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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 21, 2019 - 08:02am PT
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our common or everyday experience is not explained by the ideas (that we're talking about) supported by research
It is not a goal of physics to explain our common everyday experience. You need to be more specific with your objection. It sounds like you are trying to get physics to explain why butter tastes the way it does.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Apr 21, 2019 - 10:36am PT
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It seems to me that at some point, the connection between the two worlds needs to be made, especially if we are to believe that research efforts *are* indeed driven by empirical observation.
The connection is made, and many people have experience of the atomic and subatomic phenomena, but it is not common. On the other hand, it is not "revealed truth," you can arrange to do the experiments yourself, and by so doing, gain experience of that physical domain.
For me it was doing an experiment in a sophomore lab at UCB, on rubidium, an optical pumping experiment to understand the Zeeman effect. This all lies in the domain of quantum mechanics, and while it was essentially a demonstration, the students had to run the experiment, acquire the data and analyze.
My analysis had run afoul of some effect, I couldn't reconcile the data... and then I realized that I had neglected to account for the Earth's magnetic field, a mere 0.25 Gauss and tilted with respect to the surface. The Zeeman effect is response of the atom's energy levels to an applied magnetic field, and those energy levels split with the size and the direction of the field, due to the angular momentum of each of the the energy states.
Adding the Earth's magnetic field I obtained results that were much more in line with the calculations.
If this were a experimental adventure into uncharted territory then it's possible that I would have missed the effect, but upon getting agreement I could still miss important features of the phenomenon, stopping the investigation before fully exploring the experimental domain, and verifying that I understood everything about my experiment, an important part of understanding such phenomena.
This activity is not unlike a rather common experience of exploring a new neighborhood.
You could visit this same neighborhood if you wished*, and make this part of your "common experience," as I had the opportunity to do so many years ago. Since then I've wandered in various atomic and subatomic neighborhoods, and like places I've visited, they have become a part of my own experience.
My old neighborhood in NYC was not, at the time, a popular place due to the impression that there was a lot of criminal activity, only by living there did one find that the popular impression, "common sense," did not correspond to the actual situation.
* http://tesla.phys.columbia.edu:8080/eka/OpticalPumpingLabManual.pdf
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 21, 2019 - 06:30pm PT
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like most all of Largo's attempts to equate mind to the esoterica of quantum mechanics and particle physics
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Not accurate. I could go into the same material from a subjective adventure point of view but few would understand what I was driving at. On this thread I am left to try and hunt for people who are trying to get their head around all of this from a scientific orientation, since most on this thread only understand or have faint in 3rd person, physical data. Excepting climbing, since few would settle for perusing the topo over actually climbing the route.
But the way Healje phrased this jibe is telling, and underscores what the guy at CalTech was driving at. You can't parse out reality into "this" and "not this" without falling into dualism, and all attempts to "explain" mind by that route end up on the rocks every time. Remember what he said: People generally try and frame things from one or the other orientations: fields, or particles. And the attempts to posit fields as "things" is, according to the dude, especially mistaken.
Much rests on what you are after. Ed is after whatever will allow him to make predictions per physical phenomenon. If you try that route on mind you will be left with discreet physical brain function, sans mind. then you will attempt to do what particle dudes try when attempting to posit fields as things, but here (per mind), you end up with silly ideas like "experience IS neural activity, we just don't know how just yet."
If you think anyone is trying to "explain" mind by way of QM, you're missing the adventure, which is to look high and low at reality as far as we can measure and experience it, and come to know what it is to be here and now.
Note also that the dude's notion that fields and particles are the same, didn't trigger the thinking or curiosity that led the dude to think it up in the first place. Where is the dude who can harmonize the whole shebang while acknowledging both, rather then arguing for the hegemony of one or the other.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 21, 2019 - 07:04pm PT
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all attempts to "explain" mind by that route end up on the rocks every time
Is that a final, complete, and accurate description?
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 21, 2019 - 08:38pm PT
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Can we agree on the following fundamentals?
consciousness ⇒ brain activity
brain activity ⇏ consciousness
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zBrown
Ice climber
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Apr 21, 2019 - 09:47pm PT
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^^ I think many would agree
However ...
?
consciousness ⇒ Mind
Mind ⇏ consciousness
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Apr 22, 2019 - 07:27am PT
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Good one, Z, even though a bit cryptic for some, perhaps.
MH2: It sounds like you are trying to get physics to explain why butter tastes the way it does.
No, I'm not--although I'd be interested to hear if someone tried. The simple point is that *at some point* it would be a grand conclusion or realization to see that there is one reality. Perhaps that strikes you archaic or academic.
You ask a person how to get somewhere, and they respond that you can't get there from where you're at.
You want to come to some solution to a problem you think you have, and you consult a panel of experts. Every one of them comes up with a different solution.
You see something and you wonder what you're looking at. You ask another panel of educated and experienced advisors, and they all describe different dynamics using different language and concepts.
We all (apparently) live in a highly ambiguous world, awash in multiple interpretations, intractable problems, and infinite sets of facts / data sets that cannot be fully analyzed. The universe seems to be some impossibly large matrix. The only things that are tractable are abstract representations.
Language is indefinite, inconsistently denotative, and arguablely improvisational (at best). Speaking and writing are at their core, metaphorical.
Our mental, emotional, spiritual, capacities seem to be highly limited. At best, we have bounded rationality, and our psyches are troubled and forever looking for peace and satisfaction but never finally finding either ("dukkha). Emotionally, most of us exist in an amusement park, most often on a roller coaster or in a bump-em car with a steering wheel that does nothing.
It would be an understatement to say that we'd welcome a single view of "What the Hell is going on." In some form or another, it would seem that research would begin to show us some kind of single viewpoint. Instead, what we think we know and are continues to expand *and* fragment. It's as if everything is made up creatively, imaginatively. If it were--and if we were to see it that way--then perhaps we'd settle into it and relax.
Be well.
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 22, 2019 - 08:01am PT
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Without God himself, you'll never understand anything period.
You'll always be stuck in your own self absorbed defective mind ......
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Apr 22, 2019 - 01:50pm PT
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jogill wrote:
I'm thankful for this thread and for JL for starting it. If this site were to become primarily climbing (e.g., to place a bolt on Superpin or not) I would likely abandon ship. Thanks to all of you for your contributions! ;>) Right on! This is not the thread to disparage on those other threads about what Supertopo should and should not be (even if most of us ARE old).
He also wrote:
Can we agree on the following fundamentals?
* consciousness ⇒ brain activity
* brain activity ⇏ consciousness Just so you know, in software, the => symbol (lambda operator) means “goes to”. To combine that with evolution, which has a direction (forward in time), I would put it this way.
* brain activity => consciousness
* consciousness => mind
It would seem that you were using the => as a stand-in for "depends on" or something equivalent.
For my little angle on this thread, I would say that I have recently come up with the most terse statement of my thoughts on the subject. It seems trite, but here it is -- we are our memories, at least from a mind standpoint. Those memories span from the immediate to the long-term. Take away ALL of the memories, and you take away the mind.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Apr 22, 2019 - 02:01pm PT
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The mathematical/logic interpretation. Consciousness implies brain activity. But brain activity does not necessarily imply consciousness. Seems perfectly obvious, but some may question it.
To relate mind and consciousness in this way is more tentative, since both those concepts are vaguely defined.
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Apr 22, 2019 - 02:20pm PT
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To be clear, this is just a difference in definition of the => symbol. You are using it as "implies"; in software parlance it means "goes to". To the average reader, it is confusing without a definition. The mathematical and software definitions seems at complete odds with each other.
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Don Paul
Social climber
Washington DC
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Apr 22, 2019 - 02:38pm PT
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Jogill makes an important point. There is no such thing as consciousness without a brain. Not one single example of it ever.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 22, 2019 - 02:49pm PT
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Consciousness implies brain activity. But brain activity does not necessarily imply consciousness.
It does if you use a computer model, which most people do. Now try and find people who are trying to make a conscious machine. Nobody. They're working on much more practical applications, stuff they can actually accomplish.
It's interesting to see people arguing that you should or should not try (for example) to contrast physics with mind, meaning that we can look at physics, for example, and learn something about mind, usually a linear "cause." Same with neuroscience. We have neural activity at time A, and later at Time b - viola = mind. Mind is the physical output of effect of physical processes.
More useful is to ditch mechanitus for the moment and look at the one reality (including mind AND science) and go from there. Problem is, most only want to look at physical data (part of reality), believing that if you understand the mechanism that "creates" mind, you got it.
What happens when time becomes a non-factor in any fundamental way? Cause no longer means what we think it means, nor fundamental, etc.
And yet there clearly is causation in some form.
How to square the opposites? Mind does so. Reality does so.
It's instructive to remember the group over at MIT who were interested in trying to work up a model on how brain activity could "create" mind. Before anyone could get to calculating, they had to answer what the question actually meant. Mind, as we experience it, the mind they were trying to wrestle down, could not be framed in strictly physical terms without defaulting to identity theory, that is, the physical IS conscious, and they knew enough to know this was a dead end. Their conclusion is that the question basically implied magic. Physical causes produce physical results.
If you press any counterargument far enough, you end up with gibberish and magic every time, in a way that will never be challenged by "new data."
Believing that we can wrangle mind down via old models is essentially to believe in magic, in my view.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Apr 22, 2019 - 03:53pm PT
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Well, given your view is entirely magical, I should think you'd be more comfortable with it.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Apr 22, 2019 - 04:12pm PT
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it would be a grand conclusion or realization to see that there is one reality. Perhaps that strikes you archaic or academic.
It strikes me as a grand vision.
There are connections everywhere, from hearing the song of a bird and from that knowing what the bird looks like and how it behaves, to seeing an apple fall from a tree and knowing that the same force affects the motions of the Earth and Moon and explains the rise and fall of the tide.
There is nothing wrong with just seeing what "is", just watching the show so to speak, but for many people an additional layer of beauty comes from seeing how the 'fragments' fit together.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 22, 2019 - 04:15pm PT
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Healje, my brother, you are one who is smitten by mechanitus. When you say, "scientifically explain," in what way is your "explanation not totally beholden to linear, physical causation? Do you believe there is no limit to what this mode of inquiry can vouchsafe? Consider this:
In an excerpt from his book, Can A Scientist Believe in Miracles, MIT Nuclear Scientist Ian Hutchinson, answers one of the most common questions he’s received at Veritas Forums: won’t science eventually answer all of our questions about the world?
Said Ian:
If we accept the assumption that scientists use methodological naturalism, what areas are not susceptible to that?
The term methodological naturalism is often used to describe what is regarded as science’s method. I prefer to say that science sets out to explain nature naturally.5 That is a tremendously powerful and fruitful way to investigate the world. But since nature is the normal course of events, i.e. the reproducible aspects, science can’t be expected to encompass areas of knowledge that concern unrepeatable events, or events beyond the normal course. It is not that those events are “not susceptible” to scientific investigation; they are; it is just that the relevant aspects of many kinds of event (and human history was my example) are not addressed by science because they are not repeatable, and so are not nature.
Although we don’t now know for example what happened before the big bang, we might one day find out. What sorts of questions are permanently unanswerable by science?
Once you accept that there are important areas of knowledge that are not nature, you have questions that are permanently and in principle unanswerable by science. That is why we have in universities lots of nonscientific disciplines such as history, language, literature, the law, philosophy, ethics, politics, and music. We already have many answers to crucial nonscientific questions about these and other subjects, arising from their systematic studies. They possess all kinds of knowledge that is scientia, but is not science.6
Positivists of the early nineteenth century such as Auguste Comte thought that the nonscientific disciplines are in some kind of proto-scientific developmental stage, and that given time and effort, they would gradually evolve to become science. Today, although positivist philosophy is essentially dead, there still remain those who think that being turned into science is the way human and social disciplines gain credibility. But for those disciplines to become science requires either that they abandon the questions that they have traditionally set out to investigate or that the meaning of science should change. Either way, the questions are unanswerable by what we currently mean by science. We don’t need to settle whether the island of knowledge will grow forever in order to maintain that some questions are unanswerable by science. We already have substantial parts of the island itself that are known but are not science.
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WBraun
climber
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Apr 22, 2019 - 04:39pm PT
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Although we don’t now know for example what happened before the big bang,
See this how they indirectly make an absolute (the big bang) all while in actual reality they really have no clue, but masquerade themselves as the ultimate authority.
Cheaters!
That is how they brainwash themselves and everyone else who is a sheep in their so-called Modern Science.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Apr 22, 2019 - 07:54pm PT
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it has not been dismissed, certainly not as Largo has stated many times.
Identity Theory is still held as a kind of life raft for staunch physicalists, though it has never disclosed a single insight about consciousness. But it does muddy the waters - of that we may be sure.
Consider the various non-intensional properties of mental states (on the one hand), and physical states (on the other). After-images, for example, may be green or purple in color, but nobody could reasonably claim that states of the brain are green or purple. And conversely, while brain states may be spatially located with a fair degree of accuracy, it is widely agreed that mental states are non-spatial. The problem generated by examples such as these is that they violate Leibniz's Law, which states that if A is identical with B, then A and B must be indiscernible in the sense of having in common ALL of their (non-intensional) properties.
Or this sillyness: "The logical objections which might be raised to the statement ‘consciousness is a process in the brain’ are no greater than the logical objections which might be raised to the statement ‘lightning is a motion of electric charges.’
Conflation is so evident in the above it's almost absurd. The author is trying to use a physical metaphor of a measurable, localized force (lightning) to contrast with consciousness. As many have pointed out, consciousness is not "like" any other localized phenomenon in the physical world, so physical metaphors are non-starters, clumsy attempts to try and rope mind into the home turf (physical).
These are just a few of the glaring problems with identity theory. The bigger questions is: Why do people cling to the hope that it will someday pan out per "new data." The answer is always the same: First Assumptions.
Lastly, consider this brief rundown of Identity Theory:
Of course there are a lot of objections against Identity theory and physicalism or materialism, basically, the idea that mental states are brain states. The criticism based on Leibniz's Law is well known. Let's have a look at some other objections.
When you feel pain, special nerves are firing: c-fibers. Now you could say: My pain is in my foot, but my c-fiber is not.
The identity theorist can insist that, strictly speaking, my pain is not in my foot. The brain state which is identical to my pain is in my head.
Rather than talk about a pain in my foot, we should talk about having a pain of the in-the-foot kind. Just think of phantom pains.
People who lost a body part can still feel pain in the missing part. This means that have a brain state that is of the kind of ……
There is one more application of Leibniz's principle which we should briefly consider. There is something that it is like to be in pain: it hurts.
On the other hand, it impossible to conceive how electrical activity in a nerve cell could hurt. So it seems that pain has a property, namely 'hurting,' which no brain state could ever have.
This is a glaring problem, indeed. If pain hurts and c-fiber firing doesn't, then they cannot be identical.
On the one hand we could refer to the intentional fallacy, as an answer. On the other hand we can postpone a definite answer until we focus on consciousness itself (which no proponent of Identity Theory ever does, but in passing).
We have another problem to face. We said that Lightning is identical with electrical discharge. So every instantiation of such a specific electrical discharge is a lightning.
Suppose a squid has no c-fibers, while we say that pain (mental state) is identical with c-fiber firing (brain state). Do we conclude that a squid does not experience pain?
We could say that pain is multiply realized: in different creatures pain is 'realized' in different ways. Type identities are thus restricted to a given species.
I believe that Big Ben is in London; chances are that you do too. If we postulate type identity, this means that all these beliefs about the Big Ben in our heads are identical brain states.
The coarse anatomy of your brain is probably very similar to mine, but the idea that the information of Big Ben in my brain is stored in an exactly identical way in your brain, is neurologically impossible.
So, we have to reconsider our basic idea of identity. In what ways are mental states identical with brain states?
Maybe some of you remember that short video about using a fMRI scanner as lie detector. The general theory is a type identity, which means that telling the truth shows on the scanner always the same pattern for every individual brain. Reality shows different.
These considerations have lead most serious investigators of mind to abandon even restricted type identity theory because no one can make sense out of it.
The most we can say is that each mental state token is identical to some brain state token. In other words, all we can reasonably take here is some token identity of mental states with brain states.
Neurological research has certainly demonstrated clear correlations between mental states and brain states, but not remotely in a way that we can assume simple type identities between mental states and brain states. The idea that the evidence suggests otherwise is widely held to be "fake science," for obvious reasons.
What you see here and elsewhere is that adherence to Identity Theory leads to double talk, jabberwocky and logical incoherence, all in a effort to preserve a first assumption. Rather than to accept a facile conclusion (the brain and mind are NOT identical), people scramble to find workarounds, and end up with incoherence and nothing insightful or even promising.
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ruppell
climber
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Apr 22, 2019 - 08:54pm PT
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What is MIND?
It's an undefined feature of the human brain that let's us pretend we are better than my dog.
I'll happily admit I haven't read all pages of this thread. My mind has better things to do.
So, someone, nutshell me.
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