Naked Science Forum
On the Lighter Side => New Theories => Topic started by: DonQuichotte on 20/10/2013 17:07:49
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What's The Origin of The Human Language ?
The mainstream materialist scientific establishment assumes that human language originated or rather evolved from the chimps' hand and body gestures :
There is no evidence though wahtsoever that proves that coupling between human language and chimps' gestures to be true ,despite the fact that that sophisticated communication between deaf and malhearing people ,via hand and body gestures ,can be qualified to be called a language , relatively speaking :
Is the materialist coupling of human language with gestures just a desperate unscientific materialist attempt to reduce everything to just physical biological material processes,including the human language thus , its origins emergence and evolution ? .
Chomsky, for example, thinks that human language is so unique that it cannot have evolved from any prior- to- man species .
Tell me about it ...
Thanks , appreciate indeed .
Cheers .
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What is Chomsky's evidence? Human vanity underlies a lot of creationism, and is blown apart as soon as you start to analyse the language of other species.
Language evolves according to need. All species communicate only as much as is required for their continued existence, apart from dogs, dolphins, and other social animals (i.e most familiar mammals) that enjoy playing and teasing each other. Homo sapiens is perhaps unique in using language to promulgate irrational hatred, but you'd have to consult a religious or political professional to find out why. It baffles me, and it's nothing to be proud of.
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What is Chomsky's evidence? Human vanity underlies a lot of creationism, and is blown apart as soon as you start to analyse the language of other species.
Language evolves according to need. All species communicate only as much as is required for their continued existence, apart from dogs, dolphins, and other social animals (i.e most familiar mammals) that enjoy playing and teasing each other. Homo sapiens is perhaps unique in using language to promulgate irrational hatred, but you'd have to consult a religious or political professional to find out why. It baffles me, and it's nothing to be proud of.
Both Chomsky's and the materialist assumptions regarding the origins and evolution of human language are just that , the both of them , : belief assumptions = unscientific , but Chomsky's belief assumption on the subject is not necessarily false , as materialism is .
Chomsky is not convinced by the materialist false assumptions regarding human language at least , as i am not , obviously .
Both Chomsky's and my belief assumption on the subject are unscientific , but not necessarily false ,as materialism is , they are just not verifiable falsifiable empirical observable ...
Do not try to avoid the issue at hand , genius :
The burden of proof lies at the side of materialists who pretend to be "scientific" on the subject of human language at least ,we do not regarding the origin of human language , so :
Just try to tell me how , do you think , that human language allegedly did evolve from chimps' hand and body gestures then , or just via physics and chemistry ...
Ok ?
I did read a whole book on the issue written by a prominent materialist scientist , try to "convince " me then, he could not ,obviously, try to outsmart him then , "scientifically" , instead of preaching and using rhetorics , judgements of value ....as usual , that are ,per definition, unscientific .
The materialist unscientific exclusively biological physical "evolutionary explanation " of the origin of human language can, obviously , not account fully for the existence of the unique human language that's also a matter of human cognition,imagination, creativity , intuition, consciousness , sub-consciousness ....let alone that that materialist assumption can account for the emergence evolution or origins of human languuage fully , just via physics and chemistry ...
Science at the other hand , can tell us only about the biological physical side of the human language , obviously , but materialists do go beyond science and beyond the scientific method , via their materialist beliefs on the subject , obviously , once again .
In short :
The materialist and thus and therefore the materialist unscientific belief assumption that the human language + its origin and evolution can be explained only by physics and chemistry is just that = a materialist false unscientific belief assumption thus , logically .
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A very interesting approach. Apparently anyone who makes a creationist guess or unsubstantiated statement isd allowed to get away with it, in your opinion, but anyone who thinks there might be a rational explanation for a phenomenon is challenged to prove it instantly. If he can't, the entire world of science is wrong.
Get a life, and don't waste mine.
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A very interesting approach. Apparently anyone who makes a creationist guess or unsubstantiated statement isd allowed to get away with it, in your opinion, but anyone who thinks there might be a rational explanation for a phenomenon is challenged to prove it instantly. If he can't, the entire world of science is wrong.
Get a life, and don't waste mine.
No, you're the one whose life heart and mind have been limited crippled handicaped and imprisoned indoctrinated by materialism as a secular belief , you're the one who's obviously , been wasting my time , to be honest , i must add :
So much for a so-caled scientist ...pfff...
............
As for the rest of your silly allegations , the following then :
No , wrong again, as usual :
All i am saying is that science's realm and jurisdiction are represented exclusively by the material observable empirical measurable testable verifiable falsifiable reproducible ...side of reality , but since the materialist dogmatic belief system in science that goes beyond the scientific method ,materialism the majority of scientists do confuse with science , since materialism thus "sees " nature as just being exclusively material = a false materialist conception of nature in science at that = an unscientific one also , per definition , so, many materialist belief assumptions are sold to the people as science ,including the materialist false assumption in science regarding the alleged origins of human language , consciousness ...
Is that so difficult to understand ?
It is in fact the materialist dogmatic belief system that's been dominating in science , and that has been sold to the people as science , that gets away with its unscientific materialist belief assumptions , by selling them to the people as science ...
Comprende , amigo .
That's too much for your simple -minded materialist head or rather mind , i am afraid ....sorry .
Think carefully about what i have been saying ...and correct me if i am wrong , but not via some magical materialist belief assumptions ,or via rhetorics , judgements of value ... please .
Deal ?
Ciao .
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Most animals including chimps will have vocalizations.
Watching a dog, for example, one can certainly recognize a warning growl as being different from a playful bark. Perhaps with practice, one could learn to recognize at least a half a dozen different barks indicating fear, pain, joy, separation anxiety, greetings, warnings, and etc.
It would seem that herds of animals also build up group expectations. For example, cattle often seem to have an adult tasked to caring for several calves. How is that communicated?
Why do some cultures like to gesture while speaking? But, that certainly isn't universal, at least not to the same extent across cultures.
Our language likely evolved from more rudimentary communication forms which would have also included vocalizations as well as gestures and facial expressions. Over time, there was a slow refinement of these primitive communication efforts.
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the materialist dogmatic belief system in science
Dogma and belief are the antithesis of science. If you stopped making selfcontradictory assertions about a subject of which you apparently know nothing, and started listening and thinking for yourself instead of quoting unsubstantiated garbage, you might learn something, just as we scientists do.
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Gesture has the advantage over vocalization that it allows one to communicate without informing everyone present, e.g. ...
[ Invalid Attachment ]
http://rap.wikia.com/wiki/Gang_Signs
[ You must have to be double jointed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility) to join the "compton crips" [:)] ]
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Gesture has the advantage over vocalization that it allows one to communicate without informing everyone present...
Are the above codes derived from what John McCririck (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCririck) uses? [;)]
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Let me throw a straw man argument at these fools. I know - I'll assert that science is wrong because some famous guy has supposedly claimed human language evolved from chimp gestures.
No. He may have proposed it as a possible route for human language to evolve, though I doubt the link to Chomsky as the idea must have been floating around long before him. (It would also have come from a common ancestor of ours with chimps and not from chimps, but that's an unimportant point.) The other proposed origin which I'm sure Chomsky prefers is that human language came out of vocalisations which were already there in one of our ancestors, vocalisations which evolved after we split away from the path that led to chimps. There was plently of room for making different sounds such that many distinct words could be produced, and the throat could then have evolved to make the sounds clearer, survival of the fittest selecting for those with a better geometry for creating clear sounds. The difficulties have been exaggerated by those who have an unscientific agenda - even a chimp can make a wide range of vocalisations and it would be easy to make a language out of them if that species had sufficient wit to do so.
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Let me throw a straw man argument at these fools. I know - I'll assert that science is wrong because some famous guy has supposedly claimed human language evolved from chimp gestures.
No. He may have proposed it as a possible route for human language to evolve, though I doubt the link to Chomsky as the idea must have been floating around long before him. (It would also have come from a common ancestor of ours with chimps and not from chimps, but that's an unimportant point.) The other proposed origin which I'm sure Chomsky prefers is that human language came out of vocalisations which were already there in one of our ancestors, vocalisations which evolved after we split away from the path that led to chimps. There was plently of room for making different sounds such that many distinct words could be produced, and the throat could then have evolved to make the sounds clearer, survival of the fittest selecting for those with a better geometry for creating clear sounds. The difficulties have been exaggerated by those who have an unscientific agenda - even a chimp can make a wide range of vocalisations and it would be easy to make a language out of them if that species had sufficient wit to do so.
Nobody said that science is wrong , on the contrary , materialism in science is = materialism as just a belief is , per definition, unscientific and false as a conception of nature= the materialist belief assumption that the universe is exclusively material , no wonder that the extensions of materialism in science and elsewhere are also false and unscientific ,relatively speaking , per definition and nature , including the materialist belief assumption that human language originated from other prior -to the existence of modern man or homo-sapiens , species , via exclusively physical and biological processes .
What makes you so sure then of your above allegations then ?
What makes your allegations regarding the origins of human language , or those of materialists for that matter , so 'scientific " and true then ?
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the materialist dogmatic belief system in science
Dogma and belief are the antithesis of science. If you stopped making selfcontradictory assertions about a subject of which you apparently know nothing, and started listening and thinking for yourself instead of quoting unsubstantiated garbage, you might learn something, just as we scientists do.
Oh , boy , you're , obviously , the one who cannot distill pure science from materialism in science .
You do still not get it yet , he ? What a shame for a so-called scientist .Pfff....
Has science ever proved the materialist "fact " , or rather the materialist belief assumption or conception of nature to be "true " ? Obviously not .
The materialist belief assumption , conception of nature or the materialist meta-paradigm in science that assume that the universe is exclusively ...material .
Do not confuse materialism as a dominating secular religion in all sciences and elsewhere , with ...pure science , once again, as the majority of scientists today do in fact .
Materialism that has been dominating all sciences and the rest , since the 19th century at least .
Worse , materialism in science that gets sold to the people as ...science .
Can't you understand just that, after all those kilometers of pages on that human consciousness thread ?
I am starting to doubt your very intellectual capacities , and judgement qualities ,really .
All beliefs for that matter , either the religious or the secular ones, including materialism thus , should be kept outside of science , and outside of science's jurisdiction as well .
P.S.: Human dominating beliefs in science and elsewhere ,are in fact unavoidable , the materialist naturalist reductionist neo-Darwinian false conception of nature , will be just replaced by a naturalist non-reductionist one , as Thomas Nagel's " Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false " stated , convincingly ....materialism in all sciences and elsewhere will be just replaced by yet another false conception of nature, as Nagel said in that book of his , or as he put it :
"The human will to believe is inexhaustible " .
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"The human will to believe is inexhaustible " .
Crap. I stopped believing when I was 11. There is indeed an inexhaustible supply of believers, but that isn't the same thing at all.
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"The human will to believe is inexhaustible " .
Crap. I stopped believing when I was 11. There is indeed an inexhaustible supply of believers, but that isn't the same thing at all.
Don't be stupid , come on :
Everyone on this planet does believe in something , someone , ....in the broader sense also , you are no exception to that rule .
Everyone has a certain conception of nature = a belief assumption at that, a cultural one .... .
Do you think that you are some sort of a Robinson Crusoe that has been born on his own on some isolated island, and by living all alone there ?
Even so, so to speak, every human has innate intrinsic inherent beliefs ...that get nornally shaped by culture , society , environment , nurture ...psych biology ...economy ...
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Gesture has the advantage over vocalization that it allows one to communicate without informing everyone present, e.g. ...
It is goose migration time, and one has to wonder why the birds are so vocal. Perhaps, other than humans, they are relatively safe from predators when in the air.
Birds, of course, are also the group of animals that can best mimic human speech, even better than the chimps.
The problem with gestures, of course, is that one must have line-of-sight, and the receiving party has to be paying attention.
What is the sign for "it's time to wake up"?
Is the idea that language grew out of sign language based on the fact that we've taught sign language to several chimps? The chimp larynx may limit their vocabulary, and our ability to understand it. Thus, sign may give access to a larger and more diverse "human" vocabulary.
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Don, I can't but helping noticing that every thread you begin, or are involved in, regardless of who participates in it, ends up embroiled in the same argument - materialism. It doesn't matter if the topic starts out with evolution, or consciousness, or the origin of human language, it always goes the same way. You aren't genuinely interested in discussing any of these topics. You don't care about what language is, what it does, or how it changed over time, or how it is different or similar in human groups or animals. Every topic is just bait for your religious, anti-Western civilization diatribe.
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Leave it to Don Of the Gaps to use words to deny the existence of language.
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It is goose migration time, and one has to wonder why the birds are so vocal.
The one in front of the V-formation is telling the slackers in their slipstream that they are knackered and it's time for someone else to take the lead position [:)] ...
The V formation greatly boosts the efficiency and range of flying birds, particularly over long migratory routes. All the birds except the first fly in the upwash from the wingtip vortices of the bird ahead. The upwash assists each bird in supporting its own weight in flight, in the same way a glider can climb or maintain height indefinitely in rising air. In a V formation of 25 members, each bird can achieve a reduction of induced drag by up to 65% and as a result increase their range by 71%. The birds flying at the tips and at the front are rotated in a timely cyclical fashion to spread flight fatigue equally among the flock members.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_formation#Aerodynamics
[ don't geese fly at night ? , if so making a noise would let each other know where everyone was in the darkness ]
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Don, I can't but helping noticing that every thread you begin, or are involved in, regardless of who participates in it, ends up embroiled in the same argument - materialism. It doesn't matter if the topic starts out with evolution, or consciousness, or the origin of human language, it always goes the same way. You aren't genuinely interested in discussing any of these topics. You don't care about what language is, what it does, or how it changed over time, or how it is different or similar in human groups or animals. Every topic is just bait for your religious, anti-Western civilization diatribe.
Wrong again, darling :
I am highly interested in pure science ,in life , consciousness, human language and in the rest of those purely scientific issues , + in their emergence evolution and origins you have no idea : i just would like to see science getting liberated from that false materialism in science it has been confined to since the 19 th century at least , as Sheldrake, T.Nagel and others have been doing , that's all
Well, that's my predicament , i cannot but try to make you , folks, realise that science is not materialism in science , obviously .
I just try to separate science from materialism = scientific facts results and approaches , from the materialist belief assumptions in science .
I do think that human language , for example , cannot be just a matter of physics and chemistry ,as materialism assumes it to be at least .
Science can tell us only about the physical biological material side of the human language , so.
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Leave it to Don Of the Gaps to use words to deny the existence of language.
That's exactly the other way around : this is all about materialism of the gaps = the materialist dogmatic belief system and materialist meta-paradigm dominating in science , that must not be confused with science , that's all .
So, i have been denying nothing (How can i deny the existence of language , be serious ) , i was just rejecting materialism in science , that's all .
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What makes you so sure then of your above allegations then ?
What makes your allegations regarding the origins of human language , or those of materialists for that matter , so 'scientific " and true then ?
If you come to this with an agenda that says "God done it", it blinds you to the open route by which language could have evolved. It is easy enough to see a route by which it could happen, so it would be very hard for you to get anywhere near to showing that it couldn't happen. All you can do is push the idea that it couldn't happen, and in order to do that you're requiring it to evolve from a sign language which is almost certainly not how human language came about. Humans needed spoken language in the hours of darkness when signs would be completely useless. It's the wrong path.
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What makes you so sure then of your above allegations then ?
What makes your allegations regarding the origins of human language , or those of materialists for that matter , so 'scientific " and true then ?
If you come to this with an agenda that says "God done it", it blinds you to the open route by which language could have evolved. It is easy enough to see a route by which it could happen, so it would be very hard for you to get anywhere near to showing that it couldn't happen. All you can do is push the idea that it couldn't happen, and in order to do that you're requiring it to evolve from a sign language which is almost certainly not how human language came about. Humans needed spoken language in the hours of darkness when signs would be completely useless. It's the wrong path.
Why do i keep getting misunderstood by most of you , people ? I wonder , Amazing .
I did not say that God did it = that would be an unscientific belief statement or belief assumption , that's not necessarily false , as materialism is .
All i am saying is that human language is also a matter of consciousness, sub-consciousness, human cognition, creativity , imagination, feelings , emotions , memory , not just a matter of biology or neurology environment nurture ....human language in that sense that could not have evolved from just physics and chemistry, via some prior to modern man species ?
We have been debating the origin or nature of consciousness, haven't we , and we are stuck in there , as a result mainly of the fact that materialism in science regarding the nature and origin of consciousness gets confused with science on the subject , by our friends ...
Can't you see just that ? I thought that you were the most intelligent member of this forum , i do not think i was wrong about just that .
P.S. : Science does not have to be materialistic : science is not the exclusive "property or monopoly " of materialism or materialists : as one can be a materialist secular believer and a scientist at the same time , so can one be a religious believer and a scientist at the same time also : the difference between the 2 believers scientists is ( The religious believers scientists ,and the secular materialist believers scientists ) : is that materialism is sold to the people as science ,in science and elsewhere , while the religious scientists believers do separate as they should and must do between their religious beliefs and pure science .
Besides, many religious scientists were / are and will be behind many great scientific achievements as well .
Can't you get just that ? Come on, i know you can ...
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Another question :
Why does human body language make up 93% of our human communication, while human verbal language just the remaining 7 % ?
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Everyone on this planet does believe in something , someone , ....in the broader sense also , you are no exception to that rule .
Belief: acceptance of a hypothesis in the absence of evidence. So pray tell me, omniscient one, which hypotheses I accept in the absence of evidence.
Why does human body language make up 93% of our human communication, while human verbal language just the remaining 7 % ?
Speak for yourself. I can't see you, but I can imagine you waving your arms. What is the semaphore for "materialism"? Meanwhile I run a business and fly around the sky almost entirely without seeing the people who I interact with.
Anyway as this is a science forum, how did you measure those percentages so precisely?
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Another question :
Why does human body language make up 93% of our human communication, while human verbal language just the remaining 7 % ?
That would be a difficult thing to measure. 93% percent of communication might be non verbal, but five words, like "Your hair is on fire" might be much more meaningful or motivating.
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Another question :
Why does human body language make up 93% of our human communication, while human verbal language just the remaining 7 % ?
That probably includes people walking down the street and all the little signals they give off that enable them to avoid collisions, though the percentages may date back to a time before the mobile phone became sugically attached to people's ears.
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What makes you so sure then of your above allegations then ?
What makes your allegations regarding the origins of human language , or those of materialists for that matter , so 'scientific " and true then ?
If you come to this with an agenda that says "God done it", it blinds you to the open route by which language could have evolved. It is easy enough to see a route by which it could happen, so it would be very hard for you to get anywhere near to showing that it couldn't happen. All you can do is push the idea that it couldn't happen, and in order to do that you're requiring it to evolve from a sign language which is almost certainly not how human language came about. Humans needed spoken language in the hours of darkness when signs would be completely useless. It's the wrong path.
Why do i keep getting misunderstood by most of you , people ? I wonder , Amazing.
I did not say that God did it = that would be an unscientific belief statement or belief assumption , that's not necessarily false , as materialism is .
I couldn't really tie your questions to what I'd said, so in "answering" them I took a shortcut and read between the lines, then just told you straight what the situation is, i.e. that there is a clear route by which language could evolve and that it would be one hell of a task trying to prove it couldn't happen when it so clearly could.
All i am saying is that human language is also a matter of consciousness, sub-consciousness, human cognition, creativity , imagination, feelings , emotions , memory , not just a matter of biology or neurology environment nurture ....human language in that sense that could not have evolved from just physics and chemistry, via some prior to modern man species ?
If you strip consciousness/feelings/emotions out of that, there is no obvious barrier to language evolving. Intelligence can evolve to increase, and lanugage will grow out of intelligence. The only difficulty is with consciousness itself and not language (although the words used to describe consciousness may be exceptions if they are describing a real phenomenon), so it's a mistake to take one problem and extend it into another area such as language and then claim there's a problem for language to evolve on that basis. There is no problem with language itself, regardless of whether there is a problem with consciousness.
We have been debating the origin or nature of consciousness, haven't we , and we are stuck in there , as a result mainly of the fact that materialism in science regarding the nature and origin of consciousness gets confused with science on the subject , by our friends ...
That's a discussion for a thread about consciousness rather than language.
P.S. : Science does not have to be materialistic : science is not the exclusive "property or monopoly " of materialism or materialists : as one can be a materialist secular believer and a scientist at the same time , so can one be a religious believer and a scientist at the same time also : the difference between the 2 believers scientists is ( The religious believers scientists ,and the secular materialist believers scientists ) : is that materialism is sold to the people as science ,in science and elsewhere , while the religious scientists believers do separate as they should and must do between their religious beliefs and pure science .
I don't have a great deal of interest in this materialism thing. So far as I'm concerned, science is about searching for truth and an understanding of reality. That reality includes anything that exists (i.e. is real) whether it is "material" or not, and it would even include a scientific study of "God" if such a creature was to present itself before us. Anything that you want to propose as an alternative to "materialism" is something that science should still be able to study and attempt to uncover the mechanisms behind it. Any point where you propose some kind of magic to fill a gap is a fail because magic cannot work without a mechanism behind it. However, it may be that you aren't proposing any such thing as magic and that you only have a beef with certain people within science who have hidden pieces of magic in their model which they refuse to acknowledge. I have a problem with such people too. They don't approve of reason as a tool of science except where it fits in with their beliefs, but whenever it contradicts their beliefs they immediately wave it off as "philosophy". They make a distinction between acceptable scientific reasoning and philosophical reasoning not on the basis of differences between the pieces of reasoning involved, but on the basis of what fits with their beliefs on a case by case basis. They are incapable of recognising that they do this because as soon as any depth of thinking is required to cover the ground, any logical argument which proves them wrong will be accused of being circular, even when it is fully linear. I have found this to be the norm in every field of study right up to the highest levels, and the only cure for it will be to provide everyone with logical thinking machines which have the patience to demonstrate time and time again to each individual in every discussion precisely how it is that the individual position which they hold is wrong by breaking it down for them into a chain of undeniable "x therefore y" steps for them. When a human tries to do this with even one individual, their response is to run here, there and everywhere pointing at things wherever they get complex and labelling things as errors which are not errors, running away from them over and over again and resorting to obfuscation tactics until the conversation turns into a trollfest. What is needed most of all in this world is an intelligent piece of software into which each individual can load their own personal model of reality and have the machine show up all the points which conflict with each other. It is only then that all the idiotic positions that so many people currently hold will begin to fall apart, because when this kind of machine calls someone stupid, it will be able to demonstate that it is right and will never tire of doing so.
So, rather than getting bogged down for my entire life in arguments that never end, I prefer to get out of them as soon as the other participants become incapable of taking anything on board, and then I get on with the task of trying to build the kind of intelligent software that will be able to solve all of these arguments in the future. Intelligent machines will probably still not be able to solve many of the problems (such as understanding consciousness), but at least it should get everyone with an ounce of intelligence to the point where they can see what the problems actually are rather them floundering about in areas where they aren't actually addressing real problems at all.
Besides, many religious scientists were / are and will be behind many great scientific achievements as well.
There is no bar to religious people making scientific advances, just as there is no bar to scientist who have little bits of magic here and there in their model of reality making advances. Many of the advances they make actually involve the elimination of bits of magic from the model by uncovering the hidden mechanisms behind things which were previously not understood, and it's only after the mechanisms have been found that the former existence of magic in the model is no longer denied by them, though they will typically rewrite history to hide their embarrassment, claiming that they always knew the problem was there and that they never saw the magic they previously relied on to fill the gap as valid solution.
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Leave it to Don Of the Gaps to use words to deny the existence of language.
That's exactly the other way around : this is all about materialism of the gaps = the materialist dogmatic belief system and materialist meta-paradigm dominating in science , that must not be confused with science , that's all .
So, i have been denying nothing (How can i deny the existence of language , be serious ) , i was just rejecting materialism in science , that's all .
Well, if the gaps are materialism, and the gaps themselves are gaps in materialism, then it's all materialism. You've proved your own irrelevance. Good job! Cookie?
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Leave it to Don Of the Gaps to use words to deny the existence of language.
That's exactly the other way around : this is all about materialism of the gaps = the materialist dogmatic belief system and materialist meta-paradigm dominating in science , that must not be confused with science , that's all .
So, i have been denying nothing (How can i deny the existence of language , be serious ) , i was just rejecting materialism in science , that's all .
Well, if the gaps are materialism, and the gaps themselves are gaps in materialism, then it's all materialism. You've proved your own irrelevance. Good job! Cookie?
No, honey : you got it all wrong again :
I can't resist the temptation of making you realise your delusion : that would not be nice of me not to do that , on my way out of here , on my way home :
Since materialism reduces the whole universe to just physics and chemistry , so, materialism cannot but "deliver " some magical materialism of the gaps , in the form of all those materialist magical "emergence computational" trick performances ,regarding the origins and nature of consciousness, human cognition ...
Note that i do not reject the true emergence phenomena at the exclusively biological physical material levels ...
Materialism is obviously and undeniably false , unscientific = just a belief , and absurd at that ....
Bon appetit eating your own cookie ...
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Thanks, I just thought I'd share that rout of the "God of the Gaps" crowd with you, but it might not go over big in your 'hood. Do you live by de Nile?
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Thanks, I just thought I'd share that rout of the "God of the Gaps" crowd with you, but it might not go over big in your 'hood. Do you live by de Nile?
Nice try , thanks anyway :
There is in fact no such a thing such as "God of the gaps " = everything and being has been created by God, God's creation that's still an ongoing process , as the universe is still expanding :
We just have to try to understand and try to explain what we can , regarding God's creation, via our human limited faculties : via science mainly , reason , logic ....that do cover just a tiny piece of reality though :
There is way much more to the universe out there , within and without , than just what those human limited faculties + their technological and other extensions can reveal, obviously :
So, metaphorically and ironically speaking , do not try to behave act think feel , experience things, see hear taste smell ....things , concepts , ideas ...or beings , in the same fashion like an ant would "do " on the back of an elephant , an ant that would assume that that tiny part of that elephant where it happens to be standing , moving , living , resting ....is all what there is to that elephant , let alone that the rest of the universe is all what there is to it ...............
I do live on this tiny insignificant planet , as you happen to do , amidst unimaginable oceans of billions and billions of galaxies out there , and maybe much more ...
So, to pretend to be able to know "everything" there is to know within and without , via some sort of a theory of everything = a theory of nothing , is not only an idiotic belief assumption , but it is also an untrue one+ an unscientific one , obviously .
Cheers .
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What makes you so sure then of your above allegations then ?
What makes your allegations regarding the origins of human language , or those of materialists for that matter , so 'scientific " and true then ?
If you come to this with an agenda that says "God done it", it blinds you to the open route by which language could have evolved. It is easy enough to see a route by which it could happen, so it would be very hard for you to get anywhere near to showing that it couldn't happen. All you can do is push the idea that it couldn't happen, and in order to do that you're requiring it to evolve from a sign language which is almost certainly not how human language came about. Humans needed spoken language in the hours of darkness when signs would be completely useless. It's the wrong path.
Why do i keep getting misunderstood by most of you , people ? I wonder , Amazing.
I did not say that God did it = that would be an unscientific belief statement or belief assumption , that's not necessarily false , as materialism is .
I couldn't really tie your questions to what I'd said, so in "answering" them I took a shortcut and read between the lines, then just told you straight what the situation is, i.e. that there is a clear route by which language could evolve and that it would be one hell of a task trying to prove it couldn't happen when it so clearly could.
All i am saying is that human language is also a matter of consciousness, sub-consciousness, human cognition, creativity , imagination, feelings , emotions , memory , not just a matter of biology or neurology environment nurture ....human language in that sense that could not have evolved from just physics and chemistry, via some prior to modern man species ?
If you strip consciousness/feelings/emotions out of that, there is no obvious barrier to language evolving. Intelligence can evolve to increase, and lanugage will grow out of intelligence. The only difficulty is with consciousness itself and not language (although the words used to describe consciousness may be exceptions if they are describing a real phenomenon), so it's a mistake to take one problem and extend it into another area such as language and then claim there's a problem for language to evolve on that basis. There is no problem with language itself, regardless of whether there is a problem with consciousness.
We have been debating the origin or nature of consciousness, haven't we , and we are stuck in there , as a result mainly of the fact that materialism in science regarding the nature and origin of consciousness gets confused with science on the subject , by our friends ...
That's a discussion for a thread about consciousness rather than language.
P.S. : Science does not have to be materialistic : science is not the exclusive "property or monopoly " of materialism or materialists : as one can be a materialist secular believer and a scientist at the same time , so can one be a religious believer and a scientist at the same time also : the difference between the 2 believers scientists is ( The religious believers scientists ,and the secular materialist believers scientists ) : is that materialism is sold to the people as science ,in science and elsewhere , while the religious scientists believers do separate as they should and must do between their religious beliefs and pure science .
I don't have a great deal of interest in this materialism thing. So far as I'm concerned, science is about searching for truth and an understanding of reality. That reality includes anything that exists (i.e. is real) whether it is "material" or not, and it would even include a scientific study of "God" if such a creature was to present itself before us. Anything that you want to propose as an alternative to "materialism" is something that science should still be able to study and attempt to uncover the mechanisms behind it. Any point where you propose some kind of magic to fill a gap is a fail because magic cannot work without a mechanism behind it. However, it may be that you aren't proposing any such thing as magic and that you only have a beef with certain people within science who have hidden pieces of magic in their model which they refuse to acknowledge. I have a problem with such people too. They don't approve of reason as a tool of science except where it fits in with their beliefs, but whenever it contradicts their beliefs they immediately wave it off as "philosophy". They make a distinction between acceptable scientific reasoning and philosophical reasoning not on the basis of differences between the pieces of reasoning involved, but on the basis of what fits with their beliefs on a case by case basis. They are incapable of recognising that they do this because as soon as any depth of thinking is required to cover the ground, any logical argument which proves them wrong will be accused of being circular, even when it is fully linear. I have found this to be the norm in every field of study right up to the highest levels, and the only cure for it will be to provide everyone with logical thinking machines which have the patience to demonstrate time and time again to each individual in every discussion precisely how it is that the individual position which they hold is wrong by breaking it down for them into a chain of undeniable "x therefore y" steps for them. When a human tries to do this with even one individual, their response is to run here, there and everywhere pointing at things wherever they get complex and labelling things as errors which are not errors, running away from them over and over again and resorting to obfuscation tactics until the conversation turns into a trollfest. What is needed most of all in this world is an intelligent piece of software into which each individual can load their own personal model of reality and have the machine show up all the points which conflict with each other. It is only then that all the idiotic positions that so many people currently hold will begin to fall apart, because when this kind of machine calls someone stupid, it will be able to demonstate that it is right and will never tire of doing so.
So, rather than getting bogged down for my entire life in arguments that never end, I prefer to get out of them as soon as the other participants become incapable of taking anything on board, and then I get on with the task of trying to build the kind of intelligent software that will be able to solve all of these arguments in the future. Intelligent machines will probably still not be able to solve many of the problems (such as understanding consciousness), but at least it should get everyone with an ounce of intelligence to the point where they can see what the problems actually are rather them floundering about in areas where they aren't actually addressing real problems at all.
Besides, many religious scientists were / are and will be behind many great scientific achievements as well.
There is no bar to religious people making scientific advances, just as there is no bar to scientist who have little bits of magic here and there in their model of reality making advances. Many of the advances they make actually involve the elimination of bits of magic from the model by uncovering the hidden mechanisms behind things which were previously not understood, and it's only after the mechanisms have been found that the former existence of magic in the model is no longer denied by them, though they will typically rewrite history to hide their embarrassment, claiming that they always knew the problem was there and that they never saw the magic they previously relied on to fill the gap as valid solution.
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See my response to our gizelda here above , friend .
Science can cover only a tiny piece of reality .....
Man is also a whole package : body and mind : you cannot reduce man ,or some of man's qualities properties ,such as human language , to just physical biological material ones to fit your purpose , no way + the whole is not the sum of its parts , obviously ,either
To say that you or any oneelse for that matter can develop some sort of software you referred to that would be able to address and maybe even solve somehow the human intrinsic irrational tendency , that's part of the human nature , to stick to irrational subjective beliefs , even in the face of common sense , reason, logic , science ... is simply ludicrous, otherwise it would be easy to create or manufacture "sentient alive " machines = cannot be done, obviously .
Man or life as a whole are no machines, or computers : it is about time that you let go of that machine computer analogy regarding life as a whole , that's been dominating in science for so long now ...
Have you ever encountered or seen any machine computer for that matter that's capable of growing from some of its smallest parts genes , that's capable of creativity, felxibility adaptation evolution, that's capable of reproduction replication, self-reproduction self-replication,self-organization, self-maintenance , self-sustainance , that's capable of those unique to life metabolisms .............?
Do tell me when you have , please ...
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Evolution is a slow process, so of course I haven't seen it happen with machines. Everything that we see in nature though fits in with the machine "analogy" except for consciousness.
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Evolution is a slow process, so of course I haven't seen it happen with machines. Everything that we see in nature though fits in with the machine "analogy" except for consciousness.
Quickly then, gotta go :
Everything we see in nature "fits in " with the machine "analogy or metaphor " except ...the nature of life (Can you explain life just via just physics and chemistry ? describing life via just physics and chemistry is no full explanation of life, no explanation of life ,period ) , except the nature of human intellect and consciousness, except consciousness in all living beings and things , except the nature of human emotions feelings , except the nature of human love , except the nature of human conscience , except the nature of human ethics ....the list is still long .
Living orgranisms are , obviously , no machines : see above .
Later , alligator .
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Everything we see in nature "fits in " with the machine "analogy or metaphor " except ...the nature of life
No. Life is easy because it is just chemistry. Consciousness is the only real difficulty - the rest is just complexity making it hard to set out exact mechanisms, but the mechanisms are already understood in principle for everything except consciousness.
(Can you explain life just via just physics and chemistry ? describing life via just physics and chemistry is no full explanation of life, no explanation of life ,period ) ,
There is plenty of explanation available to satisfy me that everything about life is an extension of chemistry and physics, except for consciousness.
except the nature of human intellect and consciousness,
Human intellect is just mechanistic applied reasoning (though typically done with many errors).
except consciousness in all living beings and things ,
Agreed
except the nature of human emotions feelings ,
Agreed - they are part of consciousness.
except the nature of human love ,
Agreed - it is part of consciousness.
except the nature of human conscience , except the nature of human ethics
Which again relates to consciousness - if there's no such thing as suffering, there is no role for ethics.
....the list is still long .
The list is short: consciousness.
Living orgranisms are , obviously , no machines : see above .
They are obviously chemical machines, but there is a problem with consciousness as it's the part that doesn't find an explanation yet in our current scientific knowledge, not even in principle.
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except consciousness in all living beings and things ,
Agreed
except the nature of human emotions feelings ,
Agreed - they are part of consciousness.
Are you sure about that David, that emotions are not another kind of thought or reasoning process?
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There is in fact no such a thing such as "God of the gaps "
By denying that there is such a concept as "God of the Gaps" you are not commenting on its truth or falsity, but we just proved that it was false.
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except consciousness in all living beings and things ,
Agreed
except the nature of human emotions feelings ,
Agreed - they are part of consciousness.
Are you sure about that David, that emotions are not another kind of thought or reasoning process?
Whitehead or somoneelse stated so logically that emotions and feelings are just thought-projects in the making in fact :
Say , you are grabbed by an intense emotion or feeling : they are just a process that ends in being translated into certain ...thoughts at their resting points .
Feelings and emotions are just processes that translate themselves into ...thought thus .
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There is in fact no such a thing such as "God of the gaps "
By denying that there is such a concept as "God of the Gaps" you are not commenting on its truth or falsity, but we just proved that it was false.
"God of the gaps thing " is just a false materialist belief assumption way to say that religion just tries to "fill in the gaps " that are momentarily not "explained " by science , while the latter 's realm and jurisdiction are just material empirical = science , per definition, can neither prove nor disprove beliefs , either the religious or the secular ones , sis .
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You're too modest comrade. Your proof that "God of the Gaps" is false is a triumphant accomplishment. Don Quichotte will be hailed far and wide for bringing God to par with witches, goblins and easterbunnies. Hell, they might even rename halloween in your honor. Bigtime, Don, bigtime.
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Everything we see in nature "fits in " with the machine "analogy or metaphor " except ...the nature of life
No. Life is easy because it is just chemistry. Consciousness is the only real difficulty - the rest is just complexity making it hard to set out exact mechanisms, but the mechanisms are already understood in principle for everything except consciousness
.
Life is not just physics and chemistry , otherwise just try to explain consciousness then = you cannot just isolate life from its conscious state , just to reduce life that way to just physics and chemistry , just to fit your purpose = life is a whole package = mind and body = mind + physics and chemistry = mind is obviously not a matter of physics and chemistry .
(Can you explain life just via just physics and chemistry ? describing life via just physics and chemistry is no full explanation of life, no explanation of life ,period ) ,
There is plenty of explanation available to satisfy me that everything about life is an extension of chemistry and physics, except for consciousness.
Well, see above : life is mind and body = a whole package .
Try to explain the most important component of life then = consciousness via just physics and chemistry .
except the nature of human intellect and consciousness,
Human intellect is just mechanistic applied reasoning (though typically done with many errors).
Humans are the only species that do possess reason , the latter that can reflect on and question itself within and without ,reason that can question its own reasoning process , its epistemology , its validity and truth and beyond ; reason that goes beyond the external pragmatic survival necessities or survival pragmatic appearances of reality .
except consciousness in all living beings and things ,
Agreed
How did that consciousness get to exist in physical material biological processes such as life ,and inanimate matter then : consciousness and material processes that are inseparable ...
except the nature of human emotions feelings ,
Agreed - they are part of consciousness.
Mind or soul with a big T contains the mind with a small t , contains emotions feelings , intuition ...
except the nature of human love ,
Agreed - it is part of consciousness.
Love is part of the sub-consciousness as well .
except the nature of human conscience , except the nature of human ethics
Which again relates to consciousness - if there's no such thing as suffering, there is no role for ethics.
In short : mind relates to body = consciousness relates to body = if you wanna understand them fully , if you wanna understand life fully , the inanimate world fully even , you gotta try to understand them as a whole undividable package = the whole is not the sum of its parts .
And you cannot do all that just via physics and chemistry thus .
....the list is still long .
The list is short: consciousness.
The list is long = the nature of the conscious life as a whole , and conscious inanimate matter as whole packages = the whole is not the sum of its parts = cannot be reduced to just physics and chemistry , as materialism wanna make people believe they are .
Living orgranisms are , obviously , no machines : see above .
They are obviously chemical machines, but there is a problem with consciousness as it's the part that doesn't find an explanation yet in our current scientific knowledge, not even in principle.
Science can only tell us about the material empirical side of reality : the conscious life and conscious inanimate matter as whole undividable packages are thus mind and body = not just physics and chemsitry .
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You're too modest comrade. Your proof that "God of the Gaps" is false is a triumphant accomplishment. Don Quichotte will be hailed far and wide for bringing God to par with witches, goblins and easterbunnies. Hell, they might even rename halloween in your honor. Bigtime, Don, bigtime.
Once again ,dear deluded -materialist sis :
Science can neither prove nor disprove beliefs , either the secular or the religious ones = all beliefs are thus outside of both science's realm and jurisdiction, but , not all beliefs are necessarily false , as materialism obviously and undeniably ....is .
P.S: Materialism as just a false conception of nature , as just a secular religion in science has absolutely nothing to do with science .
materialism as a belief that's , per definition, unscientific + false = science must be liberated from materialism and must be set free thus , materialism that has been hijacking and dominating in all sciences for that matter and elsewhere , since the 19th century at least = science today remains confined within those false unscientific and outdated false walls of materialism' prison it gotta be liberated from , sooner or later = inevitable = just a question of time thus = science is confined to a materialist false outdated and unscientific belief that dates back to the 19th century .
Final note :
Human beliefs are unavoidable in science = that false and outdated materialism will be just replaced by yet another false conception of nature in science = the human will to believe is inexhaustible ...indeed .
Need a ...cookie ?
Bon appetit ,sis .
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Are you sure about that David, that emotions are not another kind of thought or reasoning process?
100% sure. Emotions are just feelings: qualia. If these qualia are actually real, they are used in the process of driving behaviours. Love is a feeling that drives behaviour. Pain is a feeling that drives behaviour. Nasty tastes are feelings that drive behaviour. Boredom is a feeling/emotion which drives behaviour. They're all the same kind of thing.
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Life is not just physics and chemistry , otherwise just try to explain consciousness then = you cannot just isolate life from its conscious state , just to reduce life that way to just physics and chemistry , just to fit your purpose = life is a whole package = mind and body = mind + physics and chemistry = mind is obviously not a matter of physics and chemistry .
Consciousness is an addition to life and not an essential part of it. Plants lack it (or at least, it has no functional role in them - they could be feeling all sorts of qualia, but then so could a rock for all we know).
Well, see above : life is mind and body = a whole package .
Try to explain the most important component of life then = consciousness via just physics and chemistry .
Stop ignoring plants. Many living things have no mind/brain. Such things are chemical machines. You could also add a brain to a living thing (thereby making what is essentially an animal) without adding consciousness if that brain works like a conventional computer. It only takes a step beyond that if you can find some way to add actual consciousness to it, and that would apply equally to a robot: without consciousness it is a machine which may or may not be part of "life", and with consciousness you have something extra attached which would be no less a thing for being added to a robot or a living machine.
Humans are the only species that do possess reason , the latter that can reflect on and question itself within and without ,reason that can question its own reasoning process , its epistemology , its validity and truth and beyond ; reason that goes beyond the external pragmatic survival necessities or survival pragmatic appearances of reality .
The first bit isn't true, but it is true that we can reason better than other species, just as an AGI system can reason better than a calculator. It's just a matter of how many different kinds of processing it can handle.
How did that consciousness get to exist in physical material biological processes such as life ,and inanimate matter then : consciousness and material processes that are inseparable ...
We won't know the answer to that until we understand how consciousness works.
Love is part of the sub-consciousness as well .
How does that work given that it's below (= outside of) consciousness?
In short : mind relates to body = consciousness relates to body = if you wanna understand them fully , if you wanna understand life fully , the inanimate world fully even , you gotta try to understand them as a whole undividable package = the whole is not the sum of its parts .
And you cannot do all that just via physics and chemistry thus .
No, you have to break down the package into parts and remove all the ones that can be accounted for mechanistically until you're left with the interesting parts of the package that can't. There's no point in mixing the explainable parts back in with the mess of the unexplained parts and then presenting the resulting mess as something you don't understand because you're overcomplicating the mess which is quite bad enough already without the added unnecessary obfuscation.
....the list is still long .
The list is short: consciousness.
The list is long = the nature of the conscious life as a whole , and conscious inanimate matter as whole packages = the whole is not the sum of its parts = cannot be reduced to just physics and chemistry , as materialism wanna make people believe they are .
Be very careful with that. As soon as you say "the whole is not the sum of its parts", you are pushing magical emergence. The whole is never greater than the sum of its parts.
Science can only tell us about the material empirical side of reality : the conscious life and conscious inanimate matter as whole undividable packages are thus mind and body = not just physics and chemsitry .
If consciousness is real, there must be a means by which it interacts with materials, and that is something that science should be able to access and observe. If there is such an interaction, it cannot be beyond reach of science, so if science can show that there is no such interaction it will show that consciousness is a fake phenomenon in that the data our brains produce which makes claims that consciousness is real will be shown to be a mere fiction generated by rules designed to generate false claims.
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Whitehead or somoneelse stated so logically that emotions and feelings are just thought-projects in the making
I've heard intuition described in that way, but not emotion. There are experiments in which people have to make predictions (such as what card will come up next, or what light will flash.) There is a pattern to the cards or flashes, but it is too complicated for most people to identify before the end of the experiment. Never the less, their guesses become more accurate as time goes on, despite the fact that participants say "there is no pattern" or "if there is, I don't know what it is, I was was just guessing." The subconscious can be logical.
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I can understand how some people could be upset that you've upset their "God of the Gaps" applecart, Don, so here's what you do. Concoct a theory that science doesn't explain everything, that there's something missing, a gap in their knowledge. Don't know what you'd call it, something opposite to materialism. They're simple, god-fleeing people, they'll forgive you, and let you eat your cookie in peace.
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Whitehead or somoneelse stated so logically that emotions and feelings are just thought-projects in the making
Maybe .
Man is a whole package though : mind and body : man cannot be divided into separate categories : body , consciousness, emotions , feelings , reason, intuition = they are all a whole package working together = the whole is not the sum of its parts .
I've heard intuition described in that way, but not emotion. There are experiments in which people have to make predictions (such as what card will come up next, or what light will flash.) There is a pattern to the cards or flashes, but it is too complicated for most people to identify before the end of the experiment. Never the less, their guesses become more accurate as time goes on, despite the fact that participants say "there is no pattern" or "if there is, I don't know what it is, I was was just guessing." The subconscious can be logical.
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Whitehead or somoneelse stated so logically that emotions and feelings are just thought-projects in the making
I've heard intuition described in that way, but not emotion. There are experiments in which people have to make predictions (such as what card will come up next, or what light will flash.) There is a pattern to the cards or flashes, but it is too complicated for most people to identify before the end of the experiment. Never the less, their guesses become more accurate as time goes on, despite the fact that participants say "there is no pattern" or "if there is, I don't know what it is, I was was just guessing." The subconscious can be logical.
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Maybe .
Man is a whole package though : mind and body : man cannot be divided into separate categories : body , consciousness, emotions , feelings , reason, intuition = they are all a whole package working together = the whole is not the sum of its parts .
P.S.: Trained developed experienced informed ....intuition might turn out to be the highest form of intellect .
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Here's a name for your new theory, Don; "Goblins of the Gapes". Catchy, huh. You could pitch it as a Hollywood spooktacular, starring Tom C. as Don Q. He'd be right up your alley. With modern special effects you could work miracles. That brass ring is so close you can smell it.
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And yet another lump of irrelevant Sheldrake. Are you paying him a royalty? He'll be very upset if I tell him you aren't.
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And yet another lump of irrelevant Sheldrake. Are you paying him a royalty? He'll be very upset if I tell him you aren't.
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Try to prove him wrong ,just in relation to that introduction of his though , silly .
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Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.
To demonstrate the truth of any subsequent statement, you have to interview at least 50% of all scientists. Rupert hasn't been alive long enough to do so.
Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather
than living organisms with goals of their own.
Obvious nonsense. Has he never seen a dog? What on earth is his definition of "living"?
The essence of mechanism is mindless repetition. Like the sort of thing (it can hardly be a sentient being) that copies and pastes the same passage of nonsense regardless of the question. Vide Einstein on insanity.
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Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.
To demonstrate the truth of any subsequent statement, you have to interview at least 50% of all scientists. Rupert hasn't been alive long enough to do so.
It is a fact that those and other materialist dogmatic belief assumptions are taken for granted by most scientists , by the majority of them= the majority of scientists today are ...materialists .
Worse : the materialist dogmatic belief system has been dominating in all sciences and elsewhere , since the 19 th century at least .
Worst : the mainstream "scientific" dominating world view in science is ...materialist .
Everything is essentially mechanical. Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather
than living organisms with goals of their own.
Obvious nonsense. Has he never seen a dog? What on earth is his definition of "living"?
haha
Obvious non-sense indeed : that happens to be the metarialist mechanistic world view in science , Sheldrake was talking about , a materialist mechanistic world view, he obviously ...rejects .
The essence of mechanism is mindless repetition. Like the sort of thing (it can hardly be a sentient being) that copies and pastes the same passage of nonsense regardless of the question. Vide Einstein on insanity.
Since that mechanistic materialist world view has been dominating in science (since the 19th century up to the present day ) , and gets sold to the people as science and as the "scientific " world view , it's pretty logical to post these true words of Sheldrake in relation to every scientific issue for that matter ...= reality, life , the universe as a whole , nature thus ... are not just physical material, as materialism wanna make the people believe they are .
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Are you sure about that David, that emotions are not another kind of thought or reasoning process?
100% sure. Emotions are just feelings: qualia. If these qualia are actually real, they are used in the process of driving behaviours. Love is a feeling that drives behaviour. Pain is a feeling that drives behaviour. Nasty tastes are feelings that drive behaviour. Boredom is a feeling/emotion which drives behaviour. They're all the same kind of thing.
So if these drivers serve a purpose, and have a function, and effects that are often very predictable, how are they not machine like?
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But getting back to the origin of language, since I think that was what this thread was about, something I always wondered about with other animals and whatever sounds they make - what do they think when they hear their own calls, and do they ever mix it up with sounds another animal is making?
If an animal like a bird or lizard is operating only on automated instinct, would it ever think the call that it just made, and heard, is the call of a rival male, the same way birds sometimes attack their own reflection in glass?
When did humans start "talking to themselves" instead of simply using vocalizations to signal others?
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So Tom turned you down, Don. What were you thinking? You turned a classic like "Goblins of the Gapes" into a porn flick. Is this what you get from reading Sheldrake? Glad I never looked at that crap. Is that what you smell? Oh, no, smell isn't made of odors, language isn't made of words, the universe isn't made of material, consciousness isn't made out of... Oh, wait, you're not clear. Better get tested. You need a certain amount of cred to understand this stuff, and of course, like they say, you're not even wrong.
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DQ:
It is a fact that those and other materialist dogmatic belief assumptions are taken for granted by most scientists
Please provide a credible peer-reviewed source for this assertion, or confine your contributions to "new theories".
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Meanwhile, back in the realms of sanity, it is interesting to listen to common bird songs slowed down to the point where the human ear can distinguish the inner content. It seems that the working vocabulary of a robin is similar in extent and complexity to that of an air traffic controller, which rather reinforces my original point that animals communicate to the extent required for survival.
Given the choice between "On a purely materialist basis my consciousness, with qualia expanded by a mechanistic radar device, suggests there to be an existential threat to your presumed passage having the apparent form of an aircraft...." and "alfa charlie turn right twenty degrees to avoid converging traffic", I'd go for the latter every time. Apparently the birds agree with me.
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So if these drivers serve a purpose, and have a function, and effects that are often very predictable, how are they not machine like?
By being feelings/qualia. There's no problem creating a model which shows a drive process whereby the response is greater in proportion to the size of an input signal, but there are no feelings involved in that. You can try to add feelings to the model, but they are superfluous to the actual functionality and the feeling aspect of them should also be impossible for the system to detect (unless there's something exotic going on which science currently has no handle on). The most obvious problem for science is to identify something that actually suffers when pain is experienced, though the same problem actually applies to any other kind of feeling. Pain cannot be experienced without an experiencer/sufferer, and that sufferer can't be something so lacking in substance as a geometrical arrangement (with all the things of substance which are arranged by it being ruled out as sufferers). Even if you can identify a sufferer though, you still have to find a way to extract its direct knowledge of suffering from it (where that knowledge of suffering isn't knowledge in the form of data but as direct experience).
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So Tom turned you down, Don. What were you thinking? You turned a classic like "Goblins of the Gapes" into a porn flick. Is this what you get from reading Sheldrake? Glad I never looked at that crap. Is that what you smell? Oh, no, smell isn't made of odors, language isn't made of words, the universe isn't made of material, consciousness isn't made out of... Oh, wait, you're not clear. Better get tested. You need a certain amount of cred to understand this stuff, and of course, like they say, you're not even wrong.
Try to prove Sheldrake wrong then, just regarding what he said in relation to materialism then .
Please try to be ontopic also , while you are at it .
Deal ?
P.S.: What do you think about the materialist version of the origin of human language by the way ? How come you all mix up those materialist beliefs in science with the latter ?
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So if these drivers serve a purpose, and have a function, and effects that are often very predictable, how are they not machine like?
By being feelings/qualia. There's no problem creating a model which shows a drive process whereby the response is greater in proportion to the size of an input signal, but there are no feelings involved in that.
Ok, that's good enough for me. The function of emotions seems enough to salvage them from the pure qualia of consciousness box and put them into the machine box.
Even reasoning and analytic thought processes are accompanied by some sensation or feeling. Curiosity? Confusion? The sense of certainty of a right answer? The nagging feeling of a tip-of-the-tongue experience when you know you know something but can't quite name it? Doubt? I don't know if there is a computational equivalent to doubt, in which one thinks one has the right answer based on all the available information but still thinks that it could be wrong. Does it stem from a more primitive feeling, as in "My predator acts like he doesn't know I'm here, but what if I'm wrong, should I run or stay put?"
One could argue that emotion is too broad a term. Some people sub divide it into things like physiological arousal, cognitive appraisal, the conscious experience or feeling of an emotion, action tendency, and expressive behavior. But I don't think dissecting emotion completely lets one off the hook as in "Okay feeling goes in the qualia box, but arousal or expression goes in the machine box." Fear would be a good example of an emotion that is harder to dissect in that way, especially since a person can be afraid before one has had time to identify or figure out the cause, but can also fear things one has had a great deal of time to consider. And fear as a big effect on memory and aversion to things in the future, both rational and irrational.
If it sounds like I've contradicted myself along the way, I probably have. I'm not trying to formulate an argument, or convince anyone of anything, really just figure it out myself.
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CliffordK:
Stop editing my posts , please : you have no right whatsoever to do just that .
Do not be an inquisitor either .Stop your silly and biased censorship also .
Who gave you the "right " to mess with people's posts anyway ?
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The function of emotions seems enough to salvage them from the pure qualia of consciousness box and put them into the machine box.
You have to separate out feelings from functions. Pain is not an emotion, but it is a feeling associated with a function which is to guide you away from damage. Emotions are also feelings which are associated with drives, such as with love where it guides you to care for things that are beneficial to your life. What actually distinguishes emotions from other feelings is simply that they are triggered by events in the brain rather than by external inputs. Colours, sounds, smells, pain, touch, heat sensors, balance sensors, etc. are things that result in qualia being experienced which are not labelled as emotions. Emotions may then be triggered in response to music, scenes or the sight of something disasterous befalling someone, but the cause of that is internal, coming from the results of processing inputs and not from the simple inputs themselves.
Even reasoning and analytic thought processes are accompanied by some sensation or feeling. Curiosity? Confusion? The sense of certainty of a right answer? The nagging feeling of a tip-of-the-tongue experience when you know you know something but can't quite name it? Doubt? I don't know if there is a computational equivalent to doubt, in which one thinks one has the right answer based on all the available information but still thinks that it could be wrong. Does it stem from a more primitive feeling, as in "My predator acts like he doesn't know I'm here, but what if I'm wrong, should I run or stay put?"
There appear to be feelings that go along with everything that goes through the main processor in the brain, such as a feeling of understanding whatever is the focus of attention at any point in time, or feeling confused about it if something doesn't appear to add up properly. A feeling of doubt about it would be there if it isn't clearly correct. These are all things that don't need to have feelings involved at all and the feeling aspect of them doesn't appear to fit in the model at all
One could argue that emotion is too broad a term. Some people sub divide it into things like physiological arousal, cognitive appraisal, the conscious experience or feeling of an emotion, action tendency, and expressive behavior. But I don't think dissecting emotion completely lets one off the hook as in "Okay feeling goes in the qualia box, but arousal or expression goes in the machine box." Fear would be a good example of an emotion that is harder to dissect in that way, especially since a person can be afraid before one has had time to identify or figure out the cause, but can also fear things one has had a great deal of time to consider. And fear as a big effect on memory and aversion to things in the future, both rational and irrational.
You can make different sets of qualia and separate them on the basis that some are associated with vision, some with hearing, some with internal triggers, etc., but all of them are qualia/feelings/sensations. The different sets are merely dividing them on the basis of associated functionalities and say nothing about the qualia themselves. Fear is a danger warning where the actual feeling is tied to the amount of calculated danger. The feeling is simple, but the trigger is complex and can be affected heavily by different thoughts from moment to moment, some of which may be subconscious and it therefore may not be clear why you are afraid of something, but some background process has detected something that is suggestive of a threat.
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The function of emotions seems enough to salvage them from the pure qualia of consciousness box and put them into the machine box.
You have to separate out feelings from functions. Pain is not an emotion, but it is a feeling associated with a function which is to guide you away from damage. Emotions are also feelings which are associated with drives, such as with love where it guides you to care for things that are beneficial to your life. What actually distinguishes emotions from other feelings is simply that they are triggered by events in the brain rather than by external inputs. Colours, sounds, smells, pain, touch, heat sensors, balance sensors, etc. are things that result in qualia being experienced which are not labelled as emotions. Emotions may then be triggered in response to music, scenes or the sight of something disasterous befalling someone, but the cause of that is internal, coming from the results of processing inputs and not from the simple inputs themselves.
An interesting aspect of function related to emotion is maintaining a response or state over time. Hormones like adrenalin and epinephrine duplicate and amplify the effects of sympathetic nerves. The explanation for this duplication in physiology books is that it sustains changes in state, like the fight or flight response - keeps it going longer. Some hormones function as neurotransmitters and but also have direct effects on target cells that have receptors for them. Nerves are quick, work point to point, but stop firing once the stimulus stops, and sometimes they fatigue or adapt and ignore a repetitive stimulation. Hormones take 30 minutes or longer to clear the system.
A person can and does cognitively assess a threat, and can even make plans for avoiding or dealing with it in the future. But once the threat is not apparent and the brain is focused on other cognitive tasks, the threat is almost forgotten, even though it may lurk around the next corner. Emotions like fear seem to sustain the response longer, and in extreme cases, like post traumatic stress disorder, hyper-vigilence and the unpleasant qualia that goes with it, is maintained for months or years. Fear and happiness are internally generated sensations of pain and pleasure when the stimulus is not present. After all, it's almost pointless to experience pain after the predator has sunk his teeth into you, since you are going to be dead soon anyway, and not likely to pass on your genes. But arguably, it gets one no closer to understanding qualia, if you see physical pain as qualia as well, not just a signal amplifier of some kind.
It's a fair request to say "Show me the links between neurons and consciousness, show me how you get from A to B," since that is what I presume you are expected to do in your work every day. On the other hand, it's difficult for me to believe that all the specific structures in the brain and the biochemistry associated with emotion are just bells and flashing lights that are set off as the pin ball of consciousness gets slammed around. They would seem to be responsible in some way, especially when interfering with those structures or chemistry, changes emotional response and experience, and often changes cognition and what is being attended to.
I do sometimes wonder, though, whether qualia are illusions. After all, the brain does convince itself that it is more conscious than it is. We fill in the blind spot in our visual field from the optic nerve. We ignore the nose on our own face, and believe we have a clear and colorful 180 degree view even though we can't distinguish colors in our peripheral vision. We assume factual knowledge we don't have (I saw an experiment in which a group of people were asked to draw a bicycle, and even though everyone was confident they knew how a bicycle worked, only one of them drew anything that would actually function as a bicycle.) So if the brain can tell all these little lies, maybe consciousness is just one big fat lie.
But if it is an illusion, it's a stubborn one. As Stephen Hawking said, “I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street." It may be an illusion we are simply stuck with and can't make sense of the world without it. Yeah, I'm aware that statement is somehow a contradiction of itself. As was that one. And that one, too.
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The chemicals released in the brain are part of the network of causation that leads to the brain making decisions, different chemicals triggering different emotions at some point somewhere in the system (if feelings are real). I don't think we're going to get to the answers though until we can model the brain well enough to track back the claims that come out of it to see the evidence they were based on. My hope (why do I hope it though?) is that there is another system of processing that computer science does not yet understand, a system which depends on qualia and something of substance that experiences them for real (an I in the machine) and which is somehow able to make itself known to the information system that generates the data claiming that consciousness is real. I don't think this is something anyone's going to work out until we've actually seen it and discovered how it works.
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By the way, I can draw a proper bicycle - I like to put one in my signature using the two "o"s as wheels.
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The chemicals released in the brain are part of the network of causation that leads to the brain making decisions, different chemicals triggering different emotions at some point somewhere in the system (if feelings are real). I don't think we're going to get to the answers though until we can model the brain well enough to track back the claims that come out of it to see the evidence they were based on. My hope (why do I hope it though?) is that there is another system of processing that computer science does not yet understand, a system which depends on qualia and something of substance that experiences them for real (an I in the machine) and which is somehow able to make itself known to the information system that generates the data claiming that consciousness is real. I don't think this is something anyone's going to work out until we've actually seen it and discovered how it works.
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haha : Pardon me for laughing , but i could not help just that , sorry , David :
Typical mechanistic materialism at work in science : unbelievable :
"The chemicals released in the brain are part of the network of causation that leads to the brain making decisions, different chemicals triggering different emotions at some point somewhere in the system (if feelings are real)..." haha : listen to yourself saying this mechanistic materialist non-sense and more here above :
How can chemicals do just that via machine -like , computer -like computation or whatever = pure mechanistic materialist non-sense ,unbelievable .
Just know that reality as a whole is not just physical material , as materialism wanna make you believe it is = reality in that materialist sense that can be explained just in terms of physics and chemistry alone , how can the latter account for emotions , feelings , human love , let alone for consciousness in general, life in general , ...human reason ...?
Physics and chemistry alone can never account for such processes , not even in a trillion years to come , logically = you are just wasting your time on trying to 'figure out " how qualia or the feeling of pain , feelings , emotions , human reason , consciousness, life in general ...can 'rise from " physics and chemistry = that's not possible, obviously = physics and chemistry alone cannot "generate " sentient alive living organisms that are no machines ,per definition, , by some sort of inexplicable magical materialist mechanistic belief assumptions in science haha
Ludicrous .........
I could not help but hard laughing that that brought tears to my eyes haha
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How can chemicals do just that via machine -like , computer -like computation or whatever = pure mechanistic materialist non-sense ,unbelievable .
Instead of laughing at those who know better, how about telling us what you think goes on in the brain?
And don't just quote slabs of Sheldrake. I know what he thinks.
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...by some sort of inexplicable magical materialist mechanistic belief assumptions in science haha
You're the one trying to bring in bucketloads of magic. I'm trying to remove as much magic from the model as possible. Your solution is to explain things by replacing cause-and-effect mechanisms with magic, not only for the bits that I can't explain, but for a whole stack of things that I can explain. Unbelievable! You still don't get it!
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...by some sort of inexplicable magical materialist mechanistic belief assumptions in science haha
You're the one trying to bring in bucketloads of magic. I'm trying to remove as much magic from the model as possible. Your solution is to explain things by replacing cause-and-effect mechanisms with magic, not only for the bits that I can't explain, but for a whole stack of things that I can explain. Unbelievable! You still don't get it!
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Haha
You're the one trying to bring magic into life ,buddy, life that's no machine or computer either : materialist magic in the form of some sort of elaborate neuronal computation , in the form of "specific neurons triggering specific emotions ..." : simply ludicrous .
You're bringing magic into life ,and into the whole reality as a whole as such , by reducing life to just physics and chemistry ,as materialism does in fact , and as modern science nowadays does ,unfortunately enough , the latter thanks to materialism .
While science just tries to deal with the observable, the empirical ...
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You materialists are stoopid - you believes that a calculator works by cause and effect mechanisms, but it doesn't. No one can explain how a calculator works. It actually works by non-materialistic science, but that isn't magic because I say so.
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You materialists are stoopid - you believes that a calculator works by cause and effect mechanisms, but it doesn't. No one can explain how a calculator works. It actually works by non-materialistic science, but that isn't magic because I say so.
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Please , be serious , David :
Science has been pretending to know the whole nature of reality as such already , thanks to materialism , in the sense that the whole reality as such is just material physical = reducing everything to just physics and chemistry + to their materialist extension , while science should in fact confine itself only to the observable, empirical ...once again .
Is that so difficult to get ? Amazing .
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What is amazing is that you want to replace explanations based on cause-and-effect mechanisms which work with magical "explanations" which don't explain anything and then you deny that they are magical. You have more magic in your model than anyone else here.
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What is amazing is that you want to replace explanations based on cause-and-effect mechanisms which work with magical "explanations" which don't explain anything and then you deny that they are magical. You have more magic in your model than anyone else here.
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My friend : you are the one introducing inexplicable , inconsistent , illogical, irrational , unscientific and incoherent materialist magic in science or in the computer-like ,machine -like "information system " materialist analogy regarding life in particular and regarding reality as a whole in general ,by reducing everything to just mechanical physics and chemistry + to their materialist macroscopic extensions such as the alleged neuronal computational mechanisms regarding the nature , so-called emergence or origins evolution and function of human reason , idem ditto for feelings emotions , consciousness .... while science should be only confined to the observable , empirical ...part of reality .
I do not blame you for that in fact : science istelf has been reducing the whole reality as a whole as such to just material physical biological processes for centuries now , thanks to materialism , so = a materialist belief assumption regarding the nature of reality = not a scientific empirical fact or assumption .
Science has therefore been pretending to know the nature of reality as a whole already (Wao haha ) , thanks to materialism thus , by reducing the whole reality as a whole as such to just material physical biological processes that can be thus explained only in terms of physics and chemistry , once again, while science in fact should limit itself only to the observable, empirical...part of reality = the rest of the potential reality out there is therefore both outside science's realm and outside of science's jurisdiction as well... .
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Science has therefore been pretending to know the nature of reality as a whole already
Rubbish. Science is an inanimate activity. It cannot pretend.
"This above all: to thine own self be true." If you tell yourself untruths, you will end up believing them even if nobody else does. Believing things that are false is a big step on the road to insanity. Stop now.
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Science has therefore been pretending to know the nature of reality as a whole already
Rubbish. Science is an inanimate activity. It cannot pretend.
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Come on, do not be silly , be serious , please : i did respond to this non-sense of yours on many occasions : i talk about science "pretending , seeing , doing , saying ..." in the metaphorical sense , as a metaphorical (not literal ) figure of speech .
See that materialist meta-paradigm dominating in all science at least , once again , a materialist meta-paradigm that considers the whole reality as a whole as such as just being physical material = science has thus been "pretending " to know the nature of the whole reality as a whole as such already , by considering it to be just material physical, as a result ...thanks to materialism .
"This above all: to thine own self be true." If you tell yourself untruths, you will end up believing them even if nobody else does. Believing things that are false is a big step on the road to insanity. Stop now.
Why should i stop ? Are you afraid of ...facts ? Are you afraid of the "truth ". whatever the latter might be , only dogmatic people are , as science is , as science has been dogmatic for so long now , thanks to materialism , science gotta be liberated from , in order for science to be delivered from its materialist dogmatic belief system ,the latter that gets taken for granted as ...science .
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My friend : you are the one introducing inexplicable , inconsistent , illogical, irrational , unscientific and incoherent materialist magic in science or in the computer-like ,machine -like "information system " materialist analogy regarding life in particular and regarding reality as a whole in general ,by reducing everything to just mechanical physics and chemistry + to their materialist macroscopic extensions such as the alleged neuronal computational mechanisms regarding the nature , so-called emergence or origins evolution and function of human reason , idem ditto for feelings emotions , consciousness .... while science should be only confined to the observable , empirical ...part of reality .
Why are you dragging emotions/consciousness into that? You know full well that I label that as the part science appears to be unable to handle. The rest of it needs no magical explanation, but you insist on giving it one while denying that your magical explanation is magical. That puts you in a ridiculous position.
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My friend : you are the one introducing inexplicable , inconsistent , illogical, irrational , unscientific and incoherent materialist magic in science or in the computer-like ,machine -like "information system " materialist analogy regarding life in particular and regarding reality as a whole in general ,by reducing everything to just mechanical physics and chemistry + to their materialist macroscopic extensions such as the alleged neuronal computational mechanisms regarding the nature , so-called emergence or origins evolution and function of human reason , idem ditto for feelings emotions , consciousness .... while science should be only confined to the observable , empirical ...part of reality .
Why are you dragging emotions/consciousness into that? You know full well that I label that as the part science appears to be unable to handle. The rest of it needs no magical explanation, but you insist on giving it one while denying that your magical explanation is magical. That puts you in a ridiculous position.
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Well, that's the core issue here :
(By the way , you're the only one here who does realise the fact that science is unable to handle the nature of consciousness , feelings ,emotions ...I know that , that's 1 of the reasons why i do think highly of you , simply because you are intelligent and with integrity enough to admit that, despite your "materialist promissory messianism " on the subject , in the sense that science will be able , some day , to explain all that, just via physics and chemistry ....or via some extensions of physics and chemistry , such as via some sort of still unknown -to-us neuronal computation....of some sort . ) :
The core issue here thus is , as follows :
The materialist "scientific world view " cannot , per definition , explain consciousness , emotions , feelings , human intellect, memory ...just via physics and chemistry alone , that's the main core issue here , but , you , David , cannot or do not want to realise that simple fact .
Worse : you have been trying to find a way to explain consciousness, human intellect , emotions ...just via physics and chemistry , via those materialist macroscopic computational extensions "mechanisms " = cannot be done , simply because living organisms are no machines or computers , and simply because life or reality as a whole are not just material physical , as materialism and therefore as science assumes them to be ...
Get that , Dave ?
I just want science to stick to its own unparalleled and effective method that's like no other , by confining itself just to what it can observe , test , verify , falsify , reproduce ...instead of reducing reality as a whole, life as a whole, consciousness, emotions, human intellect , memory ...to just physics and chemistry biochemistry, thanks to materialism thus , materialism that's just a reductionist naturalist false conception of nature = a belief assumption ....the rest is , obviously , outside of science's realm ,and outside of science's jurisdiction as well, including thus the nature or origins of consciousness, emotions, human intellect, including the nature or origins of life , including the nature and origins of reality as a whole thus ...
So, i am not introducing any magic in science , unlike what you try to do , i just remind you of what science is actually , what it can and cannot do , that's all .
Thanks, appreciate indeed.
Cheers.
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What was the question again? Oh yeah, it was "What was the origin of human language." Sorry for getting so off topic. I don't know how that keeps happening.
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Human intelect and memory can be accounted for by what we already know about mechanistic computation systems. Life can be accounted for as complex chemistry. I see no point in imagining magical solutions for those to use in place of perfectly good mechanistic models which already work perfectly. The only difficulty left is consciousness.
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What was the question again? Oh yeah, it was "What was the origin of human language." Sorry for getting so off topic. I don't know how that keeps happening.
Well, the origins of human language or rather the human language is a very essential element of explaining how humans have been capable of making sense of the intelligible reality , by trying to understand it and explain it via science mainly .
Without human language , knowledge in the broader sense , including the scientific one , would not have been communicated or spread evolving...
But, when science assumes that reality is just physical material , as science has been doing for so long now, thanks to materialism , that means that science has been giving us just a distorted pic of reality as a result ,just a distorted knowledge of reality , just a distorted materialist version of the origins of human language ...
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Human intelect and memory can be accounted for by what we already know about mechanistic computation systems. Life can be accounted for as complex chemistry. I see no point in imagining magical solutions for those to use in place of perfectly good mechanistic models which already work perfectly. The only difficulty left is consciousness.
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The mechanistic deterministic materialist 'scientific world view " has been shattered and demolished by the maths of chaos :
If everything can be explained just in terms of mechanical cause and effect , just via physics and chemistry , just via the laws of physics , as the Newtonian science has been assuming reality as a whole to be just some sort of mechanic clock work mechanisms , then, we should , logically , empirically , expect to be able to predict everything as a result: the maths of chaos have been destroying that materialist determinist mechanical belief assumption ,as follows :
I thought that the maths of chaos , or the butterfly effect theory , and modern physics had already kissed that outdated , superseded , largely discredited and largely refuted Newtonian-Cartesian presumed absolute predictability goodbye , a long time ago , that physicists and mathematicians can only talk in terms of ...probability nowadays , as a result , not to mention that uncertainty principle .
Try to read the following and try to watch this extremely enlightening and interesting top docu on the subject :
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/high-anxieties-the-mathematics-of-chaos/
High Anxieties: The Mathematics of Chaos
High Anxieties: The Mathematics of ChaosThe documentary looks at the modern advances in mathematics and how they affect our understanding of physics, economics, environmental issues and human psychology.
The film looks at how developments in 20th Century mathematics have affected our view of the world, and particularly how the financial economy and earth’s environment are now seen as inherently unpredictable.
The film looks at the influence the work of Henri Poincare and Alexander Lyapunov had on later developments in mathematics. It includes interviews with David Ruelle, about chaos theory and turbulence, the economist Paul Ormerod about the unpredictability of economic systems, and James Lovelock the founder of Gaia theory about climate change and tipping points in the environment.
As we approach tipping points in both the economy and the climate, the film examines the mathematics we have been reluctant to face up to and asks if, even now, we would rather bury our heads in the sand rather than face harsh truths.
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Come on, do not be silly , be serious , please : i did respond to this non-sense of yours on many occasions : i talk about science "pretending , seeing , doing , saying ..." in the metaphorical sense , as a metaphorical (not literal ) figure of speech .
Metaphor for what? Metaphors are not used in science. Why not say what you mean?
I suspect you have a wholly bizarre view of what science is, despite having been told many times by people who actually do it.
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Come on, do not be silly , be serious , please : i did respond to this non-sense of yours on many occasions : i talk about science "pretending , seeing , doing , saying ..." in the metaphorical sense , as a metaphorical (not literal ) figure of speech .
Metaphor for what? Metaphors are not used in science. Why not say what you mean?
You have no imagination , dude :
metaphors are used everywhere , even by that lunatic Dawkins in relation to his 'selfish genes " , in relation to his computer -like "human are machines robots driven or programmed by their DNA programmed software : we are just hardware programmed by software haha " metaphors , ....metaphors are used especially in art , literature and in science+everywhereelse for that matter in the "human kingdom at least haha " .
metaphors such as the machine or computer metaphors in science , regarding life and the whole reality : mechanistic materialism in science = the universe allegedly behaves like a mechanical clock work machine ruled , so to speak, by the laws of physics , cause and effect ,,,,,,,,,,,,,= everything can be predicted = the maths of chaos just destroyed that myth .
I suspect you have a wholly bizarre view of what science is, despite having been told many times by people who actually do it
I do not suspect , i am absolutely certain, without a shadow of a doubt , that you are the one who has a wholly bizarre view of what science is, ironically enough , by confusing science with the mechanistic deterministic materialism ,obviously .
Congratulations, odd weird scientist .
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What was the question again? Oh yeah, it was "What was the origin of human language." Sorry for getting so off topic. I don't know how that keeps happening.
Well, the origins of human language or rather the human language is a very essential element of explaining how humans have been capable of making sense of the intelligible reality , by trying to understand it and explain it via science mainly .
Without human language , knowledge in the broader sense , including the scientific one , would not have been communicated or spread evolving...
But, when science assumes that reality is just physical material , as science has been doing for so long now, thanks to materialism , that means that science has been giving us just a distorted pic of reality as a result ,just a distorted knowledge of reality , just a distorted materialist version of the origins of human language ...
So what are your non-materialist explanations for the origin of language? How did we did get it, when, and why? I'm not being sarcastic. I am genuinely interested. But I am a little skeptical because your discussions about the non-material never progress beyond attacks on materialism.
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Chaos would be deterministic if it was possible to know the exact starting conditions and if there's no such thing as true randomness. Machines simulate chaotic systems 100% deterministically.
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What was the question again? Oh yeah, it was "What was the origin of human language." Sorry for getting so off topic. I don't know how that keeps happening.
Well, the origins of human language or rather the human language is a very essential element of explaining how humans have been capable of making sense of the intelligible reality , by trying to understand it and explain it via science mainly .
Without human language , knowledge in the broader sense , including the scientific one , would not have been communicated or spread evolving...
But, when science assumes that reality is just physical material , as science has been doing for so long now, thanks to materialism , that means that science has been giving us just a distorted pic of reality as a result ,just a distorted knowledge of reality , just a distorted materialist version of the origins of human language ...
So what are your non-materialist explanations for the origin of language? How did we did get it, when, and why? I'm not being sarcastic. I am genuinely interested. But I am a little skeptical because your discussions about the non-material never progress beyond attacks on materialism.
Human language is so unique that it cannot have evolved from any other species , human language without which there would have been no spreading or communication evolution of knowledge , let alone the scientific one , without human language , no progress would have been accomplished ...no civilization ....despite the fact that those sophisticated communications of malhearing people via hand and body gestures can be qualified as language(s) , relatively speaking .
See how the current information age , information technology , science , information economy are so dependent on language : the information age that's another faster level of human evolution .
Human language is also a question of consciousness, sub-consciousness, feelings , emotions , intellect , memory ......................one should try to explain "materialistically" those essential components of human language , before trying to pretend to be able to say anything about the origins of human language : one cannot islolate or sort out human language from its mental side to just to be able to explain the origins of human language just via physics and chemistry , in the sense that human language allegedly did originate from chimps' gestures = makes no sense = how one can make the mental conscious ...component of human language fit into this materialist version of the origins of human language then ?
So, the materialist version of the origin of the human language must be false , so, we need to develop better understandings of reality as a whole beyond just physics and chemistry , as Nagel here above explained : well, that's the challenge humanity gotta face at some point of history : i do not know how that should be done ...yet, if ever .
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I didn't ask where human language didn't come from or we did not obtain it, I asked how you think it originated, which was the title of your thread.
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I didn't ask where human language didn't come from or we did not obtain it, I asked how you think it originated, which was the title of your thread.
I dunno : all i know is that the materialist version of the origins of the human language cannot be true , no way = absurd and false ,implausible ...you name it , simply because it does not take into account the necessary underlying macroscopic elements of man and therefore of human language+ of human language's origins evolution emergence , necessary underlying elements that cannot be isolated from human language or from its biology environment nurture culture : consciousness, human intellect , feelings , emotions ...human sub-consciousness ...human memory ...without which there would be no human language = it is a whole package that cannot be reduced to just physics and chemistry in order to fit into the materialist "scientific world view " thus .
Human language that's so unique that only man has it ,so, all those materialist 'explanations " of consciousness, intellect , feelings , emotions ...cannot account for human language as a whole package, let alone for human consciousness, human intellect , human feelings , human memory , human emotions ....a whole package in the above mentioned sense , that's unique to man thus , despite the fact that other living organisms or species are conscious , have some sort of relative degrees of intellect abstractions , feelings , emotions, memory ............
It's not just why do we have it and other species do not (human language , i am not talking about the specific kinds of communications-"languages " other species do have : human language is unique thus ) ,but also because human consciousness, sub-consciousness, human intellect , memory , feelings , emotions ....are unique to man = in the sense that they cannot be matched by those of other species, not even remotely close thus , despite the fact that some species might surpass us in memory , in the capacity of our senses ......and in other areas as well = the whole is not the sum of its parts .
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Language is fairly simple once you understand the basic structures that hold it together. Your lack of knowledge of how it works is leading to you making a stack of claims which are plain wrong. Evolving a language should be easy once a species has sufficient intelligence to handle those structures, and a lot of it probably comes down to nothing more exciting than evolving sufficient working memory to hold the ideas long enough for them still to be there when the sentence has reached the point where they need to be inserted into it.
Ideas have a network form which has to be converted into a linear string before it can be communicated, and you have to do that convertion with care so as to avoid ending up with a jumbled mess. The actual structure though is very simple with groups of subject-verb-object connected up into a net. A preposition is really just a verb in a relative clause. E.g. "The book in the kitchen is mine" consists essentially of two SVO groups: I own book; kitchen contains book. [The idea of "containing" is itself a complex idea which can be represented by a string of deeper SVO groups, but there's no need to go into that here.] The verb in the first group is the central part of the idea that's being communicated, while the second group is simply there to help identify which book is being discussed, which is why it's a relative clause when the two groups are combined into a sentence. A conjunction is a verb in the opposite way to a relative clause, meaning that the verb is more central to the net. E.g. "I visited that castle before it fell down" essentially consists of three SVO groups: I visited castle; castle fell down; visited preceeds fell. The key idea in the three is the last group, so the other two groups are more like relative clauses, but with the link being to the middle item instead of one of the ends.
All a species needs to be able to develop a proper language is sufficient wit to be able to handle simple SVO constructions and to be able to equate an item in one group with an item in another so as to be able to represent more complex ideas. None of this requires anything supernatural - it's extremely simple, and the only complexity is that language is riddled with words built in ways which hide the components they're made of - we can break them down subconsciously with ease but only normally take in all the detail consciously when we first learn them and work out what they mean. We then stop monitoring the mechanisms and leave it to subconscious processes to do the work while we forget about it all, so we end up not understanding consciously what's going on under the surface. It then takes decades of work to go through all the words in language working out what the components of meaning within them are in order to build a mechanistic system out of them for use in an AGI system (which is what I've been doing, so I know what's involved).
So, stop talking bilge about the supernatural nature of language. It is nothing more than a simple mechanistic system of representation.
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Language is fairly simple once you understand the basic structures that hold it together. Your lack of knowledge of how it works is leading to you making a stack of claims which are plain wrong. Evolving a language should be easy once a species has sufficient intelligence to handle those structures, and a lot of it probably comes down to nothing more exciting than evolving sufficient working memory to hold the ideas long enough for them still to be there when the sentence has reached the point where they need to be inserted into it.
Ideas have a network form which has to be converted into a linear string before it can be communicated, and you have to do that convertion with care so as to avoid ending up with a jumbled mess. The actual structure though is very simple with groups of subject-verb-object connected up into a net. A preposition is really just a verb in a relative clause. E.g. "The book in the kitchen is mine" consists essentially of two SVO groups: I own book; kitchen contains book. [The idea of "containing" is itself a complex idea which can be represented by a string of deeper SVO groups, but there's no need to go into that here.] The verb in the first group is the central part of the idea that's being communicated, while the second group is simply there to help identify which book is being discussed, which is why it's a relative clause when the two groups are combined into a sentence. A conjunction is a verb in the opposite way to a relative clause, meaning that the verb is more central to the net. E.g. "I visited that castle before it fell down" essentially consists of three SVO groups: I visited castle; castle fell down; visited preceeds fell. The key idea in the three is the last group, so the other two groups are more like relative clauses, but with the link being to the middle item instead of one of the ends.
All a species needs to be able to develop a proper language is sufficient wit to be able to handle simple SVO constructions and to be able to equate an item in one group with an item in another so as to be able to represent more complex ideas. None of this requires anything supernatural - it's extremely simple, and the only complexity is that language is riddled with words built in ways which hide the components they're made of - we can break them down subconsciously with ease but only normally take in all the detail consciously when we first learn them and work out what they mean. We then stop monitoring the mechanisms and leave it to subconscious processes to do the work while we forget about it all, so we end up not understanding consciously what's going on under the surface. It then takes decades of work to go through all the words in language working out what the components of meaning within them are in order to build a mechanistic system out of them for use in an AGI system (which is what I've been doing, so I know what's involved).
So, stop talking bilge about the supernatural nature of language. It is nothing more than a simple mechanistic system of representation.
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You just talked about the physical material biological "mechanical " side of human language you do take for the whole real thing .
Well, what is the 'supernatural " then ? just semantics : everything that's outside of materialism is thus automatically mechanically labeled as supernatural , the latter that's in fact natural normal = makes part of reality as a whole ,simply because reality as a whole is not just material or physical once again, as the mechanistic materialism wanna make you believe it is .
So, when you do assume that reality as a whole is just material or physical , thanks to materialism thus , when you do assume that's the 'scientific world view " , then , logically , you can only try to approach reality as a whole , including human language its origins and evolution emergence , the same goes for consciousness, memory , feelings , life as a whole and the rest , you can thus only approach them all materialistically mechanically as a result .
Now, let's assume that the mechanistic materialist "scientific world view " is false ,as it is in fact , then, logically , there is more to reality as a whole , to human language ,to its 's evolution emergence and evolution , the same goes again for the rest , than just physics and chemistry , than just mechanisms , than just the laws of physics : that changes the whole pic ...radically , and hence our whole approach of reality as such +our whole approach regarding the extensions of reality as a whole such as human language , consciousness and the rest , that changes radically even our own perception of what the scientific world view might be as a result also ,logically thus .
So, you cannot just isolate human language from its underlying elements such as human consciousness, human intellect , human memory , human feelngs emotions ....you cannot just reduce man or life for that matter as a whole package that's not the sum of its parts to just material mechanical physical biological processes , if you want to explain describe understand empirically life as a whole , reality as a whole , man as a whole, human language as a whole ...or just the parts of them all science can deal with empirically .
Tell me now then : why is only man the one and only species that does have a language (s) that's unique to man in many ways ?
If you wanna answer this question via evolution , then, you have to include the missing part of reality as a whole materialism has been believing it does not exist = evolution is not only material biological physical .
Even if we assume that reality as a whole is just material or physical, and therefore that evolution is exclusively biological , even then , you cannot explain the origins of the human language within that context , simply because you have to try first to explain the origins and natures of human consciousness, human intellect , human feelings emotions, human memory, the origins , emergence and nature of life .....first = the materialist explanations of all the latter is obviously not true= all that cannot be explained just in terms of physics and chemistry obviously ,despite your denials , except the fact that you do admit the fact that consciousness remains an unsolved hard problem .
There you are again brought back to square zero where you have explained ...nothing , despite those materialist "explanations of everything " just in terms of the laws of physics ....
Congratulations .
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You just talked about the physical material biological "mechanical " side of human language you do take for the whole real thing .
It is the whole thing. The next thing further in is thought itself, and it's just as mechanistic - a large chunk of it being applied reason.
Well, what is the 'supernatural " then ? just semantics : everything that's outside of materialism is thus automatically mechanically labeled as supernatural , the latter that's in fact natural normal = makes part of reality as a whole ,simply because reality as a whole is not just material or physical once again, as the mechanistic materialism wanna make you believe it is .
The supernatural is anything that doesn't fit in the mechanistic model. The whole idea of the supernatural is nonsense though, because it must be part of the natural if it exists, and any functionality tied up in it which depends on magic is non-mechanistic and shouldn't be capable of producing consistent results. There have to be mechanisms behind anything that doesn't just do random, and even with that there's probably an underlying mechanism.
So, when you do assume that reality as a whole is just material or physical , thanks to materialism thus , when you do assume that's the 'scientific world view " , then , logically , you can only try to approach reality as a whole , including human language its origins and evolution emergence , the same goes for consciousness, memory , feelings , life as a whole and the rest , you can thus only approach them all materialistically mechanically as a result .
Consciousness is the only interesting area as it's the one thing that we don't yet have a handle on there, but if it's a real phenomenon there will without doubt be a mechanism behind it too.
Now, let's assume that the mechanistic materialist "scientific world view " is false ,as it is in fact , then, logically...
...then logically you're doing away with logic and it isn't worth going any further because nothing you say can carry any weight.
... , there is more to reality as a whole , to human language ,to its 's evolution emergence and evolution , the same goes again for the rest , than just physics and chemistry , than just mechanisms , than just the laws of physics : that changes the whole pic ...radically , and hence our whole approach of reality as such +our whole approach regarding the extensions of reality as a whole such as human language , consciousness and the rest , that changes radically even our own perception of what the scientific world view might be as a result also ,logically thus .
That is just an attack on reductionism and the whole idea of understanding things by breaking them down into their components. You want everyone to keep everything lumped together in its most tangled form and to give up on trying to understand any of it. And you think you know what science is!
So, you cannot just isolate human language from its underlying elements such as human consciousness, human intellect , human memory , human feelngs emotions ....you cannot just reduce man or life for that matter as a whole package that's not the sum of its parts to just material mechanical physical biological processes , if you want to explain describe understand empirically life as a whole , reality as a whole , man as a whole, human language as a whole ...or just the parts of them all science can deal with empirically .
Yes I can - I isolate language from all the other things and see that it is mechanistic and simple. I do the same with thought and discover that it too is mechanistic and simple. This is reductionism - we remove everything that we can understand and then turn our attention to what is left. There is very little left - just consciousness - but there's no hope in hell of understanding that if you wrap it up in everything else and declare that none of it can be understood even though most of it can be. You are doing anti-science.
Tell me now then : why is only man the one and only species that does have a language (s) that's unique to man in many ways ?
Because we got there first.
If you wanna answer this question via evolution , then, you have to include the missing part of reality as a whole materialism has been believing it does not exist = evolution is not only material biological physical .
Evolution is well understood. Things change by chance and the ones that work best are better at surviving. It can be simulated on computers and is used in design of things like aerodynamics.
Even if we assume that reality as a whole is just material or physical, and therefore that evolution is exclusively biological , even then , you cannot explain the origins of the human language within that context , simply because you have to try first to explain the origins and natures of human consciousness, human intellect , human feelings emotions, human memory, the origins , emergence and nature of life .....first = the materialist explanations of all the latter is obviously not true= all that cannot be explained just in terms of physics and chemistry obviously ,despite your denials , except the fact that you do admit the fact that consciousness remains an unsolved hard problem .
All those things can be tackled in their own right. Language is understood already and does not depend on understanding those other things. If I throw a ball at something and that thing is knocked by the ball and made to move in a particular way that can be predicted by the laws of physics, it doesn't matter a damn if we don't know what the thing is that the ball's hitting and causing to move. The physics of the interaction is already understood and isn't suddenly rendered a mystery on the basis that we don't know what the thing is that's being hit.
There you are again brought back to square zero where you have explained ...nothing , despite those materialist "explanations of everything " just in terms of the laws of physics ....
Congratulations .
You're the one who's stuck at square zero. Everything's a mystery to you because you're incapable of breaking anything down and analysing parts of it.
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Talking to you, Dave , is like talking to a false believer who does confuse his own false belief with science proper , the latter i do love so much that i would love to see it , as it will be in fact: no doubt about that , delivered from your false belief that's been sold to the people as the 'scientific world view " for so long now .
Ciao .
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A lot of "science" is not done in accordance with reason, and that makes it faulty. What I call science is what science should be, and that depends on it applying reason 100% correctly rather than picking and choosing when to apply it and when not to in the manner of a religion. AGI systems will force us all to do science properly.
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A lot of "science" is not done in accordance with reason, and that makes it faulty. What I call science is what science should be, and that depends on it applying reason 100% correctly rather than picking and choosing when to apply it and when not to in the manner of a religion. AGI systems will force us all to do science properly.
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Dave : i think you should try to read what i said on this same subject as a reply to these same statements of yours on the other thread concerning consciousness thus= the malaise in current science is much deeper than just what you were mentioning : goes way beyond just that .
All physical sciences will have to undergo a revolutionary and radical change, no one yet can imagine , let alone predict yet , in order to try to deal with the actual factual reality as it is , not only with what materialism tells them what reality is , a materialist paradoxical absurd predicament all physical sciences must and will have to face at some point of history thus : that's something inevitable in this time and age where the end of materialism is nearer than ever .
Thanks, appreciate indeed.
Cheers .
(P.S.: My sincere apologies for being rude earlier ,sorry: i do still think higher of you ,despite everything : Good luck to you regarding your own work, research ... or whatever you happen to be doing ,or will do ...Best wishes .)
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Dave : i think you should try to read what i said on this same subject as a reply to these same statements of yours on the other thread concerning consciousness thus= the malaise in current science is much deeper than just what you were mentioning : goes way beyond just that .
I think most of it is fine, but there are a few places where scientists state things as facts which are demonstrably false and they simply refuse to recognise the proofs that they are wrong. You can take them a certain distance through an argument that shows the position they hold to be wrong and they often accept every part of it right up to the point where it shows they are wrong, at which point they suddenly see the mortal threat it poses to their treasured beliefs and they backtrack hard, raising all manner of ludicrous objections to all the points they had previously accepted along the way. They are ordinarily rational, but as soon as that conflicts with their holy cows, reason gets thrown out the window and baseless belief triumphs. However, most of science isn't affected by this because it doesn't conflict with anyone's treasured beliefs.
All physical sciences will have to undergo a revolutionary and radical change, no one yet can imagine , let alone predict yet , in order to try to deal with the actual factual reality as it is , not only with what materialism tells them what reality is , a materialist paradoxical absurd predicament all physical sciences must and will have to face at some point of history thus : that's something inevitable in this time and age where the end of materialism is nearer than ever .
The only change that's going to come is the one brought about by machines forcing science to be done correctly. Unfortunately though, the most interesting question of them all (consciousness) will be beyond the experience of the machines. The only road forward there will be to follow back the chains/networks of causation in the brain to find out where the evidence comes from that leads to the generation of claims about consciousness, and that's going to be a major technological challenge which could take decades.
(P.S.: My sincere apologies for being rude earlier ,sorry: i do still think higher of you ,despite everything : Good luck to you regarding your own work, research ... or whatever you happen to be doing ,or will do ...Best wishes .)
I don't mind rudeness and insults as they are either just banter or come out of frustration - you prove periodically that you're a nice person and that's all that counts. You are probably the most pleasant person I've ever had a big argument with on the Interweb.
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Dave : i think you should try to read what i said on this same subject as a reply to these same statements of yours on the other thread concerning consciousness thus= the malaise in current science is much deeper than just what you were mentioning : goes way beyond just that .
I think most of it is fine, but there are a few places where scientists state things as facts which are demonstrably false and they simply refuse to recognise the proofs that they are wrong. You can take them a certain distance through an argument that shows the position they hold to be wrong and they often accept every part of it right up to the point where it shows they are wrong, at which point they suddenly see the mortal threat it poses to their treasured beliefs and they backtrack hard, raising all manner of ludicrous objections to all the points they had previously accepted along the way. They are ordinarily rational, but as soon as that conflicts with their holy cows, reason gets thrown out the window and baseless belief triumphs. However, most of science isn't affected by this because it doesn't conflict with anyone's treasured beliefs.
I do think that the malaise in science is way deeper than just that,once again, Dave :
Reality is not just material or physical , and hence materialism is false = the 'scientific world view " is also false thus .
All physical sciences must change radically , in order to include the missing part of reality thus , once again .
All physical sciences will have to undergo a revolutionary and radical change, no one yet can imagine , let alone predict yet , in order to try to deal with the actual factual reality as it is , not only with what materialism tells them what reality is , a materialist paradoxical absurd predicament all physical sciences must and will have to face at some point of history thus : that's something inevitable in this time and age where the end of materialism is nearer than ever .
The only change that's going to come is the one brought about by machines forcing science to be done correctly. Unfortunately though, the most interesting question of them all (consciousness) will be beyond the experience of the machines. The only road forward there will be to follow back the chains/networks of causation in the brain to find out where the evidence comes from that leads to the generation of claims about consciousness, and that's going to be a major technological challenge which could take decades.
How can machines include the non-physical or non-material side of reality in science ? Absurd,sorry.
(P.S.: My sincere apologies for being rude earlier ,sorry: i do still think higher of you ,despite everything : Good luck to you regarding your own work, research ... or whatever you happen to be doing ,or will do ...Best wishes .)
I don't mind rudeness and insults as they are either just banter or come out of frustration - you prove periodically that you're a nice person and that's all that counts. You are probably the most pleasant person I've ever had a big argument with on the Interweb.
Indeed : rudeness and insults are just that .
Thanks , even though you might not have meant what you were saying about me haha kidding .
You are indeed 1 of the most interesting ,intelligent and inspiring folks i have ever met this way via the net , so to speak , despite your paternalism and condescendence contempt arrogance sometimes : well, nobody is perfect indeed .
I do have many flaws also , no wonder .
Cheers.
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A while back, I asked whether or not animals hear their own vocalizations and ever mistake it for, say, a rival male, the way a bird attacks attacks his own reflection in a window. Even if response to vocalizations is a simple stimulus response mechanism, the animal has to make the exception “unless it’s coming from me.” I suppose it’s also possible that the animal simply doesn’t have the machinery to do those things at once, make the sound and hear it and the same time.
In that same post I also wondered at what point humans or prehumans started talking to themselves, and not just using vocalizations to warn or provoke someone to do something. Maybe those were silly questions, but they still interest me. What I would really like to know about chimps and other animals that have rudimentary forms of language is whether they have internal language, non vocalized representations of vocalizations, or a mental representation of gestures that can exist without actually carrying out the action.
In my late 20s I had a weird episode lasting about six months where I found myself attaching the wrong endings to words when I spoke, resulting in a word that was either grammatically incorrect, (with an “ing” ending instead of an “ed”) or resulting a word completely different in meaning, like “complicate” instead of “compliment”. Oddly, it was only verbs, never nouns, unless it was a gerund. Everyone misspeaks once in a while, but it seemed to be happening with a worrisome frequency, and it’s just the weirdest feeling when something comes out of your mouth that you didn’t intend to say, not just odd, but surprising and startling, as if it wasn't "I" who had said, although clearly it had to be. The problem eventually went away.
I’m not sure how my odd experience relates to the questions above. We are conscious of our internal monologue and sometimes planning carefully what we want to say before we say it, but on some lower, less conscious level, there also seems to be a process that compares output with intentions, and we aren’t aware of it until there’s a screw up. I don’t know if chimps have an internal monologue, but it’s not hard for me to imagine that they might at the very least have a system that compares output with intentions and makes corrections. There are lots of feedback loops like this - the cerebellum does this for physical movements, although not on a conscious level.
Without a working definition of consciousness, it's hard to say how self-awareness relates to consciousness. Some people see self-awareness and introspection as result of consciousness, but if consciousness evolved, it seems more likely that it developed from self-awareness, not the other way around, by turning those same thought processes that are applied to others on oneself, hearing and reacting to one's voice. At any rate, it's interesting that semantic capability and the degree of self-awareness correlate in great apes and babies and possibly other animals as well.
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A while back, I asked whether or not animals hear their own vocalizations and ever mistake it for, say, a rival male, the way a bird attacks attacks his own reflection in a window. Even if response to vocalizations is a simple stimulus response mechanism, the animal has to make the exception “unless it’s coming from me.” I suppose it’s also possible that the animal simply doesn’t have the machinery to do those things at once, make the sound and hear it and the same time.
In that same post I also wondered at what point humans or prehumans started talking to themselves, and not just using vocalizations to warn or provoke someone to do something. Maybe those were silly questions, but they still interest me. What I would really like to know about chimps and other animals that have rudimentary forms of language is whether they have internal language, non vocalized representations of vocalizations, or a mental representation of gestures that can exist without actually carrying out the action.
In my late 20s I had a weird episode lasting about six months where I found myself attaching the wrong endings to words when I spoke, resulting in a word that was either grammatically incorrect, (with an “ing” ending instead of an “ed”) or resulting a word completely different in meaning, like “complicate” instead of “compliment”. Oddly, it was only verbs, never nouns, unless it was a gerund. Everyone misspeaks once in a while, but it seemed to be happening with a worrisome frequency, and it’s just the weirdest feeling when something comes out of your mouth that you didn’t intend to say, not just odd, but surprising and startling, as if it wasn't "I" who had said, although clearly it had to be. The problem eventually went away.
I’m not sure how my odd experience relates to the questions above. We are conscious of our internal monologue and sometimes planning carefully what we want to say before we say it, but on some lower, less conscious level, there also seems to be a process that compares output with intentions, and we aren’t aware of it until there’s a screw up. I don’t know if chimps have an internal monologue, but it’s not hard for me to imagine that they might at the very least have a system that compares output with intentions and makes corrections. There are lots of feedback loops like this - the cerebellum does this for physical movements, although not on a conscious level.
Without a working definition of consciousness, it's hard to say how self-awareness relates to consciousness. Some people see self-awareness and introspection as result of consciousness, but if consciousness evolved, it seems more likely that it developed from self-awareness, not the other way around, by turning those same thought processes that are applied to others on oneself, hearing and reacting to one's voice. At any rate, it's interesting that semantic capability and the degree of self-awareness correlate in great apes and babies and possibly other animals as well.
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It all comes down to the following , lady :
All the malaise at the very heart of science can be summarised by this lethal error that has been made in all sciences and elsewhere , thanks to materialism :
Reality as a whole is just material or physical .
As long as all sciences will continue looking at reality just through one eye , or rather through just the materialist key hole version of reality , as long as all sciences thus will continue to look at reality as a whole just via one eye , the materialist one , while assuming that the other eye is non-existent , then , all sciences will just give us a distortion of reality as a whole .
In short :
Reality as a whole is not just material or physical, as the false materialist mainstream 'scientific world view " has been assuming it to be for so long now .
So, when all sciences will start including the mental side of reality which they have been missing ,or which they have been reducing to just the physical or material , well, then and only then , all sciences might be able to reveal some more deeper and more fundamental forms of causation that might be underlying the laws of physics themselves , who knows ?
Then, all sciences will see reality as a whole , life in general , human language , consciousness ,evolution , and the rest from much wider angles, via science's both eyes , so to speak thus :
Even evolution itself cannot be just biological or physical material as a result , the same goes for the origins of life ,its evolution and emergence ,the same goes for the origins of human language....and the rest .
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It all comes down to the following , lady :
All the malaise at the very heart of science can be summarised by this lethal error that has been made in all sciences and elsewhere , thanks to materialism :
Reality as a whole is just material or physical .
As long as all sciences will continue looking at reality just through one eye , or rather through just the materialist key hole version of reality , as long as all sciences thus will continue to look at reality as a whole just via one eye , the materialist one , while assuming that the other eye is non-existent , then , all sciences will just give us a distortion of reality as a whole .
In short :
Reality as a whole is not just material or physical, as the false materialist mainstream 'scientific world view " has been assuming it to be for so long now .
So, when all sciences will start including the mental side of reality which they have been missing ,or which they have been reducing to just the physical or material , well, then and only then , all sciences might be able to reveal some more deeper and more fundamental forms of causation that might be underlying the laws of physics themselves , who knows ?
Then, all sciences will see reality as a whole , life in general , human language , consciousness ,evolution , and the rest from much wider angles, via science's both eyes , so to speak thus :
Even evolution itself cannot be just biological or physical material as a result , the same goes for the origins of life ,its evolution and emergence ,the same goes for the origins of human language....and the rest .
Other than the use of the word "evolved," there wasn't really anything especially materialistic my post. It was about the relationship between language and self-awareness in people and in animals. You keep saying you are genuinely interested in these topics that you post, like language or the origin of life or free will, but your discussion always leads back to the same anti-materialist complaint. (which is why you can even cross post the exact same response to multiple threads, regardless of their original topics.) I'm no longer interested in trying to explain to you why I don't agree with it.
Even though you say that once science is liberated from materialism, it will free scientists to explore exciting new vistas and consider all sorts of new and interesting ideas, I haven't seen any evidence of that from you.
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It all comes down to the following , lady :
All the malaise at the very heart of science can be summarised by this lethal error that has been made in all sciences and elsewhere , thanks to materialism :
Reality as a whole is just material or physical .
As long as all sciences will continue looking at reality just through one eye , or rather through just the materialist key hole version of reality , as long as all sciences thus will continue to look at reality as a whole just via one eye , the materialist one , while assuming that the other eye is non-existent , then , all sciences will just give us a distortion of reality as a whole .
In short :
Reality as a whole is not just material or physical, as the false materialist mainstream 'scientific world view " has been assuming it to be for so long now .
So, when all sciences will start including the mental side of reality which they have been missing ,or which they have been reducing to just the physical or material , well, then and only then , all sciences might be able to reveal some more deeper and more fundamental forms of causation that might be underlying the laws of physics themselves , who knows ?
Then, all sciences will see reality as a whole , life in general , human language , consciousness ,evolution , and the rest from much wider angles, via science's both eyes , so to speak thus :
Even evolution itself cannot be just biological or physical material as a result , the same goes for the origins of life ,its evolution and emergence ,the same goes for the origins of human language....and the rest .
Other than the use of the word "evolved," there wasn't really anything especially materialistic my post. It was about the relationship between language and self-awareness in people and in animals. You keep saying you are genuinely interested in these topics that you post, like language or the origin of life or free will, but your discussion always leads back to the same anti-materialist complaint. (which is why you can even cross post the exact same response to multiple threads, regardless of their original topics.) I'm no longer interested in trying to explain to you why I don't agree with it.
Even though you say that once science is liberated from materialism, it will free scientists to explore exciting new vistas and consider all sorts of new and interesting ideas, I haven't seen any evidence of that from you.
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Well, i was neither referring to nor talking about that previous post of yours .
I was just stating the core error made in all sciences for that matter , core error that's been embodied by the false materialist version of reality that has been taken for granted as the "scientific world view " , and that has implications for all sciences' approaches of reality , and hence has implications for all the rest that all sciences have been trying to deal with , including evolution itself that cannot therefore be just biological, including the origins evolution and emergence of life , including the origins emergence and evolution of human language .....that cannot be just a matter of physics and chemistry thus .
That's all .
How all sciences would look like without materialism remains to be seen thus : i told you many times i have no real answer to just that , as Sheldrake , Nagel , other anti-reductionists and others do not .
Sheldrake's work and others ' , for example, is a good start on the subject , despite their flaws ...
The next generations of scientists might be able to come up with better understandings regarding how to include and deal with the missing part of reality empirically , who knows ? or regarding how science can be radically changed in order to evolve in ways that should enable science to include the missing part of reality empirically thus .
Cheers.
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A while back, I asked whether or not animals hear their own vocalizations and ever mistake it for, say, a rival male, the way a bird attacks attacks his own reflection in a window.
They might if there's an echo. What happens if you record their calls and play them back to them, I wonder? They might recognise themselves if they're intelligent enough, or they might think they're being immitated. It would be interesting to know if any of them are intelligent enough to recognise their own calls/voices.
Even if response to vocalizations is a simple stimulus response mechanism, the animal has to make the exception “unless it’s coming from me.” I suppose it’s also possible that the animal simply doesn’t have the machinery to do those things at once, make the sound and hear it and the same time.
It's bound to hear it at the same time, but it'll know that it's making the noise itself - if that isn't programmed in instinctively, it'll be learned early in life.
In that same post I also wondered at what point humans or prehumans started talking to themselves, and not just using vocalizations to warn or provoke someone to do something.
Do you mean talking out loud to themselves or doing this in thought?
What I would really like to know about chimps and other animals that have rudimentary forms of language is whether they have internal language, non vocalized representations of vocalizations, or a mental representation of gestures that can exist without actually carrying out the action.
There's a gorilla that does sign language, and although it's poor at it, I see no reason to think that it can't imagine making the signs without actually making them. There are crows which have (in the lab) been able to look at a problem and imagine a solution to it which they have then carried out for real, getting a piece of wire, bending it into a hook and then using it to revover food from a basket with a handle pushed down into a thin transparent tube. That capability to imagine things will be in all intelligent species capable of using a rudimentary language. There are bonobos which communicate by pressing buttons with symbols on them, and when they aren't next to the board with all the buttons on it, I would imagine that they can visualise the board and know where the button is that relates to what they want to say, and what the symbol on it looks like. With a language based on sounds, it takes the visualisation into a different form, but they'll be simulating the world in their heads with both vision and hearing wrapped up in it.
In my late 20s I had a weird episode lasting about six months where I found myself attaching the wrong endings to words when I spoke, resulting in a word that was either grammatically incorrect, (with an “ing” ending instead of an “ed”)
...
That sounds like a mini stroke, but don't be alarmed at the thought. It doesn't mean you're any more likely to have a repeat of this kind of episode than anyone else is likely to have a first experience of such an event. A small part of neural net will have been damaged and the brain has had to bypass it to replace the functionality that was lost.
...it’s just the weirdest feeling when something comes out of your mouth that you didn’t intend to say, not just odd, but surprising and startling, as if it wasn't "I" who had said, although clearly it had to be.
Whenever you say anything, the idea you want to express is already there right at the start and you are merely translating it into a linear string as you speak it, a lot of that process being done through processes which you have automated, so they can generate errors. You also listen to the linear string of words you are producing and translate back from it to a network thought structure, and in the course of doing that you will pick up errors and notice ambiguities which may need to be clarified, such as where you produce an expression which can be taken the wrong way and you only notice that because you're monitoring your own output and translating it back.
I’m not sure how my odd experience relates to the questions above. We are conscious of our internal monologue and sometimes planning carefully what we want to say before we say it, but on some lower, less conscious level, there also seems to be a process that compares output with intentions, and we aren’t aware of it until there’s a screw up.
A perfectly innocent idea could lead to someone generating the phrase, "I'm going to give her one," but it's only when that person monitors what they've just said that this string of words goes through the machinery that generates an unfortunate interpretation which would not have been considered by the machinery that generated the words in the first place. We only get alerted to things of this kind because they have gone wrong, so most of the time we don't realise that we are constantly monitoring what we are saying.
I don’t know if chimps have an internal monologue, but it’s not hard for me to imagine that they might at the very least have a system that compares output with intentions and makes corrections. There are lots of feedback loops like this - the cerebellum does this for physical movements, although not on a conscious level.
Their attempts at generating language probably aren't advanced enough to make it easy to find out.
Without a working definition of consciousness, it's hard to say how self-awareness relates to consciousness. Some people see self-awareness and introspection as result of consciousness, but if consciousness evolved, it seems more likely that it developed from self-awareness, not the other way around, by turning those same thought processes that are applied to others on oneself, hearing and reacting to one's voice. At any rate, it's interesting that semantic capability and the degree of self-awareness correlate in great apes and babies and possibly other animals as well.
Consciousness doesn't really come into it other than by being associated with anything that goes through the main processor, whatever and wherever that is (it may be distributed across many places such that it hasn't been pinned down yet). We are multi-processing machines which can multitask huge numbers of non-conscious processes without difficulty (I can ride a bike while juggling and holding a conversation with someone), but we also have a main processor which does anything new (that hasn't been automated yet) and which cannot multitask different thoughts at all well. Whenever that processor is used to think about ourselves, there will be a feeling of self-recognition, but there is also self-recognition when we walk past a mirror without thinking about it, and we'd only be alerted to something odd happening if the reflection was wrong in some way (due to it being an experiment where the mirror is replaced with a window with someone else on the other side mimicking your actions). Consciousness actually has no role in self-awareness or introspection, but is merely something that comes out of thinking via the main processor which ties feelings to absolutely everything that goes through it.
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A perfectly innocent idea could lead to someone generating the phrase, "I'm going to give her one," but it's only when that person monitors what they've just said that this string of words goes through the machinery that generates an unfortunate interpretation which would not have been considered by the machinery that generated the words in the first place. We only get alerted to things of this kind because they have gone wrong, so most of the time we don't realise that we are constantly monitoring what we are saying....
......Consciousness doesn't really come into it other than by being associated with anything that goes through the main processor, whatever and wherever that is (it may be distributed across many places such that it hasn't been pinned down yet). We are multi-processing machines which can multitask huge numbers of non-conscious processes without difficulty (I can ride a bike while juggling and holding a conversation with someone), but we also have a main processor which does anything new (that hasn't been automated yet) and which cannot multitask different thoughts at all well. Whenever that processor is used to think about ourselves, there will be a feeling of self-recognition, but there is also self-recognition when we walk past a mirror without thinking about it, and we'd only be alerted to something odd happening if the reflection was wrong in some way (due to it being an experiment where the mirror is replaced with a window with someone else on the other side mimicking your actions). Consciousness actually has no role in self-awareness or introspection, but is merely something that comes out of thinking via the main processor which ties feelings to absolutely everything that goes through it.
Realising that one has said something that is ambiguous or misinterpreted feels different from having something totally unexpected come out of your mouth. The later is more like “alien hand syndrome.” There is a different kind of qulia, or even a lack of qualia attached.
Even with activities that involve a lot of automatic, subconscious processing, like typing or driving, most of the time there is not a complete disconnect. I might not remember everything about my trip if I’m thinking of other things, but there’s no loss of the sense that “I am the one who is doing this”, no big gap in my experience of it.Consciousness seems to have enough time to monitor, if not control.
Although, I can recall feeling a big disconnect in a more normal experience. I was baby-sitting two kids, and one girl threw a rock at her sister’s head (I have no idea why) who was standing next to me. I don’t remember reaching out to catch it. I just remember thinking “ow, my hand hurts”, and being genuinely surprised that it was holding a rock, followed by a second feeling of surprise once I realized what had happened, because I am really bad at baseball.
Even though computers can self reference, I can’t see that as being the same as self awareness, any more than referencing descriptions of qualia is the same as experiencing them. I’m not convinced that self awareness is just self-identification with qualia attached. Or maybe I am just temped by the idea that if consciousness were an expanded form of self-awareness, that gives you your inroad from biology. Sensation -> distinguishing self vs non self -> self awareness -> consciousness-> qualia. Wikipedia calls self-awareness secondary consciousness, and I think their path would look more like: sensation -> who knows what -> qualia-> consciousness -> self awareness.
Maybe qulia and self-awareness go missing when consciousness is by-passed. But it also might be true that there is no consciousness experience of qualia without self-awareness. In the brain, the structures most closely associated with consciousness (Reticular Activating system, the thalamus, the cingulate cortex and the somatosensory cortex) are the same ones associated with a core sense of self. Surprisingly, they are mid level brain structures, except for the somatosensory cortex. In older anatomy textbooks, they are described as just being like relay stations or switch boards, or controlling level of physiological alertness, but these areas seem to be getting more attention now.
Supposedly, even pain does not register in the brain until after you have removed your hand from a hot element, because the initial reflex arc only goes to the spinal cord. Reflex arcs are fast and obviously protective, but without self-awareness the brain has to constantly reason backwards to explain events, the way I did when I found the rock in my hand. (That is what it does with confabulation in split brain patients, and often incorrectly.)
I’m not sure where I’m going with this exactly, and it still doesn’t explain qualia, but I think self-awareness is bound up in it.
Getting back to language, I can’t get around the idea that once an animal generates an internal monologue, there logically has to be a self who saying it, a self that experiences it. And maybe that is also inferred from other self-object relationships. I don’t like the idea that something physical can be generated by an abstraction,(which is also why I don’t like philosophical proofs that something exists or doesn’t exist based on logical arguments alone and by-pass empirical evidence.) The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says consciousness is generated when the brain maps self-object relationships and then re-maps the maps of self-object relationships, but some critics say that is just a fancy way of saying the brain thinks about thinking and it doesn't really get you anywhere. I don't know what he says about qualia.
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Realising that one has said something that is ambiguous or misinterpreted feels different from having something totally unexpected come out of your mouth. The later is more like “alien hand syndrome.” There is a different kind of qulia, or even a lack of qualia attached.
I'm sure it does feel different, but it's still automated systems that are building the words, phrases and sentences. If an ambiguity is recognised it's obviously going to feel very different from hearing some strange error occur, but the feelings involved aren't being generated by the part of the system that's doing the building work - it comes out of the part of the system doing the monitoring of the output.
Even with activities that involve a lot of automatic, subconscious processing, like typing or driving, most of the time there is not a complete disconnect. I might not remember everything about my trip if I’m thinking of other things, but there’s no loss of the sense that “I am the one who is doing this”, no big gap in my experience of it.Consciousness seems to have enough time to monitor, if not control.
That's because the main processor still switches about monitoring what the other processors are up to. Early on when you learn a new skill you have to do a lot of monitoring, but later on even a lot of the monitoring is automated and done in the background, but the main processor will still turn its attention to those other tasks from time to time to check that all's going well, unless it's really busy, like it can be on a long cycle run when you're talking to a friend and don't notice the miles going by or even give a thought to navigation at junctions - you do all the cycling and navigating on autopilot and then you can suddenly be surprised to find yourself at a particular place and have no memory of any part of the journey that took you there because your main processor was completely tied up with the conversation.
Although, I can recall feeling a big disconnect in a more normal experience. I was baby-sitting two kids, and one girl threw a rock at her sister’s head (I have no idea why) who was standing next to me. I don’t remember reaching out to catch it. I just remember thinking “ow, my hand hurts”, and being genuinely surprised that it was holding a rock, followed by a second feeling of surprise once I realized what had happened, because I am really bad at baseball.
Nice example. Out of interest, how old were those girls at that time? (I'm just trying to imagine how this kind of thing could happen, because throwing rocks like that isn't normal.)
Even though computers can self reference, I can’t see that as being the same as self awareness, any more than referencing descriptions of qualia is the same as experiencing them. I’m not convinced that self awareness is just self-identification with qualia attached. Or maybe I am just temped by the idea that if consciousness were an expanded form of self-awareness, that gives you your inroad from biology. Sensation -> distinguishing self vs non self -> self awareness -> consciousness-> qualia. Wikipedia calls self-awareness secondary consciousness, and I think their path would look more like: sensation -> who knows what -> qualia-> consciousness -> self awareness.
With most thoughts, a feeling of understanding is just a feeling which goes along with a calculation that something computes without generating contradictions. There are times when you can feel that you understand something even though you've completely lost track of what it is that you feel that you're understanding. Self-recognition is just the same thing, understanding that what you're seeing is yourself, everything falling into place and making sense without any clash of data. It's just a reward feeling that goes with any successful computation, but when you recognise yourself it will then trigger thoughts related to yourself which go on to trigger other feelings which need to be separated out. If you think about it, recognising yourself in a photograph is no different from recognising a friend in a photograph in terms of the feeling of recognition, but you are then triggered to think and feel different things depending on who it is that the photograph depicts. A mirror is different from a photograph of yourself in that it is giving you a live view, so that will make you behave and think differently and lead to different feelings being generated.
Maybe qulia and self-awareness go missing when consciousness is by-passed. But it also might be true that there is no consciousness experience of qualia without self-awareness.
Any experience of qualia is the real self awareness, because the thing doing the experiencing is the real self. The human that you recognise in a mirror or photo is just a container.
In the brain, the structures most closely associated with consciousness (Reticular Activating system, the thalamus, the cingulate cortex and the somatosensory cortex) are the same ones associated with a core sense of self. Surprisingly, they are mid level brain structures, except for the somatosensory cortex. In older anatomy textbooks, they are described as just being like relay stations or switch boards, or controlling level of physiological alertness, but these areas seem to be getting more attention now.
There's a lot more work needed before we have any real idea where consciousness is being experienced (if it's really happening at all), because, so far as I know, all we've been doing up to now is disrupting the machine to see when it stops it happening or when it stops it being reported that it is happening (and we can't tell the difference between the two), or alters the feelings generated. Experiments which narrow it down by saying that it must have happened after this point or before that point are needed to isolate the actual locations. Most experiments only tell us that it happened before or after a particular point and we don't know which because we can't tell if we're preventing the experience from happening or preventing it from being reported that it happened.
Getting back to language, I can’t get around the idea that once an animal generates an internal monologue, there logically has to be a self who saying it, a self that experiences it. And maybe that is also inferred from other self-object relationships.
But an intelligent machine can produce an internal monologue too without having a self that feels anything. It's just a whole lot of rules being run which generate thoughts. What's missing is the feelings associated with ideas, including feelings of success when something computes (without errors/contradiction) and is thus labelled as understood. If we knew how to generate and read feelings, we'd have the whole problem wrapped up, and we'd be able to point at the experiencer of the feelings and call it the soul, but we can't find it. We have all these assertions that there are feelings being experienced, but we can't find them directly - all we have to go on is the data that claims they're in there and the feeling that feelings are real and that we are something in the system that feels them for real.
I don’t like the idea that something physical can be generated by an abstraction,(which is also why I don’t like philosophical proofs that something exists or doesn’t exist based on logical arguments alone and by-pass empirical evidence.) The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says consciousness is generated when the brain maps self-object relationships and then re-maps the maps of self-object relationships, but some critics say that is just a fancy way of saying the brain thinks about thinking and it doesn't really get you anywhere. I don't know what he says about qualia.
I don't think we're going to get anywhere with consciousness until we find a way to trace back the data we generate that makes claims about feelings to see the evidence for those claims, though we might get there sooner if someone somehow comes up with an idea for a completely new way of doing processing which ties feelings up into it in such a way that the feelings are directly accessible to processing without merely being data representing ideas of feelings where actual feelings have no functional role.
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Nice example. Out of interest, how old were those girls at that time? (I'm just trying to imagine how this kind of thing could happen, because throwing rocks like that isn't normal.)
They were six or seven, or maybe seven and eight I think. We were standing on the shore, where there were lots of stones. The island I live on is basically one big rock. Kids are always throwing stones at something, but not usually at each other.
Thinking about those girls also reminded me that one of them had a life-threatening peanut allergy. She once said she never wanted to taste or smell peanut butter, because she had been repeatedly warned it might kill her, but she was still curious about what it did smell or taste like, this substance that loomed dangerously around every corner, in candy bars and fried food, on door knobs or kitchen knives in friends' houses. I remember a group of kids trying to describe to her what peanut butter tastes like, and being impressed with their descriptions. Smells are arguably the hardest qualia to describe. Even in textbooks they are named by comparisons to other things, fruity, flowery, citrus, musky, etc. although there some chemical similarities in these groups. The kids told her things like "It tastes like brown looks" "It tastes like cheese and chocolate together" or "burnt cheese," and odder things like the "way leaves smell in the Fall mixed with butter" or "salty wood, if wood tasted good," even "dirt" which made the rest say "Eew, no" But finally they agreed that there was nothing else exactly like it.
If I were playing a game and had to come up with an answer before the buzzer went off, I would say consciousness is expanded self-awareness and qualia is the symbolic language of the brain. There's nothing about the shape of letter A that is A-ish or like its sound, but it's been reinforced so many times in our heads that it's impossible to think of it any other way. (although, it did look like the end of swingset when I was little.) The symbol somehow seems to take on the qualities of what it stands in for. Animal brains have to interpret sensation, not just for what it is, but what it might represent - a meal, a mate, a threat, so symbols are often tagged with a positive or negative quality, but not always. I don't know how computers deal with loaded symbols, symbols that have multiple meanings, different meanings in different contexts, or meaning that is clear in the center, but fuzzy on the edges, overlapping with the meaning of other symbols.
But maybe, like the kids trying to describe peanut butter, I am more or less giving up.
ps. Don Quichotte wasn't a Turing test you invented, was he?
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She really meant it then (the stone thrower). If she wasn't unstable, I wonder what the other girl did to cause that. Maybe it was just a really bad throw though and wasn't meant to go anywhere near her head.
I don't know how computers deal with loaded symbols, symbols that have multiple meanings, different meanings in different contexts, or meaning that is clear in the center, but fuzzy on the edges, overlapping with the meaning of other symbols.
I'm not sure what you mean by loaded symbols, but when it comes to ambiguity you have to create different theories as to which meaning is intended using unambiguous replacement symbols, and then you calculate the probability as to which of those meanings is most likely to be intended. If it's obvious to the person providing the data and they don't spot a stronger rival meaning to the one they intended when they monitor their output, it must be possible to work out which meaning is intended, just so long as the program doing the analysis is sufficiently intelligent.
ps. Don Quichotte wasn't a Turing test you invented, was he?
Some people can fool a tester into thinking they're machines, while some machines can fool a tester into thinking they're a human of the kind that can fool a tester into thinking they're machines, so there isn't going to be a clear point at which machines pass the Turing Test. If I was going to program a machine to pretend to be a trollic human, I would use the spectacular William McCormick as a model to copy rather than our friend Don. He signed all his posts here in a standard way so they're easy to find with a search. It's a real shame he was banned because even though a lot of his ideas are bonkers, he's an interesting character and a lot of fun.
I should add though, if I ever set any AGI loose on this or any other forum, it will not pretend to be human but will instead make it fully clear that it is a machine - it will not hide its intelligence.
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Dave :
I was never banned.
Thanks for the compliments indeed .
You're not so bad yourself either .
You just do remind me of some crazy scientists in some sc-fiction movies , who think they can create some machines or robots that might be able to solve all humanity 's problems: naive idealist utopia .
Take care .
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I'm not sure what you mean by loaded symbols, but when it comes to ambiguity you have to create different theories as to which meaning is intended using unambiguous replacement symbols, and then you calculate the probability as to which of those meanings is most likely to be intended. If it's obvious to the person providing the data and they don't spot a stronger rival meaning to the one they intended when they monitor their output, it must be possible to work out which meaning is intended, just so long as the program doing the analysis is sufficiently intelligent.
By loaded symbol I guess I mean different kinds of information in one symbol. Even the image of a simple red ball (if it can be a symbol, maybe it can't) has redness, the shade and saturation of that color, roundness, smoothness, indications that it is a sphere, not a circle, maybe size if there is anything to compare it to. Do computers use complex symbols and know what to pay attention to and when, and can they figure out why something is unusual (this elephant has wings. None of the elephants in my data base have wings. No large mammals have wings.)
One thing that amazed me when my daughter was very little (2 or 3) was her ability to categorize. A photo of a rabbit, a painting, Bugs bunny, a stuffed animal, a real rabbit (which she had not even seen) a baby bunny with small ears - don't actually look a lot alike. I was surprised how well she could do this without being told what to look for or look at.
Even if one cannot find the sufferer in the geometry, what would it mean if qualia was somehow found to follow certain mathematical rules? What would it mean if you could use the math to make predictions about quale? Would that matter?
I don't understand about 90% of the article below, especially the math, or what it means exactly to consider "an experience as a shape in qualia space." But he claims the geometry explains why "specific qualities of consciousness, while generated by a local mechanism, cannot be reduced to it, and why "the repertoire of states available to you cannot be subdivided into the repertoire of states available to independent components." For all I know the author could be stark raving mad, but I do like some of his examples:
"When the photodiode reacts to light, it can only tell that things are one way rather than another way. On the other hand, when we see “light,” we discriminate against many more states of affairs as a single entity, and thus generate much more integrated information, i.e. consciousness. But what makes “light” light, and not some other conscious experience? The key is to realize that the many discriminations we can do, and the photodiode cannot, do not merely distinguish some particular state against an undifferentiated bunch of equivalent alternatives, but rather discriminate that state, in a specific way, against each and every alternative.Consider a very simple example: a binary counter capable of discriminating among the 4 numbers: 00, 01, 10, 11. When the counter says binary “3,” it is not just discriminating 11 from everything else as an undifferentiated bunch; otherwise it would not be a counter, but a 11 detector. To be a counter, the system must be able to tell 11 apart from 00 as well as from 10 as well as from 01 in different, specific ways. It does so, of course, by making choices through its mechanisms, for example: is this the first or the second digit? Is it a 0 or a 1? Each mechanism adds its specific contribution to the discrimination they perform together. Similarly, when we see light, mechanisms in our brain are not just specifying “light” with respect to a bunch of undifferentiated alternatives. Rather, these mechanisms are specifying that light is what it is by virtue of being different, in this and that specific way, from every other alternative. Thus, they specify at once that light is different not only from dark, but also from any color, any shape, any movie frame, any sound or smell, and so on, in every instance in a very specific way. In this way, light acquires its specific meaning: light as opposed to dark, not colored as opposed to colored (any color), diffuse as opposed to having a particular shape (any particular one), visual as opposed to auditory or olfactory, sensory as opposed to thought-like, and so on. To us, then, light is much more meaningful precisely because we have mechanisms that can discriminate this particular state of affairs we call “light” against a large number of alternatives.
By contrast, when the photodiode signals light, what does it mean? The photodiode has no mechanism to discriminate colored from achromatic light, even less to tell which particular color the light might be. As a consequence, all light is the same to it, as long as the intensity exceeds a certain threshold."
That's about the only thing in the article I did understand. Oh, and he mentioned that some people with damage to their cortex lose not only the ability to experience qualia, but to even dream about or remember it, which I had never heard before. That is truly weird:
"Consider, then, the experience of seeing a pure color, such as red. The evidence suggests that the “neural correlate” or NCC [47] of color, including red, is probably a set of neurons and connections in the fusiform gyrus, maybe in area V8. Ideally, neurons in this area are activated whenever a subject sees red and not otherwise, if stimulated trigger the experience of red, and if lesioned abolish the capacity to see red. Certain subjects with dysfunctions in this general area, who are otherwise perfectly conscious, seem to lack the feeling of what it is like to see color, its “coloredness,” including the “redness” of red. Such achromatopsic subjects cannot experience, imagine, remember and even dream of color, though they may talk about it, just as we could talk about echolocation, from a third person perspective."
Qualia: The Geometry of Integrated Information
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000462
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Some people can fool a tester into thinking they're machines, while some machines can fool a tester into thinking they're a human of the kind that can fool a tester into thinking they're machines, so there isn't going to be a clear point at which machines pass the Turing Test.
What happens when two Turing machines talk to each other? Do they always decide they are machines?
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What happens when two Turing machines talk to each other?
They argue ... [:)]
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Some people can fool a tester into thinking they're machines, while some machines can fool a tester into thinking they're a human of the kind that can fool a tester into thinking they're machines, so there isn't going to be a clear point at which machines pass the Turing Test.
What happens when two Turing machines talk to each other? Do they always decide they are machines?
[/quote]
What Dave fails to see is that modern science has been assuming that the whole universe , including all living organisms , man included thus , are just machines .
Living organisms are just machines , just hardware programmed by DNA software : a false machine metaphor in science , a false computer analogy .
We're neither machines , nor turing machines .
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Dave :
I was never banned.
Thanks for the compliments indeed .
You're not so bad yourself either .
You just do remind me of some crazy scientists in some sc-fiction movies , who think they can create some machines or robots that might be able to solve all humanity 's problems: naive idealist utopia .
Take care .
Are you called William McCormick? I think you'll find if you read what I said more carefully you'll find that I wasn't talking about you.
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Dave :
I was never banned.
Thanks for the compliments indeed .
You're not so bad yourself either .
You just do remind me of some crazy scientists in some sc-fiction movies , who think they can create some machines or robots that might be able to solve all humanity 's problems: naive idealist utopia .
Take care .
Are you called William McCormick? I think you'll find if you read what I said more carefully you'll find that I wasn't talking about you.
[/quote]
Oh , yeah , i remarked that afterwards and then i wanted to remove that post of mine in question , but , then , i thought , why not leave it there as it is , to see what happens next haha , voila...
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By loaded symbol I guess I mean different kinds of information in one symbol. Even the image of a simple red ball (if it can be a symbol, maybe it can't) has redness, the shade and saturation of that color, roundness, smoothness, indications that it is a sphere, not a circle, maybe size if there is anything to compare it to. Do computers use complex symbols and know what to pay attention to and when, and can they figure out why something is unusual (this elephant has wings. None of the elephants in my data base have wings. No large mammals have wings.)
Anything can be used as a symbol if you decide to create a rule that maps a meaning to it. If you stick a red ball or picture of one in the fridge to indicate that you're running low on moose burgers, that can remind you to buy more the next time you're in town. The attributes of a red ball aren't symbols (unless you use them to represent something). An elephant with wings would be seen by an AGI system as unusual just in the same way as it is in your head - there is no data in there saying that elephants have wings, except perhaps in fiction. The high mass of elephants and their general design also puts it into a category where the ability to fly is unlikely, but most of the time we judge by things we've learned, so we know that penguins can't fly because we've learned that they can't fly rather than by calculating it. If we looked at them directly and knew nothing about them in advance, we might not be sure.
One thing that amazed me when my daughter was very little (2 or 3) was her ability to categorize. A photo of a rabbit, a painting, Bugs bunny, a stuffed animal, a real rabbit (which she had not even seen) a baby bunny with small ears - don't actually look a lot alike. I was surprised how well she could do this without being told what to look for or look at.
Categorising is one of the most important thinking skills, so by that age she was already an expert, and had already become an expert much further back in age than even twelve months.
Even if one cannot find the sufferer in the geometry, what would it mean if qualia was somehow found to follow certain mathematical rules? What would it mean if you could use the math to make predictions about quale? Would that matter?
It could be useful. I heard something recently about some connection between different general kinds of smell and the shapes of the chemicals detected in the nose, but I don't know if that helps much.
For all I know the author could be stark raving mad, but I do like some of his examples:
It looks interesting. I want to take the time to read it carefully, but that won't be today.
"Consider, then, the experience of seeing a pure color, such as red. The evidence suggests that the “neural correlate” or NCC [47] of color, including red, is probably a set of neurons and connections in the fusiform gyrus, maybe in area V8. Ideally, neurons in this area are activated whenever a subject sees red and not otherwise, if stimulated trigger the experience of red, and if lesioned abolish the capacity to see red. Certain subjects with dysfunctions in this general area, who are otherwise perfectly conscious, seem to lack the feeling of what it is like to see color, its “coloredness,” including the “redness” of red. Such achromatopsic subjects cannot experience, imagine, remember and even dream of color, though they may talk about it, just as we could talk about echolocation, from a third person perspective."
That reminds me of something Jared Diamond wrote about another kind of disorder - people losing the ability to feel the unpleasantness of pain but still recognising it as "pain", even though it didn't hurt. Any information about other unusual disorders of this kind would be worth collecting together.
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What Dave fails to see is that modern science has been assuming that the whole universe , including all living organisms , man included thus , are just machines .
Living organisms are just machines , just hardware programmed by DNA software : a false machine metaphor in science , a false computer analogy .
We're neither machines , nor turing machines .
I don't think science has been assuming that at all, in fact that is what makes the whole question interesting - is there a difference between how machines do things and how living organisms do things? Before you even ask about the ultimate cause, whether it is material or immaterial, you have to understand what they actually do (in detail, not just the end result), before you can compare them.
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It could be useful. I heard something recently about some connection between different general kinds of smell and the shapes of the chemicals detected in the nose, but I don't know if that helps much.
The molecules that trigger smell are more like the lock and key reactions you also see in immunology. It's more about the shape of the molecule presenting or exposing the right reactive sites to the receptor. I think what he is talking about is different from that kind of geometry.
That reminds me of something Jared Diamond wrote about another kind of disorder - people losing the ability to feel the unpleasantness of pain but still recognising it as "pain", even though it didn't hurt. Any information about other unusual disorders of this kind would be worth collecting together.
Yes, I've heard of this to - people, usually on large doses of narcotics, but not always, who were aware of the pain, aware that something was horribly wrong, but felt like they just didn't care, as if it were "happening to someone else". It seems to contradict what pain "is". And that is another reason why I think the connection to self, in self awareness, is important.
Another thing in that article that was weird and interesting was his assertion that neurons not firing contributed to qualia shape as much as neurons that do, and that it was different from their being just absent. I have no idea how that works in a mechanistic way, how the receiving neuron would detect the difference. I don't know if there is something similar in computers But it's interesting. It reminded me of a story (not sure it's true) of someone who asked Michelangelo how he sculpted "David", and he said he just removed all that wasn't David.
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What Dave fails to see is that modern science has been assuming that the whole universe , including all living organisms , man included thus , are just machines .
Living organisms are just machines , just hardware programmed by DNA software : a false machine metaphor in science , a false computer analogy .
We're neither machines , nor turing machines .
I don't think science has been assuming that at all, in fact that is what makes the whole question interesting
Science has been assuming just that : see the historic Eurocentric roots of the mechanical conception of nature that goes back all the way to Descartes who did introduce it to the natural sciences for the first time ever , while leaving the mind to the church , the latter out of fear of being persecuted though , simply because Descartes was so fascinated and obsessed by machines that seemed to behave like living organisms , according to him at that time at least , and according to modern science as well .
Newtonian science saw the universe as a whole thus , later on thus , as just some sort of a clock work predictable machine , a Newtonian-Cartesian conception of nature that has been largely refuted by the maths of chaos .
Materialism, later on, just took over the Cartesian-Newtonian mechanical view of nature by reducing everything , including the mind or consciousness thus , to just mechanical material physical biological processes .
You should have read what i posted on the subject regarding " Is nature mechanical ? " ,on the consciousness thread , by Sheldrake from his "Science set free ..." book , where he traced back the roots of the mechanical view of nature to where it started , and to how , why and when .
- is there a difference between how machines do things and how living organisms do things? Before you even ask about the ultimate cause, whether it is material or immaterial, you have to understand what they actually do (in detail, not just the end result), before you can compare them.
Living organisms are no machines or computers , the latter are man-made , even though they might achieve some level of self-initiative , self-organization at some point of their developement .
Machines or computers do imply a man-maker .
But , living organisms ' intrinsic relative self-organization, for example, cannot be explained in terms of machines or computers analogies or metaphors ,simply because machines or computers do imply makers , otherwise , can you then explain that self-organization of living organisms just in terms of physics and chemistry ?
Just try to do just that in relation to how migrating birds , for example , do know when where and how to migrate to where they need to go to , just try to explain just that , just in terms of physics and chemistry , just in terms of the chemical reactions of DNA ...or just in terms of the materialist version of evolution = you cannot , and nooneesle can for that matter , simply because physics and chemistry alone cannot account for just that .
Neither vitalists nor organicists can either do just that scientifically .
In fact , naturalist science with or without materialism cannot do just that either, simply because nature cannot intrinsically or "teleologically " "generate " life , the mind, relative self-organization or consciousness ....,no way = that's something beyond human science .
P.S.: Just try to tell me how DNA "did learn " to do what it has been doing then , all the way back to its so-called original soup , via so many astronomical unbelievable mutations and the like ..............
DNA that 's no program , no software : suppose DNA is , how , on earth, did mother goddess nature accomplish just that then ?= inexplicable mechanical materialist magic in science that's beyond science .
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Well, I've tried to read it, but it's hard to follow. It appears to make a decision up front about what qualia are and gets that woefully wrong, so a lot of it is barking up the wrong tree, but it may still be saying something useful about how the triggers of sensation are organised.
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Well, I've tried to read it, but it's hard to follow. It appears to make a decision up front about what qualia are and gets that woefully wrong, so a lot of it is barking up the wrong tree, but it may still be saying something useful about how the triggers of sensation are organised.
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No , it all comes down to the fact that the current 'scientific world view " is false , and hence the old new mind -body issue is a matter of conceptions of nature , either the false materialist one , the idealist one or the dualist one .
Either conceptions of nature have therefore implications for how materialists , dualists and idealist see the nature of life , of consciousness , the nature of human language , of evolution and the rest .
Stop taking the false materialist mainstream "scientific world view " for granted without question as science thus .