Re: consciousness

"Alpha" <OmegaZero2003@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Curt Welch" <curt@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:20070414154906.058$W0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
HMSBeagle <jsbach@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The "mind" does not have to refer to cartesian non-material SUBSTANCE
at all. I think the science of intelligence can do well using this
common-sense abstract word "Mind". If it helps our science, we SHOULD
USE IT wether it makes Ray feel comfortable or not.

The word "Mind" can also refer to the abstract "mental space" used in
the imagination. I think that even among non-specialists, everyone
realizes that its not an *actual place* in the world. I used my
"mental space" today to add 13 to 225. I literally imagined the
numbers written like so

225
+13
--------
???

And I did this in mental space (which is understood to not be an
actual place, by everyone).

I sure the hell don't believe that and if everyone things that way,
it's no
wonder we have so much problem getting people to reject dualism.

I did this "in my mind". And there is
nothing unscientific about that statement.

The mind is the brain. To pretend it doesn't exist in a physical
location in space is just an argument in support of dualism.

Would you argue that a computer, when it adds two numbers in its head,
is using a "mental space" which doesn't exist in the physical world? I
hope you would not be so stupid. The hardware in the computer which is
used to add two numbers very much exists in our physical world and has
a very physical location.

Likewise, everything you do with your brain is doing with physical
hardware
which all exists in a very real place. To pretend that the "mental
space" exists outside of physics is to argue for dualism - which is
what we are all taught to believe when we are taught how the correct
usage of words like "abstract" and "intangible" and "mental" but it's
all wrong, wrong wrong.

Everything is physical and just because you were taught a language that
makes you believe mental activity is not physical and does not exist
anywhere in the physical universe doesn't make it true.

The mind is just another name for the brain.

While your point that everything is physical may be true (although it
begs the question of just what is physicality (Feynman's We ain't found
no stuff yet), the leap to the mind being another name for brain is
erroneous on many fronts.

For example, are you a s-functionalist or a p-functionalist or an
i-functionalist? The first (scientific functionalist) posits that it is
the functional organization of the brain that produces or gives rise to
consciousness while the second says that a mental state's property of
being conscious is *one and the same* as its property of ocuppying or
playing a certain functional role.. Note that the former impies a
phenomena that is created *from* the mechansims that cause it whereas the
latter implies an identity relationship! It sounds like you are in the
latter camp.

Yes, it sound to me like I would fit into the second camp.

However, the word "functional" is dangerous as hell in these discussion.

It gets back to what I was just writing in the other post about what order
is and where it "exists". HMSBegal is trying to argue that it exists, but
has no location. This results simply from not understanding what the word
is really making reference to. It exists as brain signals which have a
very real location in the brain. Only because of our heritage of dualism
does it feel natural to us to talk as if it's real but has no location (not
physical) simply because all mental activity is assumed to be non-physical
from that perspective.

The word functional jumps deep into the middle of this confusion by
implying something like a hammer has a function but that the function is
somehow separate and independent from the device. The device somehow gives
rise to the function. The function of a hammer could be to drive nails,
but yet, many very different hammers could share the same function. So we
say the function of "nail-driving" is abstract and exists but yet has no
location.

This is just muddled thinking that causes even more confusion when we try
to apply the idea of function to brain.

This is because the "nail-driving" "function" doesn't exist in the hammers,
it exists as a physical signal in our brain. It is my brain that defines
what function the hammer has, not the hammer itself.

Someone who had never seen a hammer and knew nothing about nails would not
see the same nail-driving function in the hammer that I see. This is
because the other person doesn't have the same pattern detectors in their
brain that I do in mine. I have "nail-driving" pattern detectors in my
brain and he doesn't.

So when we talk about the function of a hammer, we are really talking about
pattern detectors in our brains more so than we are talking about the
hammer itself.

So what happens when you try to talk about the function of a brain? You
are talking about pattern detectors in our brain that can recognize
patterns of brain behaviors. It doesn't take too long before people get
totally lost in that debate about which brain and which pattern detectors
you are talking about.

We talk about the hammer giving rise to the function but that the function
is not actually the same as the hammer. This is all true because the
"function" we are talking about is pattern detector hardware in our brain
and the hammer does give rise to it in the sense that it cause the patter
detector to activate. But there's no magical non-physical thing being
created in all this. The hammer is just activating our pattern detectors
because of the normal laws of physics.

The classic mistake is to spin this little loop of self reference into a
belief that the brain magically gives rise to something that is real, but
yet doesn't exist. Next thing you know, this confusion over reference that
happens when abstract ideas are played with looks like it has produced the
answer to what this magical stuff caused consciousness is.

Instead, it's all just a mess created by sloppy thinking and sloppy word
usage. This is the danger of going too far with concepts of "function"
when talking about brains.

If so, you have to explain how it is that neurons A-ZZ
firing have the dual phenomenal charateristics

No I DONT! You have to explain why it is "dual" when there is no evidence
that it's anything other than a identity.

of "being experienced as
imagining pie and ice cream in my mind's eye" as well as the
electrochemical processes and states of the particular areas of the CNS
that are involved.

It's hard to know where to start here. You are confusing two things that
aren't the same thing and aren't the identity you think I'm talking about.

Lets try this.

I build a digital video camera and point it at a car. We have two things
here which aren't the same. We have the actual car, and we have the
internal representation of the car in the signals and memory of the video
camera.

The internal signals are the car's image in the mind's eye of the camera.
Simple enough right? And if the device can play back the recording later,
you have a temporal memory sequence of a past event happening in the mind's
eye of the camera.

Now, we set up a mirror, and allow the camera to see inside itself. It
sees in there wires, and memory chips that store the picture of the car.
It has now stored a digital image of it's own memory chips, which hold an
image of car.

Just like in the previous example of the car, we have two things. We have
the memory chips which are being looked at, and we have the internal
configuration of the memory chips which controls the behavior of the
camera, and which are the camera's experience of it's own memory chips.

So now we have a digital camera that has an experience of a car, and an
experience of memory chip stored in it's memory chips. Those two
experiences are different for obvious reasons - one is an image of a car
and one is an image of a memory chip. The two experiences are different
because the values in the memory are different. Isn't this obvious? Two
different pictures are different.

Now, lets look at your example. The memory of ice cream in your mind's eye
is one state of your CNS, and the thought of states of your CNS, is another
and different thought which is represented by a different state of your
CNS.

So then you ask me to explain the difference between a memory of ice cream,
and a thought about human brains. Well, one is a thought about ice cream
and one is a thought about human brains. Why on earth would these two
different thoughts be the same? So just what are you actually asking me to
explain?

You seem to be asking me to explain why an image of car stored in a digital
camera is different than the image of computer memory chip stored in a
different location of the same chip. And you seem to be trying to use this
difference to show that the image stored in a memory chip exists as
something separate from the memory chip.

The question seems unfounded to me.

You can take any usage of the
word mind and substitute the word brain. If the sentence doesn't mean
the exact same thing to you with either word, then you still have
dualist beliefs conditioned into your brain.

You have nonsense conditoned in your mind, which is not the same *type*
of thing as the brain's mediation of such a state (are your neurons
nonsense? - NO! It is what they produce as phenomena - mental states
that have *meaning* to other mental states/processes - I do not "think"
of neurons firing from the intralaminar neurons of the thalamus into the
PFC, but I do think of pie and ice cream)!! Your conflation of the two
types of things/processes does not withstand scrutiny.

Again, I have no clue what you are trying to say. When you think of pie and
ice cream, it's because your brain is changing though one set of physical
configurations, and when you think about neurons firing, your brain is in a
different set of states. How is this hard to understand and how does that
difference, imply that there is not an identify between mental state and
thoughts just like there is an identify between memory chip configuration
and the image stored in it?

Further, dualism is the notion that C cannot be *explained* in physical
terms. This covers both reductive and causal explanation. Physicalism,
which you bring up here, is the notion that C can be explicable *in terms
of * brain function, if only causally. It does not entail, necessarily,
an identity relationship.

Any view other than identity creates a dualism (by definition) and can't be
correctly called physical ism. If it's not one thing, it's two, and if
it's two, it's dualism. This should be fairly simple to understand.

Indeed, if A is caused by B then A has an
ontological status just as B does.

If the physical body _causes_ consciousness then you are viewing the
problem from a dualistic stance.

If you believe in dualism, then fine. Continue to be lost and
confused. But if you think you believe in materialism and are trying to
learn to be a
true physicalist, then all these left over beliefs in the soul

Mind DNE Soul except in twisted minds.

Sure, I well understand that most people have separated mind from soul.
But there's an underlying argument I'm making here that's going right over
your head.

really need
to be removed from your brain. Stop thinking that mental activity is
non physical and doesn't exist. Stop thinking that your "mental space"
doesn't
exist. It does exist just as much as a register for holding a 32 bit
binary number exists in the computer.

You are correct there at least.

Stop thinking that abstract ideas
don't physically exist - they are all physical and they all exist as
physical objects.

Or better yet - as processes.

NO NO NO. That's just as bad. The entire concept of "process" is just like
the concept of "order" and has all the problems of "function" I was talking
about above.

It's again a reference to pattern detectors in our brain while pretending
to be a reference to the subject. When we see a "process" in the physical
actions of something, we see it because our pattern detectors have
recognized a pattern. So the the process we are seeing, is really in our
brain, and not in the physical stuff outside the brain that was the cause
of the signals.

This means that process, like order, is something that seems to be
connected with something, but yet separate from it. And it is separate
from it, because it actually exists as physical pattern detection hardware
in our brain and not in the subject. But it's not some magical "floating"
property that is there but yet has no location has HMSB was trying to
argue.

People like to use the idea of process in this context because it seems to
fit nicely with the concept of consciousness as something which is an
attribute of a physical object, or which the physical object "gives rise
to", but yet is not really "there".

Doing this is just taking advantage of circular definitions built on a
foundation of dualism. The idea of "process" as well as all these other
abstract words as being something that is there, but not there, at the same
time all comes from the foundation of the language where we all believed
that mental activity was not physical.

So we started with an assumption that seemed reasonable - that mental
activity was not physical, then we used that idea to define concepts like
"abstract" and the idea that a process was something non-physical, then we
point these same words back to the brain to try and define what it is doing
and it all seems to fit because now we have these words that are
referencing non-physical mental activity which we are using to explain how
the brain is able to create non-physical mental activity. It's a circular
definition which uses an error to try and self justify it's own error -
with that error being the dualism paradigm.

Dualism is just wrong from the start and using the idea of a process (which
is in itself a dualistic concept) to explain how the brain is dualistic in
nature is just a self fulling prophecy.

There is no dualistic nature that needs to be explained. But understanding
it is something I've had endless trouble getting people who are not able to
think in any terms other than dualism to see. If you just throw all the
dualistic concepts out, including the idea of "process" and see it as
nothing but the physical actions of a physical brain, then everything fits
just fine and there is not complex ideas of consciousness that needs to be
explained.

The brain can be looked at as nothing but a large collection of pattern
detectors which produce output when the correct input patterns show up.
It's a learning system so the pattern detectors are being adjusted over
time based on experience, but the basic nature of what it is doing is
nothing more complex or mystical than a large set of signal processing
pattern detectors. There's no need to play with concepts like "process" to
make it work.

Once people see how a physical foundation explains it all, then I don't
mind them going back and using words like "process". But when I see people
using terms like "process" because they feel it makes it all "work better",
that's just a sure sign they don't yet understand the true simplicity of it
all and a sure sign they still have at least one foot in the world of
dualism.

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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