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How do we know our brain creates our mind? That is a materialist assumption, which is just an assumption.
by yters 8y ago
How do we know our brain creates our mind? That is a materialist assumption, which is just an assumption.
- Sharlin 8y agoIf we can’t assume physicalism, we can’t assume anything. The sun might not rise tomorrow because it might be magicked away.
- yters 8y agoCan you explain why prediction is predicated on physicalism? For example, Hume argues the opposite, and his argument is furthered by Wolpert's No Free Lunch Theorem. It seems like if prediction is possible it is only because physicalism is false.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- yorwba 8y agoIt's an assumption that has been tested many times. Humans can survive losing parts of their brain, but it causes observable changes in their mind. That's were those colorful maps of brain regions and their functions come from: by recording what kind of brain damage caused what kind of function to deteriorate. Don't forget that people used to believe that the heart contained the mind and the brain was just a cooler. There was real evidence that caused scientific consensus to change.
- yters 8y agoThere are some interesting examples of very highly functioning individuals with very little brain. At any rate, correlation does not imply causation.
- 0xffff2 8y agoWhat's your proposed alternative? I'm trying not to be dismissive, but I'm also having trouble coming up with a reasonable alternative hypothesis.
- coldtea 8y agoWhy would an alternative hypothesis have to be "reasonable"? Reason is just a category of how we see the world, not necessarily some ultimate truth.
- yters 8y agoI would say halting oracles are a possibility that have some degree of mathematical traction: https://www.am-nat.org/site/halting-oracles-as-intelligent-agents/ https://www.am-nat.org/site/halting-oracles-as-intelligent-a... But, we shouldn't prefer an incorrect model to no model, and the brain = mind model does not seem correct.
- baddox 8y agoFrom that article: > So, the objection that humans cannot solve every problem only shows that humans might not be complete halting oracles, but cannot show that humans are not partial halting oracles. I don't get it. We can already easily making Turing machines that answer the halting problem for certain infinite sets of Turing machines, so there's nothing unique about the human brain in this regard.
- yters 8y agoThe previous sentence to the one you quote explains: > We can even remove an infinite number of problems from the set and still have an infinite and undecidable set. It is an undecidable set, so cannot be described by a TM.
- baddox 8y agoOh okay, I guess that entire paragraph is just a complicated way of rephrasing their claim, which is that there is at least one TM for which no TM can possibly answer the halting problem, but for which humans can. So then, the claim is that it's at least conceivable that humans can do this, because you can remove a finite or even infinite number of elements from an infinite set and still be left with an infinite set. I still don't understand how this is a remotely useful insight or in any way an indication that humans may have super-Turing abilities.
- zamalek 8y agoDualist mind theory is not yet quack science, but it looks like it could be. > It's an assumption that has been tested many times. But it does not make that assumption.
- joak 8y agoWhat do you mean ? That the mind is created in by another piece of matter, other than the brain ? Or that there is "something" that is not matter (that incidentally produces the brain)? What is weird is assuming the existence of something that is not matter so that by definition cannot be observed or measured. Personally I love to assume there is a teapot orbiting Saturn (cf Bertrand Russell) Can you disprove that ?
- the_af 8y agoI cannot answer for the parent poster (actually, I cannot answer at all :P ), but the author of TFA posits that the mind is created -- or co-evolved with -- not by the brain alone, but also by the body, the environment and even by society itself. It's an argument against the brain-in-a-jar trope, and I think it's an empirical argument, unlike Russell's teapot.
- worldsayshi 8y agoIt's amusing how we in 2018 still can't fully rule out that the brain depends on magic to work. (Not that I personally believe that it's anything but a meat computer.)
- tlb 8y agoThe human mind certainly involves systems other than the brain, like the limbic system. Even the face is involved in communicating emotion between various parts of the brain, which is why you can make yourself happier by smiling. But it seems extremely likely to me that some arrangement of material could create a mind that, if not exactly human, we would recognize as intelligent and useful. If you're skeptical of the materialist assumption, a productive line of inquiry is to investigate what capabilities of a mind can or cannot be replicated by computers or other material devices. That probably looks a lot like doing AI research.
- yters 8y agoYes, for example Solomonoff induction (SI) requires infinite computational capacity. If SI is representative of the human mind, then the human mind cannot be physical.
- tlb 8y agoThe human mind isn't exactly Solomonoff, because we often hold theories that are more complicated than necessary. Working towards simpler scientific or mathematical theories takes decades. So it seems like we don't just have SI in the inner loop. People have made plausible attempts to approximate SI with practical amounts of computing, like AIXI (https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.0801 https://arxiv.org/abs/0909.0801).
- yters 8y agoIt is not so much whether we identify the simplest theory, but that we are so good at inferring principles and predicting, whether in science or in day to day life. SI is a formalization of this general capability. Perhaps a finite TM can approximate SI to some degree, but to what degree, and is this degree equivalent to human capability? I don't know of any evidence of the latter. If you do, let me know!