The never ending debate ...

casey <jgkjcasey@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 22, 11:21=A0am, c...@xxxxxxxx (Curt Welch) wrote:

I take reality to be reality (it was it is and
has nothing to do with us) and our model to be our
understanding of what it is (right or wrong).


An illusion is a persistent difference between
reality and the brain's model of reality.

But we cannot know anything about Reality we can only
know our mental models of reality. How do you know if
something is an illusion? How, for example, would you
demonstrate that mach bands are an illusion?

Because they have the word "illusion" after their name?

If what you suggest is true, we wouldn't be having this conversion because
there would be no such thing as an illusion since, according to your idea,
it's impossible for us to know if something is an illusion.

We discover illusions because they create inconsistencies in our models of
reality. We discover illusions because we in fact are not limited to only
one view of reality. We have man many different views. If we see
something with our eyes (one view) we can verify the nature of what we see
by closing our eyes and touching it with our fingers. If our fingers to
not confirm what our eyes saw, we know something is amiss - that we are
dealing with some form of an illusion. I can then ask you to use your eyes
and report to me what you see. That gives me a third view of the same
feature of reality coming into me though my ears. I can use a camera and
have it take a picture, and then look at the results. Again, this creates
yet another view of that same feature.

We understand the true nature of reality by creating a model which explains
all the views we can collect.

The only aspects of reality we can never know, are the aspects that we can
not view at all. There is good evidence to suggest that there are such
elements of reality, but as long as we can't view their effects through any
sensory system, we can never know of it exists or not. Those are the
aspects of reality we can never know.

Which just gets me back to the issue that you have
never shown a sign of understanding what I'm trying
to communicate to you.

Has anyone understood the issues you raise :)

Hard to say. Perhaps not. There are many who understand the fundamental
ideas I argue but the subtle issue of how language makes people people
believe in distortions that don't exist I've never seen anyone fully grasp.
But sometimes that's because the people that understand don't bother to
respond to my posts and the people I end up talking to are only the ones
that don't understand or don't agree.

The brain also has mass and pushes against the ground
and blocks light. These are things the brain does.

I never meant that everything the brain does is called
mind. Indeed I don't even assume all neural activity
is involved in what we might call a Mind Activity.

Yes, I know you know this. I was not bringing that up to suggest you
didn't known it. I was bringing it up to help you see the contradiction in
views that indicates we are dealing with an illusion. The way we talk
about the mind is different than the way we talk about everything else -
but yet there is no evidence to suggest these things we associate with the
mind are different from anything else. It's just left over baggage from
the days when dualism was assumed true by default.

... Why is it that the brain is the only object in
the universe we have a word which means "all the
stuff this object does - but not really all the
stuff but just the stuff I can sense about it
without using my eyes ears nose fingers or tongue".

I have explained that many times and indeed when not
declaring it being due to "training" and "conditioning"
you have also hit the correct reason we have this
illusion of the Mind as being something extra.

... we have verbs for what the brain does. Words
like "thought", "memory", "idea", "think", "recall",
"envision", "sense", "understand", "dream". Those
are the words that are parallels with run and walk.

Well not exactly parallel. I don't know if you read
the post in which I made reference to SHRDLU?

Either I've not yet read it or I missed it. There are lot here at he
moment I haven't yet read. Or maybe I read it and just forgot???

Although
it was a virtual reality robot it could have been
implemented in hardware where it could move its arms
to manipulate blocks. I tried to show in this system
what parts were more like "conscious" processes and
what parts were not "conscious" processes. You have
asked what was the difference between a "conscious"
process and an "unconscious" process and I tried to
flesh out some of the differences in terms of content.

Ok, I don't remember that precisely but it does ring a bell.

My issue is mostly that if you think consciousness is a special type of
process (and are trying to explain what type of process it is), you don't
understand that it's an illusion. That is, there is nothing so special
about humans that deserves all the baloney that people assign to this
concept of consciousness. The only thing to understand about consciousness
is that there is nothing there to understand. Everything people point that
when they try to describe what they are talking about, are characteristics
that already exist in all our robots. But yet, they declare, NO IT
DOESN'T! But yet, the only evidence to support it doesn't, is them saying
"NO IT DOESN'T!".

There is not a single class of process that exists in the human body
creating our intelligent behavior that doesn't exist in some form in all
our computer controlled robots.

If you think consciousness is something we need to "go figure out" or
"discover", you don't get my point.

Trying to argue that mind is just a verb that
describes an action of the brain doesn't explain
the externally odd way we use it in the English
language.

I think we both agree on the fact that many have
the belief in a mind or soul as a separate entity
to the brain. And I think we both agree that there
is no evidence for such an entity and most people
who know about our current knowledge of brains
realize that the contents of the mind correlate
100% with brain activity.

Yes, except the simple fact you said "correlate" shows you are thinking
about it wrong. It is meaningless to talk about how something correlates
with itself. Correlation only exists between to separate events. You
would not, for example, talk about how the sun rising in the morning has
100% correlation with the sun rising in the morning - but yet that's what
you just wrote above.

I don't see the word "mind" as a single action rather
it is the word that covers all the things you mention
above such as "thought", "memory", "idea" and so on,

Yes, that's exactly how we use it which is fine. It's odd as hell and we
don't do use language like that for anything else in the universe (as far
as I have been able to figure out), but we continue to use the word mind
because it's common language left over from the time when everyone assumed
dualism was a fact. The mind is the thing that existed in that other
domain which produced all those thoughts.

It's like living next to a mountain which we can't cross and giving it a
name - Mount Brain. Then we travel 24,000 miles around the world and come
to another mountain and call it Mount Mind. It's the same mountain, but
because we don't understand the world is round, we don't have a clue it's
the same mountain. We think Mount Brain and Mount Mind are 24,000 miles
apart. They don't even look the same from the two different sides so it
never occurs to anyone that they are in fact the same.

This is the situation we are in with the mind body problem. We gave it two
different names because we have no direct data which shows us it's the same
mountain.

But along comes a scientist, and he figures out the world in round. And by
using clocks and the stars and the sun, he's able to figure out how big the
earth is. And he calculates that Mount Brain and Mount Mind must be the
same mountain. So he stops talking about it as two mountains and talks
about it as one. But everyone else still thinks it's two mountains because
they don't understand the complex logic of the round earth theory that
proves they are in fact the same. They just look at the two Mountains and
say "they don't look the same, and they are 24,000 miles apart - you are
stupid for even suggesting they are the same - I don't care what all that
fancy theory of yours says".

all of which make up possible contents of the mind.
However other effects the brain has due to its other
properties such as mass are not part of the brain
behaviors we call mind.

Yes, that's because we can't sense those other effects with the sensor
system we use to sense the "Mind" effects.

Actually, I take back what I said above. We do have another simple example
of a single event which we have given two names because we sense the effect
with two different sensory modalities and just like the mind brain body,
the brain has failed to merge the two sensory modalities into a single
"thing" for us. The example is thunder and lightning. These are two nouns
we use to label a single thing in the universe - the discharge of
electricity in the atmosphere.

Our brain parses them as different because of the temporal delay that
happens with the effects. they don't always happen close enough together
in time to allow the brain to consider them a single "thing". And, because
our brain defines them as two different things, we perceive them as
different things, and make up separate words for each.

Our brain parses the body and mind as being different because there is NO
temporal correlation in the sensory data to cause the brain to merge the
signals together.

The firing of a neuron isn't what we call a conscious
process even though a conscious process is entirely
due to the activity of firing neurons.

But it is, and that's your problem. You are looking for something else
when there is nothing else to look for.

When you say
a neuron (or rock) is "conscious" it has no meaning
in this context unless you are still seeing the mind
as some kind of entity or extra substance rather
than a type of process.

No, I'm saying that by what everyone talks about as examples what
consciouenss is, a rock fits the description. It only fails to fit when
they simply say "no - rocks are conscious you idiot".

The point is not to figure out what consciousness is, the point is to
realize that it's an illusion and not something we need to go searching
for.

The only thing there is to search for, is the cause of the illusion - which
I've explained many many times here.

The action of an NOR gate is not what we call a
"finding the square root of a number" process even
though the "finding the square root of a number"
process involves the action of many NOR gates.

That's right, that process, unlike the one you want to call "consciousness"
is actually defined. The process you are looking for is like a pink
elephant - it doesn't exist.

A "conscious" process is the same as an "unconscious
process" with respect to them both involving the
firing of neurons and most likely the same neurons.

That's something I've never seen anyone actually talk about. What does the
brain activity of an unconscious person look like on something like an
fMRI?

The content of a "conscious" process is made up of
colors, feelings, thoughts and so on which are the
result of the firing of neurons.

No, they _are_ the firing of neurons. The contents of a conscious process
in a human brain is the firing of neurons.

However a firing
neuron does not have feelings or thoughts as its
content even though it is a subprocess required
for the feelings and thoughts to take place in the
system as a whole.

But it does. There is no indication that it doesn't.

I think you keep assuming that others are using the
word Mind to refer to an entity or substance and
that is why you came up with your conscious rocks.

Others are using the word Mind like it's been used for hundreds of years.
It's used as the name of the thing that contains the thoughts of the soul.

When you translate it into a language where dualism has been rejected, the
name doesn't mean "special type of process which exists in the brain that
causes phenomenal experience". It means brain.

You are clinging to the ides of mind == type-of-process because even though
you have accepted the faith of materialism, you still cling to the idea
that consciousness is more than the illusion that our thoughts are
something other than just the activity of the brain. You think it's
something created by a special type of process in the brain like a
transformer creates a magnetic field or a light bulb creates light.

This stuff "created by" the special process doesn't exist. And if nothing
is created, then what is it that you think you could possibly be talking
about which makes our behavior any different than any robot or any
computer?

Is playing chess a test of consciousness? How about talking? How about
running in fear from something? How about being able to see the red block
so you can pick it up when someone asks you to? How about a thought
process which allows one to find a new solution to playing back-gammon?

These are all exmaples of things our comptuers and robots are already
doing. There is no single type of behavior humans produce that I can't
show you an exmaple of a robot producing the same _type_ of behavior.

Of course Alpha just shakes his head in disbelief that I could be so stupid
to say such things, but the only evidence he (or anyone) has that I'm
wrong, is that he says I'm wrong. He has not evidence.

You also have no evidence that this myth yo call "the conscious process" is
real. You can't define it, you don't know it when you see it happening in
a computer. Why do you continue to put so much faith in something that
doesn't exist?

You say you have the magic power to "sense conscious" in yourself. How do
you know my digital camera doesn't have the same power?

If I make my computer print out - "I can sense consciousness in myself so I
know I'm conscious, but I'm not sure about those humans", would that make
the computer conscious? It's the test that you want me to swallow as
"proof" that you have this magic process running in you.

The point of my never ending discussion with you is that even though you
have rejected dualism and believe in materialism, you still think dualistic
conciseness is real - you just changed it's name from "soul" to "process"
and by doing so, since "process" is a material thing, you believe you have
resolved any conflict between materialism and consciousness.

And at the same time, since you believe in dualistic consciousness, you
have no issue in thinking that "you" are not a human body, but a "pattern
of behavior", or "a process". You are just cheating by doing this. You
haven't rejected dualism, you have just used materialist words incorrectly
to keep your belief in dualism alive while trying to believe in materialism
at the same time.

It's a fine consistent story you have created for yourself - but it's just
not true and it's not real materialism. Real materialism rejects dualistic
ideas of consciousness. Real materialism says the body and what it does is
all there is and that there is nothing else there to talk about that could
be called "consciousness". Or, at best, "conciseness" means something non
interesting and non descriptor like "functioning normally".

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

Relevant Pages

  • Book review: The illusion of Conscious Will (Daniel M.Wegner)
    ... THE ILLUSION OF CONSCIOUS WILL ... Wegner writes well and clearly and there are numerous witty asides. ... the brain in the run-up to a voluntary movement such as lifting a finger. ... The obvious implication is that consciousness appears to be an epiphenomenon or ...
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    ... the self or ego is an illusion, ... I know that the stuff you talk about called "consciousness" (your word, ... is a brain and that's all that exists. ... "phenomenal experience" when in fact, you are simply sensing your own very ...
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