Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
SELFISHNESS BRED INTO US. CAN WE WHIP IT?
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
FREE WILL, AN IMPORTANT ILLUSION
If you watch this particular episode of Wormhole, you'll quickly see that the men who are doing the experiments are the ones concluding that the human animal does not have free will whereas those who believe we have free will did a lot of philosophizing. Stick with the experimenters, the scientists. You'll always be closer to the truth, and I generally feel better the more I know the facts. Odd...that no women were featured in this episode. Why?
One philosopher among them did say that the more each of us knows, the closer to having a sense of control seems possible. I agree with him because the computer with the most data in memory will naturally have more information informing the decisions it makes for the consciousness called "I" that it makes decisions for.
Saturday, July 13, 2013
LITERALLY, THE LITERALIST DROWNS IN THE LAMB'S BLOOD
Monday, April 25, 2005 [This entry was originally posted on this date. Blogger refuses to believe that this posting exists so I'm re-posting now in larger typeface. I wanted to enlarge the original, but it won't come up when I feed in that date.]
"... the
language of religion, including most of the Bible, is necessarily
figurative or symbolic and therefore the literalist, who by definition,
lacks imagination or poetic insights, is the least religious of men." (from THE DARTMOUTH BIBLE, 2nd Edition, p. xl)
I'm always troubled when I discuss atheism or religion with fundamentalists because they're so sadly dead and plodding and unpoetic. They don't know what they're missing. Oh, they're emotional enough, writhing in the clutch of their Jesus experience, but they are also like frothing pit bulls who won't let go the seat of his pants. As to any larger feel for the visionary Universe, they get nothing. Their god is a puppet maker who whittled humans from mud and who never left earth. Their god has no imagination. He's a petty choirmaster who punishes them or the choirmaster's wife who gives them milk and cookies.
Never mind that in every encounter with the details of science, fundamentalists have, throughout history, lost in the courts of time. You would think that, therefore, they would embrace a less literal interpretation of their big book and take up a poetic and symbolic interpretation.
Christian and Muslim fundamentalists are more alike than they are different when it comes to a contrast with most rational Americans. They are ever people of the law rather than people of the spirit. As Thomas Merton writes, "One cannot apprehend a symbol unless one is able to awaken, in one's own being, the spiritual resonances which respond to the symbol not only as sign but as 'sacrament' and 'presence.'"
I've lost much of my own poetic spirit with the ravages of time. A certain ability to concentrate my consciousness seems to have declined, but, still, I recall how spiritual and painful is the truly poetic way of experiencing reality. The poetic and symbolic way challenges the petty laws of the literalist and allows doubt to flourish. In the brief passage I quoted above from the Dartmouth Bible, I found for myself an explanation of the literalistic problem which I have never forgotten, and then, recently, Joseph Campbell explained further:
"The symbols of the higher religions may at first sight seem to have little in common," wrote a Roman Catholic monk, the late Father Thomas Merton, in a brief but perspicacious article entitled 'Symbolism: Communication or Communion?' "But when one comes to a better understanding of those religions, and when one sees that the experiences which are the fulfillment of religious belief and practice are most clearly expressed in symbols, one may come to recognize that often the symbols of different religions may have more in common than have the abstractly formulated official doctrines.
"'The true symbol,' [Merton] states in another place, 'does not merely point to something else. It contains in itself a structure which awakens our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and of reality itself. A true symbol takes us to the center of the circle, not to another point on the circumference. It is by symbolism that man enters affectively and consciously into contact with his own deepest self, with other men, and with God. God is dead . . . means, in fact, that symbols are dead.'
"The poet and the mystic regard the imagery of a revelation as a fiction through which an insight into the depths of being—one's own being and being generally—is conveyed anagogically. Sectarian theologians, on the other hand, hold hard to the literal readings of their narratives, and these hold traditions apart. The lives of three incarnations, Jesus, Krishna, and Shakyamuni, will not be the same, yet as symbols pointing not to themselves, or to each other, but to the life beholding them, they are equivalent. To quote the monk Thomas Merton again: 'The symbol is an object pointing to a subject. We are summoned to a deeper spiritual awareness, far beyond the level of subject and object.'
"Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions, are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a 'presence' or 'eternity' that is whole and entire in each. In this function all mythologies, all great poetries, and all mystic traditions are in accord; and where any such inspiriting vision remains effective in a civilization, everything and every creature within its range is alive. The first condition, therefore, that any mythology must fulfill, if it is to render life to modern lives, is that of cleansing the doors of perception to the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves and of the universe of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind. Whereas theologians, reading their revelations counterclockwise, so to say, point to references in the past (in Merton's words: 'to another point on the circumference') and Utopians offer revelations only promissory of some desired future, mythologies, having sprung from the psyche, point back to the psyche ('the center'): and anyone seriously turning within will, in fact, rediscover their references in himself." (from MYTHS TO LIVE BY, Joe Campbell, pp. 265-266)
______________________________________________
"All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable." —Fran Lebowitz (She spends lots of time looking in the mirror too.)
Friday, December 17, 2010
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
FREE WILL IS A FEELING, NOT A REALITY
Hey! I'm getting there, to the robot self brain flow. The following is another entry on the World Pantheism Website:
Walt writes: A FAAP Free-Willist asserts that ultimately all our choices are determined in a physicalist way by nerve action potentials, etc. but that for all practical purposes, (due to irreducible complexity) we have free will, or what is operationally indistinguishable from free-will.
I would not say FAPP "we have free will." Free will is traditionally defined as the conscious human animal control of our human behaviors. What FAPP is saying in reality is that because no computer can copy a mind well enough to duplicate and/or predict a human act (a human act as understood as a series of synaptic firings), then to that computer (which does not possess a consciousness function via language that corresponds to "I"), the action would automatically be channeled into a category or storage function that would register as "misunderstood and/or random activity" versus another category that would be counted as "understood and predictable behavior i.e. copyable behavior". Since to that computer all human activity would be counted as "misunderstood and/or random behavior", no human behavior can be counted as copyable behavior. Free will and determinism do not exist for an unconscious computer. Only copyable or nonsense behavior as recorded in its memory banks.
Taking consciousness out of the discussion eliminates the concepts of free will and determinism. Only consciousness through language can assign meaning to those words. It's the paradox.
The human brain, because it must understand other human activities so as to respond to those behaviors appropriately for survival purposes, functions as if there is an understandable behavior (purposive function) operating in the counterpart it observes outside itself. So the default mechanism operating in the brain is assigned the words FREE WILL by all the robots operating on the global environment, whereas what an individual brain is actually doing is interpreting and responding to stimuli which a computer would send into the "misunderstood and/or random behavior" memory bank. A computer can not generate an appropriate response to any human activity whereas the human brain, because its program is identical to the program operating in its human counterpart, imagines its response to the other human brain as a FREELY WILLED behavior. It experiences its responses to the OTHER as self-generated behavior because it senses its actions as occuring within its carcass. The SENSATION or FEELING of SELF-GENERATED ACTIVITY is interpreted, via language, as a free will activity because the computer brain can't catch itself being a computer, but it can use consciousness to label its felt activities as free will activities when, in all actuality, the brain is just a computer, with quantum capabilities, responding to another computer with quantum capabilities outside of its housing or carcass.
Can I try to say this more succinctly? Yes, maybe: The brain is a computer which feels itself functioning. The sensation caused by its functioning gives the brain a sense that it controls those activities. The brain's feeling of its own functions is consciously encapsulated in the words FREE WILL which it has assigned to those sensations of function that it experiences. Just as we assign the word "love" to a set of physiological sensations we experience so we assign the words "free will" to the physiological sensations of computation we experience.
Hey! I'm getting there, to the robot self brain flow. The following is another entry on the World Pantheism Website:
Walt writes: A FAAP Free-Willist asserts that ultimately all our choices are determined in a physicalist way by nerve action potentials, etc. but that for all practical purposes, (due to irreducible complexity) we have free will, or what is operationally indistinguishable from free-will.
I would not say FAPP "we have free will." Free will is traditionally defined as the conscious human animal control of our human behaviors. What FAPP is saying in reality is that because no computer can copy a mind well enough to duplicate and/or predict a human act (a human act as understood as a series of synaptic firings), then to that computer (which does not possess a consciousness function via language that corresponds to "I"), the action would automatically be channeled into a category or storage function that would register as "misunderstood and/or random activity" versus another category that would be counted as "understood and predictable behavior i.e. copyable behavior". Since to that computer all human activity would be counted as "misunderstood and/or random behavior", no human behavior can be counted as copyable behavior. Free will and determinism do not exist for an unconscious computer. Only copyable or nonsense behavior as recorded in its memory banks.
Taking consciousness out of the discussion eliminates the concepts of free will and determinism. Only consciousness through language can assign meaning to those words. It's the paradox.
The human brain, because it must understand other human activities so as to respond to those behaviors appropriately for survival purposes, functions as if there is an understandable behavior (purposive function) operating in the counterpart it observes outside itself. So the default mechanism operating in the brain is assigned the words FREE WILL by all the robots operating on the global environment, whereas what an individual brain is actually doing is interpreting and responding to stimuli which a computer would send into the "misunderstood and/or random behavior" memory bank. A computer can not generate an appropriate response to any human activity whereas the human brain, because its program is identical to the program operating in its human counterpart, imagines its response to the other human brain as a FREELY WILLED behavior. It experiences its responses to the OTHER as self-generated behavior because it senses its actions as occuring within its carcass. The SENSATION or FEELING of SELF-GENERATED ACTIVITY is interpreted, via language, as a free will activity because the computer brain can't catch itself being a computer, but it can use consciousness to label its felt activities as free will activities when, in all actuality, the brain is just a computer, with quantum capabilities, responding to another computer with quantum capabilities outside of its housing or carcass.
Can I try to say this more succinctly? Yes, maybe: The brain is a computer which feels itself functioning. The sensation caused by its functioning gives the brain a sense that it controls those activities. The brain's feeling of its own functions is consciously encapsulated in the words FREE WILL which it has assigned to those sensations of function that it experiences. Just as we assign the word "love" to a set of physiological sensations we experience so we assign the words "free will" to the physiological sensations of computation we experience.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
POETRY AND THE DETERMINED MIND
Joe Bescop said (on the Pantheism website):
I replied:
At 73 (just had a birthday last month), I notice I've lost the capacity for poetic concentration. It was concentration (Joe's focused mind) that led to my best poetry. It's a state of mind out of which arises metaphorical and happy connections about concrete objects in the material world. Sometimes, however, poems came with me out of sleep. All I needed to do was write the words down and arrange them on the page to look like poetry.
The following is one such poem which was selected for Intro 9, a collection of the best poetry to come out of writing programs around the US that year:
EXPLORATION BY CANOE
The savages had left them.
By accident, by searching, hidden
in bushes, we found them—
canoes of animal skin.
Where water was stillest, we pushed in,
then worked out where it ran swiftest.
Someone had lost our maps—
by a not knowing, we got along.
This river we've not seen the end of
empties to a sea we've not tested,
a sea horizon we must think beyond—
over its edge another place to go or,
up, an endless black the stars gleam through
like small hopes we feel inside of us that say,
Yes. Our boats are working out a long journey.
From this river, the sea's imagination away
and beyond that the endless black or…
over the edge in our animal skin canoes!
I just now realize how much determinism is in that poem which I wrote while a believer in AA. Most fascinating about this concentration process (call it meditative too) is that when the poet focuses purely on a physical activity, like flying a kite, and, following that line of concentration, emotively and accurately describes the physical situation, he often discovers that his brain is talking, giving him words, about an intellectual process that evokes similar feelings. Making the "I" conscious of a connection between the feeling brain and outside world.
Thus a poem I wrote about flying a kite as a child, many years later I understood as a search for God, at the end of which my line came down with the kite, and I came "to lay my line along the earth". I can still recall the powerful way those lines felt when they struck into my consciousness, accompanied by powerful feelings of RIGHTNESS. That process is so powerful a feeling that ancient poets often thought they were possessed by a spirit of poetry. What interests me, nowadays, when the poems no longer come my way, is how a physical activity can equate emotionally to a mental process through the act of accurately and emotionally describing the physical world. It's got to be as powerful as early humanoids felt when they began to become conscious of the physical world they lived in. Thus internal emotional states took on spiritual clothing that we are only just now beginning to unravel.
MORE OF SAME LATER...
Joe Bescop said (on the Pantheism website):
"Most of the arts require a focused mind, without which, the physical mechanisms tend to become as dysfunctional as the unfocused mind.
"I find with the musical and literary arts this is the case in my practices--more so in the musical than literary arena."
I replied:
At 73 (just had a birthday last month), I notice I've lost the capacity for poetic concentration. It was concentration (Joe's focused mind) that led to my best poetry. It's a state of mind out of which arises metaphorical and happy connections about concrete objects in the material world. Sometimes, however, poems came with me out of sleep. All I needed to do was write the words down and arrange them on the page to look like poetry.
The following is one such poem which was selected for Intro 9, a collection of the best poetry to come out of writing programs around the US that year:
EXPLORATION BY CANOE
The savages had left them.
By accident, by searching, hidden
in bushes, we found them—
canoes of animal skin.
Where water was stillest, we pushed in,
then worked out where it ran swiftest.
Someone had lost our maps—
by a not knowing, we got along.
This river we've not seen the end of
empties to a sea we've not tested,
a sea horizon we must think beyond—
over its edge another place to go or,
up, an endless black the stars gleam through
like small hopes we feel inside of us that say,
Yes. Our boats are working out a long journey.
From this river, the sea's imagination away
and beyond that the endless black or…
over the edge in our animal skin canoes!
I just now realize how much determinism is in that poem which I wrote while a believer in AA. Most fascinating about this concentration process (call it meditative too) is that when the poet focuses purely on a physical activity, like flying a kite, and, following that line of concentration, emotively and accurately describes the physical situation, he often discovers that his brain is talking, giving him words, about an intellectual process that evokes similar feelings. Making the "I" conscious of a connection between the feeling brain and outside world.
Thus a poem I wrote about flying a kite as a child, many years later I understood as a search for God, at the end of which my line came down with the kite, and I came "to lay my line along the earth". I can still recall the powerful way those lines felt when they struck into my consciousness, accompanied by powerful feelings of RIGHTNESS. That process is so powerful a feeling that ancient poets often thought they were possessed by a spirit of poetry. What interests me, nowadays, when the poems no longer come my way, is how a physical activity can equate emotionally to a mental process through the act of accurately and emotionally describing the physical world. It's got to be as powerful as early humanoids felt when they began to become conscious of the physical world they lived in. Thus internal emotional states took on spiritual clothing that we are only just now beginning to unravel.
MORE OF SAME LATER...
Friday, October 15, 2010
FREE WILL, CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE LIVING WORD
More discussions on the World Pantheist Movement website:
Walter I like the way you laid it down in your last entry. I'm sure there's a psychological necessity that we humans feel as if we exercise free will. If I felt my moment to moment activities were not in my control, my existence would be anxiety filled. I'd feel out of control, and having, in my past, felt what it feels like to feel out of control, I'd hate to feel that way all the time, so I do believe it's a psychological necessity for humans to feel they are the captains of their ships. In fact, I feel more in control of my life now that alcohol abuse is a long time back in my past, and I don't feel anxiety during most of a day as I did back then when my fears overwhelmed me. So the sense that I control my existence adds to a calm and mostly worry free emotional existence but, of course, I believe I lived my way to my current sense of well-being and did not think my way to it. Thoughts follow acts. Not the other way around.
Ron, you wrote, Can I intentionally as a conscious act of free will fire a neuron? Yes any time that I choose at random or by a whim,to remember in detail some particular memory.
Yes, but what fired up that synaptic whim or randomly fired up the thought that you are going to consciously go through all your memories in order to choose one memory and bring it to consciousness? Unless you consciously search through all your memories in order to choose one to bring into consciousness, then I maintain, something out of your control triggered your reflection and chose the memory to be experienced or to enter consciousness. I'm absolutely certain that we humans are incapable of stopping our thoughts on a dime (without cause) and deciding to have a memory moment. Something triggered the moment that brought you to experiencing a memory moment.
My view of mental life both as (1) experienced consciously in fragments and (2) as existing in memories stored in synaptic patterns waiting to be called into action and/or consciousness to guide our behaviors in the moment is that it commenced somewhere in the womb when the brain was mature enough to retain a synaptic impression. I truly believe we human animals consciously experience our births, but they're so traumatic that we repress them. Imagine the sensations that accompany being squeezed through that birth canal, being expelled into light and sounds so much different than those we'd had in the womb. Suddenly being hit by unfamiliar smells, sounds, sensations of all kinds. We've all experienced what it's like to be an alien in an alien environment.
Once the brain is mature enough to begin retaining impressions in the womb, it NEVER shuts down. One sensation flows into the next, sleeping or awake, and when we awake each morning out of dreams or out of unconsciousness nights (nights of unremembered dreams) our very first actions are not chosen but are decided by habitual actions or necessities and our conscious thoughts flow right out of sleep to trigger our first conscious thought of the day which triggers the next and the next and the next. Our bodies have been carrying us along for several years before most of us recall our first conscious moment. The body is in charge of our lives long before we come to imagine that we control our bodies. Our bodies are carrying us along and we experience what is going on in fragmented moments of consciousness.
I challenge you to an act of imagination, for I believe it requires imagination to get to the point where you have the moment of aha? and you sense that your body and your consciousness are one, that you are an animal in the human environment, that your body is making all the important decisions that keep you alive and well and content in the human environment of buildings and jobs and crowds. I superimpose an image of a stag in its environment over my imagination of buildings and et cetera. Like a stag I move through my environment, following the lead of my instincts. Consciousness slips away into second place in order of importance. My staglike body is powerful and leading where consciousness follows. It's a pretty powerful image. This imagination moment must transcend the conscious thoughts my words on this page trigger in your consciousness. The imaginative leap must be so powerful that you FEEL it, experience it so that you feel you are landing on a new undiscovered continent or planet.
In recovery from alcohol abuse, I often understood the words of some helpful hint, but until the words penetrated through my consciousness and struck fire in my emotional life, they were a dead set of words. Live words are in touch with the realities of the body and its decisions; they are in direct contact with the emotional triggers that lead our lives for us.
More discussions on the World Pantheist Movement website:
Walter I like the way you laid it down in your last entry. I'm sure there's a psychological necessity that we humans feel as if we exercise free will. If I felt my moment to moment activities were not in my control, my existence would be anxiety filled. I'd feel out of control, and having, in my past, felt what it feels like to feel out of control, I'd hate to feel that way all the time, so I do believe it's a psychological necessity for humans to feel they are the captains of their ships. In fact, I feel more in control of my life now that alcohol abuse is a long time back in my past, and I don't feel anxiety during most of a day as I did back then when my fears overwhelmed me. So the sense that I control my existence adds to a calm and mostly worry free emotional existence but, of course, I believe I lived my way to my current sense of well-being and did not think my way to it. Thoughts follow acts. Not the other way around.
Ron, you wrote, Can I intentionally as a conscious act of free will fire a neuron? Yes any time that I choose at random or by a whim,to remember in detail some particular memory.
Yes, but what fired up that synaptic whim or randomly fired up the thought that you are going to consciously go through all your memories in order to choose one memory and bring it to consciousness? Unless you consciously search through all your memories in order to choose one to bring into consciousness, then I maintain, something out of your control triggered your reflection and chose the memory to be experienced or to enter consciousness. I'm absolutely certain that we humans are incapable of stopping our thoughts on a dime (without cause) and deciding to have a memory moment. Something triggered the moment that brought you to experiencing a memory moment.
My view of mental life both as (1) experienced consciously in fragments and (2) as existing in memories stored in synaptic patterns waiting to be called into action and/or consciousness to guide our behaviors in the moment is that it commenced somewhere in the womb when the brain was mature enough to retain a synaptic impression. I truly believe we human animals consciously experience our births, but they're so traumatic that we repress them. Imagine the sensations that accompany being squeezed through that birth canal, being expelled into light and sounds so much different than those we'd had in the womb. Suddenly being hit by unfamiliar smells, sounds, sensations of all kinds. We've all experienced what it's like to be an alien in an alien environment.
Once the brain is mature enough to begin retaining impressions in the womb, it NEVER shuts down. One sensation flows into the next, sleeping or awake, and when we awake each morning out of dreams or out of unconsciousness nights (nights of unremembered dreams) our very first actions are not chosen but are decided by habitual actions or necessities and our conscious thoughts flow right out of sleep to trigger our first conscious thought of the day which triggers the next and the next and the next. Our bodies have been carrying us along for several years before most of us recall our first conscious moment. The body is in charge of our lives long before we come to imagine that we control our bodies. Our bodies are carrying us along and we experience what is going on in fragmented moments of consciousness.
I challenge you to an act of imagination, for I believe it requires imagination to get to the point where you have the moment of aha? and you sense that your body and your consciousness are one, that you are an animal in the human environment, that your body is making all the important decisions that keep you alive and well and content in the human environment of buildings and jobs and crowds. I superimpose an image of a stag in its environment over my imagination of buildings and et cetera. Like a stag I move through my environment, following the lead of my instincts. Consciousness slips away into second place in order of importance. My staglike body is powerful and leading where consciousness follows. It's a pretty powerful image. This imagination moment must transcend the conscious thoughts my words on this page trigger in your consciousness. The imaginative leap must be so powerful that you FEEL it, experience it so that you feel you are landing on a new undiscovered continent or planet.
In recovery from alcohol abuse, I often understood the words of some helpful hint, but until the words penetrated through my consciousness and struck fire in my emotional life, they were a dead set of words. Live words are in touch with the realities of the body and its decisions; they are in direct contact with the emotional triggers that lead our lives for us.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
WHAT HAPPENS TO THE HUMAN WHO SUSPENDS JUDGMENT?
Currently, slowly, working my way through a Darwin biography.... I couldn't help drawing a comparison between a repeated comment (by the biographers) about why an Owen or a Lyell hesitated to make the jump to "transmutation"... i.e. "evolution" while a handful of others, like Darwin, did, and similar comments by people discussing free will versus determinism. Always, those reluctant naturalists stated "fears" that it degraded mankind to put him in the biological line of monkeys.
In almost every situation when we're discussing free will, those opposed to determinism fear that we will lose "moral accountability" if we agree that human behavior is determined by electro/chemical factors beyond our control. Darwin's reply in his journals was that he opposed the arrogance of that idea which put humankind on a pedestal in the discussion of biology. He got this from his Fueguian [sp] experiences.
There is nothing scientific about a moral or fearful objection to the facts of natural selection or determinism. Of course, I know there's nothing scientific about my conclusion that we can measure the accuracy of the facts by the depth of the fear that they arouse in the human subconscious, but it's interesting to contemplate: the deeper the fear the nearer the truth. But who or what is fearing the concept of powerlessness? And why? Would accepting our powerlessness be harmful to our survival or would it create an entirely new world consciousness?
Imagine how fearful we would be if we had to suspend our judgment about all human behavior since those judgments are vital to our survival....... but........ only in a hunter/gatherer society?
Currently, slowly, working my way through a Darwin biography.... I couldn't help drawing a comparison between a repeated comment (by the biographers) about why an Owen or a Lyell hesitated to make the jump to "transmutation"... i.e. "evolution" while a handful of others, like Darwin, did, and similar comments by people discussing free will versus determinism. Always, those reluctant naturalists stated "fears" that it degraded mankind to put him in the biological line of monkeys.
In almost every situation when we're discussing free will, those opposed to determinism fear that we will lose "moral accountability" if we agree that human behavior is determined by electro/chemical factors beyond our control. Darwin's reply in his journals was that he opposed the arrogance of that idea which put humankind on a pedestal in the discussion of biology. He got this from his Fueguian [sp] experiences.
There is nothing scientific about a moral or fearful objection to the facts of natural selection or determinism. Of course, I know there's nothing scientific about my conclusion that we can measure the accuracy of the facts by the depth of the fear that they arouse in the human subconscious, but it's interesting to contemplate: the deeper the fear the nearer the truth. But who or what is fearing the concept of powerlessness? And why? Would accepting our powerlessness be harmful to our survival or would it create an entirely new world consciousness?
Imagine how fearful we would be if we had to suspend our judgment about all human behavior since those judgments are vital to our survival....... but........ only in a hunter/gatherer society?
Friday, August 20, 2010
MORE DEBATE ABOUT FREE WILL
Ronhorgan wrote: Thus my problem with the determinist position is that it may be demotivating.
Ronhorgan,
My distant computer friend is only one of many reasons that I believe my behavior is determined by factors beyond my control.
The argument that determinism is "demotivating" cannot be a legitimate reason to disregard the evidence for our determinant situation. I note a tendency to bring morality into this particular discussion quite a lot. People cite the lack of moral accountability that seems to accompany a materialistic view of human behavior. People note that we won't be able to hold people accountable for their behavior if we come to the conclusion that human decisions are determined by factors not in their control. But the fear of a particular scientific conclusion is not itself a scientific fact that ought to keep us from arriving at the truth. We would all be Bible literalists if we failed to accept the truth because of irrational fears.
I have to note that we long ago decided that some people are not in control of their behavior when we allow insanity as a plea in trial cases, but insanity, itself, is a label that we put on behavior that does not fit into the normal range of human behavior. In short, it's asocial behavior that our fear of death causes us to angrily respond to. For a time, I believe, in some countries, the rage of a jealous husband was an allowable defense for murder of a rival. If we now realize that such a view of jealousy is unacceptable, it is because slowly a new social norm has arisen into human consciousness, but that new norm is a group phenomena that is evolving as we speak, one brain at a time. We also do not, in America, allow a Muslim father to kill his daughter for asserting her right to fit into American culture. We also are beginning to reign in a parent's religious right to kill his children through neglect of their health needs. As to our overall debate about the death penalty, we seem, because we can debate the issue, to believe that we have free will, but if each of us were honest about our own individual decisions about the death penalty, we would see that individually, our decision were emotional decisions over which we had no control. For myself, my brain is able to consider that—maybe—we ought not to allow the death penalty, but my emotions have not come to that conclusion at all. All arguments against the death penalty fall on my deaf emotional ears so I have made no decision about that particular reality external to my own. Just don't ask me to be the executioner, then, I fear, I would be immobilized by emotional considerations. Future human cultural decisions, if they are basically self-regarding, will naturally lead the human species to the best survival strategies though it will be one individual at a time.
Let me return to another fact that causes me to believe that we are not in control of our own behavior—the moment to moment functioning of the human brain. At any one moment the brain is being bombarded by information arriving from its sensory apparatuses. All of this information is aiming to arrive into our consciousness, all at the same time. Through chemical reactions beyond our control, chains of synapses are firing or being shut down by processes beyond my control. Which impulse from which sensory apparatus that arrives into our consciousnesses is completely out of our control. We hear a sound (a loud crack or a bee buzz) and we instinctively duck and cover. All evidence shows that we commence to duck before we are conscious that we will duck. In short, action precedes awareness.
As to bees, why do we so instinctively duck? It's because those that didn't duck in the evolutionary past and for whom a bee sting was toxic are no longer among us. We now have bee sting kits, et cetera for those who are allergic to bee stings. Same with peanut butter. We have new cultural phenomena arising based on past experience which we are now conscious of, but these are group phenomena. In the individual brain, the duck or don't duck remains an instinct.
My conclusion is that if I cannot control any of the synapses which are firing in my brain and, thus, cannot control which sensory data reaches my consciousness, I cannot be said to be in control of my behavior. Behavior is going on under the radar of my consciousness constantly which, when I become aware of it, I am proud or ashamed of (to name but two possible emotional reactions). Since emotions are the adaptations that regulate human behavior (according to evolutionary psychologists) and emotional reactions are also beyond my control, I conclude here, too, that I am not a free agent. I cannot even choose which thoughts I will think. I conclude we are all day dreamers every moment of our lives while our biological frameworks go about functioning of their own volitions.
PS: I must add here that some of us are able to refrain from hitting the human who is irritating us while others among us can't control that hit reaction. And don't we pride ourselves on our restraint in our afterthoughts? Yet, if most of us were honest with ourselves, we'd see that we were afraid to strike out at our antagonist because we feared the result of that action more than the emotional resolution that hitting our antagonist would bring to our limbic systems. It's fear that keeps us in check, and if we're honest, we wouldn't be so proud of what we can't control.
By the way, an additional consideration here, is that some discussions of my fear-based view of human behavior might label me as conservative rather than liberal. Steven Pinker concludes in his book, The Blank Slate, that the conservative view of human behavior is probably more attuned with evolutionary psychology's findings than the liberal view is. Liberals are hopefully naive while conservatives are pessimistically inhibited. Wouldn't that knowledge of his alignment to evolutionary psychology drive a religious conservative nuts?
Ronhorgan wrote: Thus my problem with the determinist position is that it may be demotivating.
Ronhorgan,
My distant computer friend is only one of many reasons that I believe my behavior is determined by factors beyond my control.
The argument that determinism is "demotivating" cannot be a legitimate reason to disregard the evidence for our determinant situation. I note a tendency to bring morality into this particular discussion quite a lot. People cite the lack of moral accountability that seems to accompany a materialistic view of human behavior. People note that we won't be able to hold people accountable for their behavior if we come to the conclusion that human decisions are determined by factors not in their control. But the fear of a particular scientific conclusion is not itself a scientific fact that ought to keep us from arriving at the truth. We would all be Bible literalists if we failed to accept the truth because of irrational fears.
I have to note that we long ago decided that some people are not in control of their behavior when we allow insanity as a plea in trial cases, but insanity, itself, is a label that we put on behavior that does not fit into the normal range of human behavior. In short, it's asocial behavior that our fear of death causes us to angrily respond to. For a time, I believe, in some countries, the rage of a jealous husband was an allowable defense for murder of a rival. If we now realize that such a view of jealousy is unacceptable, it is because slowly a new social norm has arisen into human consciousness, but that new norm is a group phenomena that is evolving as we speak, one brain at a time. We also do not, in America, allow a Muslim father to kill his daughter for asserting her right to fit into American culture. We also are beginning to reign in a parent's religious right to kill his children through neglect of their health needs. As to our overall debate about the death penalty, we seem, because we can debate the issue, to believe that we have free will, but if each of us were honest about our own individual decisions about the death penalty, we would see that individually, our decision were emotional decisions over which we had no control. For myself, my brain is able to consider that—maybe—we ought not to allow the death penalty, but my emotions have not come to that conclusion at all. All arguments against the death penalty fall on my deaf emotional ears so I have made no decision about that particular reality external to my own. Just don't ask me to be the executioner, then, I fear, I would be immobilized by emotional considerations. Future human cultural decisions, if they are basically self-regarding, will naturally lead the human species to the best survival strategies though it will be one individual at a time.
Let me return to another fact that causes me to believe that we are not in control of our own behavior—the moment to moment functioning of the human brain. At any one moment the brain is being bombarded by information arriving from its sensory apparatuses. All of this information is aiming to arrive into our consciousness, all at the same time. Through chemical reactions beyond our control, chains of synapses are firing or being shut down by processes beyond my control. Which impulse from which sensory apparatus that arrives into our consciousnesses is completely out of our control. We hear a sound (a loud crack or a bee buzz) and we instinctively duck and cover. All evidence shows that we commence to duck before we are conscious that we will duck. In short, action precedes awareness.
As to bees, why do we so instinctively duck? It's because those that didn't duck in the evolutionary past and for whom a bee sting was toxic are no longer among us. We now have bee sting kits, et cetera for those who are allergic to bee stings. Same with peanut butter. We have new cultural phenomena arising based on past experience which we are now conscious of, but these are group phenomena. In the individual brain, the duck or don't duck remains an instinct.
My conclusion is that if I cannot control any of the synapses which are firing in my brain and, thus, cannot control which sensory data reaches my consciousness, I cannot be said to be in control of my behavior. Behavior is going on under the radar of my consciousness constantly which, when I become aware of it, I am proud or ashamed of (to name but two possible emotional reactions). Since emotions are the adaptations that regulate human behavior (according to evolutionary psychologists) and emotional reactions are also beyond my control, I conclude here, too, that I am not a free agent. I cannot even choose which thoughts I will think. I conclude we are all day dreamers every moment of our lives while our biological frameworks go about functioning of their own volitions.
PS: I must add here that some of us are able to refrain from hitting the human who is irritating us while others among us can't control that hit reaction. And don't we pride ourselves on our restraint in our afterthoughts? Yet, if most of us were honest with ourselves, we'd see that we were afraid to strike out at our antagonist because we feared the result of that action more than the emotional resolution that hitting our antagonist would bring to our limbic systems. It's fear that keeps us in check, and if we're honest, we wouldn't be so proud of what we can't control.
By the way, an additional consideration here, is that some discussions of my fear-based view of human behavior might label me as conservative rather than liberal. Steven Pinker concludes in his book, The Blank Slate, that the conservative view of human behavior is probably more attuned with evolutionary psychology's findings than the liberal view is. Liberals are hopefully naive while conservatives are pessimistically inhibited. Wouldn't that knowledge of his alignment to evolutionary psychology drive a religious conservative nuts?
Thursday, June 17, 2010
WASHINGTON STATE MATH FAILURE RATE IS 42%
The following are my remarks to the Comments Section in the Columbian newspaper following the story about Washington State's math failure rates:
The following are my remarks to the Comments Section in the Columbian newspaper following the story about Washington State's math failure rates:
Mathematics requires logical and rational mental skills. We live in a nation in which a large percentage of us still believe that the supernatural and irrational Genesis tales make up a true story. In fact there's an interesting correlation between the percentage of Americans who believe that Genesis is a true story and the percentage who aren't logical enough to pass a simple math test.
If you want a real explanation for our modern problems, study what neuroscience is revealing about human brain function. We are living with a consciousness that evolved between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago to meet the needs of small tribes of hunter-gatherers, living in a Neolithic culture. Their math skills were simple counting skills and their intuitions were adapted to aid them in living together in SMALL communities. They were good at hunting, fishing and gathering and in working together in small social units. When farming arrived, larger communities came into being and new social skills were needed. We're still trying to catch up to cultural change, to bring our brains up to speed with the fast-changing technical culture we live in. Change only gets faster. Those who are falling behind are frightened and, thus, angry.
A sign that one's brain is adaptable enough to live in a modern, technological culture is its ability to think logically and rationally and that will be reflected in mathematical test scores. Not that intuition is no longer needed (intuition is NOT logical nor rational). Intuition evolved from our living within cultures. It’s our brain’s adapted tool by which we evaluate one another and decide who to trust or not to trust in our daily lives. Good intuitive skills are needful to survival, but logic’s mathematical skills are becoming really necessary to being able to adapt to modern requirements.
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
THE DEBATE GOES ON: HOW CONSCIOUS IS HUMAN CHOICE?
These conversations go on on the World Pantheism Movement website:
Jim,
Perhaps I ought to admit that I completely understand any human beings desire to say that writing a symphony is many orders higher than my little vacuuming machine, but if you take the day by day composition of a symphony (and I've written four, yes, unpublished novels, plus many other false starts, long projects, plus ten or so volumes of poetry, TV scripts, several big near misses but no cigars) and break it down minute by minute as the hours pile up each day, each decision that is constructing that novel (or symphony) is a feeling by feeling, irrational, process of words coming forth "out of nowhere" that arise from an intense concentration on the job at hand. As far as the bird metaphor, I'm sticking to the facts that the bird is "making decisions" that guide his flight path just as surely as a man walking down a street is making decisions about every twist and turn of his journey. It's when we do our journey while distracted and arrive at our destination with no memory of how we got there that we understand that our decisions are exactly like the bird's. Here's a poem of mine that has been published in a reputable literary magazine from which I'll build a further case for the supremacy of feeling over consciousness as the director of human behavior:
MEMORY OF ALL THE RELIGION I'LL EVER NEED
Back to the wind, I held it
And tied to it a knotted tail.
Spring, and all that wind was with me.
Muddy feet that made me clearly dirty,
I was a thing of earth who sought the sky.
Then I ran and let it go and let it out,
And felt it lift to take the wind. Whipping
Madly in a rush, it sought a surface far above me
Until I lost control of it and it flew itself,
And what I held was something in the wind,
A line that curved to nothingness.
For one full windy afternoon, I watched it
Whip and twist at nothing I could see.
All control I had was in the knotted tale
I'd been sure to fasten to it
To hold it straight and true into the wind.
And then that wind became a calm,
And it began to flutter down and
Down, to lay my line along the earth.
END
"Muddy feet that made me clearly dirty, I was a thing of earth who sought the sky... Whipping madly in a rush, it sought a surface far above me... And what I held was something in the wind... A line that curved to nothingness." How well I recall to this day the skin-tingling elation with which those words, sans any meaning other than a sort of music that came with them, arrived into my consciousness out of nowhere. The choices were being made for me.... By Whom? By What?
In retrospect, you'd think that this poem with its very clear metaphor of kite flying is a conscious and rational process of putting together a creative work about the search for God that ends in atheism, but that ain't so. The title which eventually encapsulated what I imagine the poem is about came long after the basic lines were on the page. As an afterthought, that search is what the poem seems to be about, but there was nothing conscious or willful about the trip from the first words that spilled out of my unconscious onto the page. At first the writing flowed from a feeling about kite flying, a memory loaded with emotion about childhood, and a descriptive process, words tumbling after words, filled with elation but no sense of where it was going to land. At the time, I was still not the atheist that I am now, so the ending was a delightful surprise to me when it arose from the sky down into my awareness.
Later, too, I realized, another flash of insight, that if one describes something in the material world with enough accuracy and emotional force, that material description comes to "feel like" a comparable intellectual process, i.e. kite flying and searching for God. A canoe trip that ends with falling off the end of the world into existentialism. A combat flight that ends up with being shot down and finding a grape arbor from which one selects a grape and eats it like a sip from a chalice of blood.
The interesting thing about good poetry is that it's a discovery, a discovery of a poet's inner landscape that was hidden from him until a metaphor, firmly lodged in the material world, tugged out the flow of words that become the poem. A good poem is as much a delight of discovery to the reader as it is to the poet who created it. The more conscious the poetic process, usually, the worse the poetry. Even the polishing that goes on is an unconscious process. On rereading and rewriting, the poet goes over the work dozens if not hundreds of times and, in each reading, new words and arrangements of words suggest new directions and set off more feelings of correctness. The final "choice" of each word is based on a "sense of rightness" that is not logical or reasonable. It's an emotional choice. The writing of a poem is a purely emotional process during which the words come out of nowhere (usually triggered by an emotion laden metaphor that came out of nowhere, stimulated by something in the landscape, inner or outer). Unbidden, the words scramble out of the unconscious to pass swiftly across the screen of consciousness, unbidden and blindly scurrying to join the other words that call to them to come join their brothers already on the page.
My understanding of the poetic and novel-writing process is, in my declining years, further proven to me by the fact that the level of concentration from which arose my best poetry has fallen off. I haven't written a successful poem in years because the unconscious connections can't be called upon without the missing intense emotional concentration. Some of that may also be due to my emphasis on rational forms like working algebra problems. It's no accident, either, that many poets in the past have refused counseling because they were afraid it would harm their art by making them more conscious of the artistic process. Some of them ended in suicide. You might put Hemingway in that camp to name but one. The healthier I become, the more difficult to contact my muse which probably was a very nasty muse, something like the one that plagued Ernest Dowson. And, again, I did not have the courage to pursue that particular muse any farther, but wonder of wonders, the less emotional my approach to writing, the more I am able, far beyond anything I've ever experienced before, to explain and describe rational processes that escaped me before, yet, as always, the words flow out of nowhere and tell me what I'm thinking, rather than the other way around.
I hope all concerned will understand that the preceding arguments are ON TOPIC and have everything to do with my belief that when it comes to decision-making (specially at those higher creative levels that some of my friends on this site cite as proof that man is more free than I imagine he/she is) humankind is making the decisions first in the unconscious and the rationality comes afterwards. Even mathematicians say there are proofs more beautiful than others. I agree with that as a further proof of my argument. What is beauty other than a most personal emotional response to a woman, a book or a painting, a mathematical proof? Afterward, we try to justify our choices, but the choices are emotional and determined beforehand by the entire synaptic landscape of hidden connections beneath the rational world.
James Doerfel said:
These conversations go on on the World Pantheism Movement website:
Jim,
Perhaps I ought to admit that I completely understand any human beings desire to say that writing a symphony is many orders higher than my little vacuuming machine, but if you take the day by day composition of a symphony (and I've written four, yes, unpublished novels, plus many other false starts, long projects, plus ten or so volumes of poetry, TV scripts, several big near misses but no cigars) and break it down minute by minute as the hours pile up each day, each decision that is constructing that novel (or symphony) is a feeling by feeling, irrational, process of words coming forth "out of nowhere" that arise from an intense concentration on the job at hand. As far as the bird metaphor, I'm sticking to the facts that the bird is "making decisions" that guide his flight path just as surely as a man walking down a street is making decisions about every twist and turn of his journey. It's when we do our journey while distracted and arrive at our destination with no memory of how we got there that we understand that our decisions are exactly like the bird's. Here's a poem of mine that has been published in a reputable literary magazine from which I'll build a further case for the supremacy of feeling over consciousness as the director of human behavior:
MEMORY OF ALL THE RELIGION I'LL EVER NEED
Back to the wind, I held it
And tied to it a knotted tail.
Spring, and all that wind was with me.
Muddy feet that made me clearly dirty,
I was a thing of earth who sought the sky.
Then I ran and let it go and let it out,
And felt it lift to take the wind. Whipping
Madly in a rush, it sought a surface far above me
Until I lost control of it and it flew itself,
And what I held was something in the wind,
A line that curved to nothingness.
For one full windy afternoon, I watched it
Whip and twist at nothing I could see.
All control I had was in the knotted tale
I'd been sure to fasten to it
To hold it straight and true into the wind.
And then that wind became a calm,
And it began to flutter down and
Down, to lay my line along the earth.
END
"Muddy feet that made me clearly dirty, I was a thing of earth who sought the sky... Whipping madly in a rush, it sought a surface far above me... And what I held was something in the wind... A line that curved to nothingness." How well I recall to this day the skin-tingling elation with which those words, sans any meaning other than a sort of music that came with them, arrived into my consciousness out of nowhere. The choices were being made for me.... By Whom? By What?
In retrospect, you'd think that this poem with its very clear metaphor of kite flying is a conscious and rational process of putting together a creative work about the search for God that ends in atheism, but that ain't so. The title which eventually encapsulated what I imagine the poem is about came long after the basic lines were on the page. As an afterthought, that search is what the poem seems to be about, but there was nothing conscious or willful about the trip from the first words that spilled out of my unconscious onto the page. At first the writing flowed from a feeling about kite flying, a memory loaded with emotion about childhood, and a descriptive process, words tumbling after words, filled with elation but no sense of where it was going to land. At the time, I was still not the atheist that I am now, so the ending was a delightful surprise to me when it arose from the sky down into my awareness.
Later, too, I realized, another flash of insight, that if one describes something in the material world with enough accuracy and emotional force, that material description comes to "feel like" a comparable intellectual process, i.e. kite flying and searching for God. A canoe trip that ends with falling off the end of the world into existentialism. A combat flight that ends up with being shot down and finding a grape arbor from which one selects a grape and eats it like a sip from a chalice of blood.
The interesting thing about good poetry is that it's a discovery, a discovery of a poet's inner landscape that was hidden from him until a metaphor, firmly lodged in the material world, tugged out the flow of words that become the poem. A good poem is as much a delight of discovery to the reader as it is to the poet who created it. The more conscious the poetic process, usually, the worse the poetry. Even the polishing that goes on is an unconscious process. On rereading and rewriting, the poet goes over the work dozens if not hundreds of times and, in each reading, new words and arrangements of words suggest new directions and set off more feelings of correctness. The final "choice" of each word is based on a "sense of rightness" that is not logical or reasonable. It's an emotional choice. The writing of a poem is a purely emotional process during which the words come out of nowhere (usually triggered by an emotion laden metaphor that came out of nowhere, stimulated by something in the landscape, inner or outer). Unbidden, the words scramble out of the unconscious to pass swiftly across the screen of consciousness, unbidden and blindly scurrying to join the other words that call to them to come join their brothers already on the page.
My understanding of the poetic and novel-writing process is, in my declining years, further proven to me by the fact that the level of concentration from which arose my best poetry has fallen off. I haven't written a successful poem in years because the unconscious connections can't be called upon without the missing intense emotional concentration. Some of that may also be due to my emphasis on rational forms like working algebra problems. It's no accident, either, that many poets in the past have refused counseling because they were afraid it would harm their art by making them more conscious of the artistic process. Some of them ended in suicide. You might put Hemingway in that camp to name but one. The healthier I become, the more difficult to contact my muse which probably was a very nasty muse, something like the one that plagued Ernest Dowson. And, again, I did not have the courage to pursue that particular muse any farther, but wonder of wonders, the less emotional my approach to writing, the more I am able, far beyond anything I've ever experienced before, to explain and describe rational processes that escaped me before, yet, as always, the words flow out of nowhere and tell me what I'm thinking, rather than the other way around.
I hope all concerned will understand that the preceding arguments are ON TOPIC and have everything to do with my belief that when it comes to decision-making (specially at those higher creative levels that some of my friends on this site cite as proof that man is more free than I imagine he/she is) humankind is making the decisions first in the unconscious and the rationality comes afterwards. Even mathematicians say there are proofs more beautiful than others. I agree with that as a further proof of my argument. What is beauty other than a most personal emotional response to a woman, a book or a painting, a mathematical proof? Afterward, we try to justify our choices, but the choices are emotional and determined beforehand by the entire synaptic landscape of hidden connections beneath the rational world.
James Doerfel said:
I have no problem classifying both birds and humans as eukaryotes, nor calling the organ housed by a bird skull and the organ housed by the human skull both “brains,” nor placing human intelligence and bird intelligence on a continuum, nor relating bird behavior and human behavior to their eukaryotic organisms. I do wish to maintain that birds and humans are different species—they cannot viably mate. I recognize a different design in bird bodies and in human bodies, despite the fact that they are made from roughly the same stuff. [Given a cup of bird stuff (molecules) and a cup of human stuff I doubt you could tell me which one belonged to which.] I recognize different structures in their respective brains, including structures in human brains which never evolved in bird brains. I also wish to point out for the record that no bird yet discovered is a scientist or an Olympic competitor or a pantheist. And I account for a bird navigating by the stars and a human being composing a symphony by different explanatory matrixes—you know, like science does. Biologists speak of humans evolving a capacity for deliberative choice beyond that of any other known species, and they identify this capacity as the number-one reason for our species’ success on planet earth.
Regarding math, my philosophical aporia does not owe my distrust of mathematics but to the comparative absoluteness of my/our trust in mathematics. What makes math so &%$@ trustworthy… so decisive? I consider mobility, the ability to move up and down the various levels of complexity and emergence, the ability to pan in and pan out, to synthesize a coherent representation from multiple points of view, the benchmark of reason and the scientific method—you know the reason and method we Pantheists respect “as our best way of understanding nature and the Universe.” And, yes, we have the evolution of our bodies with their big brains—brains capable of reason and science—to thank for that.
George Thomas said:James Doerfel said:I can see no difference between a bird's flying by the stars and human's learning things to store in memory, memory being the storage capacities of synaptic patterns in the brain for recall when something in our environment compels those favorable memories back into the thin sliver of awareness. Memories, of course we all know, are stored with emotions and people without the capacity to feel (some of whom have been studied) that summons the connected thoughts, are unable to make decisions. (This last sentence is why I say that first comes the feeling (the instinct), then follows the thoughts that some of us believe are the impulse toward a behavior when, actually, it is the voiceless feeling that triggers the behavior, not the thought.) What we and birds do instinctively, we humans have learned the clever trick of discussing (ruminating, predicting) it afterwards. Step by step these improvements in learning capacities increased and at each step, the instinct preceded the thoughts about that capacity.
Jim, I can't help noticing that you express a distrust of the abstractions of mathematics but that in discussions of free will and/or consciousness, you do believe in going "up" several levels of abstraction and speak of "top down" reasoning toward the problems of consciousness and free will.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Title: THE LAST MAGICAL PROPERTY IN THE COSMOS
WAIT, PAUL, I AM A ROBOT, DARN IT. AND I CAN PROVE IT!
It’s now 9 am and as I awoke, my thought machine fired up. Here’s where we are now: I agree with Paul that my unconscious is part of the total package that is described as “me” and that my unconsciousness makes decisions for me. Therefore I must agree that I’m an object in the Cosmos that runs around making decisions without being conscious of making them (pause) except when reflecting upon those decisions afterward, sometimes within seconds of making them. These decisions are stored in memory for consideration at a later date when similar or different situations call my memories back into consciousness. Fair enough? And I have a memory of thinking, a memory that could be called the essence of consciousness because it allows my memories to loop back upon themselves and to become RECURSIVE.
Now… let’s construct a simple carpet vacuuming machine that guides itself. We already have them in existence. We attach to it a simple computer and speaker that fires up when you plug it in and bring it to LIFE. As it runs around vacuuming a carpet, it reports things like, “I’m vacuuming the carpet. Last week I vacuumed the carpet. Tomorrow, when I come to life again, you’ll see that I’ll start vacuuming the carpet again,” et cetera. Next, let’s connect these ruminations to the things Mr. Vacuum is actually doing. When it turns right, it says, “I just turned right.” When it hits an obstruction and can’t move, it says, “I can’t move.” When it backs up to free itself, it says, “You can’t keep a good vacuum down.” Et cetera. Further it stores in memory activities it did yesterday so that it tells you what it did the day before when you awake it to vacuum. And we might as well give it predictive powers so that as long it’s vacuuming a familiar carpet, it can do the same carpet, or household, repeatedly. Once Mr. Vacuum has done his job, he knows how to do it over and over.
I’ve just described a being that runs around making “unconscious” decisions that it can talk about. I’ve just described myself, minus my feelings. I more or less got that concept of robotics from Daniel Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained.
Next! Feelings are described in evolutionary psychology as adaptations for the regulation of the human machinery. So here’s what we add next. We attach a set of tubes and vials with chemicals and pumps and gages rigged into them. We’ll call them the limbic system. And we set the vacuum on an unfamiliar terrain. When the vacuum cleaner hits the end of its carpet world and senses the hardwood edge of a carpet (or a defining wall or object), it pauses, a pump fires up and sends chemicals from a full vial labeled CALM to an empty vial labeled PAIN, and Mr. Vacuum informs you it’s in PAIN. When the PAIN vial fills up, a switch is activated that gives Mr. Vacuum an order to turn right. It turns right but senses hardwood (or obstruction) again and the PAIN vial stays full. The computer automatically orders another direction, and Mr. Vacuum continues to try movements until one of the movements puts it in contact with carpet again at which time the PAIN vial returns its contents to the CALM vial while Mr. Vacuum “calmly” goes on its way vacuuming and, perhaps, if you’re a clever programmer, it hums Church In The Wildwood.
Of course Mr. Vacuum gives a running commentary of everything it is experiencing and doing. It can also be storing all this activity in memory for referral next vacuuming day. Soon, it will have memorized a new household or carpet. So… I’ve successfully added intervening mechanisms for the regulation of vacuuming into Mr. Vacuum’s circuitry. The machine is “feeling” its way through its life and talking about it. I claim, therefore, that I’m a robot just like Mr. Vacuum only I’ve got what is called LIFE. No one has to plug me in, but, wait a minute (pause) I wasn’t plugged in myself until my father plugged into my mother, was I? So I’ve been plugged in too, just like Mr. Vacuum, only it takes me a lifetime to finish my carpet.
Now all that’s left to do is define LIFE in purely material terms, define myself as a collection of matter that is arranged in such a way as to give an observer of my behavior the illusion that I’ve got this MAGICAL PROPERTY called LIFE. And since these other computers (people) need this capacity for projection to recognize my behavior as their behavior so that they can react (find the carpet) correctly for their survival, they give themselves the idea that they LIVE.
Are we, indeed, robots that have come to “life” (just like in science fiction), become cognizant of self and invented the concept of consciousness to describe the process of recursion? I think so. That’s right, we are matter through and through and there is no magical property of life that a power greater than ourselves has bestowed upon us. It’s rocks all the way down. And that's what I, as a naturalist pantheist, understand my condition to be in relation to the Cosmos. "Yep! He's got rocks in his head," some may say, but is that true?
WAIT, PAUL, I AM A ROBOT, DARN IT. AND I CAN PROVE IT!
It’s now 9 am and as I awoke, my thought machine fired up. Here’s where we are now: I agree with Paul that my unconscious is part of the total package that is described as “me” and that my unconsciousness makes decisions for me. Therefore I must agree that I’m an object in the Cosmos that runs around making decisions without being conscious of making them (pause) except when reflecting upon those decisions afterward, sometimes within seconds of making them. These decisions are stored in memory for consideration at a later date when similar or different situations call my memories back into consciousness. Fair enough? And I have a memory of thinking, a memory that could be called the essence of consciousness because it allows my memories to loop back upon themselves and to become RECURSIVE.
Now… let’s construct a simple carpet vacuuming machine that guides itself. We already have them in existence. We attach to it a simple computer and speaker that fires up when you plug it in and bring it to LIFE. As it runs around vacuuming a carpet, it reports things like, “I’m vacuuming the carpet. Last week I vacuumed the carpet. Tomorrow, when I come to life again, you’ll see that I’ll start vacuuming the carpet again,” et cetera. Next, let’s connect these ruminations to the things Mr. Vacuum is actually doing. When it turns right, it says, “I just turned right.” When it hits an obstruction and can’t move, it says, “I can’t move.” When it backs up to free itself, it says, “You can’t keep a good vacuum down.” Et cetera. Further it stores in memory activities it did yesterday so that it tells you what it did the day before when you awake it to vacuum. And we might as well give it predictive powers so that as long it’s vacuuming a familiar carpet, it can do the same carpet, or household, repeatedly. Once Mr. Vacuum has done his job, he knows how to do it over and over.
I’ve just described a being that runs around making “unconscious” decisions that it can talk about. I’ve just described myself, minus my feelings. I more or less got that concept of robotics from Daniel Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained.
Next! Feelings are described in evolutionary psychology as adaptations for the regulation of the human machinery. So here’s what we add next. We attach a set of tubes and vials with chemicals and pumps and gages rigged into them. We’ll call them the limbic system. And we set the vacuum on an unfamiliar terrain. When the vacuum cleaner hits the end of its carpet world and senses the hardwood edge of a carpet (or a defining wall or object), it pauses, a pump fires up and sends chemicals from a full vial labeled CALM to an empty vial labeled PAIN, and Mr. Vacuum informs you it’s in PAIN. When the PAIN vial fills up, a switch is activated that gives Mr. Vacuum an order to turn right. It turns right but senses hardwood (or obstruction) again and the PAIN vial stays full. The computer automatically orders another direction, and Mr. Vacuum continues to try movements until one of the movements puts it in contact with carpet again at which time the PAIN vial returns its contents to the CALM vial while Mr. Vacuum “calmly” goes on its way vacuuming and, perhaps, if you’re a clever programmer, it hums Church In The Wildwood.
Of course Mr. Vacuum gives a running commentary of everything it is experiencing and doing. It can also be storing all this activity in memory for referral next vacuuming day. Soon, it will have memorized a new household or carpet. So… I’ve successfully added intervening mechanisms for the regulation of vacuuming into Mr. Vacuum’s circuitry. The machine is “feeling” its way through its life and talking about it. I claim, therefore, that I’m a robot just like Mr. Vacuum only I’ve got what is called LIFE. No one has to plug me in, but, wait a minute (pause) I wasn’t plugged in myself until my father plugged into my mother, was I? So I’ve been plugged in too, just like Mr. Vacuum, only it takes me a lifetime to finish my carpet.
Now all that’s left to do is define LIFE in purely material terms, define myself as a collection of matter that is arranged in such a way as to give an observer of my behavior the illusion that I’ve got this MAGICAL PROPERTY called LIFE. And since these other computers (people) need this capacity for projection to recognize my behavior as their behavior so that they can react (find the carpet) correctly for their survival, they give themselves the idea that they LIVE.
Are we, indeed, robots that have come to “life” (just like in science fiction), become cognizant of self and invented the concept of consciousness to describe the process of recursion? I think so. That’s right, we are matter through and through and there is no magical property of life that a power greater than ourselves has bestowed upon us. It’s rocks all the way down. And that's what I, as a naturalist pantheist, understand my condition to be in relation to the Cosmos. "Yep! He's got rocks in his head," some may say, but is that true?
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
A TOPIC ON PANTHEISM WEBSITE
A discussion thread had to do with why we pantheists call ourselves pantheists. My reply follows:
The consciousness that rides along within and is generated by the activities of the brain that calls itself I, since it is the slave of biology and physiology, interacts strangely with these attempts or any institution's attempts to use the language of consciousness to define what consciousness, carried along by the body's activities, finds itself being and thinking from day to day.
I call myself pantheist because the brain that calls itself I and that carries the I of me along with it is deeply enmeshed in the biology and physiology of the airy reality into which it found itself swimming (existing). The collective brains who make up the category "scientist" have physically interacted with the Cosmos in such a way as to give other brains, through the senses of their eyes (reading) and ears (hearing), a new kind of information about that reality. The brain that calls itself I has learned from this set of scientific brains (who form opinions, expressed mathematically, only after by materially testing the physical Universe) that it is not enough to trust language, the creator of consciousness, and, thus, does not accept any reality that exists solely within the language and which is not physically present (so as to be sensed) in the material Cosmos. Thus concepts like "god" which exist only in the realm of the untrustworthy consciousness and which can't be smelt, touched, sensed by the physical body are foreign to it (the brain that calls itself I). The brain that calls itself I and finds itself afloat in air like a fish in water knows itself as a part of the physical Universe and not part of the conscious Cosmos.
If "MY" speechless physical body has any relationship with the physical Universe, it is much like a zygote to a mother's body than it is a consciousness to a higher consciousness which language has made up totally and completely. Since it is my speechless body that exists in the Cosmos and "I" am the language it is hearing as thought, it/I am completely and totally dependent on the physical Cosmos for my continued existence. And since a speechless zygote can't worship it's source, so my body can't worship the Cosmos, except through hearing itself in the thoughts that are generated within its synaptic patterns by its daily efforts to procreate, win friends, have sex with the opposite sex, surround itself with comfort and surplus, et cetera.
Sometimes the body that experiences its own self in consciousness as I will sense itself so safe for a moment in the Cosmos that a wonderful feeling of well-being (i.e. flood of dopamine or other chemical) fills it and that feeling will generate a thought to explain to itself what it's feeling and that thought is "worship".
The previous philosophical notations have made me understand something very interesting to me—the human robot (i.e. animal) through consciousness (the naming with words of the outer reality) has been returning from the naming of the outer world back to the naming of itself, to its physical reality as a robot that is experiencing and responding to the physical Cosmos. The namer is discovering the silent source of its naming function and, perhaps, someday the namer and the named will become as one.
Anyway, that's why I (or the brain that names itself I) name myself "pantheist" for this moment in time. It's purely an emotional thing, separate from all the conscious quibbling that goes on in the insubstantial world of consciousness where disagreements about naming are common.
A discussion thread had to do with why we pantheists call ourselves pantheists. My reply follows:
The consciousness that rides along within and is generated by the activities of the brain that calls itself I, since it is the slave of biology and physiology, interacts strangely with these attempts or any institution's attempts to use the language of consciousness to define what consciousness, carried along by the body's activities, finds itself being and thinking from day to day.
I call myself pantheist because the brain that calls itself I and that carries the I of me along with it is deeply enmeshed in the biology and physiology of the airy reality into which it found itself swimming (existing). The collective brains who make up the category "scientist" have physically interacted with the Cosmos in such a way as to give other brains, through the senses of their eyes (reading) and ears (hearing), a new kind of information about that reality. The brain that calls itself I has learned from this set of scientific brains (who form opinions, expressed mathematically, only after by materially testing the physical Universe) that it is not enough to trust language, the creator of consciousness, and, thus, does not accept any reality that exists solely within the language and which is not physically present (so as to be sensed) in the material Cosmos. Thus concepts like "god" which exist only in the realm of the untrustworthy consciousness and which can't be smelt, touched, sensed by the physical body are foreign to it (the brain that calls itself I). The brain that calls itself I and finds itself afloat in air like a fish in water knows itself as a part of the physical Universe and not part of the conscious Cosmos.
If "MY" speechless physical body has any relationship with the physical Universe, it is much like a zygote to a mother's body than it is a consciousness to a higher consciousness which language has made up totally and completely. Since it is my speechless body that exists in the Cosmos and "I" am the language it is hearing as thought, it/I am completely and totally dependent on the physical Cosmos for my continued existence. And since a speechless zygote can't worship it's source, so my body can't worship the Cosmos, except through hearing itself in the thoughts that are generated within its synaptic patterns by its daily efforts to procreate, win friends, have sex with the opposite sex, surround itself with comfort and surplus, et cetera.
Sometimes the body that experiences its own self in consciousness as I will sense itself so safe for a moment in the Cosmos that a wonderful feeling of well-being (i.e. flood of dopamine or other chemical) fills it and that feeling will generate a thought to explain to itself what it's feeling and that thought is "worship".
The previous philosophical notations have made me understand something very interesting to me—the human robot (i.e. animal) through consciousness (the naming with words of the outer reality) has been returning from the naming of the outer world back to the naming of itself, to its physical reality as a robot that is experiencing and responding to the physical Cosmos. The namer is discovering the silent source of its naming function and, perhaps, someday the namer and the named will become as one.
Anyway, that's why I (or the brain that names itself I) name myself "pantheist" for this moment in time. It's purely an emotional thing, separate from all the conscious quibbling that goes on in the insubstantial world of consciousness where disagreements about naming are common.
Saturday, March 06, 2010
THE SOURCES OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN LANGUAGE
Here's another entry of mine on the website World Panthiesm:
Antony wrote: "the authors speculated that language probably arose for situations like hunters going out for the hunt, and coming back and telling the young or inexperienced the story of the hunt."
Antony, I like to take that discussion back further... to where language participated in the evolution of consciousness. I think language (thus consciousness) did evolve from two human functions—sex and work sounds, both vital to survival.
Years ago, when I was a teaching assistant, I came across the idea (50 years ago—don't remember from which book) that the sounds made by working people turned into language when the sound was associated with the work. Imagine that different sounds were forced from the men (and women) doing work—grunts and whooshes of various kinds. Eventually one more conscious member of the human species would summon another male to the kind of work that was associated with that grunt, wheeze or whoosh. The more facile the user of sounds the more he could use others to aid him. By being able to do that, his chances of survival would increase, consciousness be selected for and passed on. Another theory was that the imitation of animal sounds summoned others to the hunt for whatever sound he was imitating. Thus, a sound becomes associated with a specific animal and language facilitates the evolution of consciousness.
One idea about language I found for myself, but others, I'm sure, also know this... at some point during my days of the mutual seduction between the sexes that goes on and ends in the bedroom, I began to realize that it was not so much what I said as how I said it that ended up with coupling. The sound of my voice would change, soften and deepen, become less tense and more relaxed. So I tied that idea to the one I'd already heard about work. Soothing, comforting sounds led to sex and, eventually, one sound more than another, came to mean "let's do that sound, let's fuck!" Thus the four letter word came into existence and helped procreation and thus helped consciousness survive. I also know that perhaps humans listened to other species have sex and imitated those sounds to indicate a desire for sex.
Ain't love and work grand!? It may be no accident that Freud believed that if a person had love and work, that person was functioning okay.
By the way, this supports my idea that the so-called mysterious mind is just the brain listening to itself use words and rewatching images in a recursive fashion. I don't think the mind is as mysterious as some would have us believe.
Here's another entry of mine on the website World Panthiesm:
Antony wrote: "the authors speculated that language probably arose for situations like hunters going out for the hunt, and coming back and telling the young or inexperienced the story of the hunt."
Antony, I like to take that discussion back further... to where language participated in the evolution of consciousness. I think language (thus consciousness) did evolve from two human functions—sex and work sounds, both vital to survival.
Years ago, when I was a teaching assistant, I came across the idea (50 years ago—don't remember from which book) that the sounds made by working people turned into language when the sound was associated with the work. Imagine that different sounds were forced from the men (and women) doing work—grunts and whooshes of various kinds. Eventually one more conscious member of the human species would summon another male to the kind of work that was associated with that grunt, wheeze or whoosh. The more facile the user of sounds the more he could use others to aid him. By being able to do that, his chances of survival would increase, consciousness be selected for and passed on. Another theory was that the imitation of animal sounds summoned others to the hunt for whatever sound he was imitating. Thus, a sound becomes associated with a specific animal and language facilitates the evolution of consciousness.
One idea about language I found for myself, but others, I'm sure, also know this... at some point during my days of the mutual seduction between the sexes that goes on and ends in the bedroom, I began to realize that it was not so much what I said as how I said it that ended up with coupling. The sound of my voice would change, soften and deepen, become less tense and more relaxed. So I tied that idea to the one I'd already heard about work. Soothing, comforting sounds led to sex and, eventually, one sound more than another, came to mean "let's do that sound, let's fuck!" Thus the four letter word came into existence and helped procreation and thus helped consciousness survive. I also know that perhaps humans listened to other species have sex and imitated those sounds to indicate a desire for sex.
Ain't love and work grand!? It may be no accident that Freud believed that if a person had love and work, that person was functioning okay.
By the way, this supports my idea that the so-called mysterious mind is just the brain listening to itself use words and rewatching images in a recursive fashion. I don't think the mind is as mysterious as some would have us believe.
Friday, May 15, 2009
THOSE MIXED UP NEURONS
After I retired a few years back, I took a couple of algebra/mathematics courses. I noticed a strange quirk in my mental processes. Frequently four years ago when I meant to write down x, I would write down the numeral 8. Recently, I've begun working through my old algebra textbook in order to get to a new unused textbook I bought and wasn't able to use back in Spokane because my wife and I moved to Vancouver. This morning, I was doing the exercises at the end of a section, and I wrote down 4 when I meant to write down +. I'm still also confusing quite frequently the 8 and the x.
So, according to my poor befuddled neurons
8 looks like x sometimes and
4 looks like + sometimes also.
These slips occur when I'm lost in the overall algebraic function I'm doing and not always paying attention to the finer details that my hand is putting on the paper. But I can see how certain neurons which are responsible for curves and curlicues can get confused between x and 8 and I can see how the neurons responsible for lines that are vertical and horizontal and which intersect in the figures for numeral 4 and a + sign can also get confused when I'm not paying strict attention and am slightly distracted.
Now isn't that fascinating to catch our neurons at work like that?
After I retired a few years back, I took a couple of algebra/mathematics courses. I noticed a strange quirk in my mental processes. Frequently four years ago when I meant to write down x, I would write down the numeral 8. Recently, I've begun working through my old algebra textbook in order to get to a new unused textbook I bought and wasn't able to use back in Spokane because my wife and I moved to Vancouver. This morning, I was doing the exercises at the end of a section, and I wrote down 4 when I meant to write down +. I'm still also confusing quite frequently the 8 and the x.
So, according to my poor befuddled neurons
8 looks like x sometimes and
4 looks like + sometimes also.
These slips occur when I'm lost in the overall algebraic function I'm doing and not always paying attention to the finer details that my hand is putting on the paper. But I can see how certain neurons which are responsible for curves and curlicues can get confused between x and 8 and I can see how the neurons responsible for lines that are vertical and horizontal and which intersect in the figures for numeral 4 and a + sign can also get confused when I'm not paying strict attention and am slightly distracted.
Now isn't that fascinating to catch our neurons at work like that?
Friday, July 27, 2007
MINDFULNESS
Neuroscience is still trying to unravel the nature of consciousness and the origin of mind in the human animal. Here are some more theories.
[OPEN QUOTE]
This also led to speculation as to which species did or did not have theory of mind and at what point in evolution it appeared in humans (Povinelli & Preuss, 1995).
There are two distinct origin scenarios for our capacity to understand intentional agency, to create representations of other agents' behavior, beliefs, and intentions. A widely accepted social intelligence scenario is that higher primates evolved more and more complex intentional-psychology systems to deal with social interaction. Having larger groups, more stable interaction, and more efficient coordination with other agents all bring out, given the right circumstances, significant adaptive benefits for the individual. But they all require finer and finer grained descriptions of other agents' behaviors. Social intelligence triggers an arms race resulting from higher capacity to manipulate others and a higher capacity to resist such manipulation (Whiten, 1991). It also allows the development of coalitional alliance, based on a computation of other agents' commitments to a particular purpose (hunting, warfare; Kurzban & Leary, 2001), as well as the development of friendship as an insurance policy against variance in resources (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996).
Another possible account is that (at least some aspects of) theory of mind evolved in the context of predator-prey interaction (Barrett, 1999, this volume). A heightened capacity to remain undetected by either predator or prey, as well as a better sense of how these "other" animals detect us, are of obvious adaptive significance for survival problems such as eating and avoiding being eaten. Indeed, some primatologists have speculated that detection of predators may have been the primary context for the evolution of agency concepts (van Schaik & Van Hooff, 1983). In the archaeological record, changes toward more flexible hunting patterns in modern humans suggest a richer, more intentional representation of the hunted animal (Mithen, 1996). Hunting and predator avoidance become much better when they are more flexible, that is, informed by contingent details about the situation at hand, so that the human does not react to all predators or prey in the same way. [CLOSE QUOTE]
—H. Clark Barrett, “Adaptations to Predators and Prey” in Handbook Of Evolutionary Psychology, pp. 105-106
Re. the photo: Some species still don’t have a conscious mind. Think of the most illustrious of Crawford, Texas’s citizens.
Neuroscience is still trying to unravel the nature of consciousness and the origin of mind in the human animal. Here are some more theories.
[OPEN QUOTE]
This also led to speculation as to which species did or did not have theory of mind and at what point in evolution it appeared in humans (Povinelli & Preuss, 1995).
There are two distinct origin scenarios for our capacity to understand intentional agency, to create representations of other agents' behavior, beliefs, and intentions. A widely accepted social intelligence scenario is that higher primates evolved more and more complex intentional-psychology systems to deal with social interaction. Having larger groups, more stable interaction, and more efficient coordination with other agents all bring out, given the right circumstances, significant adaptive benefits for the individual. But they all require finer and finer grained descriptions of other agents' behaviors. Social intelligence triggers an arms race resulting from higher capacity to manipulate others and a higher capacity to resist such manipulation (Whiten, 1991). It also allows the development of coalitional alliance, based on a computation of other agents' commitments to a particular purpose (hunting, warfare; Kurzban & Leary, 2001), as well as the development of friendship as an insurance policy against variance in resources (Tooby & Cosmides, 1996).
Another possible account is that (at least some aspects of) theory of mind evolved in the context of predator-prey interaction (Barrett, 1999, this volume). A heightened capacity to remain undetected by either predator or prey, as well as a better sense of how these "other" animals detect us, are of obvious adaptive significance for survival problems such as eating and avoiding being eaten. Indeed, some primatologists have speculated that detection of predators may have been the primary context for the evolution of agency concepts (van Schaik & Van Hooff, 1983). In the archaeological record, changes toward more flexible hunting patterns in modern humans suggest a richer, more intentional representation of the hunted animal (Mithen, 1996). Hunting and predator avoidance become much better when they are more flexible, that is, informed by contingent details about the situation at hand, so that the human does not react to all predators or prey in the same way. [CLOSE QUOTE]
—H. Clark Barrett, “Adaptations to Predators and Prey” in Handbook Of Evolutionary Psychology, pp. 105-106
Re. the photo: Some species still don’t have a conscious mind. Think of the most illustrious of Crawford, Texas’s citizens.
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If the body can write poetry without need of consciousness, why does it need consciousness to make other types of decisions? Decisions are always first a feeling in the body (like poetry) which then through activation of the body parts are realized in the real world in such a way as to allow observers to judge the intent and purpose of the actor's behavior. Emotional decisions can be made and not acted upon if other factors, such as fear or shyness or love, hem in the potential for action in the physical world.
Poetry is powerful because it speaks to the emotional parts of the brain where all decisions are ultimately made, and, again, if poetry can, through inspiration arise without conscious intent, and then influence another body to action, where does the power of decision rest... as we normally think of it? And if poetry has this unconscious power to arise unasked into consciousness and, then, to influence personal behavior and, by transmission, influence the decisions of other listeners, why not recognize that all language operates exactly as poetic language operates? And language began I believe with naming things. Before that, human life was all feeling, with no access to language. It's this power of consciousness that continually obscures our discussions of free will and makes us think we have conscious power over the emotions that deeply make our decisions for us.