The self minus thoughts?
If you take away thoughts, what is left of the self? Is there anything?
By thoughts I mean self talk, visualizations, and any other perceptual modality you use to think.
Without thoughts, is there self awareness? Without self awareness, is there awareness?
By thoughts I mean self talk, visualizations, and any other perceptual modality you use to think.
Without thoughts, is there self awareness? Without self awareness, is there awareness?
Comments (80)
Quoting hypericin
Depends what you mean by 'self.' I'd include the body, so a passed out person is still a self.
If you take away waves, what is left of the sea?
A bit of tangent in this thread (started one exactly on the theme), but I'll leave a quote from the guy and a comment. It is relevant to the OP, more or less.
https://freddieyam.com/gen2/p/quotes.merrell-wolff.html
This is quite close to what I quoted from another thinker/site. The transcendental ego becomes (seems to me) a synonym for being itself, except it remains dependent on a pair of eyes and ears and is still localized in terms of sensation. For less philosophical types, this journey of abstraction could indeed be difficult and painful (well I guess it's likely to be painful but philosophical types might suffer it early and then take it lightly.) It's echoed in Fight Club too, in a different tone. You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world.
Of course, the kinds of philosophical schools which describe states of ‘content-less consciousness’ are typically associated with yogic practices and Buddhism. It’s obviously pointless to think about what that could be, because thinking about it already undercuts any chance of exploring it. Suffice to say that I think the aim of all of those types of therapies (because that is what they are) is to see through and disrupt the automatic chains of reactive thought and emotion that humans are normally caught up in.
In the spiritual lexicon, there are sayings such as ‘the peace which passes understanding’. I think this refers to a state of mind where any sense of self, I and mine, with all of its baggage, are in abeyance. But again, any attempt to imagine that or think that is going to interfere with realising it.
As to your observation about ‘the world existing anyway’ - of course from a common-sense perspective that is obviously true. But if you really consider the nature of consciousness, and the nature of being, you will see that ‘the world’ is always being constituted moment-by-moment in your extraordinarily powerful and large hominid forebrain. This is what it’s doing all of the time, it is literally creating your reality. And that’s the only reality you or I or anyone will know. The thought that by going to sleep or becoming unconscious that ‘the world’ ceases to exist, is simply a projection of the imagined non-existence of the world. It is not what those ‘idealist’ types of philosophy really mean. Your mind is not actually ‘your mind’ - it is the mind, the human mind, which has evolved over millions or even billions of years as a sophisticated Virtual Reality generator.
The first paragraph of Arthur Schopenauer’s magnum opus, World as Will and Representation, lays that out pretty clearly, although I don’t think Schopenhauer ever was instructed in or mastered the discipline of samadhi, although he intuitively understood it in some ways.
A calm sea.
self meditation?
Ah, but that brain is (positioned as) a mere part of the dream. I really can grok the solipsistic idea. I suppose that I more or less believe (in some register) that I live in a dream 'thrown up by' by my brain. But that only makes sense if my brain exists in a world outside that dream. The brain as known by us is (one might say) a mediated image of the brain-in-itself. But if we go the whole Kantian hog and say that time and space are part of the dream, the whole narrative of me being a ghost thrown up by a brain is endangered. Kant seems to quietly rely on the very common sense that he otherwise subverts. Our ordinary logic of sense organs and incomplete/uncertain knowledge seems to be the source material for something implausibly radical in its forgetting of this material.
I'm amenable to this view, but note that it assumes the existence of a non-mental world, a substrate of some kind (the germs needed time to evolve into monkeys with a complicated symbolic interface.) I'm a bit surprised to hear it from you, since it casts the subject as the product of evolution. Throw in some evolving cultural software, confess the substrate, and you have what I'd call a plausible indirect realism.
Potential.
I think the facts of evolution are indisputable. But unlike evolutionary materialism, I don't see evolution as a kind of spontaneous chemical reaction elaborated by the Darwinian algorithm, a la Dennett. I had a wise professor of Indian philosophy, who related the Vedic idea of evolution, which is that evolution is the result of involution - that the cosmic mind enfolds itself into the material world, which then unfolds as its expressions. 'What is latent', he would say, 'becomes patent'. So I guess that is more like Bergson and Tielhard du Chardin. And also maybe Hegel. It's not particularly compatible with the Christian doctrine of creation, it's more like the emanation idea of Plotinus.
Quoting jas0n
Only when you look at it as an object. In practice, the brain is never an object, unless you're a neurologist or some such.
Quoting jas0n
Well, your brain can be preserved in formaldehyde for much longer than a human lifespan.
Are 'you' still in there? What about those who get their head preserved in cryogenic storage?
They hope to be revived at some point in the future.
Einstein's brain was dissected which is unfortunate if he could have been brought back.
The information on a computer hardisk is not lost when the drive is separated from the computer.
If only we could read the contents of a dead human brain like we can from a memory chip.
It remains a complete unknown for now I think.
Does the brain of a dead human have to be allowed to 'disassemble,' before YOU can become truly dead. Are YOU gone from the brain the second you die?
Quoting universeness
Excellent questions! Altered Carbon runs with this idea and allows personality/memory/self to be stored on a kind of flash drive. Is there anything special about our brain meat? Don't know !
I do know you can have neural networks computing the same function and yet with very different guts/parameters, so perhaps there are many ways to store the 'same' personality.
:up:
Thanks for clarifying! That helps.
Quoting Wayfarer
I still think your not seeing/addressing the issue I'm raising. You and I both believe that the brain evolved, so this seems to require a stage (space and time and molecules) for the composition and interaction of lifeforms (call it 'physical' or whatever.) That only makes sense as 'outside' the dream of such brains (or better yet the mediated environment of such brains.)
If 'the subject' or 'consciousness' lives in healthy human brains, then what are they made of and where do they exist? An indirect realist might say (1) some kind of non-mental stuff and (2) in some kind of substrate.
Thanks, I wish we had some answers! Come on ye scientists!
We might see faster progress on the digital front. Natural language processing is getting pretty good. Translation on the fly was a sci-fi idea, and now we have it. Point your camera and watch it replace a German coffee label with one in English. I haven't messed with live voice translation, but I'm guessing it's pretty great (might not fit on a cellphone yet.)
I don't think it's really accurate to depict what I'm saying as 'a dream'. In the other thread on panpsychism - it's a bit confusing working between the two - I made the point about the subjective nature of time itself. I drew on some quotes from various scientists on that point. The very fabric of space and time is in some fundamental sense generated by the mind. Kant saw this. But saying that reality is 'generated' by the mind is not saying that it's just a dream. That's the only reality we know, and it has a fundamentally mental character. But as soon as you say 'ah, in the mind', then already you're trying to see from a perspective outside that, as it were - to imagine the world, there, and the mind, 'in here', with 'the world' being what is real independently of the mind. But that is also all a cognitive act. So I'm saying, reality has an irreducibly subjective pole - but there's no use asking 'what is that' or 'where is that'.
Computing Science is my field of 'expertise,' in that I taught the subject for 30 years.
NLP is progressing but it's still pretty bad with dialect and translation of the 'spoken' word.
Universal translators are still quite a way off I think. I don't think I will be able to visit a non-English speaking country in my lifetime and be wearing an earpiece that speaks to me in English that which is spoken to me in Spanish. Even if we do get such technologies working perfectly, I don't see how this helps answer the questions I asked about.
Do you think that it is valid to posit that there exists a reference frame within which the Universe ends when YOU die?
Personal oblivion due to death means no awareness for YOU of the passage of time.
So for you, after death, the remaining lifespan of the Universe is instant.
Is this a valid reference frame or just a human arrogance of the importance of 'self.'
The arrogance of 'me, me , me!!'
Do you know if they've got any big computers that can do it almost instantaneously ? I haven't checked in for awhile. I never focused on NLP, but I know the theory of SGD pretty well.
Quoting universeness
An 'operationalized' definition of consciousness might involve something like a Turing test. If you are talking on the phone with some voice and don't know if that voice is conscious or not, then it's 'operationally conscious' (in the context of that particular test.)
Am I conscious ? Is it plausible that I (manifested as this stream of text) am the output of a program? Because you know the field, you'll probably say no. But how about a century from now? Once we've trained some newfangled model among ten-million of its siblings and 20 billion humans? To be sure, translation alone is not sufficiently impressive, but 'thought' is most directly manifest (perhaps) in language use.
Assuming that thesis, how does an evolved brain still fit in? If time is just part of our mediation, I don't see how it can be applied to the presumed source of that mediation.
Quoting Wayfarer
Don't take the metaphor too seriously. Call it mediated content if you like. The 'dream' is of the 'world' which models/represents/presents (presumably, if we talk in terms of mediation) some 'world-in-itself.'
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, but this isn't some barbaric metaphysical preference. I see my wife and friends 'from the outside.' I see all other subjects 'from the outside' and embedded in the same one world with me. Spoiler: a Möbius strip seems like a better metaphor to me than a reduction to all-mental or all-physical.
Quoting Wayfarer
I get that. The question is whether or not you grant the existence of some kind of substrate where all of us more or less conscious/subjective animals live (and can have evolved in the first place.) Given your taking evolution as a fact, it seems that of course you'll acknowledge some kind of 'physical' world. One can still insist that it's only experienced mediately (as sensations, thoughts, etc) and that all such experience is a marriage of whatever a nervous system is understood to host and whatever kind of stuff it's embedded in and made of.
Quoting Wayfarer
Currently I think Kant went too far, that he needs an ordinary notion of time and space to build his spaceship. Brilliant for 1781, but we've had a lot of time to worry over it. We are the ancients (vessels of an old flame, encrusted with the dialogue of centuries.)
:rofl: I've never heard of SGD, so much for my 30 years teaching computing science! I only taught to advanced higher level in Scottish Secondary Schools and I only taught the curriculum so thats my excuse. I have tried to 'keep up' with my field but I still haven't heard of SGD. A quick internet search
took me to https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ml-stochastic-gradient-descent-sgd/
and I read a little about Stochastic Gradient Descent. Sounds to me like a 'fine tuning' methodology to better predict what word has been spoken. I have not seen or heard of any natural language translator that is any major improvement on a system such as 'siri,' have you?
Quoting jas0n
Oh, I totally agree! Although I think you are setting a very ambitious time frame. I think some seriously transhuman creations are in our future but I think it will take thousands of years not hundreds and only of course if we can prevent our own extinction.
I have never seen or read about any AI system that can pass the Turing test in any interesting way, have you?
Yeah, that's it! It's a very general technique. Let's say I have a differentiable function of ten thousand floating-point variables, then I can probably find a very nice local max or local min using SGD. The gradient points in the best direction for the next baby step. Doesn't always work, but one can try lots of random starting points.
No. I just don't see why it won't happen eventually. We're near the beginning of the revolution. An economic/military arms race will only accelerate the process. 'Skynet' might destroy us one day (mostly joking, but who knows? We are reckless enough...)
Perhaps you are right. We were supposed to have floating cars by now, right? If, however, a particular kind of 'AI' is especially profitable or powerful, we might see 'Manhattan Project' research intensity. Cyber warfare could become decisive, so that flexible and quick-reacting attackers/defenders are developed. A genetic algorithm might be used to develop neural networks that fight one another. We already have GANs making convincing faces of folks who never lived. I confess that I really don't know.
I like your 'baby step,' analogy. I think that's currently quite accurate for 'significant advances in AI.'
I really don't think there is ANY danger of a data/information singularity, anytime soon.
Quoting jas0n
I think it will happen eventually, yes but do you think the potential technological movements toward a transhuman distant future is evidence of emerging panpsychism?
Humans merging with technology! Cyborgs/human brains contained in cybernetic bodies/human consciousness transferred to cloned bodies etc. All these sci-fi projections of transhumanism. Will this eventually mean more 'networking' of individual consciousnesses and the ultimate result would be a Universal consciousness which is a merging of the individual consciousness of every lifeform in the Universe? Could such a manifestation of panpsychism satisfy the god criteria, ie the Omni's?
So the reason the god posit has always been with us, is because it is our ultimate fate/goal.
I don't particularly subscribe to this, I am an atheist through and through but I find the 'ultimate result of technological advancement,' interesting.
If you mean, am I scientific realist, answer is negative.
Quoting universeness
That's a sound empirical hypothesis, although of course you won't be around to test it.
I don't either but I find that I live in very exciting times but also very unstable.
I think we are at a turning point. Extinction or humanism is my honest opinion.
I think we are doomed if we don't achieve global unity, economic parity for all and a determination to leave our little pale blue nest and extend our species beyond this planet.
Would you end your statement there or would you offer any further opinion on the significance or consequences of the reference frame I suggest?
Translation is one of my fields of expertise, in that I have worked as a translator (using a "Computer Assisted Translation" or CAT tool) for 20 years.
Quoting jas0n
Machine translation doesn't "think" at all however, neither does it do what I do when I translate. Here's a concrete example, intended to illustrate what you do when you understand language, which a computer can't do:
1. The council members refused to allow the protestors to hold their rally as they feared violence.
2. The council members refused to allow the protestors to hold their rally as they advocated violence.
You can tell who "they" refers to in each case because of your immersion of a world of experience. The computer can't tell.
I wouldn't use that exact word for it myself. I understand that (perhaps incorrectly) in terms of even a copper atom having its little allowance of 'consciousness.' I'm not a consciousness denier, but I think it's almost impossible to talk about apart of public criteria that themselves have no need of that hypothesis. A statement that I can't be wrong about...contains no information? 'I am conscious.' What do/can I mean? A deep question. Messing with it in another thread I started.
Quoting universeness
Excellent stuff! I'm also an atheist, but the dream/concept/ideal of God remains central for humans (under different names perhaps.) As other thinkers have noted, humanity is already a little god itself, when considered in aggregate. Look at our cities of concrete and steel, our satellites that allow us to facetime one another from the other side of the worldball. Not exactly just beavers, are we? Language is the primary network, but technology could perhaps accelerate communication. On Youtube, I saw a video of a device that allows 'locked in' victims of ALS to talk again. They can't even blink, let alone speak, but can change their brainwaves so that the machine gives them words. Early days, but circumventing the mouth and hands is suggestive.
If we could extend the life of a personality, so that someone could master 30 languages, master physics and chemistry and electronics....and basically build the newer and better cyborg (or a newer body for itself, motivated by a flight from a mortality that is revealed as a stupid and obsolete Darwinian glitch.)
Anyway, Sartre thought the individual consciousness was a futile quest to be god. As a species goal..and conceived less metaphysically..it's at least plausible. More knowledge, more power, and (hopefully!) more wisdom and decency. That's where David Pearce might come in. Dare we tinker with our own DNA to make us kinder and happier? Or is this Act I of an unspeakable tragedy? Deep Blue Sea features sharks that become super-intelligent and super-unfriendly in pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer's. As you already mention, our hubris, however glorious, might also be self-extinguishing.
I take it you mean human language translators rather than the many other 'translators' used in Computing such as translating high-level languages into low-level languages or into binary etc.
Part of the Advanced Higher computing course we taught included a unit on natural language translation. Computers don't 'understand' anything at all, so you are of course correct.
Getting a computer to process context is one of the hardest parts of NLP.
"Spies like us." Are these spies who like us or spies who ARE like us?
The heuristic algorithms we used employed the semantic and syntactic rules of English to enable the system to display all of the possible contextual meanings on the screen and ask the user to choose which one was closest to the intended meaning. A poor solution but good enough for the purposes of the teaching content of the unit.
I know pretty well what goes on at the level of bits, and I agree, and yet...I don't know if we think either. Zoom in on our neurons and AFAIK there's no localized special sauce.
My own preference is to measure intelligence or thinking in terms of ability (from the outside of that intelligence, ignoring the presence of absence of qualia/intuition/etc.).
Quoting Daemon
Excellent example. So currently humans are better. My question would be whether there's any reason why improved algorithms, more compute, and more/better data won't eventually result in machines being as good as humans at translation? Our own brains, immensely complex, are nevertheless finite. Consider a machine the size of the moon, built in 4056, trained on all data generated in the meantime. (I wonder if GANs have been used to detect machine versus human translation. )
A single celled organism has no thoughts, but it does have a "self", in that it is distinct from its environment.
Dreyfus used Heidegger's work to argue against the hopes for AI back in his day. I think the approach was more symbolic at the time. I'm more hopeful with a continuous (floating-point ) approach. The internal thought of such 'machine' is just 'boxes' of numbers, not unlike the brain perhaps, if interpreted appropriately. (Of course we're actually talking about currents, etc., which represent floating point numbers.)
That's the second time you've used this rather tired metaphor/straw man. How about explaining what you mean in plain language.
We might say that the self is that which is controlled toward homeostasis. The environment would be where this 'self' finds food and releases waste. We say it has no thought (because it doesn't speak), but if it inherited reactions to its environment, that might deserve to count as intelligence. What do humans really know of their thoughtstuff except as language that organizes other activities?
If you zoom in on the brain and look at neurons firing, where do you find thought? Is there something irreplaceable about human brain tissue? Or does 'consciousness' only require a host of the proper structure? Maybe (I don't know) silicon or something else can work just as well as brain tissue. IMO, we humans are a bit too confident in our consciousness talk. I don't know how well we actually know what we have in...mind ? I suspect that our ignorance is manifest in our haste to accept it as obvious.
The 'pure witness' thread is about consciousness, being, etc., and its fraught relation with language.
In practice, the brain is inseparable from the lifeform as an integrated event, and has evolved with a high degree of variability within its protective casing. It is this integrated variability that enables a relational structure of ‘mind’ to develop through the ongoing interoception of affect. It’s effectively a DNA-style structure in 4D, a variable biochemical prediction of this lifeform’s ongoing interaction with the world.
There are many varieties of panpsychism, such as cosmopsychism etc but I don't think the initial 'ingredients' or quanta or initial composites of consciousness are as interesting as it's possible future 'composites.' Our two consciousnesses are networking in such an easy and convenient way that has never existed for the vast majority of the past 14 billion years. The internet does bring individual human consciousnesses closer than has ever been possible before. Surely the distance between us will blur more and more as time passes and transhuman technologies propagate.
I remember watching the much underrated (in my opinion) film AI by Steven Spielberg.
The futuristic creatures portrayed near the end of that movie were 'individual' but also had the ability to merge or act collectively by 'tapping into' the experience of any one of their fellows.
All this stuff is part of why I don't understand the theist position. I would be so so disappointed if any of the religions turn out to be true. The future possibilities for the human species are far more exciting in my opinion than anything heaven posits have to offer.
This is bit dense, but it seems especially relevant .
This is what I take to be the default view, that we can 'talk to ourselves' and know exactly what we mean. The signified shines for an 'intellectual organ' that grasps meaning directly, instead of simply emitting sentences in response, just a machine can do (if not as well.) In this view, sentences are vehicles for meaningstuff, delivered to consciousness. And this is what we don't want to grant machines.
Highly plausible ! We might form little subcommunities to (wisely) prevent homogenization.
Quoting universeness
I love that film! Those are my favorite aliens from any film, though the fellows in Arrival are great too.
I agree that visions of heaven don't tend to make sense. We might not like to admit it, but we need our problems and our projects. We need to be tired to enjoy the bed, hungry to enjoy food, afraid to enjoy safety, etc. There's a Twilight Zone episode where a creep goes to 'Heaven' (where he wins every game without effort, etc.) and slowly figures out it's the bad place.
Nice ! That makes sense. I like the emphasis on 4D and time. I acknowledge that the brain/non-brain distinction is an abstraction. I think it was appropriate in the context you quoted, but I don't take it seriously. Even the organism/world boundary is an abstraction/approximation. If light from distance stars is tickling my retina...
I think our best attempts algorithmically are 'object oriented' approaches combined with the idea of 'methods.' The autonomous vehicles we have sent to the planets are amongst our best AI attempts compared to say 'expert systems.' The Mars rovers such as spirit, curiosity, opportunity and the new one, 'perseverance' have demonstrated a kind of 'learning' ability. They go a little bit beyond just 'pattern matching' algorithms. Their heuristic algorithms can 'make decisions,' based on a combination of their sensory inputs and their 'recorded data of previous experience.' This previous experience is recorded as a 'knowledge base,' which is formed based on 'training scenarios.' the rover is put through on Earth. This knowledge base can be 'queried,' by the system to simulate a human asking an internal question.
This system does 'kind of,' emulate how humans access their previous experience to make decisions when faced with new unpredicted/unexpected conditions never encountered before.
The distinction/boundary is heuristic.
Yeah, I have the Twilight Zone box sets. I remember the episode well.
I wonder how long it would be before the physical joy of an eternal orgasm would turn into a horrific scream. Pleasure of any kind must reach a 'ok stop now because I am full,' point. Hell must exist or else heaven cannot be. We are creatures who need comparators as you state yourself.
Of course, theists get around this easily by claiming 'you are trying to conceive 'heaven' with a human mind and you cant do that,' my answer is normally 'but that's all I have! and it's all you have too!' They will normally just respond with a head shake and a comment like 'have faith in god!' To which I INTERNALLY say 'AW F*** OFF!' :naughty:
Thanks. I've studied pieces of the field but others are blanks for me. I expect algorithims to get better, and this may turn out to be more important than more compute and more data.
Quoting universeness
Even orgasms of normal length, if sufficiently intense, aren't always simply pleasure. 'Ride the lightning.'
Quoting universeness
One way to view philosophy is as a thinking that doesn't run off into the darkness. Of course some will tell you that the 'Truth' is 'foolishness to the Greeks,' that the 'Inner Light' hides in what the arrogant and faithless philosopher can only misunderstand as darkness. It's a battle of the labor of concept (against and yet through metaphors) and what seems more like paradoxical mystical poetry.
For us as viewers, the organism, or both? I suppose both. Is your background in biology, btw? You seem to know some stuff!
Your view reminds me to some degree of that presented in I am a Strange Loop, which is probably why it made sense to me so quickly (though fairly complex.)
It's not because it doesn't speak that I say a bacterium doesn't think. I say it because we can fully explain its behaviour, which looks like consciousness, by means of non-conscious biochemical processes. Also, it doesn't have the elaborate biological mechanisms (neurons and all that) that are so clearly linked to our consciousness (and that of other animals).
The bacterium's inherited reactions to its environment could be described as intelligent behaviour, but it's non-conscious.
This is what a family member is doing:
You mean silicon like in a computer?
Emulate: match or surpass (a person or achievement), typically by imitation.
"most rulers wished to emulate Alexander the Great"
Computing
reproduce the function or action of (a different computer, software system, etc.).
"the adaptor is factory set to emulate a Hercules graphics board"
The Mars Rovers do not match or surpass the way humans access experience because they don't have experience.
They don't reproduce what we do.
They do something different to what we do.
Algorithms, computation, representation and ‘data’ are part of the ‘old’ way of thinking about what brains do. Affective, Enactive, embodied, auto-poetic, self-organizing , embedded and extended point to the new ways of conceiving behavior in living systems. A designed entity that can rival humans at translation will likely be along the lines of a ‘wet-wear’ creature that we interact with rather than ‘program’.
Perhaps that's why I included the words 'kind of' and put them in quotes for emphasis.
I don't have the qualifications in cognitive science or in the development of Mars rovers to make statements like yours above.
I don't really subscribe to old ways or new ways of thinking, especially on a website that is forever quoting from ancient thinking and thinkers. There are just different/alternate ways of thinking. I am happy to accept any way of thinking if it results in new knowledge.
Do you feel the same way about old science vs new science? Does science advance, such that ignoring the distinction between old and new theories in physics or biology is hard to justify?
That's no way to achieve clarity is it? "The Mars Rover "kind of" emulates human thought".
One thing I didn't consider: without thoughts, we still have bodily feelings, and emotions. These are both egoic in the sense that they mark a "me" as distinct from the sensory world. Unless I am dissociated, this pain is my pain, and I am frightened.
But then, suppose we subtract these. A hapless individual suffers a stroke. As the cerebral artery occludes, his train of thought fades away, his mind is utterly empty. He is terrified, but is unable to mentally formulate his situation in any way. He sees, he hears, he is afraid, he has a throbbing migraine. That is his experience. Can you empathize with this state?
Then, his migraine fades away, replaced by an all encompassing numbness. Yet even numbness is a feeling, what he feels is nothing. His terror is replaced by a corresponding emotional blankness. He sees bright lights passing above him. He hears the doctors comment on his condition, but can't seem to understand. He smells the antiseptic odor of hospital, and tastes copper in his mouth. That is all. No thoughts, no feelings, no sense of the body. Can you empathize? Is this being strictly speaking still sentient?
Sadly for our subject, the cerebral artery, a mighty river in more halcyon days, is now barely a stream. Sight is gone. Taste is gone. Smell is gone. Hearing is gone. What is left? Is it a unperturbed sea, as per ? I contend, there is nothing left at all. Our hero is now a vegetable.
I don't see them as combative. 'Standing on the shoulders of giants,' is how new science should forever view old science.
Quoting Joshs
To me, the term 'new science,' can often be portrayed, by some, as in some way 'superior,' to 'old science.' I simply defend against that. Otherwise, I have no problem with the two labels 'old' and 'new' applied to anything. I also don't fully subscribe to the comment that an 'old head' is wiser than a 'new head.' Perhaps it's true in a majority of cases but certainly not all.
I was not going for absolutes. I was going for a level of comparison between a current AI system and human thought processes. An electronic knowledge base that can be queried is comparable, as an emulation of a human querying their own previous experience. They are not exactly the same but they are comparable.
An electronic knowledge base is quite unlike a human memory.
Is modern physics superior to Newtonian physics? Is Darwinian biology superior to pre-Darwinian biology? Do they subsume and transcend their older versions , giving us more options in dealing with the world than the older models? In other words , the modern physicist can shift back and forth between a Newtonian and a quantum description , whereas the Newtonian only has one option.
Isn’t this true in many other areas of culture , from the arts to psychology and moral theory, that the new is superior to the old to the extent that it subsumes and enriches the old, giving us the option to choose from among a variety of ways of thinking ( including the old) that the older approach could not?
Evidence?
Can there be a modern physics without Newtonian physics?
Modern physics has the larger scope due to Newtonian physics.
Quoting Joshs
Are scientists smarter now than they were then? I don't like your use of 'superior.'
A car can always be faster and have more functionality and more efficiency than an earlier model but that does not necessarily make it 'superior,' as I'm sure classic and vintage car enthusiasts will attest to.
I am not suggesting scientific advancement is identical in consequence to technological advancement in cars but I think the principle holds regarding 'superiority.'
Quoting Joshs
No, in my opinion, such are not superior as they are a consequence of.
Do you know that, personally?
Are you able to have bodily feelings or emotions without also having some thoughts along with them?
To feel fear, one must already have certain beliefs about the workings of the world and the meaning of life.
How do you know?
Is it because he merely can't speak or write, due to the stroke, or is he truly mentally disabled?
If one measures oneself the way a not particularly compassionate external observer might judge one, then the result is going to be truly meagre.
It depends on what we translate.
If the current trend toward idiocity is anything to go by, machine translation will soon surpass the average human.
Another line of thought might be, in your opinion, is the capitalist free market economy 'superior' to the Epicurean commune?
Shouldn’t it be the case that they are superior precisely because they are a consequence of ? Isn’t that the whole point and value of advancement in understanding , that you take with you but build upon the old knowledge? The latin root of superior is ‘above’. There cannot be an above without a below, a foundation, a ground. The above is consequent on the below Quoting universeness
The know- how required to build the new model was not available for the earlier model The new know-how is superior to the old know—how in that one’s newer knowledge gives one the option of building a replica of the older model but the earlier era of technology in which the older model was built did not have the option of building the newer model.
Similarly , in the era of modern and postmodern art, we have the option of recreating older style of art , but renaissance and Romantic artists did not have the option of creating modern or postmodern art. The newer era is superior in having the advantage of being the consequence of the older era.
I want to be clear that what I’m saying isn’t that newer painting or cars are necessarily aesthetically superior or prettier than the older versions , but that the newer ways of understanding art or car technology are superior to the older because they stand on the shoulders of the old ways and provide more. choices. The classic car enthusiast certainly isn’t averse to making use of the
newer technologies to help to preserve the old car , to make it run longer , to make it safer, to protect it better from rust and use better quality oil, gas, paint, tires than were available when the car was built.
Only to the extent that the larger background philosophical knowledge that a capitalist free-market economy depends on( Enlightenment thought , Adam Smith, etc) was not available to the Epicureans , so they did not have the option of choosing a modern free market system , whereas we moderns, being the consequence of older thinking like Epicureanism, have the requisite knowledge to choose to set up an Epicurean commune if we want. We could say that many today who are familiar with ancient history ( certainly not all) prefer modern capitalism to an Epicurean commune , but we can’t say the Epicureans preferred their model to modern capitalism, because the ideas did not exist for them.
I think it depends on the circumstance. If you are in a state of dreamless sleep, you can't say you have a self, but another person who is awake would surely consider you (the sleeping you) to have a self, despite the absence of thoughts.
But if you take a somewhat similar situation, and make it worse, like permanent brain damage and being in a vegetative state, then it seems to me that outside of a few religious people, no one would say you have a self, you won't have any thoughts anymore.
Then there's everything in between. You could be doing an activity, like walking or playing a sport and be "in the moment", very little of this is explicitly thought out after a point, but we'd say you'd have a self in this situation.
The connection is not easy to state in detail, but they do seem to require each other.
To me, this thinking is based on a very old bias. The notion that up is in some way superior to down or right is superior to left. This is mathematical BS, is it not?
My rights rather than my lefts, a bill of rights, human rights. no bill of lefts. Your last two sentences suggest equal importance between the foundations and that which is built upon it. We see further only because we stand on the shoulder of previous scientists. I maintain my rejection of your use of 'superior' in the context you employ it.
Quoting Joshs
I am not arguing about the advantages that the new may have over the old, but 'superiority' is a different matter. You are pushing the 'above' relationship with the word 'superior' but there are other relationships such as the aristocratic/divine or even nazi connotations associated with the word.
Industrial created more wealth and prosperity for most compared to early agricultural but the consequence of climate change suggests that from the point of view of looking after our planet, industrial is not superior to agricultural. A faster and more efficient car may not be superior to a more roomy, aesthetically pleasing car.
In science, it is often better and quicker to get a computer to 'process data,' but it is often wise to also check where you can using pen, paper and human to check the computer's result.
Quoting Joshs
An interesting case in point. Art has always been and will always be in the eye of the beholder so I don't see how you can ever use the word 'superior' in relation to art. I am personally not a fan of modern art, at all, no matter what new technique, not available to the old masters, is employed.
Quoting Joshs
Ok, I responded to earlier comments before I read this but no matter as this allows me to highlight the clear difference between us. I think it is that you see that which is built on top of the foundations as being 'superior' to those foundations due to the added advantages and my position is that those advantages are often not so advantageous and that the foundations are equal in importance to any enhancement and are not inferior.
But if a group did choose to set up an Epicurean communal system, I assume that they would do so because they thought that was a better or superior way to live compared to modern capitalism so the newest system is not always the superior one.
What one considers to be an acceptable reply to these questions depends on one's intention for asking them. Because there are many ways to reply to these questions, each reply different according to the intention with which it was made, and its acceptability measured by the intention with which it was asked for.
I agree that interaction will probably be primary. 'Wet' may not matter. Why should moisture matter? My money is on stuff-independent structure.
I do, being human. I think with a little reflection you will agree. For you to experience the itch of a mosquito bite, must you constantly think, I'm itching? If so, this must be the most distracting event possible, precluding all other thought and activity.
Quoting baker
Obviously false. Babies and animals feel fear.
Quoting baker
I stipulate that he has lost the ability to think: to self talk, and to visualize.
Quoting baker
This person has lost the ability to measure anything.
Quoting baker
I am interested in the nature of self, and of sentience in general. Is the self fundamentally composed of all the sensations it feels, internal and external? Or is there something more?
It cannot be ‘stuff-independent. The stuff is the particular embodiment , which cannot be separated from the nature of sense-making. Stuff-independent cognition only makes sense if we are remaining within the computationalist representationaliat model, but ones and zeros conceal the nature of embodied thought.
Sutff-independent is not intended as disembodied. I am just speculating that maybe there's nothing special about brain tissue. Maybe what matters is relationship or structure.
Quoting Joshs
I'm thinking we might figure out how to build interactive/social 'minds.'
Wetwear is just a buzz term that currently belongs more to sci-fi than computing science.
We don't have any technology that you could call an 'organic' or biological computer, such technologies are still very much in their infancy.
If we had little self-replicating nanobots which we could inject into our body and they could then become part of us and we could have a small control system attached to and controlled by our brain that controlled the nanobots and could be used to combat disease in our bodies and keep our blood clean and help heal our wounds very quickly then such could be labeled wetwear.
At the moment, the term is really just a way of categorising the workings of the human brain in deference to the computing terms hardware and software. The term wetware has very limited significance to the world of computing at the moment.