Re: What is a "deliberate" process?

Denis Loubet said:

By Termite mound, I assume you mean the mass of termites as a whole, and not the physical collection of dirt and saliva. ;-) <

Actually, I mean both: the "physical collection of dirt and saliva" is
what Dawkins would term the "extended phenotype" of "the mass of
termites as a whole," and its arrangement feeds back into the behavior
of the termites, altering it. But yes, the termites are more important
-- you could stun them, move them somewhere else, and they would
recreate their mound, while the abandoned mound, unless one
accidentally left their eggs in it, would not recreate the termites.

I don't think your analogy works because what an idiot savant is, is a person that presents the ILLUSION of intelligence. That's the whole point of an idiot savant, and that's what makes them unusual. <

No, the idiot savant really _is_ highly intelligent _in the field of
his particular competency_. Look, "idiot savant" is just the extreme
end of a spectrum of specificity of intelligence that at the other end
has the man who is slightly competent in almost all fields but not very
competent in all of them. To take another point within that field,
Albert Einstein was a brilliant physicist but very inept at many
ordinary tasks of life; he needed to be taken care of by wives, lovers,
friends, servants etc. for his entire life because he literally would
forget things like doing laundry, wearing matching clothing, or taking
meals out of the stove at the proper time. He was not an idiot savant,
but his intelligence was definitely more focused than, say, Robert A.
Heinlein's.

To take Heinlein by contrast he was not as good at doing any one thing
as Einstein was at doing physics, but his intelligence was to some
extent focused on his writing skills. However, he was also a rather
competent man in general -- he understood mathematics and science
fairly well, he studied history and literature, he was able to cook and
to help maintain his own home, he grasped the law and business
management, he was interested in and knew something about how to engage
in politics, etc. etc. Heinlein was closer to the "generalist" end of
intelligence, Einstein towards the "specialist," most people who knew
either man considered him highly intelligent.

A termite mound is (as a collective entity) much more intelligent than
any single termite. Its system of transferring information around
itself is different from ours -- its "neurons" are actual independent
life forms that convey its "nerve impulses" by physical touch or
pheronomal trace, and they double as other organs -- but the analogy
with the brain of an animal is a good one. The termite mound's
intelligence is rather "idiot savantish" -- it is programmed by
genetics to do a certain number of things and it does them very well;
it is wholly ignorant and uncaring about doing anything else. It is in
many ways, like the mind of an insect writ large.

Compare this to an avian or mammalian brain. Birds and mammals are
behaviorally flexible. You can make friends, or enemies, with such a
creature; you can also teach it novel forms of behavior. Birds and
mammals can have learned skills; smart birds and mammals (such as
parrots or apes) can also develop "cultures" (meeting the requirement
of being primarily memetic rather than genetic).

Now, the intelligence of the bird or mammal is ultimately collective,
too. The difference is that, instead of having swarms of insects
crawling around inside their heads, birds and mammals have masses of
neurons intricately linked with chemically rewirable
conductivity-paths, forming very complex holographic computers. Viewed
at the level of the individual neuron, there is no intelligence -- the
individual neuron is neither your friend nor enemy, and it can't learn
anything novel -- all it knows how to do is to spark when it is sparked
at, and that is all that it will ever know. However the bird or mammal
as a whole behaves intelligently. This is because it is _the system of
neurons and their interconnections_ that is intelligent.

Consider the atom. The atom as a whole has chemical properties. Its
electrons don't -- an individual electron only "knows" to jump from one
quantum state to the next, or (if free) to fly according to the four
basic forces of physics. Electrons, by themselves, aren't acidic or
basic, they can't form complex molecules, they don't _have_ valences --
they are instead the objects whose existence _creates_ the property of
"valence" -- in conjunction with the kind of nucleus they happen to be
whirling about and the number and position of other electrons whirling
about that nucleus.

This doesn't mean that atoms, chemical properties, and the molecules
that emerge out of them are "illusions" -- they are very real, as you
and I demonstrate by existing and metabolizing our food into energy
every second of every day! Nor does the fact that quarks and quantum
chaos exist make electrons "illusory" -- they too, are real.

_No scale is privileged_. All are equally real, and each scale could
conceivably exist on very different substrates than they happen to do
now.

For instance, let us suppose that we create a complex simulation of
atoms such that they can form chemical compounds according to the very
same rules that the kind of atoms built out of subatomic particles do.
It makes little sense to say that these atoms are "illusory" -- they
are "simulated" atoms but they are, _within the simulation_, as "real"
as any other atoms. (In fact, within the simulation they are _more_
real than "real" atoms, since the computer simulating them is
specifically designed to pay attention to its own internal memory
states and _exclude_ the effects of stray real atoms wandering by the
computer -- a single simulated atom may have a great effect on the
simulation while it would take a very large number of real atoms to
damage the computer and thus have any effect on the simulation at all).

Getting back to our (presumably) non-simulated universe, it's nonsense
to look at one level and say "this is what objects REALLY are."
Objects "really" are what they are on _all_ levels, and some properties
of objects, which may be very important at one level, _and which may
even dominate lower levels_, may be impossible to understand from the
POV of the lower levels that they dominate.

Consider the position of a proton in one of the atoms forming part of a
molecule in a cell in an organ of your body.

The principle determinant of the position of that proton is what you,
Denis Loubet, decide to do today. If you decide to walk a mile west,
that proton will move a mile west. If you decide to remain still, that
proton will not move very much at all.

By your logic, the proton is more "real" than your own mind. But it is
your own mind that makes the decision that will (probably) determine
the position of the proton! By your logic, the "illusion" is
controlling "reality," which makes very, very little sense given the
normal meanings of "illusion" and "reality."

What's worse, the problem of determining your decision is intractable
from the level of subatomic particles. To create a simulation of
subatomic particles vast enough to recreate your entire brain alone
(let alone your entire body, and let alone the other things you may
interact with that affect your decision regarding staying put or
walking a mile west) would probably require so much processing power
and time as to be infeasible to any technology we're likely to have
within a century or more.

On the other hand, if we look at it from the "illusory" level of people
and the geography of your city, we may discover that you have a job a
mile west of here, to which you normally will walk today. The problem
then becomes _very_ tractable, and with no special facilities or vast
intelligence I can easily decide "Denis Loubet will probably go to his
job today, hence this proton within Denis Loubet will wind up a mile
west of its present location." Indeed, stated this way the problem is
so simple that a dog or cat could probably figure the answer out, if
one were able to convey the notion of there being something small
inside you which must travel with you (which, given enough effort,
probably _would_ be conveyable to a reasonably smart mammal like a dog
or cat!)

To attack the issue from another direction, the labels are not symmetrical. What I mean is that the labels address only themselves and what's higher on the hierarchy. For instance, the label "brick" encompasses the walls and buildings that you can construct from them. It does not address the atoms and molecules that constitute the brick. This means that the base level in the hierarchy, the quantum chaos or whatever, occupies a special position as it can be used to describe everything above it, bricks, walls, buildings, and all. Bricks cannot be used to describe the quantum chaos. <

Well, sure they can. Said quantum chaos reacts differently in the
presence of large amounts of matter than it does in "empty" space,
which is _why_ it is possible to detect void energies (you put two
large amounts of matter together and give them an electromagnetic
charge, and watch the fields be affected by the transient particles
that spring into existence between them). A "brick," at the quantum
level, is a very large roughly rectangular-prisim shaped object,
composed of certain arrangements of subatomic particles, which affects
the quantum energies in the space where these particles can be found.
And of course, to take the complementary point of view, the "brick"
only exists because its molecules hold together, which happens because
electromagnetic fields work, and electromagnetic fields work because of
the interactions betwen the virtual particles at the quantum-chaos
level of spacetime.

You are trying to argue that the reality flows only one way, from the
very small to the very large. But there is feedback; the actions of
very large things also affect vhe actions of very small things. Hence,
the reality must be flowing in _both_ directions -- and hence, there is
no single "actual state of affairs," simply expressible (*). What
there are are different "states of affairs" on different scales of
reality, and all of them equally "real."

Sincerely Yours,
Jordan

(*) There is of course an objective reality, but that objective
reality, if it is to include the entities and events of more than one
scale simultaneously, is a very complex one. On December 7th, 1941,
the Japanese Empire attacked the United States of America, because of
Japanese imperial ambitions over the Pacific, and thus a state of war
came to exist. During this attack Hiro Matsumita fired a bullet from
his Zero as part of his strafing of the battleship _Arizona_. The
bullet struck Ensign Michael Jones in the hand and carried away some of
Ensign Michael Jones' tissues into the sea. These tissues included
Wally the White Blood Cell, which as a consequence moved several yards
in a fraction of a second. Within Wally the White Blood Cell, Denny
the DNA strand was carried along on this adventure. And Charlie Carbon
Atom was a component of that DNA strand, as was Ernie Electron (in the
inmost shell). As Ernie Electron changed his position quite suddenly,
the quantum chaos at the base level of existence at that point in the
ocean fluctuated, the mix of virtual particles changing as the electron
passed through that space. If we ignore the higher scales, this sudden
fluctuation in the mix of virtual particles becomes more difficult to
explain.

.

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