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Quote from: DonQuichotte on 10/11/2013 17:59:49It 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.
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 .
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.
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”)
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
ps. Don Quichotte wasn't a Turing test you invented, was he?
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.
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?
Quote from: David Cooper on 13/11/2013 17:57:24Some 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?
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 .
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 14/11/2013 19:14:32Dave : 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.
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?
For all I know the author could be stark raving mad, but I do like some of his examples:
"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."
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 .
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.
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.
Quote from: DonQuichotte on 15/11/2013 18:24:10What 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 .QuoteI don't think science has been assuming that at all, in fact that is what makes the whole question interesting
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.
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.