owleye

Laurentius...

On the materiality or immateriality of the mind...

"First, the mind is a product and manifestation of matter. My position is by no means idealist. It is not reductionist either."

Though you may believe this clarifies your position, I find it contains an idea that baffles me. How can the mind be a product of matter, yet not be reducible to it?

One answer could be that matter (possibly in the right configuration) creates the mind, as an agent might, and thereby stands apart from it, as for example, God could be said to have created the heavens and earth. To hold otherwise, I would have to identify it by the analogy with the solar wind in connection with the earth's magnetic field, that is, they create or produce auroras. However, this in itself does not imply that auroras would not be reducible to the same sort of things that the solar wind and magnetic fields consist of -- namely matter. Thus, I think much more work is needed here.

On what is required of matter to produce the mind...

a. highly organized
b. self-preserving
c. willful
d. self-reflecting

With respect to the a and b, I take it you want to exclude non-living things, including human artififacts.

Without prejudicing a possibly criticism of non-living things, generally, I'm not sure I would be so quick to write off all human artifacts as lacking self-preservation. One that comes to mind is government created by a legal system. Laws seem to exist in a realm that requires humans to preserve them. So as to anticipate a possible objection of yours, I don't think it is unreasonable to identify a legal system as including within itself humans who tend to it. It might be considered organically. Institutions, generally, have this feature. How different is a colony of termites from a human institution?

In any case, since all living organisms are highly organized and self-preserving (to the extent to which a "self" can be identified), the inclusion of these criteria does not raise the bar much.

With respect to the will, however, this is presumably something that intends to raise the bar. However, the account you give of the "will" criteria makes it a matter of degree, not of kind that distinguishes mental phenomena and physical phenomena. How are we to judge what is wide enough in the range of environments an organism is adapted to that would signal willful behavior? Indeed, what is the key relationship that you want to express by the will? If what you have in mind is some inner force that "tries" to move mountains, for example, then we would have to figure out how to deny the possibility that termites, in building their home, are not trying to build their home. They clearly have the power to do so. How, from mere behavior, can you attribute an inner principle called the will that is responsible for that behavior such that entities having a will can be distinguished from those that don't?

The issue of self-reflection is similar. I may not be able to discern whether cats, for example, possess consciousness but grass does not. That is, I am equally in the dark about consciousness as I am about the mind.

owleye

excreationist

Animals higher up the ladder are capable of learning to become more intelligent and versatile. e.g. monkeys vs. modern humans.
This means they have less constraints on their reasoning and behaviour so I guess they are "freer". (Though I don't believe in free-will)

[ March 10, 2002: Message edited by: excreationist ]</p>

Adrian Selby

"Try to describe a chess game in terms of strict space coordinates, natural time, solids, gravity, friction, and so on, and the accurate account of what is physically going on there will make nothing but a grotesque picture - you'll miss the game, actually."

Of course you will, but that proves nothing. You're trying to show that one lot of descriptions of a physical reality are not another lot of descriptions of a physical reality.

The game of chess you refer to is something that physical organisms do with physical things. It's an explanation of physical phenomena that is suitable for a given purpose, and if you're a chess master you'll use a 'chess' vocabulary to describe what's going on in a chess match. If you're a neuroscientist or biologist, you'll be interested in the processes of the brains involved. But just because there are different vocabularies that we use for different purposes doesn't mean that anything other than purely material processes are occurring. The 'chess' and the 'neural' vocabularies describe the same physical events, but have different purposes.

Similarly, if I want to know why my PC won't work, I can get a subatomic physicist to describe the altered electron flows around the circuitry, and he or she would be using 'physics' vocabulary.

Or, I can get a PC technician to point to a bad piece of solder or a knackered chip, and replace the motherboard, and he would be using 'PC technician' vocabulary. One is a more useful description for a given purpose than the other, but at no point is there anything non physical that need be referred to.

Laurentius, I think you're confusing the physical vocabularies and the chess vocabularies as somehow having to be equally meaningful for the materialist case to work, and yet clearly, they can't be, but you haven't refuted the materialist case.

Adrian

crocodile deathroll

Just think about it
Just think about it
Just think about it
Just think about it
When we think about it, we are crunching words and using our semantic memories, and to develop those semantic memories we have to make neural connections. Something which is lacking in a cat.

Laws of consciousness still govern a cat as it has elements of behavior like circadian rhythms an newly acquired hunting skills or procedural memories but without the faculty of language does a cat have the faculty of mind like us? I have to ask myself how did language begin it predated writing so is must of been sound patterns There could of course be a primitive form of proto-language that utilizes these sound patterns that even predates that of the cat. I am speaking here of song birds. A gray strike thrush for example may be capable singing a repertoire many thousands complex tunes that enables it to interact with potential mates so the sound patterns are reproduced like organic matter. The first "sound meme" in other words. But that was just driven by genetically encoded instinctive behavior and they just kept adding a new note to the bird song repertoire without any conscious intent like a musical composer. So from the point of view from the song bird, there was still no link between these self replicating sound memes and consciousness.
It is the laws of language and not consciousness that govern here when we think about a problem it is language patterns/vocabulary that differentiates each of us. But the differences need to be only subtle enough so we can interact with each other. With language there was a true link between the immaterial sound memes like with song birds and consciousness.
And is only though language we have a true mind.

CD

Laurentius

AVE
Brief intermission.

Ever since I started this thread I have wanted to make a comment on the Webster acceptations of mind:

mind
(a) the element or complex of elements in an individual that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and especially reasons;
(b) the conscious mental events and capabilities in an organism;
(c) the organized conscious and unconscious adaptive mental activity of an organism.

The mind should not thererfore be mistaken for the brain.

According to (b) all conscious mental events and capabilities in an organism may or may not take place in the brain. Assuming that they definitely do is a matter of faith.

The "broken brain" argument does not prove location. The brain has indeed been shown to be the headquarters of all activities. This only indicates only that nothing can take place in its absence.

For instance, once the locomotor center is destroyed, there would be no locomotion, but this does not justify one to say that locomotion is situated in the brain.

There are phychologists who consider that consciousness is not located in the brain only, but it "inhabits" all parts of the nervous system at once.

Acceptions (c) and particularly (a) clearly refer to the fact that consciousness (and I mean the Mind) is an expression of simultaneous physical activities occurring ALL OVER the nervous system AND outside it.

Bear with me, and I'll come up with specific replies.
AVE

[ March 12, 2002: Message edited by: Laurentius ]</p>

echidna

Laurentius, just a quick observation. From time to time I’m also surprised at the seeming dominance of the reductionists here, but over time I suspect that there are many if not most, who actually do agree that mind cannot be reduced back to the processes which govern electrons and quarks.

It’s just that the reductionists can sometimes be quite vocal, and just saying no sometimes gets overlooked.

Try here,

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=57&t=000077" target="_blank">What, exactly, is so bad about reductionism ?</a>

[ March 11, 2002: Message edited by: echidna ]</p>

Laurentius

Christopher Lord
The hierarchy I've made is a working one. It is a theoretical tool for me to understand the stuff that makes up reality and the way it works, and particularly to make my perspective on the world clear here. In reality there may be a things may discreetely range from simple to complex, or there may be leaps - I don't know. Life and non-life seem to severed drastically, for instance. My interest is in the Mind right now, and how it may not be reduced to the Brain with which it obviously cohabites.

First, you live in a false dichotomy: matter or magic. Not everything that is not matter is magic, if there were anything like magic in the first place.
(...is information matter? ...are emotions caused by information matter? ...is interpretation of information matter as well?)

You've asked me to say whether or not I agree that an amazingly complex AI could bear the Mind, and I said yes. I do not want to retract that, but I have to avoid misunderstandings. I am a materialist, but I don't think that life can be reduced to sheer matter and determinism. Neither can will. Nor the Mind. If you possessed some kind of sci fi powers and created a super-sophisticated brain, yes, that wonderous artifact could bear a Mind of its own, but this sounds highly farfetched to me. I don't think one could ever devise such thing. However, I do not know for sure, and I choose to be skeptical with my own beliefs as well. That's why I agree, in principle, a super scince fictional AI could show the properties of the Mind, but only hypothetically.

Our disagreement resides in the fact that you seem to consider living things "biological mechanisms". This is not only reductionist, it also defies reality. I keep pointing out that living things resist falling into higher degrees of entropy (which non living things don't) and you keep disregarding it. Perhaps you say to yourself: "well, they are different classes of material objects naturally behaving differently." No, they're not just behaving differetly: the former complies to natural laws without a grumble, while the latter does what it can to resist it. This is fundamental different in my opinion, and even if the living still uses natural processes to conserve and replicate itself, it does so with the "purpose" of defeating natural laws with their own weapons.

That is why self-conservation is not just conserving itself. One could, theoretically again, place a self-conservation software into a robot, but the robot would then simply comply with external rules added to the ones it already functions by. Self conservation is embeded in living things, not an additional package. Living things preserve themselves the same way they breath, reproduce, eat and so on. In the living, matter seems to be arranged in such configuration that creates a new order, which goes against natural laws - and still naturally making use of them though. Self perservation is not an additional set of rules that some objects follow; it represents the manifestation of a higher organization of matter, where complexity resists determinism and self preservation opposes entropy.
AVE

Laurentius

Owleye
I'm glad to have stirred your interest, despite my superficiality. Your initial condescendence has not bothered me in the least because I sensed you meant well. I am aware that my approach and drafts look clumsy, but I'm so tied up in everydays activities of all kinds that I cannot spend more time on this. However, it is so much fun that I don't want to give up. My superficiality comes from my background (which less phylosophy-oriented than others', maybe), from the nature of these rather informal debates, from my ambition to throw in the battle ideas that actually lie in my mind at the moment of the drawing up, from the lack of time for searching for sources. Anyway, the idea with superseding Mind is mine, good or no good. I don't want to look as if I were claiming originality in respect with a view that has not been seriously elaborated yet. This theory, you've noticed right, aims at ruling out inert matter and human artifacts from the category of mind-bearing entities.

In my university and post-university studies I have come across with phenomenology, and I have also read about it out of curiosity, but, being a strong (and likely to be narrow-minded sometimes, I guess) materialist, I did not pay much attention to it. In fact, I've always had the tendency to retain from all systems of belief only the parts that echoed my ideas, and now I want to see how my perspective realy works.
I am synchronic, rather than diachronic in my all approaches (with notable exceptions, though).
Disregarding the fact that there is too much (for the impatient or narrow minded me) about the spirit in his approach, the intentionality Husserl speaks reminds me of transitivity. In my native language there are three categories of verbs: intransitive, transitive, and reflective.
Analogically, INERT MATTER may be said to be intransitive, LIVING MATTER may be considered transitive, while CONSCIOUSNESS would be reflective.

What I particularly appreciated about your intervention was idea with the auroras. It can make a wonderful analogy, although, taking into consideration that I've just stated that the mind resides in the whole nervous system and beyond it, people may again suspect me of defending the idea of a ghost hiding not only in the brain, but all over the body.

As for the legal system, is it an "artifact"? (mind you, English isn't my native language and I'll have to look it up) Well, I would include the legal system in the human culture (human are social animals that spontaneously establish or take over rules of behaviour within the community). Before I came up with "the chess game parable" I had been thinking of giving the example of the human organization, which is also material, but does not follow natural laws, no matter how deeply they are determined by the material reality. As for the parable, it all sounded crappy because I did not elaborate it appropriately - I only named it a parable for the readers to fill in the huge gaps I left uncomplete.

The idea of the legal system and the organization of the termites raises no real difficulty to me. But I'll have to speak about this some other time.
AVE

[ March 12, 2002: Message edited by: Laurentius ]</p>

excreationist

BTW, I've got a hierarchical model as well:
I'm not sure which stage where the "mind" comes in. For a philosopher's mind it would be the last stage (Formal operational stage). For an animal "mind" it would be stage 2 (Aware systems/Sensorimotor stage).

Christopher Lord

Thanks, I was worried we where agreeing there for a little while, which would have severely disrupted my interest.

I agree your hierarchy exists and can be used to extract meaningful categorization. I think it does help to both strengthen and diminish the meaning of your words, though, since I cant figure out what your implicit meaning is behind some of the succinct descriptions. Things do tend to proceed on a gradient with leaps and whatnot due to species loss and minor revolutions, even from non-life, for instance. Take a self-replicating protein. Is this device a machine or a life-form? How about one with a simple information medium through which evolution can begin? RNA Viruses? Prions? Single-celled creatures? I think all of these can be understood completely by a single human given a fair amount of research. After this, the complexity overwhelms a single human. One can’t yet fully understand a neural-limbic endoskeletal feline. We can see that the main limitation in understanding more advanced forms of life is our own. Even though the complexity has surpassed our ability to fully understand, we can still know that all the processes in a cat are ultimately physical, directly analogous way to a computer.

But what then of the mind? Well, my original statement was that it is the manifestation of a procedural execution of the complex neural network it runs on. By this I mean the mind is a cascade of neural events inside a mass of neurons. I use the word cascade because the mind is a procedure of events, and these events can trigger more suchlike events. These events can be trained to fire certain events with certain inputs, including feedback input. Training introduces information, memory, and order, all of which can be the source of still more events. This cascade of events rides all the way up to a very abstract level, which is what we refer to as the mind. This process does indeed occur in most animals with a central nervous system, but at some critical threshold a mind can be supported on this tower of abstraction. Therefore my definition of a mind is “A tower of abstractions of sufficient height to support abstract reasoning, memory, creativity and self-awareness.” Once a device capable of building abstraction layers exists, it need only be refined to this point in order to express a mind.

I have not defined an abstraction layer yet, so I will now do so. A layer of abstraction is a way of compartmentalizing a set of information into a single new bit. Using a symbol for a physical thing is an abstraction, for instance. Using a specific call to signal a predator is an abstraction, and having a concept of predator in the first place is also one, associating a whole collection of sensual data with a single neural signal. Eventually this is the foundation through which we as mind-bearing humans use to communicate to each other, and much more importantly, to ourselves--via abstract spoken language. The inner dialog is the main reason we feel we are superior to the ‘lower’ animals. It is the glue for our piecemeal brain, bringing together the mind.

Back to your comments. I use the word magic to ensure you are not a pure soul-based dualist. The dichotomy is not false, I believe, however, since information is simply a procedure applied to matter. Matter also consists of the forces and energy, since they are equivalent. I note this to ensure we are on the same page. Now take a machine which counts stones. In order to count stones, you must have a symbol for each number from 0 to stonecount + 1. Using symbols are a form of abstraction. Why have one symbol for each and every stone though? Why not symbolize the symbols, and use a Base X number system, such as binary, trinary, hexadecimal, or decimal? This enables you to use a very small set of symbols which in turn symbolize all the symbols you need for physical objects. All you need to do is proceduralize your counting a bit more. Are we still in the realm of the physical or are we now in your alternate dimension? As I will show, once you accept symbols for counting rocks, you are on a slippery slope towards accepting that symbols for love and minds are of the same sort.

Now, on to the AI.

Permit me to rephrase my question with what I have already said on the table. If someone built a machine capable of all the abstractions a human is capable of, would this machine have a mind? Answering yes would be a pure materialistic answer, since a mind with all the abstractions and a means to proceduralize them would be an exact replica. Answering no admits that this machine does not/can not possess something that the neuron clumps do. This would be a dualist position, and it implies we have something machines can not possibly have, and can not pass on. When asked what this something is, dualists quickly turn towards attacking materialism as overzealous reductionism. They never lay out their cards, but they insist on claiming they have the better hand none the less. Currently, we have machines capable of early-mammal-class abstraction abilities, and expert system AI is currently exceeding human capability, since an expert system has a smaller abstraction set. No science fiction here--If you have ever flown in a commercial airliner, you have placed your life completely in the hands of an expert system AI, developed a decade ago. There is every reason to suspect this will scale up with our ever-spiralling technology just like it has so far, quite likely producing human-level abstraction capabilities in 20 years. If this is science fiction, what barrier-to-entry exists for ever-improving AI? I would propose that at the very least, human level minds are the limit, since they have already been realized by a much slower process of abstraction building.

Later in your post you make mention again of what you consider my view of biological life. In your view, I appear to believe life is a robotic, industrial process of cogs and wheels, working like clock-work (evidenced by the use of the words ‘reductionist’ and ‘mechanisim’). If this is your view of me, it is a straw-man. It takes a tremendous pile of abstractions for even a simple life form to operate. ATP, DNA and RNA are all abstractions of physical things. Cells operate like entire cities, with buildings compartmentalizing and abstracting away the physical world. At this point already chaos has reduced the clockwork-ness of life to almost nothing. Stars, galaxies, and even crystals resist entropy by following a procedure. Life also resists with its own set of bureaucratic processes. These processes happen to be more complex and efficient because they had the advantage of being honed with replicative evolution.

Your final statement regarding self-conservation does not take into account that self-conservation is a trait highly favoured by evolution, and is thus probably one of the first behaviours after food-seeking and replication itself to develop. In effect, living things gave themselves self-preservation due to competition with nature and other replicators.

Thank you for the interesting discussion so far, I enjoy getting into this topic in depth.