I haven't delved into theories of mind here so much as theories about *machine* minds. The former, such as GWT or IIT, offer some observational evidence, but we seem to be so far from understanding how mind arises from brain that it all feels like guesswork at this point.
I read a neuroscientist say that synapses are the most complicated biological machine we've encountered, and there are roughly 500 trillion of them in a human brain, so we're reaching to understand something that's way beyond our current grasp.
As with quantum mechanics, another deep and fundamental mystery, the unknown leads to a lot of imagination!
I think that we understand a lot about how physical processes make up the mind. Consider endocrinology: if you're high in testosterone, you're likely to interpret people as hostile to you. If you're high in oxytocin, you will tend to be nice ingroup members. We know a lot about what type of behavior is generated by different brain regions. The PFC is involved in impulse control, for example. We know all sorts of things like that. There are probably some big issues that I don't understand very well that make you say what you do, but it seems unfair to the state of science to say that we know nothing about how the mind arises from the brain.
Yes, we know a fair amount about neural correlates as well as about how the brain can be affected and studied. Those are all what Chalmers calls "easy problems". Not that they're easy, but that we can foresee not just solving them but how we go about solving them.
What Chalmers famously termed "the hard problem" -- how self-aware consciousness arises from a configuration of matter -- is what I was referring to in saying we're "so far from understanding." We have no physics that explains that.
I look forward to responding in our previous conversation and here more thoroughly very soon. Gödel will play a very big part in "proving" "Hammock's Razor" as (among other things) the parsimony of tradeoffs, which include trading on consistency and completeness under much less abstract circumstances.
Still two more posts to go before that one, though, and much more in the speculative, anti-reductive domain.
For now, I will just mention that Penrose's "orchestrated objective reduction" is likely incomplete without its complement.
Somewhat naively, I suspect a network-level system sufficiency management system to manage collapse thresholds (if indeed collapse is the mechanism). Essentially, a system of social projection to go with local reduction. But that's pure speculation on my part, and likely not that descriptive without a giant runway of why to expect a complement to begin with.
Robert Sapolsky in Determined makes the strong case against free will, calling human actions determined but not predictable (and not through some quantum superposition mumbo-jumbo).
Determination is a tricky one, I think. It operates at different levels and has a past-future division to it as well. It seems one thing to look back and account for causes leading to an effect but quite another to predict effects from causes.
I do think we have free will (although defining that is a rabbit hole on its own). I think we can select "freely" among equally weighted imagined futures. Something akin to symmetry breaking, if you're familiar with that. My canonical example is, having decided on dinner, and having decided on soup, as I stand in front of my pantry, what causes me to pick Minestrone, for example, over the other varieties? Low-cost choices seem the most free -- the least constrained by pending imperative factors.
I've recently argued that scientific defenses of free will are pseudoscientific. What I wonder is whether any testable predictions about the mind have been derived from the theories that you discuss. If you can't test them, how can you assess whether they're true or not? And what use are they for actually understanding how the brain works? https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/the-pseudoscience-of-free-will?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I haven't delved into theories of mind here so much as theories about *machine* minds. The former, such as GWT or IIT, offer some observational evidence, but we seem to be so far from understanding how mind arises from brain that it all feels like guesswork at this point.
I read a neuroscientist say that synapses are the most complicated biological machine we've encountered, and there are roughly 500 trillion of them in a human brain, so we're reaching to understand something that's way beyond our current grasp.
As with quantum mechanics, another deep and fundamental mystery, the unknown leads to a lot of imagination!
I think that we understand a lot about how physical processes make up the mind. Consider endocrinology: if you're high in testosterone, you're likely to interpret people as hostile to you. If you're high in oxytocin, you will tend to be nice ingroup members. We know a lot about what type of behavior is generated by different brain regions. The PFC is involved in impulse control, for example. We know all sorts of things like that. There are probably some big issues that I don't understand very well that make you say what you do, but it seems unfair to the state of science to say that we know nothing about how the mind arises from the brain.
Yes, we know a fair amount about neural correlates as well as about how the brain can be affected and studied. Those are all what Chalmers calls "easy problems". Not that they're easy, but that we can foresee not just solving them but how we go about solving them.
What Chalmers famously termed "the hard problem" -- how self-aware consciousness arises from a configuration of matter -- is what I was referring to in saying we're "so far from understanding." We have no physics that explains that.
Seriously, Wyrd. Any person who can figure out all this can surely come up with an easy formula for simple choco-mel.
One bite of choco, one bite of mel. Easy peasy!
You are a genius Wyrd! I knew you could do it!
‘Twas a complicated formula: 1 bite this + 1 bite that = 1 bite yum. Give or take a decimal point.
I look forward to responding in our previous conversation and here more thoroughly very soon. Gödel will play a very big part in "proving" "Hammock's Razor" as (among other things) the parsimony of tradeoffs, which include trading on consistency and completeness under much less abstract circumstances.
Still two more posts to go before that one, though, and much more in the speculative, anti-reductive domain.
For now, I will just mention that Penrose's "orchestrated objective reduction" is likely incomplete without its complement.
What would its complement be in this case?
Somewhat naively, I suspect a network-level system sufficiency management system to manage collapse thresholds (if indeed collapse is the mechanism). Essentially, a system of social projection to go with local reduction. But that's pure speculation on my part, and likely not that descriptive without a giant runway of why to expect a complement to begin with.
Okay. Can’t say it means anything to me as stated, but many things don’t.
It's nice to hear about these issues from someone who actually knows about computers. Looking forward to your next post about 'digital dualism'.
Thanks! All those years gotta be good for something, right?
Robert Sapolsky in Determined makes the strong case against free will, calling human actions determined but not predictable (and not through some quantum superposition mumbo-jumbo).
You’d like Sapolsky, I think. Brilliant guy. He doesn’t buy the emergent properties argument, which is similar.
Determination is a tricky one, I think. It operates at different levels and has a past-future division to it as well. It seems one thing to look back and account for causes leading to an effect but quite another to predict effects from causes.
I do think we have free will (although defining that is a rabbit hole on its own). I think we can select "freely" among equally weighted imagined futures. Something akin to symmetry breaking, if you're familiar with that. My canonical example is, having decided on dinner, and having decided on soup, as I stand in front of my pantry, what causes me to pick Minestrone, for example, over the other varieties? Low-cost choices seem the most free -- the least constrained by pending imperative factors.