Book said an interesting thing that brought up one of my own personal theories that I've had since I was a teenager.
Memories, thinking, emotion, and muscle control appear to be stored in and originate from the brain. And what happens where is very specific. If one part of the brain gets damaged, something is lost. Ability to speak, motor skills, judgement, self control, etc. We can almost point to an area of the brain and say: Here, this is where you think about math. That is where you react to music you listen to. There is where you imagine things.
But what if the brain was not where that happened, but merely an interface. I think people tend to think of the spirit as some sort of homogenous presence within the body, controling it like a hand moving in a glove. Damage to the body would not damage the spirit, so the body could still think and react. I think it is more like the input into a computer. Think about your keyboard.
Your computer cannot feel your fingertips on your keyboard, nor even the impression of the key onto the circuit, closing the circuit so that a signal is produce. All your computer percieves is that the circuit is somehow closed so that it recieves an impulse that makes it store that signal in a memory and write it on the screen with photons. For all the computer knows, the signal originates in the keyboard.
And what happens if you damage your keyboard? Perhaps just a small bit of damage: the letter R no longe woks. Now you ae unable to type that lette. It makes the output less undestandable. And what if the damage is worse. My daughter obliged me in that experiment once by baptising my computer in apple juice. Luckily she used the sprinkle method. Short circuits were everywhere. A signal was sent to the computer alright, but not the one I had intended. ?4hwo slh\dl eh [%ohk....
I am still intact, but no longer able to use the keyboard as a proper interface.
Brain damage has the same result. The spirit is intact, but the body is unable to recieve the signals the spirit intends. We also have the interesting fact that the brain is also responsible for sending the data it recieves to the spirit. Again, damage in that capacity is going to cause faulty data to be sent to the spirit so that it cannot react competently.
Another point of proof is that it appears that there is a neural origination for things spiritual. And why not, if the spirit is controling and experiencing the body through the brain? I learned that long after I developed this idea and it seemed to mesh perfectly with it.
Anyway, this makes sense to me.
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
Curious as to the implications:
- do the thoughts present at time A cause the thoughts at the next instant B? in other words, how often does the spirit intervene, and how would we distinguish it from chemistry? - if the damaged brain were replaced with a new one, would the spirit remain the same? - what is neural origination? you mean one neuron or cluster controls all the rest?
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Wow! I am 100% with you on this, and I have been contemplating the same things and talking to folk about it for a couple of years. Do I know you IRL?
The real kicker comes when you think of mental retardation and Alzheimer's in the context of an impaired interface instead of a flawed intellect. That means there's a normal, fully-functional spirit inside!
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
Is it possible to tell whether there's a difference? (Confining ourselves to the present plane of existence, i.e. chatting about it with them afterward in heaven doesn't count.)
Posted by Book (Member # 5500) on :
I brought that up because it's in a Kurt Vonnegut book; he tells a story about a scientist who used to steal brains from a coroner's office and root through them, trying to figure out how what he called a "dog's breakfast" contained a consciousness. What got stuck in my head was that he just called brains "dog's breakfasts" over and over again.
[ April 16, 2004, 07:14 PM: Message edited by: Book ]
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Richard:
quote:- if the damaged brain were replaced with a new one, would the spirit remain the same?
If structures in the brain are linked somehow to structures in the spirit, then it would be difficult to ensure that same linkage with the replacement brain. I think the recipient of such a brain would behave much like a newborn baby, trying to re-establish links between the spirit and the various functions of the body.
Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
Richard,
Those are fantastic questions. We would have to develop a prediction of the theory that could experimented with. It would take people with a lot more expertise than myself. But I wonder if there is some way to tell the difference.
I would believe that the interaction would occur on the quantum level.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Richard:
quote:Is it possible to tell whether there's a difference?
Probably not. Even if the memories of an impaired person were laid down in a pure, unimpaired manner, and even if the impaired person could mentally construct a coherent sentence to express those memories, it may not be possible to verbalize that sentence. How frustrating to be trapped in such a body! Then consider that the input interface may be equally impaired, and the memories don't get laid down perfectly.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
OSC wrote a short story called Angles that talks about the brain being the interface to memories that are stored in alternate dimensions.
[ April 16, 2004, 07:40 PM: Message edited by: mr_porteiro_head ]
Posted by Slash the Berzerker (Member # 556) on :
Yeah, and if brain damage only caused losses of certain functionalities, then that might make sense.
But the fact is, brain damage can cause radical alterations in a persons personality.
I can see how damage could cause a spirit to say, "I am happy." and have that translate as drooling on yourself because half the brain is missing.
I just can't see how the spirit could say, "I am happy." and have that translate into stabbing someone in the eye forty times with an ice pick. And, before you ask, yes. Brain damage has caused nice normal happy people to become homicidal and dangerous.
I just don't see how you can escape the fact that you are nothing more than a hunk of meat, and your carefully constructed sense of self is nothing more than the sum of a bunch of chemical reactions that are easily disrupted.
Does this mean there is no god? Not at all. It is still a pretty miraculous hunk of meat, and a marvellously complex set of chemical reactions. It is truly something to be in awe of.
But a radio transmitter to the spirit world? Not likely.
[ April 16, 2004, 08:08 PM: Message edited by: Slash the Berzerker ]
Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
I've had this thought for years (college anyway), and I came to it indepedent of Vonnegut
One of my psych/cognitive science knowledgeable friends had heard of criticisms to this idea, having to do with causality, which now escapes me. The idea, that is, not causality.
-Bok
Posted by Jerryst316 (Member # 5054) on :
Well, from a philosophical standpoint, I can see at least three things that Amka is going to have to deal with.
1. Your going to have to give an account of exactly what the soul is and where it is.
2. Your going to have an epistemological problem with the soul. (IE how do we know that the brain is only an intermediate to the soul?)
3. Finally, your going to have to show the existence of the soul, and since it isnt physical, apparently, it must be a priori. More importantly, where did it come from and how was it made (God?).
Otherwise, the theory seems pretty cool actually!!
quote: One of my psych/cognitive science knowledgeable friends had heard of criticisms to this idea, having to do with causality, which now escapes me. The idea, that is, not causality.
I think, maybe, that it has to do with mental causation and whether or not it exists. Is that right?
[ April 16, 2004, 08:40 PM: Message edited by: Jerryst316 ]
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
Amka, cool analogy/theory. I have come up with a similar theory on my own, namely that the brain is just a tool through which our spirit works. What really got me started thinking about this was holding my first newborn child.
My faith tells me that he has an intelligent, eternal spirit that is perhaps eons old already packed inside his little body. But when I looked into his eyes, he seemed no more intelligent or aware than a dumb animal. (Like, a dog or even a mouse might be too smart.) I thought of those with mental retardation. Those in comas. And I began looking upon our very brains as limiting factors on our spirits when they are joined together. His newborn brain still had much developing to do. His spirit had to function through it with all its limitations. That's how I looked at it.
Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
Jerry, yeah; something about your brain "reordering" physio-neural responses to fit our normal ideas of causation, even though it was false...
-Bok
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
Slash, if I can believe that an elegant, intelligent entity can be reduced to a vegetable, I can also believe that same entity can be twisted into a frightening, homosidical monster because of a flaw in the tool through which it must work. When such flawed body is shed, the effects would be gone, but the entity would continue sane and intelligent once more. Perhaps the entity would be horrified at the things he did, but hopefully he would realize he was not to blame.
I also believe that our entire bodies influence our spirits in numerous ways. Genetics, hormones to name a couple. I believe the spirit and soul together are the "soul" of man. A spirit separated from his body by death is "incomplete". But our bodies now are so flawed and imperfect, some more than others.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
I believe that Slash is right.
And the brain does order and reorder as it forms. Neurons (not glial cells but the neurons that have axons and dentrites) head to areas of specificity. As they make proper connections through synapses, neurons that are not needed once circuits are completed, die off. This process is called apoptosis.
The idea of phantom limbs happens when a person has, say, an arm amputated. The neurons left at the stump, once responsible for sensation in the now removed arm, still have axons and dendrites hanging around. These neurons are still sensory neurons, still have a purpose, and the axons grow to make other connections. They make connect in the wrong place--so that stimulation of these neurons will cause the phantom pain from the absent limb.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
beverly:
quote:But when I looked into his eyes, he seemed no more intelligent or aware than a dumb animal.
That's partially because he was probably seeing things upside down. His spirit had no experience processing the visual signal from his eyeballs, which is inverted. He had no visual patterns in his memory to compare with the input from his eyeballs. All he saw was light and dark and random color...no meaningful patterns.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
I think you are right, Amka. In fact, I think there's some strong philosophical argument that prove you right - at least, to some degree.
We know that damaging or manipulating the brain can alter our ability to experience things the way we do. I think this implies that either the brain contains our experiences, or it is an interface between the external world and what we ultimately experience. But, the brain is a physical thing made up of neurons and chemicals and so on, while our experiences and thoughts are nonphysical things that can't be made up of neurons and chemicals and so on. So, I think that rules out any possibility that the brain actually contains our experiences, except perhaps in some coded form to become uncoded by something capable of holding nonphysical things (like the soul). So, it must be that the brain is just the interface. This is along the lines of what you are saying, I think.
A key question is, though, how much is in the brain and how much is in the soul, and in what ways they interact. It seems that at least part of personality is in the brain, for instance, if not all of it.
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
Interesting thought, skillery. The sort of behavior I am thinking of is how the eyes would slowly roll across the room, perhaps briefly pause on my face, then continue rolling somewhere else showing little "response" to that eye-to-eye contact. Very very similar to what an elderly person does when their mind is "gone". They seem to revert back to that newborn "cluelessness".
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
Please, please read up on some biology, psychology and neuropsychology.
Please.
Posted by peter the bookie (Member # 3270) on :
I wonder what part of the brain controls willful ignorance.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
Prefrontal cortex.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
mackillian:
quote:Please, please read up on some biology, psychology and neuropsychology.
Are you referring to the possibility that memories are stored in the brain as chemicals passed between neurons? Then you must also believe that all those memories go in the grave when we die.
By the way, when I refer to the "spirit," I'm talking about a physical entity, in the shape of the human body, made of refined matter. I don't know what you folks are talking about.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
I do believe that memory are formed and stored in neurons in the brain.
However, don't assume to know what I believe in terms of the afterlife.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
I think in Slash's example, where someone becomes homocidal, that it points to something fairly unique to Mormons: A sound body is critical to the functioning of the spirit. We are not ghosts clothed in meat, but a marriage of two unlike things.
While the idea is poetic, I can't think of a practical reason to prefer it over the mechanistic explanation for the most part. When it comes to treating the body and the spirit by someone other than ourselves (and self treatment would be in the form of meditation, exercise, or what have you) it has to only treat one part. For years I've felt medicine is wrong headed in being non-holistic. But the nature of medicine is to analyze or pull apart, not bring together.
I guess in reality I take further exception not on behalf of the mechanistic interpretation, but on behalf of the heart. The biggest problem with artificial hearts is getting them to feedback to the appropriate level of activity. Beating faster when exertion is required. Slowing down for relaxation. Our own hearts are very responsive to thought states. It is far to common to merely think of it as a pump, or an engine. But it is also (forgive the car analogy) the accelorator and the transmission.
Well, I have to put my kids to bed, but Amka, did you read the article about brain death in Dag's fetus thread?
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
An artificial heart wouldn't contain the neurons normally assigned to the task of sensory feedback back to the hindbrain for maintenance of heart rate.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
I'm not assigning the functions of the autonomic nervous system to the spirit, and I'm sure that the central nervous system handles many other bodily processes. But I don't think that cognition takes place in the gray matter. Maybe there's enough room up there to store and catalog all those memories in chemical chains, but I doubt it.
[ April 16, 2004, 11:52 PM: Message edited by: skillery ]
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
Speaking as someone who has experienced brain damage, I'd have to say your example about brain damage is way the heck off, Amka. You're sorta reverse-personalizing, applying concepts of simple personal computer components to the human body. It is plainly not that simple. I only lost a measurable amount of the area involved with short-term memory, and yet my whole brain chemistry changed in that I no longer require the medications I once needed to stabilize my bipolar disorder. I've been plagued by years by depression and bipolar, and yet my emotional state has been very different than before the damage.
quote:I think you are right, Amka. In fact, I think there's some strong philosophical argument that prove you right - at least, to some degree.
That's baloney. There's some strong philosophical argument to prove it's a load of crap, as well. There's some strong philosophical argument to prove that there is no human spirit like Amka is suggesting. There's some strong philosophical argument to prove that a rock has as much spiritual essence as a human being. There's some strong philosophical argument that life as we know it is no more real than our dreams.
Go ahead and pick one, and it'll still be a bunch of well-written ideas based on little more than a desire to explain "god" (or pick your deity or faith), and even less basis in scientific fact.
quote:Are you referring to the possibility that memories are stored in the brain as chemicals passed between neurons? Then you must also believe that all those memories go in the grave when we die.
I agree with Mack. So, since you are so sure you have the freaking answer: tell me where my memories of my accident and the three subsequent weeks are. If you can't answer that, then stop trying to pretend you know what you're talking about. They're gone. That's it. No 'rerouting' or spiritual brouhaha is going to bring them back. Ever. This isn't Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I'm no Data. Reversing the polarity isn't going to save the day in real life.
Science fiction is just that: fiction. When it disagrees with science fact, it's no longer scientific.
Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
The spirit is experiencing everything through this body. And that includes emotions and feelings. So the spirit isn't thinking "I am happy" at all, but is experiencing great rage through the inputs of the brain.
I know for a fact that good, gentle, responsible people have been turned into raging maniacs through brain injury. The body isn't a puppet being run by the spirit. Lots of processing power is happening within the body itself. As such, it is not really possible to physically distinguish between the spirit and the body.
In some cases, yes. I think a person could feel concious and trapped within a non-functioning body. But in most cases, the body and spirit are acting as one, and so the person is aware only of what their body is experiencing. For anyone that has gone under heavy sedation or general anesthesia, that is a type of damping of the inputs and outputs. We do not remember being concious and frustrated that we can't be in touch with our body. Our experience is that we slept. However, I can tell you from my experience I do sense that I was not in control. In general, I hate that sensation with a passion. I think it is why I never even experimented with drugs or alcohol.
What is most likely happening to the person who has turned into an angry, abusive person is that the brain is firing anger emotion and irrational signals from logic and judgement areas of the brain. What can the spirit do with that? Control my actions, responds the spirit, perhaps. But this goes through the judgement and self control areas which are damaged and cannot recieve the message.
For those of us that believe in souls, the spirit has to run the body somehow. The brain orders itself according to how the spirit uses it. Could we use another person's brain? No. Back to our keyboard analogy, let us imagine that we are designing a keyboard as we go. A key here, a key there, and they each mean something to us. There are trillions of keys that we've put into place ourselves as we increased our ability to control this body when the process first started before we were born. What if we had someone else's custom designed trillion button keyboard? Could we use it? No. When one of the buttons stops working, what do we do? We fix it or go around it, if at all possible.
Not a radio transmitter to the spirit world, but a thing that is intimately meshed with the spirit. The brain is just where the spirit experiences the world.
Philosophically, this starts with the assumption that we have spirits. Whether we have them or not is a different issue, kind of like "Is there a God?"
I find the idea that there is a God but we do not have spirits an interesting stance. Care to elaborate?
[ April 17, 2004, 12:02 AM: Message edited by: Amka ]
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
quote:But I don't think that cognition takes place in the gray matter.
There are college courses to explain it in great detail. Maybe you should think of taking some. Or just read a few non-fiction books covering the subject.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
First, cognition != memory.
Second, consider how complex the body is. That information is stored in any one cell. Heck, in a tiny subsection of any one cell. Its hardly unreasonable to think memory might be stored in a large mass such as the brain using similarly small units (chemical compounds and such).
Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
John - we were writing at the same time. This theory of mine is not meant to prove that we have a spirit. It is just an idea about how it would work, if we have one.
Anyway, LDS people believe that everything does have a spirit. The big difference between our own and others is that we are spirit children of God.
Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
Where are your memories? I believe they are there, but it is the connection to them that is gone. But the damage is so severe that rerouting is, as you said, impossible. That your body changed biochemically wouldn't disprove the theory.
And it is just a theory. The idea of a wandering mind.
I am not claiming to KNOW this. I thought it was an interesting idea and put it forth for other people to think about. I may very well be wrong. But it is fascenating to think of the possibilities.
[ April 17, 2004, 12:13 AM: Message edited by: Amka ]
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:That's baloney. There's some strong philosophical argument to prove it's a load of crap, as well. There's some strong philosophical argument to prove that there is no human spirit like Amka is suggesting. There's some strong philosophical argument to prove that a rock has as much spiritual essence as a human being. There's some strong philosophical argument that life as we know it is no more real than our dreams.
Well, no, there's arguments for all of those but none of them are all that strong, in my opinion. There are ways around those other arguments that I've heard of, but I haven't yet heard of a good way around the nonphysical mind/soul proof that I alluded to. You just can't make sensory experience into neurons, and you can't deny the existence of sensory experience, so you are stuck, as I see it.
quote:For those of us that believe in souls, the spirit has to run the body somehow. The brain orders itself according to how the spirit uses it.
Ah, but here's the trick, and where science can come into play. Right now the laws of physics state that the brain orders itself based ONLY on it's previous state and the physical forces acting upon it. What you are suggesting is that the laws of physics are wrong, I think. If the brain actually does order itself according to how the spirit uses it, then we should see it doing that, rather than following what the laws of physics would tell it to do. We should be able to see neurons firing without any physical trigger whenever the soul tells it to, or something like that, no? We should be able to find telekenesis on some microscopic, atomic, or even quantum level somewhere inside the brain. Otherwise, how could the soul be control it's physical state?
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
quote:One of my psych/cognitive science knowledgeable friends had heard of criticisms to this idea, having to do with causality, which now escapes me.
Even Descartes had trouble reconciling his theories on Mind-Body with the equally "obvious" notion that two things which interact in a causal way must share some common attribute (beyond the circular argument that they belong to the same event sequence). There's plenty more if you Google "dualism* causality" or similar -- most of it bad, but even bad philosophy is good for your intellect.
*the division between that whose existence we know a priori, and that which we must take on faith to avoid Idealism
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
quote:I'm not assigning the functions of the autonomic nervous system to the spirit,
So, do you know what those functions are?
'Cause the autonomic nervous system is a part of the peripheral nervous system. It's a branching, really. Peripheral into the autonomic system, which is then divided into afferent and efferent nerves. Efferent nerves make up the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The other division of the peripheral nervous system is the somatic nervous system, also further divided into afferent and efferent nerves.
quote:and I'm sure that the central nervous system handles many other bodily processes.
Actually the nervous system handles all bodily processes
And the central nervous system is split into the brain and the spinal cord.
quote:But I don't think that cognition takes place in the gray matter. Maybe there's enough room up there to store and catalog all those memories in chemical chains, but I doubt it.
Do you realize how large the chemical chain are? How specialized the cerebral cortex is in storing and retreiving information?
Do I need to go into an explanation about how emotional behavior works neurologically? About how learning and memory work neurologically?
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
quote: I find the idea that there is a God but we do not have spirits an interesting stance.
I could be wrong, but don't JWs believe this?
It never seemed to me like Amka or any of us were trying to prove anything. Just discussing an theory that matches how we think of things. I do find it surprising though, with how many times a new scientific discovery bowls over an old theory that so many people have trouble believing that there could be so much truth out there beyond what science is currently capable of measuring.
John, is it inconceivable that you have a spirit that recorded those memories but it is working through a mortal brain which is not able to retrieve them? No way to prove it unless you find yourself dead and remembering them, but we are talking hypothetically.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
quote:You just can't make sensory experience into neurons, and you can't deny the existence of sensory experience, so you are stuck, as I see it.
Actually, neurons are, aside from the sensory stimulus, what create sensation. There are a few different types of neurons. But if you want to stick to sensory, this is how it works.
Someone pinches you...hard. You gasp in pain.
In the nervous system, this is what happened at an amazing speed.
There are axons extending from the soma of sensory neurons attaching to the end of your skin cells. These are sensitized to pressure changes in your skin. The pinch activates these neurons and triggers the action potential and the axons release neurotransmitters that are picked up at a postsynaptic nerve. These signals continue to travel up the spinal cord into the brainstem where it's sent to the thalamus. The thalamus interprets the sensory information from the sensory neurons in the skin and shoots out this processed sensory information to the limbic system. The limbic system triggers an autonomic respose, sending out signals for your body to react with a jump from the pain and the verbal exclamation of pain.
The sensory information within your body is entirely run by neurons.
Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
Tres -
There are quantum levels where the firing of the neuron is an issue of probability. Will it fire, or not? Is that chance, or the will of the spirit?
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
It's called action potential.
[ April 17, 2004, 12:34 AM: Message edited by: mackillian ]
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:I just can't see how the spirit could say, "I am happy." and have that translate into stabbing someone in the eye forty times with an ice pick. And, before you ask, yes. Brain damage has caused nice normal happy people to become homicidal and dangerous.
"Interface" implies two way traffic. Brain damage would mess up the input as well as the output. Also, there's nothing in Amka's speculation to say that feelings are 100% spiritual. You're making up a difficulty that doesn't exist, here. If there is a spirit or soul or some other supernatural construct associated with personhood, then the idea that there's a mechansism for connecting the body and spirit isn't far-fetched at all. Damage to that interface causing a change in behavior would be more likely than not.
quote:I just don't see how you can escape the fact that you are nothing more than a hunk of meat, and your carefully constructed sense of self is nothing more than the sum of a bunch of chemical reactions that are easily disrupted.
I don't see how you can be so mired in that "fact" that you require escape from it.
Dagonee
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
quote:Well, no, there's arguments for all of those but none of them are all that strong, in my opinion.
Tell you what, Tres: when you can form an opinion on philosophy that is cogent enough to make publication and remain an argument for more than a century, then I'll weigh your opinion as much as those that have withstood millenia.
In my opinion, you're someone who will gladly disregard all logic, science, and reality as long as it fits your idea of how the world should or does work. This thread has just strengthened that opinion of you.
Amka: not good enough. Tell me where. You cannot, and neither can doctors, brain surgeons, phsychologists or psychiatrists. There are only guesses, and ones that are far more educated that the simplistic ideas so far in this thread. The human brain does not work like computer memory, the body does not take input like a computer keyboard.
And your assumptions on the nature of god have just removed me from ever having a valid point on this, as far as you're concerned. When in doubt, claim it's because I don't have faith.
First fiction, now the religion card.
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
You guys have had a few more biology classes than I have. Let me just state one thing I agree with, and one belief I have:
quote: Are you referring to the possibility that memories are stored in the brain as chemicals passed between neurons? Then you must also believe that all those memories go in the grave when we die.
Absolutely. My memories are in my brain. When it ceases to function, those memories will be gone. Irretrievable to current technology. However, the memories I shared with other people, at least the memorable ones, will endure with them. To me, that's the part of a person that continues on (the spirit, as it were), when a person dies.
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
quote:There are quantum levels where the firing of the neuron is an issue of probability.
Naturally quantum effects at the level of enzymes are fascinatingly irrelevant, diverging interactions from those predicted by deterministic chemistry on the order of 1 in a million-jillion occurrences. Even if probability were a factor, however, I'd consider this more troubling. We don't normally consider free will to be a matter of pure chance.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Considering that free will is observationally indistinuishable from weighted random chance, how is one to say a quantum result isn't free will rather than a weighted random chance?
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Mackillian:
quote:Do I need to go into an explanation about how emotional behavior works neurologically? About how learning and memory work neurologically?
That would be great. Thanks. Also please address fugu13's assertion that cognition doesn't necessarily equal memory. Why would a cognitive pattern of connections between memories not also constitute a memory?
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
*was thinking just what Fugu said*
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
If someone is happy with that definition of free will, it's not inconsistent or anything. I just don't think that answers most of the questions people have. For instance, who/what assigns the weights? (I.e., one's belief systems + situational ethics.) Are we happy with black-box functionalism encapsulating what feels like very real consciousness?
I think physicalism* is quite logical, but I have a feeling I'd have a hard time convincing Amka of it.
*the world should be thought of as consisting of algorithms, data structures, and intentionality
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Its not a definition, its a case of being observationally indistinguishable.
Which does not make them the same things, just means we can't tell the difference .
Posted by Chris Bridges (Member # 1138) on :
Interestingly enough, when you remove the concept of the soul the workings of the brain aren't nearly as mysterious.
My running theory, altered and changed over the years, is that the brain is a combination of our memories and the connections made between those memories. To use the computer analogy, it's both hard drive, keyboard and applications. What we consider consciousness is, basically, the desktop generated by the brain's cognition/electrical impulses. Short-term memory is what's on your desktop that hasn't been saved to disk yet.
The amazing mind/body interface is already being duplicated in ridiculously rudimentary forms in exploratory robots which can react to stimuli based on programmed responses. Our responses are just lots more complicated and largely self-programmed, and are only a little tougher to predict.
Memories are saved to your brain more or less indsicriminantly, but their importance and the connections between those memories is determined by several conditions: the relevance to you personally, the usefulness of those memories, and the emotional attachment. There's a theorist now (have to go look up his name) that suggests our memory-gathering and subsequent connection-building is just as strongly tied to natural selection as anythng else about ourselves. Connections that seem to help you are strengthened, connections that do you no good are lessened or dropped. (Obviously our control over "helped" and "no good" is a bit shaky at times). I've no clue whether the memories, once saved, remain the same and the connections change, giving us different versions of events at different times, or if new events and emotional situations can cause us to actually rewrite memories in our brains to fit new information.
Loss of memory or function (brain damage) can affect how well the desktop works. But when the brain turns off, the desktop winks out, and that's it.
This is a theory that has worked well for me so far, fitting most every situation I can think of.
Posted by AvidReader (Member # 6007) on :
One of the things I've noticed about my family is no one ever remembers the same event the same way. Everyone's version of what happened is different, and in my family usually dramatically so. If the brain was recording events as they happened, everyone would have the same memory of the event. But we remember our feelings and perceptions. Memory actually seems to enhance the personality influence over the facts.
So how do we define personality? Is it just biochemistry created by our responses to past events? And how different is that from a soul encoding its experiences in the brain? I don't think the two ideas, the scientific and the spiritual, have to be mutually exclusive.
I don't know anything about memory brain damage. But doesn't the brain tend to rewire itself and get back in touch with areas it lost contact with? Like stoke victims learning to walk again. Part of the brain is dead, so the brain has to make connections around that area before it can get use of the arm or leg back.
Doesn't the brain also rewire itself when the damage is too severe? Parts that should control one function take over for another function. And even if the damage is irreparable, people learn to live with the changes in their lives and can go on to be happy and productive. Why should where the memories are encoded and stored prove or disprove the soul?
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
AR, that's not particularly sensical. It makes far more sense to assume that everyone's memory of the event is different because everyone's perception of the event was different -- what was being focused on, how keen the senses of the person are, what sorts of things already have strong associations in his or her memory, if the person was thinking of something else strongly at the moment, all sorts of things. It would make no sense at all for people to have the exact same memory of the event were it being stored in chemicals or anything else, because even were the perception stored exactly (which nobody has been asserting it has been, because that seems silly based on experience) everyone's perceptions of an event are going to be different.
Also, since when are chemicals perfect? They're messy, inexact things, and given what we know of the brain often storing references to previous memories of perceptual items (people, things) instead of a particular instance's perception of the thing itself. Take DNA, for instance. Our cells (which luckily have error correcting capabilities) regularly mess up in handling.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
I'll give explanations, but lemme eat breakfast first. Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
I hold to the belief that the body having a spirit in such a fashion is probably not provable. But if I were to think of someplace to look for evidence, it would be identical twins. They have the same genetic structure, though their experiences are going to be different. And of course, some might believe that if they share the same genetics, they also share the same "soul".
But lets look at the idea that they have two different, unique spirits or souls within them. Do they tend to have differences than cannot be accounted for by experience alone? Measuring such a thing would be, well, impossible, but observations could still be meaningful.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
quote:I hold to the belief that the body having a spirit in such a fashion is probably not provable.
Which removes discussion from being a possibility. People used to hold the belief that sperm was "little people" who then housed themselves in the womb of a woman as fertilization. If actual discussion, study, and medical evidence was not an option to further explain it, we'd still believe as much.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
My thought on the spirit is that it "infiltrates" the whole body. I mean, look at the liver. The artery that once linked us to our placenta terminates in the liver. I've read that it has several hundred known functions. People can live without a heart, or an artificial one but not without a liver.
I think what's funny is that in Chinese Traditional medicine, the Central Nervous System was not recognized as being of much importance. I'm not sure what they thought the brain did. Not that this has much direct bearing on my theory of the spirit (I don't think, for instance, that it is necessarily attached at the accupuncture meridians).
P.S.
quote: What you are suggesting is that the laws of physics are wrong
Are we talking about the laws of physics that explain gravity or quantum physics? Physics is not a canon of truth unto itself.
[ April 17, 2004, 11:31 AM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
The brain IS a part of the central nervous system.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
I don't see how what I wrote implied it wasn't, mack. I can see how they never noticed nerves, as they tend to follow blood vessels. But I don't understand how they could have overlooked the brain. I don't know what their history of gathering information through dissection or animal analogies is either.
Anway, I don't put the smackdown on folk's linguistic musings. Is what you want to tell us really going to have reference without 4 years of undergrad training? I realize there are folks here who are young and impressionable. In discussion like this, I think it's fair for folks to say what their credentials or lack thereof may be. My degree is in linguistics with a cognitive science emphasis. I've also read a few of the non-fiction books on the brain body connection.
I think the one I'm most influenced by is Emotional Intelligence , which is a lot about overcoming the predicted responses to messages from the limbic brain to the Prefrontal Cortex without losing the value of that communication. I don't think an extreme view on either side serves anyone very well.
P.S. I'm also a mental health consumer and a survivor of traumatic memory loss
[ April 17, 2004, 11:43 AM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
*raises eyebrow*
My bachelor's degree is in English. I didn't take biology. The only psychology I took was abnormal psychology, child psychopathology, and clinical psychology.
So, considering I've been able to learn this stuff in the past six weeks, I hardly think 4 years of undergraduate education is necessary for understanding it.
And I DO think an extreme view is necessarily in comprehending the physical nature of the nervous system before applying philosophical ideas. Why? Because if you don't, the resulting theory is all full of holes and can easily be proven wrong. So taking a different approach and learning enough to understand the basic concepts that you're musing about is a much better approach.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
Pooka, I'm a survivor of not only traumatic memory loss, but actual brain damage where I really did have to redevelop a portion of my memory skills. So, don't begin to toss credentials at me and then use bad science (supposition and un-backed hypothesis), because I've been there, dealt with the numerous doctors and neurophsychologists who are far more accredited than you are, and there are loads of biological science references that you can go find at your local library to back all of it up.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
quote:
quote: I hold to the belief that the body having a spirit in such a fashion is probably not provable.
Which removes discussion from being a possibility.
What are you saying, John? That it is impossible to discuss something that cannot be proven? This thread obviously refutes that. Or are you saying that something unprovable cannot be true? I would think that the fact that people are using such terms as soul and spirit tould make it obvious that they are talking about things that might be true and yet unprovable.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
I'm saying that it removes anything but religion and flowery interpretations of religion from the conversation. I have zero faith in any god, so you're not talking with me by telling me that your beliefs are true and that's how it works, you're talking at me.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:There are quantum levels where the firing of the neuron is an issue of probability. Will it fire, or not? Is that chance, or the will of the spirit?
Even in that case science should be able to measure the probabilities as being not as random as they should be, if the soul were controlling it. Chance would be totally random, whereas I would think the will of the soul would not be random.
quote:Tell you what, Tres: when you can form an opinion on philosophy that is cogent enough to make publication and remain an argument for more than a century, then I'll weigh your opinion as much as those that have withstood millenia.
John, my stance on the existence of a soul or mind IS the one that has withstood millenia. Only in the past hundred years or so has the idea that the mind could be a physical part of the brain gained any popularity, and if you are ruling out arguments that haven't lasted a century, none of those arguments have.
quote:In my opinion, you're someone who will gladly disregard all logic, science, and reality as long as it fits your idea of how the world should or does work. This thread has just strengthened that opinion of you.
I think that merits a Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
Well, if people just want to ignore science, then I suppose there's no point in my participating in the discussion by providing scientific basis for our current understanding of brain function.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
And Tres decides to also pull the religion card.
Good going, chum.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
Um... no, I didn't. I never made any reference to religion.
If you're talking about the millenia comment (which you brought into the discussion, I might add) I was referring to philosophy and the theories on the existence of mind that have existed since Greek times and before, and are built on arguments and proofs, not religion.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
Tres, those "philosophies" you're referencing are old religious ones.
Seriously, dude, if all you want to do is turn this into a philosophy argument excluding scientific evidence to the contrary, then I have nothing to say to you about it. Continue living in your fantasy world.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
John, where did I undertake to treat you?
mack:
quote: And the brain does order and reorder as it forms. Neurons (not glial cells but the neurons that have axons and dentrites) head to areas of specificity. As they make proper connections through synapses, neurons that are not needed once circuits are completed, die off. This process is called apoptosis.
See, mack, if I didn't know that all cell death is referred to as apoptosis, I might think you were saying the overall process of reordering the brain is called apoptosis.
I appreciate you guys are trying to "clean up" the science here, but it's just as silly as me trying to clean up the moral content of this board.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
John, You asked for millenia-old theories, and those are about as nonreligious as you can find in those times. In more recent years (the last 500 or so) arguments along the same lines have been accepted by many an atheist philosopher.
And since this is about the interaction between souls in brains, which is something science touches on but lacks the tools to really get into, this IS a philosophical debate. If you try to turn it into a purely scientific debate, you're going to have great difficulty talking about souls and internal experiences, as science can only measure observable, physical stuff and can't talk about souls.
If there IS any scientific evidence to the contrary, feel free to state it, but as of yet nobody has - so please give up on the baseless claims and ad hominem attacks. You haven't given an actual argument to me yet, beyond "that's religion and religion doesn't count" and "there's a strong argument for anything, so your strong argument means nothing."
[ April 17, 2004, 01:14 PM: Message edited by: Xaposert ]
Posted by Bokonon (Member # 480) on :
If only Descartes had been right!
Stupid pineal gland...
-Bok
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
pooka: what?
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Bok, that was one of my first thoughts when I was reading this thread. Descartes and his pineal gland. Though it does do some interesting stuff.
I hope all the memories I don't care about aren't stored. Like being asleep, or driving while I'm thinking about something else.
I actually struggle with the definition of the spirit on mormon.org (what happens after we die, in the video), that it includes our memories. I mean, what would be the point of an afterlife if our consciousness is substantially the same as it is now?
[ April 17, 2004, 01:43 PM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
Just to back Tres up a bit, the original philosophy of the separation of mind and body was thought up by Plato, and did not originate from any religious views he might've had. The particular arguments that back up Tres's dualism are due to philosophers like Frank Jackson and John Searle, who are not religious so far as I know. So he's not playing "the religion card."
Of course, I agree with Leto that his view is wrong. But he and I have been over this often enough that I'm not sure there'd be much benefit in arguing. And as I've said before, if you concede (as any scientifically-informed dualist must) that behavior is fully determined by physiology, the "soul" that remains doesn't seem to provide much basis for religious views about an afterlife. For instance, if my soul doesn't dictate how I behave, why should it be rewarded or punished for my sinful actions?
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Cellular apoptosis is whenever a cell becomes dispensible. Failure of apoptosis is the main problem of molecular biologists studying cancer.
Or do you mean cleaning up the board? I'm saying we can't expect someone to adhere to the rigor of the discipline we have personally chosen.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
Actually, although I will concede that my behavior is determined by my physiology, I won't concede (not without more proof at least) that my physiology is not to some degree determined by my soul, and thus I don't have to concede that the soul does not determine my behavior. For one thing, we don't yet have the capacity or complete model of the brain to be sure that the laws of physics aren't "bent" in the brain in some way.
For the moment, I think it's uncertain to what degree the "soul" can control the body's behavior, if it can at all.
However, I definitely think that, in contrast to things like God's existence which much be taken to a large degree on faith, the existence of the soul is something that can and has been proven to a fairly high level of confidence. There are a number of arguments out there against this theory, and they are widely popular arguments, but so far each that I've seen is based on assumptions that I take to be directly observably wrong (in the way 1+1=3 is observably wrong).
[ April 17, 2004, 01:49 PM: Message edited by: Xaposert ]
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
quote:we can't expect someone to adhere to the rigor of the discipline we have personally chosen
No, but basic, factual knowledge would lead to better discussion rather than going on little to no knowledge.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
I'm going to have to back off from my initial assertion that all memories are stored in the spirit.
Remembering back to my freshman psych class, which is as far as I got, there is quite a bit known about olfaction and the memory of smells. If I recall correctly, the olfactory portion of the brain is the most primitive, and the memories of smells are the most persistent. Numerous experiments have been performed on animals, establishing the olfactory as the repository for smell memories.
Also, in the LDS religion, there is no scriptural basis for the assertion that memories reside in the spirit. The only scripture that I can think of is a statement by Joseph Smith that whatever principle of intelligence that we attain in this life will rise with us in the resurrection . This suggests to me that our set of memories is not complete without our bodies.
I would guess that there are both brain memories and spirit memories, but I have no idea where to draw the line between the two. Maybe we could say that the brain stores memories related to the physical senses, and maybe we could ascribe memories of higher thought processes to the spirit.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
There is more than one set of laws of physics. I'm personally okay with there being two primary forces in the universe that can never be reconciled.
P.S. Is unified field theory the same as the search for a single description of force?
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
skillery: even catholic theology says that the body is resurrected as well. which is why I do believe that even religiously that memories are held within the working of brain neurons.
Did you still want me to explain neurological stuff on this thread?
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Sure
Posted by Hobbes (Member # 433) on :
Well I think that at least to some degree, memories have to be held spirtually, for the LDS faith anyways. This is because it is very clear that God lives within our universe (in a body much like ours), and also that God knows the entire universe. Thus, if He knew everything and it was all stored in the temporal world then He would also have to know everything about his body too, wich loops back on itself into a storage space of inifite size.
But even if you thought you could do it without looping, the fact is that each piece of matter can only store a finite amount of information, and all the matter in the universe is, by defenition, storing the maximium amount of information. So God's brain (where the knolwedge is stored if it's stored in the brain in general) must be the size of the universe.
If you follow me...
Hobbes Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Mackillian:
quote:Did you still want me to explain neurological stuff on this thread?
Yes. We're all here to learn.
But I want the poor disembodied spirits to have some memory of the life they just completed. I would hate to think that we have to wait until the resurrection to get back our learning of physics and math and languages and such.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
Hobbes,
If God is coming into this, I'm not sure there's any need to believe God has a brain, or is within the physical world.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Mack, I should warn you that I don't understand what the somatic nervous system is. My grasp of the sympathetic/parasympathetic delineation isn't that great either.
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
Jamie & John (and others), I appreciate your input on our terribly unscientific discussion. You could be, like, referees and call foul when we say something that doesn't jive with current scientific knowledge.
My two cents: We have in scripture the concept of a spiritual creation before the physical. To me this has always inferred that the operations of the spiritual mirror the operations of the physical. In fact, this is inferred numerous times in scripture. I have always assumed that memories are recorded in the spirit body and the physical body both.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
Okay. I'll do my best to explain.
The brain and consciousness (not as in awake, but as in alive and aware of being alive) has quite a few different views.
Dualism: mind and body are composed to two different substances that exist independently but somehow interact.
Monism: bloief that the universe is made of only one type of existence. There are a few different types of monism--materialism (everything exists in the physica), mentalism (only the mind really exists), identity position (mental processes are the same as brain processes but described in different terms).
Neurons in humans: 12-15 billion neurons in cerebral cortex and associated areas, 70 billion neurons in the cerebellum (hindbrain), 1 billion neurons in the spinal cord.
The body of a sensory (specialized at one end to be very sensitive to a particular kind of stimulation) or motor neuron (gets mesages from other neurons and sends messages from its body in the spinal cord to muscle or gland cells) is composed (basically) of soma (cell body)and axon (this is the information sender of the neuron. The axon ends in a "bulb" type swelling--this is called the presynaptic terminal, and is where neurotransmitters are released.
Nerve Impulse: The outside of a neuron (the membrane) keeps an electrical gradient (a difference in electrical charge between the inside and outside of the cell). Without outside disturbance, the membrane keeps a polarization of a slightly negative electrical potential as opposed to the outside (slightly positive). This difference between inside and outside voltage is called the resting potential.
In keeping this polarization, the cell membrane has two ion channels: sodium (Na+) and potassium (K+).
Now this resting potential, as I said before, remains stable unless stimulated. Usually, this stimulation takes place at the synapses (where the neurotransmitters are released and received). When stimulated enough (enough neurotransmitters for example), the cell has a rapid depolarization (evening the polarization to zero) followed by a slight reversal of the normal polarization. This response is called the action potential. Action potential, basically, is what allows neurons to communicate.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
How a synapse works: 1. The neurotransmitter is made in the presynaptic neuron. 2. Neurotransmitter is stored in little containers called vesicles. 3. If a neurotransmitter leaks from that container, it's destroyed. 4. When an impulse arrives, the containers fuse with the presynaptic membrane (the outside of the message sending cell) and the neurotransmitters are released. 5. The release of neurotransmitters is decreased BY this release of neurotransmitters. 6. These neurotransmitters travel across the synapse (the gap between the sending and receiving neurons) and attach to receptors on the postsynaptic membrane. 7. The release neurotransmitter is sucked back up by the cell that released it or its destroyed by enzymes.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Okay, I'm with you so far.
Bev: I essentially agree with your idea about spiritual creation/physical creation except for the fall apparently brought about more changes of the physical.
Strangely, though, LDS are materialists by the description mack gave. Or Mentalists. But definitely monists. But for the purpose of this discussion, I'm fine with assuming I'm a dualist and just discussing the physcial without trying to draw a parallel.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Okay, so in this chain of events "presynaptic" refers to the neuron's relation to the synapse and not a part of the neuron?
And because of action potential the release of NTs supresses additional release?
Other than that, I think I'm following you.
Action potential would also explain the theory that pain is the result of cells leaking their contents. If a cell ruptures near by, it's going to screw up the action potential.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
Types of Neurotransmitters: acetylcholine, dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine, serotonin...and many more.
Structure of the nervous system: Central Nervous System (CNS): brain and spinal cord Peripheral Nervous System (PNS, don't say that out loud, you'll giggle): nerves outside the brain and spinal cord
Somatic Nervous System: made of nerves that send messages from the sense organs to the CNS and from the CNS to muscles and glands.
Autonomic Nervous System: controls the heart, intestines, and other organs.
Gray matter: densely packed cell bodies and denrites.
White Matter: made of mostly myelinated axons (axons with a "coating" for protection).
In the Autonomic Nervous System, there's the sympathetic nervous system, which prepares the organs for vigorous activity. The parasympathetic nervous system organizes vegetative, nonemergency reponses from organs.
The hindbrain is the most "primitive" part of the brain. It consists of the medulla, pons, and cerebellum (contributes to movement, balance, coordination, attention shifting, detecting timing.
Midbrain (middle of the brain): tectum (roof of the midbrain), superior and inferior colliculus, tegmentum, and substantia nigra (has a dopamine containing path).
Forebrain: The outer portion is the cerebral cortex. A bunch of interlinked structures forming a border around the brainstem form the limbic system. These structures are important for emotions, motivations, the four F's (feeding, fighting, fear, and...sexual activity). The structures of the limbic system are the olefactory bulb, hypothalamus, hippocampus, hippocampus, amygdala, and cingulate gyrus of the cerebral cortex. The thalamus is a structure at the center of the forebrain. Most sensory information is FIRST sent to the thalamus, it processes the info and kicks it back out to the rest of the cerebral cortex. The hypothalamus is a structure just below the thalamus and it sends messages to the pituitary gland (the endocrine glands that releases hormones). The basal ganglia are composed of the caudate nucleus, the putamen, and the globus pallidus. This structure is responsible for planning sequences of behavior, some memory and some emotional expression. The hippocampus is responsible for storing certain kinds of memory, but not all. Folks with damage to the hippocampus have trouble keepin new memories, but don't lose the memories they had before the damage occurred.
Organization of the cerebral cortex: Contains six different distinct cell layers called laminae. Each have different tasks for each different connection. The cortex is also arranged in columns of cells with similar properties as well, arranged perpendicular to the laminae.
Occipital lobe (back of the cortex): contains the primary visual cortex. Parietal lobe: contains the primary somatosensory cortex. Temporal lobe: responsible for auditory processing.
Frontal Lobe: primary motor cortex, prefrontal cortex (large proportion of the brain). This cortex gets messages from all sensory systems once its been processed.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
quote:Okay, so in this chain of events "presynaptic" refers to the neuron's relation to the synapse and not a part of the neuron
No, presynaptic refers to the neuron itself in relation to the synapse--presynaptic neuron sends, post synaptic neuron receives. '
quote:And because of action potential the release of NTs supresses additional release
No, the supression of additional neurotransmitter release is controlled by autoreceptors on the presynaptic nerve membrane.
quote:Action potential would also explain the theory that pain is the result of cells leaking their contents. If a cell ruptures near by, it's going to screw up the action potential.
Not quite. I'll get into that soon.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
I gotta go, but I'll try to think about these systems. Thanks.
Actually, I do want to ask. Do the Autonomic and Somatic systems both root back into the spinal cord?
[ April 17, 2004, 03:56 PM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
quote: However, I definitely think that, in contrast to things like God's existence which much be taken to a large degree on faith, the existence of the soul is something that can and has been proven to a fairly high level of confidence.
Right...
All the modern dualist arguments basically boil down to this: point at phenomenal conscious experience. Say, "We now know, for absolute certain, that no future science will ever be able to explain this."
Even if you reject every physicalist account of the mind offered so far, I don't see how you can miss the arrogance of this argument. We don't know the limits of future science, any more than Descartes knew the limits of our modern science when he wrote that it was impossible to construct a machine that could mimic human speech. The greatest mind of the 17th century couldn't forsee that it was possible for an object to speak without possessing a soul. Couldn't our modern worries about how conscious experience might arise from matter be just this sort of misunderstanding?
[ April 17, 2004, 03:57 PM: Message edited by: Destineer ]
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Depends on what you mean by mimicking human speech. A tape recorder? A computer hooked up to a speaker? A program that could extrapolate a complete grammar with partial input? A program that can be taught Egyptian Arabic but implicity understand Iraqi Arabic? As far as I know, the last two of these has yet to be done. Please do link me, I haven't been following the field very close.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
Growth and differentiation of the brain: Proliferation: production of new cells Migration: cells moving to eventual destination Differentiation: cell forms its axon and dendrites that provides its distinctive shape. Synaptogenesis: formation of synapses--this continues throughout life. Cholesterol is essential for synapse formation. A protein called Nerve Grown Factor (NGF): promotes survival and growth of a neuron; neurotrophin. Neurotrophins increase regrowth of axons after brain damage. Apoptosis: programmed mechanism of cell death
All areas of the nervous system initially make more neurons than needed. Each brain area has a period of massive cell death. Maturation is marked by these die-offs (such as the final maturation of the prefrontal cortex in teens and young adults).
Posted by PSI Teleport (Member # 5545) on :
While I have, when I was younger, briefly considered some of the things that Amka said here, it really helped to see it all laid out and to read it instead of just thinking about it. To me, a Christian, I think it has some religious implications, too. Correct me if I'm wrong in this.
We think of Jesus as fully God, and also fully man, and yet it's difficult to grasp how this concept would be. I had always struggled with the verse where Jesus says that no one knows when Heaven and earth will pass away but the Father. Not even the Son. I thought, how could Jesus not know, if he's God? While I still consider it to be one of those mysteries that I'll never fully understand, it makes some sense to look at it as God (the Son) using a man's imperfect interface.
There are a million and one questions that arise when I type that, and I can't answer any of them. But it does open up a new way of seeing things that is pretty nifty.
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
Pooka, no argument with you there.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
I gotta stop! But that reminds me...
quote: Maturation is marked by these die-offs
I heard a theory that autism could be related to the lack of die off. Also why Bean will die in the books, because the brain cells just keep proliferating without dying. These are just theories. Of course, I don't know how Bean could live very long without some die off. Maybe the die off mechanism was, in sci fi theory, merely hampered. Sorry to digress.
P.S. PSI, I know what you mean. While I don't agree with Amka's premise, I think the discussion that has arisen from it is very fertile.
[ April 17, 2004, 08:03 PM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:All the modern dualist arguments basically boil down to this: point at phenomenal conscious experience. Say, "We now know, for absolute certain, that no future science will ever be able to explain this."
That's not a very good portrayal of the dualist argument at all. Dualism is only concerned with the limits of science in an indirect sense. I don't think many at all would frame an argument in terms of the limits of science, or what science can explain. Science might be able to explain the nonphysical some day somehow, for instance, which would be entirely consistent with dualism.
The dualist argument actually boils down to this: Point at phenomenal conscious experience. Say "We know this exists, and we know it is nonphysical." Point at external world. "We know this exists, and we know it is physical. Therefore, there is both physical and nonphysical."
It's no more arrogant than any theory predicting that something must be true before it is actually observed experimentally. Physics does that sort of thing all the time (and physics arguments tend to be much more complicated.)
There are four basic ways to refute it (two materialist, and two mentalist.) 1. There is no phenomenal conscious experience (Eliminative Materialism) 2. Phenomenal conscious experience is actually a physical thing, made of matter and energy in some way (Behaviorism, Identity Theory, standard Functionalism) 3. There is no external world (Solipsism) 4. The external world is a mental thing, made of the same thing as phenomenal conscious experience (Berkeley)
[ April 17, 2004, 04:24 PM: Message edited by: Xaposert ]
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
I feel like we're in the Matrix. Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
I'm confused here. The title clearly suggests some supernatural attributes to the theory (the brain being part of the body, describing it as an interface to the body implies an interfact to something outside the body. Such things are generally described as the consciousness, soul, or spirit.
So people come into a thread that has as its starting supposition some supernaturalist element, and complain becasue religion comes into it? I don't get it.
Dagonee
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
I don't think anyone has argued that science has proved that there is no spirit, just that some things that have been attributed to the spirit can be explained by neurology. We are trying to get a groundwork of neurology laid, and then see where we are. And I'm always interested in brain stuff.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
I'm not sure it's quite right to call consciousness or a soul supernatural - although it is certainly something dealt with by religion a great deal.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
pooka, Descartes argued (in the Treatise on Man, I think) that it was impossible for the sounds of human speech to be made by anything without a soul. Obviously we now have computers, not to mention tape-recorders, that can make speech sounds.
Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
quote:Science might be able to explain the nonphysical some day somehow, for instance, which would be entirely consistent with dualism.
This gets into the difficult issue of defining 'physical.' The definition I prefer is, X is physical iff X is one of the objects or properties appearing in the complete, accurate scientific theory of the world (which is obviously not yet discovered). So by my preferred definition, what you're saying doesn't make sense.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
All I meant is that any matter or energy within the body that forms a permanant part of it would likely still be called part of the body. Therefore, the thing that formed the connection to it and the rest of the body wouldn't be called an "interface to the body." It might be called an interface within the body.
Therefore, the title of the thread implies some non-materialistic construct, which implies the discussion will have to involve non-scientific topics.
Dagonee
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Interesting, Destineer, I wonder if that counted parrots, of if he just didn't know about them. I mean, was this a linguistic thing or an opera afficionado thing?
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
mackillian:
quote:Neurons in humans: 12-15 billion neurons in cerebral cortex and associated areas, 70 billion neurons in the cerebellum (hindbrain), 1 billion neurons in the spinal cord.
If neurons were analogous to computer bits, that wouldn't be much storage capacity.
Do we know how neurons store information, and how much information can be contained in a single neuron? Do memories of visual patterns take more memory space than spoken language memories?
I'm enjoying this discussion. Thanks for the good information.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:This gets into the difficult issue of defining 'physical.' The definition I prefer is, X is physical iff X is one of the objects or properties appearing in the complete, accurate scientific theory of the world (which is obviously not yet discovered). So by my preferred definition, what you're saying doesn't make sense.
Well, yes. I'd argue, though, that "science might be able to explain the nonphysical" is something that DOES make sense, and hence indicates your definition is not accurate. I suspect most people on this forum understood what I meant when I said it, at least.
And also, I don't think it's fair to call dualists "arrogant" for claiming something that only your definitions are forcing them to claim. I mean, the dualist could just as easily argue that it's your definition that is the thing suggesting science will never be able to explain the nonphysical (which it does, no?), not them, and hence it is your definition that is arrogant, not them. You said yourself that "we don't know the limits of future science", but now your definitions tell us that we DO know science is limited to understanding the physical.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:If neurons were analogous to computer bits, that wouldn't be much storage capacity.
Do we know how neurons store information, and how much information can be contained in a single neuron? Do memories of visual patterns take more memory space than spoken language memories?
Well, neuron's don't store things like normal computers do. In computers, there is a specific location in memory for each piece of data. Each piece of data takes up a certain amount of space, and has a fixed beginning and end within the memory space.
Neural networks, though, don't store things in a specific location. Instead, they use what is called "distributed" memory, which means that each piece of knowledge is stored across the entire network, rather than in a single spot. If you want to know where "1+1=2" is stored, you can't go to any specific neurons to find it. The knowledge is stored across the whole network, by the exact way in which all the neurons are connected to one another.
This means that in computers, if you destroy one bit, you probably ruin one piece of data but leave everything else exactly intact. Whereas, in a neural network like the brain, if you destroy one neuron, you very slightly alter every piece of data stored in the network, but don't really completely delete anything. Each neuron may be part of millions of different facts.
This sort of system has a lot of benefits for the brain. For one thing, if brains stored stuff like computers, then when a certain neuron contained some critical piece of information for speech, you might be able to lose the capacity to talk by losing just that one neuron. By spreading everything across the whole network, losing individual neurons only cause a virtually unnoticable effect on your knowledge - unless vast numbers of neurons are lost at once.
It's kinda complicated I think, but the important thing to remember from it is that you can't talk of a single neuron storing a piece of information. It's the network as a whole (or at least areas of it) that stores things.
[ April 17, 2004, 11:00 PM: Message edited by: Xaposert ]
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
quote:If neurons were analogous to computer bits, that wouldn't be much storage capacity.
This is what I mean about complete ignorance being the leading factor in that side of the discussion.
A single "bit" in a computer can hold only a single character's worth of information, like the letter "K." A single cell in the human body—not even a neuron or neuroglion—holds exponentially more information in just the nucleus. It stores exponentially more in just the chromatin of the cell. And by "exponentially," I mean hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bits' worth of information. In just the chromatin. Even more within the whole of the cell—all of the organelles perform specific tasks. In just one cell. The human body is composed of at least trillions upon trillions of these cells.
Also, these cells become even more complex in "what they do" in that when they work together to form cell systems (tissues), the complexity increases, not decreases. Then, when these systems form organs, the level is again increased in complexity. It is even more complex when organ systems (endocrine, vascular, digestive, nervous, etc.), of which the brain is only part of one of these systems (nervous).
The human brain alone can hold more information than, say, Google's famous computer farm. The brain is more complex than even the most famous artificial intelligences, like Kismet. There are many projects out there that can almost simulate the human brain's complexity, but none that can duplicate it. None.
And to further shoot down this computer analogy, I'll also point out that the brain alone is not the source of "who we are." The nervous system alone does not define "who we are." We are an amalgam of our various systems, working together chemically and otherwise, in a symbiotic relationship.
In other words, we are more than the sum of our parts. Trying to define mankind, the mind, or the soul from only one part of one part of what makes a human being a human being is extremely ignorant of what modern medical and physical science has shown us about who we are. Philosophize all you want, but all of the philosophizing in this thread has been from the viewpoint of old, incorrect assumptions of how the body works, which leads to how personality, cognition, memory—everything that makes us who we are—works in making us who we are incredibly flawed.
I am not going to teach a whole Bio 101 class here, but suffice to say, there is enough misunderstanding of simple animal biology, let alone human biology, rampant in this thread to seem completely ridiculous. And this is just from a basic biological perspective, not the more distinct specific medical perspectives. And this is why I keep saying that this is all based on fantasy, because the foundation for all the philosophizing is completely flawed, making the conclusions just as flawed (or more). The early great thinkers of the Greek and Roman times had some great ideas, but as medical scientific knowledge has gained more basis and understanding, the original basis for these philosophers' ideas need to be adjusted accordingly (and correctly). Same with those of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Same with those great philosophers of the ancient and older-era East.
Without a firm understanding of what is already known about what makes us who we are, all the suppositions are going to come to ridiculously erroneous conclusions.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Uh, John, a bit can only hold a zero or a one. A byte can only hold a single character (of a very limited character set, of course).
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
You're right, fugu. I don't know where my mind was. Of course, that make what I was saying about that even more poignant, doesn't it?
Posted by Bob the Lawyer (Member # 3278) on :
I don't want to step on Mack's toes here, she’s running this thread’s bio ship, but I figured I'd answer pook’s pain question. At least, what I think her question was.
What you're talking about is, I think, something called "The Danger Model" which was proposed by a woman named Polly Matzinger. It goes like this:
When a cell "dies badly" (i.e. not by apoptosis. Apoptosis is how cells are supposed to die and when a cell dies in this manner it doesn't pop, it shrivels. A lot of people get this confused. Remember no popping in apoptosis) it spews out its contents. "Bad death" can happen by things like pathogen infection or getting stabbed.
Ms. Matzinger holds that it is internal proteins within your own cells that trigger the immune response and not foreign bodies. An invading virus in her model doesn’t illicit a response until it kills something which means that vaccination works because of damage done by the needle and not the viral fragments that are injected. There is some scientific evidence for this, but the theory is by no means canon.
Anyway, where pain comes in (keep in mind that this is a very simplified model). The immune system’s first line of defence are these guys called macrophages. These are big cells that eat up foreign bodies indiscriminately and also signal the heavier hitters to come to the scene and specifically take out the problem. They roam all over the body and are going to be around when things start blowing up. One of the first things they do at a problem site is release two cytokines (cytokines are chemicals released by one cell to trigger a specific response in another cell) called Tissue Necrosis Factor-alpha (TNF-a) and interleukin-1 (IL-1). The aspect of their function that concerns us is signalling increased blood flow (which causes swelling) and increased body temperature. Increasing the blood flow allows for faster transport of cells involved in the immune response and the swelling isolates the infection to one area so it can’t spread. Increasing the body temperature interferes with bacterial and viral production and increases the rate at which the immune system works. Although, it also messes up a lot of other systems in the body so it's by no means a good thing all the time. Anyway, that's why these two cytokines are good, but back to the topic at hand. Why does it hurt?
TNF-a will also cause a depolarization in nearby senory neurons that are geared to send pain signals. Which is normally a good thing. Pain makes you miserable and makes you not want to run around and expose yourself to new threats, irritate the site of infection and just generally conserve your strength.
I don’t mean to say the TNF-a is the pain signaller, there are plenty of other things that can cause you to feel pain (heat, deformation of skin cells, etc). But, with regards to the danger model, it’s the guy that’s causing the problems.
Action potentials only arise in nerve cells, cells popping in their general vicinity oughtn’t cause them to lose their ability to polarize/depolarize. Indeed, if it did interfere with the propagation of action potentials in some way you wouldn’t feel pain at all.
Hope I haven’t only served to confuse you even more
Edit: If you tried to read this before, I'm sorry. One paragraph was a brutal combination of two others that I wrote.
[ April 17, 2004, 11:33 PM: Message edited by: Bob the Lawyer ]
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:Philosophize all you want, but all of the philosophizing in this thread has been from the viewpoint of old, incorrect assumptions of how the body works, which leads to how personality, cognition, memory—everything that makes us who we are—works in making us who we are incredibly flawed.
Not ALL of the philosophizing.... some of it.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
Yeah, and the parts that aren't are bad science. That's my point.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Thanks, Bob, I hadn't known where that pain theory came from. But it puzzled me. I'm not sure I grasped what you were saying about vaccinations. Were you merely outlining the idea or advancing it?
So what about the idea that our skin can only sense hot or not, intense or not, and sharp or not? Is that still the thinking? Also that the tongue can only actually sense 4 tastes? Or all these a matter of "we have only discovered 4 tastes so far"?
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
quote:The human brain alone can hold more information than, say, Google's famous computer farm.
The two share some design patterns, namely massive parallelism, but I don't think the brain is anywhere near approaching the scale of Google. The smartest people of a generation can hold ~100k digits of pi, or the contents of a bookshelf of medical references, or the score to every symphony in the repertoire. Amazing feats, but nothing rivalling a 300GB hard disk.
The unique parts of the brain are its suborgans for processing speech and vision. They are extremely difficult to match because they represent specialized hardware evolved to specific and complex tasks; present-day computers have to get by with software emulation, as it were.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Mr. L:
quote:This is what I mean about complete ignorance being the leading factor in that side of the discussion.
If I had a mentally impaired child, or if I wanted to interact with such a person, I would want my actions and attitudes regarding that person's impairment to be based on the best knowledge available. If science did not have all the answers, I might add knowledge from other fields.
In my opinion, imperfect knowledge will always result in less than ideal actions and attitudes.
Intolerance of a person's mental impairment or a person's apparent complete ignorance, and inability to interact with such a person in an ideal manner indicates a less than perfect knowledge of that person's impairment.
I am interested in this thread because I want to better understand mentally impaired people and be able to have positive interactions with them.
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
*is in awe of the human brain*
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
quote:The two share some design patterns, namely massive parallelism, but I don't think the brain is anywhere near approaching the scale of Google. The smartest people of a generation can hold ~100k digits of pi, or the contents of a bookshelf of medical references, or the score to every symphony in the repertoire. Amazing feats, but nothing rivalling a 300GB hard disk.
Yet another incredible feat of raw ignorance. A 300 GB hard disk wouldn't be able to hold all the sensory data the brain collects from a simple solitary stroll once around a block. Google's computer farm is nowhere near the complexity of a single human's brain, and are not the same design pattern. It may have some similarities to parts of the human brain, but nothing like the whole.
quote:The unique parts of the brain are its suborgans for processing speech and vision. They are extremely difficult to match because they represent specialized hardware evolved to specific and complex tasks; present-day computers have to get by with software emulation, as it were.
Simulation, not emulation. Not even the most complex and advanced projects can pass the basic "human intelligence" tests (not to say that the tests themselves are basic, because determining "human intelligence" is very complex). I can sit in a cardboard box and simulate driving a car, but I'm not driving in a car. The level current technology is at with regard to emulating a human is even lower than that.
skillery:
quote:If I had a mentally impaired child, or if I wanted to interact with such a person, I would want my actions and attitudes regarding that person's impairment to be based on the best knowledge available. If science did not have all the answers, I might add knowledge from other fields.
And using personal computers as your basis for comparison for such a thing would be horribly wrong, and drastically underestimating that impaired person's ability and disability.
quote:In my opinion, imperfect knowledge will always result in less than ideal actions and attitudes.
Very Hume-like. We can never know for sure. Nice cop-out.
quote:Intolerance of a person's mental impairment or a person's apparent complete ignorance, and inability to interact with such a person in an ideal manner indicates a less than perfect knowledge of that person's impairment.
Ignorance is not an impairment. It is the state of lacking knowledge. I am intolerant of wanton ignorance, where knowledge is assumed but not present. Saying "I don't know" is acceptable, saying "I know" but not really knowing is not.
quote:I am interested in this thread because I want to better understand mentally impaired people and be able to have positive interactions with them.
Then stop looking at them as a computer with a faulty keyboard or some bad RAM, because it completely misunderstands them and dehumanizes them.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
Quite true, the perceptual data that a human can recall is truly stupendous in its vastness. Though it does use some tricks to reduce load, as far as we can tell. For instance, unless its particularly unusual people will often not recall what someone was wearing after a bit, and if they try to visualize an event will not have that person wearing the correct clothes.
Which suggests seemingly useless or duplicate information gets tossed.
However, even leaving out stuff like that, the pure visual imagery capabilities of the human brain are ridiculously large.
Now, whether or not its being directly stored is a much more complex question. Its possible only 'hints' are being stored, that trigger certain pathways in our minds, generating the sensations/images/et cetera. But in some ways thats even more amazing.
There's an interesting question related to that: are human thoughts P or NP? And what would the implications of either be?
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
But fugu, people can not only develop photographic memory—which indicates the capacity is there—but there are techniques that can be used to help those who forget details to bring them up from the unconscious. Even with the most forgetful (barring brain damage like mine), almost everything is stored, it's the retrieval that is having problems.
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
Any clue what's up with de ja vu? I just had one today.
I had a brief conversation with my husband while handing off the baby to him at a friend's house. I remember the exchange and actions as very similar as though I knew what was going to happen next before it happened, but had the impression of it happening in a different place, time, and with a preivious baby. I don't get de ja vu often, but when I do it feels, not so much "this has happened before" but "something eerily, impossibly similar to this has happened before".
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
It's mostly just familiarity with a situation, or remembering similar parts of things that make it look like something that has never happened before actually did. It has to do with how the brain saves certain details, and I don't know off the top of my head the contributing factors, but the way those things are only kinda remembered helps create deja vu. In other words, had you no experiences from which to draw analogous connections (and they don't have to be logical, and are often not), then you would not experience deja vu. Not that no experience of deja vu means you have no experience, it's just that without the prior experiences (no matter how dissimilar), there would be no deja vu.
Or it's a glitch in the Matrix.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
John -- I am not aware of anyone with a complete photographic memory, ever. Most people with a photographic memory I know of either have a perfect short term memory, the ability to selectively remember scenes perfectly for a fairly long time (but not all scenes), or some combination thereof. Never everything, for all time.
Also, I think you'll find a lot of hypnotic recall people just don't recall many details except what they happened to be focusing on.
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
The brain's sensory inputs are massive, yes, but its storage is very finite. Google doesn't remember the millions of pages of links that it generates millions of times a day; it remembers the index. The brain doesn't even do that much.
I'm not sure what you mean by visual memory being immense. It's immensely perceptive in some ways -- face recognition is one application that's hardwired and difficult to simulate. But how many faces can someone really remember? Let's be inordinately kind and say 100,000. Lots of distinct features there, but they're undoubtedly stored as patterns (compression). 100k JPEGs is nothing to a disk, and it will preserve a lot more detail to boot. As well as you know someone's face, could you paint in a 1000x1000 image?
Scenes are bigger, of course. A 300GB disk can "only" store 50 days or so. But that's storing (in some intelligent fashion) every pixel of every frame. Could you reconstruct some given frame N exactly? For all N, 24 each second? Not a chance.
Please give some real evidence before rolling your eyes.
[ April 18, 2004, 01:58 AM: Message edited by: Richard Berg ]
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
I didn't say hypnotic recall. I said other techniques. There are not only relaxation techniques, but sessions one can go through to remember certain events. Also, memory can be tied to surrounding events, which can immediately bring up things you missed before by making connections. It's all about how one makes use of our ability to make connections in our head.
And I have known people with photographic memory who can remember mass detail, including numbers, pages of text, names, and other minutiae for very long periods of time. Heck, one of the techniques I had to learn when rebuilding my memory was to apply details to long term memory willfully instead of unconciously. It can be done, and the amount of information we're capable of storing is staggering.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
quote:Please give some real evidence before rolling your eyes.
Read the posts between fugu and myself for the last few posts for just a fraction of how human memory surpasses modern technology by light years.
A hard drive stores as single data bits, while the human mind can store overlapping incongruent data with only the slightest of connections. Additionally, the amount of space to store even one single byte of information exceeds the space required for even a single cell to store massive amounts of data. As far as memory goes, just the motor control memory a person has—say, just to run (which requires a great deal of thought that you never even realize)—far exceeds anything the Google farm, or even a room full of your "300 GB hard drives" can store. Technology can simulate walking, but making a machine that can run like a human is, to date, nigh impossible due to the complexity of the act (which is controlled falling, put in its simplest terms). We cannot create systems like those that exist within the human being using today's technology, because today's technology does not have the efficiency or capability to actually imitate those things accurately.
But, to sum up: Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Mr. L:
quote:I am intolerant of wanton ignorance, where knowledge is assumed but not present.
Then why would you voluntarily join a thread based on such? Were you hoping to learn something? Or is teaching your avocation? Interesting technique.
Is photographic memory commonly associated with a high I.Q.?
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
quote:Is photographic memory commonly associated with a high I.Q.?
Nope, but depending on the test, it can be mistaken for it.
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
quote: Technology can simulate walking, but making a machine that can run like a human is, to date, nigh impossible due to the complexity of the act
Complexity != storage capacity. There's no doubt we perform extremely difficult calculations, but all the evidence we have points AGAINST doing so via a giant lookup table.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
quote:but making a machine that can run like a human is, to date, nigh impossible
Sony has almost done it. The trick with running is that both feet are off the ground momentarily. Their Qrio robot can jump and land and maintain stability, which is a pre-requisite to running.
I got to see it jump at the CES show in January.
[ April 18, 2004, 02:46 AM: Message edited by: skillery ]
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
And notably, they didn't achieve this by adding more and more disks. They did it by working smarter.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
Going back a little bit towards the original topic, Skillery's earlier suggestion that some memories might be "stored" in the soul some way might offer us an alternative explanation to how we might be able to remember so much data. This would require some sort of "talking" between the brain and the mind/soul, however, which seemingly would in turn require a rather complex bending of the currently accepted laws of physics within the brain.
At the same time, it's hard to say exactly how far so many billions of neurons can go. We can build hard-drives with more bits, but as I mentioned earlier, hard-drives operate on different principles than neural networks. The last I heard (and I could be wrong) we did not have the capacity to build an artificial neural network at anywhere near the complexity of the brain. Without being able to test it, I don't think we should presume to be able to guess how far it can go. Maybe it CAN vastly exceed the abilities of a room full of 300GB hard disks. I don't see why that would be hard to imagine.
Posted by Shlomo (Member # 1912) on :
This is a fair amount of oversimplification, but it seems to me that:
"Secularization" resulted (and perhaps still results) from new scientific discoveries because many theologians simply say, "Science/rational thinking cannot explain this. Therefore, God/whatever must be behind it." The result of this horrendous logic is that the more we know, the less power God/whatever has, and the fewer believers. So it doesn't work to justify things with "We lack a better explanation."
In this case, we are talking spirits. Ami never said (that I can recall) that we should accept the "interface" theory because we do not understand parts of brain function. If she did, she's setting herself up for a fall. But in the original thread, she justified herself simply by saying the theory made sense. It does appear to make sense. However, it also makes sense to say that hormones, collectively, comprise the spirit. Or that the spirit controls hormones. Or, beverly, if you prefer, the spirit is the brain. Personally, I do not see what difference it makes. Either way, the brain will evolve a certain way to better channel the person's "spirit" (personality?) and the hormones will evolve as well. And if a person is irrational/retarded, the spirit is getting lost somewhere in transit. A better question is where we will go with this knowledge. How to best channel the spirit, or maximize endocrine efficiency or memory storage or whatever else?
But none of this adequately explains emotions. If certain people say certain things to you, you will feel pain or pleasure. Not "physical" pain or pleasure (as in knife wound/endorphins) but "emotional" pain or pleasure. You could conceivably call emotional pain a "conditioned response". Dogs can be made to run to their dishes at the ringing of a bell, and people can be made to cry at a certain collection of sounds from the mouth of an individual.
My philosophy may seem to leave no room for religion, but it does. You could simply say (as I do) that God represents all that is good, a perfect emotional response, a perfect spirit-body interface, etc., and that getting "close to God" is getting closer to good (God with an extra O). It would still be possible to have a "son of God", as Christians hold. This isn't any religion's "accepted" doctrine, but it is actually one that will withstand science...many doctrines have no such claim.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
quote:Complexity != storage capacity.
You are incorrect. The more complex the storage unit is, the more can be stored. This is even true in hard disks. Do you even understand how a hard disk works (if not, read this)? It is just a fancy writable record player. They are disks with magnetic blocks on them, crammed together tightly (link). The reason we have been able to fit more and more storage on a hard disk is because we keep managing to cram more and more on each platter (disk) in the hard drive, but there is a point where no more can be fit. Additionally, the way the hard drive access the data is exactly like a record player, with a little head that must move around inside to the certain block on the platter (link).
There are inherent flaws to this type of data storage, not just in way it's stored (like a record player), but in the simple fact that it's stored in binary bits to begin with. Human data storage is light years ahead of binary in terms of storing, because humans can store information on top of information on top of information, with no recordable end to capacity, only with retrieval in some (most people never realize how much they actually have stored of events). So, you see, you can list to me all the various hardware in the world, but there are set physical limits to their capability, all due to the basic concept of how they work to begin with. Someday, we might come up with technology to begin matching the human mind, but today's bits and bytes just can't match the capacity or complexity of the human mind, which is why there exists no computer or multi-computer system that can even come close to actually emulating the human brain. Memory and data storage isn't even the determining factor, and computers can't match it.
quote:There's no doubt we perform extremely difficult calculations, but all the evidence we have points AGAINST doing so via a giant lookup table.
Calculations != intelligence. Doing a mathematical calculation is even lower than elementary, it's so basic as to be something that we do on a cellular level constantly. A computer, no matter how complex, can only perform, it cannot create. Not without human guidance. The reason even the most advanced computer systems need human guidance to do is because a computer system cannot imagine something up from nothing. Without a preprogrammed formula set from which to decisively draw from, nothing is done. Not even the most advanced computers can intuitively merge separate instructions on the fly and come up with alternates in a blink. There are CPU instruction sets that set themselves up to anticipate certain things under certain conditions, but even then those are still statically assigned instruction sets that the CPU must follow or else start over.
On top of this, the level of instructions a CPU could hold is nowhere near the capacity a human brain could hold. If you don't think that is pertinent, then I really can't help you, because it means you have a whole lot to learn that would take far more time than I'm willing to sit here and explain to you, both in terms of computer hardware and human biology. I know more about computer hardware than I do about human biology, but you don't even know enough about human biology to make an accurate comparison. You keep thinking "how many frames per second" is some kind of incredible indication of capabilities, when the human mind is so advanced it doesn't even need to break something down into frames. It sees real motion, and modern technology can't even come close to copying that.
However, Richard, you keep coming off as a typical "computer geek" guy who thinks that because he uses a computer a lot, he knows a lot about how all computers work. Your 300 gigabyte hard drives are a joke to even the brain stem alone, let alone the whole brain. Your CPU calculations are a joke, since the human body dwarfs that level of processes at the cellular level, let alone at the conscious level (once again, think stroll around the block). You need some more education on the basics of how a computer works, though, so here. When you can grok that, I'll introduce you to the more complex stuff.
skillery:
quote:Sony has almost done it. The trick with running is that both feet are off the ground momentarily. Their Qrio robot can jump and land and maintain stability, which is a pre-requisite to running.
I got to see it jump at the CES show in January.
That is so laughable. That thing, as well as the other robots out there like the Asimo, can only simulate such activity. They can do it in a laboratory or on a display floor. In other words, they can follow very specific instructions in a vaccuum. The human body, when it runs, is not just executing a specific set of instructions. Every step is handling the controlled movements in direct relation to the body and the ground (YMMV depending on coordination). Those robots "run" on an even less advanced scale to a baby who is just learning to walk trying to run.
Nope, it looks the same, but is very much not. Hence the "simulation" and not "emulation."
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
quote:The more complex the storage unit is, the more can be stored.
You're misquoting me. I think it was obvious to everyone else that we were discussing the complexity of the problem (walking) and therefore the complexity of its solution. This is completely independent of the details of the storage system being used. Algorithms do take up space, yes, but they take up a lot less than you think. I'll bet the source code to every algorithm ever submitted to a major journal would fit comfortable on a CD-R.
I have seen no evidence offered that the internal logic of the brain requires several orders of magnitude more space. There are certainly no trends in CS research that indicate a correlation between code size* and efficiency.
*Let's be crystal clear and say we're talking about the text segments of object files (a gzip'd repository is too language-dependent, though still nowhere near creating order-of-magnitude differences). You have to link to so many libraries these days that executable size is misleading.
quote:The reason even the most advanced computer systems need human guidance to do is because a computer system cannot imagine something up from nothing.
Neither can a brain, unless you're about to switch sides and resort to completely independent influences. (That stance practically defines dualism.)
quote:If you don't think that is pertinent, then I really can't help you
The question is somewhat pertinent from an inquisitive point of view. I just don't give any credence to your answer.
quote:You keep thinking "how many frames per second" is some kind of incredible indication of capabilities, when the human mind is so advanced it doesn't even need to break something down into frames. It sees real motion, and modern technology can't even come close to copying that.
I work with desktop video every from both a developer's and user's POV, so I know computer processing and storage is not magic. It is, however, far superior to a human's. "Breaking something down" is lossy data compression -- very, very lossy. Unless you have a startingly insightful definition of "real motion," I can't think of any way in which the brain can compete.
This is not an indictment of overall brain capability. There are many areas (which I've already listed) where its internal data structures perform vastly better than anything we've come up with. But it does debunk the notion that visual memory is one of them, instead more akin to tasks like multiplying 100,000-rank matrices that everyone has to agree give computers the edge.
quote:However, Richard, you keep coming off as a typical "computer geek" guy who thinks that because he uses a computer a lot, he knows a lot about how all computers work.
Please. I've taken graduate classes in computer architecture, operating systems, AI, and numerical machine learning.
It's you who seems bent on assigning grandiose attributes to the brain that are not supported by the evidence. Just because our high-level and biochemical descriptions of brain activity haven't been unified into a single theory doesn't mean the intermediate processes deserve mythical status.
quote:. The human body, when it runs, is not just executing a specific set of instructions. Every step is handling the controlled movements in direct relation to the body and the ground
Precisely. Our abilities don't hinge on 100 million if-then statements; the exact mechanism is unknown, but it's certainly much closer to fuzzy logic, pattern recognition, and other processes that drastically reduce the necessary storage capacity from what you claim.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
quote:Please. I've taken graduate classes in computer architecture, operating systems, AI, and numerical machine learning.
It's you who seems bent on assigning grandiose attributes to the brain that are not supported by the evidence.
Because I already said that I'm not going to teach a Bio 101 class in this thread. Obviously, you haven't even the knowledge you'd get from that general ed class, because you think your "Graduate level" CS classes make you somehow able to compare it to biological science. That's like automotive engineer (mechanic) thinking that because they know how to build a car from parts that it entitles them to equate it as being as complex as the human body.
But whatever, continue thinking that you know enough about the brain to compare it to a glorified record player (a 300 GB HDD).
That's why all you deserve is a Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
Actually, I think the limit is more like 10GB, maybe 50GB if we're feeling kind to our geniuses. I know you'll step in to get the last word, but I'm through discussing this subtopic until there's some evidence and/or reasoning demonstrated.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Richard Berg:
quote:Algorithms do take up space, yes, but they take up a lot less than you think.
I'll agree with you there. Algorithms make up about 5-percent of the code I write. The rest is anomaly processing for unexpected input. Sony's robot can run...in a straight line, on a hard, smooth surface, but it probably can't handle running in the rain, on loose gravel. That's the remaining 95-percent of the code that has yet to be written.
As for processing visual information, I wish I could recall the exact color of my kitchen wall when I try to match it at the paint store. Sammy Sosa wishes he could remember the exact pattern of the wood grain on his favorite bat, so that he would know when someone swaps it with a corked bat. The brain seems to be cutting corners to save storage space when it comes to recording visual information.
Posted by Pod (Member # 941) on :
um, john, just to let you know, you're wandering away from both reality and the point of this thread
As someone who studies both brains and computers, i feel at least like i know generally whats going on in the field.
Psychological models of how people's memory function look like this:
Sensory buffer: under a second of massively parallel visual memory ~2 seconds of auditory buffer ---> working memory: (debated, but for arguments sake is typically acknowledged), here's where tasks which take conscious attention use memory. If you're multi-tasking and failing, it's cause you can't store all the input in working memory. ---> long-term memory: Where "perminant" information is stored. It's extremely unclear how this works on an neurological level. all sorts of junk goes in here. Gets queries all the time for previously stored info (and there are interesting computational models of this).
What i'll first point out is that the gigantic sensory store (as far as we can tell, basically all immediate sensory information is avaliable there for a very short duration of time. That way, if you miss something, you've got an instant where you can still retrieve the visual or auditory input, and stick it in working memory.). However, what makes it into working memory is -significantly- pared down. People couldn't function if a) all the sensory info avaliable to them had to be attended to, and b) they had to store (effectively, memorize) all the information avaliable to them.
Some people have good nmemonics for remembering things and such, but so far as we can tell, there is no such thing as "photographic" memory, just different ways of chunking input, and people who have more practice with these methods will remember more, but its done via a different storage algorithm, rather than simply piping raw input straight to long term memory.
Alright, on to more philosophical things.
The belief that there are things that science cannot solve (for instance, how people work), is called the Mysterion Hypothesis. Not dualism.
There are several sorts of dualists, and not many educated philosophers have believed in mind-body dualism in a long time. It's not a credible or tenable way to view the world. Many dualists in this day and age are property dualists which merely has to do with what it means to be somethign (say a person) and how thats different from being made of stuff (matter). I've also typically heard "mentalists" referred to as "Idealists" which is what i believe they were originally called (this harkens back to George Berkely).
Oh, i notice that tresopax has mentioned some things on the subject. eh.
As for raw storage capacity of the brain, this depends on two things. How much incoming data can be compressed in various ways, and how much actual information capacity we have. Since we don't know the format by which the brain stores stuff, we're out of luck on the latter question. Lets just suffice it to say it's a really big number.
Posted by Pod (Member # 941) on :
And skillery, that is exactly the wrong way to think about what robots, or anything else that walks functions.
The point is that there is a class of problems that needs a general solution, you don't just solve a specific instance of the problem (walking in ideal conditions), and call the whole issue solved. Running in other conditions aren't sub-problems of the ideal case that can be patched. The ideal case is what you get for free by solving the general problem.
Posted by Pod (Member # 941) on :
And just to let you know john, pyschology has been carried along by a good number of computer scientists.
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
quote: It's mostly just familiarity with a situation, or remembering similar parts of things that make it look like something that has never happened before actually did. It has to do with how the brain saves certain details, and I don't know off the top of my head the contributing factors, but the way those things are only kinda remembered helps create deja vu. In other words, had you no experiences from which to draw analogous connections (and they don't have to be logical, and are often not), then you would not experience deja vu. Not that no experience of deja vu means you have no experience, it's just that without the prior experiences (no matter how dissimilar), there would be no deja vu.
Or it's a glitch in the Matrix.
I wonder if it has to do with the complex way the brain saves information. Perhaps a very similar thing did happen to me, and as my brain was logging the current info away across a complex net of neurons, a bit here, a smattering there, the pattern was recognized as being very similar to a pattern recorded once before and inadvertently brought up the fairly inconseqential but comparative memory. If my brain's OS were Windows, I would have gotten an error message telling me that there was already a file saved under that name.
Or maybe it is just a glitch in the Matrix.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:Because I already said that I'm not going to teach a Bio 101 class in this thread. Obviously, you haven't even the knowledge you'd get from that general ed class, because you think your "Graduate level" CS classes make you somehow able to compare it to biological science. That's like automotive engineer (mechanic) thinking that because they know how to build a car from parts that it entitles them to equate it as being as complex as the human body.
John, If we are getting into qualifications, what are yours, that you are under the impression that you can pass judgement on the extent and validity of other people's knowledge in all these areas? In addition to repeatedly claiming people in this thread have no understanding of biology, you have also rejected the capacity of the computer science discipline and the philosophy discipline to deal with this issue. It would be one thing if you WERE teaching Bio 101 in this thread, with reasons and explanations to back up your claims, but as it is you are expecting us to just take your word for it that everyone is wrong and you are right. What background do you have in ALL these fields that you can do this?
I can tell you from direct experience that even undergraduate A.I. programming courses get into quite a bit of detail on the capacities and functioning of the brain. It's a field that has shaped the way biopsychology thinks about the brain.
Posted by Pod (Member # 941) on :
And tresopax, that's not true.
Computer science has shaped cognitive psychology, not biopsychology. The biopsychologists i've talked to are extremely disdaneful of both cognitive psychologists and computational neurodynamics.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
This is what I hate about computer geeks: they are limited to only speaking in terms of computers, which when talking about the human brain fall far short of the actual subject.
So, let me first use Peter Drake, grad student of Computer Science & Cognitive Science at Indiana University:
quote:Any answer to this question should be taken with several grains of salt. Digital computers and brains don't work the same way. For one thing, every memory location in a computer is created equal. You can move stuff from one location to another without losing any information. In the brain, on the other hand, certain cells specialize in certain jobs. While there is considerable plasticity (the ability to change what some part of the brain does, enabling the brain to recover from injury), there's nothing like the uniformity seen in a computer. Secondly, processing and memory are completely separated in a computer; not so in the brain. Finally, data in computers is digital, and not really susceptible to "noise". In the brain, there are continuous voltages.
With those caveats, let's look at numbers. The brain contains 10^11 neurons -- in other words, 100 giganeurons. Each one has synapses connecting it to up to 1000 other neurons. Many researchers believe that memories are stored as patterns of synapse strengths. If we suppose that the strength of each synapse can take on any of 256 values, then each synapse corresponds to a byte of memory. This gives a total of (very roughly) 100 terabytes for the brain.
For more info, see the book "Mind and Brain: Readings from Scientific American".
Of course, a rather optimistic outlook for computer-level intelligence to match humans says:
quote:It may seem rash to expect fully intelligent machines in a few decades, when the computers have barely matched insect mentality in a half-century of development. Indeed, for that reason, many long-time artificial intelligence researchers scoff at the suggestion, and offer a few centuries as a more believable period.
And all of this still makes the same point I do: it's not just silly to equate modern hardware/software to the human brain, it's downright stupid (especially for a CS grad student). Whether it's in a few decade or—as leading CS researchers say—a few centuries, the fact remains that comparing current technology to the human mind is misguided at best, asinine at most.
But go ahead, keep the incredibly ignorant assumptions. After all, they make watching your sci-fi TV and reading your sci-fi books so much easier.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:There are several sorts of dualists, and not many educated philosophers have believed in mind-body dualism in a long time. It's not a credible or tenable way to view the world. Many dualists in this day and age are property dualists which merely has to do with what it means to be somethign (say a person) and how thats different from being made of stuff (matter).
Actually, it only hasn't been popular since the 60s, which is not a very long time in philosophy. And there are a good number of philosophers who do favor that position today, so I don't think it's fair to call it not credible or tenable like that's an accepted fact or something. (I even suspect, given that materialists are beginning to resort to extremes like eliminativism these days in order to defend against dualism, the materialist movement is headed into decline. But that's me, of course, and I could be biased.)
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
And to make it simple to explain why they can't be compared, here:
quote:Ever since computers have been around, people have tried to compare them with the human brain, but this really cannot be done. A megabyte is an exact measure of the number of bits (like light switches) which can be used to store digital information inside a computer. One megabyte is just over a million bytes (a byte is 8 bits, or switches) and so you know exactly how much information can be stored.
The brain is organic--not digital--and so memory is not made up of two-way switches or bits. The exact way the neurons in the brain work is still unknown, but they appear to mesh together so that memory is really a complex, developing network of cells. These cells gain value as they link to others so, as you learn more and remember more, your capacity for learning increases.
Human memory is governed more by feelings and emotional associations than by exact data. Computers easily store abstract numbers and require much more room for pictures or sound, but humans usually experience the opposite.
The brain is more flexible than fixed-capacity memory chips. It is designed to expand and no-one has ever completely filled their brain to the point that they cannot know anything else. Any nominal brain capacity would far exceed computer memory ranges. Be proud to own such a remarkable device.
Current technology cannot match the flexibility that comes along with the complexity of the human mind, let alone the ability of it to handle so many concurrent processes without direct monitoring (breathing, blood pressure, balance, etc.). Add to that the processes that we do handle on lower levels (walking, chewing, swallowing) and higher levels (hand-eye coordination, speaking), and you have capabilities that modern technology can't even come close to. The current level of technological marvel is at about the level as a housefly.
Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
Shlomo is right, and thank you for pointing out assumptions I had not picked up. I never expected or meant my idea to be an alternate explanation to scientific knowledge and theories. I won't fear the retribution of John and I will play the religion card: My idea assumes the religious belief that there is a spirit.
If there is a spirit, then it must follow that there is a way that the spirit fuses with the body.
I would politely ask that if you want to argue the existance of the spirit, you consider that a different discussion than a theory on how things work if there actually is a spirit.
On the topic of ignorance, even wanton ignorance:
There is great joy in learning. And I believe one of the best ways to learn is by discussing. It is interactive and requires examination of knowledge and logic. But such a process breaks down when anger, defensiveness, and lack of patience rules the semantics one uses in the discussion. I will be the first to stand up and say that I've been guilty of this.
There is also great joy in teaching. It is fantastic to be teaching someone a concept and see them catch an understanding of it. But the student will shut you out if they find you to be putting them down if they are wrong.
This is not a class, but a meeting of minds where some people have more knowledge in some areas than others. What a beautiful thing to share! You lose nothing, and someone gains something. I would even say that in the explanation of the concept, you gain a slightly better understanding. The total sum of knowledge has just increased. But again, this process is curtailed by contention.
If you are right, then it is an act of kindness to correct people. But people may not always believe you. This is no reason to get angry at them. This does not make you better or worse than they. But we must also realize that we may be wrong, and there is nothing bad about this. Being wrong, we correct ourselves, and correcting ourselves we grow. We become superior to what we were before. And that is always a (damn you, Martha Stewart, you've ruined those words!) a good thing.
The computer - brain analogy:
It is useful sometimes to use a computer as an analogy to the brain. But as we've seen, it breaks down whenever you try to make it more than an analogy.
I think John has made the most pertinant point: Computers cannot create. I am not talking about big artistic creation. I'm talking about the simple stuff we do everyday. Humans can recognize anyone's handwriting without much difficulty. Even truly awful handwriting is mostly recognizable. This is because we can imagine lines where there are none and delete lines that are superfluous. All of this, we do usually without thinking. This extrapolation is so easy for us simply because we can imagine what is not there. And that is an aspect of creation that computers don't have. Sure, we are programming computers to do that in a limited fashion, but the computer can't use that information to do anything else. Where we can use the same exact skill to predict that a half drawn object is going to turn out to be a bird. Not only a bird, but an eagle.
Pod said:
quote:The biopsychologists i've talked to are extremely disdaneful of both cognitive psychologists and computational neurodynamics.
Argh. That kind of attitude is far more harmful to science than ignorance of the masses.
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
Well, I can't rightly argue with you on the existance of a spirit, because I have no definite opinion either way. So, if you're basing your entire idea from the assumption of a spirit, it is, as I said, unarguable.
But that's fine. As long as you're being open with it, like Amka is, then there's nothing more I can say except that it's conjecture and unprovable, thus of little use to science or medicine (unless you are using faith healing).
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
Cheers to speculative discussion! *clink*
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
Speculation is fine, but the problem I have with it is that it uses unprovable and unmeasurable assumptions. I have no "retribution" for Amka ( ) because she basically diffused what I was saying by being straight-forward and saying outright that it assumes religious belief. I can't argue that, mostly because I'm not in the business of trying to disprove people's faith (they are entitled to is as much as I am entitled to not have it).
[edit] It would be nicer if all of the massive evidence in neurophysiology and neuropsychology were actually compiled and put together into salient cooperative reports, but that's gonna take time, and I'm not involved in any such research, so I can't even say what is being done to accomplish it. However, a lot of this information can be found in numerous biology texts, and for particulars there were at least two books mentioned in the quotes I gave. The info is there, none of it is complete, though.
[ April 19, 2004, 12:18 AM: Message edited by: John L ]
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
Finally, something to work with.
quote:This gives a total of (very roughly) 100 terabytes for the brain.
This is completely fallacious. One could similarly claim: disk platter substrates are made of aluminum alloys; each molecule in a metal crystal can assume 100 states (in reality it's a lot more...); therefore any disk that weighs 100g can store 100 ^ (100 * 6 * 10^23) bits. Not.
Without a working model of memory, our only recourse at the moment is to approach the problem from neuropsychology -- what limits on information storage have we observed in the real world? Numerical and text data is no contest, obviously; images and scenes I've covered; algorithms were treated in detail with no objection. What else is there? Put up or shut up, as they say.
Pod has the right idea. We have no idea what the mapping function between memories and neurons looks like. Any claim to perform calculations on these unknowns is at best a shot in the dark, and at worst a defensive agenda reminiscent of 19th century chemists who thought organic molecules were too complex to be synthesized. Unfortunately for them, we've already achieved the computational equivalent of urea, and whether it takes "a few centuries" or a few years is irrelevant.
I too think it will be on the 100+ year timescale, but that doesn't invalidate some core truths. Digital computers, for all their weaknesses, are still Turing-complete. Organic brains, for all their strengths, still cannot break the laws of information theory.
quote:This is what I hate about computer geeks
Hint: repeated arguments ad hominem don't make you look good
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:But that's fine. As long as you're being open with it, like Amka is, then there's nothing more I can say except that it's conjecture and unprovable, thus of little use to science or medicine (unless you are using faith healing).
Hold on, now. Just because Amka is taking this on religious faith does not mean she can't be proven wrong or right. After all, there have been plenty of things taken on religious faith that have been proven one way or the other - like the old idea that the earth was the center of the solar system.
For one thing, if Amka is suggeting that the soul has some sort of effect on how the body acts and makes the body do things that the same body would not have done had there been no soul, then scientific study should be able to see this at some point. If no such effects exist, then how can we believe the soul is fused with the body in the way Amka is suggesting?
Furthermore, I would argue that philosophical analysis, along with the simple observation that we experience life, has ALREADY proven that the soul must exist (for the reasons I gave briefly earlier.) This would depend on how you define "soul" though. (I define it as our conscious self - that which experiences things.)
And that raises the question... Amka, when you say you have faith in the existence of a soul, what do you mean? What do you consider a soul to be?
And why does its existence imply it must be fused with a body in the manner you suggested?
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
RB: If it is so obvious that computers are more powerful than the brain, why don't we have a computer brain yet? John: If humans are so smart, why don't we have a computer brain yet?
I think deja vu is the result of assigning the perception of a situation to an analogous memory that is not where it was expected to be. Most of my deja vu that I would class as such is when a situation in reality correlates with a situation from a dream.
When I'm going about my daily routine, I expect to be accessing reference situations from a daily routine part of my brain, which I assume exists. I don't guess there is a lot of money in mapping it. It would be pretty hard to get someone to truly do their daily routine whilst wired up to an MRI brain mapping thing. Stupid Heisenberg principle.
If a situation arises that better fits my dream part of my brain, then I get this weird "am I dreaming or awake?" feeling. I don't always dream about movie stars. I dream about parking structures a lot as well. And the other night I dreamed I was posting on hatrack, making my point through acrostic sentences (the first letter of each word spells out a secret message. In this case it was the f-bomb. It seemed so real!)
Well, I had some stuff I wanted to say about Jane, but I'll put it over on the other side.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
If we're ready to discuss the spirit-to-brain connection, here are a few aspects of LDS belief that might have a bearing on our discussion:
The eternal nature of intelligences
God's creation of spirit bodies for the intelligences
Intelligence is light and truth
Some intelligences are greater than others, with God being the greatest
God's creation of Adam and Eve and putting into them their spirits
Adam and Eve did not perceive opposites such as good and evil until after they became mortal.
Joseph Smith's teaching that intelligence gained in this life will rise with us in the resurrection
Joseph Smith's teaching that learning more in this life will give us an advantage in the next
Various visions and revelations regarding the Spirit World and the activities that take place there
Revelations regarding judgement day: having a bright recollection of guilt, testifying against others, etc.
Revelations regarding our progression beyond the vail
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
And with that, I'm out.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Oops. Sorry mackillian. You were still in the middle of teaching your class, and I interrupted. Go ahead.
Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
I've been saying spirit because I believe the soul is the spirit fused with the body, or perhaps the spirit after that experience.
In LDS theology, we existed as spirits before we were born. There is not a lot we know about it except that at that time we had intelligence and free will. We know this because in our theology there was a debate in heaven and we all had to choose.
We also know that we have always existed in some form. Before we were spirits we were intelligences. Heavenly Father gave us 'spirit bodies' to house our intelligence. There is not a lot more known beyond that, but I've always assumed it to mean we were given the ability to have input and output, thereby giving us the ability to learn, thereby giving us free will. For all of our scientific discussion, it is this intelligence or will, I believe, that endows us with creativity.
There are other examples of what our spirit should be like. In our theology, the angel Gabriel was the spirit of Noah. I'm not sure what it was Noah who gave the message to Mary, but that was his assignment. The archangel Michael is actually Adam. These spirits have form, and we do not believe this form was put on to appease the witness receiving the message. God and heaven, after all, have integrity. Why show something that is not real?
Also, in our theology, everything has a spirit and an intelligence. The auia speculation in the Speaker books is a very common LDS idea (though not doctrine). Most anyone who was LDS and didn't know OSC was LDS would have started to wonder if he might be or have been LDS after reading that.
So with form, spirit needs a way to interface with body. The more complex the intelligence, the more complex the interface needs to be. This may very well have been an aspect of the selection process for evolution: the will of spirit to have a more fitting vessel, with an infinite variety of such intelligences.
I am frustrated with the crude manner that some have assumed such an interaction to have. I used the keyboard-computer as an analogy. To think that the spirit would rule the body with some sort of telekinesis is crude. The fusion is far subtler than that and involves questions of why sub atomic particles always ALWAYS act in such a manner that we can actually describe laws of physics. Our laws of physics do not exist because we have some special insight into the universe. They exist because that is what we have observed, over and over again, without exception. But WHY? So far, any why questions have only been answered by more laws, at more basic levels but never have we known why particles act in such ways.
More speculation on my part: We know that ultimately, all matter is actually energy. But what if the tiniest spark of energy is actually will, intelligence? An equation, so to speak, expressed existentially. The more complex the will, the more complex must be the expression of that will in existence, binding other wills to help it accomplish its own expression. In every instance though, these combinations will follow the laws of physics because we have observed and noted the laws of physics within this existence I'm describing. I'm calling it will, but below a certain threshold, I do not believe these simple particle wills have free will or choice. They merely express a simple equation. Equation, here, is an analogy. I'm not sure exactly what the will is.
[ April 19, 2004, 12:26 PM: Message edited by: Amka ]
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
So we're forging ahead without mackillian? She had some great input.
More points of LDS belief that came to mind, reading Amka's latest post:
The veil that causes us to forget our pre-mortal existence.
The notion that our spirits are mature beings
Joseph Smith's teaching that spirit is made of refined matter
Edit: spelling
[ April 19, 2004, 12:49 PM: Message edited by: skillery ]
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
The will is that which chooses, or causes.
As we are talking about energy, I'm thinking of wave theory. Where do the waves come from? Something starts them, and they are carried by passive media.
To borrow a scriptural axiom, "man is to act, not to be acted upon". (Sorry mack, but if you're gone you're gone- though I think the brainpower vs. computer power discussion is at least as irrelevant as Mormon space doctrine. If you come back, though, I wanted to ask where the white matter is since I'd always thought of the brain as gray matter.)
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
My concept of the veil is definitely being developed in this discussion. My current thinking is that the veil is simply the construct of what we have learned in this life. Not worldliness or materialism even, just learning to control our bodies and value things of proximity over things of importance.
I think this applies both to the baby learning not to bite her mother and to the final judgement when we ask the Lord "when saw we Thee naked, and hungered and athirst?" Both the "good" and the "bad" will ask this question, but those who served their neighbors will continue on while those who served themselves will not. It certainly challenges the idea that altruism is ultimately self serving.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Oh, and one more, although not unique to LDS doctrine...the notion of demonic possession.
Christ had an encounter with a man possessed by a legion of devils. The devils were somehow able to induce the man to speak. Did the devils override the owner-spirit's interface to the brain?
Ya know what, bringing religion into this kinda dumbs down the whole discussion. Maybe we should go back to the computer/brain analogy.
Sorry about this.
Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
The brain is the seat of the mind. It is the source of consciousness. Think of our soul, or personality, as a holographic projection from the hardware that is our brain. In a side note, that is why "The Matrix" movie's idea of being unplugged would kill you was always a bit sour for me. Of course it would not kill you! Like I said, your mind is a projection from your brain...sure, in the Matrix you can cast out the projection much farther out, but if you are unplugged you should not be "lost" or killed. Think of your brain as a flashlight. The light is your mind and personality. Your body is the wall which reflects the light. In the Matrix, the wall is just much farther out... so if you get unplugged the light is still shining on from the flashlight, it will just reflect again from the wall that is your body. That is why head and brain damage is so terrible and horrifying for me… it is like raping the soul.
[ April 19, 2004, 12:57 PM: Message edited by: Telperion the Silver ]
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Tel, have you read the Dune series? You remind me of when they have the ecumenical convention (in the backstory) and the only thing they can agree on is "thou shalt not disfigure the soul" (soul being used as human spirit here, I think ). <-- because of where the series eventually went, in abnegating transcendence.
Skillery, I don' t think the dumbing down is inevitable, just when the questions come so thick. Also, I think something that would be incomprehensible to a non Mormon might better go on Nauvoo.com. Though I don't like it over there. I like my liberals to be liberals and not confused conservatives.
P.S. I'm not prepared to touch demonic possession with a 10 foot pole. It's out there with ghost sightings for me. Are there perfectly sincere people who've seen it? Sure. But I don't feel a need to be one of them.
[ April 19, 2004, 01:03 PM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
I don't believe it does, skillery.
What I want is scientific data combined with speculation and religious ideas that do not refute or replace that data. All truth is truth, regardless. God does not make things appear to be what they aren't, therefore what we observe using the scientific method must be true. But that does not mean that religious belief or speculation is must be false, or that it is somehow stupider or a more dumbed down version of the truth. There is still a LOT to learn assuming religious beliefs that do not fly in the face of science. I believe we gain a deeper understanding by utilizing all the tools we have to learn truth.
Not only that, there was another discussion going on about computer technology vs. brain. There is no reason for that discussion to stop. I found it quite fascenating.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Here's a couple of ideas on the "veil" thing:
We don't remember what took place before our spirits entered our bodies because God supposedly put in place a "veil of forgetfulness." This suggests that without the veil, there is the possibility that we might have remembered something. This in turn suggests that spirits do have memory capacity.
I read somewhere that conceptual information, as opposed to visual information, is stored in the human brain in the form of the spoken language of the individual. This might explain why we don't remember much of what look place when we were infants. We had no language as infants to translate our experiences into prior to storage in memory.
Perhaps the conceptual information that is part of our spirit memory is not stored in a language that we are currently capable of understanding, at least not very well.
Visual memories from pre-mortality would have been recorded before we had physical eyeballs for processing visible light. Perhaps we don't remember anything viewed in our prior life as spirits because we have no visual context in this life by which to interpret visual spirit memories.
Perhaps we don't remember much of what we saw with our infant eyes because we had no experience translating visible light images into recognizable symbols.
So a "veil of forgetfulness" might simply be a loss of the language key and symbol key (maybe those two are the same thing).
[ April 19, 2004, 01:45 PM: Message edited by: skillery ]
Posted by Bob the Lawyer (Member # 3278) on :
I don't know how appropriate this is to this thread any more, but I just can't leave questions unanswered
I was just using vaccinations to show how the same outcome is explained by the two different schools of thought. You know that when you're vaccinated your body responds to the viral fragments and mounts an immune response. The end result being you're able to react to that same foreign body faster should you encounter again in your life. Classical thinking would say that your body is responding the fragments themselves, just by being there they promote a response. The Danger Model says that the body doesn't work that way and these little pieces of proteins would float unnoticed in the body so long as nothing "dies badly". But, because the needle damages your cells on delivery of the vaccine your immune system gets activated at the site of the damage. Like many things the truth will probably turn out to be a combination of the two.
Does that make it any clearer?
Well, it's always going to be a case of "we have only discovered these things so far." With the tongue we’ve figured out that there are these things that bind to specific receptors on the taste buds and cause them to release a neurotransmitter to a nearby nerve to fire off a signal to the brain (sweet, sour, salty, bitter). But each taste bud can detect each taste, although the specificity isn't always the same. Heck, we’re even pretty sure why we respond to them. But there are so many things that can be on the surface of cells, it'd be pretty hard to say that we’ve found all of them. For instance, we recently realized that the tongue also responds to certain amino acids and fire off "this is good" signals to the brain. This is where MSG fits in. I realize I'm just kind of talking around your point without really answering your question, but that's because I don't really understand what your question is.
Just because I'm already rambling, there are different receptors in the skin that detect different things. It's not that something is hot or cold, but there are different receptors for temperatures above and below body temperatures. Same with sharp or dull, sharp signals are sent along "fast" nerves and dull ones are sent along "slow" nerves (myelinated or unmylinated). Generally we say that the skin responds to touch-pressure, temperature, nocicpetion/pain and proprioception. Is it possible that there are other things that the skin responds to that we don't know about? Sure, there’s billions of different things your skin can come into contact with, some of which may not illicit a conscious response. These are just the ones we're sure of. Given the amount of study that's been done on both these organs, is it probable that we've completely overlooked something? No, but scientists generally hate to rule things out completely (because if they do they'll probably be quoted 50 years down the road when we find out otherwise and undergraduate students around the world will laugh at them for the rest of time).
Again, back to your regularly scheduled conversation.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
[edit, simultaneous postage] Bob, thanks. I guess the sensors in the tongue and skin are also neurally networked and so while there are a limited number of primary values, they can be combined in various ways to produce different results. I guess the classic example is that a combo of warm and very intense is reported back to the brain as "very hot" when the intensity came from a cold stimulus. Love the Exploratorium. So I guess I was making the mistake of assuming the inputs are digital. [/edit]
Skillery:
quote:I read somewhere that conceptual information, as opposed to visual information, is stored in the human brain in the form of the spoken language of the individual.
Now this is a topic you don't have to be Mormon to debate. Is there thought without language? Is there a thought that can remain without our brain naming it, even if it is a new word?
As I have alluded to several times, Linguists (at least in the 90's) believed that true languages processing is not possible without "Strong A.I.". "Weak A.I." would be most of what we now know as Artificial Intelligence. It can produce the results we want, we don't really care how the computer does it (as consumers, the programmers care a great deal). "Strong A.I." would be self-aware, genuine consciousness. (Though I think the meaning of consciousness fell through the cracks earlier on this thread).
The analogy of human intelligence I often hear is that a dog can know that he's laying on the floor in front of the fireplace. But he doesn't know that he knows that he's laying on the floor.... I guess it could be called the capacity for meta-thought. Thought about thought. Meh, I'll start my own thread.
[ April 19, 2004, 02:01 PM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by Pod (Member # 941) on :
People seem to be missing the point.
We don't know how the brain works. It's -pointless- to speculate how much it can store. We don't know, we don't have any way of knowing.
The brain is an extremely complicated device, it doesn't just store data, thus, we can't even say how much neuronal matter is dedicated to storage, and in what fashion.
Pooka, we have devices that can store alot of data. Again the brain is not just a squishy storage device, it's an extremely complicated fully integrated recever, processing device and storage device all in one.
The issue is not one of raw materials, its one of mappings and coding.
But, i will say that 100 terabytes seems extremly high. My argument is that i bet information stored in the brain is extremely compressed (and lossy). Theres no way to test this, however, it seems odd to say for instance, that the brain would be recording say 44 kHz audio, and then storing it to disk (we don't need all that raw info). Now, think how much 44 kHz audio you could record to a 100 terabyte disk. That means that -all- the information is retrevable later. Since people don't seem to be terribly good at that, i'd say that it seems unlikely that we're storing anything in extremely high fidelity.
Posted by Pod (Member # 941) on :
Pooka, that's not it. Recursion and meta-thought is something that AI researchers are very interested in (check out Douglas Hofstader), but the issue of strong AI vs weak AI is more one of Qualitative experience.
It amounts to this: A demon who's omniscient in the sense that he knows the positions and interactions of all the particles in the entire universe, will obviously know exactly what's going on inside a particular person at any given time.
However, can such a demon be said to know what it is like to be that person, simply by knowing all this information?
Since i'm a qualia reductionist, i'd say yeah. it's not an issue. Tresopax would disagree.
Anyway, language is not a strong vs weak AI thing. Language is based on two things, convention, and the way the world is. Thus it has nothing to do with theories of consciousness.
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
Amka,
How do we learn truths through religious beliefs?
Certainly, one can use religious beliefs to point one in the direction of truth (Newton, Galileo), but it seems to always rely on science to get at the truth.
When has religion, by itself, ever shown the truth? "God exists?" You may believe it to be true, but religion does not show it to be true. Religion states it as true--claims it as its primary tenet.
What does religion prove?
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
I disagree, Pod (about storage). But what's interesting is I can take in a tune but can't sing it right away. But the more I hear it, the better I can sing it. The more I sing it, the better I can sing it. Both of these are the exact opposite of magnetic media (in my experience, at least.)
How is saying the brain is too complex to ever be understood different from saying anything we don't understand is explained by religion?
P.S. I also heartily disagree about language not being an AI thing. But I guess all this demostrates is why people in disciplines that sound related but are different can disagree.
[ April 19, 2004, 02:14 PM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
A.T. Fields...
We are nothing but the wall that separates us from Everything Else, aka the Universe, aka God, aka the collective sea of souls which is in fact one great "Oversoul". We are all waves... separate and unique, but all still part of the Ocean and part of each other.
[ April 19, 2004, 02:11 PM: Message edited by: Telperion the Silver ]
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
I was wondering when someone would bring up Hofstader. I think he's right in that if all intelligence is algorithmic (which is the underlying assumption that a Turing machine can become intelligent), then it will be the self-referential/meta-recursive capabilities that make it so. I'm just no convinced he's made the case strongly enough that this is enough to achieve strong AI.
Dagonee
Posted by Pod (Member # 941) on :
i didn't say that it was too complicated to be explained, i just said that the hard part of building a brain was not the physical stuff, it was how to connect together the physical stuff in a meaningful way.
And second, so what? if you practice, you'll get better. That's got nothing to do with recursion or meta anything. That's a simple loop.
Posted by Pod (Member # 941) on :
I don't think turing machines are a basis for intellegence. They're deterministic. And i don't think living things are. And besides, they still have to deal with Godel incompleteness.
Thats really the issue with recursion. Any sufficently interesting set of axioms aren't complete, and are provably incomplete. We need a different class of device. But its interesting to see how much of any sort of behavior can be accounted for with symbolic or connectionist systems.
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
Going back to the initial point (Mind as interface).
How many here have experienced, either directly of immediately indirectly (being with a loved one, for instance), when part of the mind goes missing?
Some more than others, obviously. Some, not at all.
Ami, I stood by my mother as her body (and brain) were ravaged both by leukemia, and by the drugs that were supposed to help her (but didn't). I watched her lose her mind--physically and chemically (and, if you want--spiritually). I saw absolutely nothing to indicate that there was a soul trapped within, trying to get out.
C.S. Lewis makes the same mistake you do on this: in "The Problem of Pain," he discounts the pain of the mentally retarded--either they don't know that they have a problem (they all appear to be totally happy to him, anyhow!), or they'll get over it, and have no memory of their temporary bout with retardation. I would like to award him the posthumous "Clueless" prize, if I may.
We really don't have to wory about the mentally reatarded, then; do we? According to Lewis, they're just fine as they are.
--Steve
Posted by Pod (Member # 941) on :
Steve, i know that was english, and well formed english, but i didn't get anything out of that. I apologize, but could you explain what you just said in some other way?
-pod
i'll also be out for an hour, as my class is about to begin
[ April 19, 2004, 02:18 PM: Message edited by: Pod ]
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Pod- for someone who thinks we can never understand the brain, you sure seem certain everyone else is wrong. But we do agree on one thing:
quote:We need a different class of device.
ssywak, I don't know what C.S. Lewis meant by mentally retarded. I would agree that people with Down Syndrome should be taken at face value when they seem happy, though. But I haven't been able to get into that book.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:Anyway, language is not a strong vs weak AI thing. Language is based on two things, convention, and the way the world is. Thus it has nothing to do with theories of consciousness.
This isn't entirely true, at least if comprehension is included as part of language. A "weak AI" computer can take in certain language inputs and express the correct language as output. That's the Turing test. But for those (like me) who would argue that you don't really comprehend what is being said unless you also can convert the language into qualitative experiences, only a "strong AI" computer can truly comprehend language.
This is the basis behind the Chinese Room argument, among others. Right chinese input, right chinese output, no understanding of chinese.
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
Pod,
Religion cannot be used to prove anything, let alone the existence of God or a soul.
To be complete: neither can science be used to prove the existence of God (not that we're trying, mind you), or the soul.
If one wants to believe in God & Soul, then fine--go ahead by all means. But any statements that "God is this", or "the Soul does that" are theoretical at best, and misleading at worst.
At least when a physicist states that "the lepton effects a change in the muon through weak interaction" (or whatever), all the terms are defined, and agreed upon, and the results can be reproduced. Eventually, the knowledge gained can be used to understand and manipulate the world.
Religion is no better at understanding the world than science (though I could possible be proven wrong on that, I would love to see it refuted--really, I would!). But, as DOG has said elsewhere--it is pretty good at manipulating it!
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
Pooka,
Read the last few pages for Lewis' out of hand dismissal of the mentally retarded.
It's not like it's going to give away the ending.
Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
Steve:
I have never said that religion proves anything. Religion is about faith, and has more to do with behavior than anything else. A few truths I learned through religion that have been proven to me not only by experience, but by religious experience:
Balance in everything. Do unto others as you would have them do to you. Personal integrity. God loves everyone as intimately as he loves me.
So, I can stand here and say I believe in God and that he loves everyone. That is a religious belief, and my own experience has proven it. I believe it to be true, but I understand that you don't. You can't use my own experience to prove the concept.
But I can also stand here and say that I believe the universe is billions of years old and it has taken millions of years for life to evolve to the form it is today on earth. I got this through study of observed and collected data that other scientists gathered.
These two bits of personal knowledge are not exclusive of eachother and were gotten through different means.
As for the soul trapped in a body: the experience of the spirit is so wholly tied up in the body that it cannot feel as if its will is being acted upon in a contrary manner. The person simply becomes confused. How can you tell why they are confused when they are incoherent? And I am not at all saying that they do not experience pain. They do, in fact, experience great pain.
You yourself know, I'm sure, that saying that you saw no evidence of a trapped soul struggling to get out doesn't mean that is not true. It simply means you were unable to observe it.
All I am saying is that, for the religious, we must seek for the truth using every tool possible and that truth is more than just physical descriptions of the universe.
[ April 19, 2004, 02:53 PM: Message edited by: Amka ]
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Is there any recorded instance of a trapped soul successfully escaping the body? I mean a case in which the subject said: "I'm leaving now," and then the body died for no medical reason.
Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
We don't have that power. That is an act of God. Besides, even if one managed to do that, it would still be suicide.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
From a religious viewpoint it would be called suicide, but what would the medical cause of death be?
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
quote:1) Balance in everything. 2) Do unto others as you would have them do to you. 3) Personal integrity. 4) God loves everyone as intimately as he loves me.
I agree with you on items 1-3. Please note, however, that religion--and its attendant requirement for a belief in a large and powerful spiritual entity--is entirely unecessary for these items.
But where did you get the idea that God loves everyone (as intimately as he loves you)?
Your religion told you that, and then told you to interpret what you experience as proving that. I would bet that you were also taught to interpret totally contradicting information as proving that.
You've been taught (I'll assume) that when things go really well it's proof of God's love.
You've been taught (I'll assume) that when things go really badly it's proof of God's love.
When people are born, when they die, while they live--it's all proof of God's love.
When bones heal--God's love. When children die--God's love. Brain damage; leukemia; altzheimers; dementia; murderous rage; thunderstorms; house fires; pederasty; massacres--all proof of God's love.
"Timmy fell down the well--pray for his safe return"
Ten-year-old Timmy dies in the well, screaming in pain and fear, his shoulder dislocated and his thorasic spine broken in two places, surrounded in his own vomit, urine and feces.
"It must be God's will...God is love"
At what point would experience convince you that (4) is false?
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
ssywak:
quote:Timmy fell down the well...
A scene from Lassie!
quote:Ten-year-old Timmy dies in the well, screaming in pain and fear, his shoulder dislocated and his thorasic spine broken in two places, surrounded in his own vomit, urine and feces.
God's love comes into play when a stranger rides up to the well to water his horse, and a voice (or the smell) says: "stop!"
God must love the stranger more than Timmy, and I'm okay with that. He was an obnoxious little cuss anyway.
[ April 19, 2004, 03:35 PM: Message edited by: skillery ]
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
Skillery,
You're missing my point.
Timmy's dead.
Lassie told us where Timmy was, and we all went out to help. We dug a parallel shaft, and sent in the best diggers to retreive him.
And he's still dead.
There are thousands of Timmy's every year. They're in Afghanistan. They're in Iraq. And they're in the United States.
No amount of help can save them; they all die horrible, painful, and fearful deaths.
How has your Church convinced you that this is a sign of God's love?
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
Misery is not a sign of God's love. It's a sign of living in the real world. Adam and Eve made the choice to live in the real world, and misery is the consequence. It's not such a bad deal; we learn by being miserable. In Candyland we learn nothing.
Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
Steve,
You and I share such a basically different perspective that it is nearly impossible to communicate how I can believe this. So that you can understand. Believing that death is the end, all suffering in this short life is unacceptable to you and God should not have inflicted it upon us.
I believe we existed before we were born and there never was a point where we didn't exist. I believe we will continue to exist after we die and will never cease to exist.
So for me, how miniscule is this life, in that great, infinite span? In that perspective, the young boy suffered but an instant. The pain will be behind us, but what we DID with that pain will always be with us. Did we wallow in it, allow ourselves to be overcome? Or did we push ourselves as much as possible and overcome it?
The horrible things that happen are not the direct result of God's love but the result of us living in a mortal and imperfect sphere where we must meet up with challenges, sometimes extreme. It is the result of our own choice to live in this sphere in order to gain experience. I believe we had an idea, abstract as it was, of what we were in for.
For me, the boy died, painfully and alone, but he is with God now and the pain is gone. For you, the boy simply ceased to exist, painfully and alone.
In my perspective, death is not the horrible thing to be avoided. Death is the next step, entered into sometimes painfully and sometimes peacefully.
There will never be anything so horrible that it proves to me that God doesn't exist and doesn't love. It is not merely religion that has taught me this. I have my own experience. I am not blind to the suffereing, nor have I not experienced it. I simply carry a different perspective.
Perhaps an analogy will help: When strength training, pain is an expected part of the process. If I stop the program because of the pain, my muscles will weaken and I will become less healthy. Which is better for me? To avoid the pain, or overcome my fear of it?
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
I'll paraphrase something said by Jack Nicholson's character in "As Good As It Gets" "You're not pissed that you had it so bad, you pissed that so many other people had it so good". This probably described me at my low point in recovering from the death of my son. I could maybe get why my child had died, but not why I should be happy that anyone else experienced miracles. But you don't think I'm going to parade the answer for a cynic such as yourself? You won't listen to me anyway. Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:If one wants to believe in God & Soul, then fine--go ahead by all means. But any statements that "God is this", or "the Soul does that" are theoretical at best, and misleading at worst.
Again, I disagree. The soul may be within the sphere of things we can investigate.
As I told John earlier:
quote:For one thing, if Amka is suggeting that the soul has some sort of effect on how the body acts and makes the body do things that the same body would not have done had there been no soul, then scientific study should be able to see this at some point. If no such effects exist, then how can we believe the soul is fused with the body in the way Amka is suggesting?
Furthermore, I would argue that philosophical analysis, along with the simple observation that we experience life, has ALREADY proven that the soul must exist (for the reasons I gave briefly earlier.) This would depend on how you define "soul" though. (I define it as our conscious self - that which experiences things.)
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
Pooka,
I didn't know.
I apologize for using an example that hit so close to home.
I am punching myself in the head even now.
.
.
I'll write more later (with renewed respect), but work calls. I do want to apologize, though.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Okay P.S. Besides, it wasn't in a well. Don't most deaths involve feces anyway? But I still don't know if I can put the answer in words for you. So much for no thought without language.
[ April 19, 2004, 04:08 PM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by beverly (Member # 6246) on :
So many people can't believe in a God that allows suffering. Not a loving God, anyway.
Steve, I have been reading OSC's book "The Worthing Chronicle". I don't know if you have read it, but it deals with this very tender subject. Thousands of worlds are protected by near-omniscient super-humans from experiencing any pain. Their lives go on peacefully with no real fear or regret.
Then, suddenly, that protection ceases. People die and suffer, all the more since they have never learned how to protect themselves. These super-humans have made a conscious decision to allow this to happen. They are still aware of all the pain suffered, all the horrible consequences. They have the power to stop it. And they choose not to. Why would they make that decision? OSC investigates this idea in the book as well as many other things. I recommend it.
Posted by Pod (Member # 941) on :
Um, no offense Pooka, but what the hell are you talking about?
I keep saying i DON'T believe that figuring out the brain is impossible.
If i did believe that i wouldn't be a cognitive scientist!
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
quote:If it is so obvious that computers are more powerful than the brain, why don't we have a computer brain yet?
I never said anything like this! Scroll back to where I reentered the thread -- everything from then to now addressed what I first thought was a piece of pure hyperbole regarding organic storage. I addressed "power" only when refuting a secondary claim that solving certain complex problems (vision, language, locomotion) required 10+ orders of magnitude more space than every other problem we've come across.
FWIW, even that silly 100TB figure isn't in Google's class. Now to something interesting...
Pod, I've read Penrose, Hofstadter, Lucas, etc. and I'm far from convinced that Godel incompleteness is a roadblock for AI. The theory that models intelligence as theorem-proving was pretty much discarded by the late '70s as one that shed fascinatingly little light on the main dialectics of philosophy of computation: meaning/mechanism, syntax/semantics...
Even aside from these important theorems, we have to establish some basics before we start talking past each other. I think bringing up Godel is a red herring similar to bringing up Turing's Halting problem. The brain-apologists will look at this limitation imposed on computers and immediately claim themselves superior. But do they really believe a brain is immune to Turing's criticism? Maybe so on principle, but in practice can anyone volunteer to solve the Halting problem themselves? I wouldn't want to be first in line. Back to Godel, I think it's even more wrongheaded to suggest a human can "see" the "inherent truth" in a Godel statement -- not only because we lack the quasi-spiritual ability, but because there's no such thing.
Note: I think much of what McCarthy, Chalmers, Maudlin, and the rest of that crowd say is equally stupid.
(edit) In hopes of keeping at least some of us on a philosophical bent, I'll list some other important dialectics: [what it means to be] abstract/concrete, static/dynamic, one/many (cardinality). The essential one -- meaning/mechanism -- was already mentioned, but important enough to be repeated. It represents the computational equivalent to the mind/body problem in metaphysics.
[ April 19, 2004, 06:44 PM: Message edited by: Richard Berg ]
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
quote:The soul may be within the sphere of things we can investigate
Then for Gods' sakes, man; start investigating!
Humankind has thought that souls existed for how many thousands of years, now? And all we have is a couple of photographs with blurry pictures of the Captain and Tenille in the background, and a strange rustling noise in the kitchen/attic/basement which disappears when we get near it? That, and some self-serving greedy charlatan SOB in a ribbed turtleneck on the Fox network at 2:00 am, claiming to be able to speak to your dearly departed ones (he's got his own ring in hell, thank you very much!).
We've thought that atoms existed since the Greeks, and now we not only know that they exist, but we can rationally discuss smaller and smaller components of those atoms.
Why has soul-science lagged so far behind? It's not for lack of funds. I seem to recall John L ripping some poor schmuck an entirely new one for claiming that various religious organizations weren't sponsoring enough scientific research. If finding the soul was so important, you'd think that building one less multi-million dollar temple would allow you to start funding such a project.
Oh, wait--there's one study: that famous double-blind study on the effect of prayer. Anybody ever follow up on that? Plus, let's agree not to get into the debate as to why God (who knows all, and is perfect) would be swayed, apparently, to change his mind as to whether a person will get better or not, based on how many others are requesting it.
But maybe there's a reason no one's really researching the existence of the soul. Maybe it's the same reason no one's researching the existence of invisible pink unicorns, either.
Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
Steve,
The existance of a soul has a meaningful impact on how we view life. The existance of a pink unicorn has about as much impact as the existance of the duck-billed platypus.
People HAVE been contemplating and discussing the issue of the existance of a soul for thousands of years. Just because we've discovered the existance of atoms, an idea which came after the soul, doesn't mean we can't discover the existance of the soul. It may very well be far more difficult and involve science more advanced than what we have today. This is a very valid response. There are many theories out there that have in the past been unprovable simple because the technology didn't exist, and there are theories right now that we cannot prove because the technology doesn't exist.
The particular little trick of athiests to pull some silly imaginary creature into the argument and give it the same weight irritates me because it completely ignores the consequences of the existance of those things and the depth of discussion and seriousness that intelligent minds have applied to the concepts when it tries to put them on the same level. It serves only the ego of the athiest and does not move the discussion forward.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
quote:Plus, let's agree not to get into the debate as to why God (who knows all, and is perfect) would be swayed, apparently, to change his mind as to whether a person will get better or not, based on how many others are requesting it.
Oh my. You've uncovered the flaw that no one notice for 2000 years of Christianity! Let's give him the philosophy medal for saving us from our ignorance.
Dagonee
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
If we accept Joseph Smith's assertion that spirit is made of refined matter, then all we've got to do to prove the existence of spirits is to find a way to detect that matter.
But science has found ways to detect almost every kind of matter imaginable, and none of it was spirit.
Personally, I think to prove the existence of spirits we need to revive the long-disproved theories regarding the existence of the aether. That would get lots of laughs. However, if one could prove that in addition to north/south, plus/minus, and up/down polarization of matter, that there is also light/dark polarization…
Should I run and hide now?
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
Did Smith give any indication what he meant by "refined?" That could help...
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
quote:Hint: repeated arguments ad hominem don't make you look good
Disagreeing with leading researchers in CS makes you look ignorant.
The plain truth is that current technology, at its basis, cannot momic the human brain. Period. When thechnology advances and we have hardware that can hold more than two states and store memory in a finite manner (as opposed to the as-yet-unreached limit of the brain), then we can talk accurate speculation. It doesn't exist, and insisting it does is just stupid.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
D&C 132:7-8
"There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes;"
"We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter."
D&C 93:29
"Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be."
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
History of the Church, Volume 6, page 310:
"The mind or the intelligence which man possesses is co-eternal with God himself."
I would also like to point out what Joseph Smith wrote, recorded on page 308 and 309 of the same volume:
"Element had an existence from the time He had. The pure principles of element are principles which can never be destroyed; they may be organized and re-organized, but not destroyed. They had no beginning and can have no end."
I don't know if that means that Mormons don't believe in the "big bang."
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Pod:
quote: We don't know how the brain works. It's -pointless- to speculate how much it can store. We don't know, we don't have any way of knowing. The brain is an extremely complicated device, it doesn't just store data, thus, we can't even say how much neuronal matter is dedicated to storage, and in what fashion.
Sorry I misinterpreted this as you not knowing how the brain works. Since all your later statements indicated you figure you at least know better than everyone else here.
Mormons who believe in a 6x24 hour creation very often exclude the big bang, as you call it. Many link it with Nietzche's concept of an eternally recurring deterministic universe. But there is no reason you "can't" accept the theory. I think as long as something explains the facts, it has a good run at being the truth. But science isn't about truth, it is about the most valid argument.
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
I've claimed (agreed from the start, actually) that the differences in underlying topology make direct comparisons invalid (although we do have enough information to discard complete fallacies like the 100TB remark). Even if you wanted to continue on this level, an attempt to justify your claim that parallel information cannot be represented digitally would be in order, but I've seen nothing of the sort. As such, I've asked for examples of things that humans can remember that digital logic cannot, keeping in mind my many qualifiers that have gone undisputed. One will do.
I'd say shifting from arguments ad hominem to arguments from authority, when you fail to engage the subject directly, shows ignorance. Lifting dubious quotes from Google and then basing your [non-]argument on obviously spurious "facts" shows ignorance. Refusing to either refute my positions (without strawmen like "momic the human brain" with implications beyond storage that mislead the reader), or provide evidence for your position, shows ignorance.
But as O'Reilly says, we'll let the audience decide.
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
Skillery, obviously that doesn't help much. It sounds somewhat compatible with the notion of subatomic particles carrying intelligence a la philotes, but I don't think even a liberal reading can make terms like "refine" and "purify" mean "blast into bits." Who knows.
Has there yet been a claim of where in the brain the spirit/body interaction takes place? Or somewhat equivalently, at what point in the chemical reactions? I admit to only skimming the religion-infused posts...
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Who is the audience?
I haven't made a claim. I specifically did not say accupuncture meridians. I think someone was saying something about hormones, but I don't know if they know a lot about biochemistry.
Actually, there was a book by a General Surgeon. The Wisdom of the Body where he was hailing the human spirit. I quit reading that one. I guess he was talking about how the organism seems to have a will to live that is separate from what I would normally think of as free will.
As far as cognition goes, I believe there is a point beneath any discernible chemical or electrical activity where meaning will still evade scientists. But that is merely my belief. I don't know if it will ever be possible to observe quantum states in a living brain, which would be the point I am referring to. I don't know whether I would find animal analogy applicable at that point, as I believe humans have a degree of consciousness that animals do not.
So I guess that opens a new topic: Is pooka too dismissive of the intellect of animals?
[ April 19, 2004, 10:51 PM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
If anyone wants some interesting reading on this, try Roger Penrose's THE LARGE, THE SMALL AND THE HUMAN MIND. The interesting part of his ideas (to me, anyway) is that he considers consciousness deterministic (i.e., solely dependent on the physical and subject to its laws) but non-computable.
Dagonee
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
That's what the dolphins tell me.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Dag, I think I've tried on every page to point up the disharmony between the physics of gravity and quantum physics. But I am loathe to press the point since my most current knowledge comes from educational TV. And not only "The Elegant Universe". I saw a series back in the 80's that was still rather optimistic about unifying the theories of force. I don't know, to me their graphical representations of the quantum layer did look like the fabric of space.
Edit: mack is back! So where is the white matter and the gray matter boundary?
[ April 19, 2004, 11:24 PM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
pooka, you'll not I didn't attempt to convey his theory or give any opinion on its possible validity. Because I doubt anyone could say something about it that won't result in vicious disagreement. I mean, Stephen Hawking disagrees with him, but for very different reasons than the other two experts.
Not touching. Just putting it out there for the world to judge.
Dagonee
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
There isn't a boundary. The cerebral cortex IS gray matter--densely packed neuron cell bodies and dendrites. White matter is a bunch of myelinated (insulated) axons--the spinal cord is "white matter"--and up through the brain stem.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
Richard: I don't think the 10 terabytes was advanced as definitive, just a scenario that would give a sense for the scale. But there have been supercomputers with multiple terabytes for years. (Just saying it's not so much, not insisting that they should be able to think.) The 256 degrees of synaptic contact was obviously a hypothetical.
So, mack, I think my question about whether somatic and autonomic nerves root (or reverse branch) back into the spinal cord hadn't been answered yet. What about reflexes?
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
pooka: I'll have to answer that tomorrow. I'm too pissed off to really think about it right now (and no, not at you).
Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
Pooka, I was talking to John. Please know for future reference that I don't get snotty until someone asks for it
I'm glad you brought up meaning vs. chemistry. This is the hardest and most important question. Is there meaning there intrinsically, or only because we are able to interpret it? If the latter, does that work for any group of observers (human or not)? Neither building really cool computers nor figuring out brain interactions is going to answer questions like these to our satisfaction.
On external readings...Penrose comes off as rather fanciful and defensive. I touched on this when I defended Godel from John's overgeneralizations earlier, but we can revisit him if there's some subtopic you find interesting.
What part of the quantum vs. relativity information did you find relevant? (I'm not going to criticize the pop-sci literature ATM -- not because it doesn't deserve it, but because there's nothing better to link to; the position of more educated sources is largely "we have no idea.")
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:Why has soul-science lagged so far behind? It's not for lack of funds.
Well, in the field of science there is not much research into souls because science isn't equipped to study it. That might change, but it it hasn't yet. It's the field of philosophy that has made strides in studying the soul (as philosophy DOES have more of the tools needed.) But you can't expect philosophy to move as quickly as science because, unlike science, it can't just point to repeatable experiments to prove things. Things must be carefully analyzed and debated over decades or centuries, unfortunately.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
mack, You've been doing a great job. Mind if I take over for a little bit? Tag me in baby, I'm ready to go.
pooka, I've never been terribly interested in the biological basis of behavior (BBBiology as it's called), so don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure reflexes, despite being largely autonomic in execution, are generally considered part of the somatic nervous system. Of course, that depends on exactly what kinds of reflexing you're talking about.
I think mack filled in the basics for what I'm going to say. If I use a term or concept that is unfamiliar, be sure to point it out and I'll clarify.
The kind of stereotypical reflex arc is the sensory nerve to afferent interneuron to the spinal cord then immediately back out on an efferent interneuron to a muscular nerve. While the sensation may travel up the spinal cord as sensation to be processed in the brain, the reflex arc doesn't involve this and generally comes out faster. That's why you pull your hand away before you realize that something is hot.
There are other reflexes that control the funcioning of internal organs and not muscular reponses. For example, the Mamalian diving reflex, where a shock of extremely cold water to a person's face can trigger a massive activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, thus putting the body into a sort of dratic slow down.
skillery, You asked a little while ago about brain storage. Leto (John L) answered with a lot of hostility and a generous helping of poor information, as is his wont. Seriously John, where did you get the information that neurons store memory in the nuclei? That's utter BS. If you're going to bitch about people not knowing things, you really should actually know the basics of the field before jumping in with fists flailing.
Anyway, skillz, it's important to realize that the brain and a computer store information much differently. A computer relies on on/off states of either magnetized little bits of stuff or a flow/no-flow of electricity. The brain doesn't have the option of that sort of permenant store, but it does have a much more complex way of doing things. Nerves store information and govern actions based on a complex set of interconnections between themselves. It's not the nerve cells themselves, but rather the network that they form that allows the complexities of life.
Mack talked about how the nerve impulse travels down on cell and is transferred to another cell, but she hadn't yet gotten into how the nervous systems acts as a network. At either end of a nerve cell, there can be many, many branches off for (at the in end) receiving neurotransmitters or (at the out end) setting off neurotransmitters. In many cells, there are literally hundreds of these branches (called dendrites at the receiving end and terminal endings - yeah, I know, it's redundantly unecessary - at the transmitting ones). Each one of those dendrites or terminal endings can be tasked to a separate nerve cell, or some of them can affect the same cell, or they can even branch back onto the same cell that sent them, so a cell firing shoots a message out some of its endings onto its dendrites.
Now, mack covered this, but I'm going to restate it because it's really important to understand it. When an impulse hits a dendrite, bits of neurotransmitter are packed up in vesicles and shoved out into the synaptic cleft where the vesicles burst and they travel across the gap. When they reach the other side, they attach themselves to specialized receptors and cause changes in the post-synaptic nerve cell. The changes can either be activating the cell, thus bringing it closer firing or crossing the threshold and making it fire or depressing the cell, thus moving it further away from firing.
So, in some cases, you'll have a nerve cell linked multiple times to another nerve cell and some of these links are excititory and some of them are inhibitory. Freaky, isn't it. That's actually works because the can be modulated based on context.
Now, a nerve can only fire or not fire. That's the only information it can carry. There's no "this is pain-firing" and a separate "this is pleasure-firing". To carry that information, you need different nerve paths. A cell in the pain pathway, however, can either be transmitting it's information leading to a sensation of pain, or it can be not transmitting, leading to the absence of a perception of pain.
Also, that post-synapitc cell that we were talking about that's getting contradictory messages from the other cell is also getting messages from all these other cells as well. As I said, there can be literally hundreds of other cells pinging away it. In most complex pathways, there will need to be multiple cells exiting another cell before it will fire. So, the pain path cell might itself fire, but the next cell in the pain path might be being inhibited by a bunch of other cells or at least not being stimulated enough to fire, and the nerve impulse will end there and there will be no perception of pain.
A possible problem with the all-or-none law of nerve firing is that it doesn't seem to account for stimuli of different intensities, unless you're going to have a bunch of largely redundant pathways all hitting the target at the same time. Instead of using such a wasteful system, our nervous system uses temporal summation. It's how often in a period of time that a neuron fires that determines how intense a stimulus is perceived. This is achieved by a neat little process that happens in a neuron after it fires. There's a period of time where it can't fire again no matter what, called the refractory period. After that, there's a period where the cell is harder to get to fire that eventually diminishes when it gets back to its resting state. So, instead of hitting it with 10 thingies, for a while you need 15, then 14, then 13, etc. until it gets back to 10.
Another factor to consider is the different chemical states that there can be. The body sends messages by nerve impulses but it also uses hormones generally traveling through the blood stream to send other messages. In various ways, these chemicals can alter how the neurotransmitter stuff works. So in the case above, where we had the contradictory exciting and inhibiting messages, let's say they are being carried by different neurotransmitter. If we introduce a chemical to, let's say, block the majority of sites where one of the neurotransmitters binds to the post-synaptic cell, then it's influence is going to be blockes as well. Or let's say the chemical makes the one NT to be cleaned up sooner than it normally would be while the other one will hang around longer (that's the reuptake inhibitor in Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors or SSRI's) than the one message is going to hang around longer than the other one.
It's amazing how much complexity that these arangements can make possible in even a very simple insect or something. For example, the stereotyped walking behavoir or many species (our own included, to a certain extent) is due to Central Pattern Generators or CPGs. These are more or less perpetual motion mechaines made up of neurons. Once they get started from the outside, they cells in the pattern stimulate themelves in a circle, with each part of the circle bringing out a different part of the walking cycle. Dump say a fear hormone into the mix, and the cycling is sped up, leading to faster motion.
Anyway, that's the very basics of how neurons work in a networked fashion. I would like to point out that, from my perspective, I'd characterize my knowledge of that side of psychology as me knowing a very little bit. There's an immense body of knowledge that I just don't know about nor am particulary interested in. I just know the basics.
---
Oh, and I wanted to throw out another neat piece of information. A nerve cell that fires, barring other changes, becomes infitessimily more likely to fire again. Over time, this results in a process called long term potentiation, by which an often used nerve path way sort of becomes smoother, more likely to fire at lower stimulations. I haven't really studying this out at all, but I think that the possibilties for things springing from this are kind of neat.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
To reiterate for Richard, Godel's incompleteness theorem poses no problem at all for AI. Hofstadter himself explained why in one of his books.
The part/consequence of Godel's theorem that people think "causes problems" for machines is the idea that one can feed a machine a problem which is the equivalent of "this machine cannot prove this statement true". Which is true, but can never be proven true by the machine (for certain limited definitions of proof).
However, I dare any person to prove the statement (or an equivalent one) "[your name] cannot prove this statement true". Equally impossible. So Godels incompleteness theorem is, in this way, no more or less a barrier to machines than to people.
[ April 20, 2004, 01:52 AM: Message edited by: fugu13 ]
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
quote: Nerves store information and govern actions based on a complex set of interconnections between themselves.
I thought this is what John L said. I missed the memories stored in nuclei part. There are some people who believe that memories are stored in all kinds of neural nuclei, and not just the brain. My husband does neuromuscular massage, and while he doesn't do emotional release work, it is fairly common. To him that just seems beyond his scope of practice. edit: In his case, neuromuscular means he works on resetting the proprioceptors.
I do think there are some value in correlations between muscles and organs according to the accupuncture meridian system. But I tend to view these as a physiology/anatomy correlation, and don't jump readily to the emotional judgements. I find emotional release kind of annoying when it's not what I'm looking for.
P.S. I also don't think that if a church funded spiritual research and had result supporting its existence, that anyone would take them seriously. So that sounds like kind of a waste of tithes. To me.
[ April 20, 2004, 12:23 PM: Message edited by: pooka ]
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
Squick--awesome.
I'll throw in some posts about emotion, memory, and behavior later today.
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
Apologies for my trollishness. I've got to work at correcting that aspect of myself & my supposed debating skillz.
Amka,
But what if the God a perticular person has chosen is not the true God. What is "Person X" has chosen to believe in a God that does not exist. What if it's some other God that exists.
What if "Person X" is a Jew, or a Jehovah's Witness, or a Muslim, or you? What if none of us have it right?
Everyone thinks that their own way is right--that they belong to the "One True Church" (or, in my case, the "One True Un-Church.") Whatever scientific test we're proposing here would need to be able to discriminate among different possible types of God and Spirit. What if you can have spirit, but there is no central intelligence and mechanism of action for God?
Ami, I realize that the existence/non-existence of a human soul has an immense impact on my life. That's why I spend so much damned time looking for it, and why I get so pissed off when no one has any idea what it is, or how to find/detect it. I've been having this debate since at least High-School, and I feel that I've been pretty open and fair about it. I'll listen to Lewis, and to what's-his-name trying to prove Darwin a fool, and challenge my beliefs at every opportunity. I acknowledge that I think there's something "inside me" that's more than just a series of wonderfully complicated chemical reactions. But I can't put a name to it, and I can't seem to just wrap it up in the concept of Soul, and God, and all that. What if it's just "awareness?" What if we have memory--maybe better, maybe worse than the other animals in the universe--coupled with a stronger sense of "self-awareness?" There may be no individual, innate "self" (Steve as different from Ami on some core level), but only my memories instead of yours, being reviewed by some kernel of awareness that all animals possess in varying degrees.
Again, when I watched the chemical processes in my mother's brain falter--and with them her personality--this last interpretation was really driven home. We are meat. But we are aware. That makes us semi-unique on the planet. It makes humankind, as a species, worth preserving and advancing.
But God and the Soul either have nothing to do with it, or do not need to have anything to do with it to give it its innate value.
Xaos,
Philosophy gives us the language to discuss things, but has it ever proven anything? It allows us to construct things (such as political systems), and as it gets a touch more scientific (the study of logic, for instance) it helps us with the physical sciences. It's certainly part of the path towards knowledge, but I believe that it always winds up deferring to the physical sciences for the last 100 feet or so.
[This rant has been reviewed for snarkiness: 0 snark content]
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
Pooka,
Do you think that if the Vatican could prove the existence of the human soul, and back it up with multiple experiments and double-blind studies, that it would just be rejected out-of-hand?
Something else is inolved, then...
Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
quote:You asked a little while ago about brain storage. Leto (John L) answered with a lot of hostility and a generous helping of poor information, as is his wont. Seriously John, where did you get the information that neurons store memory in the nuclei? That's utter BS. If you're going to bitch about people not knowing things, you really should actually know the basics of the field before jumping in with fists flailing.
You pretentious little prick (you can insult, so can I), I never said we store our memories in the nuclei. I said that the information in just the chromatin of a single cell's nucleus is more than an easily measurable amount (say, so many gigabytes). I said that the complexity level goes up from there, and that when it comes to actual memory storage, the complexity level is so high that to compare it to the "on/off" of binary data storage is completely stupid.
Do yourself a favor and stop assuming before you try to insult me, jerk, and definitely stop putting words into my mouth.
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
Whew! Thank God I swore off being a Troll! (Just in time, too!)
Posted by Mike (Member # 55) on :
I think something obvious needs to be said: a human brain is not a digital computer. A digital computer is not a human brain. Both a brain and a computer can do similar things. The intersection of their functionalities is non-empty. There are things that computers do much better than brains (e.g. accurate numerical calculations with large datasets, tireless repetition of simple tasks without increased chance of error); likewise, there are things that brains do much better than computers (e.g. recognizing faces, communicating through natural language, playing go, being "creative").
How much raw memory capacity is available to either a human brain or a digital computer is really irrelevant, since we know in both cases the answer is "enough". So let's stop beating each other up about it. 'K?
Carry on, then.
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
Mike,
Actually, the answer varies between "Almost enough," and "Never enough," but--as you said--let's continue!
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
Leto, Your decriptions of "facts" on this thread have been a mixture of some facts, some assertions of highly debating theories as fact, and some egregious BS that I can only assume you've made up because you've certainly never gotten it from a reliable source. As I've said before, I'd never dream that it was possible for you to either admit you were wrong or even act responsibily, but I think that it's important that people understand how unworthy of trust you are.
You want to play the bully and make up for your ignorance with bluster, that's fine. Go do it somewhere else, or at least choose a topic that I don't know anything about. We don't need you if you're going to be like this, and, as much as this may suprise you, I'm not at all intimidated by you.
Posted by Mike (Member # 55) on :
ssywak -- good point! Posted by John L (Member # 6005) on :
You say I'm spouting BS, and yet the only example you give is completely misquoting me and putting words in my mouth. Really classy, Squick.
Posted by Bob the Lawyer (Member # 3278) on :
I don’t understand why people have been going into such detail about the nervous system and ignoring things like the limbic system and the differences between things like short term memory, working memory and long term memory. You know, things like how they’re formed, how one becomes the other, etc. Basically, why people aren’t answering the questions about the brain and rather are going into big long spiels about the inner workings of nerves when you really don’t need to understand how reflexes work to get a basic understanding of how memory storage works.
I assumed it was just a pissing contest. Hell, I know I answered pooka’s questions because a) she asked and b) I got to look smart. But at least I’m honest about my motivations Posted by Amka (Member # 690) on :
Steve,
You are entirely right. I may be wrong. I don't think you were in the church calling discussion before, but I detailed how I came to the conclusion to believe in God.
quote:The BIG answer is that there is no logical resolution.
That is what I learned from Tom.
I crawled all the way back through my assumptions and realized that I could never KNOW this in my life. I would have to die first.
Therefore, there must be a leap of faith.
So I prayed:
I don't know if you exist, but my concept of you is good. I believe the concept of a good and caring God is more beautiful than the concept of no God. So, I want to believe in you. I'll follow you, regardless of your existance. Take this offering and perfect my understanding, if you can, please. Fill in the gaps of my weakness. Help me do good despite myself.
There was little comfort in this, knowing that I must act without knowing, and risk weakness. But this is my truth. It is not rational because by nature, it cannot be.
So this is the other truth: Rationality is cold and meaningless without faith and wonder, compassion and love.
So far, for me, the LDS church is the only one that provides for people living and believing in another religion to still have a good outcome in the afterlife, other than eastern religions that believe in reincarnation - a concept I cannot reconcile with other reasonings, and religions based on "whatever you believe will come true" which I find silly and self aggrandizing.
I cannot give you more than the fact that I weighed my options, I took into consideration my experience and concepts I'd learned from others (all sorts) and made a decision. But I can say that once I made that leap of faith, looking at the world that way made a lot of sense. Logically everything fits, and it feels right in my heart.
But what if I'm wrong?
Then either there is a God that cares only that we did our best with what we had, still the God I believe in but perhaps not as LDS describe him, or there is an exclusive God. I cannot really believe in the morality of an exclusive God. In that case, there would probably always be something I'd done wrong. I choose simply to ignore that possibility since I'd be doomed no matter what.
Or there is no God. And what have I lost by believing? Nothing. Not even a departure from the truth because I am very much aware that my belief is an act of faith, not knowledge. But I will have gained much. I will have had a peace through this life and hopefully served others because I was inspired by the concept of a living God such that my ultimate contribution is better to the human race with my belief in God than without.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
But if there is no God and there is reincarnation, I will have to come back as something highly unpleasant. At least if I were to die at this stage in life. I'm LDS but I don't accept Pascal's wager. I only take it on faith that I wouldn't be better off as a dope dealer. But I'm fairly narcissistic.
Posted by skillery (Member # 6209) on :
I've been giving more thought to the LDS concept of the spirit and came up with the following:
When the scripture says "likeness" we might venture so far as to assume: "likeness," right down to the cellular level. After all, there are single-celled animals, and supposedly they have spirits and were created spiritually first.
We might also expect to find the same types of organs, structures, and functions within the spirit body that we find in the temporal body.
When this thread was launched I thought to downgrade the importance of the temporal brain, thinking that surely the brain could not be the repository of so many memories, and almost certainly the brain couldn't be the root of intelligence. But from the many learned posts we've enjoyed in this thread, it becomes apparent to me that downgrading the brain was my mistake.
Based on my interpretation of the above scriptures, the spirit also has a brain, and our temporal brains are patterned after it. Both brains would then have roughly analogous capabilities within their respective spheres of operation.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
BtL, I answered them because I was trying to provide a basis for science in this thread instead of people going off half cocked on misinformation.
Posted by Xaposert (Member # 1612) on :
quote:Philosophy gives us the language to discuss things, but has it ever proven anything? It allows us to construct things (such as political systems), and as it gets a touch more scientific (the study of logic, for instance) it helps us with the physical sciences. It's certainly part of the path towards knowledge, but I believe that it always winds up deferring to the physical sciences for the last 100 feet or so.
That is a tricky question because of philosophy's rather unique desire to question every possible assumption. Whereas most other fields have starting assumptions from which to base proofs upon and frame debates, philosophy does not, except perhaps for logic itself. As a result, although I think philosophy does prove things, there is tends to always be someone there to question the premises of the proof ad infinitum. For instance, I think philosophy has proven (as far as your typical proof for something can go) that we exist - despite the fact that some still doubt it.
Aside from things like that, there's also more practical philosophical proofs that have spun off into various fields. (Whenever philosophy becomes practical, this seems to happen.) The field of mathematics, for instance, originated as a set of philosophical proofs that became their own field once the proofs became widely accepted and studied.
Posted by ssywak (Member # 807) on :
Xaos,
Maybe I've proven my point by overdefining it.
If I claim that only the physical sciences can prove the physical things, and that the natural sciences cannot (help me here--do I have the original meanings correct?), and every time natural philosophy proves something physical, then it becomes a branch of the physical sciences...well, then I really haven't said anything at all.
BTW, in checking some of this philosophical stuff out, I stumbled across this site:
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Dont Know]](graemlins/dontknow.gif)
![[Frown]](frown.gif)
Maybe the die off mechanism was, in sci fi theory, merely hampered. Sorry to digress.![[Cool]](cool.gif)
![[Confused]](confused.gif)
![[Angst]](graemlins/angst.gif)
![[Evil Laugh]](graemlins/evillaugh.gif)
<-- because of where the series eventually went, in abnegating transcendence.![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)