Re: The structure of a self-conscious mind

On 12 Sep 2005 19:40:58 GMT, curt@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:
>Well, I think you are just deceiving yourself into believeing that "new
>meaning" is more special than it really is. The brain has learned through
>a slow processes of conditining how to respond to each of the words and how
>to respond to sequences of words. The "new meaning" that is created is
>nothing more than a new sequence of combination of old behaviors.
>

This is just absolutely wrong Welch. A sentence is not NOT NOT a
mere "sequence of commands" to be carried out in the order they were
spoken. Your claim is patently absurd. The words in a sentence
MODIFY the meanings and contexts of the tokens that appear around them
and on both sides. This requires extremely complex parsing that you
are continuing to ignore over and over again in your posts. Everyone
else who reads this newsgroup knows there is parsing going on in real
time ... well, everyone accept you.

>If I tell a dog to "sit, roll over, shake" even though it has never seen
>those words, in that order before, it will in turn, respond in a way it has
>never respond in the past. The dog is creating just as much "new meaning"
>in how it responds to a new sequence of old words as humans create when
>they respond to a new sequence of old words.

No.. the dog does not pick up the specific meaning that the speaker
intended by conjuncting those words. Do you even read my posts? Did
you see that thing I said about the dolphins? Researchers
specifically tested dolphins to see if they were capable of parsing
sentential commands on the fly. Its not like im talking out of my ass
here (like you are). I am literally referring to things that real
researchers know about and have tested on animals.


>I just refuse to believe that humans are as special as so many people seem
>to think they are.

Yeh, but you think dogs can parse sentences too.


>
>Yeah, just like the dog HAD TO parse and understand the commands "sit
>rollover and shake". Humans just have longer short term memory for words.
>

What? What the hell are you saying? Are you saying the dog parsed
that sentence?

(wait..I already know what the answer will be, it will be something
like CW: "Yes, im saying the dog parsed the sentence, but only if you
use my specially-made defn of the word 'parse' that I will create on
the fly right now to defend my crazy nonsense posts.")


>I strongly suspect that a good part of human ability comes from a longer,
>short term memory. With longer short term memory, you can prase far
>longer, and more complex, temporal sequences. You can execute longer and
>more comoplex goal-directed behaviors.
>

Only if you can imagine such goals in your imagination. Only via
seeing yourself in a future that has not yet happened (in your "mind
space") can you engage in goal-directed behavior. Otherwise, where
does the goal come from?



>
>Just like you continue to ignore the automatic temporal parsing required
>for a dog to recognize the meaning of the sequence of sounds that make up
>"sit".
>

"automatic temporal parsing"? What? Now you are just making things
up as you go.

I really really wonder why I ever respond to your posts. This is
bordering on insanity. You run around in circles like you have
forgotten every other post that was posted here that already proved
you wrong. Now you are going to say that the whole sentence can be
"Learned via operant conditioning" and I will respond "No, because the
human has never seen that sentence before." And round and round we
will go in Crazy WelchLand.

No dog has ever demonstrated the ability to conjunct several tokens
that modify each other to pick up an appropriate meaning of the formed
sentence. When a speaker utters a sentence, you have not successfully
parsed it unless you have obtained the meaning the speaker had in
mind. Obtaining your own meaning is a failure to parse. They tested
this exact ability on dolphins. The tests were inconclusive. As
you can guess, dogs utterly fail this test.


>> To show the absurdity of this logic, consider that one water molecule
>> is hard and dry, but 100 million of them togethor are liquid and wet.
>
>The notion of appying words like "hard" and "dry" to a single molecue is
>absurd. Your example is absurd even if I do happen to agree with the point
>you were making.

One person remarked that trying to explain the brain from the level of
neuronal biochemistry is like trying to explain an episode of Seinfeld
by talking about the phosphors on the screen of the TV. I am not
cooking up ideas on the fly and then defending them to the death (like
some people here do)... When i make a statement here most of the time
Im re-iterating a concept that is well-known everywhere else in the
world. A million water molecules can give rise to liquid even when
none of them are liquid.
.

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