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I had a look at Robert Wright's course, it's irrelevant to this discussion but I will devote some time to it since I'm interested in its subject matter and have

I had a look at Robert Wright's course, it's irrelevant to this discussion but I will devote some time to it since I'm interested in its subject matter and have been for years. Thank you for suggesting it. I don't like to mix philosophy or mysticism with science. In both your posts, you are going back and forth between the two, mixing and matching, and while everything may make sense to you, it's not really helping when other minds come into play. It's far more productive I feel to talk from one or the other perspective, but not both. This was the major point of me disagreeing with your first post, and also that you seemed to dismiss "the process" itself. Surely the mind is not mere conditioning and memories of experiences, maybe you could get away talking like this with other Buddhists or mystics or Vedantic followers — and then they'd tell you that none of that really exists — but when talking with cyberneticists or system theorists you'll be laughed out of the room. And this is coming from someone who is very familiar with the first and well-versed in the second of these domains. You talk about the brain having "emerged" but this risks confusion when applied to the topic at hand. The brain may have emerged through evolution and natural selection, but it is not emerging right now. The mind is an emergent process altogether. The conditioning and memories that you talk about is really the "self-model", data, but not the process-in-execution itself. Maybe you will say that the mind emerges from said data and that therefore this sort of data is a pre-requisite. I could argue for or against this depending on day or phase of the moon, it's an interesting point. But it's erroneous I feel to identify the mind with said data. In deep sleep, there is no mind even though the brain is physically there and so are the memories and experiences and conditioning. The mind begins to emerge in dreams and is fully emergent in wakefulness. There is a clear distinction between data as stored in the brain and the process of becoming self-aware. Finally, there is plenty of evidence that certain animals possess self-awareness without possessing anything close to human language. Dolphins, some apes and birds (parrots and magpies). And again, all of this makes a lot of sense from a cybernetic perspective but it makes no sense whatsoever from your mystical/philosophical pov. Which is why it's a mistake to apply notions from the second to the first.

deleted 10y ago
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lngnmn 10y ago
There is a story about blind philosophers touching an elephant. Fortunately, in the case of mind they all are touching the same elephant, contrary to some theoretical physicists and dark matter/dark energy astronomers who are touching imaginary spherical elephants in vacuum, or french existentialists touching each other. This means that after pruning out, like in a search algorithm, obvious nonsense the remaining insights and formulated principles "describe" the same phenomena from different perspectives, so the process is still have good chances to converge to some approximation of what is (or truth or absolute, if we wish to use archaic terms) while other processes are not even convex (this is another analogy). So, dismissing a proper philosophy as unscientific is a bit premature, in my opinion. Sometimes metaphors are the only way to correctly express certain notions, which are foreign to our conditioned and specialized brains, like the notion of non-existence of time as a distinct phenomena, or that there are such things as appearances - patterns of sensory input which interpreted by the brain, conditioned to do it by the environment in which it has been evolved, to accept these perceptions as ultimately existing. Forth grade example with zooming form a solid into atoms and then "particles" would illustrate it best. For the system theorists the analogy would be that they are talking about implementation details, while philosophers are talking about higher lever, linguistic abstractions, the domain of what we call the mind. It is easy to see that linguistic abstractions of the mind does not necessarily exist, like angels or dark energy. The state of deep-sleep or losing of consciousness has been used as a counterargument to refute the separate good-created-soul dogmas back in the times of Upanishads. Nowadays we would say that some processes are suspended and then recreated, which at least refutes the dogma of separate, permanent self as a distinct entity. Obvious examples from software systems one could find himself. The good AI research, like a good philosophy, which could be characterized by pruning of nonsense and collecting non-contradictory general principles, with help of evolutionary and social psychology already got what is possible and how it works in principle. What they, obviously, do not know is how exactly it works (due to complexity) and how it came to be, but these are non-principal questions. At least, there is no doubt for a modestly educated person that most of mind-created appearances does not ultimately exist, like socially constructed dogmas or memes. Time, soul, self are a memes of the mind, if you wish. Implementation details are irrelevant.
lngnmn 10y ago
Forgot to ask - what exactly are the evidences of possessing sefl-awareness? Which experiment has been accepted as a proof? How did they proved that an animal subject does not see a mere another animal, but exactly "that is me" or not just merely confused, like all these babies with ridiculous looking time experiments?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

lngnmn 10y ago

There is a story about blind philosophers touching an elephant. Fortunately, in the case of mind they all are touching the same elephant, contrary to some theoretical physicists and dark matter/dark energy astronomers who are touching imaginary spherical elephants in vacuum, or french existentialists touching each other. This means that after pruning out, like in a search algorithm, obvious nonsense the remaining insights and formulated principles "describe" the same phenomena from different perspectives, so the process is still have good chances to converge to some approximation of what is (or truth or absolute, if we wish to use archaic terms) while other processes are not even convex (this is another analogy). So, dismissing a proper philosophy as unscientific is a bit premature, in my opinion. Sometimes metaphors are the only way to correctly express certain notions, which are foreign to our conditioned and specialized brains, like the notion of non-existence of time as a distinct phenomena, or that there are such things as appearances - patterns of sensory input which interpreted by the brain, conditioned to do it by the environment in which it has been evolved, to accept these perceptions as ultimately existing. Forth grade example with zooming form a solid into atoms and then "particles" would illustrate it best. For the system theorists the analogy would be that they are talking about implementation details, while philosophers are talking about higher lever, linguistic abstractions, the domain of what we call the mind. It is easy to see that linguistic abstractions of the mind does not necessarily exist, like angels or dark energy. The state of deep-sleep or losing of consciousness has been used as a counterargument to refute the separate good-created-soul dogmas back in the times of Upanishads. Nowadays we would say that some processes are suspended and then recreated, which at least refutes the dogma of separate, permanent self as a distinct entity. Obvious examples from software systems one could find himself. The good AI research, like a good philosophy, which could be characterized by pruning of nonsense and collecting non-contradictory general principles, with help of evolutionary and social psychology already got what is possible and how it works in principle. What they, obviously, do not know is how exactly it works (due to complexity) and how it came to be, but these are non-principal questions. At least, there is no doubt for a modestly educated person that most of mind-created appearances does not ultimately exist, like socially constructed dogmas or memes. Time, soul, self are a memes of the mind, if you wish. Implementation details are irrelevant.

lngnmn 10y ago

Forgot to ask - what exactly are the evidences of possessing sefl-awareness? Which experiment has been accepted as a proof? How did they proved that an animal subject does not see a mere another animal, but exactly "that is me" or not just merely confused, like all these babies with ridiculous looking time experiments?