xoc

I think putting intelligence down into two forms of base processes, synthesis or analysis, is key. This has been described above as "seperating" (analysis) or the "join" (synthesis).

Analysis is the breaking down of problems, the breaking down of ideas, interpretations, categorisation of objects, etc.

Synthesis is the putting together of various ideas. This is explained often as "making the connection." Einstein "made the connection" between Lorentz's transformation and Galieleian relativity(joined them) to form Special Relativity, Newton "made the connection" between the movement of the planets and the falling apple(allegedly) and deduced/analysed Gravity. Analysis is desctructive, or "deconstructive", synthesis is creative. The highest and most influential minds of all times must employ both methods with skill to be able to come up with new and relevent ideas and build "names for themselves."

Looking at nature, we find the same two principles constantly at work- all we observe tends to follow the matter of joining and seperating to relative extents, and all motion can be explained as either synthetic or anylitic(or both) depending on our frame of reference. Intelligence corresponds to the same forces of nature, repellent and attractive forces that govern the world, giving the "system" (person) the ability to judge the "system" (world/person) through symbols. This is the transcendental nature of intelligence, as unlike nature a "thought" can be more than the thing-in-itself(that is a thought relates to the world outside rather than just existing as it's specific form of brain activity). Intelligence is neccesarily transcendent of matter, qualitatively. The Symbol of transformation/translation is what makes all thought possible; that a thing can transcend itself in meaning allows intelligence to be possible.

As far as I know intelligence starts off early (baby-wise)as entirely synthetic apprehension of Life, follows later to anylitic differentiation of objects(telling the difference between voices, faces), then oscillates between the classic right/left brain poles of analysis/synthesis in our understanding through time, as we grow, etc. Our stress of anylitic or synthetic principles determines our role in life, as every intellectual/artistic trade has a certain proportion of anylitic/synthetic work to it. Intelligence is the measurement of our ability to anylyze and synthesize individually and synthesizing the two processes together to come to the most relevent/real views of the world/ourselves.

So intelligence=synthesis ANDOR analysis+"the transcendence of symbols"
non-intelligence=synthesis ANDOR analysis with no inherent transendence (I mean both of these in the particular sense, universally it would be better to just use AND as both s and a are processes of nature/intelligence.)

John Page

But doesn't intelligence arise from certain arrangements of matter? Why "unlike nature" - I thought "thought" was natural . What do you mean by "The Symbol of transformation/translation"?

Cheers, John

xoc

To me, it seems apparent that intelligence may correlate directly to certain arrangements of matter but does not neccesarily "arise from it", rather is embodied within it. For example, meaning does not derive from words as physical entities(ink on paper, ASCI-binary encoded magnetic patterns on the disk, sonic shapes) but are rather used as a vehicle for meaning. Meaning is transcendent of the specific physical medium; so that unlike physical phenomenon (spoken vs. written word) can contain the same meaning. Intelligence/Mind is primary, preceding matter, though coming later through matter as arranged to do so.

The "Symbol" could be x, that is the ultimate variable that gives a meaning transcendent to itself.

I say "above nature" because I consider the "intelligence" of the self to posit itself "naturally" above Nature(the world). We consider our intelligence to be some way "above" Nature when we try to analyse and understand it- we are implicitly "above" what we understand, like the man on a mountain surveying the world beneath. This could be a higher-dimensionality of "Man", or spirit, whatever allows us to interpret symbols(like words) as relating to external/ideal objects rather than just spatial/physical entities. Consciousness and self-consciousness are transcendent of matter, though we can never find consciousness seperated from "matter" as all we can perceive is matter in flux. IT must be found through inference/intuition rather than empirical observation. This is to take the qualitative sense of the "I" vs. "The World" as self-evident, as it cannot be proven empirically it might be good to accept the most natural inference of the difference.

John Page

Hi xoc:
Hope the below is not too brusque - I was pressed for time.

I understand and I don't mean arise, as if by magic. I was trying to avoid using "emergent"! Certain arrangements of matter exhibit intelligence as detected by other arrangements of matter?
A word's meaning is its relationship to the thing referred to. A word has common meaning when both you and I work within the same semantic framework,
Matter preceeds mind. I have not yet encountered a mind that is not dependent on the pre-existence of matter.
Ultimate variable? What do you mean?
Consciousness is a property fo certain arrangemnts of matter without the need for transcendence. I agree that any amount of empirical observations will not impart an understanding of how consciousness arises or is embodied as part of matter.

Cheers, John

xoc

That's kind of the circle we fall into. The only thing we can encounter, through the 5 senses anyways, is material by necessity. So all our relations with other "minds" as we know them is taken through the 5 senses. However there are other(possible) receptors of "input" beyond the 5 senses, such as intuition, instinct, etc. Basically what could be called the "sensibilitys" are in my opinion on a similar, if not equal, footing with the senses, so our intuition of other minds(the voices in our heads, that different minds that argue within our own brains), or a Mind-Immaterial(God by some definitions) ought to be taken into consideration and evaluated without necessariliy rushing after naturalistic explanations first thing.

The justification for this, is that while different sections of the brain are mapped to outside phenomenon, firing off the same patterns to replicate to our "mind" a same phenomenon, we do not take it that this outer phenomenon does not exist. If a person can be made to "smell burnt toast" by stimulating a certain part of the brain even when no toast is burning, it is more suggestive that there is such a thing as "burnt toast" even though in this instance there is none around. So too with the "God-part of the brain" etc.

Here's a link to http://www.paradigm-sys.com/cttart/s...t78-troni.html a page on "Emergent Interactionism." As I am not a psychologist I cannot say with any authority how successful a theory it is, but I am very inclined to agree with the man and am happy to see such work around which I find more believable than materialist-monistic theories of brain/mind... the psy information is more of a distraction as I am not particularly concerned with debating such phenomenon but think it's a good starting point for "mind-as-transcendent."(or whatever it should be called)

The need for "transendence" I am trying to relate is the concept of the pattern/symbol as representative. We must think of our mind and brains in a dualistic fashion, even if we don't really believe they are seperate, which suggests to me an inherent, qualitative distinction. Minds are reliant on matter for transmission of information, for storage of information, and processing of information, as far as material beings are concerned. The computer of course provides a great analogy for this, but it's important to note that the "pattern" is itself a by-product of mind, one that is understandable not by it's physical properties but by inference of order. A Thought is known to correlate to a certain physical process in the brain, this "thought" is then typed out by me with deliberation into a written code, translated by the machine into binary, transmitted, and then re-translated up the stack of decoders till it reaches another mind. You cannot find the sense of it anywhere in it's physical nature, the "meaning" transcends the various symbols and physical states it uses as a vehicle otherwise it could not travel in such a way. The "meaning"(intelligence of) is not physical in itself, only reliant (apparently) on physical mediums for transmission of information.

This is a pretty deep problem, as it is clear that information does travel through and is processed by physical medium, just that the "translation" of a physicality to thought is the transendence of the thought, not the communication of it.

Quote:

Ultimate variable? What do you mean? Consciousness is a property fo certain arrangemnts of matter without the need for transcendence. I agree that any amount of empirical observations will not impart an understanding of how consciousness arises or is embodied as part of matter. Cheers, John

Ultimate variable? Basically this may have been unnecesary to mention, I mean here the ultimate "archetype" or Idea of the Symbol(the object that transmits more than the thing-in-itself). This is the superclass of the classes of symbols- a Word is a subclass of the ultimate variable, mathematical symbols are the subclass of the ultimate variable, maps are subclasses of the ultimate variable, etc. It is inferred Ideally, I do not suppose there to be any ultimate "reality" to it necessarily although it is supposed to be reflective of the essence of all of our symbolic forms of communication. By speaking of an "ultimate variable", a lot of work is cut-out because then we don't need to reference specific kinds of symbols and can speak of what defines the essential status of a "symbol" as singular.

The question is, why do certain arrangements of matter have the property of consciousness and not others? Consciousness is an animation of biological systems(most), but information produced from consciousness is transmitted through non-organic material, like the computer systems, telephone. The "essence" of the person, his/her "signature" is replicated through these means with ease, I see this all as mind-transcending-matter, qualitatively if not physically.


This is one of my favorite topics of philosophy. I must admit that every time I try and make this kind of argument, I am more convinced of it being true intuitively then intellectually, but since it's such an open and undecided subject in the philosophy of psychology I guess it'll have to do for now.

John Page

This is the traditional view, but does not include magnetic fields, for example, that extend beyond the normally accepted boundaries of the body and in certain other animals (e.g. electric eels) are used for communication and weaponry. Certain Japanese research (don't have a reference to hand, sorry) shows that the brain can encode signals onto electric currents in novel and efficient ways. I guess what I poking at is that we're still on the learning curve and a balance of open-mindedness and skepticism is, perhaps, the most appropriate. Take this passage from the link you provided:
"More than 600 experiments, however, provide first-class scientific evidence for the existence of paraconceptual phenomena such as extrasensory perception (ESP), phenomena that cannot be explained in terms of brain processes and which argue that some aspects of consciousness are of a qualitatively different nature than physical processes."
While I would agree there is first class evidence that there are phenomena that are poorly understood, to turn round and say ESP (somewhat of a contradiction IMO) cannot be explained in terms of brain processes destroys the protagonists credibility. Our current understand of brain processes could be likened to Copernicus' understanding of astro physics.
I'm not sure what the point is here - the organ of perception is not the object and imaginary objects may not exist outside the mind/brain.
I don't think there is any need for transcedence, what we call meaning is just the referential relationship between the symbols/language we have used and the object or event they used to describe.
Isn't this "ultimate variable" just the set of all variables?

Cheers, John

xoc

Well I definitely agree that the field work for understanding brain-mind consciousness is only in it's infancy so there is a lot to still be figured out. I was less concerned with ESP than with showing a kind of mind/brain dualism that is "emergent" or "transcendent." I consider the "encoding" of information to be similar to a 3d image translated onto a 2d page- this is how the 2d picture "transcends" it's 2 dimensionality, as it can portray what is of higher dimensionality.
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The kind of symbol can vary for a same meaning, as a same symbol can give a different meaning. I take this to mean that there is no meaning in any symbol in itself: such meaning must be "infused" by an intelligence first. This may be suggestive of the kind of Intelligent Design thing that is probably despised a lot around here, but I see a huge gap between the physical activity of the brain and what such activity "represents" (or what we actually imagine with that activity- how does our imagination of "car" for example correspond to the code the brain activity puts off in-itself? There is nothing inherently "car-like" about any form of brain activity, nothing inherently "car-like" about the word car either, the symbolic translation we attribute to Mind is apparent in the way the brain works itself. Thought as we know it maintains a physical medium but it must transcend it qualitatively(meaningfully) to give meaning. The difference between information and non-information is only deducable to "intelligence", there is no distinction of the two by any physicality alone.

10010101010101, for example to "decode" binary or infer a pattern, intelligence must first be present, or methods approaching intelligence. Our perceptions are input centers that transfer "code" to the brain, furtheirng the imagination and thinking etc. on the "higher level." I see this as implying either theism(mind precedes matter) or panpsychism(mind coexists with matter, "intelligence" is found in all material things to varying degrees) or some combination. Patterns are only ever inferred by minds, on a higher conceptual level then just a sense of existence is the sense of differentiation, so how could certain combinations of matter arise to produce intelligence with no intentionality from the greater system? I know that there's no easy answer for this, and that may not mean it didn't happen, I have trouble seeing it myself is all.
I'm sure a better knowledge of neurology would sure make this a more comprehensive discussion all the way around, but I do recall that a certain area of the brain is related to "man-made" things and another to "natural things", the division we have conceptually of these things is in the brain itself. I guess there is not much of a point other than the brain has correspondence with the "Real world" in it's functions for objects, often so certain expereiences of a certain type are not negated by the fact just that they correlate to a certain part of the brain: so do objective, "factual" experiences of normal life correlate to certain parts.

I consider that "referential relationship" to be transcendent, as it is a leap of physicality to intellectuality that cannot be proven as a physical leap/process. There's a picture of a lake "objectively", me thinking of the picture, but what does this brain activity pattern have to do in any physical similarity with a "lake?" How can we compare the two in any physically meaningful way? Even showing the flow of information in the physical(light from the picture hitting the eye, info passing through the eye to the brain etc. to give the consciousness of the picture) does not explain how it is possible for the particular brain activity to "become" or "create" a lake in the mind. The leap from brain to mind is a qualitative "quantum leap", it's so hard to deal with because it hits so close to home. How can "thought" analyse itself, this seems to do away with any possibility of objectivity at all(especially if we don't consider thought to be an object)
Well it's representative of them all, but put in the "singular" to be a kind of Granddaddy of them all. Whether such a "Thing" could or does exist at all or in anyway I could not guess, I just posited it because it suits my laziness to speak of only one thing than a myriad host of things(set of all variables). Not to be too confusing as by variable I mean anything that is to be used as a symbol, this could theoretically include any and every thing(and abstract "things) in the World as long as some mind uses it with intention to represent something else.

John Page

Symbols are arrangements of matter ("things") that are used by the minds/brains (other "things") to refer to something else. I agree that a symbol by itself has no meaning, but believe the meaning is built on physical relationships rather than transcendental.
Why would certain arrangements of matter not arise? Why is infinite regress to "greater systems" necessary - isn't this just human nature to look for some higher cause?
While there is a gap in our knowledge I don't see why a "leap" is required, other than human imagination positing such "leap" as a temporary explanation.
Regarding the lake, that we can simulate experiences (with varying degrees of success) that produce the same or similar sensations as exposure to the "real thing" demonstrates that the mental transformations to perceive a lake are internal to the mind (rather than in the lake itself).
OK. Perhaps the confusion was my assumption that "variable" exists as a concept in the mind/brain, whereas you were talking more literally.

Cheers, John