, stroke, poke, squeeze, probe, and rub. We are great big hands extended toward the world around us.
--Alva Noë, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature


Life in the twenty-first century leaves little doubt that the human brain is headed for a role reassignment, the nature of which will ultimately depend on what computers cannot do to solve human problems and to manage our complex affairs. In this context, philosopher Colin McGinn's new book Prehension is a critical reminder that human intelligence is irreplaceably human, rooted in ancestral and evolutionary circumstances that gave the hand its distinctive and powerful individual, social, and cultural agency.
--Frank R. Wilson, author of The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture